Overton, aware of something at work in the back of the old man’s mind, looked at him curiously.
“I don’t see what you’re driving at.”
The doctor got up and went down the hall to the front door with Overton, one arm flung affectionately across the younger man’s shoulders.
“I’m not driving at anything, Simon. I was weighing it—that’s all. You were immeasurably ahead of him in the race when you forgave him and gave up the command to shield him; but now, when he’s ready to give his wife her freedom—well, he’s almost caught up with you, hasn’t he? As I said, my boy, it’s his heart’s blood, and he’s offering it as bravely as a brave man might. Let’s give the devil his due—he’s paying up!”
XXIX
It was dark by this time, and Overton consulted his watch, to be sure that it was not too near the judge’s dinner-hour for his errand. He was astonished to find that it was almost half-past eight. He had not felt the need of food. He dismissed it entirely from his calculations, and tramped steadily on in the moonlit mist. Through it he could see the lights twinkling in distant houses, while the trees loomed up in feathery, indistinct outlines, downy with foliage. Something in the effect—the weird brightness of the white sky and the elusive lights—reminded him of the mirage that had so often mocked him in his polar quest. He recalled it with a keen recollection of Faunce’s receding figure, and he thought grimly of the task that lay before him—the task of persuading Judge Herford to spare his own son-in-law for his daughter’s sake.
But the thought uppermost in Overton’s mind, as he opened the old gate that had stood for so much in his life, was the prospect of seeing Diane again. No matter how she regarded his return, even if she felt that it was his hand that had destroyed her house of cards, his heart leaped up with hope. The insistent demand for personal happiness is not only a primal instinct of human nature, and as much a constituent part of it as the flowers and birds and bees are evidences of springtime and summer, but it is also the hardest aspiration to kill, surviving blows that would destroy the strongest impulse of endeavor or ambition.
In the words of the sage, “the veriest whipster of us all desires happiness.” Overton, who had actually stood upon the bourn of the undiscovered country, craved it the more keenly because of his long starvation.
He noticed every familiar object as he walked up the path. The old cedar was there, where he had put up the squirrel-house for Diane when she was a child in short skirts and pigtails. There, too, was the old worn seat around the oak, where they had read Tennyson together. He remembered with a smile Diane’s cry to him that he must go in quest of the Holy Grail. Had her insistence, her inspiration, indeed, sent him on that quest which had led to this fatal climax?
He went slowly up the steps, rang, and stood waiting, almost expecting that she would open the door with the same inspired look she used to wear, the same mystic charm of girlhood and dream-land which had always clothed her, to his imagination, in a beauty more spiritual than mundane.