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

by William Clark Russell

It rejoiced me, however, to learn that Alphonse and his uncle had been rescued and were safe. Strange indeed did it seem to hear of them in such a roundabout way; and yet perhaps it would have been stranger still had nothing been heard of the fate of the crew of the Notre Dame de Boulogne, considering the paragraphs which had appeared about me, and the letters which had been written, some of them being despatched to shippers, consuls, and others, not only in France, but in Spain and Portugal.

Mrs. Lee, fixing as well as she could the time of the month in which I had been drifting about in the open boat, and willing to suppose—merely to supply me with a further chance—that I had been blown away from some part of the English coast, set her friends to inquire if there had been any notice in the newspapers of that date of a lady who had gone out in a boat and had not returned nor been heard of. The files of local papers were searched; but, though there were several accounts of boating accidents, none could be found that at all fitted my case. A friend of Mrs. Lee, a Mr. Weldon, ‘fancied’ in a vague sort of way that he had read, probably in a mood of abstraction, of a lady who had gone out with a boatman from some part of the coast which he could not recollect, but which he believed was the south-east coast—it might have been Ramsgate or Folkestone, he could not be sure—and he had some dim idea that the body of the boatman was discovered, and the boat afterwards brought in ... he would look the incident up ... he would endeavour to recollect the name of the paper in which it was published. But if he gave himself any trouble it was to no purpose.

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The time went on; the interest I had excited died out; I heard not a syllable from the owners of the Deal Castle; Mrs. Lee had long since persuaded herself that, though I was undoubtedly of English parentage, and perhaps born in England, my home was not in this country, and that I had no friends in it. And this was now my belief also. My spirits grew apathetic. I ceased to importune my memory. My past, let it hold what it would, I regarded as dead as my sweet Alice Lee was—as buried, mouldering, irrecoverable as her twin sister was.

Three years passed—three years dating from my rescue by the French vessel. In all this while I had lived with Mrs. Lee as her companion. I strove to keep up my heart for her sake, thanking God always for finding for me so true a friend as she had proved, and praying to Him always that He would give me back my memory. I know not how to express my state of mind throughout all these months now running into years. My intellect was dull, my conversation to strangers insipid. I found myself constantly at a loss through inability to carry my memory back past the point where it had vanished; but I read aloud very well, my tastes corresponded with Mrs. Lee’s; she owned again and again that she would not have known where to seek for such a companion as she desired had my strange experiences not brought us together; there was no one who could have talked about Alice as I did; my presence seemed to give embodiment to the memory of her child, and in our many lonely rambles our conversation was nearly wholly made up of our recollections of the sweet girl’s closing days.

It chanced one day in October—three years from the time when I was taken on board the Deal Castle—that, having occasion to go into Newcastle for Mrs. Lee, and finding myself with some leisure on my hands, I went on to the High Level Bridge to view the scene of the river and the busy quayside. It was a somewhat cold, grey day. The wind blew strong, and the rapid ripples of the rushing river broke in white water upon the dingy banks. Many tall chimneys reared their stacks on my right, and the smoke breaking from their orifices was again and again flashed up by a ruddy glare as though the chimneys themselves were full of living fire. Large steamers lay at the quayside under me; steam broke from their sides, and there was an artillery-like sound of rattling engines; scores of figures on the wharves hurried here and there. And from time to time above my head would sound the thunder of a train roaring past over the wondrous height of metal ways.

I was singularly depressed. Never before had I felt so low in spirits. Heretofore my days had been passed in the coldness of settled grief, at first in a capricious and now in an habitual acquiescence, charged with despair, in my lonely, outcast, hopeless lot. But this day misery was active in me. I might compare myself to a woman who, having for long rested apathetically in her cell, is stimulated by some wild longing of misery to rise and grope with extended hands in agony of mind round the black walls outside which she knows the sun is shining.

My head ached, but the ache was a novel pain; it was a dull sick throb, a thick and dizzy pulse, not in my brows, but on the top of my head, in the middle of it. It was as though I had been stabbed there and the wound ached. I stood upon the bridge, perhaps for twenty minutes, gazing down at the sight of the vessels moored at the wharves, or passing in mid-stream below me; and then, hearing the clock of the church of St. Nicholas strike, I quitted the bridge and walked in the direction of Jesmond.

It was a considerable walk—I had measured the distance both ways; and when Mrs. Lee asked me if I felt ill, and I answered my head pained me, she accounted for my headache and for my pallor by my having over-fatigued myself. This I knew was not the case, for I had awakened in the morning with a pain in my head, but it was not nearly as bad then as it was now.

We passed the evening in the usual way. I read to Mrs. Lee, then she dozed a while, and I picked up some work that I was upon, but could do nothing with it, for my head ached so badly that my sight was confused by the pain, and I could not see to thread a needle. Supper was ready at nine o’clock, but I could not eat. Mrs. Lee felt my pulse and placed her hand upon my brow.