A candle in the wind

by Mary Imlay Taylor

“I can’t remember.”

“I thought you would,” she said softly. “It’s only a little place, but—Simon Overton was born there.”

Faunce made no reply at all. He sat quite still, looking steadily before him at the people in the car. For the moment it was impossible to meet her eyes.

XIX

With Diane things had reached a climax long before that culminating moment when she found that she had married not the man of her imagination, but a strange, abstracted, sleepless creature whose soul seemed to be retreating deeper and deeper into some hidden recess of his being. Following out their early plans they had spent months of waiting in Florida, but now the ship being nearly ready to sail, they had come north and gone to the Catskills. During their long stay at the south Diane had written occasionally to her father and heard from him at even rarer intervals. The judge was a poor correspondent and she noticed that he avoided any mention of the continued rumors that Overton still lived. Now, in this last retreat, even these rare letters stopped. Faunce had asked her to let their last brief week in their sylvan cottage be uninterrupted, and they had left no address behind them. They had spent six or seven days together in the solitude of the mountains. The splendor of the sky, which was already softening with the promise of summer, and the soft purple of the infolding hills, had soothed her spirit, but they seemed to have only increased a deep disquietude in Faunce.

He tried to hide it from her. She could see a kind of furtive watchfulness in him that defeated any effort on her part to surprise his confidence. The subtle feeling of distrust that had crept into her reluctant heart leaped up whenever she saw his pale face opposite her, even at table, and found that his eyes, handsome and luminous as ever, avoided hers, or only met them with a sidelong glance from under his long, girlish lashes. It was a glance that had an indescribable effect of retreat, of slipping away, as if his soul evaded daylight and the open, as some hunted animal might shun the fellowship of its kind.

In this desire for isolation, he would not even allow a newspaper to find its way to the house, and she was as completely cut off from the world as if his love had marooned her on a desert island.

At first she had acquiesced in this peculiarity of his, had tried to adjust her own keen and active mind to a period of quietude, to a dropping away of the universe, that they might learn how to adjust their own temperaments to each other and find a common ground on which to establish their life together; but the longer she faced the problem, the more difficult was its solution. She could not reconcile herself to characteristics which she recognized as wholly divergent from her own conception of the man.

He was not frank, as he had seemed to be, nor cordially disposed, nor courageously bent on high endeavor. He was secret, complex, and perilously evasive. He had never once, since their arrival in the mountains, spoken the name of Overton; yet by the swift and unerring instinct that comes to a woman at such moments, Diane knew that his former leader was never out of her husband’s mind. Overton it was who loomed between them, his shadowy arm outstretched, as if, even from the bourn of the undiscovered country, his spirit had arisen with new power and new divination.

Diane had accepted Faunce’s word. She had declared that she would believe her husband; and no whisper from the world beyond those shadowed hills had yet broken her resolution. But there were moments—in the depth of night, or in the solitude of some early-morning stroll—that made her heart sink. When she had hoped to find candor and stability, she had encountered a silence as perplexing as it was evasive.