Part 4

“Keep it for Diane. She’ll need the money about the time you kill yourself with hard work.”

The judge eyed him.

“Trying to intimidate me into taking your drugs, eh?”

“That’s my business,” replied the doctor, drawing his chair to the fire and looking over his open case for an appropriate dose.

The other man lay back in his cushioned chair, free for a moment of the teasing ache, and regarded Gerry in silence. His appearance of great strength, the florid flush on his skin, and his iron-gray hair, defied both age and weakness; but the doctor’s words had set him thinking, and he strummed on his chair-arms with angry fingers. A bright fire was burning on the hearth, and the flames made fitful shadows in the small, comfortable, book-lined room--a room that had an intimate air of having associated long with a man of affairs, and of having acquired, even in its old, dilapidated bindings and its well-worn rug, the full measure of dignity and reserve which befitted a judge.

“I’ve got a great deal to do before I’m ready to go,” he remarked at length, in his deep voice. “They’ve mussed up the political situation in this State. If I died or resigned, they’d put in that fool, Henry Runes, as judge!”

Gerry selected a glass bottle, and, opening it deliberately, shook some pink pills into an envelope.

“Henry Runes? Isn’t he a cousin of Overton’s?” the doctor asked.

“Is there any one who isn’t a cousin of Overton’s, since he got famous?” snapped the judge.

“Has he got famous? I thought he had only died. It’s Faunce who’s famous.”

“That’s the way of the world. A man’s got to be very much alive nowadays to be famous overnight.”

“I hear that you have undertaken to be his political sponsor. They say he’s nursing a boom for Congress.”

“He’d better do that than go to his death like Overton, hadn’t he?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever confused him with Overton. He isn’t of the same mental caliber. What’s the idea, Hadley?”

The judge twisted in his chair with a wry face.

“If he doesn’t take up a career here, they’ll put him in command of the new expedition. He’s booked for it, I believe. I’d rather have him settle down and go into politics here. There’s good stuff in him, and he’s got what the newspapers call personal magnetism.”

“He’s got a good many things besides that!” retorted the doctor dryly, adjusting his glasses as he started to write directions on three sets of envelopes. “You seem to take his affairs to heart. Got any special interest in the boy, Hadley?”

Herford was silent for a moment. In his large and more judicial aspect he seemed to be weighing an important question, and his eyes dwelt moodily on the fire. The doctor, without apparently observing him, finished his hieroglyphics, put back his little glass bottles, and closed his case with a snap. As he did it, he heard the judge’s voice in an unwonted key.

“The truth is he’s taken me into his confidence--not a word of this to Diane, Sam--and I know he wants to marry my daughter. I’ll admit that at first it was rather a shock. I’m selfish enough to want to keep her; but gradually I’ve reconciled my mind. I suppose it’s inevitable. Besides, if anything happened to me, she’d be alone, and--well, I haven’t any objection. I’ve been considering, instead, some way to keep him out of that infernal south pole business.”

“Does Diane know?”

“That he’s in love with her? I suppose she does; girls do, as a rule, I think. But he hasn’t spoken to her yet--I know that--and I’ve held my tongue about it. He made me promise.”

The doctor whistled softly. His patient turned a suspicious eye on him.

“What’s your objection?” the judge asked.

“Why don’t you ask Diane if she has any? She’s the important person.”

“I think she likes him.”

The doctor laughed dryly.

“Take it from me that she has a mind of her own!”

The judge threw back his head haughtily.

“I’m not trying to push her.”

“Better not! She won’t stand for it. How did Faunce come to tell you?” The doctor’s large mouth crinkled at the corners. “Did he ask your consent?”

“Not quite. That’s not the fashion these days, is it? It was an accident. I found out a good deal, and he admitted it handsomely. Upon my word, I never liked a young man better than I did Faunce just then. I’ve never thought any man quite good enough for Di, but he’s won me over. I sha’n’t oppose it--if she wants him.”

“Hope she doesn’t!”

“Why?”

The doctor rose and pulled himself into his greatcoat.

“He isn’t fit to tie her shoe!”

“You’re prejudiced. You didn’t like his father.”

Gerry grinned.

“I remember you did like his mother!”

“Lily Blake?” The judge smiled reminiscently. “We were young sweethearts, but she threw me over to marry Henry Faunce.”

“Just so! Now you follow my advice and throw her son over. Diane can do better than that.”

The judge, taken with another twinge of lumbago, growled.

“It’s up to her; but I like Faunce.”

The doctor’s response was an inarticulate grunt. Then he pushed his medicine envelopes into a little row on the library table.

“I’ll send Diane in to dose you,” he remarked, moving toward the door.

“You can’t. She’s gone out with Faunce.”

The two old men looked at each other. Then they both laughed, the doctor without merriment.

“Hadley, if you weren’t a judge, I’d say you were----”

“An old fool!” concluded the judge grimly.

The doctor nodded and went out, shutting the door rather sharply behind him. On the front steps he encountered Diane and Faunce, just returned from a long walk. It was a cold day, and the wind had brought a brightness into Diane’s face. Her eyes sparkled with something of the latent fire of her father’s, and her cheeks were aglow. Faunce, on the other hand, looked like a ghost of himself.

“How’s father?” Diane questioned as she came up.

“Cross as two sticks,” replied the doctor, and gave her some directions about his patient.

Her face sobered.

“You don’t think he’s really ill?”

The doctor shook his head grimly.

“I’d like to make him sick enough to keep still for six weeks. He’s overworked, Di, and the machinery needs oiling up.”

“I can’t make him mind,” she objected. “I wanted to take him to Florida for three months.”

“We may get him there yet. Don’t worry! Hello, Faunce; coming my way?”

Faunce shook his head smilingly.

“I’m going to see the judge,” he said.

For a moment Dr. Gerry stood staring at him. The young man winced.

“You won’t find the judge in a good humor,” the doctor warned him. “You’d better come along with me and test my cigars. Di’s got her hands full taking care of her father.”

Faunce turned involuntarily and looked at Diane, who stood in the vestibule, listening, and smiling in an absent way, her eyes on the gloves that she was slowly unfastening. As Faunce turned, however, she looked up, and her face softened and glowed with a new and delicate embarrassment. She had never looked more charming, more desirable in his eyes, than at that moment. Dr. Gerry, following his glance, caught the look on her face, too, and his hand tightened its grip on his little black bag.

“I think I’ll stay for a while and risk the judge’s lumbago,” Faunce said without turning his head.

Gerry went slowly down the steps. At the foot he turned and looked at Faunce again.

“You’re risking a good deal more than that,” he observed dryly; and with this enigmatical remark he plodded steadily down to the gate without once glancing over his shoulder.

Diane laughed.

“The doctor’s so full of crotchets! I suppose he and papa have been quarreling again. They always do.”

Faunce, to whom Dr. Gerry’s look had conveyed a very different meaning, made no immediate reply. Instead, he followed Diane into the drawing-room, and waited there while she went to carry out the doctor’s instructions and administer a dose of medicine to the querulous patient.

Faunce moved over to the long French window and stood looking out, aware of the judge’s voice in the distance, before Diane shut the door between. In a long vista between the hedgerows he saw the doctor’s sturdy figure trudging toward the automobile that he had left at the end of the lane.

He recalled the night, now nearly two months ago, when they had walked home together, and he had admitted his insomnia. Since then he had more or less avoided the older man. Gerry had been so quick to divine his use of drugs that he dreaded a more searching scrutiny, which might fathom yet another recess of his inner mind, or surprise some secret that he was still determined to hide.

Yet, as he stood there alone in the warm and fragrant room--a room that seemed to express so much of Diane’s rich personality, her refinement and taste and spirit--he recalled Dr. Gerry’s words:

“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.”

A sudden impulse gripped him, a potent longing to rush out of the house, bareheaded as he was, and, pursuing the older man down the lane, to pour out the misery that was destroying his soul. It seemed to him that the relief would be more than commensurate with the humiliation; that the very sound of his own voice unfolding his terrible story would break the dread spell, release his spirit from thraldom, and expel the specter that haunted his brain.

The impulse had come to him before, but never with such compelling force as now--perhaps because there had never been so much reason for him to pause, to halt on the road he was following, before it was too late.

VIII

BUT even while the feeling--keen in itself, and searching--was passing through his mind, Arthur Faunce knew that he would not yield to it--not now. He could not, for he was moved by a greater and more compelling force--his passion for Diane Herford. Between that and his peace of mind, or something which he thought might help restore his peace of mind, he felt himself unable to choose.

It was this lack of moral stamina that had always been his trouble. He could not resist an impulse to secure his own happiness or his own life. He had nothing of the Spartan in him; he would have dropped the fox and denied all previous knowledge of it, rather than risk his vitals. He could not now jeopardize his chance with Diane for the mere sake of a confession which, however it might ease his mind, could not fail to raise the moral obstacle of Gerry’s opinion.

Faunce dismissed the thought. He resolved, as he had resolved a hundred times before, to keep his own counsel, to show himself “the captain of his soul.” If he was not strong enough to drive the miserable fantoms from his own mind, no other man could expel them. It remained for him to live them down.

His eyes traveled over the winter landscape, the brown fields and hedgerows, the occasional roof of some neighboring house. Beyond the slope of the hill, where the land dipped suddenly, he saw a long strip of the Sound, its tranquil surface shimmering like burnished copper in the sunshine. The sight of it recalled the ship that was soon to sail on another expedition, and the choice that fate and circumstance were forcing on him.

He must return to those frozen fields, must face again the awful thing that held his soul in its grip, or he must renounce that part of his new fame that rested on his explorations, and, following Judge Herford’s lead, must plunge into the field of politics. He had thought the choice assured--home and easy preferment, the presence of Diane and the approval of her father; but of late, loving her as he did, he was still curiously aware of a mysterious power that had laid hold of him. He felt the lure of those frozen depths, the gray sky, the blue peaks of giant ice--and the soul of Overton! It was like an obsession, it drew him; but he would not go--he was resolved he would not go, if Diane----

At the thought he heard her coming through the hall. The soft rustle of her dress startled him away from the window. He turned and stood facing her as she came into the room.

She had taken off her hat, and her soft hair, a little disordered by the wind, fell low over her small ears. There was still a delicate flush, a softness, about her face that made it at once more youthful and more charming.

“Papa is feeling better,” she announced as she went over to the fire, “and I’ve ordered tea. Won’t you stay and drink a cup with me?”

He did not reply, and she turned her head, looking over her shoulder at his tall figure outlined against the dark portière behind him. Something in his face arrested the words on her lips. She stood holding her hands out toward the blaze and looking back, the soft glow of the fire touching the fine oval of her cheek and the white curve of her full throat.

“Diane,” Faunce said in a low voice, urged on by an overmastering emotion which he tried in vain to control, “I love you! You know it. Is it fair to keep me waiting so long for an answer?”

She turned her head quickly, hiding her face from him. Deep and contending emotions swept over her; yet she was more tranquil than he was. She had realized long ago that her sorrow drew her nearer to the man who had been Overton’s comrade, who shared with her a deep and reverent tenderness for his memory. If any one had a right to her confidence, her friendship, her love, surely it was the man who had almost given his life to be with Overton to the end. But she said nothing for a moment, and then she heard his voice again.

“Diane, they want me to go back to the antarctic, and lately I’ve felt the deepest, the most unaccountable impulse to go; but there’s one thing that holds me, that would make me give anything up--I mean the hope of your caring enough to want me to stay!”

She turned slowly toward him.

“Would you think that it meant something quite different if I said that I wanted you to go? That I felt that the work should be finished, the victory won?”

He hesitated; his face blanched.

“You want me to go? You don’t care enough to want me to stay here--where you are?”

“I didn’t say that. I want you to go because there’s a great work to finish, because it seems to me like rounding out your career, winning the greatest victory. I--I don’t want to help a man falter by the way or step back. I know _he_ would never have faltered--I mean Overton.”

He looked at her blankly.

“No, he would never have faltered, but--you know, I’ve told you, Diane--I’m not as great as he was. I suppose that’s the reason--the reason you can’t feel as I do, you can’t accept all that I have to give--my love for you?”

“I want to tell you the truth,” she replied, looking up at him with clear eyes. “You know how I’ve felt about Overton. I cared for him so much that it seemed to me I could never feel anything like that for any one else, but lately----”

“Yes?” he cried eagerly, bending toward her, his eyes searching her face.

“Lately I’ve begun to feel that I--I did care for you!”

IX

IT was late that evening before Faunce left the house. As the door finally closed behind him, a biting wind drove the first flakes of a snow-storm into his face. The touch of it, the sting of ice on his flushed cheek, roused him.

He had been, for a while, like a man in a trance, who sees through the golden mist the beautiful shapes of an Elysian vision, and hears the heavenly music of the spheres, while he lies there powerless alike to grasp the full joy of his translation or to confess his own unworthiness to bask in its heavenly sunshine. Only a moment before he had held Diane in his arms, the soft touch of her cheek was still warm on his, the fragrance of her shadowy hair lay still upon his shoulder; yet he felt the intensity of his moral solitude, the depth of the gulf that yawned between her warm faith in him and his hidden shame.

His love for her, his firm determination to wrest happiness from the depths of his misery--the primal instincts of a nature that could not resist temptation--had driven him on. He had won her; however reluctant, however spiritually blinded she had been to his moral attributes, she had promised to be his wife. But his triumph was short-lived, for he knew already that his joy was like a beautiful, shimmering bubble, dancing before the wind. In an instant it would break, and his outstretched hand would grasp only the empty air.

A moment before he had been so happy, so passionately confident that his soul had at last risen above its dishonor. With the assurance of Diane’s love, he could shake off the shackles of fear and rise to such heights of courage, to such magnificent security, that not even the clutching hands of the Furies who had pursued him day and night could drag him down.

A moment ago--how different it had been! He thought of the warm old room with its mellowed air of age and comfort, the dark rug on the floor, the fire sparkling on the hearth, the somber but beautiful hangings, the few fine pictures--a Gainsborough that an ancestral Herford had brought from England as a family treasure, a small Greuze head, and a simple but lovely landscape by an American painter, who had loved the shaded dell and the dashing waterfall. He could see again the table with the lamp, the carved armchairs, and the figure of Diane in a pale house-gown that she had worn at dinner, its simple folds revealing the long, dryadlike lines of her slender form and the buoyant grace of her easy pose as she stood there, beside her own hearthstone, talking to him.

The kindled loveliness of her eyes haunted him still. He had held her soft hands in his, and had felt the tremulous touch of her lips, believing himself one with the immortal lovers of old; but now the door had closed on him, and the night, wild and wintry and touched with snow, had engulfed him. He shuddered awake from his dream of bliss, and saw himself as a lost soul at the gate of paradise.

That was his fate. Happiness might be within his grasp, but it would elude him and mock him. He might attain, but he could never possess. A power greater than life itself had laid hold upon him, an invisible force was crushing him down, and his soul, like the proverbial candle in the wind, only leaped and flickered at the mercy of the gale.

A driving snow-storm swept across the open country, and the trees creaked and swayed in the tempest; but he walked on. The very tumult of it seemed to submerge the still more cruel tumult in his soul, and he breasted the rising storm with something akin to joy that there was endurance enough left in him to face it. For the time the need of physical exertion relieved his mental tension.

Leaving the highroad and climbing to the summit of a little hill, he stood looking down upon the distant city, shrouded in fog and cloaked in blinding snow, until its lights seemed to blend into gigantic arches and semicircles, like broken rainbows in a bank of vapor. It was a familiar spectacle; he had seen it often before, but never in an aspect quite like this.

The strange effect of the lights in the sky, together with the snowflakes that were driving into his face and whitening his arms and shoulders, recalled the frozen wastes of the polar ice-fields, the curtain of deathlike fog that hung over those bleak solitudes. He remembered Diane’s words, her faith in his high endeavor, her hope that he would complete his task and win, at last, a certain claim to the glory that was now but the fallen mantle of a greater man.

He must go back! He recalled the impulse that had been so overwhelming, the keen desire to return. It had seemed to him sometimes as if unseen hands had grasped him and were drawing him back to those haunted seas. Diane had voiced his feeling; she, too, had urged him to go.

But now, alone in the night, he fell into one of his bitter moments of revulsion. The whole thing filled him with horror. It was strange, he told himself, that she should so insist upon it. It was unlike a woman to bid her lover go into such perils. He began to believe that she did not love him--it was Overton still who stood between! Jealousy laid hold of him and rent him.

A prey to contending feelings, he turned and fought again with the gale, plunging on into the drifting snow. She had told him that she loved Overton. He was second in her heart, second in the great expedition, second in the very honors he had won!

Yet--a shudder ran through him--what right had he to be jealous of Overton? What right had he, indeed, to any honor, or to high repute, or to Diane’s love? An hour before he had lifted the cup of life to his lips and tasted joy; now he was draining the bitter dregs in a spiritual agony that laid bare his own soul.

He saw his course, as he had followed it in the long year that was drawing now to its close; and it was plain to him why the thought of it had haunted him night after night, even when he had tried to shut it out, until insomnia had driven him to the verge of madness. Like Orestes, he had been pursued by the Furies; but no tribunal of the gods would release him from their clutches. He could never sleep again without the deadly poison of some narcotic stealing into his veins.

He had walked blindly, without following the road, and he was almost out of his reckoning when, through the white folds of the storm, he saw the outlines of the Gerry house set low and solid amid its clustering cedars. A light burned in two windows in the rear, showing that Dr. Gerry was still up, keeping his usual vigil in his study. The fact that the rest of the house was dark suggested that the household slept, and that the doctor was alone.

Faunce paused in his struggle with the wind and stood staring at the light. Again he was swept with an unaccountable impulse to cry aloud for help, to strip the veil from his soul, after the manner of those desperate ones who snatch at the wild hope that some other mortal may be able to apply a panacea that shall stay the devouring agony, heal the secret wound, before the sufferer bleeds to death.