A candle in the wind

by Mary Imlay Taylor

Diane staggered to her feet and went up-stairs. Her strongest feeling was one of keen humiliation. She had made a confession that she had never intended to make, and it did not matter if her father had been the only listener. The actual admission, the spoken words, had clothed a dim specter with reality. She had heard her own voice making an admission that seemed to establish a motive—a motive at once primal and unjustifiable—for her desertion of her husband.

It frightened her. She felt as if Overton must have heard her, through the intervening night and the distance, that he must at last put the true interpretation upon the terror with which she had thrust him away when they met on the lonely mountain road. Then, as now, it had come to her with a revealing shock that she still loved him, and not the man she had married. Yet she must love Faunce, she argued wildly to herself. She did love him, she had loved him when she had married him, and it agonized her now to think of him as one who was so totally different from the man she had imagined him to be.

She found herself in the most inexplicable tangle of emotions. She did not know which way to turn. She had fled from her father, afraid to meet his pitying eyes, afraid, most of all, to hear his reassuring voice, for she knew what that meant!

She fled into her own room, and, locking the door, threw herself down before the open window, her head on the sill, the soft night air stirring the dusky hair on her forehead. It was a night for a love-dream, not for such shrinking and terror as now harassed her.

When Faunce had confessed to her, when he had torn away the last shred of her illusion about him, she had left him, overwhelmed with horror and dismay. The revulsion of feeling had been so intense that it had carried her home and swept her along in the current of her father’s rage against her husband. She had been as eager as he to get Faunce to consent to a divorce. She did not wish to bear the name of a man who had so deeply disgraced himself.

When he had assented to Herford’s demands, when he had declared that, if she wished it, she could have her freedom, the tension had snapped, and she had collapsed. She had been ready for conflict, ready to fight for her liberty; but when she found that there was to be no opposition, she experienced a sudden feeling of helplessness. She was adrift on a shoreless sea.

A beacon, indeed, shone across it—the beacon of Overton’s love, which sometimes seemed to beckon her home to the harbor of safety and happiness, but now there was this thing—this thing that had risen out of the night, unasked and unheralded, and it was pressing close upon her. She had discerned it from afar, and even in the midst of her wild revulsion, her determination to escape, it had filled her with awe and with dread.

It was imperceptible, yet it was with her. It held her back with strong hands, though it was invisible—as invisible as the angel who wrestled with Jacob. But she had no need to ask its name; she knew the name by which men called it—unless, indeed, they called it God. She felt it gaining upon her and threatening her, yet she would not yield.

She lay across the sill of her open window, exhausted and prone, but not beaten. She was fighting still, fighting for happiness, trying to guide her shipwrecked bark into that safe harbor where the beacon of love shone bright. She would not surrender, she would not admit that there was no room for her there—not yet! But she wished that she had not spoken, had not voiced her emotion. It seemed to give this impalpable thing, this invisible angel, so much more power for battle.

Then, suddenly as if the unseen wrestler had successfully thrown her in the conflict, she saw herself as the type of woman she most abhorred—the woman who divorces one man because she is in love with another.