When he next spoke his voice was hard—uneven.
"Elsie, for God's sake help me! Don't cry, or I must open my arms and hold you in them for ever, come what may. We have needed no words to translate love's language in—no signs to show we were each to each the complement that Heaven has made and laws of men have marred; we shall need no oath to bind us to remembrance. Good-bye. Some day, when you are older, you may know what it costs a fellow to protect a woman from her greatest enemy—himself."
The sound smote her heart, harsh and grating, like rusty steel. She could not scan the ashen mask that hid the rage of conflict; merciful darkness had enveloped the death struggle with a gossamer pall. There was not even a clasp of hands to tell his going; she knew it, but still stood there, as the vessel glided on into the sweltering night's maturity over a placid sea, under a placid sky, while human passions raged and rent themselves in useless agony.
Two hours later all was silent; most of the passengers, overcome with the tropical temperature and restlessness, were sinking into the fevered sleep that comes only when night's noon has turned a cool shoulder to the scorchings of the day. On the open deck, to catch what breeze there might be, the men slumbered, with forms inartistically outspread; the women, in a more sheltered nook, though not far removed, were stretched on couches all in a row like shrouded corpses awaiting the resurrection. Night looked down as on some pillaged city where only the dead are left to keep each other ghostly company. Suddenly, from among them there uprose a small, white wraith—lithe, barefooted, with wandering hair. It fled, looking nor right nor left—its footfall light as snowflakes—straight on, to where the ship's track threw a ruffled tongue across the stillness of the water. In a single flash the silver ripples gaped, parted, closed again, enfolding in the bosom of the deep the fair frail atom—an atom that seemed, in the immensity, scarce larger than the feather from a seagull's wing. Then the serene face of the ocean smiled smoothly as ever, hugging its hidden secret till the bursting of the grand chorus when the sea gives up its dead.
And Burton Aylmer, afar off, with outstretched, grey-flanneled limbs, lay motionless, his hands clasped beneath his head, his eyes staring with haggard scepticism at the floating ultramarine of the heavens. His lips moved as though framing a prayer, but he was only muttering to himself, parrot-wise, the burden of the ritual that bound him to "a virtuous woman, wedded to mysticism and morphia," who loved him "never a bit."