XVI
Itwas the night before her wedding, and the judge, after a long day of busy arrangements, which had included a settlement of business matters with Faunce, at last found himself at rest in the old armchair beside his study fire. He had been too occupied and too ambitious to forward the fortunes of his future son-in-law to feel that the moment was drawing nearer and nearer when he must give up his daughter; but now, alone at his own fireside, he remembered that, and was amazed at the rush of keen regret that softened his mood.
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 wasplaced 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 afloating 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? Hetold 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 youmarry 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, gazingthoughtfully 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 thesoft, 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.