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Updated: May 19, 2025
Here we are, brought together by some miraculous chance to spend one night of our lives in an African jungle, two human beings of the same age, brought up together thousands of miles away, jogging on towards the eternal blackness along lines as far apart as the mind can conceive." "Your eyes are fixed," Von Ragastein murmured, "upon that very blackness behind which the sun will rise at dawn.
Only the black shapes of the servants were dimly visible as they twirled their fans, and overhead the gleaming stars. They were alone. "I've been talking an awful lot of rot about myself," Dominey said. "Tell me a little about your career now and your life in Germany before you came out here?" Von Ragastein made no immediate reply, and a curious silence ebbed and flowed between the two men.
"And what delay do you think," she asked, with a sudden note of passion in her tone, "would the Leopold Von Ragastein of six years ago have pleaded for? Delay! He found words then which would have melted an iceberg. He found words the memory of which comes to me sometimes in the night and which mock me.
"The Day arrives," Von Ragastein pronounced, his voice shaking with deep emotion. He paused a moment in thought and continued, "the time, even the month, is fixed. I am recalled from here to take the place for which I was destined. You know what that place is? You know why I was sent to an English public school and college?" "I can guess." "I am to take up my residence in England.
This, alas, is as much as I can do for you. For us it must be farewell." "Well, I can't force myself upon you," Dominey said a little wistfully. "It seems strange, though, to meet right out here, far away even from the by-ways of life, just to shake hands and pass on. I am sick to death of niggers and animals." "It is Fate," Von Ragastein decided. "Where I go, I must go alone.
Any school or college friends whom I may encounter I shall be able to satisfy. I have stayed at Dominey. I know Dominey's relatives. To-night he has babbled for hours, telling me many things that it is well for me to know." "What about his near relatives?" "He has none nearer than cousins." "No wife?" Von Ragastein paused and turned his head.
As they embarked upon the final stage of their travels, Seaman leaned forward in his seat in the sombrely upholstered, overheated compartment. "Your home-coming seems to depress you, Von Ragastein," he said. "It was not my intention," Dominey replied, "to set foot in Germany again for many years." "The past still bites?" "Always."
His mind was fixed uneasily upon the past, searching always for something which he failed to discover. At dawn he watched for that strangely wonderful, transforming birth of the day, and at night he sat outside the banda, waiting till the mountains on the other side of the river had lost shape and faded into the violet darkness. His conversation with Von Ragastein had unsettled him.
"I had only heard of the Baron Von Ragastein as a devoted German citizen and patriot, engaged in an important enterprise in East Africa by special intercession of the Kaiser, on account of a certain unfortunate happening in Hungary." "I killed a man in a duel," Dominey said slowly, with his eyes fixed upon his companion's. "It was not an unforgivable act." "There are duels and duels.
"You talk foolishly," Von Ragastein protested. "If there has been tragedy in your life, you have time to get over it. You are not yet forty years old." "Then I turn and consider you," Dominey continued, ignoring altogether his friend's remark. "You are only my age, and you look ten years younger. Your muscles are hard, your eyes are as bright as they were in your school days.
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