But, when she had gone, and had lain herself down upon the soft, dry
sand within that cave, sleep refused to come to her. The night before
she had slept long and soundly, perhaps because of all that she had
gone through, and because also she was battered and bruised and weak
after her immersion in the sea and the contact with the rocks. But
to-night she could not do so--her mind was now triumphant over her
body; the hour of that mind's agony was upon her. And she bent and
swayed beneath this agony, and recognised, acknowledged, all the ruin
that had fallen on her future life and hopes and dreams of happiness
to come.
Her lover, her future husband, was gone--was dead! Her heart was
broken; there was in actual fact no future before her. She had loved
him madly, blindly, almost from the first time she had set eyes on
him, and now--now he was dead. There was nothing more. She would never
love any other man; none other could ever find his way into her heart
as Gilbert Bampfyld had done, nor set every pulse and fibre in her
body stirring, nor cause her to thank God when she awoke each morning
that another day had dawned when, even though she might not see him,
she could still pass many waking hours in thinking of him. No; no
other man would ever have the power to cause all that. Henceforth, if
she ever left this island alive, it would be to return to a joyless,
hopeless life--a woman widowed ere she had become a wife.
Thus she thought and mused as she lay in the cave, her head supported
on one hand while she looked out on all that devilish, cruel waste of
waters which had hurled the ship to its destruction and slain almost
every soul on board her, and which now--like some wanton trampling on
the ruin and despair that she has caused--was smiling before her in
the rays of a crescent moon that was just peeping above the eastern
horizon. Indeed, the glimmer which this young moon sent shimmering
along the tropical sea was not unlike the false sad smile that a
wanton's lips might wear in the hour of her victim's ruin; the smile
that bespeaks 'the painting of a sorrow, a face without a heart.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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