A candle in the wind

by Mary Imlay Taylor

“It’s perfectly natural, dear. Your father heard that 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 for a 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 the expedition, 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.