“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 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.
“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, 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 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.