that there was something between them, an impenetrable veil which
seemed to screen his inner self, and that not even the love which he
protested with such passion could dispel that impalpable reserve; but a
certain pride in her kept her from pursuing her questions, and she let
the matter drop.
XV
IN the hastened preparations for the wedding, Fanny Price came over
to give her help. She and Diane directed the cards of invitation, and
sorted out and arranged the presents that were to be displayed to the
few intimates who could now witness the ceremony.
“You certainly have some lovely things,” was Fanny’s comment; “but it’s
strange, isn’t it, the way people’s minds seem to run to oyster-forks?
You’ve got eighteen dozen.”
Diane laughed.
“At least I can serve oysters! Here’s a beautiful fish-knife and fork,
too. Perhaps they connect us with things from the sea because Arthur’s
going to sail so soon!”
“I should think you were going to marry Neptune. Here are some
fish-plates!”
“They ought to have added something especially for the expedition!”
Fanny occupied herself in arranging the silver.
“Aren’t you a little afraid of it, Diane? The thought of that frozen
solitude frightens me. I’ve no courage!”
Diane made no immediate reply, and Fanny, giving her a sidelong
look, discovered that she had stopped work and was looking out of the
window with an absent air, her face quite colorless. The girl’s heart
beat fast with a sensation almost of anger. She was sure, with her
keen, girlish insight into such things, that at the moment Diane was
thinking, not of Faunce, but of Overton.
Fanny’s heart leaped up in defense of her hero. She remembered him at
her own fireside, with no eyes, no thought, for any one except Diane.
She made a deliberate tinkle in spreading out more spoons and ladles.
“I should think he would hate to go. I’m sure he does, at
heart--because of Overton,” she said a little sharply. “He loved
Overton so much that I know he’ll feel it when he follows again in the
same trail. He can’t help it!”
Diane turned slowly and resumed her own task of undoing endless
packages.
“I thought, at first, he wouldn’t go,” she admitted quietly in a
colorless voice; “but then something seemed to draw him back. I suppose
it’s the lure of the pole. And I--I felt he had to go to finish the
work.”
“But it wasn’t his work!”
“You mean----”
“It’s Overton’s. When he’s done it, he won’t get the credit of it.
It’ll be finishing the work of Overton’s expedition, won’t it?”
“I--I suppose it will, in a way.”
Fanny laid down some teaspoons.
“You’ve got thirty-six dozen spoons and two soup-ladles. Yes, it’ll be
finishing Overton’s work.” She looked up and met Diane’s eyes squarely.
“Is that why you wanted him to go?”
Diane colored deeply, working hard at the knotted ribbon on another
bundle.
“I hadn’t thought of it in that way, Fanny. I wanted Arthur Faunce to
be something more than a--a second in the expedition. When a man is as
great as Overton was, he overshadows everything.”
“I don’t see how you can feel that way when Mr. Faunce is so great
himself. I don’t believe you really see it as it is, Di!”
“Oh, yes, I do! But then it wouldn’t do for me to say so much, would
it?”
Fanny reflected.
“I think I should, if I were you,” she replied stubbornly.
Diane smiled.
“There’s one thing I’ve always loved in you, Fanny, and that’s your
loyalty to your friends.”
“Oh, I get that from papa. It’s inherited, and hasn’t any original
virtue. I’ve always said that papa would stick up for Satan himself if
he happened to be an old acquaintance!”
It gave Diane a feeling of relief to laugh.
“I’m so glad,” she remarked, after a pause, which they spent in
arranging the gifts, “that it’s your father who is going to marry us,
Fan! I should hate to have a stranger do it. It seems to bring us all
so close together, because I know your father loves us.”
“He loves you,” retorted Fanny with unconscious emphasis. “Diane, do
you ever think about your father? What will he do when you’re away?
Sometimes it seems so strange that we younger ones go off and make our
lives as if they hadn’t mothered and fathered us so long.”
“It’s like birds going out of the nest, isn’t it, Fanny? I suppose it’s
the law of life--what the scientists call evolution. But I do think of
father. I hate to leave him. I shouldn’t leave him, if I didn’t know
he would be well cared for. You know old Martha understands just how
to cook for him. She knows what he likes better than I do--better,
I think, than mama used to know; and old Henry takes care of him as
faithfully as Dr. Gerry does. Besides, you’re all so near. It seems
to me as if he would be better off. Arthur and I are going into a new
land--a land of mist and mirage. I feel”--she was looking across at
Fanny without seeming to see her--“that I am indeed setting out on a
long journey. I’m taking with me the man who loves me; but I’m not
sure--I’m not at all sure what’s beyond the soft, impalpable cloud that
hangs like a veil just above the open sea of my dreams!”
Fanny was silent. After a moment Diane turned and went on with her
work; but, as she picked up another package, she added in a more
natural tone:
“Why don’t you answer me, Fan? Don’t you understand?”
“Yes, I think I do; but if I were you, I’m certain that I should know.
I mean, if I were going to marry the man I loved, I’d be sure that the
sun was shining behind that cloud!”
Diane slowly and carefully unwrapped the tissue that enclosed an
ancient Venetian vase. It was a beautiful thing in design and
workmanship, but she made no comment on its perfection as she set it
carefully down on the table.
“But I’m not sure,” she confessed softly.
Fanny had now reached the limit of her endurance, and her silence left
Diane free to pursue her own train of thought. It was this, perhaps,
which led her, later on, to her talk with her father.
XVI
IT was the night before her wedding, and the judge, after a long day of
busy arrangements, which had included a settlement of business matters
with Faunce, at last found himself at rest in the old armchair beside
his study fire. He had been too occupied and too ambitious to forward
the fortunes of his future son-in-law to feel that the moment was
drawing nearer and nearer when he must give up his daughter; but now,
alone at his own fireside, he remembered that, and was amazed at the
rush of keen regret that softened his mood.
Diane was very dear to him. He had been a busy man, a man beset with
cares and ambitions, but the girl, who had come to him instead of
the son for whom he had prayed, held a warm place in his heart. He
would miss her--he confessed that to himself, with a kind of pride
in his own tenderness. He had, indeed, planned to keep her near him,
to set his son-in-law on the path that he had already made a beaten
track to political success; but Diane herself had held Faunce to his
infatuation--she was actually leading him in this wild venture in the
antarctic seas.
Vaguely, but with a certain pride of blood, Judge Herford began to
recognize the instinct of race in her. She had sprung from a long line
of adventurers on sea and land. A Herford had been with Sir Francis
Drake; a Herford had fought at Marston Moor; a Herford had followed
the star of empire westward across wintry seas and founded the family
fortunes in the colonies. The judge himself had retrieved the losses
of his father and his grandfather, and now, in his strong middle age,
saw himself nearly at the top rung of the ladder he had set himself to
climb. He could afford to take the future in an easier frame of mind,
to slacken his gait a little, but he had lacked a son to follow in his
footsteps. His fancy, fixing itself on Faunce, on the brilliant promise
that seemed to dawn in the young man’s career, began to build new
castles in the air.
He felt a certain satisfaction in knowing that he had furthered Arthur
Faunce’s fortunes, and had been a factor in the making of the marriage
that was to take place on the morrow. Faunce was neither so famous nor
so wealthy as the judge could have wished, but he was young, able,
and already surrounded with the heroic halo of his hardships and his
services to science and his country.
In a recent public address an eminent man had said that America was
proud of mothering such sons as Overton and Faunce. That Arthur was
placed second seemed, after all, a graceful tribute to the dead, and
Faunce had succeeded now to the full leadership in place of Overton.
On the whole, the judge felt satisfied and even happy. Thoughts of
tenderness and regret added only a gentler shading to a mood that might
otherwise have been too unctuous and self-satisfied.
His friends, too, had sustained his judgment; all but Dr. Gerry. He was
aware that Gerry challenged it; but he remembered, with a reminiscent
smile, that Gerry had always been a “crank.” It was not to be supposed
that any one so eminently human and young as Faunce could please the
crusty old doctor.
“He’s too healthy,” the judge had declared, laughing.
“Oh, is he?” the doctor flung back, and muttered his objections.
“Let him go, Hadley! He isn’t fit to tie Diane’s shoe. Send her to a
convent!”
There had been more, in the doctor’s most pessimistic vein; but, when
challenged for a real objection, he refused to state his views. The
matter had dropped at last, and only Diane noticed that the old man
sent no wedding-gift. The judge had brushed Gerry’s opposition aside as
he now brushed aside his own tenderness.
He sat back comfortably in his chair, filling the big bowl of his
favorite pipe. He was just lighting it when he heard a rustle in the
hall, and Diane stood on the threshold, a slight figure in a floating
gown of flowered silk, her long hair unbound and shadowing her face.
The judge looked around at her, a smile in his judicial eyes.
“It’s twelve o’clock, Di. You’ll certainly see the dawn of your
wedding-day, at this rate!”
“I couldn’t sleep, papa, so I came to sit with you a while.”
He made room for her to bring a low seat to the fire by his side. With
a new paternal aspect, he laid his arm gently around her shoulders.
“I was just thinking of you, Di, and of Arthur. I wish I’d had my way
and put him into politics.”
“So that we should be near you? I should have loved that, of course;
but we’ll come back. I don’t want him in politics, ever!”
“And why not, miss? If it’s good enough for your dad, it should be good
enough for your husband, eh?”
She shook her head.
“I don’t think I can make you understand. You’re--you’re different!”
“Humph! Not so valuable, perhaps?”
She laughed softly; then her face sobered.
“You’ve stood like granite, papa, in the midst of all the storm. You
were made to be among the captains and the shouting. It’s fine--it has
been fine to see you. I’ve always been proud of you, and I’ve heard
men say that they were proud of you. Don’t you remember Governor Belt?
He told me that you were a wonder, that not a muckraker living could
fling ill-report at you! But Arthur? It seems to me that as he stands
to-day--young and unsoiled and on the verge of great adventure--he’s at
his best; he’ll be always at his best. If you pull him back into the
turmoil of the city and State, fling him into politics, he won’t be the
same. He won’t stand as you do, like a rock; he would bend and yield.
It might spoil him, spoil the fineness in him.”
“My child, if he’s so brittle, life will break him, and he won’t be
worth the breaking!”
“I don’t mean just that. I mean that I want to keep the fineness in
him, to see him follow the shining trail. If it wasn’t for the fineness
in him I couldn’t love him, papa, and if I didn’t believe I loved him I
wouldn’t marry him.”
“That’s your test, I know.” The judge leaned back, pulling at his
pipe, amused at Diane’s view, which seemed to him to be merely that of
untried girlhood. “There’s been many a marriage without love, my dear,
that’s turned out well enough.”
“I couldn’t do it! To me the woman who marries that way, for money, for
position, or just to be married, is”--her voice dropped to a low note,
touched with ineffable scorn--“is no better than the worst!”
The judge patted her shoulder.
“A high view, Di. I’ll agree with you thus far--if he wasn’t fine and
honest, I’d never let you marry him if I could help it. In these days
we fathers can’t help much, in my opinion; but I’ll help you out of it,
my child, if ever he shows himself less than we think him--an honest
man!”
“We’re alike in that, papa. That’s the unalterable test--his honesty. I
couldn’t live, day after day, with a man whom I knew to be a liar and
a thief, as Mabel Gardner does. Yet it’s noble in her, too. She stayed
with her husband to try to hold him up, to keep him from falling to the
lowest level.”
“It was sentiment and womanish feeling,” the judge retorted sternly.
“There was nothing noble in it. She shielded him so that some of his
creditors let him off a little for her sake. Goffery, the greatest
creditor of all, who could have sent him to prison, wouldn’t testify,
because he was in love with Mabel himself. She knew it--she played on
him. That’s not noble; it’s mere knavery.”
“You mean that she should have sent him to prison rather than let
Goffery save him for love of her?”
The judge nodded.
“Trading--mere trading! Not in the bare, ugly fact, as low people
trade, but in sentiment and honor--making a wronged man save another
because he still loves that other’s wife. She’ll get a divorce next and
marry Goffery.”
“I can’t think that!” exclaimed Diane, gazing thoughtfully into the
fire. “That would be degradation, papa, and Mabel’s a lady.”
“What’s a lady?” the judge snorted angrily. “Nothing, unless you’re
a little better bred and nobler and more virtuous than the rest of
womankind. If Mabel marries Goffery--after she gets a divorce--it’ll be
paying him for all that he’s done, won’t it? There’s nothing ladylike
in that! You’re a lady, Di--not so much by right of birth and breeding
and all that, but because you’re an honest woman, and you wouldn’t do
the kind of shabby, cowardly things that Mabel Gardner has done.”
“Poor Mabel! You’re a hard judge sometimes, papa! I pity Mabel. I’ve
thought of her once or twice to-day, because I was so happy. You
remember she was married three years ago to-morrow? She was happy
then--but he’s turned out such a rogue! I think, perhaps, that’s why I
said what I did just now. I want to keep Arthur as he is, a follower of
the shining trail.”
The judge reflected a while on this, smoking quietly.
“I’ll tell you what Arthur said to me,” he rejoined at last. “He told
me that your love for him would lead him higher than any ambition that
he had ever cherished, or any hope that he’d ever had. It’s a good deal
for a man to say, my girl!”
She was leaning against his knee, her cheek resting on her hand, and he
could see only the soft, brown arch of her head and the cloud of hair
that cloaked her shoulders.
“It’s a great deal to say,” she admitted. “It makes it harder for me
to fill the place he’s set for me in his life; but I’ll try to do it.
Meanwhile, papa, I hate to leave you! When I came in here to-night I
came to tell you that, but we’ve been talking of Arthur. I’ve tried to
be a good daughter. I hope I’ve succeeded half-way, papa?”
He patted her head again.
“The best man ever had!”
The words brought back those words of Faunce about Overton. “The best
friend man ever had!” The thought thrust itself suddenly into Diane’s
heart, and took her unawares. Her tense nerves quivered. She laid her
head down on her father’s knee and burst into bitter, inexplicable
tears.
XVII
EARLY the following morning, with the rain and sleet driving against
the window-panes, in the fury of a late winter storm--the wild
harbinger, in fact, of spring itself--Diane was married to Arthur
Faunce.
“The handsomest couple I ever saw!” Mrs. Price whispered to Dr. Gerry,
dabbing the moisture from her eyes with the handkerchief that she had
already wept into a ball.
Dr. Gerry moved an eye around to look at her without moving his head,
much as the drowsy crocodile views curious observers at the aquarium;
but he made no comment. He had spent the night in trying to force
Faunce to tell Diane the truth before she married him. He had failed,
and was therefore an unwilling witness at the ceremony.
The quaint old library, the room Diane had chosen, was scarcely altered
from its every-day aspect. Above the low book-shelves that lined the
walls were fine examples of pottery and bronze, which gleamed warmly
in the light of the fire in the great fireplace. A few moss-roses and
tall ferns, sent from a New York conservatory, were the only ornaments.
Dr. Price, small, precise, and placid, in his white surplice and black
cassock, his white hair smoothed back with what Horace Walpole would
have called “a _soupçon_ of curls behind,” performed the ceremony
before a group of old friends and neighbors, the only witnesses. Mrs.
Price lifted her plump, wrinkled face and kissed the bride on both
cheeks.
“My dear, I wish you every blessing! You remind me of Rachel, and Ruth,
and all the brides of the Bible. And, dear Diane, he’s so handsome! It
seems almost wicked for nature to waste so much beauty on a mere man,
even if he is a hero!”
Diane glanced smilingly at Faunce.
“Isn’t it splendid for me, Cousin Julia? I don’t need to shine when
he’s near, do I?”
The little woman plunged in deeper, and was still babbling along when
her daughter, a little pale and nervous, came to tell Diane it was time
to change her dress for the journey. Glad to escape, the two girls ran
up-stairs together, and Fanny and the maid made haste to help transform
a white-and-silver bride into a trim, tailor-made young woman ready
for the train. While the transformation was in progress, Diane grew
more composed, and helped with her deft fingers in the knotting and
unknotting of ribbons and laces and flowers.
“It went off beautifully, Di!” Fanny felt that she could say this
with safety, as she plunged into a new hat-box after the bride’s
traveling-hat. “That cake from New York was fine. I left dear papa
eating it, and he’ll be ill to-morrow.”
“I noticed the flowers, Fan,” Diane said, fastening fresh hooks, while
she sent the maid on an errand. “I’m glad I didn’t have too many. Is
that hat becoming? It seems to me too--too flamboyant. The styles are
dreadful!”
“It suits you exactly. What a lovely color you’ve got, Di! A minute ago
you looked like a ghost. You were----”
Diane stopped her with a gesture.
“What’s that?”
They listened. A newsboy was shouting an extra edition, and they could
hear his shrill pipe above the storm. Fanny’s eyes widened.
“What can it be? No one sells extras out here, in a storm!”
Diane went to the door and listened.
“Some one’s called him. Fanny, go and find out what it is. There’s
nothing for me to do now but to work on my gloves.”
The little bridesmaid, glad to hide her telltale face, ran out. Diane
stood listening in strange anxiety, unaware that she was frightened.
Why should she be? she argued. Why should she worry at all? They were
all together and all well--what could be better, more reassuring, than
that thought?
Then Arthur’s face came back to her as he had looked when he put the
ring on her finger--the feverish light in his eyes, the triumph and the
happiness. A feeling, deep and inexplicable, disturbed her; there had
been something wanting--some element of strength, fortitude, or poise.
At that moment, the supreme moment of the ceremony, she had experienced
a new sensation of loss, of shipwreck, as if she had survived the
failure of some fine and inarticulate hope and confidence in him.
Standing there now, for the last time in her own room, the new
wedding-ring on her finger, her wedding-finery thrown across the bed,
she shivered, she was afraid. Then she heard Fanny coming slowly back
up-stairs. The girl seemed to halt for an instant on her way to the
door. Diane turned and saw her at the threshold. She was holding the
newspaper unfolded in her hands, her eyes fixed on the front page, her
face expressionless.
“What is it, Fanny?”
The question was almost a cry of alarm. Fanny made no reply, and Diane
went to her, taking the paper from her. As she did so, Fanny pointed to
the headlines of an article that filled the head of a column. It was a
cablegram, printed in large type that seemed to stare:
H. M. S. Pelican arrived safely at Southampton to-day, with
Lieutenant Blackford and the other members of his antarctic
expedition. They brought with them the well-known American explorer,
Simon Overton, U. S. N. Having barely recovered from desperate
illness and exposure, Overton refused to be interviewed.
Diane let the paper fall to the floor, and the two girls stood looking
at each other in speechless amazement.
Down-stairs there was a moment of poignant silence in the library when
the judge read the newspaper despatch in an incredulous voice that was
a little deeper than usual. As he read, a sudden burst of sunshine,
almost as violent as the storm, flooded the room. It shone on the
smooth surfaces of the ancient vases and on the rich and multicolored
bindings of the judge’s books. It warmed the moss-roses that had
bloomed for the wedding, and shone still more keenly, with almost a
cruel concentration, on the white face of Arthur Faunce.
It revealed Faunce’s countenance at a moment when his inner self seemed
to be receding, in mortal panic, from the vision of his friends. He
stood, with his hand gripped like a vise on the back of a tall chair
and his eyes fixed on his father-in-law. He was like a man overtaken by
sudden calamity and rooted to the spot, with no more power to escape
it than the victim of a nightmare.
The judge threw back his big head and looked at him.
“What can this mean, Arthur?”
Faunce gasped. His mind was still reeling, and his voice sounded a long
way off to his own ears.
“It must be a mistake,” he replied slowly; “a mere newspaper story--or
the wrong name. Overton is dead!”
The judge looked again at the paper, and then cast another searching
look at Faunce.
“It’s strange,” he remarked, “that a thing like that should be cabled
from London--from the correspondent of this paper, too; and they think
it important enough for an extra.”
“Anything is important enough to make an extra penny on!” the little
dean remarked caustically, coming to the rescue.
Dr. Gerry, standing back by the mantel, was watching Faunce. Knowing
the story, he was convinced that in some miraculous way Overton had
been rescued, and that Faunce must know it, too.
Rallying from the first shock, Faunce was facing it with some
self-control.
“I think I can speak with more authority than the newspaper,” he
managed to say. “I was there!”
“But--oh, Mr. Faunce, don’t you think it’s--it’s just possible?”
pleaded Mrs. Price, clasping her hands. “A miracle may have happened.
It would be so beautiful! It would make Diane so happy, it would make
us all so happy, if dear Simon Overton could come back!”
Her little bubbling voice, like the pleasant singing of a teakettle,
brought relief to a tense situation.
“That’s the way to look at it,” rejoined Dr. Gerry. “Let’s rejoice in
the hope.”
Judge Herford bent his heavy brows.
“There can’t be any hope, Gerry,” he said flatly, “if Faunce has told
us the truth.”
Faunce smiled, but with a wince.
“It’s not a thing about which any man would want to jest,” he replied
slowly, purposely misunderstanding Herford’s speech. “We believed him
dead. If a miracle has happened, the body must have been recovered and
resuscitated. I can’t believe a word of this!”
Herford, however, pursued his questions, the lawyer in him roused to
ignore his new position as a father-in-law.
“Then you admit that his body might have been found?”
Faunce hesitated.
The others--his father-in-law, Gerry, who knew the truth, Dr. Price,
and the wedding-guests--all waited. The moment before he had been
the hero of the occasion, the bridegroom at his own wedding. Now,
strangely enough, he stood alone in the center of the room facing them,
much as a prisoner might stand at the bar.
He looked up and met Dr. Gerry’s eye, and it revealed the full force of
the situation. Gerry believed that Overton lived!
Faunce experienced again the terrible sensation of the world falling
to pieces around him while he still survived. If Overton lived, he was
delivered from the hideous remorse that gnawed at his heart; but he was
ruined. No power on earth could save him from public shame.
He rallied his forces again.