The Charwoman’s Shadow quotes

Picture a summer evening sombre and sweet over Spain, the glittering sheen of leaves fading to soberer colours, the sky in the west all soft, and mysterious as low music, and in the east like a frown.

Picture the Golden Age past its wonderful zenith, and westering now towards its setting.

“The Black Art!” exclaimed Ramon Alonzo.

“There is but one art,” said his father; “and it shall all the more advantage you to follow it in that there hath been of late but little magic in Spain, and even in this forest there are not, but on rarest evenings, such mysteries nor such menace as I myself can remember; and no dragon hath been seen since my grandfather’s days.”

“The Black Art!” said Ramon Alonzo. “But how shall I tell of this to Father Joseph?”

And youth and haste again urged another question. “But can the philosophers make gold?” blurted out Ramon Alonzo.

“Ill-informed lad,” said his father, “have you heard of no philosophers during the last ten centuries seeking for gold with their stone?”

“Yes,” answered Ramon Alonzo, “but I heard of none that found it.”

“Ill-informed lad,” said his father, “have you heard of no philosophers during the last ten centuries seeking for gold with their stone?”

“Yes,” answered Ramon Alonzo, “but I heard of none that found it.”

And his father shook his head with tolerant smiles and answered nothing at once, not hastening to reprove the lad’s ill-founded opinion, for the wisdom of age expects these light conclusions from youth.

… boy’s young thoughts had roamed away to beyond Aragona to the man with the black silk cloak and his house in the wood, where base metals would have to suffer wonderful changes before good thick pieces of dross should chink deep on that satin lining.

And where young thoughts have roamed there soon follow lads or maidens.

And then they talked of the way beyond Aragona, and the path that led to the wood.

“It is magic,” said Ramon Alonzo.

“All’s magic here,” said the Master.

Over the window a draught flapped remnants of curtains, but the moth must have been in those curtains for ages and ages. The Master spoke with an air of explanation, almost perhaps of apology:

“Old age comes to all,” he said.

Then he withdrew.

“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?”

“But why?” asked Ramon Alonzo.

“He wanted a charwoman,” she said.

There was blood on the stone, but though years of scrubbing had hollowed it, the blood had gone deeper than the hollowing; so deep that Ramon Alonzo asked her why she toiled at it.

“It was innocent blood,” she answered.

The young man did not even ask for that story; the house was so full of wonder. He asked instead what he had sought to find: “Who serves the dinner?”

“Then he is not his friend,” said Mirandola.

Thus lightly was brushed away the claim of Gulvarez to the excited interest of all that neighbourhood.

The Lord of the Tower held up his hand to check her hasty utterance while he thought of appropriate words with which to reprove her error.

“Yours!” she cried. “No!

Yours is a proper shadow.

A fine lithe shadow; beautiful, glossy, and young. A good sleek shadow. A joy to the wild grasses. Aye, that is a shadow. God bless us, there are shadows still in the world.”

Almost silvery their great shadows looked, slipping over the grass in the evening; and he saw the beauty of shadows as he had not seen before, and saw with envy.

It had come to this already, that the man was jealous of trees.

From the grand substantial forms of the distant trees, and those dark comrades that vouched for them as being material things, he bitterly turned away, and looked once more to the spires of Aragona, with his gaze held high to avoid the mockery at his …

“Must we leave him?” said Lolun after they had run for a while.

“He is not earthly,” cried Ariona.

“We might stay for only a little,” said Lolun.

Then seeing her sorrowful face, and the gloom of that dark nook, and the sombre melancholy of all things round her, he sought to persuade her to flee from the house in the wood, and he would escort her into Aragona. But she only said:

“The world is harder than his house.”

He reasoned with her, saying suave things of the world; but she only answered: “There is no place for me there.”

Michael, for St. Joseph, for St. Judas not Iscariot, for all the Saints, for the King, they none of them cried “for a Shadow.” And yet that was all that the fuss was about, he reflected irritably.

There are always two views, even over a trifle.

He had been gaining a little ever since he dropped his cloak; but now one runner seemed to be ahead of the crowd again. He heard his feet above the sound of their shouts and their running.

And a wise old man who had not spoken as yet was seen to be shaking his head; and when all were listening he spoke:

“Well, it is gone,” he said. “The Saints be praised.”

“Aye, it is gone,” said they all.

“Aye, it is gone,” said they all.

So they went to bed.

Nor was Ramon Alonzo in any way checked in his furious exposure of shadows by any wistful yearning that he had often felt for his own since the day that he lost it, and was often to feel again.

Logic indeed had been flouted upon either side in this business, and it is for just such situations as these that swords are made.

Ramon Alonzo had used his well, and he wiped it now on a handful of leaves and returned it to the scabbard.

Her father and mother smiled at her mistake, for she should have carried it to the Duke first; but their smiles broadened into smiles of merry understanding as each caught the other’s eye.

Gulvarez would have strutted had he been standing; had he been a peacock he would have spread his tail-feathers and rattled them.

As it was, smirks and smiles expressed all this and more. He was about to speak, but Mirandola left him to fetch another chalice.

Still no one spoke, unless the murmured anxieties of the Lady of the Tower were speech.

Mirandola was silent as a little sphinx long left by the earliest dynasty in a tomb of rock under sand.

Gulvarez was thinking to himself that he had fulfilled his part of the bargain, whatever happened to the Duke when he arrived.

and none failed to hear the roar of the Duke’s answers. So Father Joseph sighed and returned to the Lord of the Tower, who, wishful to conceal that he had heard what the Duke had shouted, said to his guest: “How fared you?”

“The power of Holy Church is waning,” said Father Joseph. “It is not what it was in the good days.”

“Alas,” said Gonsalvo. And there were looks of commiseration towards Father Joseph.

“It is because of all this sin,” Father Joseph continued, “that there has been in the world of late.”

And the commiserating looks changed all of a sudden, for they knew that Father Joseph knew all their sins.

Then the Lady of the Tower took the flagon, thinking that perchance the Duke might drink if no word were said about food.

And there as Father Joseph opened the door, ready to give absolution for some small sin, the first words that greeted him were: “I pray you, Father, to teach me the way of the pen.”

Truly now there is no sin in the pen itself, though it be a full handy tool in the fingers of liars, and the greater part of the cheating that there is in the world is done by the pen to this day.

And whatever Father Joseph suspected of Ramon Alonzo’s work he could not easily refuse instruction in the proper handling of aught that was in itself so innocent. He therefore rather temporized.

Then thought overcast her face, and a little slowly her old mind turned to the future and tried to find all it would mean if he came by all three syllables.

And while youth, under those old stairs, was swiftly building hopes on the roof of hopes, age was finding objections.

“How will you find the others?” she asked.

He went to his spidery room in the lonely tower and there lay down to sleep, but plans came to that mouldering bed instead of dreams, and far on into the night he plotted the rescue of shadows.

How many a man through hours of silent darkness has laid his lonely plans for things more insubstantial.

Plans of caution and plans of impatience came to Ramon Alonzo that night; and by the early hours he blended them, and decided to wait three days before asking the Master to read another script;

and this, the most trivial of them all, any unusual shape of a shadow, was no more tolerated than horns and tail.

So absurd a prejudice cannot be credited unless it has been experienced.

He came in his melancholy walk to the mossy roots of an oak;

“What is the trouble, Alaraba?” said Ramon Alonzo.

“White magic. Run!” said the gnome, and shuffled on eagerly.

More than this he did not say, nor thought more necessary, for he had uttered the one thing that magical folk dread most.

A sudden rally Ramon Alonzo made from the lintel, but was beaten back and again his arm was seared, and tumbling more than retreating he reeled back through the door.

“Cross no swords with magic,” said the magician warningly, with his strange sword in the doorway;

but he came no further, and Ramon Alonzo was left alone with despair, while the Master returned to the gloom of the room that was sacred to magic, and to occupations that are beyond our knowledge.

From such a fame Ramon Alonzo now wilfully turned away.

Such choices have often to be made.

Whenever the Master blamed his inattention he apologized gracefully and pretended diligence, but his heart was far from Persia, and never a spell he learned that would have hailed passing spirits and given him news unbiased by the narrower views of Earth.

Ramon Alonzo stirred uneasily.

Who 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.

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.

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.

Yet here were the sunlight and birds, and the house was behind him, and his horse was waiting for him a little way off, and none of the joy he had looked for came near him at all.

He was free of that house at last and unhappy to be free.

Never had he thought so much or thought less clearly, for all his thoughts were contradicting each other; and Mirandola’s eyes made it harder to think than ever. They were happy eyes, caring little, it seemed, for his trouble. And what was his trouble?

“You are glad to be leaving us?” said Mirandola as they crossed the strip of heather.

“Yes,” said the Duke, “I am sorry.”

It was the Duke that thought over what he had answered more than Mirandola. She said no more, but he pondered on his own words. He had said he was sorry. Yes, that was the truth of it.

He turned round to his four men, who halted to hear his order.

“Hunt rabbits,” he said.

And at once the chiefs of the bowmen disappeared in the forest; and the Duke with Mirandola walked on in silence. And no words came to him to say what was weighing upon his heart to this flashing elfin lady.

It was then that the twinkle dawned again in her eyes.

“I am engaged to Señor Gulvarez,” she said.

“Yes, my father arranged it,” said Mirandola.

“Yes, my father arranged it,” said Mirandola.

“Gulvarez shall hang,” said the Duke.

“I thought he was your friend,” said Mirandola.

What should he do? Were those two phrases to wither away his happiness? And yet what way of escape?

Hope herself seemed blind to it.

“What is the matter?” Anemone said, as he stood there still and silent.