And she proved that they were right, for when one lovely night Teddy Somers suggested very delicately to her that his affection for her was the same as it had always been, there was more than a little reproach in her voice as she cried—
“Oh, stop—stop—for Heaven’s sake! My love is dead—buried with him. I cannot hear any one talk to me of love.”
He pressed her hand and left her without another word.
She remained in her deck chair far removed from the rest of the passengers for a long time, thinking her thoughts, whatever they may have been. The moon was almost at the full, so that it was high in the sky before the quartermaster made six bells, and those of the passengers who had not already gone to their berths arose from their chairs, murmuring that they had no notion it was within an hour of midnight. A few of them, passing the solitary figure of the girl on her chair, said “Good night” to her in a cheery way, and then shook their heads suggestively together with such an exchange of sentiments as “Poor girl!—Poor girl!”
“Very sad!”
“Melancholy affair!” but it is doubtful if their hearts were so overcharged with sympathy as to interfere to any marked degree with their slumbers.
The girl remained upon the deserted deck and watched the quartermasters collecting and storing away all the passengers’ chairs which lay scattered about, just as their owners had vacated them. When they had finished their job no one of the ship’s company remained on the quarterdeck. The sound of the little swish made by a leaping flying-fish had a suggestion of something mysterious about it as it reached her ears: it seemed like the faint whisper of a secret of the sea—it seemed as if some voice outside the ship was saying “Hist!” to her, to attract her attention before making a revelation to her.
But she knew what the sound was, and she did not move from her chair.
“Alas—alas!” she murmured, “you can tell me nothing. Ah! there is nothing for me to be told. I know all that will be known until the sea gives up its dead. He loved me, and the sea snatched him from me.”
The tears with which her heart was filled began to overflow. She wept softly for a long time, and when at last she gave a sigh and wiped the mist from her eyes she found that the moon, previously so brilliant, had become dim. Its outline was blurred, so that, although the atmosphere was full of moonlight, it was impossible to say what was the centre of the illumination. It seemed to Viola as if a thin diaphanous silk curtain had fallen between the moon and the sea. Every object which an hour before had cast a black shadow athwart the deck—the spars of the mainmast, the quarterboat hanging in its davits—was clearly seen as ever, only without the strong contrasts of light and shade. The sea out to the horizon was of a luminous grey, which bore but a shadowy resemblance to the dark-blue carpet traversed by the glittering golden pathway to the moon, over which Viola had pensively gazed in the early night before Somers had come to her side.