Bells were heard now, and then, high over them, their echoes lingering drowsily; hawks rested on the heavy summer air; bright insects shone in it; the idleness that charmed those southern lands and blessed the Golden Age was theirs to toy with, and they let the young man share it.
When the novelty of the beetle and his tracks was lost they turned to other interests, and when they wearied of these they changed again, following novelty yet. And so the afternoon wore on, and the sun went slanting over their happy idleness, when Ramon Alonzo suddenly saw that it soon would be westering, and all at once remembered the warning of the magician. So he made swift farewells, meeting laughing words with words as light as them, and strode away towards the wood. A glance at his shadow seemed to show that it was not so late as he feared; and then he came into the shade of the trees.
To find the house in the wood was not easy even though he knew the way. The closer he got the harder it seemed to become. And when he knew that he was within a few paces of it he could see no sign of any house at all. Then he stepped round the trunk of an oak tree, and there it was. The green door opened to him and, walking into the house, he soon saw the darker form of the magician standing amongst the dimness.
“You are late,” said the Master of the Art.
Ramon Alonzo made courteous apologies.
“Did anything happen?” asked the magician.
“No,” said the young man wonderingly.
“It is well,” said the magician.
“To what had the Master referred?” pondered Ramon Alonzo. “What should have happened?”
Throughout his supper he wondered. Then he drank of that magical wine, which so illumined the mind in the brief while of its power; but the wine only filled him with fear of the strange new shadow.
When the fear faded, as it rapidly did, he had one more matter to ponder; for he had promised that band of maidens that he would join them again in two days’ time, for some purpose that they had named, too trivial for record. He was pondering some way of asking His Mystery for leave to go once more to the frivolous fields that lay beyond that wood, and looking for reasons for his request that might not appear too flippant when exposed to the scrutiny of the magical wisdom that the Master of the Art had gleaned from the ages. And, as he pondered, night came down on the wood, and the unnatural gloom of the house grew naturally deeper.
He would have found the charwoman then to gladden her with the talk of his gay outing, and tales of the frivolous fields, and news of her Aragona; but he knew not where she was: whatever room she frequented lay beyond his explorations. Then it was bedtime for him, and soon he was asleep in his spidery room dreaming of Aragona. And in all dreamland he saw not that band of maidens with whom he had toyed in the golden afternoon, but always only a face far fairer than theirs, which he had never seen before, and yet knew with the knowledge of dreams to be the face of the charwoman.
IX
The Technique of Alchemy
In the glittering morning that came even to that wood, through layers and layers of leafiness, Ramon Alonzo arose; and first he found the charwoman, at work where she mostly worked, on that deep-stained stone.
“Anemone,” he said, “I have been to Aragona.”
“Ah, Aragona,” she answered wistfully. “Was it very fair?”
And he spoke of its beauty, resting amongst its lanes and arbours; and the wide plains dreaming around it, lit with a myriad flowers; and its spires rising above the trees and the houses, taking the sunlight direct from the face of the sun, like planets out in ether. He spoke of the gladdening voices of its bells—like merriment amongst a band of grave old men—wandering through summer air. It was not hard to praise Aragona’s beauty.
And then he told her such names as he had heard of the folk that dwelt in the village, and little tales of some of the older ones that he had got from the maidens’ prattle; but to all this she shook her head mournfully and would hear more of the lanes and the arbours. So he told of these, and the pomegranate groves; but even then there often came over her that mournful look again, and she drooped her head and murmured: “Changed. All changed.” Only when he spoke of the hills far off, and of the tiny valley of the stream that tinkled through Aragona, did content descend on her like an old priest’s blessing given with outstretched hands on some serene evening, as she listened beside her pail overfull of a calm joy.
And when he saw her face as she knelt by her work, sitting back on her heels, arms limp, hands lightly folded, listening with quiet rapture to every word that he told of the old Aragona that lived in her ancient memories, he determined that she should go to her village again and should take a shadow to show in the face of all men.
So he said: “I will get you a shadow. The Master shall make you a false one.”
He had youth’s confidence that the magician would do this for him as soon as he asked it, and if not he should do it because of his grandfather who taught him boar-hunting.
But she cried out: “A false shadow! That is of no avail. A mere piece of darkness. He has
