The Perfume of Egypt by C. W. Leadbeater (smart ebook reader .TXT) 📕

“My dear fellow, what in the world is the matter with you?” said Charles. “What has happened?”

“Thank God, it is you,” said Henri, “and that you look quite well again; but surely I should rather ask you what happened and where you went last night, when you so mysteriously disappeared.”

“Disappeared!” said Charles. “What do you mean? I left you at about six o’clock, you know, and you were to call at my friend’s house at half-past ten, but you never came, and I was really anxious about you.

“Never came!” said Henri. “What do you mean? Certainly I came; I met you — “

“What!” interrupted Charles, “You met me? But I have never seen you since I left this hotel at six o’clock. There is some mystery here, and you look as though it had been a terrible one. Sit down now, and tell me all about it.”

“I will,” said Henri; “but first tell me where you have spent the night.”

“At my friend’s house, of course,” said Charles. “I dined with my friend as I intended, but unfortunately after dinner a slight faintness came over me. Nothing serious — no; but it lasted some time, and left me feeling weak and tottering, and my friends insisted that I should not think under such circumstances of attempting our adventure, nor even of trying to make my way back to the hotel until after a night’s rest. They seized upon me with kindly fussiness, they put me to bed in their spare room, and administered cordials to me, assuring me that when you called they would explain everything to you and, if I were still awake, would bring you up to my bedside. But long before you were due, I had fallen asleep under the influence of their medicine. I slept until this morning, and awoke feeling perfectly refreshed and strong and well again. Having heard that you had not come after all, I was anxious to see what was the matter, so I came to the hotel as soon as possible, and here I am! I am all impatience to hear your story.”

Henri told it as well as he could, to the accompaniment of many exclamations of wonder from Charles, and then they began gradually to try to construct some sort of a theory as to what had really happened. One thing at least seemed clear; that terrible Baron had somehow or other foreseen their intention, perhaps had invisibly accompanied them during their examination of his house in the afternoon, and then had resolved to lure Henri to what might very well have been his destruction, by taking the place of his friend, upon whose company and assistance he was depending for the due carrying out of his plan. Perhaps, indeed, the Baron may somehow or other have caused Charles’s indisposition; at any rate he unquestionably decided to take advantage of it by personating him; and it is equally certain that he kept up his materialisation for so long a time by draining away Henri’s strength.

In this very fact lay the peculiar horror of the situation — that Henri himself had felt unusually nervous, and certainly would not have undertaken the investigation but for the presence and support of his friend; and yet at the critical moment, when above all things support was needed, that friend himself proved to be the apparition! They talked over the matter for hours, but they could make nothing more of it than this. On one point at least they both heartily agreed, that they desired to make no further investigations into the mystery of the Baron’s room.

Nevertheless, they felt that they owed it to their good old friend, the caretaker, to pay one more visit to his cottage, and to relieve his mind as to the consequences of their strange adventure. But they took care to make that visit at high noon, and nothing would have induced either of them to enter that fatal house again. The old caretaker had been sunk in the blackest despair; but when he saw them both safe and well, he blessed God fervently and declared that a great weight was lifted from his heart, for he had been feeling all morning that he should never forgive himself for his share in the events of the previous night.

They told him their story, for they felt that that at least was due to him. They asked particularly whether he had seen Monsieur Charles the night before, and whether he had detected any difference in him, but the old man said:

“No, I did not notice the second gentleman particularly; now I come to think of it, it is true that Monsieur Charles stood back away from the light that shone out through the door, but I took no particular notice of this, since I was myself in a very agitated frame of mind.” And then he broke forth again in rhapsodies of relief that after all there was no blood upon his soul, since they were both safe and well.

They pressed on him a still further gift, assuring him when he protested that the experience through which they had passed was indeed well worth it to them; but though he was much the richer for this strange adventure, he asseverated most fervently that never again under any circumstances whatever, not even for all the wealth of the Rothschilds, should any one with his consent spend a night in the Baron’s room.

I, Victor King-Norman, am an old man now, and the events of my boyhood, of which I am about to write, lie half-a-century behind me. But even now it is painful to recall them, and I should not have disinterred them from the grave of time and renewed their vivid sensations, but for a request from an honoured friend whose wish is law to me. In obedience to that command I tell my tale, suppressing only the true names of some of the actors in the drama.

My father, Norman King-Norman, had been a man of considerable reputation in London in his youth, in the days of King William IV of somewhat inglorious memory. After he married my mother he disappeared altogether from the London firmament of which he had been a luminary, and lived all the year round at Norman Hall, his ancestral home in the north country.

When railways began to be heard of, he was keenly interested in them, foresaw a magnificent future for them, and invested much of his fortune in them. When I was thirteen years of age he had become the leading director of a certain railway then in course of construction in South America, and in connection with it he found it necessary to visit that continent — a much more serious voyage in those days of paddle-wheel steamers than it is now.

He took with him his family, consisting of my mother, myself, and my younger brother Gerald — a child of about seven years. We took a house at the seaport town which was the terminus of the railway, and resided there during the greater part of our stay in the country; but my father’s business frequently took him into the interior, to the unfinished part of the line. I believe that the contractors found themselves unable for some reason to carry on the work, and that consequently my father, on behalf of the Company, practically took the completion of the line out of their hands; at any rate, whether I am correct as to the business details or not, I know that after the first few months his absences from the town were frequent and prolonged. On several of these expeditions I was, to my great delight, permitted to accompany him; and once, on the memorable occasion whose history I am about to relate, my little brother Gerald was also allowed to join the party. The mother’s anxious eye had detected — or she fancied so — some slight sign of diminished strength in the little boy; and it was thought that the entire change of life involved in a few days camping-out “up country” would be beneficial to him.

Before I can make my story intelligible to those who have not lived in South America, it will be necessary for me briefly to explain the social conditions of that marvellous continent. There are — or were at the time of which I speak — four principal races among the inhabitants of that part of the country in which lies the scene of my tale.

First came the descendants of the Spanish and Portuguese conquerors — a haughty, indolent race; a race courtly and hospitable, by no means without its good qualities, but jet one whose strongest characteristic was an immeasurable contempt (or the affectation of it) for all other races whatsoever.

Next came the Red Indians — the earlier lords of the soil; of these many tribes had adopted a kind of squalid semi-civilisation, but many others were still savages untamed and untamable — men who regarded work of any kind as the deepest degradation — who hated the white man with a traditional, unrelenting hatred, and (strange though it may seem) more than reciprocated the boundless contempt of the blue-blooded hidalgo of Spain. It will no doubt be incomprehensible to many of us that a half-naked savage can entertain any other feeling than envy for our superior civilisation, however much he may dislike us; but I can only say that the quite genuine unaffected feeling of the Red Indian towards the white man is pure and unmitigated contempt. It is not flattering to our self-love, but it is absolutely true for all that; and an uncomfortable suspicion will sometimes creep in that there are aspects of the case in which his feeling is — well, not so very unreasonable.

Third came the Negro race — no inconsiderable portion of the population, and chiefly in a state of slavery, though the Government was doing all in its power to remove that curse from its territories; and last and worst came what were called the half-breeds or half-castes — a mixed race which seemed, as mixed races sometimes do, to combine all the worst qualities of both its parent stocks. Indian, Spaniard, and Negro alike despised them; and they in turn regarded all alike with a virulent hatred. So strong were these feelings that, when it came to enlistment in the army, the other races absolutely declined to serve in the same regiment with the half-castes, and these people therefore had to be drafted into regiments by themselves, so that there existed in the army regiments of both types, and their feelings towards each other were decidedly unfriendly.

At the time when my story begins these feelings of scarcely-veiled hostility had at last broken out into actual warfare. I forget what was made the excuse for the outbreak; some orders which were given to the half-caste regiments offended their dignity in some way, and there was an open mutiny. Four of these regiments marched off under the leadership of a man named Martinez, an officer, not without a certain amount of ability, but bearing an atrociously bad reputation. He was popularly credited with having broken over and over again every commandment in the decalogue; but whether all this was true or fabulous, it was at least certain that he was a man of vicious temper and abominable cruelty. Nevertheless he was said to be a good though unscrupulous leader, and there was a certain dash about him which made men of his own race follow him.

The affair ought to have been nothing but a petty mutiny quickly suppressed, and indeed that was what the Government wished to believe with regard to it. The Government of any South American State