Mrs. Lee read this paragraph aloud, and when she had ended it she said:—
‘I fear this will not help us, Agnes.’
‘Yet what more could be said?’ I asked. ‘It is the whole story so far as Captain Ladmore—so far as any of us could relate it.’
‘Oh, but there is more to be said,’ she exclaimed: ‘the newspaper notices of your rescue should contain conjectures as to how it happened that you were drifting about in an open boat. And a description of you should be given—a description of those points, I mean, which could not be changed, such as your height, complexion, colour of eyes, and so forth.’
She rose and paced about the room; then, stopping and gazing at me earnestly, with a look which reminded me of Alice, she said, ‘I am acquainted with a gentleman who is connected with the Newcastle press. His name is Francis Roddam. He was formerly a clerk in my poor husband’s office. I will write to him and ask him to sup with us to-morrow evening. He will be able to put together such a newspaper notice as is sure to attract attention; he will also advise us how best to place it. Indeed, I dare say he will himself send it to the newspapers. As to writing to the London police, as Captain Ladmore suggested’—she shook her head and added, ‘I fear they will not trouble themselves. Had you been the victim of a crime—but even supposing a representative of the police should call upon you, what can you say that will enable him to help you better than we are able to help ourselves?’
She wrote to Mr. Roddam, and on the following evening he arrived to supper, and spent a couple of hours in discourse with us. He was a slow-minded but shrewd man, whose light-blue eyes seemed to bore deep into me as they pierced the spectacles he wore. He listened with the interest of a born journalist to my story, and, remarkable as he doubtless found it, I believe he thought it mainly so because of the opportunity it offered him of making stories and newspaper paragraphs out of it.
He questioned me with great sagacity. Never since the hour of my rescue from the French vessel had my dead or slumbering memory been so critically ‘overhauled.’ To express my sensations by a material image: some of his inquiries flashed with the dazzle of the lightning brand upon the closed doors of a temple or sanctuary; but the midnight darkness within remained impenetrable. Sometimes I seemed to recollect; but when with a trembling heart and a white face, believing at such moments that my memory was astir—when, I say, I endeavoured to realise, I found that what I imagined to be recollection was no more than the effect of fancy acting upon what Mr. Roddam had, by his own inquiries and suggestions, put into my head.
However, he took many notes, and told me he would send my story to several newspapers for which he acted as correspondent, one of them being a London daily paper and another a widely read influential journal published in Liverpool.
‘The paragraph,’ he said, ‘will run the whole round of the British press, and, to ensure your hearing of your friends, should the paragraph meet their eye and lead to their inquiring after you, I will take care to give the address of the owners of the Deal Castle.’
He was as good as his word, and in a day or two called upon us with a printed slip of the paragraph he had written and proposed to send. It was something more than a paragraph; it ran to the length of a short story, was very well written, and bore a title of a sort to catch the eye of the most indolent reader. In it he introduced the conjectures which Mrs. Lee considered needful, since one of them alone might serve to clear up the mystery of my identity. He put it that it was supposed either that I had formed one of a yachting party; or that I had been blown away from a French port whilst making an excursion in a small boat; or that I was the sole survivor of a shipwreck, the particulars of which might never be known unless my memory returned to me; or that I had been the victim of some great outrage at the hands of the captain or crew of the Notre Dame de Boulogne, the effects of which had lost me my memory and turned my hair white.