A candle in the wind

by Mary Imlay Taylor

If Overton lived, Faunce was no longer responsible for his death. No man could brand him with the mark of Cain. He was liberated from the thing that had hung upon him as fearfully as the slaughtered albatross once hung upon the neck of the Ancient Mariner.

There was relief, then—a relief that sent the blood rushing to his heart and the fire to his brain; but with the relief came the awful certainty of ruin. He could never hold up his head again among the men who had so lately hailed him as a friend and a hero. It might be worse to be a confessed craven than a secret felon. There could be no delay, no escape; his fate had passed out of his own control, and the God whom he had ignored in the polar wastes would shape his destiny now. Faunce was powerless; he could neither hasten nor delay it.

His very impotence, in relieving him of the decision, was almost a blessing. All that he could do was to give in, to yield, to let things take their course. The feeling of numbness that follows a great disaster possessed him—a kind of apathy which was in itself a relief to a man who had not slept without the use of drugs for so long a time that sleep without them had become impossible.

He walked steadily on, and at last he became aware of the scene about him. It was a wild night. A wind had risen, and the sky was full of driving clouds, with now and then a moment when the full moon flashed out and clothed the hills with spectral beauty. The creaking of the trees, bent by the gale, and the occasional snapping of a bough, filled the air with sound. Here and there a light shone in the scattered houses, and far off a dog bayed incessantly.

Faunce climbed a sharp ascent, and, turning into a wider path, suddenly found himself before the house where Overton was visiting his old relative. As he rang and stood waiting, his apathy suddenly left him. A feeling of staggering humiliation succeeded it, and he had difficulty in controlling an almost overwhelming impulse of flight.

Then the door opened, and he found himself asking for Overton. The servant, a gaunt, pale-faced woman, evidently an old standby, led him down a long, narrow hall to a portion of the house which had been added as unexpectedly and unreasonably as some perverse imp might add an extra wing to a chicken or a fifth leg to a cow. Being lightly built, it was to-night nearly as tremulous and uncertain in the wind as the pendulum of the ancient clock in the entry.

The woman, preceding Faunce, opened a door, and asked him to sit down and wait in the library while she went to announce him. He entered reluctantly, aware of a brilliant light from the reading-lamp on the low table in the center, and looked about him, glad of a few moments’ added reprieve.

The room was low-ceiled and rather narrow. Heavy crimson curtains covered the windows, while a straggling arrangement of book-shelves and an ancient desk suggested that it had once been the sanctuary of the master of the house—the old aunt’s husband, who had died, if Faunce remembered right, about ten years before. Above the shelves stood a bust of Shakespeare, a little crude in outline, and on the wall hung an engraving of Webster, making one of his famous speeches. The low mantel was covered with a hideous hanging of crewel-work, which suggested another generation as keenly as did the crocheted tidies still on the backs of the armchairs.

On the table, amid a litter of books and papers, an old pipe lay beside the open ink-well. Near it, lying open, was the book that Faunce himself had published, which contained the rescued sheets from Overton’s diary and Faunce’s frenzied efforts to patch together the broken record, to force one and two to make four.

The sight of it there, the evidence that Overton must have been reading his version of that fateful journey, affected Faunce deeply. He moved slowly to the table and looked down at the open page, sure before he saw it that it must be the one on which he had inscribed his own story of Overton’s death—had lied, in black and white, to save himself from shame!