He sighed once.
“I pray you stand up,” he said.
He stood up himself.
She arose without a word, and stood as he said, a calm, serene over her agitation, as the calm of lakes that freeze amongst the mountains in the midst of winter’s violence. Then he carried the shadow to her and kneeled down on the grass near her heels. He turned his back to her as he laid the shadow down, to look his last on the form that he so much loved, before it should be a shadow cast by a substance on which time had wrought its worst. He knew that from these last moments there is nothing to be had but sorrow, and that it were better to have turned away towards the charwoman, looking, at it were, time full in the face. Yet he gazed long at the shadow. And now the shadow was to the charwoman’s heels. It slanted a few degrees to its left, to be right with the sun: the lines of its clothing fluttered a little. But his eyes were only on the merry head, to see the last of the curls. Still the curls crinkled there; still the lips parted in wonder. He kneeled gazing there silent and motionless, as a prophet might kneel and listen before a revelation, whose words were dying away. And still the shadow had not taken the shape of the old substance that cast it.
Then he heard a soft laugh behind him; and its tones were akin, if there be any meaning in tones and any speech in mere merriment, to the tones of streams to which Spring has suddenly come, rushing down Alpine valleys, unknown as yet to the violets, and unbound them from months of ice. And the shadow, the young shadow with wondering lips, responded. It was the shadow of one that laughed under swinging curls.
And as he gazed, as lost mariners gaze at sails, he saw the little curls move backwards and forwards, and the parted lips shut. Still he waited for the change that he dreaded; still no change came. And a wonder came on him greater even than his unhappiness. How could this thing be? How could a withered substance cast such a shadow? Again that low laugh.
He looked round then and saw her, saw the form that cast that shadow, saw the young girl he loved; for the shadow was stronger than the magician’s gift. That weary immortality was gone; and the ravages of those years that magic had given had all fallen away; wrinkles and lank hair were gone at the touch of the shadow; for, although weaker than all material things, yet, amongst spiritual things and the things that war against them, the shadow, for the sake of its shape and its visibility, is accounted as substance; and it was stronger than magic. She had had magical years for a shadow: now the shadow was back and the evil bargain over, and the work of all those dark years was brushed away at the sudden touch of reality; for the shadow was real and had its rightful place amongst our daily realities, while magic was but the mustering of the powers that are in illusion.
Ramon Alonzo wondered to see substance taking the shape of a shadow, for he had become so accustomed to the withered shape that magical years had fastened upon the charwoman that he thought it her own true shape. But her true shape was laughing gently at his wonder, with blue eyes, in the sun, while golden curls were bobbing with her laughter. One wistful look she took at her fair young shadow, and her laughter ceased as she looked on it; then those blue eyes turned again to Ramon Alonzo, and Anemone smiled again.
“Well?” she said.
“Did you know?” were his first words to her.
“Yes,” she answered.
“How?” said he.
“By the long time I have lived with magic,” she answered ruefully.
“Can magic come and go like this?” he asked.
“That is the way of it,” she said.
And still he could hardly believe what he saw with his eyes.
“The bargain is over,” she said, “and my shadow is back.”
“But your shadow is casting a body,” he said in amazement, “not your body a shadow.”
“It was only a shape of illusion, that body,” she said.
“But you? Where were you?” he said.
“It was not my true self,” she said slowly.
He asked her more of this wonder, but she answered more slowly still, and with confused words and fatigue of mind. She was forgetting.
The dark house, the magician, the evil bargain, the long long corridors, and the peril of soul, were all slipping away towards oblivion, after those lank wisps of hair and the long deep wrinkles. Her efforts to recall them became harder and harder; and soon the flowers, the gleaming grass-blades, the butterflies, or any youthful whim, turned her so easily away from effort that Ramon Alonzo saw he would learn no more from her about the ways of illusion, and perhaps never quite understand the power that shadows held amongst shapeless invisible forces such as magic. And while her memories of magic waned his own interest in the things of illusion was waning too, for he had found the one true illusion; and in the light of love all other illusions were fading out of his view; aye, and substantial things, for the man and his donkey passed by them, and the high load of green merchandise, and neither Anemone nor Ramon Alonzo saw anyone go by, or any donkey or merchandise, and though they answered the greeting that the man gave to them, they did not know they had answered. But in a haze that was made of golden sunlight and many imagined things, and that moved with them
