This last was a guess of his own, and he insisted upon including it, though I pointed out to him that I had met with the humanest treatment it is possible to imagine on board the French vessel, and that there could be no doubt whatever that the young man Alphonse’s story of my being found drifting about in an open boat was absolutely true.
‘Ay, that may be,’ he exclaimed with a knowing look at Mrs. Lee; ‘but I fully agree with those of your fellow-passengers who hold that before your disaster, whatever it may have been, you wore jewellery, and that your being found without rings, without a watch, with nothing of value upon you saving a few shillings in a purse, signifies robbery and more than robbery.’
But to end this. The paragraph was published. I read it in the Newcastle Chronicle and in five other journals sent to us by Mr. Roddam, who assured me that it had been reprinted in a hundred different directions; but nothing came of it—that is to say, nothing in any way material. About twenty letters reached me through the owners of the Deal Castle; but they contained nothing but idle inquiries; a few of them were impertinently curious, and the contents of them all were wretchedly purposeless. One was from a quack who offered to recover my memory for a certain sum; three were from people who desired to write an account of my adventures; another was evidently from a poor lunatic, who, writing as a mother, said that her daughter had perished by shipwreck twenty years before, and that she expected I was her child who had been restored to life by her prayers. She asked me for my private address that she might visit me.
How can I express the passionate eagerness with which I awaited the arrival of the post, the recurring little pangs of disappointment as the man would go by time after time without knocking, the torment of hope with which I would tear open an envelope when a letter reached me at last, the cold despair that took possession of me when the weeks rolled by yielding me nothing!
‘It must be, Agnes, as I have all along thought,’ exclaimed Mrs. Lee, ‘your home is not in England, and you have no friends in this country. But let us be patient, my dear. Mr. Roddam’s paragraph will find its way to the Colonies, to India, to distant countries, and when that has happened, any day may bring glad tidings to you. But you must wait, and meanwhile you must make yourself as happy as you can with your poor bereaved friend.’
CHAPTER XXII
MEMORY
The days rolled into weeks and the weeks into months, and still my memory remained clothed as with midnight. No whisper broke its silence. I recollected with almost phenomenal accuracy everything that had befallen me since my rescue; but all that had gone before was darkness, hushed and impenetrable. I cannot remember that I was visited by the dimmest intimation—that the dullest gleam, however instantaneous, touched my inward gloom.
My story and condition created great interest in Newcastle; for a time I was much talked about. Mrs. Lee had friends who were concerned in the shipping trade, and two or three of them good-naturedly wrote to correspondents at various parts of our coast, and to agents and representatives abroad; but it was all one. Nobody gave information that was in the slightest degree useful. A gentleman at Havre wrote that he met with a sailor who had formed one of the crew of Notre Dame de Boulogne, but the man could not tell so much of what happened after the collision as I, because, when the Notre Dame was struck, they launched and crowded into their only boat, and were swept away in the blackness of the night, losing sight of the brig, and the ship which had run into her, and seeing nothing of the flares which the Deal Castle had burnt and the rockets she had sent up. They were rescued next morning by a Spanish schooner, bound to the Mediterranean, and safely landed at Toulon, their original destination, but with the loss of all they possessed in the world. It was quite true, this man added, that the Notre Dame had fallen in with an open boat, and rescued a woman whom they found unconscious, and severely wounded about the head.
The sailor had no more to tell.