“I was wrong,” he said bluntly. “I had no right to bring your wife into it. We can’t insult her by a fight like this. As you say, we can’t get on, Faunce, but we can agree to silence—we must. To speak now does no man any good, and it will bring misery to—to some.”
“To my wife!” Faunce straightened himself. The violent flush of anger faded out of his face. He turned wearily, picked up his hat, and tossed Overton’s cigar—which he had never lit—upon the table. “Do as you like! To force me to go on is about the worst punishment you can inflict. I’ve reached the limit!”
Overton, bent on saving Diane the humiliation of her husband’s disgrace, followed him to the door.
“I’ll speak to Asher, and I’ll write to England. Let the thing die out. It’s agreed, eh?”
Faunce, who was already on the little old-fashioned stoop, looked back, and Overton got an impression of a white face and haggard eyes; but Faunce made no reply in words. He merely nodded his head and disappeared into the shadows that were gathered thick under the cedars in the path.
Overton stood a moment longer in the door, staring blankly into the night, which was again fitfully lit up by the moon, and listening to those retreating footsteps. They weirdly recalled the moment when he half revived from his frozen stupor and saw the one human figure that he had clung to receding in a white mist. It cost him again a supreme effort to control the rush of his contempt and hatred for the man who had just left him.
XXIV
As Overton went in and shut the door, Faunce found himself once more in the road, and turned mechanically to go back to the cottage. He had almost lost his mental bearings, and for the moment he was incapable of coherent thought. The march of events had been too swift, the revulsion of feeling too strong.
In his soul, at that instant, there was neither hatred, nor contempt, nor even shame. He was numb. He had passed through a long agony, and had paid—in his heart’s blood—for his craven act. He was still paying, doubtless he would pay until the day of his death; but a strange apathy had come over him. His emotion had spent itself in his attack upon Overton, and now shame had drowned him so completely that it had submerged even his resistance, and he was only intensely weary.
The physical man, worn down by want of sleep, racked by tortured nerves, keyed up to defend himself from discovery, to keep the place at which he had snatched with desperate hands, was ready to give up. He felt an intolerable longing for sleep; he could have thrown himself down by the way and slept like a dog.