HOMEWARD BOUND.
In the year 1832, within a week or two of the date that would make the
time exactly five years since the “Meteor” lay off Gravesend, waiting
to embark her captain and start for the port it was her doom never to
reach, a large ship was sailing slowly up the river, her poop crowded
with passengers, and many heads ranged along her bulwarks.
Far away aft, hard by the wheel, stood a man thickly bearded, dressed
in dark clothes, his arms folded, and his eyes bent steadfastly upon
the passing shore. He was alone; for the rest of the passengers, of
whom there were many, were grouped about the break of the poop talking
to one another excitedly, or pointing to the houses ashore, or watching
the steerage passengers on the main-deck cording their boxes, cramming
their clothes into bundles, and making preparations for landing that
afternoon.
There was something in the expression of this man’s face which would
have attracted and detained your attention; a mixture of profound
melancholy and struggling surprise, clouded with what might have passed
very well for a mood of deep abstraction. His features were thin and
haggard, the nose pinched and white, his eyes dark and gleaming, and
sunk in hollows, shagged by eyebrows of black hair mingled with white,
which met in a perpendicular seam in his forehead. He presented the
appearance of one suffering from some incurable constitutional malady
which had wasted the flesh off his bones, arched his back, hollowed
his chest, and brought into his face a permanent expression of mingled
pensiveness and sorrow.
A round-faced, brisk, and busy-looking little man happening just then
to pop his person out through the companion, stood looking awhile at
the shore with eager twinkling eyes, and then, directing his gaze aft,
caught sight of our lonely individual and approached him.
“Ah, Mr. Hampden! there you are! still puzzling, puzzling, eh?” he
exclaimed in a hearty manner. “Come now, you have seen Folkestone,
Margate, the Reculvers, eh, now? Confess that those places have helped
you to remember all you want to know.”
The person addressed as Mr. Hampden, but whom we will continue to call
by his proper name of Holdsworth, turned his eyes from the shore and
answered with an effort, as though he could not at once break away from
his thoughts.
“I know all those places well; and there’s not a house yonder, I may
say, that doesn’t assure me I am on familiar ground. But they tell me
nothing. My past is still a puzzle, doctor, of which these scenes are
only fragments. There are many more things to come before I can piece
it into a whole.”
“What _is_ a cure for a decayed memory? what _ought_ to revive old
impressions?” exclaimed the little doctor, hammering a snuff-box with
his knuckles. “You’ll never know, Mr. Hampden, how you have weighed
upon my mind. I feel, sir, that I have no business to let you quit this
ship uncured. And yet, what more than I have done _can_ I do? I have
exhausted my imagination in questions.”
“Yes, doctor, you have been very kind, and I thank you heartily for the
interest you have taken in me.”
“Ay, but interest is of no professional use,” returned the doctor,
sniffing up a huge pinch of snuff. “We look to results in our calling.
I must say I should like to have been able to tell Mr. Sherman when I
get back that I left you remembering everything. Eh, now? But I don’t
believe there’s a medical man living who ever encountered such a case
as yours. So much density of mental gloom, sir, seems psychologically
impossible. If you could only have given me one end of the thread, so
to speak, I might have drawn the whole skein out smooth. Look about you
now. Here is genuine Thames scenery, which, if you are an Englishman,
ought to go home straight to your heart and recall a thousand matters.”
Holdsworth stared around him, puzzling and biting his lip.
“I have often felt, and I feel now,” he exclaimed, “that if I could
see something which was prominently identified with my past my memory
would return. When we were off Margate, I grew breathless--breathless,
doctor, believe me, under the shock of an indefinable sensation. I made
sure that my memory was about to rush upon me--oh! it is impossible to
explain what is inexplicable to myself. But there have been moments,
since we first entered the river, when I have felt that a revelation
was close at hand--and I have trembled whilst awaiting the flooding in
of memory, which will not come--which _will_ not come!”
“It _will_ come. The power that you possess to remember the names and
qualities of things which you see, has long ago persuaded me that
your memory is not dead, but torpid. Keep your body up, when you get
ashore, with nourishing food. Walk the streets constantly and use your
eyes, and, when a recollection rises to the surface, don’t rush upon
it voraciously, but leave it to its own will. Consider, memories are
nothing but shadows; you can’t dodge and drive them into corners ...”
Here somebody called to him, on which the little man shook Holdsworth’s
hand, and darted towards the group of passengers.
The ship was rapidly nearing Gravesend, where she would disembark her
passengers. The Thames looked noble, with many vessels of all shapes
and sizes breaking its shining waters, with the houses and wharves
ashore, with here and there a short wooden pier running into the
stream, and the green summer country smiling beyond.
It was a bright July morning, and the air had an exquisite transparency
that so clarified and sharpened the outlines of objects, that it was
like looking at them through highly-polished glass. Just such a day
should greet all homeward-sailing ships, and make their inmates merry
with a foretaste of the shore-life they are to enjoy after their long
strife with the distant treacherous ocean.
Anon Gravesend opened, and then the pilot volleyed some quick orders
along the ship. Down rattled staysails, and jibs, and yards with their
spacious breadths of canvas; and the stately vessel, denuded of her
towering costume, swam lazily into position off the town. Then rose a
cry, “Stand clear of the chain-cable!” and the second mate, on the port
side of the topgallant forecastle, brandished his arms as a warning to
the people on the main-deck to crowd out of the road.
“Let go the anchor!”
Clank! clank! went the carpenter’s hammer. And then, with a deafening
roar, down plunged the mighty weight of iron, and tore the huge cable
with shrieks through the hawse-pipe. The ship swung slowly around and
became stationary, with many hands aloft furling the sails, and the
quarter-deck throbbing with the movements and struggles of excited
passengers.
And now a dozen boats, some large some small, came tearing through the
water to the ship. How the watermen pulled! Their faces all veins, and
their arms all knots, and their hats anywhere! The canoes of cannibals,
sneaking from the secret creeks and hidden points of an unexplored
island, advance not more swiftly, nor, maybe, with feller or more
rapacious designs, upon the intruder in their waters, than did our
Gravesend wherries upon this ship fresh from Australia.
Many of the watermen were soon upon the quarterdeck, demanding
monstrous sums to row three-quarters of a mile. You saw boxes and
bundles seized and disappear, and excited ’tween-deck passengers
elbowing a lane to the gangway, fired with a resolution to disembark
or perish, while children screamed, and women implored, and men
gesticulated, and even menaced one another. One by one the wherries
put off, loaded to the gunwale with people and baggage. These wherries
returned and returned again, until the ship was cleared of the majority
of her passengers.
“Good-bye, captain,” said Holdsworth.
A sunburnt man in a blue cloth coat with gilt-buttons took Holdsworth’s
hand, and grasped it cordially.
“Good-bye, Mr. Hampden, good-bye to you, sir. Any time these three
months, if you have a mind to let me see your face, you will be able to
find me out by calling at the Jerusalem Coffee House. I shall be glad,
sir, as we all of us shall be, to hear that London has stirred up your
recollection and restored your memory.”
Then the chief mate and second officers and some midshipmen pressed
forward and shook his hand, and Holdsworth, pointing out his luggage to
a waterman, descended the gangway ladder, and was rowed to Gravesend.
* * * * *
And now, whilst our hero, having been put ashore and eaten a hurried
dinner, climbs on top of the coach that is to land him at Southwark,
let us beguile an uninteresting interval by casting a brief glance
backwards.
On the arrival of the “Jessie Maxwell” at Sydney, Holdsworth had
accompanied Mr. Sherman to his house, and been then and there
established as an inmate as long as he chose to remain. He was also
given a clerkship in Mr. Sherman’s office, worth £250 a year, which was
by no means an out-of-the-way price for a man’s labour in Australia in
those days, though in Holdsworth’s case the salary was rendered nearly
worth as much again by his friend providing him with board and lodging
free. The truth was (1) Mr. Sherman wanted an honest man in his office;
(2) Holdsworth’s sufferings, friendlessness, and perfect amiability,
coupled with his deprivation of memory, which affected all whom he
conversed with as something worse even than blindness, had obtained a
permanent hold for him on his generous patron’s sympathy long before
the “Jessie Maxwell” had sighted the Australian shore.
Mr. Sherman was a widower and childless. A maiden sister of his lived
with him, a woman whose character and face were as like his as an egg
is to an egg. Not knowing Holdsworth’s name, they agreed to call him
Mr. Hampden, which would serve as well as any other, and which had at
least the merit of beginning with the letter of his real name.
As Mr. Hampden he was introduced to Mr. Sherman’s friends, who took
a very great interest in him. Indeed, some of these people went to
the extent of giving dinner-parties in his honour, and for a time he
was a lion. All this attention, meant in perfect kindness, greatly
disturbed him, for his loss of memory made him singularly sensitive,
and his nervous system had entirely given way under the extraordinary
sufferings he had endured. Mr. Sherman would have kept his secret, but
Captain Duff and the officers and men of the “Jessie Maxwell” went and
talked of him all over the city, and then the tale of his discovery and
rescue was published in a newspaper and made the property of the public.
But the public soon forgot him. The colony was young, and the New
Hollander had too many mines to sink, and houses to build, and acres
to clear, and convicts to protest against, and home oppressions of
every species to deal with, to keep his mind long fixed on one object.
Holdsworth settled into a regular clerkly routine, and every day
improved himself in Mr. Sherman’s opinion, by the peculiar sweetness of
his amiability, and by his gratitude expressed in every delicate form
that could vehicle the emotion of his full heart.
There was an able doctor at that time practising in Sydney, and Mr.
Sherman invited him to his house, and introduced him to Holdsworth,
believing that, by skilful handling, it was possible to restore the
poor fellow’s memory. But the doctor after a few weeks shook his head,
and pronounced the case hopeless, or at least beyond the reach of human
skill.
Indeed, rarely had a more curious and baffling problem been submitted,
than Holdsworth’s mind in those days.
Here was a man capable of recollecting with precision every incident
that had befallen him since his rescue, exhibiting shrewdness in
conversation, and accuracy in matters of current fact. His intellect
was as healthy as that of the healthiest-headed man who conversed with
him, but up to the period of his rescue everything was in darkness. The
conjectures which were offered him--so close to the mark some of them,
that they brushed the very skirts of real facts, and told the truth by
implication--conveyed no ideas. His eternal rejoinder was no more than
a shake of the head. Had he been a sailor? Did he remember the port
from which he sailed? the rig or name of the vessel? his native town?
Such questions, and hundreds of them, were asked, but though he grasped
familiar names with almost passionate eagerness, they established no
faintest clue as to his real past. And then inquiries becoming at last
no better than fruitless importunities, were dropped, and Holdsworth
was considered incurable.
Yet this could hardly have been thought, had those who gave in this
opinion been conscious of the under-current of secret, but not the
less powerful, yearnings, absolutely objectless, scarce owning definite
forms, which yet the restless instincts of the man urged with greedy
emphasis. These movements were, indeed, purely spiritual--the action of
the soul groping in her cell and searching for that window of the mind
which had been blackened, and through which no light could break. Of
the mental torments this intellectual blindness occasioned, no words
that I possess can describe the anguish. Month after month went by and
still found him searching heart-brokenly in the gloom for some image,
some substance, some sign, that should appease the piteous cravings of
his instincts, _which knew all, but could not speak_.
Whatever feminine tact could suggest to give light to his mind, Mr.
Sherman’s sister did. She made out a long list of names beginning with
H, trusting that one among them might be his, and that the sight of it
would recall many things or all.
But, long and patiently compiled as the list was, many names there must
be which she would omit; and amongst them his own. Then she made out a
list of the names of the ships; but here was an endless job, prosecuted
for a long while with benevolent industry, and then abandoned in
despair. She read the European papers carefully, hoping to find some
account of the loss of the vessel in which, it was surmised, Holdsworth
had been a passenger; but no such account ever rewarded her search.
Numerous were the other remedies she resorted to, but none of them
produced any result.
A few months of such unavailing work would soon extinguish hope. Both
she and her brother desisted at last from their merciful endeavours in
the full and final conviction that nothing but the hand of God could
ever draw aside the black curtain that hung over Holdsworth’s past.
But not to dwell at needless length upon this part of the story:
More than four years had passed since Holdsworth had arrived in
Sydney. Mr. Sherman had long learned to think of him as settled in the
colony, had increased his salary, and congratulated himself not only
on the possession of a valuable and trustworthy assistant, but upon a
pleasant, amiable, and thoroughly gentlemanly companion. No expression
of a wish to leave had ever escaped Holdsworth’s lips. He appeared not
only contented, but resigned to the affliction that had practically
deprived him of all knowledge of his past existence.
He came down to breakfast one morning with a face betokening great
agitation. Mr. Sherman was in the breakfast-room, and instantly noticed
Holdsworth’s air of bewilderment and distress.
“Mr. Sherman,” exclaimed Holdsworth at once to him, “do you remember
telling me that it was possible for my memory to be revived by a dream?”
“Yes--has it happened?”
“I cannot tell; but this much I know, that a voice sounded last night
in my ears, and bade me return at once to England. It was a woman’s
voice--it had a clearly-remembered tone--and I knew it in my sleep; but
when I awoke and tried to recall it I could not.”
“But your dream?”
“That was all.”
“Was your dream merely confined to the utterance of this voice?”
“I can remember nothing more than the voice.”
“And you cannot recall whose voice it resembled?”
“No.”
Mr. Sherman was silent, and Holdsworth watched him with anxiety, that
was almost pathetic, so eager was his hope that his friend would find
some light in this dim and curious night-fancy to help him with.
“I can see nothing serviceable in this,” said Mr. Sherman presently,
“but it is hopeful. Wait a while. This voice may return, or you may
dream something more tangible. Remember,” he added with a smile, “that
the morning light does not flood the world suddenly. The pale, faint
gray comes first, and there are many gradations of brightness between
the first peep of dawn and the rising of the sun.”
But though Holdsworth waited, the voice did not return. Nevertheless
it had sounded in his ears to some purpose. Day by day a longing grew
in him to return to England, which became in time deep and fervent
and irresistible. Superstition was the root of this yearning; but the
poor fellow, urged by his instincts into an eternal searching amid
the darkness, would scarcely pause to consider the nature of his keen
desire, but submit to it as an ordinance from God commissioned to impel
him into the Divine light of memory.
Mr. Sherman watched his increasing restlessness in silence, waiting for
him to declare his intention. He announced it one day.
“Mr. Sherman, I feel guilty of deep ingratitude in harbouring a wish
to leave you. But my longing to return to England has become so strong
that I can no longer resist it. God knows if I am not taking a foolish
step in voluntarily quitting so good and beloved a friend. But what are
these instincts which govern me? Ought I to blind myself to them? Are
they not given me for some end which can only be accomplished by my
obeying them? I do not know what I am leaving you to seek; but I _feel_
that whatever my past may hold which is precious to me is to be found
in England.”
“If you have this confidence in your impulse,” answered Mr. Sherman,
“you are right in obeying it. I am at least sure that your memory
stands but a poor chance of recovery in a strange land, surrounded
by objects which have no possible reference to your past, and can,
therefore, have no value as an appeal. I shall be sorry, very sorry, to
lose you, Mr. Hampden, but I think I can trace the hand of Providence
in this longing of yours, and in all humbleness and sincerity I ask
God to bless your endeavours and restore you the illumination of your
memory.”
This resolution, now taken, was final. Mr. Sherman’s encouragement
gave new strength to Holdsworth’s wishes, and the restlessness that
beset him became almost unbearable to him. In ten days from that date
a ship named the “Wellington” sailed for London; she was to carry many
passengers, but one saloon berth was still vacant, and that Mr. Sherman
himself procured and paid for, for Holdsworth. Nor did his kindness
stop with this. A few days before the ship left Sydney he asked
Holdsworth if he had saved any money.
“Yes, four hundred pounds.”
“Come! that will help you along for a time. Dr. Marlow, a friend of
mine, is attending an old lady to England. I have explained your case
to him, and begged him to give you his closest attention. He is clever,
and the long term of intimacy you will enjoy before you reach London
may be productive of some good to you. And now do me the favour to put
this in your pocket,” he continued, handing Holdsworth a little parcel.
“No need to examine its contents now. It is a small gift from my sister
and myself. You will find my address inside it, which will remind you
to write to us; for be sure that nobody can take more interest in you
than we do. Above all, remember that if ever you should want a friend,
you will find two very steadfast ones in Sydney, who will rejoice to
welcome you back.”
The parcel contained bank-notes to the value of three hundred pounds.