Part 8

Diane was very dear to him. He had been a busy man, a man beset with cares and ambitions, but the girl, who had come to him instead of the son for whom he had prayed, held a warm place in his heart. He would miss her--he confessed that to himself, with a kind of pride in his own tenderness. He had, indeed, planned to keep her near him, to set his son-in-law on the path that he had already made a beaten track to political success; but Diane herself had held Faunce to his infatuation--she was actually leading him in this wild venture in the antarctic seas.

Vaguely, but with a certain pride of blood, Judge Herford began to recognize the instinct of race in her. She had sprung from a long line of adventurers on sea and land. A Herford had been with Sir Francis Drake; a Herford had fought at Marston Moor; a Herford had followed the star of empire westward across wintry seas and founded the family fortunes in the colonies. The judge himself had retrieved the losses of his father and his grandfather, and now, in his strong middle age, saw himself nearly at the top rung of the ladder he had set himself to climb. He could afford to take the future in an easier frame of mind, to slacken his gait a little, but he had lacked a son to follow in his footsteps. His fancy, fixing itself on Faunce, on the brilliant promise that seemed to dawn in the young man’s career, began to build new castles in the air.

He felt a certain satisfaction in knowing that he had furthered Arthur Faunce’s fortunes, and had been a factor in the making of the marriage that was to take place on the morrow. Faunce was neither so famous nor so wealthy as the judge could have wished, but he was young, able, and already surrounded with the heroic halo of his hardships and his services to science and his country.

In a recent public address an eminent man had said that America was proud of mothering such sons as Overton and Faunce. That Arthur was placed second seemed, after all, a graceful tribute to the dead, and Faunce had succeeded now to the full leadership in place of Overton. On the whole, the judge felt satisfied and even happy. Thoughts of tenderness and regret added only a gentler shading to a mood that might otherwise have been too unctuous and self-satisfied.

His friends, too, had sustained his judgment; all but Dr. Gerry. He was aware that Gerry challenged it; but he remembered, with a reminiscent smile, that Gerry had always been a “crank.” It was not to be supposed that any one so eminently human and young as Faunce could please the crusty old doctor.

“He’s too healthy,” the judge had declared, laughing.

“Oh, is he?” the doctor flung back, and muttered his objections. “Let him go, Hadley! He isn’t fit to tie Diane’s shoe. Send her to a convent!”

There had been more, in the doctor’s most pessimistic vein; but, when challenged for a real objection, he refused to state his views. The matter had dropped at last, and only Diane noticed that the old man sent no wedding-gift. The judge had brushed Gerry’s opposition aside as he now brushed aside his own tenderness.

He sat back comfortably in his chair, filling the big bowl of his favorite pipe. He was just lighting it when he heard a rustle in the hall, and Diane stood on the threshold, a slight figure in a floating gown of flowered silk, her long hair unbound and shadowing her face.

The judge looked around at her, a smile in his judicial eyes.

“It’s twelve o’clock, Di. You’ll certainly see the dawn of your wedding-day, at this rate!”

“I couldn’t sleep, papa, so I came to sit with you a while.”

He made room for her to bring a low seat to the fire by his side. With a new paternal aspect, he laid his arm gently around her shoulders.

“I was just thinking of you, Di, and of Arthur. I wish I’d had my way and put him into politics.”

“So that we should be near you? I should have loved that, of course; but we’ll come back. I don’t want him in politics, ever!”

“And why not, miss? If it’s good enough for your dad, it should be good enough for your husband, eh?”

She shook her head.

“I don’t think I can make you understand. You’re--you’re different!”

“Humph! Not so valuable, perhaps?”

She laughed softly; then her face sobered.

“You’ve stood like granite, papa, in the midst of all the storm. You were made to be among the captains and the shouting. It’s fine--it has been fine to see you. I’ve always been proud of you, and I’ve heard men say that they were proud of you. Don’t you remember Governor Belt? He told me that you were a wonder, that not a muckraker living could fling ill-report at you! But Arthur? It seems to me that as he stands to-day--young and unsoiled and on the verge of great adventure--he’s at his best; he’ll be always at his best. If you pull him back into the turmoil of the city and State, fling him into politics, he won’t be the same. He won’t stand as you do, like a rock; he would bend and yield. It might spoil him, spoil the fineness in him.”

“My child, if he’s so brittle, life will break him, and he won’t be worth the breaking!”

“I don’t mean just that. I mean that I want to keep the fineness in him, to see him follow the shining trail. If it wasn’t for the fineness in him I couldn’t love him, papa, and if I didn’t believe I loved him I wouldn’t marry him.”

“That’s your test, I know.” The judge leaned back, pulling at his pipe, amused at Diane’s view, which seemed to him to be merely that of untried girlhood. “There’s been many a marriage without love, my dear, that’s turned out well enough.”

“I couldn’t do it! To me the woman who marries that way, for money, for position, or just to be married, is”--her voice dropped to a low note, touched with ineffable scorn--“is no better than the worst!”

The judge patted her shoulder.

“A high view, Di. I’ll agree with you thus far--if he wasn’t fine and honest, I’d never let you marry him if I could help it. In these days we fathers can’t help much, in my opinion; but I’ll help you out of it, my child, if ever he shows himself less than we think him--an honest man!”

“We’re alike in that, papa. That’s the unalterable test--his honesty. I couldn’t live, day after day, with a man whom I knew to be a liar and a thief, as Mabel Gardner does. Yet it’s noble in her, too. She stayed with her husband to try to hold him up, to keep him from falling to the lowest level.”

“It was sentiment and womanish feeling,” the judge retorted sternly. “There was nothing noble in it. She shielded him so that some of his creditors let him off a little for her sake. Goffery, the greatest creditor of all, who could have sent him to prison, wouldn’t testify, because he was in love with Mabel himself. She knew it--she played on him. That’s not noble; it’s mere knavery.”

“You mean that she should have sent him to prison rather than let Goffery save him for love of her?”

The judge nodded.

“Trading--mere trading! Not in the bare, ugly fact, as low people trade, but in sentiment and honor--making a wronged man save another because he still loves that other’s wife. She’ll get a divorce next and marry Goffery.”

“I can’t think that!” exclaimed Diane, gazing thoughtfully into the fire. “That would be degradation, papa, and Mabel’s a lady.”

“What’s a lady?” the judge snorted angrily. “Nothing, unless you’re a little better bred and nobler and more virtuous than the rest of womankind. If Mabel marries Goffery--after she gets a divorce--it’ll be paying him for all that he’s done, won’t it? There’s nothing ladylike in that! You’re a lady, Di--not so much by right of birth and breeding and all that, but because you’re an honest woman, and you wouldn’t do the kind of shabby, cowardly things that Mabel Gardner has done.”

“Poor Mabel! You’re a hard judge sometimes, papa! I pity Mabel. I’ve thought of her once or twice to-day, because I was so happy. You remember she was married three years ago to-morrow? She was happy then--but he’s turned out such a rogue! I think, perhaps, that’s why I said what I did just now. I want to keep Arthur as he is, a follower of the shining trail.”

The judge reflected a while on this, smoking quietly.

“I’ll tell you what Arthur said to me,” he rejoined at last. “He told me that your love for him would lead him higher than any ambition that he had ever cherished, or any hope that he’d ever had. It’s a good deal for a man to say, my girl!”

She was leaning against his knee, her cheek resting on her hand, and he could see only the soft, brown arch of her head and the cloud of hair that cloaked her shoulders.

“It’s a great deal to say,” she admitted. “It makes it harder for me to fill the place he’s set for me in his life; but I’ll try to do it. Meanwhile, papa, I hate to leave you! When I came in here to-night I came to tell you that, but we’ve been talking of Arthur. I’ve tried to be a good daughter. I hope I’ve succeeded half-way, papa?”

He patted her head again.

“The best man ever had!”

The words brought back those words of Faunce about Overton. “The best friend man ever had!” The thought thrust itself suddenly into Diane’s heart, and took her unawares. Her tense nerves quivered. She laid her head down on her father’s knee and burst into bitter, inexplicable tears.

XVII

EARLY the following morning, with the rain and sleet driving against the window-panes, in the fury of a late winter storm--the wild harbinger, in fact, of spring itself--Diane was married to Arthur Faunce.

“The handsomest couple I ever saw!” Mrs. Price whispered to Dr. Gerry, dabbing the moisture from her eyes with the handkerchief that she had already wept into a ball.

Dr. Gerry moved an eye around to look at her without moving his head, much as the drowsy crocodile views curious observers at the aquarium; but he made no comment. He had spent the night in trying to force Faunce to tell Diane the truth before she married him. He had failed, and was therefore an unwilling witness at the ceremony.

The quaint old library, the room Diane had chosen, was scarcely altered from its every-day aspect. Above the low book-shelves that lined the walls were fine examples of pottery and bronze, which gleamed warmly in the light of the fire in the great fireplace. A few moss-roses and tall ferns, sent from a New York conservatory, were the only ornaments.

Dr. Price, small, precise, and placid, in his white surplice and black cassock, his white hair smoothed back with what Horace Walpole would have called “a _soupçon_ of curls behind,” performed the ceremony before a group of old friends and neighbors, the only witnesses. Mrs. Price lifted her plump, wrinkled face and kissed the bride on both cheeks.

“My dear, I wish you every blessing! You remind me of Rachel, and Ruth, and all the brides of the Bible. And, dear Diane, he’s so handsome! It seems almost wicked for nature to waste so much beauty on a mere man, even if he is a hero!”

Diane glanced smilingly at Faunce.

“Isn’t it splendid for me, Cousin Julia? I don’t need to shine when he’s near, do I?”

The little woman plunged in deeper, and was still babbling along when her daughter, a little pale and nervous, came to tell Diane it was time to change her dress for the journey. Glad to escape, the two girls ran up-stairs together, and Fanny and the maid made haste to help transform a white-and-silver bride into a trim, tailor-made young woman ready for the train. While the transformation was in progress, Diane grew more composed, and helped with her deft fingers in the knotting and unknotting of ribbons and laces and flowers.

“It went off beautifully, Di!” Fanny felt that she could say this with safety, as she plunged into a new hat-box after the bride’s traveling-hat. “That cake from New York was fine. I left dear papa eating it, and he’ll be ill to-morrow.”

“I noticed the flowers, Fan,” Diane said, fastening fresh hooks, while she sent the maid on an errand. “I’m glad I didn’t have too many. Is that hat becoming? It seems to me too--too flamboyant. The styles are dreadful!”

“It suits you exactly. What a lovely color you’ve got, Di! A minute ago you looked like a ghost. You were----”

Diane stopped her with a gesture.

“What’s that?”

They listened. A newsboy was shouting an extra edition, and they could hear his shrill pipe above the storm. Fanny’s eyes widened.

“What can it be? No one sells extras out here, in a storm!”

Diane went to the door and listened.

“Some one’s called him. Fanny, go and find out what it is. There’s nothing for me to do now but to work on my gloves.”

The little bridesmaid, glad to hide her telltale face, ran out. Diane stood listening in strange anxiety, unaware that she was frightened. Why should she be? she argued. Why should she worry at all? They were all together and all well--what could be better, more reassuring, than that thought?

Then Arthur’s face came back to her as he had looked when he put the ring on her finger--the feverish light in his eyes, the triumph and the happiness. A feeling, deep and inexplicable, disturbed her; there had been something wanting--some element of strength, fortitude, or poise. At that moment, the supreme moment of the ceremony, she had experienced a new sensation of loss, of shipwreck, as if she had survived the failure of some fine and inarticulate hope and confidence in him.

Standing there now, for the last time in her own room, the new wedding-ring on her finger, her wedding-finery thrown across the bed, she shivered, she was afraid. Then she heard Fanny coming slowly back up-stairs. The girl seemed to halt for an instant on her way to the door. Diane turned and saw her at the threshold. She was holding the newspaper unfolded in her hands, her eyes fixed on the front page, her face expressionless.

“What is it, Fanny?”

The question was almost a cry of alarm. Fanny made no reply, and Diane went to her, taking the paper from her. As she did so, Fanny pointed to the headlines of an article that filled the head of a column. It was a cablegram, printed in large type that seemed to stare:

H. M. S. Pelican arrived safely at Southampton to-day, with Lieutenant Blackford and the other members of his antarctic expedition. They brought with them the well-known American explorer, Simon Overton, U. S. N. Having barely recovered from desperate illness and exposure, Overton refused to be interviewed.

Diane let the paper fall to the floor, and the two girls stood looking at each other in speechless amazement.

Down-stairs there was a moment of poignant silence in the library when the judge read the newspaper despatch in an incredulous voice that was a little deeper than usual. As he read, a sudden burst of sunshine, almost as violent as the storm, flooded the room. It shone on the smooth surfaces of the ancient vases and on the rich and multicolored bindings of the judge’s books. It warmed the moss-roses that had bloomed for the wedding, and shone still more keenly, with almost a cruel concentration, on the white face of Arthur Faunce.

It revealed Faunce’s countenance at a moment when his inner self seemed to be receding, in mortal panic, from the vision of his friends. He stood, with his hand gripped like a vise on the back of a tall chair and his eyes fixed on his father-in-law. He was like a man overtaken by sudden calamity and rooted to the spot, with no more power to escape it than the victim of a nightmare.

The judge threw back his big head and looked at him.

“What can this mean, Arthur?”

Faunce gasped. His mind was still reeling, and his voice sounded a long way off to his own ears.

“It must be a mistake,” he replied slowly; “a mere newspaper story--or the wrong name. Overton is dead!”

The judge looked again at the paper, and then cast another searching look at Faunce.

“It’s strange,” he remarked, “that a thing like that should be cabled from London--from the correspondent of this paper, too; and they think it important enough for an extra.”

“Anything is important enough to make an extra penny on!” the little dean remarked caustically, coming to the rescue.

Dr. Gerry, standing back by the mantel, was watching Faunce. Knowing the story, he was convinced that in some miraculous way Overton had been rescued, and that Faunce must know it, too.

Rallying from the first shock, Faunce was facing it with some self-control.

“I think I can speak with more authority than the newspaper,” he managed to say. “I was there!”

“But--oh, Mr. Faunce, don’t you think it’s--it’s just possible?” pleaded Mrs. Price, clasping her hands. “A miracle may have happened. It would be so beautiful! It would make Diane so happy, it would make us all so happy, if dear Simon Overton could come back!”

Her little bubbling voice, like the pleasant singing of a teakettle, brought relief to a tense situation.

“That’s the way to look at it,” rejoined Dr. Gerry. “Let’s rejoice in the hope.”

Judge Herford bent his heavy brows.

“There can’t be any hope, Gerry,” he said flatly, “if Faunce has told us the truth.”

Faunce smiled, but with a wince.

“It’s not a thing about which any man would want to jest,” he replied slowly, purposely misunderstanding Herford’s speech. “We believed him dead. If a miracle has happened, the body must have been recovered and resuscitated. I can’t believe a word of this!”

Herford, however, pursued his questions, the lawyer in him roused to ignore his new position as a father-in-law.

“Then you admit that his body might have been found?”

Faunce hesitated.

The others--his father-in-law, Gerry, who knew the truth, Dr. Price, and the wedding-guests--all waited. The moment before he had been the hero of the occasion, the bridegroom at his own wedding. Now, strangely enough, he stood alone in the center of the room facing them, much as a prisoner might stand at the bar.

He looked up and met Dr. Gerry’s eye, and it revealed the full force of the situation. Gerry believed that Overton lived!

Faunce experienced again the terrible sensation of the world falling to pieces around him while he still survived. If Overton lived, he was delivered from the hideous remorse that gnawed at his heart; but he was ruined. No power on earth could save him from public shame.

He rallied his forces again.

“There was a terrific blizzard; we were rescued from an avalanche of packed ice and snow. How is it possible that these Englishmen could find and resuscitate a dead man? If they did, where were they? Why didn’t we meet them? The thing’s absurd!” he climaxed, with an actual thrill of relief as he remembered the situation.

Yes, it was absurd! No living man could have reached Overton after he left him.

The dean nodded his head slowly and thoughtfully.

“Of course, of course! You must be right, Faunce; you were with him when he died. This is a cruel mistake!”

“It’s more than cruel--it’s a mockery of death,” Faunce declared with renewed force.

He was determined not to believe it. He was convincing himself, and he was regaining his control of the others.

Judge Herford folded the paper and put it down.

“We’ll hear more of it to-morrow--or they’ll contradict it. Of course, if you were with him until the last minute, you know, Arthur!”

“Yes, I know!” Faunce returned, a feverish light in his eyes. “I----”

He stopped abruptly, looking toward the door, and they all turned and followed his eyes.

XVIII

FANNY PRICE, a pale-faced little creature, in her bridesmaid’s finery, stood there looking at them. Conversation had begun again in a faint-hearted way, but it hushed as she spoke.

“Diane wants to know--is it true about Overton?”

Faunce crossed the room and took Fanny’s hand in his, trying to reply to the challenge of her eyes. She was shaken, horribly shaken, with the remembrance of his book and Overton’s, and of that black gap in the narrative which could easily be filled with Overton’s death.

“Tell Diane that it’s a story, a mere newspaper story,” he said firmly. “It couldn’t be true--you know that.”

She assented, drew her hand hastily out of his, and ran back up-stairs.

The dean exchanged a meaning look with his wife. They had both seen Faunce flinch under Fanny’s glance, and Mrs. Price tried to divert the thoughts of the guests. She touched Herford’s arm and whispered:

“Take them all into the dining-room, Cousin Hadley. She wants to get off without a shower of rice!”

The judge nodded, rousing himself from the unpleasant break in the festivities.

“Come!” he said in a genial tone. “Let’s go back and drink to the health and happiness of the bride and groom for the last time!”

They followed him through the wide folding doors, with the little flutter of excitement that remained after the interruption. They felt as if they had been for a moment over the edge of an abyss, and were still hanging there, suspended by a very thin thread.

Faunce, however, obeyed Fanny’s signal and went toward the door, only to be halted by Dr. Gerry in the hall.

“It’s true, Faunce--you know it’s true. What d’you mean to do?” he demanded grimly.

Faunce leaned back against the door of the drawing-room, shielding himself by holding out a portière on a rigid arm, that the girls might not see his face as they came down-stairs.

“It can’t be true!” he reiterated passionately. “It can’t be true! It’s some horrid story, an attempt to ruin me.”

Gerry shook his head.

“I’ll wager it is true. Didn’t you think you saw figures? You supposed it was a mirage. It’s true, and it’s up to you!”

Faunce put his hand to his throat with a helpless gesture, like a man struggling to breathe.

“I tell you he was stark and freezing,” he gasped. “I swear it. He can’t have come back!”

The doctor laid his hand on Faunce’s shoulder.

“Be a man!” he whispered sharply. “I warned you not to marry Diane, I warned you to keep away from this; but now you’re in it. For God’s sake, shield her! Be a man!”

Faunce shook off the old man’s touch.

“Let me alone! I tell you she’s safe. It’s false, every word of it; he simply can’t have come back!”

The doctor said no more, but made a sign, warning him. Diane and Fanny came down-stairs together, the bride in her traveling-dress. Her filmy veil, floating on the edge of her wide-brimmed hat, obscured the pallor of her face. The doctor took her hand, patting it benignly.