A candle in the wind

by Mary Imlay Taylor

She came slowly toward him and knelt beside his chair, lifting her eyes steadily to his.

“I thought I did, and there was once—when I was away from you—that I was tempted. I thought my happiness lay that way, but now——”

He bent over her, his hands clasped hers and held them, his eyes searched hers.

“But now, Diane?” he whispered hoarsely.

She smiled.

“Now I know that you’ve expiated it all, that you’ve come back to me in the semblance that I knew and——” she paused, and a beautiful look came into her face, a look of such tenderness, such faith, that it touched him to the soul, he would have drawn her closer, clasped her in his arms, but her eyes still held his and he waited until she went on softly, with infinite gentleness: “you’re my husband—it was that, Arthur, the bond that I couldn’t break. That, and the hope which has come to me, the hope that I’m not long to be the only one to love you—because—because there may be sometime, before very long now, a great change! Out of those beautiful vague clouds—that I seem to see at the horizon of our lives—coming as surely as the sun rises and the day dawns—a little child is coming to us, Arthur!”

XXXIX

Diane awoke the next morning with a sensation that was so new to her that it seemed almost unreal. She felt at peace—at peace with herself and with the world. She was willing now to accept her share of the public disgrace, even her share of the unpleasant notoriety that was sure to come to Faunce. It was the price of his redemption, it was the earnest of his return to the semblance that she had loved, and she was willing to pay it. She was willing to face any sacrifice that meant that her husband, the man she loved, had completed his atonement, that he had had the supreme courage to tell the truth and bear his punishment.

As she lay there—unaware that it was late and that she had overslept—she thought of him with a new and beautiful tenderness. She had left him, she had treated him with scorn and cruelty, and he had borne no ill will toward her, he had continued to love and to trust her. Whether she had deserved it or not, he had trusted her! In their long talk the night before, in that moment when she had told him her secret, that the dawn of a deeper love in her heart had revealed the truth to her—that the bond between them was too strong for her to break—he had not failed her. It had seemed to her that his joy and his relief at the assurance of her love had crystallized into a sterner purpose, a resolution to wrest something still from the exigencies of his confession, to rise above it and, for her sake, and the sake of the child who was yet unborn—to reclaim his life, to win back the laurels he had lost, to come back to her, indeed, in the semblance that she had loved. She had seen the purpose rise in him, it had shone in his pale face and his kindling eyes, she had heard it in his voice, although he had given it no form in words. It was as if she had seen the soul of the man rise—at the call of her love and her faith—from the ashes of his despair. She had rekindled the flame of the candle, and her heart was thrilled with a new and exquisite tenderness. The instinct of maternity, the love that lies dormant in the heart of every good woman, was slowly but surely unfolding in hers, and it reached out toward her husband, it brooded over him in his sorrow and his suffering, it was ready to forgive him, to lift him up. It had kindled in her, too, the instinct of defense, the instinct to battle for those she loved—as the leopardess in the jungle will battle to save her young. The thought that the world was against him made him more than ever her own. It was her portion now, not to fly from him, as she had in the mountains, but to stand by him, to fight for him, to help him to that moment—which she no longer doubted—the moment when he should redeem himself, not only in her eyes, but in the eyes of the world.

It seemed to her now, as she lay there, that these thoughts had been with her through the night, that they had, indeed, possessed her with a new gift, a kind of clairvoyance. She seemed to see into the mists of the future and behold there—not the man who had failed at the supreme test in the desert of ice and snow—but the soul of her husband, purified by suffering and lifted to a courage greater than death.