II
Leadingthe way into the small, old-fashioned drawing-room, Diane seated her guests around the bright fire on the hearth, taking care to select a chair for herself that would put her face in the shadow.
Mrs. Price took the low seat opposite. Her plump, round little body spread out comfortably and settled into the cushions with the genial softness of a pudding. Her lustrous black silk, which the dean approved as “the most suitable and stately dress for a lady,” seemed to billow over the curved arms of the chair, and decorously veiled her white stockings and old-style, low shoes. Fanny, pretty and fair and barely eighteen, with only a suggestion of her mother’s button nose and her father’s tranquil brow under a fluffy mass of fair curls, dropped on a low cushion between the two.
“Isn’t he splendid?” she exclaimed rapturously, clasping her hands. “He’s so handsome—isn’t he, Di? He looks just as I’ve always imagined heroes did!”
“He’s very good-looking, my dear,” her mother admitted amiably. “I couldn’t help thinking of that picture at the seminary—you remember it,Fanny—of David? You must know it too, Diane?”
“I don’t think I’ve noticed it very much,” Diane replied vaguely. “Of course, Mr. Faunce seems a hero just now, and people are making a great deal of his exploits. It’s right that they should; but what hurts me, what seems to me so strange, is the way they forget that Overton led the expedition, that he made all these great discoveries, that it isn’t right to forget him while they’re applauding the things he did.”
“My dear, nobody forgets him,” Mrs. Price reassured her. “He was tremendously real, I’m sure, and we all liked him, though, as Edward said at dinner, he seemed a little—a little——”
“Fogged on religion,” chimed in Fanny cheerfully. “So many men are, mama, and I’m sure Overton was as nice as he could be. When I was a child, he used to give me candy—didn’t he, Di?”
“A sure way to win your heart!” retorted Diane, smiling. “I don’t think I’m as orthodox as you are, Cousin Julia,” she added calmly. “There are greater things in heaven and earth than mere formalism.”
“Diane!” breathed her shocked relative.
“Oh, I sha’n’t dispute it with you!” Diane went on easily; “but you mustn’t think that a man like Simon Overton hadn’t a soul great enough to have its own faith. I know he had it.”
“I’m sure he did,” agreed Fanny warmly.“Didn’t you hear what Mr. Faunce said—that Overton was one of the best friends a man ever had? Isn’t that a great tribute—from a man like Faunce, too?”
Diane assented, leaning farther back in her corner. At the moment she could not quite command her voice. Overton’s face seemed to rise before her as she had seen it last—manly and tender and kindled with high hope. How could she think of it veiled in the mist and chill of a frozen death, like a light suddenly quenched in a tempest, or a star receding into the clouds of the infinite?
“No, I’m not a formalist,” she said with sudden passion, as if her thoughts must find an outlet in words; “but I do believe in the immortal soul. It isn’t possible that a man’s life, going out as it does like—like a candle in the wind, leaves nothing whatever behind, nothing to reach up to the heights that he sought.”
“Of course you believe in the soul!” Mrs. Price was immeasurably startled. Her round eyes grew rounder than ever. “How can you express a doubt of it, Diane?”
“Di hasn’t really,” argued Fanny, interfering between the two. “She’s off on one of her tangents, that’s all. She can’t get the awful part of it out of her head. Wasn’t it touching, mama, the way Faunce couldn’t even speak of Overton’s death?”
“It’s perfectly natural, dear. Your father heardthat Faunce risked his life in trying to bring Overton’s body back, and was almost dead himself when he reached the cache.”
“It was the blizzard that overwhelmed them,” supplemented Diane’s rich, melancholy voice from the shadow. She was resting her head on her hand, and her face was completely obscured. “They had pushed far ahead, they had reached the farthest south, and then—Overton died. It seems terrible to think that the rescue ship was so near all the while. They had only to struggle a while longer, only to keep life in them for four days!”
“Their ship was completely crushed in the ice, wasn’t it?” Fanny asked softly, clasping her hands around her knee and gazing into the fire. “If it hadn’t been for that——”
“He would have been saved, yes!” Diane drew a long breath. “If it hadn’t been for that, the wrecking of the ship, the great storm, he would be here now with Faunce.”
“Well, for my part,” said Mrs. Price firmly, “I don’t think we should dwell on these things too much. They’re all appointed. ‘The wind bloweth where it listeth.’ We ought to cheer up Arthur Faunce. He’s been given back to us, and there must be a purpose in it. I always feel, when a man comes back from the dead, as it were, that he’s been spared for a reason. You mark my words, Arthur Faunce has been marked out fora great work. He will be a kind of prophet in Israel!”
Diane made no immediate reply. Her mind was too deeply absorbed in thought. She realized more fully than Mrs. Price the great opportunity that had come to Faunce like a legacy from the dead. She remembered his emotion at the mention of Overton, the feeling tribute that he had paid to his friend, and the spirit, at once kindled but modest, that had breathed through many of his previous utterances.
He was like a man who had been following in the wake of genius, content to take up the fragments of success that fell to his share, but had suddenly found the gates flung wide open and seen the long road beyond—the road which he would henceforth travel alone, and to no uncertain goal. He had loved Overton. Their friendship was well known, and he had been faithful to the end. Even now he did not withhold the laurels that belonged to his leader; he only accepted them because there was no one left to dispute his claim.
She knew, too, that he had shown his ability, his power to command in an emergency. He had returned a far-different man from the uncertain youth who had set out two years before. Something in this, and in the optimism he had shown in the midst of disaster, touched her imagination.
If he had been more vainglorious, more eager to take the glory of the great work achieved by theexpedition, she would have hated him. But his tone when he had begged them not to speak of Overton’s death, the tribute he had paid to his dead comrade’s friendship, when his voice broke and his eyes filled—these things went to Diane’s heart.
The thought of them had taken such possession of her that she scarcely noticed the silence that had fallen on the little trio. Fanny’s blue eyes were gazing dreamily into the blaze, while the remote murmur of talk and the scent of tobacco came to them from the dining-room. Diane was startled by the awakening of her elder relative, who, apparently, had also been wrapped in dreamy meditation.
“Diane, did your cook make those delicious rolls that were served with the fish?” Mrs. Price asked abruptly.
Diane looked up blankly.
“Why, of course! She’s very proud of them, too. Haven’t you ever tasted them before?”
“I don’t think so, and I’m sure I should remember. They were so crisp! I’ve got a new cook—did Fan tell you? She’s dreadful. Poor Edward says she’s ruining his digestion, and I’d better try a fireless cooker instead. Can’t you let me have that recipe for her?”
“It wouldn’t do any good, mama. She’s a Norwegian, Di, and she understands so little Englishthat when she tries to talk it sounds like a turkey gobbling.”
Fanny began to give a practical illustration, but her mother protested.
“Hush! Here are the gentlemen, and they’ll think you’re crazy, child!”
Fanny stopped, with a queer little grimace that made Diane laugh. They were interrupted by the entrance of Dr. Gerry and Arthur Faunce, who were a little in advance of the judge and the dean. Diane found herself engaged in conversation by the old doctor, who began by remarking that she was too pale, and that he suspected she sat up half the night to read novels.
Diane, who knew that this was merely an excuse to give him an opportunity to probe her inmost mind, parried it lightly, and engaged him in an animated discussion of the latest best-seller.
“Advertisement—nothing but advertisement!” he declared bruskly. “In my young days a novel had to be good to be read. Now it’s an even thing between the man who’s written a book and the man who’s invented a bunion-eraser—it all depends on which gets the most advertising!”
“Iconoclast! Won’t you leave us the illusion of fame?” retorted Diane, laughing.
“It isn’t fame men want these days—it’s money!”
“Filthy lucre!” said the dean. “Don’t let that pessimist destroy your enjoyment of life,Diane. Send him off to play billiards with your father. I’ve got to take my girls home. I’ve an engagement for seven o’clock to-morrow morning, and I need rest.”
As he spoke, Mrs. Price came up and bestowed a flattering kiss upon Diane’s cheek.
“Good-night, dear! Don’t forget about that recipe for rolls,” she murmured.
Diane promised to remember, and went up-stairs to help the two women into their wraps. Fanny was still blushing and confused. She had been talking to Faunce, and her blue eyes shone like two radiant aquamarines.
“He’s so splendid, Di, isn’t he?” she whispered, as her cousin fastened her cloak for her. “And his eyes—there’s something wonderful about them. They haunt you!”
Diane laughed as she kissed her good-night, and watched the two cloaked and hooded figures marshaled out by the little dean in his long black coat and high hat. Standing in the open door, she saw the three familiar figures walking in single file down the long path to the gate, not one of them keeping step with the others, but each bobbing up and down at a different gait, as curiously bundled and indiscriminate in the darkness as so many Indian papooses suddenly set on their feet and compelled to toddle.
As she closed the door and turned back towardthe drawing-room, she saw that Arthur Faunce was awaiting her there alone.
“I thought you were with papa and the doctor,” she said, apologizing for her neglect, as he drew a chair forward for her to sit again near the dying embers on the hearth.
“They went to play billiards, and I don’t know one ball from another,” he replied. “I told them I should wait for you.” He took the chair that Mrs. Price had vacated, and leaned forward, resting his elbows on the arms. “I wanted to speak to you alone.”
Diane looked up, and met his dark eyes bent on her with a melancholy and troubled gaze that sent a sad thrill of expectation to her heart. He meant to speak of Overton!
She said nothing. For a moment, indeed, she was quite incapable of speech. They both heard the distant click of the billiard-balls and her father’s deep voice speaking to Dr. Gerry.
“You know that I was with Overton—with Simon,” he said at last, “to the very end, and once or twice he—he talked to me of you.”
She looked up in surprise. She had felt that it was unlike Overton even to mention her name, so deep and almost sensitive was the reserve that he had always shown. Faunce met her look again, and this time his pale face flushed.
“I mean in the way that Overton always spoke of women—of his friends—with the truest andmost chivalrous regard. He was not well; the climate broke him up before the end, and I think he had a feeling that he might not live to come back. One day, after we had to abandon the ship, he showed me some photographs he had—pictures that he had taken himself—and he asked me to remember, if anything happened to him, that he wished you to have them. He said that you had cared so much for the whole expedition, and had cheered him so often in those hard days when he thought he could never get the thing started. After he—after that awful time in the snow, I found the case he had shown me, and I brought it with me.” He stopped and put his hand in his pocket, producing a large, square envelope. “As soon as I got to New York I had the plates developed. A few were spoiled, but there are some here, and I’ve brought them to you to-night.”
As he spoke, he held out the package. Diane compelled herself to take it with outward composure, but her hands were shaking, and she could not meet his eyes.
“I can’t tell you how much I thank you!” she murmured, opening the envelope and looking over the pictures in order to hide her emotion.
There were only a few of them—studies of sea and sky, a familiar view of the ill-fated ship, a group of sailors, and some impressive views of frozen straits and giant icebergs. It was a meagerglimpse of the world for which Simon Overton had laid down his life, but something in it, in his thought of her, of the things she would care to see, touched Diane to the soul. She restrained her tears with difficulty, and, although she continued to make a show of examining the prints, her eyes were too dim to see the details.
For a while Faunce was silent. He seemed to understand the emotion that prevented Diane from speaking. On the whole, he was thankful for it, since she did not have time to see the pain that distorted his own face. He felt that he was white and rigid, and that his eyes stared at the fire; but he had enough self-control to keep his hands steady on the arms of his chair, and after a while he commanded his voice.
“I’m sorry that there were so few things that we could bring,” he said slowly. “A great deal was lost in the wreck, and we had to sacrifice more still in our journey across the ice. There came a time when we couldn’t carry a load—we could scarcely carry ourselves.”
Diane folded the pictures carefully away before she replied.
“What you say makes me all the more grateful for these!”
He raised his head at that, and their eyes met. The sympathy, the kindling kindness of her glance went to his heart.
“You don’t ask me about it all, and yet I’m sure you want to know.”
“I understood. I was deeply touched by what you said at dinner. I know you can’t talk of it yet—I don’t ask it.”
“I think I could talk to you; but perhaps I had better wait until another time.” Faunce paused; then, rising from his seat, he came over and stood beside her, resting his elbow on the mantel, with his face in the shadow, as hers had been. “I want you to feel that the end was painless. It always is, you know, in those awful solitudes. You knew Overton; you must know that he was a hero—to the end.”
She, too, rose involuntarily from her seat and faced him. Again her pale face, and her slight figure in its black draperies, recalled to his mind the charm and buoyant grace of that wonderful picture of long ago. It was, indeed, this charm of hers, so subtle and so poignant, that drew him on deeper and deeper into the shoals.
“I loved him,” Faunce continued, with a painful effort at self-control. “No one in the world could have suffered more bitterly than I at his loss. I don’t want you to feel that I purposely tried to take his place in this great achievement. I only fell heir to his glory.”
She was deeply touched. Again, even in the midst of her tender remembrance of Overton, this man, who had suffered with him and dared withhim, laid hold of her imagination. She raised her beautiful eyes to Faunce’s face, holding out her hand in an involuntary gesture of friendship and good-will.
“I think you’re more than his heir,” she said gently. “He was so large-hearted, so just, that I know he would feel, as I do, that you were his comrade and his partner in sacrifice and in fame.”
There was an instant of silence, one of those moments which become almost supreme in their effect upon two lives. Then, as Faunce seemed to have no words in which to reply, he took Diane’s hand in both of his and lifted it gently to his lips.