And so they came to the ridge of the hill and saw the willowy lands. The low sun glittered in their faces, no longer a flashing centre of power avoided by human eyes; but a mystery, an enchantment, almost to be shared by man; and wholly shared by solitary trees, and bands of shrubs, far off on the wild plain, which now drew a mystery about them, as men in the tended fields began to draw their cloaks. They gazed some while in silence at those strange lands, which none saw from any window in Aragona; seeking their mystery which was almost clear and was coming nearer and nearer; and finding it, but for the tiniest shrubs and shadows, amongst which it hid, though barely, its secret enchantment. And as they looked at that strangeness, part spell and part blessing, descending on all those acres out of the evening, not a ripple of laughter shook the calm of their wonder. And then a cold wind blew for only a moment, rising up from its sleep in nowhere and moving to distant sails; and they stirred as the wind went by, and their search was ended.
They turned round then to look back at Aragona, with the late light on its spires, and its windows flashing; and saw men drawing toward it home from the fields. They stood there wondering to see how far they had come; waiting in idleness for the next whim to guide them, a little band of three with the young man in the middle. The slope they had just climbed lay golden below them.
Then Ariona screamed. Again she screamed before Lolun had followed the gaze of her terrified eyes. Then scream after scream went up from Lolun also.
Ramon Alonzo stood silent in sheer amazement between them. Then they sprang away from him making the sign of the Cross. But just as they sprang away Ramon Alonzo saw for a moment, amidst the shining grass, his shadow between their shadows; theirs lying so far along the golden slope that they ran a little way out to the level fields, his only five feet long.
XI
The Chill of Space
“So it does not grow,” said Ramon Alonzo bitterly.
He was all alone on the hill and the girls had fled. Alone with a mere strip of gloom; a thing refused by the charwoman. So this was the shadow he had received so confidently, believing he had obtained from magic something without payment. A mere patch of darkness that neither dwindled nor grew. In a flash his memory went back to the suspicion he had suddenly had on the stair, and recalled how the shade of the trees in the heat of the day had hidden the evil secret a little longer. He remembered how two evenings ago it had seemed not so late as it was; that was his lying shadow. But he no longer thought of it as a shadow at all; it was mere art, and the Black Art at that. It counterfeited what his own shadow had been in the middle of that fatal afternoon, and could no more grow than shadows in pictures grow.
What should he do? A chill came into the evening, depressing all his thoughts, and his fancy roamed to the long thin magical box, in which his young shadow lay. He pictured it locked in the gloom with other lost shadows, fallen a slave to magic. He thought of its blitheness at dawn, on dewy hills in Spring; and then he looked at the sinister thing beside him, an outcast amongst the lengthening shadows as he was now an outcast amongst men. At that moment he would sooner have been shadowless like the charwoman than to have that mockery there looking ludicrous in the landscape, and seeming to taunt him with the folly he had committed after warning enough. He turned his back on it and his eye fell then on the willowy lands a little to the left of the sun, and he saw the great trees far off with a new jealousy. Almost silvery their great shadows looked, slipping over the grass in the evening; and he saw the beauty of shadows as he had not seen before, and saw with envy. It had come to this already, that the man was jealous of trees.
From the grand substantial forms of the distant trees, and those dark comrades that vouched for them as being material things, he bitterly turned away, and looked once more to the spires of Aragona, with his gaze held high to avoid the mockery at his feet. But not by lifting his gaze could he escape the thought of his folly, for now he saw Lolun and Ariona hastening home over the fields, and knew he had lost his part in material things.
Some slight regret, some reluctance, Lolun showed as she went, which Ramon Alonzo was not able to see. He only felt all tangible things were against him.
“Must we leave him?” said Lolun after they had run for a while.
“He is not earthly,” cried Ariona.
“We might stay for only a little,” said Lolun.
“It were sin,” said the other, “though for only a moment.”
“Must we never sin?” sighed Lolun.
“Sin? Yes,” said Ariona, “where there is absolution. But this …” and she shuddered.
“This?” whispered Lolun, half terror, half curiosity.
“He has had traffic with what we may not name.”
And, as Ariona said this, the last of the sun’s huge rim disappeared from the hill, and a chill came into the air; and their doubts all turned to fears in the hour of bats. So they hurried on and did not stop to rest, and came all weary into Aragona; and there the news spread quicker than their tired feet could carry it that Ramon Alonzo had trafficked in the gaudy wares of damnation.
And he, with that pitiable ware
