The Charwoman's Shadow
by Lord Dunsany
XIX: Father Joseph Explains How the Laity Have No Need of the Pen
Gonsalvo and Gulvarez went early to the Duke’s bedchamber to assure themselves that the hopes of last night were just and that the Duke would live. He still lay weakly upon his bed but his anger flamed up at once as soon as he saw them, and was the old enormous wrath they had known the last two days. Before it they backed away towards the door, and ever as they tarried fresh waves of it overtook them and seemed to sweep them further. Sometimes one would delay and stammer polite excuses, while the other backed away faster; then the rush of the Duke’s anger would bear down on the one that was nearest and drive him back spluttering; and another swirl of it soon would overtake the other. So, breathless with protestations, they were both swept out, and behind the closed door the Duke’s anger died into mutterings, like the croon of a tide along a deserted shore.
Descending they joined the Lady of the Tower and Father Joseph in the room where the boar-spears hung. And in answer to the anxious enquiry in his lady’s eyes as they entered Gonsalvo said: “He has slept and is no weaker. But the humours of sickness have not yet left him.”
She turned then to Gulvarez, seeming to look for some clearer news from the stranger.
“He does not yet lucidly understand your hospitality,” he said. “He comprehends where he is, but the fevers of his malady delude him concerning it. As yet he knows not his friends, or only sees them transmuted by the vain humours of fever.”
At this moment Mirandola passed by the door carrying two dishes, one of meat and the other of fruit. The Lady of the Tower was about to call her, for she was perplexed between the Duke’s weakness and the strength of his fevers; but Father Joseph laid a hand on her arm, and Mirandola went by. Then Father Joseph went to the open doorway and blessed the carrying of the dishes.
And much of that morning Mirandola sat by the Duke’s bedside, and at whiles he spoke with her and at whiles ate a little from the two dishes; and while she was with him his great anger was lulled; but not yet would he take food or drink from any in all that household save only Mirandola, nor tolerate one of them at the door of his bedchamber. And the rumour went through the house that the Duke would live, but it passed through gatherings of doubts and fears that had haunted the house since first he was taken ill, and many a fear clung yet to the hopeful rumour. But Father Joseph, who had some familiarity with the ways of life and death, saw how it would be and, deeming that there would be no entertainings at the Tower, nor high doings, nor any need of him, his thoughts turned now to his own little house, and the humble folk that came there for many a work-a-day need and to be unburdened of their different sins. He therefore said farewell to his host.
“What?” said the Lord of the Tower. “You leave us already?”
“It is time,” said Father Joseph.
“But you will help us to entertain the Duke?”
“Haply,” said Father Joseph, “he will lie awhile in bed.”
“But when he is recovered,” said Gonsalvo, “we will give a banquet to celebrate his deliverance.”
But Father Joseph was more sure of the passing of the illustrious visitor’s illness than he was of the fading of his anger, in the heat of which he had himself stood once already.
“I must return to the village,” he said.
Mirandola had entered the room.
“Then you will come again,” said Gonsalvo, “to marry Mirandola to Señor Gulvarez.”
For Gonsalvo had a small chapel in his house.
“Gladly,” said Father Joseph.
“Thank Father Joseph,” said the Lady of the Tower.
“Thank you,” said Mirandola.
Then away went Father Joseph; and soon from the pinnacles of lofty plans his mind descended to the little sins that the folk of the village he tended would have been sinning while he was away. He tried to think as he walked of the sins that each would have done; sometimes some girl of strange or passionate whims would a little puzzle his forecast, but for the most part he guessed rapidly, and just as he named to himself the sin of his last parishioner he reached the door under the deep black thatch of the house he loved so well.
He turned the handle and entered: it was not locked, for none in those parts dared rob Father Joseph’s house; nor was the sin of robbery much practised in houses there but rather on the road in the open air. He entered and was once more with his pleasant knickknacks that he had not seen for two days; and for a while his eye roamed over them, going from one to another, as he sat in his favourite chair in deep content. For a long while he sat thus, drawing into his spirit the deep quiet of his house, which had never been broken by such events as trouble the calm of the world: no illustrious hidalgos sojourned there; rarely even they passed it by: the sound of a trumpet or the sight of a gonfalon came once, or at most twice, in a generation. His gaze was reposing now on an old mug shaped like a bear, which rested upon a bracket: sometimes he was wont to fill it with good ale and so pass lonely evenings when sunset was early. Gazing now at the mug those evenings came back to his memory and he thought of the joyous radiance that there seemed to have been about them, when again and again till it interrupted his thoughts came a very furtive knock on his back door. He imagined the timid hand of some penitent sinner, come there to be rid of his sin, and arose to open the door. When he opened the little back door that looked to the forest, who was there but Ramon Alonzo?
The young man was wearing a fine old cloak of his father’s, which Mirandola had begged for him on the day that he had gone cloakless away from the Tower. She had told Peter to take it after him, but Peter’s master had not allowed him to go until the Duke had been received at the Tower; but when the banquet came to that sudden end none thought any more of Peter except Mirandola, so he took the cloak and went; and quietly, as he left, Mirandola said to him, “Tell him all that you saw.” So Peter had travelled all the rest of that day and all through the night, and had come on Ramon Alonzo in the magician’s wood; for Ramon Alonzo going circuitously round Aragona, over fields and wild heath, by night, and in the daylight travelling cautiously at such times as his shadow looked human, arrived on the second night so late near the house of the Master that he decided to sleep in the wood and enter by daylight. There Peter found him about dawn with the cloak, and glad Ramon Alonzo was of it. But when he heard of the malady that had overtaken the Duke, the dreadfulness of which Peter told in all fullness, and learned that the Duke had just drunk of a flagon of wine, he knew at once with a guilty inspiration that it had been the love-potion, and supposed that by some mistake of the serving maids the flagon meant for Gulvarez had been changed with the one for the Duke. Then anger came on him against the magician, and a hatred of all his spells, and he determined to put his plan into instant practice. But this plan involved writing, for he meant to write the syllables of the spell that opened the shadow-box, one by one amongst other writings, and to trick the magician into reading them for him. Therefore he thanked and said farewell to Peter, and as soon as ever the man was out of sight he turned his back upon the house in the wood, and travelling fast but cautiously and going wide again round Aragona under cover of night, came secretly the next morning out of the forest to the little door at the back of the priestly house. 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.
“The pen,” he said. “That is indeed, no doubt, a worthy tool; yet of little use to the laity. Those things it is needful to know are written already, and, should more ever be necessary, are there not monks to write it? Or is it to be supposed that those most illustrious presences, our spiritual overlords, should have neglected some matter that it were well to write and should have failed to record it?”
“Indeed no,” said Ramon Alonzo, lowering his head in a pose of appropriate humility.
“For what purpose then would you put your own hand to the pen?” Father Joseph asked of him.
“I would fain know the handling of it,” replied Ramon Alonzo, “yet not from any wish to write upon parchment, for that is no knightly accomplishment.”
“Indeed not,” said Father Joseph; “yet to know the handling of a pen, as your father knows, and the way that it takes up ink, and sometimes to have essayed sundry marks with it, as he hath, upon parchment, are things that add credit to a knightly house. This much I will teach you. But deem not that there is aught to be written that hath not long since been well said, and committed to parchment, and given to the charge of those whose duty it is to watch and protect learning.”
No more than this Ramon Alonzo needed. He therefore thanked Father Joseph courteously, who went and fetched a pen; and soon the young man was being taught the way of it, where the fingers go, the place of the thumb, the movement of the whole hand, the method of taking ink, and the suitable intervals.
“Here,” said Father Joseph, “near the window, where you shall have the full light.” For Ramon Alonzo had seated himself in a corner and dragged the little table to the darkest part of the room.
But Ramon Alonzo, as it drew near noon, shunned any approach to light, and would go near no spot on which shadows fell. Whether Father Joseph noticed or not this strange avoidance of light, his intellect pounced at once on his pupil’s trivial answer, excusing himself for keeping his seat in the dusk of the corner; and from that moment his old suspicions came on to the right trail, which they never left till the strange secret they followed had been tracked up to its lair.
As Ramon Alonzo came by the knack of the pen he began to copy one by one on the parchment those three syllables, clear in his memory, that were the key of the shadow-box. He rejoiced to think that by asking Father Joseph for never a letter of the Christian alphabet he persuaded him that he sought for no more than he said, a certain way with the pen that should be a knightly accomplishment. Far otherwise was it: for, as Father Joseph watched those sinister syllables that were no language of ours, he began to see a young mind given over wholly to magic, and as each syllable appeared on the parchment he muttered inaudibly, “The Black Art. Oh, the Black Art.”
But with practice Ramon Alonzo made those syllables clearer and clearer, until they appeared on the parchment whereon he wrote no otherwise than as they were in the great book of the magician that lay on the lectern in the room that was sacred to magic. Father Joseph watched the work of the pen that he guided, and all the while saw those syllables growing clearer, until, although he knew not what they were, nor the language in which they were written, he saw unmistakable omens and threats about them, and all those omens were magical, sinister, evil. Ramon Alonzo carried it off lightly, saying he but made idle strokes with the pen, believing he deceived Father Joseph. That hour for which he so often yearned went by, when the shadows of other men were the same as his, and still he worked at the pen. He saw, still close in his corner, the red and level rays shine in and lend a splendour to Father Joseph’s knickknacks. He saw the evening come, and those big Cathayan shapes that he made, black and bold in the gloaming. Then Father Joseph arose to light his tapers, and before he did that Ramon Alonzo thanked him and hastily bade him farewell, and was soon away on his circuitous journey that should lead him wide in the dark round Aragona.
So Ramon Alonzo came next night to the house in the wood. But Father Joseph saddled his mule in the morning and rode away by the very earliest light, and came in the afternoon to the hilly house of a priest he knew who had much knowledge of magic; and with him he brought that parchment on which all day Ramon Alonzo had practised those curious signs. This priest went sometimes down to the church in Aragona, but dwelt mostly alone in his house, where he worked on a scheme for the mitigation of sin, or read books exposing magic. Up the rocky track to that house on his struggling mule Father Joseph arrived; and when the gaiety of their greetings was over he showed his friend the marks that were on the parchment.
“I fear, Aloysius,” he said, “we have nought good here.”
Brother Aloysius took it. “Nought good,” he said. “Nought good at all.”
Then he put it down and put on great spectacles and looked at the parchment again and consulted a book, repeating now and then, “There is no good here,” and shaking his head often.
And suddenly he became sure and spoke with a clear certainty.
“Indeed,” he said, “it is a most heathen spell.”