The Charwoman’s Shadow

Peter told in all fullness, and learned that the Duke had just drunk of a flagon of wine, he knew at once with a guilty inspiration that it had been the love-potion, and supposed that by some mistake of the serving maids the flagon meant for Gulvarez had been changed with the one for the Duke. Then anger came on him against the magician, and a hatred of all his spells, and he determined to put his plan into instant practice. But this plan involved writing, for he meant to write the syllables of the spell that opened the shadow-box, one by one amongst other writings, and to trick the magician into reading them for him. Therefore he thanked and said farewell to Peter, and as soon as ever the man was out of sight he turned his back upon the house in the wood, and travelling fast but cautiously and going wide again round Aragona under cover of night, came secretly the next morning out of the forest to the little door at the back of the priestly house. And there as Father Joseph opened the door, ready to give absolution for some small sin, the first words that greeted him were: “I pray you, Father, to teach me the way of the pen.”

Truly now there is no sin in the pen itself, though it be a full handy tool in the fingers of liars, and the greater part of the cheating that there is in the world is done by the pen to this day. And whatever Father Joseph suspected of Ramon Alonzo’s work he could not easily refuse instruction in the proper handling of aught that was in itself so innocent. He therefore rather temporized.

“The pen,” he said. “That is indeed, no doubt, a worthy tool; yet of little use to the laity. Those things it is needful to know are written already, and, should more ever be necessary, are there not monks to write it? Or is it to be supposed that those most illustrious presences, our spiritual overlords, should have neglected some matter that it were well to write and should have failed to record it?”

“Indeed no,” said Ramon Alonzo, lowering his head in a pose of appropriate humility.

“For what purpose then would you put your own hand to the pen?” Father Joseph asked of him.

“I would fain know the handling of it,” replied Ramon Alonzo, “yet not from any wish to write upon parchment, for that is no knightly accomplishment.”

“Indeed not,” said Father Joseph; “yet to know the handling of a pen, as your father knows, and the way that it takes up ink, and sometimes to have essayed sundry marks with it, as he hath, upon parchment, are things that add credit to a knightly house. This much I will teach you. But deem not that there is aught to be written that hath not long since been well said, and committed to parchment, and given to the charge of those whose duty it is to watch and protect learning.”

No more than this Ramon Alonzo needed. He therefore thanked Father Joseph courteously, who went and fetched a pen; and soon the young man was being taught the way of it, where the fingers go, the place of the thumb, the movement of the whole hand, the method of taking ink, and the suitable intervals.

“Here,” said Father Joseph, “near the window, where you shall have the full light.” For Ramon Alonzo had seated himself in a corner and dragged the little table to the darkest part of the room.

But Ramon Alonzo, as it drew near noon, shunned any approach to light, and would go near no spot on which shadows fell. Whether Father Joseph noticed or not this strange avoidance of light, his intellect pounced at once on his pupil’s trivial answer, excusing himself for keeping his seat in the dusk of the corner; and from that moment his old suspicions came on to the right trail, which they never left till the strange secret they followed had been tracked up to its lair.

As Ramon Alonzo came by the knack of the pen he began to copy one by one on the parchment those three syllables, clear in his memory, that were the key of the shadow-box. He rejoiced to think that by asking Father Joseph for never a letter of the Christian alphabet he persuaded him that he sought for no more than he said, a certain way with the pen that should be a knightly accomplishment. Far otherwise was it: for, as Father Joseph watched those sinister syllables that were no language of ours, he began to see a young mind given over wholly to magic, and as each syllable appeared on the parchment he muttered inaudibly, “The Black Art. Oh, the Black Art.”

But with practice Ramon Alonzo made those syllables clearer and clearer, until they appeared on the parchment whereon he wrote no otherwise than as they were in the great book of the magician that lay on the lectern in the room that was sacred to magic. Father Joseph watched the work of the pen that he guided, and all the while saw those syllables growing clearer, until, although he knew not what they were, nor the language in which they were written, he saw unmistakable omens and threats about them, and all those omens were magical, sinister, evil. Ramon Alonzo carried it off lightly, saying he but made idle strokes with the pen, believing he deceived Father Joseph. That hour for which he so often yearned went by, when the shadows of other men were the same as his, and still he worked at the pen. He saw, still close in his corner, the red and level rays shine in and lend a splendour to Father Joseph’s knickknacks. He saw the evening come, and those big Cathayan shapes that he made, black and bold in the gloaming. Then Father Joseph arose to light his tapers, and before he did