The Bride of the Nile — Complete by Georg Ebers (best historical fiction books of all time txt) 📖

to her before their marriage, and a poem which Orion had once addressed to her; she tried to read them, but the words danced before her eyes, and she was forced to lay them aside. She took up a little packet containing hair cut from the heads of her sons after death, and a lock of her husband’s. She gazed on these dear memorials with rapt tenderness, and now the poppy juice began to take effect: the images of those departed ones rose clear in her mind, and she was as near to them as though they were standing in living actuality by her side.

Still holding the curls in her hand, she looked up into vacancy, trying to apprehend clearly what had occurred within the last few hours and what lay before her: She must leave this room, this ample couch, this house—all, in short, that was bound up with the dearest memories of those she had loved. She was to be forced to this—but did it beseem her to submit to this Negro, this stranger in the house where she was mistress? She shook her head with a scornful smile; then opening a glass phial, which was still half-full of opium pillules, she placed a few on her tongue and again gazed sky-wards.—Another face now looked down on her; she saw the husband from whom not even death could divide her, and at his feet their two murdered sons. Presently Orion seemed to rise out of the clouds, as a diver comes up from the water, and make for the shore of the island on which George and the other two seemed to be standing. His father opened his arms to receive him and clasped him to his heart, while she herself—or was it only her wraith—went to the others, who hurried forward to greet her tenderly; and then her husband, too, met her, and she found rest on his bosom.

For hours, and long before the incursion of the Arabs, she had been feeling half stunned and her mind clouded; but now a delicious, slumberous lethargy came over her, to which her whole being urged her to yield. But every time her eyes closed, the thought of the morrow shot through her brain, and finally, with a great effort, she sat up, took some water—which was always close at hand—shook into it the remaining pillules in the bottle, and drank it off to the very last drop.

Her hand was steady; the happy smile on her lips, and the eager expression of her eyes, might have led a spectator to believe that she was thirsty and had mixed herself a refreshing draught. She had no look of a desperate creature laying violent hands on her own life; she felt no hesitancy, no fear of death, no burthen of the guilt she was incurring—nothing but ecstatic weariness and hope; blissful hope of a life without end, united to those she loved.

Hardly had she swallowed the deadly draught when she shivered with a sudden chill. Raising herself a little she called her maid, who was sitting up in the adjoining room; and as the woman looked alarmed at her mistress’s fixed stare, she stammered out: “A priest—quick—I am dying.”

The woman flew off to the viridarium to call Sebek, who was standing in front of the tablinum with the Vekeel; she told him what had happened, and the Negro gave him leave to obey his dying mistress, escorting him as far as the gate. Just outside, the steward met a deacon who had been giving the blessing of the Church to a poor creature dying of the pestilence, and in a few minutes they were standing by the widow’s bed.

The locks of her sons’ hair lay by her side; her hands were folded over a crucifix; but her eyes, which had been fixed on the features of the Saviour, had wandered from it and again gazed up to Heaven.

The priest spoke her name, but she mistook him for her son and murmured in loving accents:

“Orion, poor, poor child! And you, Mary, my darling, my sweet little pet! Your father—yes, dear boy, only come with me.—Your father is kind again and forgives you. All those I loved are together now, and no one—Who can part us? Husband—George, listen...”

The priest performed his office, but she paid no heed, still staring upwards; her smiling lips continued to move, but no articulate sound came from them. At last they were still, her eyelids fell, her hands dropped the crucifix, a slight shiver ran through her limbs, which then relaxed, and she opened her mouth as though to draw a deeper breath. But it closed no more, and when the faithful steward pressed her lips together her face was rigid and her heart had ceased to beat.

The honest man sobbed aloud; when he carried the melancholy news to the Vekeel, Obada growled out a curse, and said to a subaltern officer who was super-intending the loading of his camels with the treasures from the tablinum:

“I meant to have treated that cursed old woman with conspicuous generosity, and now she has played me this trick; and in Medina they will lay her death at my door, unless...”

But here he broke off; and as he once more watched the loading of the camels, he only thought to himself: “In playing for such high stake’s, a few gold pieces more or less do not count. A few more heads must fall yet—the handsome Egyptian first and foremost.—If the conspirators at Medina only play their part! The fall of Omar means that of Amru, and that will set everything right.”