A candle in the wind

by Mary Imlay Taylor

IV

Meanwhile Faunce tramped steadily down the long lane. It led to the edge of the little river, scarcely more than a brook, which divided the village into two unequal parts. Just now, at flood from the recent rains, the stream tumbled noisily over the stones and rushed under the low bridge with a harsh, insistent murmur.

He stopped for a moment with his hand on the rail, and looked down at the black current below. Then the clouds broke, and he saw the moon reflected in the water, while the rising wind suddenly showered the falling leaves until they fell with a patter like rain. Beside him an ancient willow stood like a stricken giant. A summer thunderbolt had split the great trunk in twain, and half of it lay across the stream, while the other half still loomed up, grim and leafless, against the sky.

It was past midnight and in that rural community, where early hours prevailed, the feeling of solitude was as intense as if he had reached the end of the world and was alone in the October night, the last man. Such a feeling had come to him once before, fraught with such cruel terror, such a sensation of disintegration, of the loss of all that was mortal, that Faunce could never forget it, could never feel even the reflection of it again without recalling those vast and terrifying wastes, that inexorable sky, that blinding, cruel, exterminating ice that had frozen its image on his soul.

He tried to drive the thought of it from his mind, and, by fixing his gaze on that intimately familiar scene, to recall the days when, as a lad, he had fished by that old bridge. He remembered his grandmother as she had looked to him then, the quaint cap she wore, and the little plaid shawl folded about her shoulders over the black bombazine dress. His mother had died when he was born, and his father had married again. Young Arthur, in the way of a gay stepmother, had been reared by a fond maternal grandmother.

No one had disciplined his childhood, and he knew that as a boy he had done some mean tricks, which a better-trained lad would have scorned. But he had ceased to be small and tricky when he fell in with Overton, his senior by three years in age and by ten in mental development. He realized now, as he looked back on the long perspective, that Overton had saved him.

Strong-willed and straight-thinking, Simon Overton had possessed that kind of spiritual force of which leaders and martyrs are made. He had been a leader even at school. His companions had followed him with the boyish devotion that always surrounds the school hero with a halo of glory. It was not alone young Overton’s physical strength, and his skill in their favorite sports; it was a certain unfailing stanchness of character, a fearless square-dealing, that impressed the others, and Faunce had only followed the universal lead when he attached himself to him.

Faunce had been favored. Overton had seen that the lad was without a real friend, that his old grandmother could do little more than wrap him in a figurative blanket, spoiling and scolding by turns; and the elder boy suddenly took hold of the younger. A friendship was formed, protective on one side, almost adoring on the other, and from that time their fates had moved forward in an inseparable course.

When Overton went to Annapolis, he had helped Faunce to work his way through college. When Faunce’s father died and left his estate—a small one—to his widow and Arthur’s stepsisters, Overton had tided Arthur over, until he got a place, and his grandmother’s death left him the sole heir of her modest fortune. It was this old bond that had drawn him into the first expedition to the south pole.

Overton, as a lieutenant in the navy, had organized the great adventure, which was financed by an old friend of his father. He had selected Faunce to accompany him, and the trip had been successful up to a certain point. Then the inexorable conditions of polar exploration had worsted their efforts, and they had been forced to turn back. Bitterly chagrined, Overton had returned for another year of preparation, and then, flushed with new hope, and with that kind of fateful vision which pursues the most difficult and dangerous chimeras, he had set out for the second time, determined to plant the Stars and Stripes at the farthest south.