diana was still very ill. they found it necessary to keep her perfectly quiet. the old wound, never fully healed, had given her much pain of late. mental excitement at the picnic and her fall had produced feverish symptoms. her physician had fears which he hardly ventured to express; which he hardly dared formulate, even to himself. she had aroused herself enough during the day to send a kind message by clara to dunstan, and to ask that they would write to miss sullivan to come on. a letter to that lady would go by the morning mail to boston.
dunstan was in an agony of suspense. during the day, he tried to distract his fixed madness of thought by training pallid over the beach. the other men were also out on the beach or the road. bets were nearly even on pallid, knockknees, and nosegay. toward evening, dunstan mounted his own horse and galloped off up the island. the wild sunset and windy drift of torn, black clouds was such a mood of nature as suited the terror at his heart. it was a night like this when, in texas, he had started from san antonio to ride sixty miles[234] across the country and catch his train. there were such stormy masses of weird clouds, so flashed through by an august moon, so floating at midnight, when, as he dashed along the trail, shouting in savage exhilaration, all the wildness of his nature bursting forth in mad songs and chants of indian war, suddenly his trusty horse, who had borne him thousands of miles in safety by night and day, over deserts of dust and wastes of snow, fell with him, on him, crushing him terribly. and then, by just such fitful gleams of moonlight, he had dragged himself desolately along, with unbroken limbs, but mangled and bleeding—dragged himself whither he saw a midnight lamp, as of one who watched the sick or the dead. and near the spot whence the light came, he had sunk voiceless, fainting, dying, until he was awakened by a tender touch upon his brow, and saw bending over him, in the clear quiet of midnight, diana, who had found at last and was to save her endymion: diana, from that moment to become the passion of his every instinct, the love of every thought.
but now, now it was she who was the wounded, the fainted, the dying. o god! he could not think of this despair, and he cried aloud and galloped on furiously. the drift of wild black clouds followed him as he rode and met him more gloomily as he returned.
he could not rest, and soon resumed his sentinel[235] tramp along the shore. there for hours he walked, the breakers counting his moments drearily. the horizon all to seaward was a black line, and over it the sky was lurid blankness; it did not tempt the voyaging hope to circle ocean, chasing distant dawn. he could not seek a refuge for his miserable hopelessness in that reasoning with the infinite called prayer. was it to make him happy or content that men, questioning the infinite and receiving for all answer, “mystery!” had essayed for themselves to interpret this dim oracle and had feigned to find that sorrows and agonies are strengthening blessings? so the happy and the placid say: so say not the lonely and bereaved. pain is an accursed wrong, for all our self-beguiling and self-flattery in its lulls.
this was a man of thorough, tested manhood. there was no experience that educates the body and the mind which he had not proved. all this preparation was done; he was facing the duties of his full manhood. and now that was to happen, that sorrow he knew must come, which would make every effort joyless, every achievement a vanity, every belief a doubt, every day sick for its coming night of darkness, and every morn sad for its uninvited dawning and eager for speedy night.
as he moved along the shore, he was aware again, as on the previous night, of a shadow lurking in the dimness.
[236]“possibly a mischief-maker,” he thought, and half-concealing himself, he waited to watch. the figure approached—a man. he stepped forward to meet him in the moonlight.
“paulding!”
“dunstan!”
the two friends had not met since the picnic. paulding knew, only as everyone now knew, that his friend and diana were engaged. he therefore could conceive why there was one night wanderer by the shore. in a few passionate words, he told dunstan his own secret—the secret of his sorrowful unrest. he, too, loved diana.
“my dear friend,” said dunstan tenderly, as the other sobbed and was silent, “i have seemed almost a traitor to you and if i could have dreamed of this, i would have even violated my pledge to tell you before what i now can tell permittedly. i was too busy with my own happiness in recovering diana to think of any other man or woman.”
“recovering her?” repeated paulding. “then you had already met——”
“yes,” said dunstan, and recounted the incident of his night ride from san antonio and his fall. “diana went out upon the lawn,” he continued, “to study the moon, her emblem. she heard my moans. the noble woman was living there alone with her mother, once ruined and mad, and now dying. her whole household consisted of a few negroes and[237] two or three mexican servants. when i awoke from my fainting fit and found her stooping over me, i knew in that moment that she was to be the goddess of my life. love came upon me like a revelation. she had me taken to her house, and herself dressed my wounds and cared for me. you know her dignity and judgment as a woman of society, but you may hardly imagine the energy and skill and contrivance and fearless delicacy she showed in her treatment of me, as i lay there a perfectly helpless invalid. i convalesced slowly. we found that our worlds of society and thought and aspiration were the same. the circumstances were what are called romantic. i need not give you the history of my growing love. you know the woman. you know the man. it was fate. anywhere it must have been the same; there, how doubly certain. i have never known any being like diana; fresh and free and fearless as a savage, and yet the heir of the beautiful refinements of all chivalric ages. oh, paulding—when i think of her, as i knew her then, with a mind and character of an empress, and her dear tenderness of heart, as i knew her and loved her then, and shall forever, i cannot let her die!”
he groaned and was silent for a while. the melancholy crash of breakers undertoned his story, and now, as he paused, it filled the interval like the unpeaceful symphony of some great genius, wasting itself in doleful music.
[238]“diana had collected in that distant seclusion,” he went on, “all the beautiful necessities of elegant life. we had books and music. our acquaintance, friendship, love marched strong and fast. it grew with my convalescence. it was now admitted love. she had told me the whole of her mother’s sad story. her mother was dying; in days, weeks, or months it would be all over. she besought me to remain and not leave her alone with death. i had never seen her mother, who was confined entirely to her bed.
“you remember that beautiful bowie knife you gave me in california. one day i was sitting on the piazza cleaning that and my six-shooter, for the first time since my fall. i had given the knife an edge keen as a gleam and was trying it on a chip. suddenly diana ran out to me. her mother was wild, she said, almost in convulsions. the old nurse was terrified to death; would i come quick and aid them? she was still speaking, when a mad, ghastly figure, in white, sprang forward and seized her.
“‘devil!’ screamed this maniac, ‘you shall not ruin my child, as you have ruined me,’ and she stabbed diana furiously in the side with a knife. then she leaped upon me. i had the bowie in my hand. there was an instant’s struggle. i felt her cutting at my neck. i was not aware of using my weapon, but she stiffened in my arms and sank away,[239] bloody and wounded. she died there in a moment, horribly—she, diana’s mother!
“diana had fallen fainting, but not unconscious—she had seen the whole. i sprang to her. she repelled me with a look of horror. i was covered with blood, my own, her mother’s, hers. i screamed for help. the old nurse came out, crouching with terror. diana dragged herself away, turning back to give me a glance of utter agony.
“i was left alone with the corpse; i washed my own wounds; they were but trifling. i longed for death. i seemed to myself an assassin. i set myself to remove the traces of the struggle. the old nurse came out and aided me, cowering and shrinking away as i touched her. we carried the poor, lifeless body in—diana’s mother, feebly like her daughter. diana joined us, pale to death. she gave me her hand solemnly.
“‘go,’ she said, ‘this is between us forever—between me and my undying love. i am better. do not fear for me. go. god save and pardon us. let this be a secret between us and him.’
“i crept away like a guilty man. my horse had recovered from his sprain; i rode off and left him with the nearest settler, five miles from her house. i returned and lurked like a wild beast in the woods. i saw the funeral. no one was present but her own people. she was pale, but calm and strong. i must[240] fly despairfully, and on my hands the stain of her mother’s blood.
“my friend, the settler, told me as a piece of general indifferent news that the madwoman up at the big house had killed herself in a fit. that was the accepted story and went uncontradicted. soon after, i joined you in new york.
“that is my story. you can imagine the gradual calming of our minds, as we recognised our real guiltlessness. you can understand why, to escape questions, we seemed not to know each other. we learnt in our daily meetings here that we need not shrink from a new friendship, and then, by a chance confidence at the picnic, that our love was unchanged.
“and now, paulding, forgive this unwilling reticence of mine. you know what was this old wound. i fear the worst. but that we will not speak of.”
“it is a wide world, harry,” said paulding. “there is room in it for many exiles. i shall find my home for wandering—somewhere—anywhere.”
the moon sank away drearily, leaving a ghastly paleness in the west. and the melancholy breakers, in darkness now, went on falling, hesitating, lifting, falling on the black rocks, counting the measures of a desolate eternity.
