I felt sick and faint with fear, and the light of the dancing torch-flames made me reel. I held tight to my father's hand, and I remember thinking how big and strong and warm it was. What was about to happen I could not guess, but I knew that the shadow of death was with us, and the chill of him in my heart.
We had not gone more than two hundred yards when we came to a clearing amidst the trees—a breezy, open space, that the moon lit over the waving pine-tops. Here the jägers divided themselves into two lines, five yards or so apart, and stood motionless as soldiers on parade. Baron von Lichtenberg with his arms folded, stood with his back to us, looking at the clouds running across the face of the moon; and the two army officers, drawing aside, began to undo the swords from the bundle.
"Patrick," said my father, leading me under the shade of the trees, "I struck my kinsman in his own house to-night. The only excuse I can make for that action is to kill him, so let this be a lesson to you the length of your life." He stopped, stooped, hugged me in his arms, and then strode out into the torchlight, and took his sword from Von der Goltz.
It was a curious little speech, or would have been from anyone but an Irishman. But I was not thinking of it. I was mesmerised by the sight before me.
When the two men took their swords they returned them to the seconds. The swords were then bent to prove the steel, and measured, and then returned to the principals.
Then the jägers moved together almost shoulder to shoulder, and in the space between the two lines of torches the duellists took their stand. There was dead silence for a moment.
I could hear the wind in the pines, and the guttering and slobbering of the flambeaux, and a fox barking, away somewhere in the forest.
Then came General Hahn's voice, and, instant upon it, the quarrelling of the rapiers.
The antagonists were perfect swordsmen; the rapiers were now invisible, now like jets of light as the torchlight shot along them. Over the music of the steel, the wind in the pine-trees said "Hush!" and the barking of the fox still came from the far distance.