A candle in the wind

by Mary Imlay Taylor

His love for her was so strong and so deep that he was willing to pay the price, to pay any price to save her; but she had fled from him, fled from him after he had told her how deeply he loved her. He felt a kind of shame, now, that he had argued with her and tried to make her give up her husband. He remembered, oddly enough, some broken lines of Browning’s. He could not have placed them, but they came back to him like a message and steadied him:

Were it not worthier both than if she gave

Herself—in treason to herself—to me?

He repeated the words persistently, and in a way they helped him to compose his thoughts, to recall his conviction that she was right, that she had done the one thing that a good woman—brought up as she had been in the close hedge of conventions—would have done. No matter how her heart might have misled her for a moment, she could do nothing else but return to the man she had married, whose sin—if it had been a sin at all—was not against herself, but against another man—a man who also loved her.

This feeling, this conviction—which was not new, but had all along been lurking in his heart—helped him to calm himself finally. He rose from his stone, which might well have been called a seat of repentance, and made his way back to the old lodgings that he always used on his visits to Mapleton.

The house was kept by a widow, a woman whom his mother had long ago befriended, and she always set his room in order and kept his belongings together. In a way it was like going home. It was the only home he had known for years, and was likely to be the only one he would ever know now, he reflected, as he approached it. As soon as this expedition was under way, as soon as he felt free of the necessity of shielding Faunce, he would find some way to set out himself, he would plunge again into the mist and the mirage of the polar seas.

It was reflections like these that made it almost startling to open the old gate, which had an annoying habit of coming off one hinge—a habit that had clung to it ever since his boyhood—and to feel that it was admitting him again into the commonplace existence that he had left behind him when he started out. There were the same old piazza, the same old dog still asleep on the door-mat, the two porcelain jardinières, with the same straggling begonias that he had seen there spring after spring. There, too, was the parrot that Overton had brought from South America.

He went in, and was half-way up-stairs when a messenger-boy’s sudden arrival on the front porch aroused the dog and the parrot. The boy had brought a telegram, and wanted fifteen cents for carrying it over from the station. Overton paid the money and tore open the yellow envelope. The message was from Faunce.

You are needed to see party about expedition. Can you come at once?

Overton stared at the telegram in some amazement. He had purposely concluded his own connection with the expedition to give Faunce a free hand; he could not imagine what had occurred to bring such a summons. He had arranged with Asher to silence all questions about his own rescue. The English accounts had been too vague, so far, to arouse active suspicions, and the very fact that he had given over the command to Faunce had silenced all rumors. What, then, was the necessity for his immediate presence—a necessity so great that Faunce had summoned him? Undoubtedly there was something unexpected.