And all the while his own shadow lay full on the floor beside her, as good a shadow as any man’s. He smiled quietly and said nothing.
Then the young man hastened away to the room that was sacred to magic, for he knew the magician awaited him. And the first thing he said when he reached it, and saw the blacker mass of the magician out-darkening the gloom of the room, was, “Master, will you make me a shadow for me to give to the charwoman?”
“What should she do with a shadow?” he said.
“I know not,” said Ramon Alonzo, “but I would give her one.”
“Idleness comes of such gifts,” the magician replied. “She will go to the villages with it and flaunt it there amongst common mundane things. It will lead her towards all that is earthly, for what is commoner or more vain than a shadow?”
The young man knew not how to answer this. “I would give her a present,” he said, “of some such trifle.”
“Brooches and earthly gauds are for these uses,” replied the Master; “but the wisdom that I have drawn from so many ages is not for such as her.”
“I pray you give it me,” said Ramon Alonzo, “for the sake of what my grandfather taught you of boar-hunting.”
“The teaching that I had from that great philosopher,” said the magician, “is not to be mentioned beside the vanity of a charwoman’s shadow. Yet since you have invoked that potent honoured name I will make the shadow you seek. Bid her therefore come and stand before my door that I may copy her shadow even as artists do.”
At once Ramon Alonzo left the room that was sacred to magic to bring the good news to the charwoman, and found her still at that stone.
“He will make you a shadow,” he cried, “a fine new shadow.”
But none of his eagerness found any reflection in her wan worn face, and she only repeated with sorrowful scorn: “A piece of common darkness. I know his strips of gloom.”
Then said Ramon Alonzo: “Is my shadow common darkness? Is my shadow mere gloom?”
And he pointed towards it lying beside her pail.
“Yours!” she cried. “No! Yours is a proper shadow. A fine lithe shadow; beautiful, glossy, and young. A good sleek shadow. A joy to the wild grasses. Aye, that is a shadow. God bless us, there are shadows still in the world.”
And he laughed to hear her.
“Then this shadow of mine,” he said gaily, “is no more than what you shall have. He made it.”
“He made it?” she cried out, all with a sudden gasp.
“Yes,” he laughed. “He made it two days ago. And you’ve seen it many a time, and never knew till I told you.”
“O your shadow!” she wailed. “And I warned you. Your sweet young shadow in his detestable box. O your grey slender shadow! And I warned you. I warned you. Oh, why did you do it? I warned you. So proper a shadow. And now it drifts about beyond the world or wherever he sends it when he takes it out of his box, doing his heathen errands and hobnobbing with demons.”
“But this shadow,” he said, pointing to the one that lay now at his heels, a little pale in that house, but grey enough, as he knew, in the sunlight and on the grasses, “is not this shadow slender and grey enough? You have just said so.”
“I did not know,” she wailed, “I did not know.”
“Is any shadow better?” he asked.
But she was weeping, all bent up by her pail. He waited, and still she wept.
“Come,” he said. “The Master will make you a shadow.”
But she only shook her head, and continued weeping. And when he saw that, for whatever reason, she was weeping over his shadow, and that nothing he said could solace her, he left at last with the shadow that only made her weep. As he entered the room again that was sacred to magic he saw the magician standing all in the midst of the gloom.
“She will not come,” said the young man.
And somewhat hastily the Master of the Art passed from that topic. “We will then examine,” he said, “the differences and the kinship of various metals with gold, in order that we may choose those that with least disturbance can be transmuted to that arrangement of the element which forms the rarer metal. And this, as all men know, is accomplished by means of the philosopher’s stone, in the proper handling of which I will instruct you tomorrow, together with all spells that pertain to it; for there is a special dictology, or study of spells, belonging only to the use of this stone.”
He then lay on his lectern, in view of Ramon Alonzo, several angular pieces of metals of different kinds, of a convenient size for handling. About these he lectured with all that volume of knowledge that, in his long time on Earth, he had learned concerning the rocks that compose our planet.
“The arrangement of the element,” he said, “is most near in lead to that which it takes in forming the structure of gold. And this arrangement, the fitting together of particle into particle, is easy to be expounded, were it not for one thing; and but for one thing lead were transmuted to gold with facility. This one thing is colour. For in the final arrangement of the particles, when all else is understood, there is a certain aspect of them which produceth colour, that of all mundane things is the least to be comprehended.”
“Colour?” said Ramon Alonzo, his roving youthful fancy called back to that gloomy room by hearing the Master attribute a wonder to colour, with which he had been familiar through all the years of his life.
“Aye,” said the Master, “the outward manifestation of all material things that come to our knowledge, and yet the nature of it has baffled, and is
