The Great Impersonation | Page 5

lost."
"He is a great man," the doctor declared enthusiastically. "What he sets
his mind to do, he does."
"I suppose I might have been like that," Dominey sighed, "if I had had
an incentive. Have you noticed the likeness between us, Herr Doctor?"
The latter nodded.
"I noticed it from the first moment of your arrival," he assented. "You
are very much alike yet very different. The resemblance must have
been still more remarkable in your youth. Time has dealt with your
features according to your deserts."
"Well, you needn't rub it in," Dominey protested irritably.

"I am rubbing nothing in," the doctor replied with unruffled calm. "I
speak the truth. If you had been possessed of the same moral stamina as
His Excellency, you might have preserved your health and the things
that count. You might have been as useful to your country as he is to
his."
"I suppose I am pretty rocky?"
"Your constitution has been abused. You still, however, have much
vitality. If you cared to exercise self-control for a few months, you
would be a different man.-- You must excuse. I have work."
Dominey spent three restless days. Even the sight of a herd of elephants
in the river and that strange, fierce chorus of night sounds, as beasts of
prey crept noiselessly around the camp, failed to move him. For the
moment his love of sport, his last hold upon the world of real things,
seemed dead. What did it matter, the killing of an animal more or less?
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. Without knowing definitely
why, he wanted him back again. Memories that had long since ceased
to torture were finding their way once more into his brain. On the first
day he had striven to rid himself of them in the usual fashion.
"Doctor, you've got some whisky, haven't you?" he asked.
The doctor nodded.
"There is a case somewhere to be found," he admitted. "His Excellency
told me that I was to refuse you nothing, but he advises you to drink
only the white wine until his return."
"He really left that message?"
"Precisely as I have delivered it."

The desire for whisky passed, came again but was beaten back,
returned in the night so that he sat up with the sweat pouring down his
face and his tongue parched. He drank lithia water instead. Late in the
afternoon of the third day, Von Ragastein rode into the camp. His
clothes were torn and drenched with the black mud of the swamps, dust
and dirt were thick upon his face. His pony almost collapsed as he
swung himself off. Nevertheless, he paused to greet his guest with
punctilious courtesy, and there was a gleam of real satisfaction in his
eyes as the two men shook hands.
"I am glad that you are still here," he said heartily. "Excuse me while I
bathe and change. We will dine a little earlier. So far I have not eaten
to-day."
"A long trek?" Dominey asked curiously.
"I have trekked far," was the quiet reply.
At dinner time, Von Ragastein was one more himself, immaculate in
white duck, with clean linen, shaved, and with little left of his fatigue.
There was something different in his manner, however, some change
which puzzled Dominey. He was at once more attentive to his guest,
yet further removed from him in spirit and sympathy. He kept the
conversation with curious insistence upon incidents of their school and
college days, upon the subject of Dominey's friends and relations, and
the later episodes of his life. Dominey felt himself all the time
encouraged to talk about his earlier life, and all the time he was
conscious that for some reason or other his host's closest and most
minute attention was being given to his slightest word. Champagne had
been served and served freely, and Dominey, up to the very gates of
that one secret chamber, talked volubly and without reserve. After the
meal was over, their chairs were dragged as before into the open. The
silent orderly produced even larger cigars, and Dominey found his glass
filled once more with the wonderful brandy. The doctor had left them
to visit the native camp nearly a quarter of a mile away, and the orderly
was busy inside, clearing the table. Only the black shapes of the
servants were dimly visible as they twirled their fans,--and overhead
the gleaming stars. They were