“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 can understand 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.