No one saw her go. There was no gleam on the waves from her sea-coloured gown; her white face was undistinguishable from the foam that smothered it; she was too paralysed by the icy coldness of the water and her horror of despair to utter a cry for help. Robert, all unconscious of his loss, was calmly measuring the ship's pace on a chart with a pair of compasses, and congratulating himself on his sixteen knots, while she, sinking alone and unhelped in the eternal deeps, saw its funnels smoking against the stars a mile away. She had, as we say, "simply nothing in her," and she certainly was a little minx, from the point of view of all strictly proper people. Still, when she was gone, there were left in many lives great blanks which her betters could not fill. "She was so human," says Robert Brackenbury, in the rare, soft moments when he can bring himself to speak of her. "Not intellectual, not highly accomplished, not anything in particular— only that; human in every sweet bit of her, a woman all through—” At which point words fail him, choked with inward tears. In his cabin on the Egypt hangs a photograph of her he received it from Rosamond Ellis six months after the fatal voyage, lying in a London hospital, with a shaved head-a picture that lives. with him wherever he goes. There she stands, with her easy, confident air, looking at him with her pretty eyes and half-smiling mouth, exactly as she used; and she wears the sea-coloured teagown that was her shroud. What made her get photographed in that? The sea-weed embroidery comes out beautifully, like delicate grey lace-a dreadful detail. The likeness is perfect. "This much is saved from chance and change," he says to himself, contemplating the lifeless presentment of what was once so rich in life. And the thought comes to him, as it comes to many more who loved her, that she was not born for the common fate-not meant for rheumatism and lumbago, for cap and spectacles-like other men's wives. "Other men's wives," he tells himself, "grow old, grow cross, grow wearisome; but my wife-for she was my wife-will always be like this, beautiful and young, with eyes full of love, a complete and perfect woman, unspoilable, unchangeable, through all the wrinkling, hair-whitening, heart-paralysing years." It is not a thought that comforts him yet, while he is still in the prime of his lusty manhood, when the shadow in place of the substance is too tantalising to bear sanely. But it will comfort him some day. Then he will marry a wife like other men's wives, and she will become the reality of his life, and his "perfect woman" but a dream. THE END. |