A CANDLE IN THE WIND
A CANDLE
IN THE WIND
BY
MARY IMLAY TAYLOR
_Author of “The Impersonator,” “The Reaping,” “Caleb Trench,”
“The Man in the Street,” etc._
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY
1919
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY
MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I 1
II 14
III 27
IV 34
V 42
VI 50
VII 56
VIII 66
IX 71
X 84
XI 96
XII 102
XIII 112
XIV 122
XV 127
XVI 132
XVII 140
XVIII 149
XIX 161
XX 174
XXI 187
XXII 193
XXIII 198
XXIV 208
XXV 214
XXVI 226
XXVII 236
XXVIII 242
XXIX 255
XXX 266
XXXI 276
XXXII 285
XXXIII 297
XXXIV 309
XXXV 316
XXXVI 323
XXXVII 334
XXXVIII 346
A CANDLE IN THE WIND
A CANDLE IN THE WIND
I
DIANE controlled the secret distress which the mere mention of
Overton’s name made immeasurably keen, and tried to give her undivided
attention to the entertainment of her father’s guests. She had a fine
discrimination in social matters, and she felt that this occasion,
however simple and domestic, was made important by the presence of
Arthur Faunce, the young hero of the recent antarctic expedition.
Faunce had not been expected at Mapleton so soon after his triumphant
reception in New York, where, exalted into prominence by Overton’s
tragic death, he had been hailed as the leading survivor of the brave
band of explorers. But, with that infatuated zeal with which the moth
seeks the candle, he had returned almost immediately to the place where
he was sure to feel the radiant flame of Diane Herford’s charm.
However well aware she may have been in the past of the young man’s
incipient infatuation, Diane had almost forgotten those early passages
in their lives when she had made a conquest of a college boy’s heart
at a time when, with the sublime optimism of youth, he had worn it
joyously upon his sleeve. Since then several years had intervened, rich
in experience. Diane had traveled a good deal with her father, and had
been received, both at home and abroad, with flattering attention.
She had felt the force of a deeper emotion, suffered the actual pang
of bereavement, seen a hope, beautiful and thrilled with an exquisite
tenderness, lost forever with the gallant hero who had perished almost
within sight of the goal that he had sought with such courage and such
devotion.
That he had not spoken more definitely at parting, that their
understanding was tacit rather than actual, only deepened her grief by
depriving her of the right to indulge it. Since she was thus denied
the privilege of openly mourning the loss of Overton, and must force
herself to speak of him and to hear his death discussed with apparent
composure, Diane was listening now to the becoming modesty with which
Arthur Faunce was quietly assuming the dead man’s mantle.
She saw, too, that Faunce’s new honors, his youth, and his undoubted
good looks had again enlisted her father’s good-will. Some feeling,
almost an impulse of indignation, swept through her at the thought that
a man’s fame, like his life, had no more permanence than the flame of
one of the delicately shaded candles that she had placed among the
flowers upon the table. Her thought, poignant as it was with sadness,
must have been winged, for it found an almost immediate echo in her
father’s response to a tribute that Faunce had just paid to Overton.
“Yes, he was a brave fellow,” Judge Herford declared in his Olympian
tones. “If he had lived, Faunce, you’d have had to look to your
laurels. But what a tragic end--to fall by the way, almost in sight of
the goal!”
“As Moses died in sight of the promised land!” sighed Mrs. Price, her
host’s cousin, the plump and amiable wife of the dean of a neighboring
theological seminary.
Thoroughly imbued with the precepts of her more gifted husband, Mrs.
Price allowed herself to fall into a fatal way of applying scriptural
similitudes, or, as Dr. Gerry irreverently phrased it, of “talking
shop.”
The judge smiled involuntarily, leaning back in his chair, a massive
figure, his fine head scantily covered with iron-gray hair, and his
keen eye as bright at sixty-five as Faunce remembered it when he
himself had been a lad of ten. He tossed back a reply now with a gleam
of amusement.
“It takes your imagination, Cousin Julia, to clothe the antarctic
in milk and honey. Poor fellow! As I understand it, Faunce, Overton
perished as much from hunger and exhaustion as from cold!” he added,
turning toward the guest of honor.
Faunce seemed to flinch, and an expression of such keen distress passed
over his handsome face that it awoke a glow of sympathy, almost of
cordiality, in the breast of Diane Herford. There was a little silence.
Mrs. Price, her daughter, Fanny, her husband, the dean, and Dr. Gerry
all stopped talking to listen to the young man’s expected reply. It was
the kind of hush that expressed not only sympathy, but something like
awe of a great tragedy enacted in a distant and unknown clime, where
even death has been obscured by the mystery and silence of those frozen
solitudes.
Faunce had been admirable all the evening--brilliant, convincing, and
yet becomingly modest; but now he stretched out an unsteady hand,
lifted his wine-glass to his lips, tried in vain to swallow some
liquor, and set it down with a gesture of despair.
“Don’t speak of it!” he exclaimed in a faltering voice. “We were
together--I can never forget it, I----” He broke off, and recovered
himself. “Pardon me if I can’t talk of it, can’t tell you about it yet.
The time may come, but now----”
He ceased speaking and stared straight in front of him with unseeing
eyes, his powerful but shapely hand unconsciously clenched on the edge
of the table.
Dr. Gerry, an old family friend and an eminent practitioner, suspended
his dissection of the duck to cast a keen glance at Faunce. He had the
searching eyes of the professional observer, set well back under heavy
brows, a quantity of short red hair, and a square jaw that was somewhat
relieved by the whimsical lines about his tight, thin-lipped mouth and
the puckers at the corners of his eyes.
There was a significance in the doctor’s glance which did not escape
the troubled eyes of Diane. When he turned it suddenly upon her, she
averted her face, unable to meet its perfectly apparent suspicion. She
knew that Dr. Gerry had long ago surmised her attachment to Overton,
and her hand trembled slightly as she picked up her fork and tried once
more to make a pretense of eating her dinner.
She was so completely absorbed in her own unhappiness, in the thrill of
misery and pride that stirred her heart at the thought of the gallant
man who had died as he had always lived, in her eyes, like a hero, that
she awoke from her reverie to find that she had lost the thread of the
conversation, which had been hastily resumed to cover Faunce’s collapse.
“We’re puny creatures,” her father was saying in the tone of a
pessimist. “What do our efforts amount to, after all? There’s a
saying--and it’s true--that ‘a man’s life is like a candle in the wind,
or hoar frost on the tiles.’ It’s blown away or melted off, and there’s
nothing left!”
The little dean fired up.
“The immortal soul is left! What would life be worth if we didn’t
believe that a young, enthusiastic spirit like Overton’s had in it the
seed of immortality? ‘White-breasted, like a star fronting the dawn he
moved.’ A soul like his can’t be compared to the flame of a candle,
Herford, but rather to the light of a star that is kindled in the
darkness of our impotent endeavors. He had the magnificent youth, the
immortal courage, that always lead the world!”
“Well, well!” retorted the judge, unmoved. “He had, at least, the
courage to meet the great adventure.”
“He had more than that, papa,” Diane commanded herself to say quietly,
lifting her head with a recurrent thrill of pride. “No one could know
him without realizing that he had supremely the courage to live--to
live as he believed a man should.”
At the sound of her voice Faunce turned his head sharply, and his face
flushed, but his eyes dwelt on her with such earnestness that Diane,
suddenly meeting his look, stopped in confusion. Her embarrassment
surprised no one more than herself, for she had long ago achieved that
sort of self-control which carries a woman through far more difficult
moments than this. It was almost a relief to hear her father’s tranquil
retort.
“Di’s a good friend,” he observed, throwing her a benevolent smile.
“She always defends the absent. And she’s right this time. Overton had
courage enough to have been allowed to live. It’s one of the mysteries
why such men are cut off in their prime.”
“I had only one fault to find with him,” rejoined the dean, relapsing
into his more usual formalism. “I said that to his face, and it saddens
me now to recall it. He wasn’t what we call a Christian in the orthodox
meaning of the word.”
“How can you say that?” exclaimed Diane warmly. “He was a Christian in
the larger sense. Do you remember _Abou Ben Adhem’s_ dream of peace? Of
no man could it be said more truly than of Overton that ‘he loved his
fellow men.’”
Dr. Gerry nodded.
“That’s so, Di. I fancy you can indorse her sentiments, Faunce?”
Again all eyes turned in the direction of the young explorer, and he
roused himself with an evident effort.
“He was one of the best friends a man ever had,” he exclaimed with
feeling. “I don’t know much about his religious beliefs. I’ll leave
that to Dr. Price and to Miss Herford,” he added, inclining his head
to Diane; “but he had courage enough to stand by anything that he
believed.”
“That only brings us back again to the original proposition,” rejoined
Judge Herford. “It’s an affirmative verdict--we’ve established his
courage!”
“Haven’t we got an example of that right before us?” cried Mrs. Price,
with a little bubbling sound of enthusiasm like the pleasant hum of a
teakettle. “Here’s Mr. Faunce!”
“That’s right--we haven’t forgotten you, Faunce,” smiled their host.
“You can’t escape your rôle of hero here.”
Faunce murmured a confused acknowledgment, blushing suddenly like a
schoolboy. Dr. Gerry, who had been listening attentively, his keen eye
studying the young explorer with professional curiosity, interposed
now, giving the conversation a new and unexpected turn.
“Courage takes on strange streaks sometimes,” he remarked slowly,
leaning back in his chair in an apparently reminiscent mood. “I
remember a queer case out in the Philippines. A young private--the
fellow came somewhere from the big grain-fields of the Northwest, and
had never seen service before--went into action out there and got
honorable mention three times. One day he carried a wounded comrade off
under fire, and some of the women heard of it and wrote home, trying to
get the Carnegie medal for him. About ten days after that the cholera
broke out in a camp in Mindanao. I was down there with the regimental
surgeon when Private Bruce was ordered on hospital duty. He begged to
be excused, he turned as white as a sheet, and his teeth chattered.
He wasn’t afraid of bullets, but he was afraid of cholera. Of course
he didn’t get off. He had to go on duty, and he was sent out with a
stretcher to bring in a dead comrade. A little Filipino, one of Uncle
Sam’s new recruits, went with him. Presently the Filipino came back; he
said he couldn’t do it alone, and the white man had run away. It was
true, too. Bruce had bolted. He ran all the way to Manila, and they had
to comb the place to find him for the court martial. He simply couldn’t
face a quietly unpleasant death, and pestilence got on his nerves.”
Faunce, who had been listening with his eyes on his plate, looked up
now, and his glance kindled with something akin to anger.
“Perhaps it wasn’t pure cowardice,” he exclaimed with feeling. “It’s
easier to judge another man than to do the thing yourself. I----”
He stopped short, aware of the silence around the table, and then
ended lamely: “I’ve seen men do strange things under the stress of
circumstance!”
The doctor chuckled.
“So have I. I once saw a burly blacksmith faint dead away at the mere
sight of a tortoise-shell cat. He’d inherited a prenatal aversion to
that kind of a feline, and he’d never been able to conquer it.”
Faunce threw him a darkened glance.
“There you have it--prenatal influence!” he retorted, thrusting away
his coffee-cup, the dinner having reached its final stage. “Mayn’t a
prenatal influence excuse a sudden, an inexplicable and unconquerable
impulse?”
“In a lunatic, yes.”
Diane looked quickly at the speaker. It seemed to her that he was
purposely goading Faunce. He leaned back in his chair again, watching
the younger man, his rugged face and upstanding reddish hair thrown
into sharp relief in the midst of the group at the table. Across softly
shaded lights and flowers, the gleam of snowy damask, and the sparkle
of silver, she could see the white-haired, placid dean, comfortable,
matronly Mrs. Price, her father’s massive, aggressive gray head, and
Fanny’s bright youthfulness, which only served to accentuate the shrewd
personality of Gerry and the grace and dignity of Faunce.
For the moment these two were pitted against each other. Then the
younger man, perhaps aware that he was being baited, dropped the debate
with a shrug.
“According to your idea, then, Private Bruce had an insane impulse,
instead of simply losing his nerve, as I’ve seen men do a thousand
times--and they weren’t cowards, either.”
“You’re not exactly the man we should expect to defend any form of
cowardice,” interposed Judge Herford, smiling.
“With his magnificent record,” chimed in Mrs. Price, in her amiable
voice, “it’s simply fine to be so considerate toward the weaknesses of
the rest of us poor mortals!”
“I suppose, madam, that’s to imply that I’m not charitable,” rejoined
Dr. Gerry composedly. “As a matter of fact, I’ve the greatest sympathy
for cowards myself.”
“So have I!” exclaimed Fanny Price, her young face turned radiantly,
like a full moon, toward the hero of the evening. “I’m an awful coward!”
“She is,” agreed her father cheerfully. “She looks under her bed every
night for a burglar.”
In the laugh that greeted Fanny’s blushes, the topic was turned. Diane
asked Faunce some questions about his recent experience in New York.
“I had to lecture,” he replied with an uneasy laugh. “That’s one
penalty we pay in America when we discover anything. I gave two
lectures, and I’m booked for a third, worse luck!”
“I shall try to hear that,” she rejoined quietly, forcing herself to
smile in a conventional way, though her eyes were still pathetic.
Faunce thought he had never seen her more beautiful. The delicate
hollows in her cheeks, and the white brow under her dusky hair, made
her charm assume an elusive and spiritual quality that was rather
enhanced by the simplicity of her low-cut, sleeveless black dress and
the filmy draperies that floated about her shoulders and blended with
the long, soft folds at her waist. The beautiful lines of her slender
figure, and something in the grace and harmony of her whole aspect,
reminded him of a splendid Reynolds that had once enthralled his eye.
“You would be an inspiration,” he began, in a tone intended for her
ear alone; “but”--he hesitated for an instant, bending his dark eyes
upon her--“I wonder if I could keep on making a fool of myself with you
there to see me do it!”
Something in his tone brought the color to her cheeks, and she passed
his remark over lightly.
“I’m sorry if I’m a discouraging listener. I think I’ll have to give
you a chance to discuss that with the dean and papa. Dr. Gerry is too
critical,” she added, laughing at the doctor as she rose from the
table. “Come, Cousin Julia and Fanny dear, these men are pining to talk
politics when we’re not here to insist on suffrage.”
“Oh, I’ll give it to you any time, Di!” flung back the doctor.
But she did not answer him; she was smiling at Faunce as he held open
the door for her to pass out.
“Please come soon and give us a lecture,” she entreated.
He made no reply, but his eyes were bent so intently on her that
he entirely missed the girlishly admiring gaze of Fanny Price, who
followed her mother and Diane out of the room.
II
LEADING the way into the small, old-fashioned drawing-room, Diane
seated her guests around the bright fire on the hearth, taking care to
select a chair for herself that would put her face in the shadow.
Mrs. Price took the low seat opposite. Her plump, round little body
spread out comfortably and settled into the cushions with the genial
softness of a pudding. Her lustrous black silk, which the dean approved
as “the most suitable and stately dress for a lady,” seemed to billow
over the curved arms of the chair, and decorously veiled her white
stockings and old-style, low shoes. Fanny, pretty and fair and barely
eighteen, with only a suggestion of her mother’s button nose and her
father’s tranquil brow under a fluffy mass of fair curls, dropped on a
low cushion between the two.
“Isn’t he splendid?” she exclaimed rapturously, clasping her hands.
“He’s so handsome--isn’t he, Di? He looks just as I’ve always imagined
heroes did!”
“He’s very good-looking, my dear,” her mother admitted amiably. “I
couldn’t help thinking of that picture at the seminary--you remember
it, Fanny--of David? You must know it too, Diane?”
“I don’t think I’ve noticed it very much,” Diane replied vaguely. “Of
course, Mr. Faunce seems a hero just now, and people are making a great
deal of his exploits. It’s right that they should; but what hurts me,
what seems to me so strange, is the way they forget that Overton led
the expedition, that he made all these great discoveries, that it isn’t
right to forget him while they’re applauding the things he did.”
“My dear, nobody forgets him,” Mrs. Price reassured her. “He was
tremendously real, I’m sure, and we all liked him, though, as Edward
said at dinner, he seemed a little--a little----”
“Fogged on religion,” chimed in Fanny cheerfully. “So many men are,
mama, and I’m sure Overton was as nice as he could be. When I was a
child, he used to give me candy--didn’t he, Di?”
“A sure way to win your heart!” retorted Diane, smiling. “I don’t think
I’m as orthodox as you are, Cousin Julia,” she added calmly. “There are
greater things in heaven and earth than mere formalism.”
“Diane!” breathed her shocked relative.
“Oh, I sha’n’t dispute it with you!” Diane went on easily; “but you
mustn’t think that a man like Simon Overton hadn’t a soul great enough
to have its own faith. I know he had it.”
“I’m sure he did,” agreed Fanny warmly. “Didn’t you hear what Mr.
Faunce said--that Overton was one of the best friends a man ever had?
Isn’t that a great tribute--from a man like Faunce, too?”
Diane assented, leaning farther back in her corner. At the moment
she could not quite command her voice. Overton’s face seemed to rise
before her as she had seen it last--manly and tender and kindled with
high hope. How could she think of it veiled in the mist and chill of a
frozen death, like a light suddenly quenched in a tempest, or a star
receding into the clouds of the infinite?
“No, I’m not a formalist,” she said with sudden passion, as if her
thoughts must find an outlet in words; “but I do believe in the
immortal soul. It isn’t possible that a man’s life, going out as it
does like--like a candle in the wind, leaves nothing whatever behind,
nothing to reach up to the heights that he sought.”
“Of course you believe in the soul!” Mrs. Price was immeasurably
startled. Her round eyes grew rounder than ever. “How can you express a
doubt of it, Diane?”
“Di hasn’t really,” argued Fanny, interfering between the two. “She’s
off on one of her tangents, that’s all. She can’t get the awful part of
it out of her head. Wasn’t it touching, mama, the way Faunce couldn’t
even speak of Overton’s death?”
“It’s perfectly natural, dear. Your father heard that Faunce risked
his life in trying to bring Overton’s body back, and was almost dead
himself when he reached the cache.”
“It was the blizzard that overwhelmed them,” supplemented Diane’s rich,
melancholy voice from the shadow. She was resting her head on her hand,
and her face was completely obscured. “They had pushed far ahead,
they had reached the farthest south, and then--Overton died. It seems
terrible to think that the rescue ship was so near all the while. They
had only to struggle a while longer, only to keep life in them for four
days!”
“Their ship was completely crushed in the ice, wasn’t it?” Fanny asked
softly, clasping her hands around her knee and gazing into the fire.
“If it hadn’t been for that----”
“He would have been saved, yes!” Diane drew a long breath. “If it
hadn’t been for that, the wrecking of the ship, the great storm, he
would be here now with Faunce.”
“Well, for my part,” said Mrs. Price firmly, “I don’t think we should
dwell on these things too much. They’re all appointed. ‘The wind
bloweth where it listeth.’ We ought to cheer up Arthur Faunce. He’s
been given back to us, and there must be a purpose in it. I always
feel, when a man comes back from the dead, as it were, that he’s been
spared for a reason. You mark my words, Arthur Faunce has been marked
out for a great work. He will be a kind of prophet in Israel!”
Diane made no immediate reply. Her mind was too deeply absorbed in
thought. She realized more fully than Mrs. Price the great opportunity
that had come to Faunce like a legacy from the dead. She remembered his
emotion at the mention of Overton, the feeling tribute that he had paid
to his friend, and the spirit, at once kindled but modest, that had
breathed through many of his previous utterances.
He was like a man who had been following in the wake of genius, content
to take up the fragments of success that fell to his share, but had
suddenly found the gates flung wide open and seen the long road
beyond--the road which he would henceforth travel alone, and to no
uncertain goal. He had loved Overton. Their friendship was well known,
and he had been faithful to the end. Even now he did not withhold the
laurels that belonged to his leader; he only accepted them because
there was no one left to dispute his claim.
She knew, too, that he had shown his ability, his power to command in
an emergency. He had returned a far-different man from the uncertain
youth who had set out two years before. Something in this, and in the
optimism he had shown in the midst of disaster, touched her imagination.
If he had been more vainglorious, more eager to take the glory of the
great work achieved by the expedition, she would have hated him. But
his tone when he had begged them not to speak of Overton’s death, the
tribute he had paid to his dead comrade’s friendship, when his voice
broke and his eyes filled--these things went to Diane’s heart.
The thought of them had taken such possession of her that she scarcely
noticed the silence that had fallen on the little trio. Fanny’s blue
eyes were gazing dreamily into the blaze, while the remote murmur of
talk and the scent of tobacco came to them from the dining-room. Diane
was startled by the awakening of her elder relative, who, apparently,
had also been wrapped in dreamy meditation.
“Diane, did your cook make those delicious rolls that were served with
the fish?” Mrs. Price asked abruptly.
Diane looked up blankly.
“Why, of course! She’s very proud of them, too. Haven’t you ever tasted
them before?”
“I don’t think so, and I’m sure I should remember. They were so crisp!
I’ve got a new cook--did Fan tell you? She’s dreadful. Poor Edward
says she’s ruining his digestion, and I’d better try a fireless cooker
instead. Can’t you let me have that recipe for her?”
“It wouldn’t do any good, mama. She’s a Norwegian, Di, and she
understands so little English that when she tries to talk it sounds
like a turkey gobbling.”
Fanny began to give a practical illustration, but her mother protested.
“Hush! Here are the gentlemen, and they’ll think you’re crazy, child!”
Fanny stopped, with a queer little grimace that made Diane laugh. They
were interrupted by the entrance of Dr. Gerry and Arthur Faunce, who
were a little in advance of the judge and the dean. Diane found herself
engaged in conversation by the old doctor, who began by remarking that
she was too pale, and that he suspected she sat up half the night to
read novels.
Diane, who knew that this was merely an excuse to give him an
opportunity to probe her inmost mind, parried it lightly, and engaged
him in an animated discussion of the latest best-seller.
“Advertisement--nothing but advertisement!” he declared bruskly. “In my
young days a novel had to be good to be read. Now it’s an even thing
between the man who’s written a book and the man who’s invented a
bunion-eraser--it all depends on which gets the most advertising!”
“Iconoclast! Won’t you leave us the illusion of fame?” retorted Diane,
laughing.
“It isn’t fame men want these days--it’s money!”
“Filthy lucre!” said the dean. “Don’t let that pessimist destroy your
enjoyment of life, Diane. Send him off to play billiards with your
father. I’ve got to take my girls home. I’ve an engagement for seven
o’clock to-morrow morning, and I need rest.”
As he spoke, Mrs. Price came up and bestowed a flattering kiss upon
Diane’s cheek.
“Good-night, dear! Don’t forget about that recipe for rolls,” she
murmured.
Diane promised to remember, and went up-stairs to help the two women
into their wraps. Fanny was still blushing and confused. She had been
talking to Faunce, and her blue eyes shone like two radiant aquamarines.
“He’s so splendid, Di, isn’t he?” she whispered, as her cousin fastened
her cloak for her. “And his eyes--there’s something wonderful about
them. They haunt you!”
Diane laughed as she kissed her good-night, and watched the two cloaked
and hooded figures marshaled out by the little dean in his long black
coat and high hat. Standing in the open door, she saw the three
familiar figures walking in single file down the long path to the gate,
not one of them keeping step with the others, but each bobbing up and
down at a different gait, as curiously bundled and indiscriminate in
the darkness as so many Indian papooses suddenly set on their feet and
compelled to toddle.
As she closed the door and turned back toward the drawing-room, she
saw that Arthur Faunce was awaiting her there alone.
“I thought you were with papa and the doctor,” she said, apologizing
for her neglect, as he drew a chair forward for her to sit again near
the dying embers on the hearth.
“They went to play billiards, and I don’t know one ball from another,”
he replied. “I told them I should wait for you.” He took the chair that
Mrs. Price had vacated, and leaned forward, resting his elbows on the
arms. “I wanted to speak to you alone.”
Diane looked up, and met his dark eyes bent on her with a melancholy
and troubled gaze that sent a sad thrill of expectation to her heart.
He meant to speak of Overton!
She said nothing. For a moment, indeed, she was quite incapable of
speech. They both heard the distant click of the billiard-balls and her
father’s deep voice speaking to Dr. Gerry.
“You know that I was with Overton--with Simon,” he said at last, “to
the very end, and once or twice he--he talked to me of you.”
She looked up in surprise. She had felt that it was unlike Overton even
to mention her name, so deep and almost sensitive was the reserve that
he had always shown. Faunce met her look again, and this time his pale
face flushed.
“I mean in the way that Overton always spoke of women--of his
friends--with the truest and most chivalrous regard. He was not well;
the climate broke him up before the end, and I think he had a feeling
that he might not live to come back. One day, after we had to abandon
the ship, he showed me some photographs he had--pictures that he had
taken himself--and he asked me to remember, if anything happened to
him, that he wished you to have them. He said that you had cared so
much for the whole expedition, and had cheered him so often in those
hard days when he thought he could never get the thing started. After
he--after that awful time in the snow, I found the case he had shown
me, and I brought it with me.” He stopped and put his hand in his
pocket, producing a large, square envelope. “As soon as I got to New
York I had the plates developed. A few were spoiled, but there are some
here, and I’ve brought them to you to-night.”
As he spoke, he held out the package. Diane compelled herself to take
it with outward composure, but her hands were shaking, and she could
not meet his eyes.
“I can’t tell you how much I thank you!” she murmured, opening the
envelope and looking over the pictures in order to hide her emotion.
There were only a few of them--studies of sea and sky, a familiar view
of the ill-fated ship, a group of sailors, and some impressive views
of frozen straits and giant icebergs. It was a meager glimpse of the
world for which Simon Overton had laid down his life, but something in
it, in his thought of her, of the things she would care to see, touched
Diane to the soul. She restrained her tears with difficulty, and,
although she continued to make a show of examining the prints, her eyes
were too dim to see the details.
For a while Faunce was silent. He seemed to understand the emotion
that prevented Diane from speaking. On the whole, he was thankful for
it, since she did not have time to see the pain that distorted his own
face. He felt that he was white and rigid, and that his eyes stared at
the fire; but he had enough self-control to keep his hands steady on
the arms of his chair, and after a while he commanded his voice.
“I’m sorry that there were so few things that we could bring,” he said
slowly. “A great deal was lost in the wreck, and we had to sacrifice
more still in our journey across the ice. There came a time when we
couldn’t carry a load--we could scarcely carry ourselves.”
Diane folded the pictures carefully away before she replied.
“What you say makes me all the more grateful for these!”
He raised his head at that, and their eyes met. The sympathy, the
kindling kindness of her glance went to his heart.
“You don’t ask me about it all, and yet I’m sure you want to know.”
“I understood. I was deeply touched by what you said at dinner. I know
you can’t talk of it yet--I don’t ask it.”
“I think I could talk to you; but perhaps I had better wait until
another time.” Faunce paused; then, rising from his seat, he came over
and stood beside her, resting his elbow on the mantel, with his face
in the shadow, as hers had been. “I want you to feel that the end was
painless. It always is, you know, in those awful solitudes. You knew
Overton; you must know that he was a hero--to the end.”
She, too, rose involuntarily from her seat and faced him. Again her
pale face, and her slight figure in its black draperies, recalled to
his mind the charm and buoyant grace of that wonderful picture of long
ago. It was, indeed, this charm of hers, so subtle and so poignant,
that drew him on deeper and deeper into the shoals.
“I loved him,” Faunce continued, with a painful effort at self-control.
“No one in the world could have suffered more bitterly than I at his
loss. I don’t want you to feel that I purposely tried to take his place
in this great achievement. I only fell heir to his glory.”
She was deeply touched. Again, even in the midst of her tender
remembrance of Overton, this man, who had suffered with him and dared
with him, laid hold of her imagination. She raised her beautiful eyes
to Faunce’s face, holding out her hand in an involuntary gesture of
friendship and good-will.
“I think you’re more than his heir,” she said gently. “He was so
large-hearted, so just, that I know he would feel, as I do, that you
were his comrade and his partner in sacrifice and in fame.”
There was an instant of silence, one of those moments which become
almost supreme in their effect upon two lives. Then, as Faunce seemed
to have no words in which to reply, he took Diane’s hand in both of his
and lifted it gently to his lips.
III
HALF an hour later, Judge Herford stood on his front steps, bidding his
last two guests good-night.
“Come again!” he called after them in his deep bass. “You’ll always
find us prepared enough for the pair of you. By the way, Faunce, I
suppose it’s too much to expect that any one so famous as you will hang
around Mapleton long?”
“I don’t know any better place to hang around, judge,” Faunce replied.
“When a man’s been in exile two years, the old places look good to him.”
“That’s right! Then be sure you don’t forget the way here.”
“He won’t!” Dr. Gerry flung back, as he plodded toward the gate.
“You’re not the only attraction at this house, Hadley. For my part, I
only come here to see Diane!”
They heard the judge’s laugh following them, and saw his large figure
still outlined against the light, the big gray head and massive
shoulders and long body looking a little too heavy for the short legs.
“If Hadley had been sawed off at the waist, they’d have said he was
a perfect model for a Roman emperor,” observed the doctor, as they
passed out into the road and heard the judge shut his door for the
night.
Faunce agreed with some amusement.
“It’s strange, isn’t it, how some men seem to lose their proportion
when they stand up? They’re not put together in equal parts.”
“A good many who are put together right outside are out of joint
inside.”
“How about the mental proportion--or shall we call it the spiritual?”
“That depends upon how much you follow the dean. A mental twist is
pretty nearly certain to go hand in hand with moral lopsidedness,
though.”
Faunce reflected on this for a moment, while they made their way under
the interlacing branches of the big trees that arched over the country
road. It was late in October, and the fall of the leaves had already
stripped the big elms and left them in spectral outline against the
moonlit sky.
“I take it, then, that you hold a moral shortcoming as a sign of an
unbalanced mind?”
“I didn’t say that. That’s the other way around; but it’s true, too,
though I shouldn’t cite it as a reason for getting off a criminal.
We’ve had a little more of that lately than is good for us.”
“Then you don’t think that the mental condition palliates crime?”
“I think a good many people commit murder or highway robbery, and then,
about the time when they get caught, they decide that they must have
been crazy.”
“You argue, then, that the insanity is synchronous with the discovery?”
The doctor nodded, trudging sturdily forward toward the turn in the
road which led to his own house. The autumn air was chill with frost,
and Faunce seemed to shiver as he buttoned up his coat. Dr. Gerry,
observing the young man from the tail of his eye, remarked it.
“Feel a chill, eh? I shouldn’t think you’d mind it, after the south
pole!”
“Any touch of cold that reminds me of that is enough to make me shiver.
I can’t close my eyes now without seeing those livid wastes and hearing
the wind. It’s a frozen hell!”
“It’s on your nerves. How many hours do you sleep at night?”
Faunce gave him an uneasy look, in which surprise and something like
apprehension were strangely mingled; but the street lights were poor,
and he could only half discern the old man’s face as it emerged above
the heavy collar of his greatcoat.
“I don’t sleep at all. How did you find that out?”
“I’ve seen a good many in the same plight before, for one thing, and
you’re a pretty easy case to read.”
“Am I?” Faunce laughed harshly. “I didn’t know it. Perhaps you can tell
me what to do, then?”
“Stop taking narcotics, to begin with, and then get control of your
nerves.”
“So you’ve discovered that, too?”
“What?”
“The narcotics. I had to try something. I haven’t had three continuous
hours of sleep since--not for five months, anyway.”
“Humph!” The doctor stumbled on a stone and stopped to kick it out of
the way. “That’ll lead you on the same road with old Henry Jersey, down
in Featherbed Lane.”
“What’s the matter with him?”
“Well, there’s some divergence of opinion, but his neighbors call him
bughouse, if you know what that is.”
“Crazy?”
“Pretty near it. He took drugs, too, for a while.”
“I’ve only taken small doses, enough to get a little sleep. I had to
have it. Perhaps”--he laughed unsteadily--“perhaps you can tell me what
I’ve taken?”
“Oh, it might be anything,” the doctor replied carelessly; “but I
should call it chloral.”
“You’ve hit it! I shall begin to think you’re a mind-reader.”
“I am, in a sense. The fact is, I can tell you what’s the matter with
you now. It’s your nerves. You’ve got something on your mind, and you
won’t be any better, you won’t sleep any sounder, until you get it off.”
Faunce was startled. He glanced around again, but could only make out
a dim outline of Gerry’s blunt profile between the old man’s collar
and the big soft hat he had pulled comfortably down to his ears. For a
moment he reflected on the doctor’s words in silence.
It was evidently true that Gerry had an unaccountable way of hitting
the nail on the head. Faunce wondered how much the old man had already
divined of the trouble that was harassing his soul. If he was indeed
so palpably easy to read, how could he screen it from the curious gaze
of every inquiring eye that he met? They were almost in sight of the
doctor’s white gate before he roused himself to reply.
“That sounds like saying that honest confession is good for the soul,”
he said with his nervous laugh. “I should never have suspected you of
commending that course.”
“I’ve been father confessor for a good many,” retorted the doctor
crustily. “What I meant to say, though, was much simpler. You’ve got to
free your mind. When a man lets anything bite in as your trouble seems
to be doing, he soon comes to the end of his tether. His nerves break
down, he can’t sleep, and then he can’t eat. It’s an old story. I can
give you something to ease up the body, but I can’t do anything for the
mind. You’ll have to look after that for yourself.”
Faunce stopped at the gate.
“How about the soul?” he asked dryly.
“I’ll leave that to the dean--or to Mrs. Price. She’d have a quotation
that would fit it to the letter. Will you come in?” he added, opening
his gate.
“Not to-night. I’m going to tramp for a while. When I’m tired out, I
sometimes sleep a little--without the chloral.”
The doctor grunted, went into his front yard, and let the old white
gate swing to behind him.
“I suppose you know the risk you’re taking?”
Faunce nodded.
“Oh, I sha’n’t kill myself.” He laughed again, rather loudly this time.
“I haven’t the courage!”
“It doesn’t take courage when you’ve got enough of the stuff. It’s
as easy to slip off as it is for a frozen man to sink into the final
stupor.”
For a moment they stood peering at each other through the night. A
fitful moon vanished behind a cloud, and left each one in doubt of the
other’s attitude; but the doctor was aware that Faunce pulled himself
together and moved away from the fence.
“So you think that’s easy?” he said in a hoarse voice.
“I know it is--at the end. There’s a limit, you see, to human
endurance. When it’s reached and passed, coma ensues. That’s easy!”
Faunce took a step toward the gate, as if an impulse moved him to
follow the doctor in. Then he turned with an inarticulate exclamation,
waved an abrupt good-night, and walked rapidly away into the darkness.
Dr. Gerry watched him disappear before he turned and deliberately
climbed the steps to his own front door, to find the cat rubbing
herself against his ankles. He stooped down and caressed her, running
his hand down the length of her sleek, gray back, and finally giving
her tail a gentle tweak. Then he unlocked his door and entered,
carrying her under his arm.
IV
MEANWHILE Faunce tramped steadily down the long lane. It led to the
edge of the little river, scarcely more than a brook, which divided
the village into two unequal parts. Just now, at flood from the recent
rains, the stream tumbled noisily over the stones and rushed under the
low bridge with a harsh, insistent murmur.
He stopped for a moment with his hand on the rail, and looked down at
the black current below. Then the clouds broke, and he saw the moon
reflected in the water, while the rising wind suddenly showered the
falling leaves until they fell with a patter like rain. Beside him an
ancient willow stood like a stricken giant. A summer thunderbolt had
split the great trunk in twain, and half of it lay across the stream,
while the other half still loomed up, grim and leafless, against the
sky.
It was past midnight and in that rural community, where early hours
prevailed, the feeling of solitude was as intense as if he had reached
the end of the world and was alone in the October night, the last man.
Such a feeling had come to him once before, fraught with such cruel
terror, such a sensation of disintegration, of the loss of all that
was mortal, that Faunce could never forget it, could never feel even
the reflection of it again without recalling those vast and terrifying
wastes, that inexorable sky, that blinding, cruel, exterminating ice
that had frozen its image on his soul.
He tried to drive the thought of it from his mind, and, by fixing his
gaze on that intimately familiar scene, to recall the days when, as a
lad, he had fished by that old bridge. He remembered his grandmother
as she had looked to him then, the quaint cap she wore, and the little
plaid shawl folded about her shoulders over the black bombazine dress.
His mother had died when he was born, and his father had married again.
Young Arthur, in the way of a gay stepmother, had been reared by a fond
maternal grandmother.
No one had disciplined his childhood, and he knew that as a boy he had
done some mean tricks, which a better-trained lad would have scorned.
But he had ceased to be small and tricky when he fell in with Overton,
his senior by three years in age and by ten in mental development. He
realized now, as he looked back on the long perspective, that Overton
had saved him.
Strong-willed and straight-thinking, Simon Overton had possessed that
kind of spiritual force of which leaders and martyrs are made. He had
been a leader even at school. His companions had followed him with the
boyish devotion that always surrounds the school hero with a halo of
glory. It was not alone young Overton’s physical strength, and his
skill in their favorite sports; it was a certain unfailing stanchness
of character, a fearless square-dealing, that impressed the others, and
Faunce had only followed the universal lead when he attached himself to
him.
Faunce had been favored. Overton had seen that the lad was without a
real friend, that his old grandmother could do little more than wrap
him in a figurative blanket, spoiling and scolding by turns; and the
elder boy suddenly took hold of the younger. A friendship was formed,
protective on one side, almost adoring on the other, and from that time
their fates had moved forward in an inseparable course.
When Overton went to Annapolis, he had helped Faunce to work his way
through college. When Faunce’s father died and left his estate--a small
one--to his widow and Arthur’s stepsisters, Overton had tided Arthur
over, until he got a place, and his grandmother’s death left him the
sole heir of her modest fortune. It was this old bond that had drawn
him into the first expedition to the south pole.
Overton, as a lieutenant in the navy, had organized the great
adventure, which was financed by an old friend of his father. He had
selected Faunce to accompany him, and the trip had been successful
up to a certain point. Then the inexorable conditions of polar
exploration had worsted their efforts, and they had been forced to
turn back. Bitterly chagrined, Overton had returned for another year
of preparation, and then, flushed with new hope, and with that kind of
fateful vision which pursues the most difficult and dangerous chimeras,
he had set out for the second time, determined to plant the Stars and
Stripes at the farthest south.
In the interval between the two expeditions much had happened. Overton
had become an acknowledged force in the world of adventure, and Faunce
was aware that he had set his heart on the one girl who had remained
to both of them the sweetest and most charming reminder of their young
days at Mapleton. That Diane, too, had outgrown their early environment
and matured into a gracious and accomplished woman of the world seemed
only fitting and natural; and Faunce knew, long before the ill-fated
ship sailed from New York, that the young leader had left his heart
behind him.
Faunce had felt a thrill of satisfaction, too, that under that
supreme test he had not failed to keep his faith with his comrade and
benefactor. Loving Diane himself, he had stood aside and left the
field free to his rival. Whatever misunderstanding had obscured their
parting, he had not been at fault. He had found some consolation, in
the midst of his discomfiture, in the fact that he had demonstrated
his own spiritual growth, and had proved to himself that he was now
above those mean devices which, in his boyhood, had sometimes won for
him immunity from punishment, or a reward that was not rightfully his.
The expedition had sailed amid the thunder of salutes from the
war-ships in the harbor, and for the second time Overton followed the
ill-omened star that led him toward the south pole. All these things
came back to Faunce with fatal clarity as he leaned there, under the
pallid October sky, his hand on the worn railing of the old bridge that
he had crossed many a day on his way to school.
But at this point in his recollections--when the fated ship, brilliant
with flags, receded slowly, like a fantom, into the mists which on that
day had shrouded the Narrows--Faunce shuddered and passed his hand
over his eyes. His reverie was broken. He could no longer recall the
past without seeing the wraith that seemed to rise from the very mist
over the brook and to shape itself before him, as it had shaped itself
hundreds of times already, into a vision of Overton as he had seen him
last.
There, in that secluded spot, under the fitful moon, that face--rugged,
strong, beautiful with spiritual power--rose from the vapors. Faunce
saw it as he had seen it last, stricken with the awful look of death,
pallid and calm, a smile on the lips, the eyes closed. Solitudes, vast,
white, inexorable, the peaks of blue ice, the mirage that mocked and
deluded, only the shriek of the wind to break the silence that drove
men mad.
That drove men mad! That was it! That must be what possessed him now,
Faunce thought--madness!
He could never escape that vision, never quite cast it out. All the
laurels he had won, the applause, the eager friendships that seemed to
await him, were but empty mockery when he had only to close his eyes
to find himself in the presence of that terrible vision, to feel the
deadly chill strike again to his heart, to hear the howl of the wind on
those polar wastes.
What had tempted him to go there a second time? What infatuation
had led him to follow Overton? Faunce had never shared his leader’s
enthusiasm, had never had his courage; but he had followed him like a
little dog at the heels of a big St. Bernard, led by admiration rather
than love, held by fear rather than zeal.
He remembered what he had just said to Diane--his assurance of his
devotion to Overton; and it seemed to him now like an attempt on his
part further to imperil his own salvation by deliberately deceiving
her. Yet he had really loved Overton. It was his love for the dead man,
the remembrance of his boyish gratitude, that was driving him on,
goading him to misery.
Of what avail was the rescue that had brought him and his surviving
comrades out of that frozen inferno, and had crowned him with the
laurels that Overton had sought, if he could reap no reward, not even
grasp the triumph of their success, their victory over a rival English
expedition, without paying the price in a mortal agony that had all but
extinguished the light in his soul? He had returned to find himself
a hero, to be fêted and honored in New York and in Washington, to be
mentioned with mingled envy and praise in London and Paris--and he
could not sleep!
At first he had thought that he could conquer his weakness, that there
was courage enough left in him to force forgetfulness; but there was
not. The thing possessed him, pursued him, harried him, and he had come
to the end of his endurance. He began to dread night as a condemned man
must dread the final summons. In the daytime, and among his fellows, he
believed that he bore himself almost with the air of a hero. He had,
indeed, thought his performance perfect, but Dr. Gerry had discovered a
cleft in the armor, had put his finger on a sore spot.