Part 11

IT was late in the evening, long past their usual dinner-hour, when Diane heard Faunce coming up the path to the front door. Ever since that bitter moment with Overton, she had been trying to steady her mind for this meeting. It seemed to her that she must be ready for it--ready to force the climax, to make Faunce tell her the truth.

If she had failed to get the whole story from Overton, his very silence and his omissions had made it easy for her imagination to fill up the gaps. She shuddered now before the vision that her tortured mind had conjured from the frozen silence. What had happened behind the gray curtain of the mist and snow? What deep and tragic drama had been enacted? She did not know, yet she shuddered. She felt the weight of it upon her. The shadow of it lay across her path, between her and her husband.

She sat alone before the big fireplace, almost in the very spot where Overton had stood, and listened. She could not move, she could not even go to open the door. She was listening to the step--a little hurried and uncertain--that came up the steps and across the porch, and halted at the door. There was a moment’s pause, and then Faunce thrust his latch-key into the lock. She dragged herself to her feet and stood facing the door, incapable of action or speech.

He came in very pale and haggard, but his preoccupation had gained upon him, and he was not even startled to see his wife standing there, motionless, before the fire. He saw her, saw the long, graceful lines of her figure, the small, uplifted head; but he was too much absorbed in the struggle within to recognize the change in her.

“I’ve kept you waiting!” he exclaimed hurriedly. “You must forgive me this time, dear! I hope you haven’t waited dinner?”

As he spoke, he came over and kissed her cheek, without apparently perceiving the anguish in her eyes. She yielded, let him caress her soft hair a moment, but she was trying, all the while, to shape the questions that rushed to her lips.

Something in his face, in its stricken look, stopped her. She drew back 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.