A candle in the wind

by Mary Imlay Taylor

“Lately I’ve begun to feel that I—I did care for you!”

IX

It was late that evening before Faunce left the house. As the door finally closed behind him, a biting wind drove the first flakes of a snow-storm into his face. The touch of it, the sting of ice on his flushed cheek, roused him.

He had been, for a while, like a man in a trance, who sees through the golden mist the beautiful shapes of an Elysian vision, and hears the heavenly music of the spheres, while he lies there powerless alike to grasp the full joy of his translation or to confess his own unworthiness to bask in its heavenly sunshine. Only a moment before he had held Diane in his arms, the soft touch of her cheek was still warm on his, the fragrance of her shadowy hair lay still upon his shoulder; yet he felt the intensity of his moral solitude, the depth of the gulf that yawned between her warm faith in him and his hidden shame.

His love for her, his firm determination to wrest happiness from the depths of his misery—the primal instincts of a nature that could not resist temptation—had driven him on. He had won her; however reluctant, however spiritually blinded she had been to his moral attributes, she had promised to be his wife. But his triumph was short-lived, for he knew already that his joy was like a beautiful, shimmering bubble, dancing before the wind. In an instant it would break, and his outstretched hand would grasp only the empty air.

A moment before he had been so happy, so passionately confident that his soul had at last risen above its dishonor. With the assurance of Diane’s love, he could shake off the shackles of fear and rise to such heights of courage, to such magnificent security, that not even the clutching hands of the Furies who had pursued him day and night could drag him down.

A moment ago—how different it had been! He thought of the warm old room with its mellowed air of age and comfort, the dark rug on the floor, the fire sparkling on the hearth, the somber but beautiful hangings, the few fine pictures—a Gainsborough that an ancestral Herford had brought from England as a family treasure, a small Greuze head, and a simple but lovely landscape by an American painter, who had loved the shaded dell and the dashing waterfall. He could see again the table with the lamp, the carved armchairs, and the figure of Diane in a pale house-gown that she had worn at dinner, its simple folds revealing the long, dryadlike lines of her slender form and the buoyant grace of her easy pose as she stood there, beside her own hearthstone, talking to him.

The kindled loveliness of her eyes haunted him still. He had held her soft hands in his, and had felt the tremulous touch of her lips, believing himself one with the immortal lovers of old; but now the door had closed on him, and the night, wild and wintry and touched with snow, had engulfed him. He shuddered awake from his dream of bliss, and saw himself as a lost soul at the gate of paradise.

That was his fate. Happiness might be within his grasp, but it would elude him and mock him. He might attain, but he could never possess. A power greater than life itself had laid hold upon him, an invisible force was crushing him down, and his soul, like the proverbial candle in the wind, only leaped and flickered at the mercy of the gale.

A driving snow-storm swept across the open country, and the trees creaked and swayed in the tempest; but he walked on. The very tumult of it seemed to submerge the still more cruel tumult in his soul, and he breasted the rising storm with something akin to joy that there was endurance enough left in him to face it. For the time the need of physical exertion relieved his mental tension.