A candle in the wind

by Mary Imlay Taylor

“Oh!”

It was a little syllable, but it voiced Fanny’s awful thought—a thought which had, as she had said, nothing to do with Overton, but all to do with Faunce.

Faunce himself, on the way to New York with Diane, found the situation almost beyond endurance. The long strain had so racked his nerves that he flinched at this crisis. His belief in Overton’s death still survived. He had too keen and harrowing a memory of that awful climax in the ice and snow to be easily persuaded that there could have been a rescue; yet the mere fact that such a rescue meant his certain ruin overwhelmed him.

Even while he assured Diane that it was a mere newspaper story, his heart sank with sickening fear. Racked by conscience in the long months since he had left Overton to die in the polar snows, he had again and again cried out to the night and the solitude that he would give his soul to feel that Overton lived, that he had not abandoned his leader and friend to death, that his conscience was clear. Now, when the thought of Overton’s return was weighed in the balance with his personal disgrace, he was not strong enough to face it.

He saw, in a flash, all it would mean to him—the personal shame, the ruin, the loss of his new-won honors and of Diane’s love. He felt certain that she could never love a man stained, as he was, with a cowardice that was in itself a crime.

A feeling of terror seized him. He had put himself outside the pale of mercy. He knew not only that no word could ever be spoken in his defense, but that the world would be eager to revile him, the veriest wastrel in the street would find an excuse to fling a curse at his cowardice.

He had abandoned a prostrate comrade, leaving him to face death alone. Worse than that, he had taken the only means of rescue—the sledge and the dogs—to secure his own escape. He had sacrificed Overton to save himself whole and without a scratch. If Overton had survived, if he knew anything, he must know this. If he had had the strength to live to be rescued, he might know much more. He could not have been so far gone as Faunce had thought!

Day after day, night after night, the horror of that frozen waste had haunted him. The deathlike face of Overton had appeared to him at nightfall and at daybreak. When Faunce, against his own better judgment, had undertaken the new command, he had merely yielded to the mysterious lure that draws a murderer back to the scene of his crime. He had felt as if unseen hands clutched at him and drew him; as if a shadowy presence, standing at his elbow, demanded this sacrifice, this hideous march back on the trail; as if Overton, dead or alive, held his very soul in thrall.

And now, if some miracle had happened, if the grave was about to give up its dead, Faunce could not escape! He was facing a shame that would be more terrible than the death he had fled. Coward as he had proved himself to be at that supreme moment, he might better die now than face the truth—the truth that Overton would be sure to reveal, if he lived.

On the reality of his death, then, hung Faunce’s only hope. Once more he tried to brace himself up with the thought that it was impossible for Overton to have survived. Yet it was in perfect unison with what he had already endured that this renewed horror should quench his new happiness and make his wedding-day a nightmare. If the shade of Overton, athirst for mortal vengeance, still haunted him, this last exquisite torture was its supreme accomplishment. His broken spirit quivered under the visitation.