Part 2

If he had been more vainglorious, more eager to take the glory of the great work achieved by the expedition, she would have hated him. But his tone when he had begged them not to speak of Overton’s death, the tribute he had paid to his dead comrade’s friendship, when his voice broke and his eyes filled--these things went to Diane’s heart.

The thought of them had taken such possession of her that she scarcely noticed the silence that had fallen on the little trio. Fanny’s blue eyes were gazing dreamily into the blaze, while the remote murmur of talk and the scent of tobacco came to them from the dining-room. Diane was startled by the awakening of her elder relative, who, apparently, had also been wrapped in dreamy meditation.

“Diane, did your cook make those delicious rolls that were served with the fish?” Mrs. Price asked abruptly.

Diane looked up blankly.

“Why, of course! She’s very proud of them, too. Haven’t you ever tasted them before?”

“I don’t think so, and I’m sure I should remember. They were so crisp! I’ve got a new cook--did Fan tell you? She’s dreadful. Poor Edward says she’s ruining his digestion, and I’d better try a fireless cooker instead. Can’t you let me have that recipe for her?”

“It wouldn’t do any good, mama. She’s a Norwegian, Di, and she understands so little English that when she tries to talk it sounds like a turkey gobbling.”

Fanny began to give a practical illustration, but her mother protested.

“Hush! Here are the gentlemen, and they’ll think you’re crazy, child!”

Fanny stopped, with a queer little grimace that made Diane laugh. They were interrupted by the entrance of Dr. Gerry and Arthur Faunce, who were a little in advance of the judge and the dean. Diane found herself engaged in conversation by the old doctor, who began by remarking that she was too pale, and that he suspected she sat up half the night to read novels.

Diane, who knew that this was merely an excuse to give him an opportunity to probe her inmost mind, parried it lightly, and engaged him in an animated discussion of the latest best-seller.

“Advertisement--nothing but advertisement!” he declared bruskly. “In my young days a novel had to be good to be read. Now it’s an even thing between the man who’s written a book and the man who’s invented a bunion-eraser--it all depends on which gets the most advertising!”

“Iconoclast! Won’t you leave us the illusion of fame?” retorted Diane, laughing.

“It isn’t fame men want these days--it’s money!”

“Filthy lucre!” said the dean. “Don’t let that pessimist destroy your enjoyment of life, Diane. Send him off to play billiards with your father. I’ve got to take my girls home. I’ve an engagement for seven o’clock to-morrow morning, and I need rest.”

As he spoke, Mrs. Price came up and bestowed a flattering kiss upon Diane’s cheek.

“Good-night, dear! Don’t forget about that recipe for rolls,” she murmured.

Diane promised to remember, and went up-stairs to help the two women into their wraps. Fanny was still blushing and confused. She had been talking to Faunce, and her blue eyes shone like two radiant aquamarines.

“He’s so splendid, Di, isn’t he?” she whispered, as her cousin fastened her cloak for her. “And his eyes--there’s something wonderful about them. They haunt you!”

Diane laughed as she kissed her good-night, and watched the two cloaked and hooded figures marshaled out by the little dean in his long black coat and high hat. Standing in the open door, she saw the three familiar figures walking in single file down the long path to the gate, not one of them keeping step with the others, but each bobbing up and down at a different gait, as curiously bundled and indiscriminate in the darkness as so many Indian papooses suddenly set on their feet and compelled to toddle.

As she closed the door and turned back toward the drawing-room, she saw that Arthur Faunce was awaiting her there alone.

“I thought you were with papa and the doctor,” she said, apologizing for her neglect, as he drew a chair forward for her to sit again near the dying embers on the hearth.

“They went to play billiards, and I don’t know one ball from another,” he replied. “I told them I should wait for you.” He took the chair that Mrs. Price had vacated, and leaned forward, resting his elbows on the arms. “I wanted to speak to you alone.”

Diane looked up, and met his dark eyes bent on her with a melancholy and troubled gaze that sent a sad thrill of expectation to her heart. He meant to speak of Overton!

She said nothing. For a moment, indeed, she was quite incapable of speech. They both heard the distant click of the billiard-balls and her father’s deep voice speaking to Dr. Gerry.

“You know that I was with Overton--with Simon,” he said at last, “to the very end, and once or twice he--he talked to me of you.”

She looked up in surprise. She had felt that it was unlike Overton even to mention her name, so deep and almost sensitive was the reserve that he had always shown. Faunce met her look again, and this time his pale face flushed.

“I mean in the way that Overton always spoke of women--of his friends--with the truest and most chivalrous regard. He was not well; the climate broke him up before the end, and I think he had a feeling that he might not live to come back. One day, after we had to abandon the ship, he showed me some photographs he had--pictures that he had taken himself--and he asked me to remember, if anything happened to him, that he wished you to have them. He said that you had cared so much for the whole expedition, and had cheered him so often in those hard days when he thought he could never get the thing started. After he--after that awful time in the snow, I found the case he had shown me, and I brought it with me.” He stopped and put his hand in his pocket, producing a large, square envelope. “As soon as I got to New York I had the plates developed. A few were spoiled, but there are some here, and I’ve brought them to you to-night.”

As he spoke, he held out the package. Diane compelled herself to take it with outward composure, but her hands were shaking, and she could not meet his eyes.

“I can’t tell you how much I thank you!” she murmured, opening the envelope and looking over the pictures in order to hide her emotion.

There were only a few of them--studies of sea and sky, a familiar view of the ill-fated ship, a group of sailors, and some impressive views of frozen straits and giant icebergs. It was a meager glimpse of the world for which Simon Overton had laid down his life, but something in it, in his thought of her, of the things she would care to see, touched Diane to the soul. She restrained her tears with difficulty, and, although she continued to make a show of examining the prints, her eyes were too dim to see the details.

For a while Faunce was silent. He seemed to understand the emotion that prevented Diane from speaking. On the whole, he was thankful for it, since she did not have time to see the pain that distorted his own face. He felt that he was white and rigid, and that his eyes stared at the fire; but he had enough self-control to keep his hands steady on the arms of his chair, and after a while he commanded his voice.

“I’m sorry that there were so few things that we could bring,” he said slowly. “A great deal was lost in the wreck, and we had to sacrifice more still in our journey across the ice. There came a time when we couldn’t carry a load--we could scarcely carry ourselves.”

Diane folded the pictures carefully away before she replied.

“What you say makes me all the more grateful for these!”

He raised his head at that, and their eyes met. The sympathy, the kindling kindness of her glance went to his heart.

“You don’t ask me about it all, and yet I’m sure you want to know.”

“I understood. I was deeply touched by what you said at dinner. I know you can’t talk of it yet--I don’t ask it.”

“I think I could talk to you; but perhaps I had better wait until another time.” Faunce paused; then, rising from his seat, he came over and stood beside her, resting his elbow on the mantel, with his face in the shadow, as hers had been. “I want you to feel that the end was painless. It always is, you know, in those awful solitudes. You knew Overton; you must know that he was a hero--to the end.”

She, too, rose involuntarily from her seat and faced him. Again her pale face, and her slight figure in its black draperies, recalled to his mind the charm and buoyant grace of that wonderful picture of long ago. It was, indeed, this charm of hers, so subtle and so poignant, that drew him on deeper and deeper into the shoals.

“I loved him,” Faunce continued, with a painful effort at self-control. “No one in the world could have suffered more bitterly than I at his loss. I don’t want you to feel that I purposely tried to take his place in this great achievement. I only fell heir to his glory.”

She was deeply touched. Again, even in the midst of her tender remembrance of Overton, this man, who had suffered with him and dared with him, laid hold of her imagination. She raised her beautiful eyes to Faunce’s face, holding out her hand in an involuntary gesture of friendship and good-will.

“I think you’re more than his heir,” she said gently. “He was so large-hearted, so just, that I know he would feel, as I do, that you were his comrade and his partner in sacrifice and in fame.”

There was an instant of silence, one of those moments which become almost supreme in their effect upon two lives. Then, as Faunce seemed to have no words in which to reply, he took Diane’s hand in both of his and lifted it gently to his lips.

III

HALF an hour later, Judge Herford stood on his front steps, bidding his last two guests good-night.

“Come again!” he called after them in his deep bass. “You’ll always find us prepared enough for the pair of you. By the way, Faunce, I suppose it’s too much to expect that any one so famous as you will hang around Mapleton long?”

“I don’t know any better place to hang around, judge,” Faunce replied. “When a man’s been in exile two years, the old places look good to him.”

“That’s right! Then be sure you don’t forget the way here.”

“He won’t!” Dr. Gerry flung back, as he plodded toward the gate. “You’re not the only attraction at this house, Hadley. For my part, I only come here to see Diane!”

They heard the judge’s laugh following them, and saw his large figure still outlined against the light, the big gray head and massive shoulders and long body looking a little too heavy for the short legs.

“If Hadley had been sawed off at the waist, they’d have said he was a perfect model for a Roman emperor,” observed the doctor, as they passed out into the road and heard the judge shut his door for the night.

Faunce agreed with some amusement.

“It’s strange, isn’t it, how some men seem to lose their proportion when they stand up? They’re not put together in equal parts.”

“A good many who are put together right outside are out of joint inside.”

“How about the mental proportion--or shall we call it the spiritual?”

“That depends upon how much you follow the dean. A mental twist is pretty nearly certain to go hand in hand with moral lopsidedness, though.”

Faunce reflected on this for a moment, while they made their way under the interlacing branches of the big trees that arched over the country road. It was late in October, and the fall of the leaves had already stripped the big elms and left them in spectral outline against the moonlit sky.

“I take it, then, that you hold a moral shortcoming as a sign of an unbalanced mind?”

“I didn’t say that. That’s the other way around; but it’s true, too, though I shouldn’t cite it as a reason for getting off a criminal. We’ve had a little more of that lately than is good for us.”

“Then you don’t think that the mental condition palliates crime?”

“I think a good many people commit murder or highway robbery, and then, about the time when they get caught, they decide that they must have been crazy.”

“You argue, then, that the insanity is synchronous with the discovery?”

The doctor nodded, trudging sturdily forward toward the turn in the road which led to his own house. The autumn air was chill with frost, and Faunce seemed to shiver as he buttoned up his coat. Dr. Gerry, observing the young man from the tail of his eye, remarked it.

“Feel a chill, eh? I shouldn’t think you’d mind it, after the south pole!”

“Any touch of cold that reminds me of that is enough to make me shiver. I can’t close my eyes now without seeing those livid wastes and hearing the wind. It’s a frozen hell!”

“It’s on your nerves. How many hours do you sleep at night?”

Faunce gave him an uneasy look, in which surprise and something like apprehension were strangely mingled; but the street lights were poor, and he could only half discern the old man’s face as it emerged above the heavy collar of his greatcoat.

“I don’t sleep at all. How did you find that out?”

“I’ve seen a good many in the same plight before, for one thing, and you’re a pretty easy case to read.”

“Am I?” Faunce laughed harshly. “I didn’t know it. Perhaps you can tell me what to do, then?”

“Stop taking narcotics, to begin with, and then get control of your nerves.”

“So you’ve discovered that, too?”

“What?”

“The narcotics. I had to try something. I haven’t had three continuous hours of sleep since--not for five months, anyway.”

“Humph!” The doctor stumbled on a stone and stopped to kick it out of the way. “That’ll lead you on the same road with old Henry Jersey, down in Featherbed Lane.”

“What’s the matter with him?”

“Well, there’s some divergence of opinion, but his neighbors call him bughouse, if you know what that is.”

“Crazy?”

“Pretty near it. He took drugs, too, for a while.”

“I’ve only taken small doses, enough to get a little sleep. I had to have it. Perhaps”--he laughed unsteadily--“perhaps you can tell me what I’ve taken?”

“Oh, it might be anything,” the doctor replied carelessly; “but I should call it chloral.”

“You’ve hit it! I shall begin to think you’re a mind-reader.”

“I am, in a sense. The fact is, I can tell you what’s the matter with you now. It’s your nerves. 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.”

Faunce was startled. He glanced around again, but could only make out a dim outline of Gerry’s blunt profile between the old man’s collar and the big soft hat he had pulled comfortably down to his ears. For a moment he reflected on the doctor’s words in silence.

It was evidently true that Gerry had an unaccountable way of hitting the nail on the head. Faunce wondered how much the old man had already divined of the trouble that was harassing his soul. If he was indeed so palpably easy to read, how could he screen it from the curious gaze of every inquiring eye that he met? They were almost in sight of the doctor’s white gate before he roused himself to reply.

“That sounds like saying that honest confession is good for the soul,” he said with his nervous laugh. “I should never have suspected you of commending that course.”

“I’ve been father confessor for a good many,” retorted the doctor crustily. “What I meant to say, though, was much simpler. You’ve got to free your mind. When a man lets anything bite in as your trouble seems to be doing, he soon comes to the end of his tether. His nerves break down, he can’t sleep, and then he can’t eat. It’s an old story. I can give you something to ease up the body, but I can’t do anything for the mind. You’ll have to look after that for yourself.”

Faunce stopped at the gate.

“How about the soul?” he asked dryly.

“I’ll leave that to the dean--or to Mrs. Price. She’d have a quotation that would fit it to the letter. Will you come in?” he added, opening his gate.

“Not to-night. I’m going to tramp for a while. When I’m tired out, I sometimes sleep a little--without the chloral.”

The doctor grunted, went into his front yard, and let the old white gate swing to behind him.

“I suppose you know the risk you’re taking?”

Faunce nodded.

“Oh, I sha’n’t kill myself.” He laughed again, rather loudly this time. “I haven’t the courage!”

“It doesn’t take courage when you’ve got enough of the stuff. It’s as easy to slip off as it is for a frozen man to sink into the final stupor.”

For a moment they stood peering at each other through the night. A fitful moon vanished behind a cloud, and left each one in doubt of the other’s attitude; but the doctor was aware that Faunce pulled himself together and moved away from the fence.

“So you think that’s easy?” he said in a hoarse voice.

“I know it is--at the end. There’s a limit, you see, to human endurance. When it’s reached and passed, coma ensues. That’s easy!”

Faunce took a step toward the gate, as if an impulse moved him to follow the doctor in. Then he turned with an inarticulate exclamation, waved an abrupt good-night, and walked rapidly away into the darkness.

Dr. Gerry watched him disappear before he turned and deliberately climbed the steps to his own front door, to find the cat rubbing herself against his ankles. He stooped down and caressed her, running his hand down the length of her sleek, gray back, and finally giving her tail a gentle tweak. Then he unlocked his door and entered, carrying her under his arm.

IV

MEANWHILE Faunce tramped steadily down the long lane. It led to the edge of the little river, scarcely more than a brook, which divided the village into two unequal parts. Just now, at flood from the recent rains, the stream tumbled noisily over the stones and rushed under the low bridge with a harsh, insistent murmur.

He stopped for a moment with his hand on the rail, and looked down at the black current below. Then the clouds broke, and he saw the moon reflected in the water, while the rising wind suddenly showered the falling leaves until they fell with a patter like rain. Beside him an ancient willow stood like a stricken giant. A summer thunderbolt had split the great trunk in twain, and half of it lay across the stream, while the other half still loomed up, grim and leafless, against the sky.

It was past midnight and in that rural community, where early hours prevailed, the feeling of solitude was as intense as if he had reached the end of the world and was alone in the October night, the last man. Such a feeling had come to him once before, fraught with such cruel terror, such a sensation of disintegration, of the loss of all that was mortal, that Faunce could never forget it, could never feel even the reflection of it again without recalling those vast and terrifying wastes, that inexorable sky, that blinding, cruel, exterminating ice that had frozen its image on his soul.

He tried to drive the thought of it from his mind, and, by fixing his gaze on that intimately familiar scene, to recall the days when, as a lad, he had fished by that old bridge. He remembered his grandmother as she had looked to him then, the quaint cap she wore, and the little plaid shawl folded about her shoulders over the black bombazine dress. His mother had died when he was born, and his father had married again. Young Arthur, in the way of a gay stepmother, had been reared by a fond maternal grandmother.

No one had disciplined his childhood, and he knew that as a boy he had done some mean tricks, which a better-trained lad would have scorned. But he had ceased to be small and tricky when he fell in with Overton, his senior by three years in age and by ten in mental development. He realized now, as he looked back on the long perspective, that Overton had saved him.

Strong-willed and straight-thinking, Simon Overton had possessed that kind of spiritual force of which leaders and martyrs are made. He had been a leader even at school. His companions had followed him with the boyish devotion that always surrounds the school hero with a halo of glory. It was not alone young Overton’s physical strength, and his skill in their favorite sports; it was a certain unfailing stanchness of character, a fearless square-dealing, that impressed the others, and Faunce had only followed the universal lead when he attached himself to him.

Faunce had been favored. Overton had seen that the lad was without a real friend, that his old grandmother could do little more than wrap him in a figurative blanket, spoiling and scolding by turns; and the elder boy suddenly took hold of the younger. A friendship was formed, protective on one side, almost adoring on the other, and from that time their fates had moved forward in an inseparable course.

When Overton went to Annapolis, he had helped Faunce to work his way through college. When Faunce’s father died and left his estate--a small one--to his widow and Arthur’s stepsisters, Overton had tided Arthur over, until he got a place, and his grandmother’s death left him the sole heir of her modest fortune. It was this old bond that had drawn him into the first expedition to the south pole.

Overton, as a lieutenant in the navy, had organized the great adventure, which was financed by an old friend of his father. He had selected Faunce to accompany him, and the trip had been successful up to a certain point. Then the inexorable conditions of polar exploration had worsted their efforts, and they had been forced to turn back. Bitterly chagrined, Overton had returned for another year of preparation, and then, flushed with new hope, and with that kind of fateful vision which pursues the most difficult and dangerous chimeras, he had set out for the second time, determined to plant the Stars and Stripes at the farthest south.