A candle in the wind

by Mary Imlay Taylor

At first he had thought that he could conquer his weakness, that there was courage enough left in him to force forgetfulness; but there was not. The thing possessed him, pursued him, harried him, and he had come to the end of his endurance. He began to dread night as a condemned man must dread the final summons. In the daytime, and among his fellows, he believed that he bore himself almost with the air of a hero. He had, indeed, thought his performance perfect, but Dr. Gerry had discovered a cleft in the armor, had put his finger on a sore spot.

Was it possible, then, that others saw it, too? That Diane herself might have suspected it when she forbore to question Faunce? The thought, laying hold of him, added a fresh pang to his misery. He turned with a gesture of disgust and plunged into the night. He could not sleep, and here, in this quiet spot, he could walk until the day broke, unseen and unsuspected.

V

In the weeks that followed Faunce drifted restlessly from Mapleton to New York, from New York to Washington, and then, assured of Diane’s continued presence there, back to Mapleton.

Meanwhile he had been signally honored, as the surviving leader of the successful expedition, both at home and abroad. A medal had been voted to him by Congress for his distinguished services, and he had been notified of his election, in London, as a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Praise and emolument poured in upon the young and handsome explorer, while only one man—the chief financier of Overton’s two expeditions—devoted any large sum to a memorial tablet for the lost leader.

Like the proverbial candle in the wind, Overton’s life and his reputation had been extinguished together in the eternal snows; but they had not been exiled from the mind of Faunce. He was fully aware that his honors rightfully belonged to his friend, that he was in much the same position as the mythical jay in the peacock’s plumes. He could think of no simile less trite to express his misery.

If Overton had lived, Faunce might have been envious—he knew that he was not free from that taint; but he could at least have accepted any tribute that came his way with a light heart. As it was, his honors were so many millstones about his neck. He grew pale and thin, and the dark shadows under his eyes made their expression take on a haunted look; but his very modesty, his evident hesitation to accept the full measure of applause, and the growing melancholy in his handsome face, only served to increase the interest in a personality so attractive and so reserved.

It appealed most keenly, perhaps, to the imagination of Fanny Price. Her girlish fancy clothed the handsome explorer in all the attributes of the favorite heroes of romance. The fact that she perceived, only too clearly, his infatuation for Diane Herford whetted her admiration by removing its object from the proximity of her own possible adorers.

A pretty young thing and a great favorite, she had no lack of “beans,” to use the familiar language of the inhabitants of Mapleton; but none of them, in Fanny’s mind, could be compared to the hero of two antarctic expeditions and the probable commander of a third. Talk was already current that the same great financier who had furnished the sinews of the Overton expeditions was about to equip another and more perfect ship to be placed at the command of Arthur Faunce.

There was another reason, too, which caused a little flutter in Fanny’s innocent breast. She was well aware that a heart is often caught on the rebound, and she knew that, next to Diane, she was an object of interest to Faunce. The question therefore resolved itself into the more complex problem of the state of Diane Herford’s heart. Did she, or did she not, care for Faunce?