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

arm was rapidly tiring, and it was only by the most tremendous exertion that I could move that unwieldy sword quickly enough to guard against his lightning-like blows and thrusts. I knew that slowly and surely he was beating down my guard, and that, if he once did that, my fate was sealed. At last, after a shower of mighty blows, came a lightning-like thrust at my heart. I parried, but my failing arm was some infinitesimal fraction of a second later than it should have been. I struck the blade down, but not quite far enough. It was turned from the heart at which it was aimed, but it ran into the fleshy part of my thigh. Springing back after the thrust, as a fencer does, Martinez caught his foot in a root of the tree and went over backwards, his sword falling from his hand. In a moment I leaped upon him, put my foot upon his breast and the point of my sword at his throat. He cried out for mercy.

“Mercy!” I said, jerkily perhaps, for I was panting from the terrible exertion of the fight; “what mercy did you show to my brother?”

And I pressed the point of the sword upon his throat.

Yet again he shrieked for mercy. Somehow in some previous part of the struggle the breast of my shirt had been torn open, and the little silver and ebony crucifix which my mother had fastened round my neck was hanging outwards as I stooped over him.

“Mercy!” he said, “for the sake of the Christ whose image you wear!”

A half laugh came from me to hear this renegade, who had tried to make me trample on the crucifix, now begging for his life in the name of that same Christ whose image he had profaned. But not for that would I be turned aside.

I had recovered my breath by now, and I drew back my arm to make the final thrust, when suddenly that arm was stayed. Once more beside me stood my brother, looking up earnestly into my face, and holding back with his little hand the arm that would have avenged him. This time at least it was no hallucination, for Martinez saw it too. I saw the awful look of terror in his eyes; I saw the sweat of fear break out upon his face as he groaned in horror. But I looked into the eyes of the dead. My brother’s hand was on my arm, and he was looking up gravely, earnestly, pleadingly, into my face. I could not kill his murderer now. As I threw down my sword and drew back with a strange emptiness in my heart, the most lovely and loving smile broke out over my brother’s face, and then once more he was gone. As I turned away from the prostrate Martinez, he drew a knife out of the leg of his long leather boot, and stabbed at me even as I was retiring. I sprang aside instinctively, and before he could rise to his feet a little knot of the Government soldiers came racing up and sprang upon him, wrested his knife from him and made him their prisoner.

Still with that strange empty feeling I turned on my heel, and was about to go I know not where, when I caught sight of the forbidding face of Antinahuel, taking aim at me with a rifle over the top of a bush. My movement was more instinctive than reasoned; with the quickness of long practice I drew out the revolver from my belt, and two reports sounded together. I felt a numbing blow in my right arm, and the pistol fell from it, to the ground; but before I myself sank down beside it I had time to note the horrible blue hole in Antinahuel’s forehead — blue for a moment, before the blood gushed out of it as he fell backwards. I myself fell also, for the blood was pouring from the wound in my thigh, in addition to the shock caused by the rifle bullet; and so for a time all knowledge of mundane affairs passed from me.

When I came to myself again it was dark night, and I lay for a time watching the stars, still hardly conscious, hardly able to think of my present situation and caring nothing for the future, conscious chiefly of one thing — an awful thirst produced no doubt by the great drain of blood from the body. I had suffered much at many periods of my story, as you know by this time; yet I think that nothing that I suffered was ever so terrible as that thirst while I lay helpless under the stars. The night seemed to be years in length; sometimes I seemed to be unconscious for a few moments, and then I woke with the conviction that I must have slept through a day, and that another night had come upon me, and yet when I looked at the stars I saw that they had scarcely moved.

I lost all count of time, but somewhere amid what seemed the centuries I realised uncertainly that some lanterns were approaching, and presently with a start of joy I heard my father’s voice, and saw his face bending over me. I cried to him for water, and in a moment he held a flask to my lips, and then I think I must have swooned again for pure joy that that thirst was allayed. Quickly now my wounds were bandaged and I was carried gently away from the field.

And here to all intents and purposes my story ends. Of what avail to tell of my slow nursing back to health and strength, of the thanks given both to my father and to me by the Government of the country, and the decorations it bestowed upon us for the victory which, it said in its politeness, was so largely due to our bravery? What need I say of that day a month later, when I stood silently watching amidst a mob howling out execrations, while Martinez was shot in the great square of the capital? The hatred had gone — gone utterly out of my life, wiped out of it by the touch of the dead. No, not of the dead, but of the living, for I had looked into my brother’s eyes, and I knew that he lived and loved me still. And so I was content, though then I knew nothing of the beautiful fate which would bring my brother back to life fifteen years later in a country far away, which would bring him in that new body into my life again, which would enable us both to recognise one another, and to realise that death can never part those souls that truly love.