The Charwoman’s Shadow

he had got, that tawdry piece of gloom, stood all alone on the hill in the deepening gloaming, making helpless human plans that he hoped to set against magic. There was his sword, that he had never used yet on any serious business; he would confront the magician with its slender point and make him open the shadow-box; its purpose was to rescue the oppressed, then why not those hapless shadows that lay with his own in the box? And then there was the spell he had seen in the book, with which the Master opened the lock of his shadow-box. But he could not read the spell, which was in Chinese; and did not know with what art from his stores of magic the Master would meet the passes of his merely terrestrial sword. Vain plans that melted away as fast as he formed them.

Then the sun set; and in the sudden loss of gladness that all things felt, the faint melancholy that tinged wild grasses and tended gardens, Ramon Alonzo had comfort. For a little while he seemed to have lost nothing that all nature had not lost: he did not know that the word had gone out “The man is shadowless,” and that he would have to travel far, and faster than that rumour, to find any kindly human welcome again. And now it was the hour when all things sought their homes, and Ramon Alonzo turned towards the wood.

He came to the wood before the gloaming faded, but amongst those oaks it was as dark as night. Once more he pried for the house; once more its dark door was before him all of a sudden as he picked his way round a tree. It stood ajar as though tempting whatever was lost in the wood to enter that sombre house and be robbed at least of its shadow.

Again as Ramon Alonzo went in through that door he saw the magician’s presence increasing the gloom of the hall.

“You are late,” said the magician.

“I am late,” said Ramon Alonzo, and strode on to pass the magician, his left hand resting lightly on his sword-hilt. When the Master of the Art saw Ramon Alonzo’s humour he lost some of his ease, and stood there pondering answers to what his guest should say; for he saw that the great defect in his artificial shadow had by now been detected, and was ever anxious that nothing mortal should guess ought of his dealings with shadows. But Ramon Alonzo said nothing. He walked on silently into the deeps of the house, and presently the magician turned away and went sombrely back to the room that was sacred to magic, and unpadlocked his shadow-box; and soon in a riot of power exerted on helpless shades, he forgot all the irk he had felt at having one of his crooked dealings discovered.

But the young man called Anemone through the house; and she heard him and came from the nook in which she was resting, and met him in one of those dark passages, and led him back to the nook. It was a space beneath a wooden stair that ran whither she knew not; once in every generation she would hear the steps of the magician resounding above her head, going gravely up the stair upon which she was not permitted, and coming blithely down. One side of the space was open to the passage, but in the part that was sheltered by the stair she had a heap of straw to lie on, and all her pans and pails. Old brooms against the wall seemed to add to the darkness. She led him silently there before they spoke, seeing his attitude full of trouble if it was too dark for her to see his face; and there they sat on the floor on patches of straw, and she began to light a candle, a thing she had saved up out of old pieces of tallow.

“I have found out about his shadow,” he said.

“Ah yes,” she said, “a mere piece of gloom.” She knew he must have discovered it when she saw how late he was out.

“It will not grow,” he said.

“Never an inch,” she answered.

“You warned me,” said Ramon Alonzo.

She only sighed. She had known that the magician was after his shadow, but knew not all his tricks. Had she dreamed that he would have dared to offer one of his wretched pieces of darkness even in part exchange for a good human shadow she would have warned Ramon Alonzo of the specious imitation. And now she regretted she had not. And as she sighed a sudden tremor shook her, and shook the wretched candle she had just lighted, and convulsed her again and again, till the straw upon which she sat rustled audibly with her tremblings. And Ramon Alonzo suddenly trembled too, as he had trembled once before in that strange house, and previously he had put his tremors down to the draughts and the damp, but now they were more violent.

“It is our shadows,” said the charwoman, leaning towards Ramon Alonzo and speaking with chattering teeth.

“Our shadows?” said he.

“They are out on dreadful journeys,” she replied.

“Whither?” said he.

“Who knows?” she said. “And we are feeling their terror.”

“Has he that power?” he gasped.

“Aye,” she said. “He is sitting there now over his shadow-box, taking them out and driving them off by the dreadful spells he uses, to carry messages for him to spirits far from here. And their misery and terror touches us, for so it is with shadows.”

Ramon Alonzo was shivering now with a fear that was strange to him. The charwoman watched him a moment.

“Yes, yes,” she said, “he has our shadows out.”

“Are they far from the house?” he asked between chattering teeth.

“Beyond Earth,” she answered.

This he could scarcely believe. But now a gust of more dreadful shivering shook her, and he too felt the touch of a sudden chill.

“They are beyond the paths of the planets now,” she