Part 14

“I’d like to expose him. I meant to do it, to set Diane right; but there might be reasons why silence would be best. I know she wants it. She shrinks with horror from the whole thing, poor child!”

His tone had in it a note of tenderness that was new to Overton. He looked up and again met the older man’s dark eyes resting searchingly upon him. It affected him strongly. There was a subtle suggestion of hope in it, a reassurance.

He turned hastily, and made his way out with an abruptness that surprised his host. He had a craving for air and space; the sudden change, the revival of hope after his despair, seemed to take his breath away. He forgot his appetite for his delayed meal, and set out for a long walk in the weird light of the half-clouded moon.

Having closed the door on his visitor, Judge Herford stood for a moment with his hand on the knob, listening to the young man’s footsteps until they finally reached the open road. He had received a new and, to him, amazing impression, and it staggered him so much that for the time being he forgot his wrath against his son-in-law. It was a new impression, but it furnished the key to situations that had previously seemed vague and perplexing. Now he understood them all, and in this new light he thought he understood his daughter.

While he stood there, before he could clear up the ponderous machinery of his judicial mind and set it in motion, he heard the swish of skirts on the staircase and became aware of her presence.

“Papa, who was it?” she demanded tremulously. “Who went out just now?”

He looked up and saw Diane leaning on the banisters. The strong light on the landing made a luminous nimbus behind her small, spirited head and outlined her slender figure in a loose evening gown, the full, short sleeves falling away from delicate forearms and slender wrists. Her whole attitude suggested suspense and trepidation, and her father felt her eyes fixed on him, feverishly bright.

“Don’t worry, my dear--it wasn’t Faunce.”

“Oh!” There was a suggestion of extreme relief in the tone, coupled with some curiosity. “Then who was it?”

“Simon Overton.”

“Oh!” It was the same sound, but with a different note--a note that spoke volumes to her father’s awakened ear.

“He came here--guess what for!”

She relaxed her hold on the banisters and sat down on the steps, her face in the shadow, but her large eyes shining luminously through it and making her face seem singularly white.

“I can’t guess. I give it up--unless he came to see you?”

The judge moved slowly over and stood near the foot of the stairs, watching her.

“He came to ask me to keep silence, to shield Faunce. He’s determined never to tell the true story.”

She did not say anything for a while. When she spoke, it was in an awed tone.

“How noble of him!”

Her father nodded, his hand on the pillar at the foot of the banisters, as he looked up at her.

“He had seen Faunce and arranged for silence. He wants to let the whole thing blow over; he’s afraid of injuring you with the scandal.”

She seemed to shrink a little, and she was no longer looking steadily at him.

“Is that all, papa?”

“No, not all. You know they’ve wanted to take the command of the new expedition from Faunce and give it to Overton?”

“Yes, I suppose they will.”

“They won’t, for Overton has refused to accept it. He has asked them to let Faunce keep it.”

She made no reply to this, but put her hand up and pushed back the soft, loose hair from her forehead with a perplexed air.

“It’s a fine thing, Di, a noble thing for a man to do. It can mean only one thing!”

She still said nothing, but leaned against the banisters, watching him.

“He’s in love with you, Diane. There’s no other reason on God’s earth for a man to do a thing like that, to shield another from the blame that’s coming to him by rights. Did you know”--he stopped and looked at her again--“before this that he cared for you?”

“I used to think he did,” she answered weakly, her head leaning against the rail.

“It’s too bad, Diane!” the judge broke out. “It’s too bad that you didn’t care for him!”

His tone, as well as his words, disarmed her. She did not even suspect him of a ruse; but, in her pent-up state, it was too much, and she broke down utterly, quite off her guard.

“Oh, I did!” she sobbed. “I did!”

She turned her head and hid her face on her arm, bursting suddenly into wild tears and sobs.

XXX

DIANE staggered to her feet and went up-stairs. Her strongest feeling was one of keen humiliation. She had made a confession that she had never intended to make, and it did not matter if her father had been the only listener. The actual admission, the spoken words, had clothed a dim specter with reality. She had heard her own voice making an admission that seemed to establish a motive--a motive at once primal and unjustifiable--for her desertion of her husband.

It frightened her. She felt as if Overton must have heard her, through the intervening night and the distance, that he must at last put the true interpretation upon the terror with which she had thrust him away when they met on the lonely mountain road. Then, as now, it had come to her with a revealing shock that she still loved him, and not the man she had married. Yet she must love Faunce, she argued wildly to herself. She did love him, she had loved him when she had married him, and it agonized her now to think of him as one who was so totally different from the man she had imagined him to be.

She found herself in the most inexplicable tangle of emotions. She did not know which way to turn. She had fled from her father, afraid to meet his pitying eyes, afraid, most of all, to hear his reassuring voice, for she knew what that meant!

She fled into her own room, and, locking the door, threw herself down before the open window, her head on the sill, the soft night air stirring the dusky hair on her forehead. It was a night for a love-dream, not for such shrinking and terror as now harassed her.

When Faunce had confessed to her, when he had torn away the last shred of her illusion about him, she had left him, overwhelmed with horror and dismay. The revulsion of feeling had been so intense that it had carried her home and swept her along in the current of her father’s rage against her husband. She had been as eager as he to get Faunce to consent to a divorce. She did not wish to bear the name of a man who had so deeply disgraced himself.

When he had assented to Herford’s demands, when he had declared that, if she wished it, she could have her freedom, the tension had snapped, and she had collapsed. She had been ready for conflict, ready to fight for her liberty; but when she found that there was to be no opposition, she experienced a sudden feeling of helplessness. She was adrift on a shoreless sea.

A beacon, indeed, shone across it--the beacon of Overton’s love, which sometimes seemed to beckon her home to the harbor of safety and happiness, but now there was this thing--this thing that had risen out of the night, unasked and unheralded, and it was pressing close upon her. She had discerned it from afar, and even in the midst of her wild revulsion, her determination to escape, it had filled her with awe and with dread.

It was imperceptible, yet it was with her. It held her back with strong hands, though it was invisible--as invisible as the angel who wrestled with Jacob. But she had no need to ask its name; she knew the name by which men called it--unless, indeed, they called it God. She felt it gaining upon her and threatening her, yet she would not yield.

She lay across the sill of her open window, exhausted and prone, but not beaten. She was fighting still, fighting for happiness, trying to guide her shipwrecked bark into that safe harbor where the beacon of love shone bright. She would not surrender, she would not admit that there was no room for her there--not yet! But she wished that she had not spoken, had not voiced her emotion. It seemed to give this impalpable thing, this invisible angel, so much more power for battle.

Then, suddenly as if the unseen wrestler had successfully thrown her in the conflict, she saw herself as the type of woman she most abhorred--the woman who divorces one man because she is in love with another.

But that could not be true, the inner voice cried; for though she loved Faunce, she had left him because she had found him to be a creature so unworthy, so cowardly, so cruel, that her soul had risen up and driven her from him. Overton had had nothing to do with it. It was Faunce himself who had torn away the thin veil that had obscured her idol’s feet of clay.

As she tried to force herself to think of her husband, to recall him in his better aspect, she could only remember his face as he had lifted it, haggard and ashamed, to confess that he had left a brave man, his friend and his commander, to die, that he might be sure to save himself, be sure to reap the profit and the glory of the fallen leader’s labor and sacrifice. She could never forget it. It had slain her love for him so completely that not even a spark lingered in the ashes.

It was not that she loved Overton now. It was her remembrance of the fact that she had loved him. The thought of what he was, compared with the man she had married, had plunged her into deeper self-abasement.

It was a fine distinction, a spiritual difference between the grosser facts of life and the old, sweet memories that were dead. She understood it; she would not forget it, but would her father understand it? She knew that he could not.

He had the hard legal acumen, the keen discernment, but his strength had the quality of granite and not of crystal. It was tremendous and solid, but not transparent enough to reflect the more exquisite emotions. He had not understood her, and he would not understand if she tried to explain away that broken and inarticulate cry of regret for the past. He would believe not only that he was doing what was just and right for his daughter, but that he was seeking her happiness, when there could be no happiness for her at all.

She could never set him straight, never convince him that she had not meant every word she said. He could not know about the invisible wrestler who still held her from the temptation of that distant happiness, who even now had made her feel that she must forego it. No one knew this but herself!

It was the feeling of helplessness, of the futility of argument, that made her unwilling to face her father again. It was with her during the long night, in her troubled snatches of sleep; it was the motive that made her plead headache in the morning, and thus escape the ordeal of another _tête-à-tête_ breakfast by having hers brought up to her room; and later it drove her out of doors for a long and solitary walk.

It was a relief to be out in the open air again, to tramp down the familiar road to the seminary, to notice the rapidity with which the leaves were changing even on the late trees and shrubs, and how many of the early autumn blossoms had thrust their way up through the earth, which was moist and dark with recent rains. A storm had come up before daybreak, and the sky was still softly clouded, while fitful bursts of rain and wind drove through the narrow lane. Diane had a moment of exhilaration, of the joy of conflict, as the boughs swayed and creaked overhead and the leaves rained down at her feet.

This feeling was still with her, stiffening her power of resistance, when she finally turned into the seminary gates and made her way to the dean’s house, with no stronger motive than a vague longing to feel that some one understood.

A little later, however, sitting in Fanny’s room, she was not sure that even another girl did quite understand the perplexity of her situation, its hopelessness and its futility. Fanny had been ready enough in her expressions of sympathy, but there was something between them that hushed confidence. There was a shy reluctance on the younger girl’s part that reminded Diane of a similar restraint when Fanny had been her bridesmaid. They talked a while in meaningless commonplaces. Then, as Fanny looked up suddenly, Diane caught the quiver of the girl’s lip and leaned forward, laying her ungloved hand on her friend’s knee.

“Fanny, do you know?” she whispered.

Fanny’s eyes sank involuntarily to the hand on her knee, and rested on the new wedding-ring. Diane saw the glance, and drew her hand back with a significant gesture of pain and repugnance.

“Do I know what?” Fanny flushed with embarrassment. “You mean that you’ve--you’ve left him, Di, or--or what he did?”

Diane, busily covering her left hand with its glove, was aware that her fingers were shaking.

“I mean both,” she replied.

“Yes, papa told us. Oh, Diane, I’m so sorry--so sorry about him!”

“You mean you’re more sorry for him than for me?”

Fanny raised her blue eyes steadily.

“Yes, I think I am. He’s lost everything, even himself!”

Diane rose to her feet and began to walk about the room. It was small and bright, with two windows looking out on the campus. It contained a book-shelf, some pretty chintz-covered furniture, and a little white bed that looked like a convent cot. There were also unnumbered girlish belongings--favors, bonbon-boxes, photographs, and knickknacks.

Diane walked about restlessly, lifting up and setting down first one thing and then another, unaware of what she did.

“I--I couldn’t stay, Fanny!”

The other girl did not follow her with her eyes. Instead, Fanny sat looking out of the window at a shower that was driving across the campus, the sun breaking through the clouds in time to make it a rain of gold.

“I suppose you couldn’t, Di. I think I know just how you felt, but--well, it makes me pity him the more!”

Diane faced her passionately.

“How can you, Fanny? How can you pity him more than I do? I loved him!”

“Yes, I know; but when you knew what he’d done, you ceased to love him. Wasn’t that it, Di? You see I--I suppose I’m a weaker mortal. I couldn’t do that. I should keep on loving him--well, just because I should feel he needed it so much!”

“Would you?” Diane came slowly nearer, looking at her friend imploringly, her face colorless. “Fanny, do you think that’s it? That’s what I’ve asked myself a hundred times. Do you think I--I never really loved him?”

“Oh, that’s too much to say! I couldn’t judge for you, Di, we’re--we’re so different. I suppose I’m like--like the dog that keeps going back to lick the hand that’s struck him. If I loved any one, I couldn’t--I simply couldn’t turn on them like that!”

“I didn’t think I could, either; but when he told me what he’d done--Fanny, I can’t tell you how I felt. I felt as if something had died in my heart. I couldn’t even look at him again without seeing him in flight and--and Overton alone, deserted in the snow and ice, left to die!” She covered her face with her hands, shuddering. “I could have forgiven him a sin against myself far more easily. I could have forgiven even dishonesty, but that--Fanny, I--I couldn’t, I can’t!”

Fanny averted her eyes. The response that rose to her lips was too pertinent.

“It’s because you always loved Overton!” she longed to cry out. Instead, she rose and put her arms around Diane. “If you feel like that, dear,” she said, “there’s only one way out.”

Diane clung to her trembling.

“You mean----”

“Your father’s way,” Fanny said firmly. “Papa told us the judge meant to get a divorce for you.”

Diane held her, looking into her eyes. The two seemed to have suddenly changed places; Fanny was the more composed and confident now.

“Then you--you don’t think it would be wrong?” Diane implored.

Fanny shook her head.

“I think it’s better than to feel as you do. I know mama’s fearfully opposed to divorce, and papa is, of course. But, no, Di, I think it would be right for you--and for him, too.”

Diane’s hands fell from Fanny’s shoulders, and she walked slowly over to the window and stood looking out. For a while they were both silent. Fanny felt that instead of reassuring her friend, she had only added to her distress. Through her very words of encouragement Diane must have felt the subtle suggestion of Fanny’s mind--her belief that Diane’s love for Overton made her marriage not only intolerable but impossible.

She was conscious, too, that her own emotion dictated her pity for Faunce, that even now she could not quite forget the hold he had always had upon her mind and heart. She was flushed and tremulous when Diane turned suddenly and kissed her.

“Good-by, dear,” she said softly. “I can’t stay here now and face your father. I know what he’d think. Oh, Fanny, I--I wish I had never been born!”

The two girls clung to each other for another moment, neither of them quite able to be coherent. Then Diane ran down-stairs and made her way out into the rain.

XXXI

IT seemed to Diane that her emotion, like the storm, had nearly spent itself, and the few fresh rain-drops that fell on her face helped to cool its feverishness, just as a sudden revival of pride and strength helped to quiet the tumult within.

Torn by conflicting emotions, she had stretched out blindly for guidance--or, at least, for some sort of sympathy that would steady her purpose and point a way in the maze. Fanny had furnished it, not so much by what she had said as by what she left unsaid; and Diane felt the sting of mortification at her own weakness. She had gone out like a mendicant asking the alms of sympathy, and she had received not bread, but a stone.

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!”