Library Collections: Document: Full Text

But before he could finish the speech, the lady dropped from her chair to the floor, fainting with agitation, fatigue, and disappointment.

They raised her and placed her on the bed, and bathed her temples in cold water, while Bill hurried over to the Captain's and procured his assistance. Henrietta came over with camphor; and the lady was just beginning to revive, when in came Jims, bounding from the door, followed by Mr. and Mrs. Haddock. The boy's instincts had told him what to do in this emergency, and he had darted away over the fields, with the swiftness of a deer, to communicate the intelligence to them. Almost as rapidly, the whole party had returned.

"Where has he gone? Tell me, and I will go to him. Tell me," said the stranger, recovering. "Am I not his wife? Is not this child his own little Alice? Tell me where I shall find him, my husband!"

"Dear creature!" said Mrs. Haddock, pressing her to her lips, and soothing her with the gentlest tones of her voice. "Believe me, he is not far off". He is under our own roof, but a short, very short distance off, and will be most happy and overjoyed to see you."

The lady leaned her head on the breast of Mrs. Haddock, and burst into a flood of tears. She filled the room with her sobs and exclamations of gratitude; and Alice also cried, as a child will often cry, with fear, and wonder, and fatigue, intermingled.

As for Captain Bunce, he expressed the utmost joy that Mr. and Mrs. Haddock had come over, for he shouldn't have known "what in the world to do with the poor critur any how."

By degrees, as he could bear it, Boyce was made acquainted with her arrival. The flame of the poor sufferer's life almost flashed out in its brilliant burnings, as he at length came to understand the good news. He wildly called her name, and soon after pressed her to his heart. It was an hour of deepest emotion to both -- the hour of their first meeting. How she called him her lost "Alanson!" and rolled her long, delicate through the dark locks of his hair. How she wept on his cheek and kissed away his and her own tears, and pressed his hands which fondly clung to her's. Their eyes failed them as they looked on one another, and their voices were voices of joy and sorrow intermingled as they spoke to one another. It was now of old England! and anon of America! It was of prosperity and adversity. It was of hope and fear, of the past and present. And Boyce, with a father's pride and joy, pressed to his heart his dear little Alice, now six years of age, sweet image of her mother, a young, sunny-haired child of the old world, but early transplanted, through a storm-cloud on the sea and death-waves to many hapless ones, to the new.

It was a long story that occupied them day after day to tell each other of the past. We must in the recital cut it short. Suffice it that she had followed both her parents to the grave, and had failed during the last two or three years of receiving any letters or intelligence from her husband. At length, with Alice, she left England for America, determined to find her husband, or learn what had become of him. The ship was wrecked on the Jersey shore in a gale, and she was the only lady passenger rescued. She and Alice were saved, but nearly every thing of value was lost. They were humanely treated, however, being taken to New York, and efforts made at her request to ascertain some tidings of her husband. For a long time their efforts were unavailing, but finally she heard through a publishing house in the city, that he had been unfortunate in his recent manuscripts, finding no publisher ready to undertake them, (but that chiefly owing to his own weak state of health, affecting his intellectual accuracy,) and that he had been driven by "hard times" out of the city, they knew not where! This was a killing blow to her. For many days she was so much discouraged by it, that her health sensibly declined, and she anticipated a long, distressing sickness. One day, however, the darkness was all dissipated in a moment. The publisher already referred to sent her a letter, received from the Rev. Mr. Rodman, of Crampton, enclosing one from her husband, written at Mr. Haddock's, and requesting him to forward it in the most direct manner to England, at time urging him to make inquiry for letters to him at the post office in New York. In this letter, Boyce in a few words told his wife of his forlorn condition as an inmate of the poor-house. But he also mentioned the kind friends he had found in the Haddocks, and hoped he should never again be forced to feel all the biting of want he had experienced. He said that his address at the present time was "care of Captain Bunce, Crampton."

In a short time, Mrs. Boyce with Alice, was on the way there, with little money to defray her expenses; a stranger in the country, and depressed by the knowledge of her husband's state of health, the journey was a long one, and a weary one.

But we have seen its end. How blessed once more to meet -- to see each other's faces in the flesh, and to renew the love of other days; to talk of all the past and cheer each other with bright hopes of future joy. * * * And yet hopes brighter than their reality. Boyce lingered on till the spring and died. So lingered on a little further the loving wife, and she too slept beside him; their graves marked by the purest marble, for their lives had been innocent and good. And Alice was left alone -- an orphan in a land of strangers, but by no means an unfriended, homeless orphan, still a fatherless, motherless child.