“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 and looked 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!”