V
Ramon Alonzo Learns of the Box
Before that day had passed Ramon Alonzo had learned the alphabet. He did not master it in one lesson; yet when the magician ceased all in the midst of his wonders, in order that Ramon Alonzo should have the midday meal, he felt that the pathway was already open that led to the boundless lands made gay by the thoughts of the dead. And in those lands what spells might he not unravel; and amongst them the formula for the making of gold. If the magician ate he ate secretly. But Ramon Alonzo, going by his bidding to the room in which he had eaten and drunk overnight, found hot meats once more that awaited him.
As he entered the room he heard a small scurry of feet near the far door, but saw nothing. He ate; then guided by an impulse of youth, which is always curious until it is sure it knows everything, he began to roam through the darknesses of the house in order to find who it was that served those meats. And the further he went, the lower the corridors ran, till he had to bend low to avoid the huge dark beams above him.
Sometimes he came on towering doors in the darkness, and opened them and found great chambers, wanly lit by such daylight as came through the leaves of the forest, which everywhere were pressed against the windows. In these chambers were tapestried chairs set out for a great assemblage, with ancient glories carved upon their frames; and dim magnificencies; but the cobwebs went from chair to chair and covered all of them over, and, descending in huge draperies from the roof, cloaked and festooned the splendours that jutted out from the wall. He went from door to door, but found no kitchen. And all his quest was silent but for the sound of his own feet.
At last, as he turned back by the wandering corridors, he heard in the distance before him the work of the charwoman. She had ceased her sweeping and was scrubbing on stone. He walked to the sound of the scrubbing, and so found her, the only living thing that he had met since he left the magician. She was in a passage scrubbing at one stone, upon which, as Ramon Alonzo could see, she had often worked before, for it was all worn with scrubbing. There was blood on the stone, but though years of scrubbing had hollowed it, the blood had gone deeper than the hollowing; so deep that Ramon Alonzo asked her why she toiled at it.
“It was innocent blood,” she answered.
The young man did not even ask for that story; the house was so full of wonder. He asked instead what he had sought to find: “Who serves the dinner?”
“Imps,” she said.
“Imps?” said Ramon Alonzo.
“Imps that he catches in the wood,” she said, looking up from her work on the floor.
“How does he catch them?” he asked.
“I know not,” she said. “With his spells, like as not. He says they are no use in the wood, and so he catches them.”
“Are there imps in the wood?” asked Ramon Alonzo.
“It is full of them,” she said.
Turning to a more profitable matter he said: “I am learning a mystery from the Master.”
“For what price?” she asked quickly. “What price?”
“Only half my eyesight,” he told her.
“Oh, your bright eyes!” she sighed.
“I can see so far,” he said, “that that is a little matter. One must needs pay something for learning.”
But she only looked wistfully at his eyes.
“When I have learned that mystery I can find others for myself,” he said cheerfully. “You know those jars of dust on his shelf with their names in writing upon them: I shall be able to read what dust they are.” And he would have told her many of the mysteries that seemed to lie open to him. But she interrupted him when he spoke of the jars, saying: “I know nothing in that room. He has put a spell against me across the lintel, so that I may not enter.”
“Why?” he asked, remembering the cobwebs and the great need of tidying.
“He has my shadow,” she said, “in a box in that room.”
“Your shadow!” he said, perturbed by the grief in her voice.
“Aye,” she said, “and he’ll have yours there too!”
“Not he,” said Ramon Alonzo.
“And the light of your eyes,” she said sorrowfully.
But Ramon Alonzo, who already knew half the alphabet, was far more concerned with the unravelling of new wonders than he was with any price he should have to pay, and he turned from the charwoman’s talk with a certain impatience to be once more engaged upon serious things. She sighed and went on with her work on the bloodstained stone.
When Ramon returned to the room that no charwoman ever entered he saw the magician awaiting him, standing beside a book that made light the secrets of reading. Once more the young man toiled at the mystery, and by evening the alphabet was clear to him. That which
