Left alone with the starlight, to which the work of the moth allowed an ample access, Ramon Alonzo considered his host. The room was ominous and the house enchanted and there might well be spells in it more powerful than his sword, yet if his host were friendly it seemed to him he was safe amongst his enchantments, unless some rebel spirit should trouble the night, who had revolted from the spells of the magician. He generously accepted the Master’s explanation of the state of the room, shrewdly considering him to be a man so absorbed in the perpetuity of his art that he gave no attention to material things; so trusting to his host’s expressions of goodwill, and of gratitude to his grandfather, he lay down on the bed to sleep, untroubled by fear of spells or spirits of evil, but he took off none of his clothes, for against the risk of damp he felt there was none to guard him.
Either he slept or was in that borderland where Earth is dimmed by a haze from the land of sleep, and dreams cast shadows yet on the shores of Earth before they glide afar, when he heard slow steps come up the stairway of stone. And presently there was a knock, to which he answered, and a crone appeared in the door, holding the lantern that the magician had lately carried. Age had withered her beyond pity; for whatever pity there be for sickness and hurts, youth feels little pity for age, having never known it, and the aged have little pity to give to their fellows, because pity is withering in them with many another emotion, like the last of the flowers drooping all together as winter nears the garden. She stood there feeble and wasted, an ancient hag.
And before the young man spoke she quavered to him, with an earnest intentness the fervour of which not even her age could dim, stretching out a withered right hand to him as she spoke, the left hand holding the lantern: “Young master, give him nothing! Give him nothing, whatever he ask! His prices are too high, young master, too high, too high!”
“I have little money to give,” said Ramon Alonzo.
“Money!” she gasped, for her vehemence set her panting. “Money! That is naught! That’s a toy! That’s a mousetrap! Money indeed! But his prices are too high: he asks more than money.”
“More than money?” said Ramon Alonzo. “What then?”
“Look!” she cried lamentably, and twirled the lantern about her.
The young man saw first her face, and a look on it like the look on the face of one revealing a mortal wound; and then, as she swung the lantern round, he suddenly saw that the woman had no shadow.
“What! No shadow?” he blurted out, sitting suddenly up on his heap of cobwebs and sheets.
“Never again,” she said, “never again. It lay over the fields once; it used to make the grass such a tender green. It never dimmed the buttercups. It did no harm to anything. Butterflies may have been scared of it, and once a dragonfly, but it did them never a harm. I’ve known it protect anemones awhile from the heat of the noonday sun, which had otherwise withered them sooner. In the early morning it would stretch away beyond our garden right out to the wild; poor innocent shadow that loved the grey dew. And in the evening it would grow bold and strong and run right down the slopes of hills, where I walked singing, and would come to the edges of bosky tangled places, till a little more and its head would have been out of sight: I’ve known the fairies then dance out from their sheltered arbours in the deeps of briar and thorn and play with its curls. And, for all its rovings and lurkings and love of mystery, it never left me, of its own accord never. It was I that forsook it, poor shadow, poor shadow that followed me home. For I’ve been out with it when the evenings were eerie and all the valleys haunted, and my shadow must have met with such companions as were far more kin to it than my gross body could be, and nearer to it than my heels, folk that would give it news direct from the kingdom of shadows and gossip of the dark side of the moon, and would whisper things that I could never have taught it; yet it always came home with me. And at night by candlelight in our cottage in Aragona it used to dance for me as I went to bed, all over the walls and ceilings, poor innocent shadow. And if I left a low candle to burn away he never tired of dancing for me as long as I sat up and watched: often he outtired the candle, for the more wearily the candle flickered the more nimbly he leaped. And then he would lie and rest in any corner with the common shadows of humble trivial things, but if I struck a light to rise before dawn, or even if I should light my candle at midnight, he was always there at once, erect on the wall, ready to follow me wherever I went, and to bear me that companionship as I went among men and women, which I valued, alas, so little when I had it, and without which now I know, too late I have learned, there is no welcome for one, no pity,
