The extraordinary confessions of Diana Please

by Bernard Capes

I never thought it necessary to confess; but always after that, as I came to learn, he descended by the trap and bolted it behind him.

That did not assuage my fears, though it was some comfort henceforth to be spared the pretence of blindness to his flittings—a comfort, I think, to him as well as to me, though his silence on the main point was not to be broken. Ah! if he had only had the courage to set my mind at rest, before its fears grew to a frenzy beyond my control!

Now, as time went on, my hearing grew morbidly acute—during the dark hours of his nightly absences, when I was fastened lonely and frightened into my attic, and sleep refused to come to me—to certain shufflings and whisperings—sounds scarce to be distinguished from the wind and the rain—which filtered to me from the depths below. Sometimes it would seem a sough of blown voices; sometimes a suggestion of dragging; sometimes the low rumble of a cart on the turf, which set my pulses knocking in my ears. Then when, succeeding an ominous silence, George’s step would come mounting stealthily by the trap, on tiptoe thence to his room, I would shudder in the thought of dreadful footprints going by my screen, and would feign the deep-breathing of slumber, lest he should be moved to stop and call to me softly in the voice I had not yet learned to resist.

And so at last, out of all this torment of apprehension, out of the sleepless waitings and breathless listenings, had emerged a spectre, real and present in the end, to whose whispered hauntings I had long struggled to close my ears; whose approach I had sought to stay, beating my hands in air; whose name I had not dared to breathe to myself. And it was murder.

Yes, murder. So only, and only so, was logically expounded that perverted creed of Nature. Livid, terrifying, his hands stained with blood, I saw him in its ghastly glair; saw him savagely wreaking on the social order the wrongs he had suffered at its hands; saw him reverted to the beast he worshipped, tearing his kind, a common robber and assassin.

I will not say that I was convinced and overwhelmed in a breath. For long the hideous shadow of the phantom was poor proof against the sun of present love; would thin, attenuate to a mere gross mist in the light of kind embraces, and honest laughter, and a manly candour—on all, alas! but the subject that most corroded. Only when that later spectre of our estrangement crept between, did it assume a dreadful complexion, glooming through the other. And so, at last, the appalling confirmation.

It had been for weeks a terror to me to creep by the secret passage into Portlock’s kitchen, on the rare occasions when my brief visits there, for the sake of some small change and play of liberty, were invited. For the hole entered close by the locked door, which had come to figure to me for the seal on all most nameless horrors; and I could not pass it by but with averted head, and nostrils held from breathing, and a sickness like to the death I felt it contained. Rather would I strain a little the chance of capture without; and often now, when George was sleeping—for he lay late after his night excursions—I would put the ladder to the hill, and climb, and wander in the hidden furrow above, sometimes as far as the gravel-pit, and there indulge my misery, daring even at the worst a thought of escape. For at length, so far as we knew, the chase of us had ceased altogether, and Portlock was no longer interrogated for possible information.

Wandering thus, greatly unhappy, my thoughts would often recur for shelter to the peaceful nunnery; to my little loving Patty, the dearest pleader of a sister’s repentance; most, and with a self-humbling remorse, to the faithful, unexacting soul whom I had deserted in the tower. What if I had been misled by specious arguments to wound incurably where I had wrought to cure? Could I ever in that case forgive the false advocate? O, surely there was a greater Nature than she in whose name were perpetrated deeds of violence and reprisal? There was the human, the humorous, the tolerant large philosophy of being which Gogo had revealed in his story of himself. His misfortunes had but made him forswear the false goddess in whom weaker men sought to justify their passions. I could never think of him but as the Pan of these later days—the poor limping Pan of our era, beguiled into a hospital, and persuaded to an operation, and shorn of his limp and his legs together. One might meet him begging on a city bridge, and look wondering down for the song of the water in the rushes that were not; one might read his hairy breast into dreams of red dead bracken, and see his eyes, under their matted brows, like little forest pools reflecting glimpses of the sky, and not guess who he was, for he would never whine of better days. He always took fortune like a fallen god, did Gogo. He always smelt sweet, did my monster. And he had not erred in love before he found me.

Could that be said of another? I was never quite able to forget that discarded favourite who had warned a threatened brother and assisted him to escape. Though I had never deigned to give the thought place in my mind, the unacknowledged shadow of it, of what had been her inducement to the act, slept in me, to rise presently and add its quota of darkness to the whole. I was very unhappy—very forlorn and tired and unhappy.

But, on that morning, as it blew bitter cold without, and I longed for the fire that was never ours in that chill cellar but by proxy of the chimney-back, I brought myself to go down, and scratch out the signal to Portlock to let me pass if it were practicable. He responded at once, drawing away the grate; and I crept in and through, and stood up on the farther side. Instantly a grumpy exclamation from him, as instantly clapped back with his great hand on his mouth, took my eyes to my skirt, whereto for a flash I had seen his directed. And there, smearing the pale folds of it, was a long, foul streak of blood.