And now it is necessary that I should skip a considerable period of time—no less a period of time indeed than ten months—that this story may bring me to a close relation of my own affairs; for the most extraordinary part of my strange adventures yet remains to be unfolded, and no purpose can be served by my keeping you dawdling on shipboard, when everything from this time material befell me on shore.
I will not speak of the grief of Mrs. Lee; her bereavement left her childless, and, indeed, alone in the world, and her loss was as an arrow in her heart. Alice had been left to her when her first child was taken; but now Alice was gone, and loneliness and childlessness rendered the loss of this daughter a far deeper affliction than had been the death of the other. But Mrs. Lee was a woman of strong religious feelings; resignation grew in her with the help of prayer, and with the compassion of God, and through much silent meditation; and, long before we arrived in Australia, she could bear to say and to hear many things concerning Alice which, in the earliest stages of her grief, her faltering tongue could not have pronounced, nor her stricken heart endure to listen to.
I think it was about three weeks after Alice’s death, that Mrs. Lee spoke to me very seriously about my future, repeated her daughter’s wishes, and asked me to live with her as companion whilst my memory continued dark, and whilst I remained homeless. I gladly assented, kissing her, and gratefully thanking her again and again for her offer; and she seemed as glad as I. She had liked me from the beginning of our acquaintance; now she loved me for my association with her lost child, and also because Alice had loved me. And she loved me for myself too, as the dear little woman would often tell me, though all the kindness, all the goodness was on one side. For I could do no more than feel grateful, and thank God for having found me a friend in her, and be with her, and oblige her, and comfort her as fully as my mind, enfeebled by the want of memory, would enable me.
We arrived at Sydney, New South Wales; the passengers bade us farewell and went their ways. Some of them presented me with little gifts of jewellery to remember them by, and the tears stood in Mrs. Webber’s eyes when she said good-bye to me. Had the Deal Castle touched at the Cape of Good Hope, Mrs. Lee would have gone on shore, taking me with her, and proceeded to England direct by one of the fine steamers of the Union Steamship line; but the ship stopped nowhere during the outward passage, and therefore, unless we chose to be transferred to a homeward-bound ship, we were obliged to proceed direct to Sydney. Mrs. Lee made up her mind to return home in the ship. She had paid her cabin fare for two for the ‘round voyage,’ as it is called; she liked Captain Ladmore, and she also liked his ship; and then, again, Mr. McEwan strongly recommended her to remain in the Deal Castle, affirming that her health would benefit by such a voyage as a sailing ship provided.
So, for the reasons I have given, together with others which I need not enter into—as, for example, the cost of returning home by steam: a cost that must tax her purse, seeing that she had already paid for the voyage out and home—we returned to England in the Deal Castle living on shore at a hotel during the three months the vessel lay in Sydney harbour.
You will ask whether, in this time, my memory had returned to me—whether, indeed, I was even capable of dimly recollecting? My answer is, No! My memory seemed to grow even more impenetrable as the months went by. There had been times, as I have told you, when the cry of a child, when the gibberish of a gipsy woman would stir the gloom within me as though there were shadows or shapes of memory which moved, eagerly responsive to the cry or the syllables which fell upon my ear, but incapable of determining themselves to my mental vision. My feelings were, indeed, as the poet expresses a like state of mind:—
‘Moreover, something is or seems,
That touches me with mystic gleams,
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams.
Of something felt, like something here;