and went to the table. It had been set for two by the maid, and the
belated dinner announced itself by the savory odor of cooking from the
kitchen.
“Of course I waited,” Diane said in a dull voice. She herself was
startled at the sound of it, it seemed so changed; and yet he did not
notice it. “We’d better sit down at once. I know Annie wants to go
home before it gets any later.”
He assented readily, still unobservant, and they were already seated
when the maid brought in the soup and busied herself serving them.
While she was there, Diane felt the need of seeming as gay as usual.
She inquired for news of New York, and asked if he had telephoned to
her father.
“I left that for you. I felt sure the judge wouldn’t want me to do it
for you,” he replied without looking up. “For the rest--I saw Asher.
The expedition has been delayed. If you wish it, Diane, we can stay
here a little longer.”
She hesitated, and then, as the girl removed the tureen, she managed to
say in a natural voice:
“I think I’d rather not. If--if we’re going at all, I want to stay with
papa a while before we sail.”
He looked up for the first time.
“Why do you say ‘if’? What makes you uncertain?”
She met his eyes squarely, a slow flush staining her cheeks.
“Because I think there may be some change. Simon Overton has come back.
He was here this afternoon.”
There was a sharp pause. Faunce met her gaze steadily for an instant
longer; then he looked down at his plate, deliberately took his knife
and fork, and began to eat like a man who had been suddenly relieved of
a terrible suspense.
“Yes, I know he’s come back. I heard the details to-day; but I didn’t
know he was here. I suppose he came here to see--you?”
She could not follow his example and try to eat, though she was aware
that the little maid was watching them again with bright, curious eyes.
“He came up here to see his old aunt,” she replied with another effort.
“I met him accidentally in the woods, and he came here to tea this
afternoon. He left a message for you.”
“Yes?”
“He said he wanted to see you, and would wait--until you came.”
Faunce seemed to consider this and weigh it carefully; but he continued
to eat his dinner with more appetite, Diane thought, than usual. Again
she had a vague impression that he was relieved. The tension seemed
less, and there was even a little color in his usually pale face.
“If you’ll excuse me, then, dear, I’ll go to see him as soon as we’ve
finished dinner,” he said at last.
She caught her breath quickly, a wild hope leaping up in her heart.
Had she wronged him? Would Arthur be so ready to face Overton, so
apparently eager to meet him, if he had been the one to forsake him? A
feeling of intense relief swept over her, and she sank back weakly in
her chair.
“It seemed a miracle that he has come back--I couldn’t understand it!”
she faltered.
He glanced at her without apparent comprehension. His mind seemed
to have withdrawn itself again into the limbo of forgetfulness, and
she saw that he was despatching his food with all the haste he could
without seeming to hurry her too much.
The little maid, having served the coffee, retired to the kitchen,
leaving them alone. Diane tried again, seeking wildly for some
reassurance, some certainty that he was innocent.
“He didn’t tell me much about that awful time when he so nearly
perished,” she said slowly, choosing her words; “but what he
said--horrified me. I can’t forget it!”
Faunce raised his eyes reluctantly to her face, and she saw a strange
expression in them--an expression that baffled her.
“Such things aren’t easy to describe, Diane. It’s like anything else
that’s terrible and awe-inspiring--it leaves one speechless. There’s
something about the polar wastes that makes a man’s soul numb and mute.
I can imagine that any one lost there might become--well, just a brute!”
As he spoke, he rose from his chair, went to the mantel, and, opening
his cigarette-case, selected a cigarette and lit it. Diane, watching
him with her heart throbbing heavily, noticed that the hand which held
the match shook a little; but when the light flared up on his face, it
seemed to her unusually composed. He picked up his overcoat and pulled
it on, talking to her in an evasive tone.
“I’ll go over at once. I may be late, for we shall have a good deal to
say. Don’t sit up for me--you look tired.”
She had remained seated at the table, and she busied herself pouring
out another cup of coffee.
“I hope you won’t be too late. You’re so restless, Arthur, and you
sleep so little! I don’t see how you live.”
“I think I shall sleep to-night.”
Again his tone had in it the suggestion of relief that had reassured
her. She watched him as he went out, and then mechanically lifted the
cup to her lips and drank the coffee. It seemed to steady her nerves
a little. She rose and, going to the hearth, knelt down and stretched
her hands out to the blaze. She had not been aware before that she was
cold, but she was shaking with a chill that reached her very heart.
XXII
MEANWHILE Faunce pursued his way along the road that led to Overton’s
stopping-place with a steadiness that would have amazed no one more
than it amazed himself. He had come to the end of his rope; or, to
change the analogy, the game was played out, he had lost, and he must
pay.
He had believed himself safe. No matter how much the hidden shame
corroded his soul, he had believed that his secret was as safe as death
and the polar snows could make it. Like a mantle the inexorable ice had
covered his cowardice, and he had returned, not a craven in men’s eyes,
but a hero.
In his own eyes he had become a thing so miserable and so dishonest
that his daily life had been filled with exquisite torture. The love
that had driven him on to make Diane his wife had, in the end, been
only a knife to cut deeper into his quivering flesh. Every word of
hers, every caress, every evidence of her character, had only served to
reveal the light in which she would be sure to regard him if she knew
the truth.
She had married the hero of her imagination; if some untoward fate ever
revealed the actual man to her, she would recoil in dismay, perhaps in
horror. Faunce had seen this from the first, but he had believed that
he had a right to keep his secret, to live it down, to “let the dead
past bury its dead.”
Now, when a miracle had happened, and the grave had given up its dead,
there was no power on earth that could save him. She must know the
truth--she might know it even now! He recalled the look in her eyes,
her coldness and abstraction. She might know it already from Overton,
and only be waiting for him to enlighten Faunce. If she did not know it
now, she would know it to-morrow or the day after. It could not be long
delayed; the end was close at hand.
As Faunce realized this, he drew a long breath. He was amazed to feel
relief. In spite of all it meant to him, his first feeling had been
almost one of dizziness, like a man from whom a weight has suddenly
fallen, and who reels back light-headed and unable to adjust himself to
the change in his equilibrium.
If Overton lived, Faunce was no longer responsible for his death. No
man could brand him with the mark of Cain. He was liberated from the
thing that had hung upon him as fearfully as the slaughtered albatross
once hung upon the neck of the _Ancient Mariner_.
There was relief, then--a relief that sent the blood rushing to his
heart and the fire to his brain; but with the relief came the awful
certainty of ruin. He could never hold up his head again among the men
who had so lately hailed him as a friend and a hero. It might be worse
to be a confessed craven than a secret felon. There could be no delay,
no escape; his fate had passed out of his own control, and the God whom
he had ignored in the polar wastes would shape his destiny now. Faunce
was powerless; he could neither hasten nor delay it.
His very impotence, in relieving him of the decision, was almost
a blessing. All that he could do was to give in, to yield, to let
things take their course. The feeling of numbness that follows a great
disaster possessed him--a kind of apathy which was in itself a relief
to a man who had not slept without the use of drugs for so long a time
that sleep without them had become impossible.
He walked steadily on, and at last he became aware of the scene about
him. It was a wild night. A wind had risen, and the sky was full of
driving clouds, with now and then a moment when the full moon flashed
out and clothed the hills with spectral beauty. The creaking of the
trees, bent by the gale, and the occasional snapping of a bough, filled
the air with sound. Here and there a light shone in the scattered
houses, and far off a dog bayed incessantly.
Faunce climbed a sharp ascent, and, turning into a wider path, suddenly
found himself before the house where Overton was visiting his old
relative. As he rang and stood waiting, his apathy suddenly left him. A
feeling of staggering humiliation succeeded it, and he had difficulty
in controlling an almost overwhelming impulse of flight.
Then the door opened, and he found himself asking for Overton. The
servant, a gaunt, pale-faced woman, evidently an old standby, led him
down a long, narrow hall to a portion of the house which had been added
as unexpectedly and unreasonably as some perverse imp might add an
extra wing to a chicken or a fifth leg to a cow. Being lightly built,
it was to-night nearly as tremulous and uncertain in the wind as the
pendulum of the ancient clock in the entry.
The woman, preceding Faunce, opened a door, and asked him to sit down
and wait in the library while she went to announce him. He entered
reluctantly, aware of a brilliant light from the reading-lamp on the
low table in the center, and looked about him, glad of a few moments’
added reprieve.
The room was low-ceiled and rather narrow. Heavy crimson curtains
covered the windows, while a straggling arrangement of book-shelves and
an ancient desk suggested that it had once been the sanctuary of the
master of the house--the old aunt’s husband, who had died, if Faunce
remembered right, about ten years before. Above the shelves stood
a bust of Shakespeare, a little crude in outline, and on the wall
hung an engraving of Webster, making one of his famous speeches. The
low mantel was covered with a hideous hanging of crewel-work, which
suggested another generation as keenly as did the crocheted tidies
still on the backs of the armchairs.
On the table, amid a litter of books and papers, an old pipe lay
beside the open ink-well. Near it, lying open, was the book that
Faunce himself had published, which contained the rescued sheets from
Overton’s diary and Faunce’s frenzied efforts to patch together the
broken record, to force one and two to make four.
The sight of it there, the evidence that Overton must have been reading
his version of that fateful journey, affected Faunce deeply. He moved
slowly to the table and looked down at the open page, sure before he
saw it that it must be the one on which he had inscribed his own story
of Overton’s death--had lied, in black and white, to save himself from
shame!
Yes!
He was not mistaken--it was the very page, and a deep pencil-mark
accentuated the most damning paragraph. He straightened himself with a
sickening feeling of shame, and drew back, trying to steady himself.
At that moment he heard a step outside in the hall, and Overton
entered, shut the door behind him, and stood looking at Faunce.
XXIII
IT seemed an interminable moment to Faunce that they stood thus,
looking at each other. He had time to note the terrible change and
waste in Overton’s face--the face that had haunted him so long with
the veil of frozen mist upon it, fixed and unconscious in its awful
tranquillity. Now that he saw it alive and hollowed with suffering,
it gave him a strange feeling--or, rather, a confusion of feelings,
in which relief was for the moment uppermost. However he had failed,
however he had played the craven, the man lived, he had no death on his
soul!
But his feeling of relief was succeeded by swift and overwhelming
humiliation, which increased when Overton amazed him by advancing
calmly across the room and holding out a hand.
“Well, Faunce, I’m glad you came--although I suppose you had very
little wish to come!”
Faunce colored deeply, his hand falling away from Overton’s with a
growing feeling of shame.
“It was hard to come--for I don’t know what to say. Indeed, there’s
nothing for me to say. I know, of course, what you think of me!”
The other man put this aside with a significant gesture of weariness.
“Let it go, Faunce--I’m tired of it. For a while I believed I hated you
and reviled you in my thoughts; but afterward, looking back at it, I
couldn’t blame a man for wanting to live. That was, of course, the size
of it.”
As he spoke, he sat down in the armchair by the table, signing to
Faunce to take the seat opposite. His manner was easy and unaffected.
He had evidently prepared himself for this meeting. Besides, he had the
immeasurable advantage of being the injured party.
Faunce, who had expected reproaches and condemnation, was staggered
by Overton’s attitude. He could not fathom it, and he tried to face
it with a shrewdness and acumen that might cover his confusion and
discover the other man’s motives.
“I don’t believe you feel like that!” he said harshly. “You can’t! I’ve
often pictured it to myself, and felt that in your place I should have
cursed the man who left me. To use a sailor’s phrase, you’ve taken a
strange tack--what are you driving at? What do you want of me?”
Overton smiled a little grimly, but he opened a box of cigars and
pushed them across the table.
“Have a cigar? Here’s a light--we’ll talk it over. I’m not driving at
anything. I can only say--with truth--that having been so near death
down there, and knowing the horror of it, I can understand that you
wanted to live. It’s merely an elemental instinct, anyway.”
Faunce, who had not lit the cigar he had selected, sat staring in
speculative silence. His first thought had been that Overton must
want something--must wish to make some deal about the new expedition,
or he could not have helped reproaching the man who had deserted him
and left him to die. But, looking at the other’s face, ennobled and
spiritualized by suffering, Faunce began to realize that Overton was
still too great to fall to the level to which he himself had fallen.
His own feeling of humiliation swept back on him, wave upon wave, until
he felt like a man who was slowly drowning and knew that little by
little the water would rise above his head. He sank back in his chair
with a shudder.
“It may have been that,” he admitted reluctantly. “It came over me with
such a rush of horror that I couldn’t stay. I never meant to leave you,
Overton. I meant to behave like a man, to stay by you as we’d both
stood by Rayburn; but I had seen him die, I thought I saw you going the
same way, and suddenly it seized me--that feeling--God knows what it
was! It was impossible for me to stay. I don’t try to excuse myself--I
had to go!”
Overton nodded.
“That’s panic. I know the feeling. I’ve had it myself once or twice, in
those solitudes; but”--he hesitated, carefully holding his cigar over
the little ash-tray on the table, and knocking the ashes from it with a
deliberation that hid his eyes from Faunce--“well, I haven’t yielded to
it, that’s all!”
“I did. I don’t want to excuse myself; I know well enough that you’re
not the man to excuse--what I did. I’ve often thought that I must have
been mad--stark, staring mad!”
Overton smoked for a while in a silence that seemed to Faunce a good
deal worse than speech.
“Suppose we let that drop, eh!” he said at length. “It’s over and done
with, and if we’re to go on at all we’ve got to forget it. But there’s
another side to it--a side that I wanted to see you about. You’re
married. There’ll be some danger of this--this thing injuring you. Now,
what I wanted to say, and to say strongly, is this--we mustn’t let it
hurt your wife!”
Faunce raised his head with a look of such sudden anguish that it
astonished Overton. He had not been considering Arthur, only Diane; but
now he turned in his chair and looked attentively at the man himself.
Faunce, meanwhile, forced himself to speak.
“You saw her to-day. Did you tell her?”
“Of course not! I’m not cad enough for that.”
“You might well tell her without being a cad. There’s no reason for you
to spare me. I didn’t spare you!”
“There are a great many reasons why I should spare her, though!”
Overton retorted dryly.
Faunce bit his lip. The implication was plain--Overton had more
consideration for Faunce’s wife than Faunce had himself.
“It’s useless!” he said bitterly. “She’s sure to know, now that you’re
back.”
“Is she? That’s just what I wanted to know. I’ve been trying to recall
all that I said when I first regained consciousness--how far I gave it
all away. Lately I’ve said nothing. How much has got out already! How
much can we suppress? We must spare her if we can--you must see that!”
Faunce stared in sheer incredulity. He had come to face recrimination,
to deal with an angry and righteously offended man. He found, instead,
a hand stretched out to help him cover his own shame; but the price of
it would be a moral obligation as great as the shame. He shuddered.
“You mean”--he spoke slowly, haltingly--“that you want this to go on!
That instead of avenging yourself on me, you’re disposed to help me
hide what--what I did, and that I’m to keep on as I am--to save my
wife?”
Overton assented, stopping to look attentively at his half-smoked
cigar, that he might again avoid looking at Faunce.
“My God, I can’t do it!”
Faunce’s cry seemed to be wrung from an inner agony too great to bear.
Overton started and looked up as the other man rose from his chair and
began to pace the room with disordered steps, his head down.
“I tell you I can’t do it!” Faunce continued in a choked voice. “I’ve
been in hell for months. I came back here with a lie on my lips, and
I’ve lived a lie ever since. I thought that you were dead, and that I
should have to go on doing it; but when I knew you had come back I felt
as if a stone had fallen from my neck. You were alive, thank God, and I
was free. I was ruined, but I was free from my own tower of lies--free
to slink into a corner and grovel there in shame. I’ve known for months
that if it ever came out I was ruined, and I was prepared to face it.
I’d rather face it!”
He stopped in the center of the room and looked at Overton in a kind of
mad defiance.
“I tell you, I haven’t slept, not through a night, since I left you.
You’ve haunted me! I can still hear the crunch of the snow under my
feet, I can see that frozen desert. And they were going to send me
back. Diane wanted me to go back--she believed I had a mission! I was
going--I felt like a whipped dog that has to go home to be whipped
again. I’m a coward. I haven’t the courage to go on lying. Tell them
the truth and let me suffer, but set me free!”
Overton tossed his cigar-stump into the fire and rose slowly to his
feet, facing him.
“I can’t, nor can you. You can’t disgrace your wife. You know as well
as I know--what would happen. It would ruin you. You can’t do it.
You’ve married her, and--you’ve got to protect her. I’ll make you!”
Faunce drew back, meeting Overton’s eyes sullenly, his face distorted.
“Oh, I know! You love her. She’ll think I did it all to--to put you out
of the way. She’ll despise me, too!”
Overton returned his look steadily.
“She’d have a right to despise you, if you let this thing disgrace her.
It’s not out yet, and we must hide it.”
“Impossible!” Faunce threw out both hands with a gesture of repugnance.
“I was in New York to-day, and I was asked a thousand questions.
They’re on the trail--they’ll run it down!”
“They can’t run it down if we’re determined to hide it, to stand pat
about it. That’s why I wanted to see you. I’ve been over the ground,
and I think we can do it. Here’s this book of yours. I see you’ve
used my diary and my notes as if I had died sure enough; but you’ve
left a gap here.” He put his finger on the page. “We needn’t fill it.
We can leave it shrouded in a nebulous haze. You speak of our being
separated, but you don’t precisely state that we came together again
before I broke my ankle. It has, by the way, lamed me a little. Now,
think--think hard. Who knows the truth? Any one besides ourselves?”
Faunce thought, steadying himself.
“Yes; I think Asher knows enough to guess the rest. Asher was going
with me on the new expedition, and he knows that the news of your
return delayed it. He may be able to piece out the facts. I told them
little enough. I’ve hidden the truth--I had cause!”
Overton nodded understandingly.
“I thought so. Then I’ll see Asher; he’s a friend of mine, and I think
I can answer for him. We’ve something to fear from England; but there,
too, I’ll use my influence, and we’ll hush it up.”
“And I’m to spend the rest of my life supporting the intolerable burden
of your magnanimity--your greatness? I can’t understand your feeling
toward a fellow who--who treated you as I did. I might as well have
murdered you!”
Overton gave him a hard look.
“Understand me, Faunce, I’m human. I don’t care a hang about your
feelings, but I’m willing to do my utmost, to give my utmost, to save
the woman you’ve dared to marry!”
Faunce drew a tense breath. The accumulated fury of shame and
humiliation leaped up. The strain was too much for his taut nerves, and
he took a quick step forward.
“I see!” he said in a low voice. “You’re putting me under an obligation
because you love my wife! I may have been a craven--I admit that I was
a craven--but I have never tried to make any woman hate her husband!”
Like a flash Overton’s right arm shot out, and his fist struck Faunce
full in the face. The blow was as sharp as it was unexpected. With the
same violent impulse, Faunce leaped at him and hurled him back against
the wall. Overton, who was still broken in health, reeled before the
assault, and kept his feet only by snatching at the mantel-shelf, while
he turned deadly pale. Faunce saw it, let go his hold, and drew back
with an inarticulate sound of mingled rage and remorse.
“Good Heavens, you’re making me a coward again! I left you to die once,
and now I’ve tried to kill you! Let me go! We two can’t live on the
same planet without an intolerable conflict. Take your revenge, expose
me--and be hanged!”
Overton, however, had recovered his self-control.
“I was wrong,” he said bluntly. “I had no right to bring your wife into
it. We can’t insult her by a fight like this. As you say, we can’t get
on, Faunce, but we can agree to silence--we must. To speak now does no
man any good, and it will bring misery to--to some.”
“To my wife!” Faunce straightened himself. The violent flush of anger
faded out of his face. He turned wearily, picked up his hat, and tossed
Overton’s cigar--which he had never lit--upon the table. “Do as you
like! To force me to go on is about the worst punishment you can
inflict. I’ve reached the limit!”
Overton, bent on saving Diane the humiliation of her husband’s
disgrace, followed him to the door.
“I’ll speak to Asher, and I’ll write to England. Let the thing die out.
It’s agreed, eh?”
Faunce, who was already on the little old-fashioned stoop, looked
back, and Overton got an impression of a white face and haggard eyes;
but Faunce made no reply in words. He merely nodded his head and
disappeared into the shadows that were gathered thick under the cedars
in the path.
Overton stood a moment longer in the door, staring blankly into the
night, which was again fitfully lit up by the moon, and listening to
those retreating footsteps. They weirdly recalled the moment when he
half revived from his frozen stupor and saw the one human figure that
he had clung to receding in a white mist. It cost him again a supreme
effort to control the rush of his contempt and hatred for the man who
had just left him.
XXIV
AS Overton went in and shut the door, Faunce found himself once more
in the road, and turned mechanically to go back to the cottage. He had
almost lost his mental bearings, and for the moment he was incapable of
coherent thought. The march of events had been too swift, the revulsion
of feeling too strong.