XXIII
Itseemed an interminable moment to Faunce that they stood thus, looking at each other. He had time to note the terrible change and waste in Overton’s face—the face that had haunted him so long with the veil of frozen mist upon it, fixed and unconscious in its awful tranquillity. Now that he saw it alive and hollowed with suffering, it gave him a strange feeling—or, rather, a confusion of feelings, in which relief was for the moment uppermost. However he had failed, however he had played the craven, the man lived, he had no death on his soul!
But his feeling of relief was succeeded by swift and overwhelming humiliation, which increased when Overton amazed him by advancing calmly across the room and holding out a hand.
“Well, Faunce, I’m glad you came—although I suppose you had very little wish to come!”
Faunce colored deeply, his hand falling away from Overton’s with a growing feeling of shame.
“It was hard to come—for I don’t know what to say. Indeed, there’s nothing for me to say. I know, of course, what you think of me!”
The other man put this aside with a significant gesture of weariness.
“Let it go, Faunce—I’m tired of it. For a while I believed I hated you and reviled you in my thoughts; but afterward, looking back at it, I couldn’t blame a man for wanting to live. That was, of course, the size of it.”
As he spoke, he sat down in the armchair by the table, signing to Faunce to take the seat opposite. His manner was easy and unaffected. He had evidently prepared himself for this meeting. Besides, he had the immeasurable advantage of being the injured party.
Faunce, who had expected reproaches and condemnation, was staggered by Overton’s attitude. He could not fathom it, and he tried to face it with a shrewdness and acumen that might cover his confusion and discover the other man’s motives.
“I don’t believe you feel like that!” he said harshly. “You can’t! I’ve often pictured it to myself, and felt that in your place I should have cursed the man who left me. To use a sailor’s phrase, you’ve taken a strange tack—what are you driving at? What do you want of me?”
Overton smiled a little grimly, but he opened a box of cigars and pushed them across the table.
“Have a cigar? Here’s a light—we’ll talk it over. I’m not driving at anything. I can only say—with truth—that having been so near death down there, and knowing the horror of it, I canunderstand that you wanted to live. It’s merely an elemental instinct, anyway.”
Faunce, who had not lit the cigar he had selected, sat staring in speculative silence. His first thought had been that Overton must want something—must wish to make some deal about the new expedition, or he could not have helped reproaching the man who had deserted him and left him to die. But, looking at the other’s face, ennobled and spiritualized by suffering, Faunce began to realize that Overton was still too great to fall to the level to which he himself had fallen.
His own feeling of humiliation swept back on him, wave upon wave, until he felt like a man who was slowly drowning and knew that little by little the water would rise above his head. He sank back in his chair with a shudder.
“It may have been that,” he admitted reluctantly. “It came over me with such a rush of horror that I couldn’t stay. I never meant to leave you, Overton. I meant to behave like a man, to stay by you as we’d both stood by Rayburn; but I had seen him die, I thought I saw you going the same way, and suddenly it seized me—that feeling—God knows what it was! It was impossible for me to stay. I don’t try to excuse myself—I had to go!”
Overton nodded.
“That’s panic. I know the feeling. I’ve had it myself once or twice, in those solitudes; but”—hehesitated, carefully holding his cigar over the little ash-tray on the table, and knocking the ashes from it with a deliberation that hid his eyes from Faunce—“well, I haven’t yielded to it, that’s all!”
“I did. I don’t want to excuse myself; I know well enough that you’re not the man to excuse—what I did. I’ve often thought that I must have been mad—stark, staring mad!”
Overton smoked for a while in a silence that seemed to Faunce a good deal worse than speech.
“Suppose we let that drop, eh!” he said at length. “It’s over and done with, and if we’re to go on at all we’ve got to forget it. But there’s another side to it—a side that I wanted to see you about. You’re married. There’ll be some danger of this—this thing injuring you. Now, what I wanted to say, and to say strongly, is this—we mustn’t let it hurt your wife!”
Faunce raised his head with a look of such sudden anguish that it astonished Overton. He had not been considering Arthur, only Diane; but now he turned in his chair and looked attentively at the man himself. Faunce, meanwhile, forced himself to speak.
“You saw her to-day. Did you tell her?”
“Of course not! I’m not cad enough for that.”
“You might well tell her without being a cad. There’s no reason for you to spare me. I didn’t spare you!”
“There are a great many reasons why I should spare her, though!” Overton retorted dryly.
Faunce bit his lip. The implication was plain—Overton had more consideration for Faunce’s wife than Faunce had himself.
“It’s useless!” he said bitterly. “She’s sure to know, now that you’re back.”
“Is she? That’s just what I wanted to know. I’ve been trying to recall all that I said when I first regained consciousness—how far I gave it all away. Lately I’ve said nothing. How much has got out already! How much can we suppress? We must spare her if we can—you must see that!”
Faunce stared in sheer incredulity. He had come to face recrimination, to deal with an angry and righteously offended man. He found, instead, a hand stretched out to help him cover his own shame; but the price of it would be a moral obligation as great as the shame. He shuddered.
“You mean”—he spoke slowly, haltingly—“that you want this to go on! That instead of avenging yourself on me, you’re disposed to help me hide what—what I did, and that I’m to keep on as I am—to save my wife?”
Overton assented, stopping to look attentively at his half-smoked cigar, that he might again avoid looking at Faunce.
“My God, I can’t do it!”
Faunce’s cry seemed to be wrung from an inner agony too great to bear. Overton started andlooked up as the other man rose from his chair and began to pace the room with disordered steps, his head down.
“I tell you I can’t do it!” Faunce continued in a choked voice. “I’ve been in hell for months. I came back here with a lie on my lips, and I’ve lived a lie ever since. I thought that you were dead, and that I should have to go on doing it; but when I knew you had come back I felt as if a stone had fallen from my neck. You were alive, thank God, and I was free. I was ruined, but I was free from my own tower of lies—free to slink into a corner and grovel there in shame. I’ve known for months that if it ever came out I was ruined, and I was prepared to face it. I’d rather face it!”
He stopped in the center of the room and looked at Overton in a kind of mad defiance.
“I tell you, I haven’t slept, not through a night, since I left you. You’ve haunted me! I can still hear the crunch of the snow under my feet, I can see that frozen desert. And they were going to send me back. Diane wanted me to go back—she believed I had a mission! I was going—I felt like a whipped dog that has to go home to be whipped again. I’m a coward. I haven’t the courage to go on lying. Tell them the truth and let me suffer, but set me free!”
Overton tossed his cigar-stump into the fire and rose slowly to his feet, facing him.
“I can’t, nor can you. You can’t disgrace your wife. You know as well as I know—what would happen. It would ruin you. You can’t do it. You’ve married her, and—you’ve got to protect her. I’ll make you!”
Faunce drew back, meeting Overton’s eyes sullenly, his face distorted.
“Oh, I know! You love her. She’ll think I did it all to—to put you out of the way. She’ll despise me, too!”
Overton returned his look steadily.
“She’d have a right to despise you, if you let this thing disgrace her. It’s not out yet, and we must hide it.”
“Impossible!” Faunce threw out both hands with a gesture of repugnance. “I was in New York to-day, and I was asked a thousand questions. They’re on the trail—they’ll run it down!”
“They can’t run it down if we’re determined to hide it, to stand pat about it. That’s why I wanted to see you. I’ve been over the ground, and I think we can do it. Here’s this book of yours. I see you’ve used my diary and my notes as if I had died sure enough; but you’ve left a gap here.” He put his finger on the page. “We needn’t fill it. We can leave it shrouded in a nebulous haze. You speak of our being separated, but you don’t precisely state that we came together again before I broke my ankle. It has, by the way, lamed mea little. Now, think—think hard. Who knows the truth? Any one besides ourselves?”
Faunce thought, steadying himself.
“Yes; I think Asher knows enough to guess the rest. Asher was going with me on the new expedition, and he knows that the news of your return delayed it. He may be able to piece out the facts. I told them little enough. I’ve hidden the truth—I had cause!”
Overton nodded understandingly.
“I thought so. Then I’ll see Asher; he’s a friend of mine, and I think I can answer for him. We’ve something to fear from England; but there, too, I’ll use my influence, and we’ll hush it up.”
“And I’m to spend the rest of my life supporting the intolerable burden of your magnanimity—your greatness? I can’t understand your feeling toward a fellow who—who treated you as I did. I might as well have murdered you!”
Overton gave him a hard look.
“Understand me, Faunce, I’m human. I don’t care a hang about your feelings, but I’m willing to do my utmost, to give my utmost, to save the woman you’ve dared to marry!”
Faunce drew a tense breath. The accumulated fury of shame and humiliation leaped up. The strain was too much for his taut nerves, and he took a quick step forward.
“I see!” he said in a low voice. “You’re putting me under an obligation because you love mywife! I may have been a craven—I admit that I was a craven—but I have never tried to make any woman hate her husband!”
Like a flash Overton’s right arm shot out, and his fist struck Faunce full in the face. The blow was as sharp as it was unexpected. With the same violent impulse, Faunce leaped at him and hurled him back against the wall. Overton, who was still broken in health, reeled before the assault, and kept his feet only by snatching at the mantel-shelf, while he turned deadly pale. Faunce saw it, let go his hold, and drew back with an inarticulate sound of mingled rage and remorse.
“Good Heavens, you’re making me a coward again! I left you to die once, and now I’ve tried to kill you! Let me go! We two can’t live on the same planet without an intolerable conflict. Take your revenge, expose me—and be hanged!”
Overton, however, had recovered his self-control.
“I was wrong,” he said bluntly. “I had no right to bring your wife into it. We can’t insult her by a fight like this. As you say, we can’t get on, Faunce, but we can agree to silence—we must. To speak now does no man any good, and it will bring misery to—to some.”
“To my wife!” Faunce straightened himself. The violent flush of anger faded out of his face. He turned wearily, picked up his hat, and tossed Overton’s cigar—which he had never lit—upon the table. “Do as you like! To force me to goon is about the worst punishment you can inflict. I’ve reached the limit!”
Overton, bent on saving Diane the humiliation of her husband’s disgrace, followed him to the door.
“I’ll speak to Asher, and I’ll write to England. Let the thing die out. It’s agreed, eh?”
Faunce, who was already on the little old-fashioned stoop, looked back, and Overton got an impression of a white face and haggard eyes; but Faunce made no reply in words. He merely nodded his head and disappeared into the shadows that were gathered thick under the cedars in the path.
Overton stood a moment longer in the door, staring blankly into the night, which was again fitfully lit up by the moon, and listening to those retreating footsteps. They weirdly recalled the moment when he half revived from his frozen stupor and saw the one human figure that he had clung to receding in a white mist. It cost him again a supreme effort to control the rush of his contempt and hatred for the man who had just left him.