A CANDLE IN THE WIND
A CANDLE IN THE WIND
A CANDLE IN THE WINDI
A CANDLE IN THE WIND
Dianecontrolled the secret distress which the mere mention of Overton’s name made immeasurably keen, and tried to give her undivided attention to the entertainment of her father’s guests. She had a fine discrimination in social matters, and she felt that this occasion, however simple and domestic, was made important by the presence of Arthur Faunce, the young hero of the recent antarctic expedition.
Faunce had not been expected at Mapleton so soon after his triumphant reception in New York, where, exalted into prominence by Overton’s tragic death, he had been hailed as the leading survivor of the brave band of explorers. But, with that infatuated zeal with which the moth seeks the candle, he had returned almost immediately to the place where he was sure to feel the radiant flame of Diane Herford’s charm.
However well aware she may have been in the past of the young man’s incipient infatuation, Diane had almost forgotten those early passagesin their lives when she had made a conquest of a college boy’s heart at a time when, with the sublime optimism of youth, he had worn it joyously upon his sleeve. Since then several years had intervened, rich in experience. Diane had traveled a good deal with her father, and had been received, both at home and abroad, with flattering attention. She had felt the force of a deeper emotion, suffered the actual pang of bereavement, seen a hope, beautiful and thrilled with an exquisite tenderness, lost forever with the gallant hero who had perished almost within sight of the goal that he had sought with such courage and such devotion.
That he had not spoken more definitely at parting, that their understanding was tacit rather than actual, only deepened her grief by depriving her of the right to indulge it. Since she was thus denied the privilege of openly mourning the loss of Overton, and must force herself to speak of him and to hear his death discussed with apparent composure, Diane was listening now to the becoming modesty with which Arthur Faunce was quietly assuming the dead man’s mantle.
She saw, too, that Faunce’s new honors, his youth, and his undoubted good looks had again enlisted her father’s good-will. Some feeling, almost an impulse of indignation, swept through her at the thought that a man’s fame, like his life, had no more permanence than the flame of oneof the delicately shaded candles that she had placed among the flowers upon the table. Her thought, poignant as it was with sadness, must have been winged, for it found an almost immediate echo in her father’s response to a tribute that Faunce had just paid to Overton.
“Yes, he was a brave fellow,” Judge Herford declared in his Olympian tones. “If he had lived, Faunce, you’d have had to look to your laurels. But what a tragic end—to fall by the way, almost in sight of the goal!”
“As Moses died in sight of the promised land!” sighed Mrs. Price, her host’s cousin, the plump and amiable wife of the dean of a neighboring theological seminary.
Thoroughly imbued with the precepts of her more gifted husband, Mrs. Price allowed herself to fall into a fatal way of applying scriptural similitudes, or, as Dr. Gerry irreverently phrased it, of “talking shop.”
The judge smiled involuntarily, leaning back in his chair, a massive figure, his fine head scantily covered with iron-gray hair, and his keen eye as bright at sixty-five as Faunce remembered it when he himself had been a lad of ten. He tossed back a reply now with a gleam of amusement.
“It takes your imagination, Cousin Julia, to clothe the antarctic in milk and honey. Poor fellow! As I understand it, Faunce, Overton perished as much from hunger and exhaustion as fromcold!” he added, turning toward the guest of honor.
Faunce seemed to flinch, and an expression of such keen distress passed over his handsome face that it awoke a glow of sympathy, almost of cordiality, in the breast of Diane Herford. There was a little silence. Mrs. Price, her daughter, Fanny, her husband, the dean, and Dr. Gerry all stopped talking to listen to the young man’s expected reply. It was the kind of hush that expressed not only sympathy, but something like awe of a great tragedy enacted in a distant and unknown clime, where even death has been obscured by the mystery and silence of those frozen solitudes.
Faunce had been admirable all the evening—brilliant, convincing, and yet becomingly modest; but now he stretched out an unsteady hand, lifted his wine-glass to his lips, tried in vain to swallow some liquor, and set it down with a gesture of despair.
“Don’t speak of it!” he exclaimed in a faltering voice. “We were together—I can never forget it, I——” He broke off, and recovered himself. “Pardon me if I can’t talk of it, can’t tell you about it yet. The time may come, but now——”
He ceased speaking and stared straight in front of him with unseeing eyes, his powerful but shapelyhand unconsciously clenched on the edge of the table.
Dr. Gerry, an old family friend and an eminent practitioner, suspended his dissection of the duck to cast a keen glance at Faunce. He had the searching eyes of the professional observer, set well back under heavy brows, a quantity of short red hair, and a square jaw that was somewhat relieved by the whimsical lines about his tight, thin-lipped mouth and the puckers at the corners of his eyes.
There was a significance in the doctor’s glance which did not escape the troubled eyes of Diane. When he turned it suddenly upon her, she averted her face, unable to meet its perfectly apparent suspicion. She knew that Dr. Gerry had long ago surmised her attachment to Overton, and her hand trembled slightly as she picked up her fork and tried once more to make a pretense of eating her dinner.
She was so completely absorbed in her own unhappiness, in the thrill of misery and pride that stirred her heart at the thought of the gallant man who had died as he had always lived, in her eyes, like a hero, that she awoke from her reverie to find that she had lost the thread of the conversation, which had been hastily resumed to cover Faunce’s collapse.
“We’re puny creatures,” her father was saying in the tone of a pessimist. “What do our effortsamount to, after all? There’s a saying—and it’s true—that ‘a man’s life is like a candle in the wind, or hoar frost on the tiles.’ It’s blown away or melted off, and there’s nothing left!”
The little dean fired up.
“The immortal soul is left! What would life be worth if we didn’t believe that a young, enthusiastic spirit like Overton’s had in it the seed of immortality? ‘White-breasted, like a star fronting the dawn he moved.’ A soul like his can’t be compared to the flame of a candle, Herford, but rather to the light of a star that is kindled in the darkness of our impotent endeavors. He had the magnificent youth, the immortal courage, that always lead the world!”
“Well, well!” retorted the judge, unmoved. “He had, at least, the courage to meet the great adventure.”
“He had more than that, papa,” Diane commanded herself to say quietly, lifting her head with a recurrent thrill of pride. “No one could know him without realizing that he had supremely the courage to live—to live as he believed a man should.”
At the sound of her voice Faunce turned his head sharply, and his face flushed, but his eyes dwelt on her with such earnestness that Diane, suddenly meeting his look, stopped in confusion. Her embarrassment surprised no one more than herself, for she had long ago achieved that sort ofself-control which carries a woman through far more difficult moments than this. It was almost a relief to hear her father’s tranquil retort.
“Di’s a good friend,” he observed, throwing her a benevolent smile. “She always defends the absent. And she’s right this time. Overton had courage enough to have been allowed to live. It’s one of the mysteries why such men are cut off in their prime.”
“I had only one fault to find with him,” rejoined the dean, relapsing into his more usual formalism. “I said that to his face, and it saddens me now to recall it. He wasn’t what we call a Christian in the orthodox meaning of the word.”
“How can you say that?” exclaimed Diane warmly. “He was a Christian in the larger sense. Do you rememberAbou Ben Adhem’sdream of peace? Of no man could it be said more truly than of Overton that ‘he loved his fellow men.’”
Dr. Gerry nodded.
“That’s so, Di. I fancy you can indorse her sentiments, Faunce?”
Again all eyes turned in the direction of the young explorer, and he roused himself with an evident effort.
“He was one of the best friends a man ever had,” he exclaimed with feeling. “I don’t know much about his religious beliefs. I’ll leave that to Dr. Price and to Miss Herford,” he added, inclininghis head to Diane; “but he had courage enough to stand by anything that he believed.”
“That only brings us back again to the original proposition,” rejoined Judge Herford. “It’s an affirmative verdict—we’ve established his courage!”
“Haven’t we got an example of that right before us?” cried Mrs. Price, with a little bubbling sound of enthusiasm like the pleasant hum of a teakettle. “Here’s Mr. Faunce!”
“That’s right—we haven’t forgotten you, Faunce,” smiled their host. “You can’t escape your rôle of hero here.”
Faunce murmured a confused acknowledgment, blushing suddenly like a schoolboy. Dr. Gerry, who had been listening attentively, his keen eye studying the young explorer with professional curiosity, interposed now, giving the conversation a new and unexpected turn.
“Courage takes on strange streaks sometimes,” he remarked slowly, leaning back in his chair in an apparently reminiscent mood. “I remember a queer case out in the Philippines. A young private—the fellow came somewhere from the big grain-fields of the Northwest, and had never seen service before—went into action out there and got honorable mention three times. One day he carried a wounded comrade off under fire, and some of the women heard of it and wrote home, trying to get the Carnegie medal for him. About ten days afterthat the cholera broke out in a camp in Mindanao. I was down there with the regimental surgeon when Private Bruce was ordered on hospital duty. He begged to be excused, he turned as white as a sheet, and his teeth chattered. He wasn’t afraid of bullets, but he was afraid of cholera. Of course he didn’t get off. He had to go on duty, and he was sent out with a stretcher to bring in a dead comrade. A little Filipino, one of Uncle Sam’s new recruits, went with him. Presently the Filipino came back; he said he couldn’t do it alone, and the white man had run away. It was true, too. Bruce had bolted. He ran all the way to Manila, and they had to comb the place to find him for the court martial. He simply couldn’t face a quietly unpleasant death, and pestilence got on his nerves.”
Faunce, who had been listening with his eyes on his plate, looked up now, and his glance kindled with something akin to anger.
“Perhaps it wasn’t pure cowardice,” he exclaimed with feeling. “It’s easier to judge another man than to do the thing yourself. I——” He stopped short, aware of the silence around the table, and then ended lamely: “I’ve seen men do strange things under the stress of circumstance!”
The doctor chuckled.
“So have I. I once saw a burly blacksmith faint dead away at the mere sight of a tortoise-shell cat. He’d inherited a prenatal aversion to that kind ofa feline, and he’d never been able to conquer it.”
Faunce threw him a darkened glance.
“There you have it—prenatal influence!” he retorted, thrusting away his coffee-cup, the dinner having reached its final stage. “Mayn’t a prenatal influence excuse a sudden, an inexplicable and unconquerable impulse?”
“In a lunatic, yes.”
Diane looked quickly at the speaker. It seemed to her that he was purposely goading Faunce. He leaned back in his chair again, watching the younger man, his rugged face and upstanding reddish hair thrown into sharp relief in the midst of the group at the table. Across softly shaded lights and flowers, the gleam of snowy damask, and the sparkle of silver, she could see the white-haired, placid dean, comfortable, matronly Mrs. Price, her father’s massive, aggressive gray head, and Fanny’s bright youthfulness, which only served to accentuate the shrewd personality of Gerry and the grace and dignity of Faunce.
For the moment these two were pitted against each other. Then the younger man, perhaps aware that he was being baited, dropped the debate with a shrug.
“According to your idea, then, Private Bruce had an insane impulse, instead of simply losing his nerve, as I’ve seen men do a thousand times—and they weren’t cowards, either.”
“You’re not exactly the man we should expectto defend any form of cowardice,” interposed Judge Herford, smiling.
“With his magnificent record,” chimed in Mrs. Price, in her amiable voice, “it’s simply fine to be so considerate toward the weaknesses of the rest of us poor mortals!”
“I suppose, madam, that’s to imply that I’m not charitable,” rejoined Dr. Gerry composedly. “As a matter of fact, I’ve the greatest sympathy for cowards myself.”
“So have I!” exclaimed Fanny Price, her young face turned radiantly, like a full moon, toward the hero of the evening. “I’m an awful coward!”
“She is,” agreed her father cheerfully. “She looks under her bed every night for a burglar.”
In the laugh that greeted Fanny’s blushes, the topic was turned. Diane asked Faunce some questions about his recent experience in New York.
“I had to lecture,” he replied with an uneasy laugh. “That’s one penalty we pay in America when we discover anything. I gave two lectures, and I’m booked for a third, worse luck!”
“I shall try to hear that,” she rejoined quietly, forcing herself to smile in a conventional way, though her eyes were still pathetic.
Faunce thought he had never seen her more beautiful. The delicate hollows in her cheeks, and the white brow under her dusky hair, made her charm assume an elusive and spiritual quality thatwas rather enhanced by the simplicity of her low-cut, sleeveless black dress and the filmy draperies that floated about her shoulders and blended with the long, soft folds at her waist. The beautiful lines of her slender figure, and something in the grace and harmony of her whole aspect, reminded him of a splendid Reynolds that had once enthralled his eye.
“You would be an inspiration,” he began, in a tone intended for her ear alone; “but”—he hesitated for an instant, bending his dark eyes upon her—“I wonder if I could keep on making a fool of myself with you there to see me do it!”
Something in his tone brought the color to her cheeks, and she passed his remark over lightly.
“I’m sorry if I’m a discouraging listener. I think I’ll have to give you a chance to discuss that with the dean and papa. Dr. Gerry is too critical,” she added, laughing at the doctor as she rose from the table. “Come, Cousin Julia and Fanny dear, these men are pining to talk politics when we’re not here to insist on suffrage.”
“Oh, I’ll give it to you any time, Di!” flung back the doctor.
But she did not answer him; she was smiling at Faunce as he held open the door for her to pass out.
“Please come soon and give us a lecture,” she entreated.
He made no reply, but his eyes were bent so intently on her that he entirely missed the girlishly admiring gaze of Fanny Price, who followed her mother and Diane out of the room.