Part 17

He withdrew his hand quickly and shut the drawer. Then he walked to the arch between the two rooms. The lamp was still burning brightly on the table in the center, and his cigarette-case lay open beside it; beyond that circle of light the room was less brilliant. It seemed to be pervaded by the varied colors of the lights in the street below, by a breath of fresh air, and the clamor of the life outside.

Beyond this, on the threshold of the outer door, stood a figure which seemed to him, at first, part of his own imaginings, a specter of his dreams.

“Diane!” he said blankly.

At the sound of his voice she came slowly into the room and closed the door behind her, outlining the slender grace of her somberly clad figure, the delicate pallor of her face under her black hat. She seemed to hesitate, and lifted her eyes slowly, almost reluctantly, to his.

He did not speak, and she clasped her trembling hands against her breast, her eyes holding his, though tears trembled on the lashes.

“Arthur,” she began slowly, her tone almost inaudible--“Arthur, I’ve come back to you. I’ve come back to you to stay, if--if you want me!”

He answered her with a sound that was almost like a sob, broken and inarticulate, and sank into a chair, covering his face with his hands.

She stood looking at him, startled, amazed; then she saw that his whole frame was shaken by his emotion, that he was trembling like a grief-stricken child, speechless with tears of relief. She went slowly across the room, and, kneeling beside his chair, put her arms around him and lifted her pale face to his.

XXXVI

THE judge looked up heavily from his desk, his glance taking in the faces of both his guests--the men he had summoned to hear his news.

“Diane has left me--broken with me forever,” he announced sternly. “Last night she went back to Faunce.”

Unconsciously the little dean glanced at Overton’s pale profile, outlined cameo-like against the dark hangings behind him; but he answered Herford:

“You mean she’s gone back to her husband? And she’s right, too!”

“I suppose I had to expect that from you!” retorted the judge bitterly. “It’s orthodox, isn’t it? It may be right, but she’s given me up. I shall never forgive her!”

The dean fired up with a passion that transfigured his thin face.

“She can do better without your forgiveness than without God’s!”

The judge eyed him a moment in heavy silence.

“Did you meddle with her, Price?”

“No, more shame to me! I was afraid of you, Hadley, that’s the truth.” In spite of himself the judge smiled grimly. “I was afraid to speak. I waited my opportunity, a plain call to interfere, but all the while I hoped, I prayed, that she’d see the light--and she has! She’s a fine woman. God bless her!”

Herford turned slowly around in his chair and faced Overton.

“You, at least, will be on my side!”

A deep flush mounted slowly over Overton’s pale face. He felt both pairs of eyes upon him, and he had found it difficult, from the first, wholly to master his emotion; but he lifted his head now.

“No!” He spoke slowly and with an effort. “I’m not on your side, judge. She’s done the high thing, the noble thing, that we should have expected--knowing her.”

“You mean that it’s noble to be a martyr? It’s nothing but martyrdom to force a brave woman--and she’s a brave woman--to live with--with that man!”

“She’ll make him over. The believing wife shall save the unbelieving husband. She’s done right!” the dean cried again.

The judge looked from one to the other in open disgust.

“She’s my daughter, and I’m--ashamed of her!” he thundered.

“Good Heavens, judge, what an impossible thing to say of her!” Overton was on his feet; it seemed to the other two men that he towered, tall and gaunt and still haggard from his visit with death. He saw the look in their eyes and reached for his hat. “I beg your pardon,” he said to the judge with all his natural courtesy, “but I can’t stay. You must excuse me, feeling as I do.”

As he spoke, he held out his hand. The judge wrung it. Then, as Overton disappeared through the portières, Herford turned to Dr. Price.

“He loved her--she might have been happy yet, and she’s gone back to that--that craven!”

The little dean looked at him with a shocked face.

“You’re a judge, Hadley, and a father--don’t you know you were doing something wrong, immoral and wrong, hideously so? You’ve fed yourself too much on the old Greek idolatry. What right had you to put them asunder--you?”

The judge stared back at him, coloring deeply, angrily.

“You can’t change me--I told her so. I won’t forgive her! You’re all very well, Edward, but you can’t preach to me. I sha’n’t listen. I’m an old man, as you say----”

“I didn’t!” interrupted the dean. “And I’m older than you.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m an old man, and she’s all I’ve got. I felt I had influenced her, I had helped along the match; to get her free would have been to free my conscience of a load, too, and she knew it. She knew it so well that she ran off without saying good-by. Ran off to go to him, and--she doesn’t love him!”

“She married him; I think she does.”

The judge shook his head.

“She doesn’t,” he insisted. “She admitted as much to me.”

Receiving no reply to this, the judge rose and threw open another window. He felt oppressed for breath.

“If it comes out--if it all comes out--and it may--it’ll break her heart. If I’d had any idea of what he was, of how he was lying to us, trading on another man’s achievements, playing on us, I’d--I’d have shot him dead before I’d have let him cross my threshold! Oh! I know what you’ve got to say, but you can save yourself the trouble. I sha’n’t listen!”

The little dean got up. Like Overton, he sought his hat. Unlike Overton, however, he stopped to look mildly at the judge.

“She’s done right,” he persisted. “At the first sign of trouble, you’ll forgive her.”

Herford turned slowly. He looked aged and shaken.

“I’ll never forgive her--while he lives!” he declared with finality.

Dr. Price shook his head. They did not shake hands, and the dean went out with a curious feeling of failure and helplessness. He had failed in his Master’s business; he had failed to go to Diane with any remonstrance, and his remonstrance with the judge had fallen flat. He hurried down the steps and out into the country road.

As he got to the top of the hill, he saw Overton. Strangely enough, Overton was standing on the little bridge where Dr. Price had once seen Faunce stand at midnight. There was something in the attitude of the tall figure below him that made the little dean take the other path, for he knew he was not wanted there. He hurried home, instead, and Fanny opened the door for him. He noticed that she, too, was a little pale and shaken.

“What is it, papa?” she asked excitedly. “What did the judge want? Where’s Diane?”

Her father put down his hat and walking-stick and started for the library, holding his daughter’s hand.

“I’m glad you’re not married yet, Fan!” he remarked irrelevantly. Then he told her: “Diane’s gone back to her husband, my child. The thing’s over and done with, I hope.”

To his amazement he felt her hand trembling in his, and turned, to find her lip quivering like a child’s. She was trying to keep back tears.

“Oh, papa!” she cried softly, with a little sob. “I’m so glad--I’m so glad! I know how he loved her!”

The dean looked helplessly toward the dining-room, where the Norwegian was moving heavily around the table.

“Please give me my dinner, my dear. I’m--I’m a little done up!”

* * * * *

At that hour of the day the sun had got down a little behind the tree-tops, and was casting feathery and delicate shadows on the smooth water below the bridge. The flicker of light between them, the slender grace of the tall flags that thrust pale blossoms up through the lush grass at the edge, and the whistling call of a catbird, who was darting from twig to twig over his head, held Overton. He watched it all, tried to concentrate his attention upon it, until he should be able to wrestle with the foe within.

Over and over again he told himself, as he had told Judge Herford, that Diane was right; yet his heart leaped up in fierce rebellion against the fate that had overtaken him. He could not forget the look in her eyes, the tender beauty of her face, as she leaned toward him through the mist. He felt again the tremor of her hands in his, and he knew now that it had been the tremor of flight.

She had been stronger than he. She had seen their danger, and she had turned her back upon it. She was right--right in the higher moral sense, right in the eyes of the world, and yet--he loved her! He must give her up, too, to a man whom he despised, a man who was, at that very hour, trading upon his generosity, his forebearance, climbing upon his shoulders to a command that was not rightfully his, and doing it because his wife was shielding him.

Contempt, deep-seated and remorseless, took possession of Overton’s mind. He wondered what manner of man Faunce was--what manner of man that she could love him, go back to him! But did she love him? Ah, that tormenting question again!

Overton left the bridge and sat down upon a stone, his big figure hunched over in a strange attitude, his chin in his hands. He fixed his eyes upon the catbird again. It was a delicate creature, gray-coated and black-capped. Its bright eyes had discovered him, and regarded him in a friendly way. It hopped from twig to twig again, its twitching tail accentuating its nervous little jerks. It screamed plaintively, like a kitten crying for its mother, but its eyes were keen.

Overhead the soft blue sky was dappled with pink clouds, for the sun was setting. The trees began to rustle with a faint breeze, and he could smell the salt of the sea as the tide changed. It was very clear, yet he heard a far-off fog-horn beginning to moan; there must be a fog outside.

The thought brought back to him the longing for adventure, the lure of the sea. It had been in his blood from boyhood. If he had been born of poorer parents, he would have followed the sea--would perhaps have been a sailor before the mast. As it was, the very tang of salt in the air, the sound of the fog-horn, stirred his blood as a bugle-note stirs a soldier in his sleep.

He longed to go back, to follow the trail, to finish his work! The expedition was ready, and he had only to raise his finger to take the command; but he would not. For her sake he was still willing to give up; for her sake he was covering her husband’s cowardice with a cloak, giving him a share of the glory that his craven spirit had shamed.

His love for her was so strong and so deep that he was willing to pay the price, to pay any price to save her; but she had fled from him, fled from him after he had told her how deeply he loved her. He felt a kind of shame, now, that he had argued with her and tried to make her give up her husband. He remembered, oddly enough, some broken lines of Browning’s. He could not have placed them, but they came back to him like a message and steadied him:

Were it not worthier both than if she gave Herself--in treason to herself--to me?

He repeated the words persistently, and in a way they helped him to compose his thoughts, to recall his conviction that she was right, that she had done the one thing that a good woman--brought up as she had been in the close hedge of conventions--would have done. No matter how her heart might have misled her for a moment, she could do nothing else but return to the man she had married, whose sin--if it had been a sin at all--was not against herself, but against another man--a man who also loved her.

This feeling, this conviction--which was not new, but had all along been lurking in his heart--helped him to calm himself finally. He rose from his stone, which might well have been called a seat of repentance, and made his way back to the old lodgings that he always used on his visits to Mapleton.

The house was kept by a widow, a woman whom his mother had long ago befriended, and she always set his room in order and kept his belongings together. In a way it was like going home. It was the only home he had known for years, and was likely to be the only one he would ever know now, he reflected, as he approached it. As soon as this expedition was under way, as soon as he felt free of the necessity of shielding Faunce, he would find some way to set out himself, he would plunge again into the mist and the mirage of the polar seas.

It was reflections like these that made it almost startling to open the old gate, which had an annoying habit of coming off one hinge--a habit that had clung to it ever since his boyhood--and to feel that it was admitting him again into the commonplace existence that he had left behind him when he started out. There were the same old piazza, the same old dog still asleep on the door-mat, the two porcelain jardinières, with the same straggling begonias that he had seen there spring after spring. There, too, was the parrot that Overton had brought from South America.

He went in, and was half-way up-stairs when a messenger-boy’s sudden arrival on the front porch aroused the dog and the parrot. The boy had brought a telegram, and wanted fifteen cents for carrying it over from the station. Overton paid the money and tore open the yellow envelope. The message was from Faunce.

You are needed to see party about expedition. Can you come at once?

Overton stared at the telegram in some amazement. He had purposely concluded his own connection with the expedition to give Faunce a free hand; he could not imagine what had occurred to bring such a summons. He had arranged with Asher to silence all questions about his own rescue. The English accounts had been too vague, so far, to arouse active suspicions, and the very fact that he had given over the command to Faunce had silenced all rumors. What, then, was the necessity for his immediate presence--a necessity so great that Faunce had summoned him? Undoubtedly there was something unexpected.

He thrust the despatch into his pocket and looked at his watch. He could easily catch an evening train; but, if he did, he might have to see Faunce at his apartment, and he could scarcely hope to avoid seeing Diane also. It was more than he felt able to do at the moment. It would be better for both of them if they did not meet, he thought--at least not now.

He decided to wait until morning, and wrote a reply to the telegram, sending it back by the boy, after paying a further subsidy. Thus fate, playing strange havoc with the affairs of mice and men, held him back a moment when his very presence might have turned the scale, when the flame of that candle in the wind which has been likened unto the life of a man might have been shielded a little longer in the hollow of his hand.

XXXVII

EVERY time Diane tried to pour out a cup of coffee for Arthur Faunce she experienced a feeling of awkwardness. It seemed as if she had thrust herself back into a place that was closed to her. She could not recover the habitude of the _tête-à-tête_ breakfast-table. The man sitting opposite to her did not seem so much her husband as some specter of the man she had married.

Perhaps, she reflected, it was because she had never really known him, because his revelation of himself had destroyed the old order of things, and she had not yet had time to accustom herself to the new. She kept viewing him from a new standpoint all the time, as if she had discovered a stranger. No matter how hard she tried she could not get back to the old angle, the angle that had showed him as a hero and her lover. She was not even sure that he loved her any more, for she saw that the old confidence could not be reestablished.

He, in turn, regarded her as an outsider, a hostile critic at his own fireside, not his helpmeet and his best friend. As she realized this, she felt the shock of it--felt that he, too, had reason to complain. It was harder because they could not speak out and get it over, and find some common ground on which to build up their lives. It was always a relief when they could get away from each other. She felt it so, and she was sure that he did.

If it went on like this, either it would grow to be intolerable, or they would sink into the kind of apathy that she had seen so often--the apathy of a badly mated pair, when neither of them has the courage to find a way of escape. She tried to avoid it, she tried to throw into her manner something of her repentance, her will to do better; but he did not meet her half-way. After the first burst of feeling, the relief of getting her back, he had relapsed into a kind of sullen reserve. He had had a terrible experience in confessing to her, and she felt sure that he had determined never to risk it again; but she ventured, now and then, on commonplace questions, if only for the sake of keeping up conversation.

“I suppose you’re about ready now?” she asked politely, retiring behind the coffee-urn and pretending to be busy with her own cup. “I saw that you and Captain Asher seemed to be quite sure of your arrangements.”

He nodded without looking up from his plate.

“We’ve been ready almost a week. There are only one or two things to delay us now--some changes in the crew at the last minute.”

“You don’t have to see to that, surely?”

She spoke idly, for something to say, and she was surprised when he raised his eyes quickly to hers and she caught a look of furtive alarm in them.

“No, I don’t have to see to that; but some of the old men have been troublesome. They wanted their berths back with more pay; and then we’ve lost two we tried to get. It’s hard to get tried men to volunteer for the sort of trip we’re making.”

She assented to that, and tried to finish her breakfast. Having no appetite, the pretense of eating was difficult. She saw him looking again at his watch--the third time since they had sat down at their meal.

“Have you an appointment?” she asked gently. “You seem in a hurry.”

He thrust his watch back into his pocket. “I’m not in a hurry, I--can you remember what time the trains are due from Mapleton, Di?”

She was startled. Her thoughts leaped to her father, and she felt a queer tightening in her throat.

“There was one due at a quarter to eight, and”--she looked up at the clock on the mantel--“if that’s right, there’s one due now.”

“Perhaps he’s coming on that!” he exclaimed, rising from his seat and going to the window.

His tall figure and wide shoulders rather obscured the light as he stood there, and she viewed him with a return of the feeling that she did not know him.

“Are you expecting any one from home?” she asked weakly, laying down her fork.

He answered without looking around.

“I wired for Overton last night--he’s up there.”

She gasped, but the sound was so slight and so soft that he did not hear her. For a moment she was overwhelmed with a rush of feeling. It seemed impossible that he could have sent for Overton on any business that did not involve her, for her thoughts had been filled with Overton. She had struggled against it, but it had been too strong for her.

She kept contrasting the two, and always, in the end, she seemed to vision that moment of terrible cowardice, the flight of a strong man who was leaving an injured comrade to die. Now, as she looked at him, she saw it again, and it overwhelmed her. She clutched at the edge of the table and held herself erect in her place, but her face was ashen.

“What’s the matter?” she managed to ask at last. “I--I thought he’d given over the command long ago.”

“So he has.” Faunce swung around from the window suddenly and looked at her. He saw, at a glance, the struggle in her mind. “This is about something else--something I thought he’d like to do--for your sake.”

The color came back into her face; she blushed up to her hair.

“What do you mean?”

He continued to regard her, his haggard eyes seemed to cling to her face, but there was an expression of bitterness about his lips.

“Oh, you know! He’s been keeping this whole thing quiet to shelter you. There’s something new come up--I’ve tried to deal with it, and perhaps I’ve failed; I can’t tell yet. But I wasn’t willing to take any risk, so I wired for him.”

“Do you mean you’re asking him to do something more--to sacrifice something more for my sake?”

“My dear girl, don’t worry. He answered the telegram, but he hasn’t come.”

She had risen from her seat, but now she sank back into it again with a sigh of relief.

“I’m so glad!”

He began to walk about the room in his usual restless way.

“You won’t be later on!” he muttered.

She forced herself to speak then.

“If you mean it’s about that--about what happened down there--I think I’d rather it were known. I’d rather pay for it in some way, Arthur, than to feel that any one was protecting us, saving us as an act of mercy.”

“You didn’t do it!” he retorted dryly.

“But it’s mine now--don’t you see?” she went on courageously. “It’s mine, because I’ve taken it up. I’m your wife--I share it all.”

He gave her a strange look. She thought that he was going to break down the barrier at last and speak, that there might yet be hope for them, but he was interrupted. Some one rang the bell in the little outside vestibule, and he started at once to answer it, believing that Overton had come.

Diane thought so, too, and sprang from her chair, looking about for a way to escape without crossing the room where she was sure to come face to face with the visitor. As she reached the door that led into her bedroom, she saw that the caller was a rough-looking man dressed like a sailor, and that he and Faunce stood talking--apparently bargaining--near the hall entrance. It was simpler for her to return to her seat at the table and wait until the stranger was gone.

She went back with such a feeling of relief that she found courage to pour out another cup of coffee, and to drink it slowly, while she was trying to think. She was going to accompany Faunce on the expedition, and she had already packed. There was little or nothing left for her to do, except to write a last letter to her father, entreating him to think of her while she was away, and to try to forgive her for doing what she felt it was right for her to do--for returning to her husband.

She was thinking of this, trying to frame it in her mind, when Faunce suddenly returned. She looked up as he entered, and saw that his usually pale face was deeply flushed, and his eyes had the feverish look that she had noticed when she first came back. Something in his expression made her turn in her seat and exclaim:

“What is it? What’s the matter?”

He came over to the table and stood leaning on it with both hands, his expression heavy with some pent-up emotion.

“I want to borrow some money immediately,” he said slowly. “I’ve put about all my spare cash in--can you lend me anything, Diane?”

She saw his embarrassment and rose quickly.

“I’ll get my check-book. I haven’t got much, Arthur. You know papa’s angry, and he’ll give me nothing but my mother’s; but I can spare you five hundred dollars, I think.”

He hesitated.

“That’ll do,” he said after a moment.

She left him, and returned almost immediately with her check-book. There was a desk in the corner, and she went to it and sat down, looking hastily over her accounts. Her heart sank, for she had a sudden swift intuition that the man in the next room wanted it. Was it blackmail? She dared not ask, but she looked up.

“I can spare you six hundred.”

Faunce did not reply and she turned in her chair, looking back at him over her shoulder. He was standing erect beside the table, his arms folded on his breast and his head bent. She could not make out the expression of his face, and she thought that he had not heard her.

She repeated her statement. He roused himself and raised his head.