So Ramon Alonzo came next night to the house in the wood. But Father Joseph saddled his mule in the morning and rode away by the very earliest light, and came in the afternoon to the hilly house of a priest he knew who had much knowledge of magic; and with him he brought that parchment on which all day Ramon Alonzo had practised those curious signs. This priest went sometimes down to the church in Aragona, but dwelt mostly alone in his house, where he worked on a scheme for the mitigation of sin, or read books exposing magic. Up the rocky track to that house on his struggling mule Father Joseph arrived; and when the gaiety of their greetings was over he showed his friend the marks that were on the parchment.
“I fear, Aloysius,” he said, “we have nought good here.”
Brother Aloysius took it. “Nought good,” he said. “Nought good at all.”
Then he put it down and put on great spectacles and looked at the parchment again and consulted a book, repeating now and then, “There is no good here,” and shaking his head often.
And suddenly he became sure and spoke with a clear certainty.
“Indeed,” he said, “it is a most heathen spell.”
XX
The Magician Imitates a Way of the Gods
And that day went by with its splendours and was added to past days; and night came up and covered the skies of Spain, and the magician sat all alone in his house in the wood. He was not wholly hostile to man; but, sitting there leaning forward upon a table whereon one taper flared, he was brooding on problems so far from our work-a-day cares, so far beyond even that starry paling which bounds our imaginations, that men and women were not to him that matter of first importance they are to us, but only something to be noted and studied as we might study whatever rumours may come of life upon planets of suns that are other than ours. His care for humanity was solely this, that amongst its children, whether in Spain or elsewhere, were those that were worthy to receive and cherish, and carry to those that would bring it to the far dimness of time, the mighty learning that he himself had had from the most illustrious of all the line of professors that had held the Chair of Magic at Saragossa. For the rest, his care was more with the dominion that he held over captive shadows, and their far wanderings; the messages that they carried and the inspirations they brought; than with that narrow scope, and the brief stay, with which we are familiar. Could we know the supplications that his shadows sometimes took for him to great spirits that chanced on a journey near to Earth’s orbit; could we know the songs and the splendours with which they often replied; it might be that our hearts would thrill to his strange traffic till we might forget to blame his aloofness from man. Only in rarest moments, perhaps as an organist sleeps, and his hand falls on to the keys playing one bar straight from dreams; or just at the apex of fever in tropical forests when strange birds are mating; or, eastwards from here, where a player upon a reed in barbarous mountains hits ancestrally on a note that his tribe have known from the days of Pan; or when some flash from the sunset shows a worldwide band of colour that is not one of the colours that man has named; only at rarest moments comes any guess to us of those songs and splendours that the lonely man drew from the spaces that lie bleak and bare about the turn of the comet. And only that day he had learned a curious story, a legend of the interstellar darkness, from a spirit that was going upon a journey, and had passed through the solar planets wrapped in thunder, and had been that morning at his nearest to Earth.
Ramon Alonzo had been absent now for six days; and, having no pupil to whom to transmit the mysteries that he himself had had from so glorious a source, the Master was solely occupied in his loneliness with legend and lore that are not of Earth or our peoples. And as he brooded on matters that are of moment outside our care and beyond the path of Neptune, the step of Ramon Alonzo was heard in the hush of the wood.
The young man entered vexed at that notable failure of the potion he had compounded, and angry for Mirandola, his father and mother, and the whole household of his home. He had pictured the consternation of that house, of which Peter had told him tremblingly not only all, but more; and he laid the blame on the author of the spells, which had seemed too easy for mistakes to be possible, rather than on his own forgetfulness. He entered believing that he owed nothing to the magician, and determined to learn no more of the making of gold so that he should still owe him nothing, and to get his own shadow back as his lawful due, and to rescue the charwoman’s as an act of Christian chivalry. The two men met, one brooding upon a wrong, the other upon affairs beyond the orbit of Neptune, so that they each spoke little. And presently Ramon Alonzo, drawing forth a parchment, said: “Master, this script which was brought to Spain by a wandering man of Cathay, perchance hath matter of moment, and may even be worthy of your skill in strange tongues.”
And with that he handed the parchment to the magician. The master took it and held it low near the candle. “Ting,” he said. “Ting.” Then was silent
