The Charwoman’s Shadow

risk of death was gone, new troubles and even terrors overtook him. On Earth he had lost his shadow and lost a fight; hereafter his salvation. He was defenceless in this sinister house, for his sword had failed him, and impetuously he had cast his careful and patient plans away. He believed that none could advise him; he saw, as men often do in such times of despondency, nothing between him and everlasting damnation. He would not even pray, counting himself already among the damned, unto whom prayer is forbidden. He heard the charwoman late at her work in a corridor, but moved away from her, being in no mood to speak. But she saw him and came after him, and, seeing all at once the need that he had of comfort, she brought it him, though he would have none of it, so that she had to give comfort without his knowledge.

He did not tell her that his false shadow was gone, and would not tell her that the magician had beaten him, nor that the shadow-box was locked forever, and his soul involved in the doom of his true shadow; but he said, “All is lost.” And this he repeated often, whenever he thought she was trying to give him comfort.

“But you have the first syllable of the spell,” she said.

Little had this comforted her when first he had told her, but now that he needed comfort she said it as earnestly as though by this one syllable alone the long box could be opened.

“All is lost,” he repeated.

“The first syllable is Ting,” she said.

“All is lost,” said Ramon Alonzo.

“The next might be Tong or Tang,” said the old woman. Idle enough such a remark, unlikely to be true, light words on which to build a hope of escape from Hell; Ramon Alonzo did not even answer them; and yet they started a thought in the young man’s mind that later led to a plan, out of which he built a hope, as slender as that last bridge that the Muslim crosses, but the hope seemed to lead to salvation.

XXIII

The Plan of Ramon Alonzo

When the charwoman found that the despair of Ramon Alonzo was so vigorous that she could bring him no comfort then, she went back to the dismal haunt of her brooms and pans, while he went lurking down the passages to watch for the egress of the magician, bent only on clutching the shadow-box, without any thought or plan how to rescue the shadows within it. He found his sword was still gripped in his hand and, looking at it, even in that dim light, he saw that its glitter was gone and all the steel gone grey from its meeting with magic. A long while he waited. And, shadowless there amongst so many shadows, he envied once more the common inanimate things that had their simple shadows and excited no man’s wonder. The magician lingered in his gloomy room, till Ramon Alonzo wondered what dreadful plan he was working out against him for having drawn sword in the room that was sacred to magic. But already he had forgotten Ramon Alonzo and was brooding on problems beyond the young man’s guesses. That he had fought to protect his shadows was no more to him than it is to a master chess-player that he has locked the door of his room, when he goes to study alone the mysteries of the Ruy Lopez. Fight and antagonist were soon forgot, and he was following intricate orbits of unknown moons, a lonely imagination.

From such studies he rose late, and Ramon Alonzo saw his dark shape loom through the doorway when the light of evening was far gone from the corridors. To his joy he saw that the door had been left wide open, and before the magician’s steps had died wholly away the young man rushed into the room that was sacred to magic and had his hands on the shadow-box. First he put his sword’s point to the crack between box and lid, then he smote the box with the edge of it. But not thus easily are souls won from damnation. The open door would have hinted to any mind that was calmer that there was something about that box that was not to be opened by the first earthly implement. The gap between lid and box was narrower than the gap between one granite slab and the next in the temple beside the Sphinx, narrower than the line between night and day; the delicate point of the rapier looked gross beside it. And as for the material of the box it was not of wood, which the young man had thought to shatter, but some element that cared for the edge of steel no more than steel itself cares for the edge or point of a thin feather. He picked at the padlock then; and something about the padlock’s glittering hardness brought him to calmer ways, and taught him that, though his soul was in peril of loss, yet unreasoning haste would help him no better in this than it would in any trifle of daily things.

He put the shadow-box slowly back in its place and sheathed his sword, from which lustre and temper and ring seemed all to have gone, and walked thoughtfully thence and came to the stairs of stone, and ascended them and saw his spidery bed. There he lay down for such a night as men have who see doom close. Though the doom be only earthly they plan and plan, and mix up their plans with hopes, and then again they mix them with despairs, till all over the web of reason that makes their plans come curious patterns of the despairs and hopes; and least of all the weaver knows which is which. And the stars go slowly gliding by, and the gradual affairs of Earth; and the plans race on