The Charwoman’s Shadow

noticed; but there was growing fast in him the outcast’s feeling, and, however much he scorned the importance folk attached so vainly to shadows, he not only felt his defect but intensely exaggerated it, until impulses came to him to slink and to hide, and he began to know the natural avoidances that are part of the habits of the forsaken and hunted. Therefore he went no nearer to Aragona than where he saw a small azalea, growing a little way ahead; and there he sat down, protected by its shadow, which was only just enough to conceal his deficiency. If any noticed him he pretended to be eating, though he had forgotten to bring any food with him. At times small clouds passed over the face of the sun, but they did not stay long enough to take him through Aragona, so he stayed in the protection of that humble growth that had what he lacked, and wished he had never had to do with magic. Something was making the evening pass very slowly, and making it very cold, and Ramon Alonzo did not know it was hunger.

And at last the sun drew near to the horizon and all the shadows stretched out dark and long; and Ramon Alonzo, more than ever conscious of his own wretched strip of grey darkness, felt amongst these unbridled shadows much as he might have felt on some gala evening had he gone to a glittering fête, where men and women were dressed in all the silks of festival, and had moved amongst them himself in tawdriest oldest cloth. And then the sun set and his buoyant spirits arose and, feeling himself the equal of any material thing, he left the humble protection of the azalea and strode on towards Aragona.

No sooner had he come to the fields and gardens that lay about the village than idlers saw him and stood up at once and called aloud to warn the village folk, as though their idleness had been a perpetual guard whose purpose was triumphantly fulfilled. “The man with the bad shadow,” they all cried out; and he saw that his story had been noised about, and that this was become his name. Answering voices called from the little streets and out of small high windows, and there was the noise of feet running. And then some ran to the tower where the ropes hung down from the belfry, to ring the bells that they rang against magic or thunder, and those mellow musical voices went over the fields to protest against Ramon Alonzo. They seemed to be flooding all the gloaming with memories, as they carried to Ramon Alonzo there in his loneliness vision on vision of times and occupations from which he was now cut off and debarred by a shadow. He felt a wistful love for their golden voices, calling out to him from this land he had lost, where dwelt the happy men that had not touched magic; but when the bells rang on and on and on a fury came on him at the narrow folly of the folk that made all this fuss about a shadow, and he flung his arm impatiently to his sword-hilt. But when he saw, amongst the crowd that was hastening to gather against him, women and even children, and the protestation of the bells still filled the air with outcry, he perceived that there was an ado that it was beyond his sword to settle. So he turned back along the way he had come; and soon his shape was dim on the darkening hillside to the eager crowd that watched and talked in the village, and soon their excited voices reached him no more, and he heard no sound but the bells warning all those lands against him.

For a while he paced the hillside in the chill, full of all such thoughts as arise from hunger, and that thrive in the cold and fatigue that hunger brings; doubts, fears, and despairs. What was he himself, he wondered, now that his shadow had left him? Was he any longer a material thing? And he helplessly cast his mind over all known forms of matter. Were any of them without shadows? Even water and even clouds. And what of this sinister thing with which he associated, the magician’s piece of gloom? How much was he a fellow conspirator with it? How much was it damned?

And his thoughts turned thence to the dooms of the Last Day. How much was a shadow necessary to salvation? Would the blessed Saints care for so light and insubstantial a thing? But at once came the thought that they themselves had renounced material things and were themselves immaterial and spiritual, and might set more store by a shadow than he could ever know.

And all the while as he walked on the darkening hillside doubts asked him questions and despairs hinted replies, which might neither of them ever have spoken at all had he thought to bring some food with him in a satchel. And all the while the blue of the sky grew deeper, and moths passed over the grass, with a flight unlike the flight of whatever flies by day, and little queer cries were heard that the daylight knows not; and then, like a queen slipping silently into her throne-room through a secret panel of oak, bright over lingering twilight the first star appeared.

It was the hour when Earth has most reverence, the hour when her mystery reaches out and touches the hearts of her children; at such a time if at all one might guess her strange old story; such a time she might choose at which to show herself, in the splendour that decked her then, to passing comet or spirit, or whatever stranger should travel across the paths of the planets. Ramon Alonzo, cold and lonely while star after star appeared, not only drew no happiness from all that mellow glow, but saw