Alone on a Wide Wide Sea, Vol. 3 (of 3)

by William Clark Russell

Before we arrived at the Docks where the ship was to be berthed, and where we proposed to land, Captain Ladmore invited Mrs. Lee and myself to his cabin; for his ship was now in the hands of the pilot, and the captain was, so to speak, a free man. First of all he asked Mrs. Lee for her address at Newcastle-on-Tyne, to enable the owners of the Deal Castle to communicate with her, should any inquiries concerning me be made at their office. He informed us that it would be his duty to report the circumstance of his ship having been in collision with a French brig, on board of which there was found a single person, a woman, whose memory was gone—that is to say, who was unable to give any particulars of herself prior to her having been picked up by the French brig. This report, he said, would be printed in the shipping papers, and it would find its way into the London daily newspapers, and be copied by most of the provincial sheets; so that if I had friends in England, or, indeed, in any part of the United Kingdom, it would be strange indeed if the newspaper paragraph did not lead to the discovery of my identity.

He then advised Mrs. Lee to send my case to the London police, and solicit such help as they would have it in their power to render by advertisements and by communicating with the provincial police; and he also recommended Mrs. Lee to repeat the paragraph in the newspapers—the paragraph I mean about his ship having found me in a brig—after a few weeks should elapse, that is to say, supposing the report which he himself would make, and which would be published, should lead to nothing.

I bade farewell to this upright, worthy, humane captain with tears and expressions of gratitude again and again repeated. He had befriended me; he had protected me; his ship had been my home; he had done me a hundred kindnesses; and when I put my hand in his and said good-bye my heart was very full.

And equally full was my heart when I said good-bye to Mrs. Richards, for she, too, had proved a true friend to me at a time when I was without friends, at a time when I was destitute, helpless, hopeless, and broken-hearted, and when sympathy and friendship were precious indeed to me. I gave her of what the passengers had given to me on our arrival at Sydney. I could not part from her without a gift. I possessed nothing but the trifles of jewellery which had been given to me by the passengers, and of these I chose the best, and when I put them into her hand I kissed her and blessed her for her kindness to me.

Mr. Harris I did not see; Mr. McEwan I warmly thanked for his attention and interest in me, and then Mrs. Lee and I left the ship and drove to a hotel close to the railway station, whence we were to depart on the following morning for the north.

On our way to this hotel I spoke little, so busy was I with looking. The sight of the streets and houses, however, did nothing for me but keep me bewildered. So profound had been the sense of loneliness occasioned by my loss of memory, that I felt as one who had been shipwrecked upon an uninhabited island, where I had lived solitary, hearing nothing but the cry of tropic birds, the noise of the wind in trees, the dull thunder of the gigantic breakers bursting upon the desolate shore. I was in a manner dazed by the crowds and the throng of vehicles, by the uproar of locomotion, by the seemingly endless complication of streets. No, assuredly, it was not in London that I was to find my memory.

Mrs. Lee watched me as we sat in the cab, and when we had arrived at the hotel and were conversing in a quiet sitting-room she told me she was now certain I had never before been in London, and that, as it was impossible for her to imagine that any Englishwoman who belonged to such a station of life as was indicated by my manner and speech was never in London, her conviction was my home was not in England.

We left for the north by an early train on the following morning, and arrived at Newcastle at about five o’clock in the afternoon. Throughout the long journey my eyes and my thoughts were as busy as they had been in the drive from the docks to the hotel. I gazed, half maddened by my passionate anxiety to recollect, at every little village or town we flew past; and whenever the engine’s whistle signalled that we were approaching a station at which we were to stop my head was out of the window and my heart beat furiously, whilst I kept crying to myself, Will this be the town? Will this be the place where my home is? and shall I know it when I see it?

I had often heard dear Alice Lee talk of her home at Jesmond, and I could have made a sketch of the house without seeing it from her loving description. It was a pretty little house indeed, standing in about half-an-acre of garden. The house was removed from the road, very sheltered and retired. It had been left in charge of an old servant, a respectable Newcastle woman, now somewhat stricken in years, who had been in Mrs. Lee’s service almost throughout my dear friend’s married life. To this honest old housekeeper Mrs. Lee had written on the ship’s arrival at Gravesend; servants were engaged and the house thoroughly prepared to receive us.

Mrs. Lee bore up bravely throughout the journey and down to the moment of her entering her home; but when the house-door was opened and she saw the old housekeeper standing within dressed in black—for she had written the news of Alice’s death from Sydney—she broke down.