The Charwoman’s Shadow

will believe in a beauty he cannot see? Withered infirmity claims pity, and he had given it her to the full. But beauty demands love. Could he give that to a legend of beauty, to an old woman’s tale? He felt that silence were best. He could have pitied her more deeply without this sorry claim. Words could not build again a beauty that was gone. He patted her hand a little clumsily, where it lay all veins and hollows upon the straw. “Yes, yes,” he said. “All passes. I make no doubt you were fair.”

And she saw that she had explained nothing to him.

“It was then,” she said, with a sudden flash in those old eyes, “then that he took my shadow.”

Ramon Alonzo knew from that look and that voice that he was being told a thing of strange import, before he understood anything else. He gazed at the charwoman and she nodded to him, and still he understood nothing. And all of a sudden he shouted, “The beautiful shadow!” And she went on nodding her head.

The morning was growing late. At any moment he might appear whom they dreaded. He leaped up and ran to the room that was sacred to magic. Once more he bent over the shadow-box. Once more the spell. The padlock opened again and he found the charwoman’s shadow. The rest he left locked in the box, and carried the lovely young shadow gently to the old charwoman.

For all the haste that was urgent he carried the shadow slowly; for friendship and his knightly quest demanded that he should give it to the old woman; and as soon as this was done his love must be over. For he knew well enough that shadow and substance must be alike, and that an old charwoman could never cast the shadow of a lithe and lovely girl. He looked at that glad profile and those curls as he walked, murmuring farewells to them. For he had loved this shadow from the moment he saw it, as he had loved no mortal girl. It was that earliest love at which elders sometimes laugh, prophesying that it will pass. But now, thought Ramon Alonzo, it must pass forever, taking a glory out of his life and leaving all grey. He did not reason that he had only loved for an hour; he did not reason that his love was given to a mere shadow; he did not reason at all. But a grief as profound as the argument of the wisest of elders was settling on him, and not an argument could have removed its weight.

A little while ago he had planned a future in which he should wander through Spain, seeking always for the girl that had lost that shadow; and now that the girl was gone the future seemed empty.

He came to the dingy haunt of brooms and pans where the charwoman sat on straw, and stood still and looked long at the shadow.

How long he stood there he knew not. There are loves that are each one the romance of a lifetime. Such a love must illumine the whole of a man’s memories and light up all his years. It goes down time like lightning through the air. The length of it in hours is not to be measured. How long he stood there he knew not.

Then he went to the charwoman. “Your shadow,” he said.

If consolation had been possible to him the joy he had brought to the old woman’s face might have indeed consoled him.

“Yes,” she said, “that is my shadow.”

And she spoke all hushed as people sometimes do watching rare sunsets, or about the graves of youthful heroes too long dead for grief.

And then she would have fondled it and patted its curls, but drew back her hand ere she did so, for it would have clung to her and she did not wish to take it there. So they stood there looking at it a while longer as it lay on the young man’s arm; and the moments on which their lives depended went wasting away, for the footsteps of the magician tapped faintly in a far corridor: he was about, and they did not hear him.

“You were most lovely once,” said Ramon Alonzo.

“Aye,” she said smiling, and gazing still at the shadow.

“Take your shadow,” he said curtly, after one sigh.

And at that moment she heard the steps of the magician plainly coming towards them.

“He is coming here,” she cried.

Ramon Alonzo listened. It was clearly so. And then he remembered his kerchief that he had left in the pane in the room that was sacred to magic. After that they spoke in whispers.

Nearer and nearer came the steps in the corridor; the magician was between them and the door to the wood. Ramon Alonzo stepped hastily towards the old woman, the shadow outstretched to her. “No, no,” she whispered, “he must not see.”

“It is dark in this corner,” he said, pointing.

“No, no,” she said, “we must flee.”

They fled down the corridor away from the door to the wood, and the magician came slowly after them. They tried to guess from his footsteps how much he suspected. They wondered how much their flight had increased his suspicions. They wondered what weapon he carried, whether of Earth or Hereafter, whether a blade to sunder mortal flesh or one deadly to shadows. They feared a wound that might end all earthly hopes, or a stroke that might rip their shadows clean away from salvation, leaving their helpless souls to share the doom of their shadows. The house was full of fears.

They ran on, Ramon Alonzo still holding the curly shadow, and heard the magician plodding after them. Did he suspect or know? Had he had time at that early hour to open his shadow-box and examine all his shadows? If so, he knew. But if at that hour he had just entered his room, seen the kerchief and looked for Ramon Alonzo at once,