British -- Costa Rica -- Fiction; Short stories; Travel -- Fiction
“Why am I not sleeping with her as the poor German sleeps? Why did I let
another man take my place in dying for her?” And then he walked away
that the other might not see the tears on his face.
It was a sad night,—that at the Commandant’s hut, and a sad morning
followed upon it. It must be remembered that they had there none of
those appurtenances which are so necessary to make woe decent and
misfortune comfortable. They sat through the night in the small hut, and
in the morning they came forth with their clothes still wet and dirty,
with their haggard faces, and weary stiff limbs, encumbered with the
horrid task of burying that loved body among the forest trees. And then,
to keep life in them till it was done, the brandy flask passed from hand
to hand; and after that, with slow but resolute efforts, they reformed
the litter on which the living woman had been carried thither, and took
her body back to the wild plantation at Padregal. There they dug for her
her grave, and repeating over her some portion of the service for the
dead, left her to sleep the sleep of death. But before they left her,
they erected a pallisade of timber round the grave, so that the beasts of
the forest should not tear the body from its resting-place.
When that was done Arkwright and his brother made their slow journey back
to San José. The widowed husband could not face his darling’s mother
with such a tale upon his tongue as that.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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