Part 16

Suddenly, too, she perceived a fact that had long been only a vague idea in the back of her mind. Fanny had been fond of Faunce! She saw it plainly now, with a passionate feeling of rebellion. If love awaited him elsewhere, why had fate delivered him into her hands? It was all confused, all at cross-purposes.

If he had married Fanny, there would, perhaps, have been no question of his confession. Fanny would have helped him where she had failed. That was the cruelty of it--a cruelty that involved him as well as herself. Why had he been so blind? she cried angrily to herself. Why had he passed Fanny by to pursue her? If he had only left her alone--

She stopped short and stood still. Again she saw herself going over the edge of the abyss. She tried to steady herself, to find the guiding light, the lamp to show her the way out.

Then, just at the very moment when she was least able to endure it, least able to battle any longer, she saw Overton himself just ahead of her. He was walking fast. As he turned he caught sight of her, and, swinging around, came rapidly toward her, his face as white as hers was red with embarrassment.

As he drew nearer, she stopped, more because she did not know what else to do than from any wish to see him. Her first impulse, indeed, had been one of flight, and she suspended it only because, in the hedged lane, there was no convenient way to flee. Something of what she felt--her trepidation, which almost amounted to sheer fright--showed in her eyes and her reluctant attitude, and he saw it. He halted a few yards away and stood looking at her.

“You don’t wish to see me?”

The note of pain in his voice sent a thrill of answering pain through her heart. Unconsciously she held out her hand.

“I do--only it’s hard--after all I’ve been told!”

Her broken words touched him deeply. He realized that she felt a vicarious share in her husband’s guilt toward him, and he caught her hand in both of his.

“He should never have told you. I tried to save you that!” he exclaimed.

She drew her hand gently away.

“You did wrong, then. He was right to tell me--I had to know.”

“But why?”

He had turned with her, and they walked on through the light rain. She looked up, her mind clearing.

“It was wrong of you to urge silence on him. If he’s ever to be anything, he mustn’t be silent. A thing like that must be confessed and atoned for. Besides, he knew that I should know in the end. I couldn’t help it. I’ve felt that there was something wrong, something terrible behind it all!”

“And it has made you wretched--I see that. Why can’t you forget it? I should never have come back. It’s I who have ruined your happiness.”

“Oh, no, no! Think how infinitely worse it would have been if you had perished and I had known too late that he--that he had left you! I couldn’t have borne that.”

The passion of her tone moved him again, and for a moment he did not reply. He was keenly aware of her presence at his side, her delicate profile against the light mist that was rising like vapor about them, the curve of her brow and the oval of her pale cheek under the dusky sweep of the brown hair that waved upward under her wide hat, the meticulous simplicity of her dark dress, her grace and slightness.

She seemed so young, so girlish, and she was facing a situation so tragic and humiliating! Overton was himself a proud man, and he felt her humiliation, felt that he must lighten it.

“I’ve wanted to speak to you about this,” he managed to say at last. “You mustn’t think that he did something do unpardonable. It isn’t unpardonable to any one who’s ever been at the pole. No man has a right to expect too much from his fellows there, and”--he hesitated--“when a man drops behind, why, he’s got to perish. The stakes are too great, the price too much, to lose all for one life. I fell in my tracks, and it’s only fair to him to think that I should have stayed where I dropped. The expedition couldn’t be imperiled just for me. I wasn’t worth so much. He did what--well, what nine out of ten would have done in his place.”

She stopped and faced him, her large eyes dark with emotion.

“Did you leave Rayburn?”

He flushed under her eyes.

“That was different. Faunce was with me--there were three of us. It was different, of course.”

“I can’t see the difference.”

“It was different, though. Besides, there was no blizzard impending. In my case the storm made it doubly perilous to stay.”

“It made the going worse!” she retorted in a hard voice.

He turned his head, and their eyes met; he felt almost as keen a shame as if he, and not Faunce, had done this thing. He saw that to her it was unpardonable. She would never see any reason or excuse for it. If she had loved her husband, then Overton’s return had wrecked her life.

“I’ve made you wretched!” he exclaimed with profound emotion. “It’s come to me again and again, since my return, that it must be dreadful for a man to come back from the dead. When we die--or people think we’re dead--our places close over our graves; there’s no niche left for us any more. To come back is to disrupt the tranquillity of the life that’s begun to flow in new courses over the surface of the grave. That’s what I’ve done--I’ve come back and wrecked your happiness!”

She shook her head vehemently, tears rising in her eyes.

“No, I never had it. I know now I only imagined. I never had any happiness at all!”

“Diane!”

Her cry had gone to his heart. It was more than he could bear. He caught her hands in his again and held them.

“Don’t say that, for I can’t bear it--no man who loved you could bear to hear you say that!”

She did not answer him, but stood still, her hand quivering in his grasp. They were alone under the trees, and the sun, breaking suddenly through the clouds again, illumined the moist atmosphere until it seemed shot with golden motes.

“I’ve no right to say it,” he went on passionately; “but I’m human, and I can’t keep silence! Diane, I’d rather have died down there in the ice and snow, where he left me, than to have come back to lose you!”

Still she said nothing, but her head drooped, and she could no longer look up. She knew now why she had left her husband. Her whole subconscious being cried out:

“It was this--this! You loved this man, and not your husband!”

“I’ve always loved you, Diane!” he went on madly. The restraint he had set on himself had broken, and nothing now could stem the current of his emotion. “I loved you before I went away, but I wasn’t sure of you; I didn’t dare to risk too much. Diane, if I had spoken then, would you have listened, would all this have been saved?”

She broke down herself.

“Don’t ask me--don’t--it’s no use! It’s done--don’t you see it’s no use to ask me now?”

“It’s not done, if you’ve left him! Your father says you’ve left him. If you have, if you’re going to be free, Diane, it’s not wrong for me to speak. I can’t be silent; I’m human. I’m as bad as he is--I’m worse, for you’re his wife. But I----” He stopped, and then went on in a low voice: “Will you answer me, Diane, just one word. Did you then--before I went away--did you care?”

She looked up into his face and saw it transfigured with deep emotion--the face of the man she loved, for whom she had left her husband. She was trembling, but his eyes held hers, and she yielded.

“Yes!” she sobbed below her breath.

They swayed toward each other in the golden mist, he holding her hands in a grip that thrilled with passionate hope.

“Diane, my love!” he cried.

If she heard him, she did not answer, though she closed her eyes and her lips moved. He seemed to feel, through the impalpable veil between their two souls, that hers was struggling away from his and trying to rise by its own agony to a supreme height of renunciation. But he would not let her go.

“Then--then, if you cared once, you care--you must care again. I can’t have you speak as you did just now--about there being no happiness for you. I can’t bear that, for I’d give all that I have, the best that’s in me, to make you happy. Speak to me! It’s not wrong--I know what you think, but it’s not wrong if you’re going to begin life over again. It’s not wrong for me to try to win you again, to make you happy!”

With a sudden effort she dragged her hands from his and moved on blindly, hurrying away from him.

“Don’t!” she sobbed. “Don’t make it worse. It’s all wrong; I know it; I see it; I--I left him because----”

He had caught up with her now and walked beside her, as pale as she was.

“Because what? Tell me; I must know; I have a right to know!”

She staggered again; her hand going to her throat with a strange little gesture, as if she felt strangled.

“Because I loved you! I see it now--and it’s wicked. I hadn’t any right to judge him, for I was worse than he was. It’s one of those things that make it wrong, Simon--that make it wrong even to have cared once!”

“No, it’s not wrong! We’ll get you free. He--I’ll say it now, Diane--he had no right to marry you!”

“I was the one who did wrong--as much as he did,” she managed to say. “I--I thought I loved him; I told him I loved him. I must have. If I didn’t, I--I could never have married him!”

“But you were mistaken! That’s common; it happens often. You were mistaken--you didn’t love him!”

She stopped again, and the misty sunlight illumined her face until it appeared to him to have a purity as luminous and fragile as an alabaster lamp. Her spirit, tried beyond endurance, seemed to be shining through it, darkening her eyes and softening her lips.

“Oh, I’m not sure!” she cried. “Don’t you see how I feel? There are two roads, and I stand at the crossing. I’m bewildered; I can’t see; I can only feel----”

“But I know!” he returned with profound emotion. “I know! My love is strong enough to find the way for us both. It’s not wrong to love you, for you’ve given him up!”

For a moment, as she clung to him, he felt the slight weight of her body against him, the fragrance of her hair upon his cheek. Then she had slipped out of his arms and left him alone in the mist.

XXXII

IN a tumult of feeling deeper and more complex than ever, Diane made her way through a meadow that furnished a short cut to her own door. She was vaguely aware that the grass was long, and that she was getting drenched nearly to her knees, when she saw, in a half-conscious way, a cluster of asters blooming happily just at the spot where a lowered fence-rail made it possible for her to scramble into the end of her father’s garden.

She was scarcely conscious of what she did, and she had a new feeling of guilt. Until now she had felt that she was as supremely in the right as Faunce was supremely in the wrong; but the whole attitude of her mind was breaking down. She felt a tremor of fear, though even at that moment she could not have told what it was she feared.

Shaken as she was, she tried to let herself in without attracting attention, for she had as little courage as ever for an interview with the judge. However, she was not to escape. He heard the rear door open, and, looking out of his library, espied her at the foot of the stairs.

“Is that you, my child?” he said in the deep bass that always presaged something important. “Come in here a moment before you go up-stairs. I have something to tell you.”

She turned reluctantly and followed him into the old room, which was so full of memories that it made her shiver. Her father resumed his seat by the table, but she remained standing just inside the door, where a bit of sunshine from the window touched the edge of her wet skirt, but left her face in shadow. The judge mounted his spectacles and looked over some papers, refreshing his memory.

“My dear, of course we’ll employ counsel; you know that! I’ve just got a letter from Holt and Hickson, which seems satisfactory on the whole. Mr. Hickson--he’s the junior partner--advises us to wait until the expedition sails. He’s seen Faunce, and, as far as he can ascertain, there’ll be no opposition. Faunce has modified his first assurance to me a little, but I suppose we’ll have to expect that--to expect changes and vacillations in a man like him!”

Diane tried to steady her voice.

“What did he say--I mean, what does he say now, papa?”

The judge consulted the letter again.

“He told Hickson that it depended upon you. He has the greatest faith in you, and won’t oppose divorce if you ask it; but he wants you to ask it in writing. It’s absurd--knowing, as he does, that you’ve left him; but he seems determined, so Hickson says, to know just what you want. Of course, if that is really all he wants to know, it’s easy. You can make a statement here; I’ll have it typed and witnessed, and Hickson can let him see it.”

“And if I didn’t want to write anything, what would happen then?”

Her father looked up in amazement.

“Not want to write anything? Of course you do! The sooner you’re free of that--that coward the better. That’s what I called you in for. You can decide just what you want to say, and I’ll have it prepared for your signature.”

She lifted her head at that, looking at him, a singular expression on her face.

“But that’s just it. I--I can’t! You see, I don’t know what I want to say at all.”

Her father suppressed an exclamation of impatience.

“I should think you’d know well enough! You’ve got to say something, or else let it go, and after a while he’ll sue you for desertion; but no one knows how long it would take him to get his courage screwed up to that. I wish”--the judge let his hand fall heavily on the papers before him--“I wish we had a clean case against him to sue on at once.”

“You mean--we haven’t any case?”

He frowned.

“We’ve got case enough, in one way; but against you--well, he’s done nothing against you but to dare to marry you, knowing what a coward he was!”

Diane continued to look at him, her eyes dilating a little, but she was silent. The judge, aware of it, looked up and encountered her expression. He pulled off his spectacles and gazed at her steadily.

“What’s the matter, Di? You look ill--I’ll have to send for Gerry.”

“Oh, no! It’s nothing but the scent of those tuberoses on the table--it’s so strong, it makes me feel faint.”

She moved away as she spoke and put herself a little out of the range of his vision. The judge took the glass of tuberoses and set it on the window-ledge.

“I thought you had a craze for all kinds of weeds. This thing has been too much for you; that’s what’s the matter.”

“No, no!” she gasped weakly. “I’m strong enough to stand a great deal more than this. I----” She hesitated, beginning to walk about on the other side of the room, her figure outlined against the rich bookbindings, but her face still in shadow. “Papa, what would you say if I--if I decided to go back to my husband?”

There was a sharp little pause before the judge’s bass boomed across the table.

“I’d disown you! A woman that could go back to such a coward wouldn’t deserve recognition.”

She laughed hysterically.

“But I married him!”

“You didn’t know it, did you?”

“You know I didn’t.”

“Nor did I!” The judge controlled his anger. “I beg your pardon, Di, for my share in it. Gerry thinks I helped make the match. If I did, I’ll help unmake it. I’ll have a statement drawn up for you, and you’ll only need to sign it. I should hate to feel the marriage was my fault.”

“It’s no one’s fault--unless it’s mine. I--I had no right to think I loved him if--if I didn’t!”

“You didn’t--that’s it, my child. Mistakes like that make half the marriages. I’ve seen enough of it in my day, and I don’t mean to have your life ruined at the start. You’re getting hysterical, that’s all. I’ll see that you get out of it and have a chance to make your life over. You can trust me for that, my girl!”

“But if--if I shouldn’t feel that I wanted to--to have you do it, papa?”

He turned sharply.

“What’s the matter? Have you seen that fellow?”

“My husband? Oh, no, no!” Her face flushed painfully. “I don’t believe he wants to see me after the way I left him.”

The judge started to retort, but hesitated and reflected. He had been on the point of telling her that Faunce did want to see her, but he thought better of it.

“It was enough to cure him--I’ll admit that, my dear,” he finally replied.

Diane moved to the nearest cabinet, and lifting a little jar of ancient pottery, began to examine it as if she had never seen it before.

“Do you think that any one--that any woman who’s been through what I’ve been through can start over again!”

“Of course she can! Why not? A man can fail and fall, for that matter, and then get up and start fresh.”

“Oh, but that’s different; the man’s not the question. I’m a woman. It’s not the same thing at all!”

“You’re getting back now to the fundamental question--the double standard of morals. It’s not relevant. You’re not doing anything immoral to refuse to live with a coward.”

“I didn’t even stop to think!” she cried. “When he told me what he’d done, I”--she shuddered--“I couldn’t stay!”

“Of course you couldn’t! What’s more, I won’t let you go back to him. You understand that, Di? You’re nervous and broken down, and he may try to persuade you, but I’ll never let you go back!”

“But if--if I went, papa?”

He struck his hand down on the table.

“Understand me. If you went I’d never speak to you again as long as I lived! Don’t you see what he did? He wasn’t only a coward; he would have been Overton’s murderer if the English party hadn’t come along. It was a miracle that saved Overton; Faunce as good as left him purposely to die.”

“Yet”--she spoke with an effort--“yet Overton doesn’t blame him as you do. He tries to excuse him.”

“You’ve seen Overton?”

“Ye-es; just now. I met him on the way home,” she stammered.

A look of relief softened the judge’s face. He rose from his chair and, crossing the room, took his daughter in his arms.

“My child, you’re half sick! You’ve worried too much. Don’t talk in this way again. You know you long to be free.”

His softened tone disarmed her again. She clung to him, trembling, tears in her eyes.

“Oh, I do--I do!” she sobbed. “I long to be my old self again!”

The judge gathered her up in his arms, as he had often gathered her up as a child, and carried her up-stairs to her room. He put her on the lounge and covered her up; then he went down, and sent the old maid servant up with a cup of hot tea. It was the only thing he could think of that seemed to fill the peculiar demands of a case like this--a case which, to his mind, was nothing but hysteria. Then he set himself to framing the reply to Faunce that Diane was to sign.

He had made up his mind to settle her affairs for her. He was convinced now that she loved Overton. Sternly as he might have viewed such a case where others were involved, he could see only one side of it for his own daughter--her right, the inalienable right of youth and love, to happiness. He did not permit the finer and more ethical questions to disturb his fixed determination to wrest her from the craven who had been capable of a crime as near to murder as anything short of actual killing could be. Indeed, to his own stalwart mind, it was even worse than murder.

Meanwhile Diane, up-stairs in her own room, drank the hot tea, and permitted the maid to help her with some dry clothing; but she was still shaking like a person who had been suddenly smitten with ague. All the while she seemed to see, through a mist shot with golden rain-drops, the face of Overton, transfigured with his love for her. She wrung her hands together and hid her face in them, oblivious of the pitying eyes of the old servant who had come to take away the tea-things.

She was still sitting there, with her head in her hands, when she heard her father leave the library and go out, and knew herself to be alone in the house. She breathed more freely when she was not in immediate danger of being rushed into some new and terrible decision--a decision that might make her as wretched as that other one which had led to her marriage. She rose weakly from the lounge and went down-stairs.

It was now late afternoon, and the sun had come out with extraordinary splendor. It was flooding the western windows and dappling the lawn with a lovely lacework of rain-gemmed cobwebs that sparkled like frosted fairy veils.

Diane went slowly across the hall, and saw the evening mail lying on the little table in the corner. It recalled with a sharp pang the days long ago when she had looked there in vain for a letter from Overton, then on his way to the south pole. There were some letters there now, however, and she turned them over and started violently when she recognized her husband’s handwriting on an envelope addressed to her.

For a moment she leaned forward, her hands on the table, unable to make up her mind to open it. The aversion she had felt at his confession swept back over her in wave on wave of futile passion and shame. Then she took up the letter and, opening it, moved to the window to read more clearly the few lines that he had written in an unsteady hand: