Faunce again.
“You’re risking a good deal more than that,” he observed dryly; and
with this enigmatical remark he plodded steadily down to the gate
without once glancing over his shoulder.
Diane laughed.
“The doctor’s so full of crotchets! I suppose he and papa have been
quarreling again. They always do.”
Faunce, to whom Dr. Gerry’s look had conveyed a very different
meaning, made no immediate reply. Instead, he followed Diane into the
drawing-room, and waited there while she went to carry out the doctor’s
instructions and administer a dose of medicine to the querulous patient.
Faunce moved over to the long French window and stood looking out,
aware of the judge’s voice in the distance, before Diane shut the door
between. In a long vista between the hedgerows he saw the doctor’s
sturdy figure trudging toward the automobile that he had left at the
end of the lane.
He recalled the night, now nearly two months ago, when they had walked
home together, and he had admitted his insomnia. Since then he had more
or less avoided the older man. Gerry had been so quick to divine his
use of drugs that he dreaded a more searching scrutiny, which might
fathom yet another recess of his inner mind, or surprise some secret
that he was still determined to hide.
Yet, as he stood there alone in the warm and fragrant room--a room that
seemed to express so much of Diane’s rich personality, her refinement
and taste and spirit--he recalled Dr. Gerry’s words:
“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.”
A sudden impulse gripped him, a potent longing to rush out of the
house, bareheaded as he was, and, pursuing the older man down the lane,
to pour out the misery that was destroying his soul. It seemed to him
that the relief would be more than commensurate with the humiliation;
that the very sound of his own voice unfolding his terrible story
would break the dread spell, release his spirit from thraldom, and
expel the specter that haunted his brain.
The impulse had come to him before, but never with such compelling
force as now--perhaps because there had never been so much reason for
him to pause, to halt on the road he was following, before it was too
late.
VIII
BUT even while the feeling--keen in itself, and searching--was passing
through his mind, Arthur Faunce knew that he would not yield to it--not
now. He could not, for he was moved by a greater and more compelling
force--his passion for Diane Herford. Between that and his peace of
mind, or something which he thought might help restore his peace of
mind, he felt himself unable to choose.
It was this lack of moral stamina that had always been his trouble.
He could not resist an impulse to secure his own happiness or his own
life. He had nothing of the Spartan in him; he would have dropped the
fox and denied all previous knowledge of it, rather than risk his
vitals. He could not now jeopardize his chance with Diane for the mere
sake of a confession which, however it might ease his mind, could not
fail to raise the moral obstacle of Gerry’s opinion.
Faunce dismissed the thought. He resolved, as he had resolved a hundred
times before, to keep his own counsel, to show himself “the captain of
his soul.” If he was not strong enough to drive the miserable fantoms
from his own mind, no other man could expel them. It remained for him
to live them down.
His eyes traveled over the winter landscape, the brown fields and
hedgerows, the occasional roof of some neighboring house. Beyond the
slope of the hill, where the land dipped suddenly, he saw a long strip
of the Sound, its tranquil surface shimmering like burnished copper in
the sunshine. The sight of it recalled the ship that was soon to sail
on another expedition, and the choice that fate and circumstance were
forcing on him.
He must return to those frozen fields, must face again the awful
thing that held his soul in its grip, or he must renounce that part
of his new fame that rested on his explorations, and, following Judge
Herford’s lead, must plunge into the field of politics. He had thought
the choice assured--home and easy preferment, the presence of Diane
and the approval of her father; but of late, loving her as he did, he
was still curiously aware of a mysterious power that had laid hold of
him. He felt the lure of those frozen depths, the gray sky, the blue
peaks of giant ice--and the soul of Overton! It was like an obsession,
it drew him; but he would not go--he was resolved he would not go, if
Diane----
At the thought he heard her coming through the hall. The soft rustle of
her dress startled him away from the window. He turned and stood facing
her as she came into the room.
She had taken off her hat, and her soft hair, a little disordered by
the wind, fell low over her small ears. There was still a delicate
flush, a softness, about her face that made it at once more youthful
and more charming.
“Papa is feeling better,” she announced as she went over to the fire,
“and I’ve ordered tea. Won’t you stay and drink a cup with me?”
He did not reply, and she turned her head, looking over her shoulder
at his tall figure outlined against the dark portière behind him.
Something in his face arrested the words on her lips. She stood holding
her hands out toward the blaze and looking back, the soft glow of the
fire touching the fine oval of her cheek and the white curve of her
full throat.
“Diane,” Faunce said in a low voice, urged on by an overmastering
emotion which he tried in vain to control, “I love you! You know it. Is
it fair to keep me waiting so long for an answer?”
She turned her head quickly, hiding her face from him. Deep and
contending emotions swept over her; yet she was more tranquil than
he was. She had realized long ago that her sorrow drew her nearer to
the man who had been Overton’s comrade, who shared with her a deep
and reverent tenderness for his memory. If any one had a right to her
confidence, her friendship, her love, surely it was the man who had
almost given his life to be with Overton to the end. But she said
nothing for a moment, and then she heard his voice again.
“Diane, they want me to go back to the antarctic, and lately I’ve felt
the deepest, the most unaccountable impulse to go; but there’s one
thing that holds me, that would make me give anything up--I mean the
hope of your caring enough to want me to stay!”
She turned slowly toward him.
“Would you think that it meant something quite different if I said that
I wanted you to go? That I felt that the work should be finished, the
victory won?”
He hesitated; his face blanched.
“You want me to go? You don’t care enough to want me to stay
here--where you are?”
“I didn’t say that. I want you to go because there’s a great work to
finish, because it seems to me like rounding out your career, winning
the greatest victory. I--I don’t want to help a man falter by the way
or step back. I know _he_ would never have faltered--I mean Overton.”
He looked at her blankly.
“No, he would never have faltered, but--you know, I’ve told you,
Diane--I’m not as great as he was. I suppose that’s the reason--the
reason you can’t feel as I do, you can’t accept all that I have to
give--my love for you?”
“I want to tell you the truth,” she replied, looking up at him with
clear eyes. “You know how I’ve felt about Overton. I cared for him so
much that it seemed to me I could never feel anything like that for any
one else, but lately----”
“Yes?” he cried eagerly, bending toward her, his eyes searching her
face.
“Lately I’ve begun to feel that I--I did care for you!”
IX
IT was late that evening before Faunce left the house. As the door
finally closed behind him, a biting wind drove the first flakes of a
snow-storm into his face. The touch of it, the sting of ice on his
flushed cheek, roused him.
He had been, for a while, like a man in a trance, who sees through
the golden mist the beautiful shapes of an Elysian vision, and hears
the heavenly music of the spheres, while he lies there powerless
alike to grasp the full joy of his translation or to confess his own
unworthiness to bask in its heavenly sunshine. Only a moment before he
had held Diane in his arms, the soft touch of her cheek was still warm
on his, the fragrance of her shadowy hair lay still upon his shoulder;
yet he felt the intensity of his moral solitude, the depth of the gulf
that yawned between her warm faith in him and his hidden shame.
His love for her, his firm determination to wrest happiness from the
depths of his misery--the primal instincts of a nature that could
not resist temptation--had driven him on. He had won her; however
reluctant, however spiritually blinded she had been to his moral
attributes, she had promised to be his wife. But his triumph was
short-lived, for he knew already that his joy was like a beautiful,
shimmering bubble, dancing before the wind. In an instant it would
break, and his outstretched hand would grasp only the empty air.
A moment before he had been so happy, so passionately confident that
his soul had at last risen above its dishonor. With the assurance of
Diane’s love, he could shake off the shackles of fear and rise to such
heights of courage, to such magnificent security, that not even the
clutching hands of the Furies who had pursued him day and night could
drag him down.
A moment ago--how different it had been! He thought of the warm old
room with its mellowed air of age and comfort, the dark rug on the
floor, the fire sparkling on the hearth, the somber but beautiful
hangings, the few fine pictures--a Gainsborough that an ancestral
Herford had brought from England as a family treasure, a small Greuze
head, and a simple but lovely landscape by an American painter, who had
loved the shaded dell and the dashing waterfall. He could see again the
table with the lamp, the carved armchairs, and the figure of Diane in a
pale house-gown that she had worn at dinner, its simple folds revealing
the long, dryadlike lines of her slender form and the buoyant grace of
her easy pose as she stood there, beside her own hearthstone, talking
to him.
The kindled loveliness of her eyes haunted him still. He had held
her soft hands in his, and had felt the tremulous touch of her lips,
believing himself one with the immortal lovers of old; but now the door
had closed on him, and the night, wild and wintry and touched with
snow, had engulfed him. He shuddered awake from his dream of bliss, and
saw himself as a lost soul at the gate of paradise.
That was his fate. Happiness might be within his grasp, but it would
elude him and mock him. He might attain, but he could never possess.
A power greater than life itself had laid hold upon him, an invisible
force was crushing him down, and his soul, like the proverbial candle
in the wind, only leaped and flickered at the mercy of the gale.
A driving snow-storm swept across the open country, and the trees
creaked and swayed in the tempest; but he walked on. The very tumult
of it seemed to submerge the still more cruel tumult in his soul, and
he breasted the rising storm with something akin to joy that there
was endurance enough left in him to face it. For the time the need of
physical exertion relieved his mental tension.
Leaving the highroad and climbing to the summit of a little hill, he
stood looking down upon the distant city, shrouded in fog and cloaked
in blinding snow, until its lights seemed to blend into gigantic
arches and semicircles, like broken rainbows in a bank of vapor. It
was a familiar spectacle; he had seen it often before, but never in an
aspect quite like this.
The strange effect of the lights in the sky, together with the
snowflakes that were driving into his face and whitening his arms and
shoulders, recalled the frozen wastes of the polar ice-fields, the
curtain of deathlike fog that hung over those bleak solitudes. He
remembered Diane’s words, her faith in his high endeavor, her hope that
he would complete his task and win, at last, a certain claim to the
glory that was now but the fallen mantle of a greater man.
He must go back! He recalled the impulse that had been so overwhelming,
the keen desire to return. It had seemed to him sometimes as if unseen
hands had grasped him and were drawing him back to those haunted seas.
Diane had voiced his feeling; she, too, had urged him to go.
But now, alone in the night, he fell into one of his bitter moments of
revulsion. The whole thing filled him with horror. It was strange, he
told himself, that she should so insist upon it. It was unlike a woman
to bid her lover go into such perils. He began to believe that she did
not love him--it was Overton still who stood between! Jealousy laid
hold of him and rent him.
A prey to contending feelings, he turned and fought again with the
gale, plunging on into the drifting snow. She had told him that
she loved Overton. He was second in her heart, second in the great
expedition, second in the very honors he had won!
Yet--a shudder ran through him--what right had he to be jealous of
Overton? What right had he, indeed, to any honor, or to high repute,
or to Diane’s love? An hour before he had lifted the cup of life to
his lips and tasted joy; now he was draining the bitter dregs in a
spiritual agony that laid bare his own soul.
He saw his course, as he had followed it in the long year that was
drawing now to its close; and it was plain to him why the thought of
it had haunted him night after night, even when he had tried to shut
it out, until insomnia had driven him to the verge of madness. Like
Orestes, he had been pursued by the Furies; but no tribunal of the
gods would release him from their clutches. He could never sleep again
without the deadly poison of some narcotic stealing into his veins.
He had walked blindly, without following the road, and he was almost
out of his reckoning when, through the white folds of the storm, he saw
the outlines of the Gerry house set low and solid amid its clustering
cedars. A light burned in two windows in the rear, showing that Dr.
Gerry was still up, keeping his usual vigil in his study. The fact that
the rest of the house was dark suggested that the household slept, and
that the doctor was alone.
Faunce paused in his struggle with the wind and stood staring at the
light. Again he was swept with an unaccountable impulse to cry aloud
for help, to strip the veil from his soul, after the manner of those
desperate ones who snatch at the wild hope that some other mortal may
be able to apply a panacea that shall stay the devouring agony, heal
the secret wound, before the sufferer bleeds to death.
As he stood there, uncertain, torn by his fears and his doubts, voices
seemed to speak to him in the fury of the elements. As the storm beat
upon him, he felt an unseen presence pressing against his garments. The
Furies again pursued him!
He had reached the limit of his endurance. He pressed his hands over
his eyes; and then, as he looked up, he saw a white world and a leaden
sky. The horrible illusion was complete; his fate had overtaken him
again, and he could not resist it. Trembling from head to foot,
stricken with an overwhelming horror and dismay, he turned and made his
way through the drifted snow to the old house, climbed the short flight
of front steps, and knocked at the office door.
The doctor himself appeared in answer to the summons.
“Is that you, Faunce?” he asked, holding open the door. “I expected
you--come in.”
But the words fell on deaf ears. Faunce did not apparently heed them as
he entered, still dazed by the long struggle with the storm, and his
tall figure whitened with snow. He suffered himself to be stripped of
his greatcoat and ordered to a seat by the fire.
The warmth of the room, the glow of the lamplight, the familiar aspect
of the place, lined as it was with the doctor’s books and medicine
cabinets, the slight aromatic odor of drugs that pervaded it, awoke him
from his stupor. He leaned forward, and, stretching his hands out to
the blaze, stared steadily into it.
The doctor, who had been watching him from the first, poured some
cognac into a glass and brought it.
“You’d better drink that,” he advised gruffly. “Been trying to kill
yourself?”
Faunce took the glass, drained it, and set it down on the table.
“No,” he replied in a low voice. “I don’t want to die. There’s nothing
I dread more than death. I’ve always had a kind of physical abhorrence
of it.”
His host quietly resumed his own seat on the opposite side of the fire.
“Most strong young men have a horror of it,” he remarked dryly, “as
well as some old ones.”
Faunce looked up at him with a dazed face.
“Have you ever been afraid--mortally afraid to die?” he asked hoarsely.
Gerry shook his head.
“I never had time.”
“Then you can’t understand!”
The exclamation was almost a cry. It seemed to be wrung from some
agonized inner consciousness that had escaped his control, for Faunce
leaned back in his chair, gripping the arms with his strong, nervous
hands, and a slow, deep flush mounted over his pale face.
The doctor refilled his old pipe and lit it with elaborate
preoccupation.
“Was that what ailed you down there at the pole?” he asked between
whiffs.
Faunce, fully roused, started.
“How do you know that anything ailed me? Why have you hung on to that
idea?”
“Because I’ve seen--for one thing--that you’ve got something on your
mind. I told you so before.”
“And your theory is that--if I get it off--I’ll get rest?”
The doctor nodded.
Faunce rose from his chair and began to walk the floor, his arms
hanging at his sides, his head bent. As he walked, he clenched and
unclenched his fingers. Dr. Gerry followed the younger man with his
eyes, but continued to pull away at his pipe, the intimate of his
solitude. He noticed, too, in his cool, observing way, that the cat
avoided his nervous visitor, rising from his path with elevated back
and moving to a place of security beside the hearth.
The doctor bent down and threw a log upon the fire. The sound of its
fresh crackling brought Faunce back.
“By Jove, you’re right!” he said harshly. “I have got something on my
mind!”
The doctor smiled grimly. Faunce dropped into his seat and, leaning
forward, laid his hand on the older man’s knee.
“Do you know that this afternoon, after I saw you go, I asked Diane
Herford to marry me?”
Gerry took his pipe out of his mouth and laid it down.
“You had no business to do it!” he retorted sharply. “You’re a
dope-fiend already; what right have you to ask any woman to trust a man
who can’t sleep without chloral?”
“Chloral?” Faunce swept that aside with a gesture of contempt. “That’s
nothing--compared with the rest!”
The doctor eyed him, looking at him from under heavy brows. He saw the
mounting passion in the other man’s mood, and waited. After a moment
Faunce went on.
“I’ve been in hell for the last few hours! I’ve lived in it for months,
or I thought I had; but the last of it has been too much! But I won’t
give her up--I wouldn’t give her up if Overton came back from the
dead!”
He stopped and sat staring in front of him, his face distorted with
emotion. The doctor, watching his visitor narrowly, nodded his head.
“Ah!” he commented slowly. “It’s Overton, then, who’s on your mind?”
Faunce turned and met Gerry’s eyes.
“Yes, it’s Overton!” he flung back. “You’ve read my book and his
journal--you’ve read the story of the expedition?”
“I’ve read all that you let us read. I got an impression that you’d cut
out a good deal.”
“Yes; I cut out a good deal. Do you remember the description of the
loss of the ship? We had to take to the ice-fields, then, with the men
and the dogs. You know the rest. The progress we made, our comparative
success, and the shelter for the men--the cache that saved us? Then
you remember that Overton, Rayburn, and I set out with one sled and
some provisions to make a dash for the pole? How the storm overtook us,
Rayburn and Overton died from exposure, and I was barely saved?”
The doctor nodded in an absent way, taking up his pipe, which he had
let go out, and emptying it, without again looking in the direction of
his guest. In a subconscious way, however, he was recalling Faunce as
he stood on the steps with Diane, young, handsome, flushed with hope.
“It’s all of it true, yet there’s more behind--more that I couldn’t
tell. I never meant to tell it at all, but there’s something, some
power inside of us, or above us, that drags things out. I don’t know
what fiend it is, but it has pursued me night and day!”
“Some of us call it conscience,” remarked the doctor dryly.
“Call it by any name you choose, it has mastered me, broken me on the
wheel!” Faunce paused again; then he collected his thoughts, and went
on in a voice so level and cold that it seemed impossible that he was
telling a story of his own life. “It’s true that we set out together,
and it’s true that Rayburn died of exposure. By that time the storm had
cut us off, and we were lost in that cruel wilderness of ice. We buried
Rayburn in a drift, Overton repeating what he could remember of the
burial service, the storm beating on us and the dogs howling against
our feet. Then we pushed on. To stop was death, and we thought we could
find the others. They were in the dugout, and had food enough; but we
had been delayed by Rayburn, for Overton wouldn’t leave him until he
was buried in the snow, and the blizzard had increased. In the midst of
it Overton broke his ankle. We had only one sled, so I put him on it,
and we pushed on. The food was gone--he had given the last of it to the
dogs.
“About this time he began to get like Rayburn--out of his head.
I suppose his leg pained him, and he was exhausted. The wind kept
howling over the ice, and the cold had frozen straight through my
clothing. It seemed to be in my bones, it numbed my very soul. I had
no feeling except the desire to live, to escape! But I felt that I
was going--going the way Rayburn had gone, the way Overton was surely
going. I could feel a kind of madness creeping into my blood. I began
to be afraid of death. There was nothing there but blinding ice and
snow and the screech of the wind. It sounded as if the Furies were let
loose. Once I thought I saw figures in the distance, that help was
near; but it was the mirage, and I fancied I was going crazy. I saw,
too, that Overton was failing fast. It came over me then that I should
die, too, like that! We had to stop to rest the dogs, and I gave him
the last pull out of my flask; but he lay in a stupor in the snow. The
dogs began to howl. I was born in the country, and I’ve heard it said,
when I was a boy, that a dog’s howl meant death. It made me furious,
and I remember that I struck at the poor brutes. The cold was fiendish.
I could scarcely breathe the freezing air. Overton became unconscious,
and didn’t answer me.”
For a moment Faunce stopped, breathing hard.
“I was seized with a sickening fear,” he went on. “I shook--not with
cold, but with terror. I tried to lift him on the sled again, but I was
no longer strong enough, and it terrified me still more to find that
my strength was failing. He was as helpless as a log of wood, and I
heard the howl of the rising gale. If I stayed there, in twelve hours,
in less than twelve hours, I should be like him, or worse! I couldn’t
face it; it wasn’t human to face it!”
Faunce stopped again, and then went on in a monotonous voice:
“I didn’t look at him again. I got on the sled and made the dogs drag
me away. I had to whip them; they didn’t want to leave him. We went a
long way before we struck the trail, and as we did so another storm,
worse than the first, broke; but the dugout was in sight, the men saw
us, and I was saved.”
“And you left Overton out there--alone--in that waste--_alive_?”
“Yes!”
X
THERE was a terrible pause. For a moment a breathless silence seemed to
prevail, both outside the house and inside. Then they heard the wind
leap up and come howling back, rattling the windows. Faunce began to
talk again with a dry throat:
“He was dying. If I had stayed, I should have died, too. I tell you I
couldn’t stand it! A mortal terror had seized me, and I simply couldn’t
stand up against it. I had to go!”
The doctor leaned forward in his chair, his eyes fixed on his visitor,
but he did not interrupt. He was, in fact, at the moment too much
astonished to speak.