They had riven their last embrace long ago, because a death, bloody and terrible, beheld them with dead, chilling eyes. Even that last embrace, with all its passionate despair, seemed a sacrilege, a repeated parricide. What if the murder was no murder? Then there was the dead. There, studying them with staring eyes, staring beyond them into an eternity of vengeance. Was that a place for love’s endearments? For tenderness dear and delicate? No! no! depart! Fly, lover! Seek thy saddest exile! Crush thy dear, dear longings! Forget! ah, yes, forget! That guiltless crime they knew of severed them. Go! Let this impossible love be crushed or forgotten.
Crushed! Forgotten! These despot words are uttered easily; but all the while they know their futileness. Stronger grows mightiness until it has prevailed. And love is the strongest strength. This is the permanent and uncontrollable victor, stronger than death.
But slowly for these lovers the sense of their guiltlessness overcame the awe of crime. Heaven pardons ah! things more guilty far, than their unhappy and bewildered innocence. They saw pardon rising over them, pale but hopeful as the twilight of dawn. And when this pardon overspread their hearts, like the throbbing violet of daybreak, and the pardoned lovers met, how could they know that parting had not done its common work? All common loves are slain by separation. So these two lovers stood apart; each ignorant whether Heaven had been generous to the other of its gift of pardon, and each unwilling, as proud souls may be, to hold the other to old pledges and perhaps detested bonds. Apart, but approaching surely; until the pleasant, meaning playfulness of picnic talk, and the fateful apparition of the flirt, and the chance confession of an old, half-forgotten folly, had revealed to them, clear as their hopes had been, the certainty of their love, unchanged, unchangeable, eternal, infinite.
He had taken Diana in his arms again. Her hurt was surely not grave, a cut upon her arm as she fainted and fell. But again another spasm of paling agony passed over her face.
“The old wound,” she said despairingly. “I am fainting again. Take me to Clara.”
He lifted her—she, so dying as it seemed—he so strong in his heart’s agonies of death.
He did not note it then, but he remembered long afterward, that as he passed from the fort, the moon was rising pale and solemn, through the dull, leaden blush, reflected from sunset upon the misty east.
The gay picnic party had hardly observed Dunstan’s brief absence. Clara was watching the fort, and as Dunstan issued with his burden, she ran wildly down the slope. She met them at the foot of the escarpment. Dunstan had found himself staggering at the last few steps and was resting, kneeling by Diana. Clara knelt by his side.
“Dear sister,” said Diana, unclosing her eyes, and seeming to revive at her presence. She made a feeble movement with her wounded arm. “It is nothing, dear Clara. But I am suffering from the old pain. Forgive me that I concealed something. I could not tell you all. Now I can, for I have found my old unchanged love. We will rest here a moment. I grow stronger. Perhaps I can walk to the boats. Harry, tell her all our sad story. Dear Clara!”
Dunstan, in a few quick full words, gave Clara the history of their love and their parting. Clara listened, divining much with eager interpretation.