The Charwoman's Shadow
by Lord Dunsany
XXV: The Release of the Shadow
“Long ago,” said the charwoman, “a long long while ago, I dwelt in my father’s cottage in Aragona. I had naught to do in all those sunny days but to tend his garden, or sing; unless in winter I sometimes fetched pails of water for my mother from the stream if the well in our garden were frozen. I think the days of those summers were sunnier than those we have now, and the Springs were more sudden and joyous; and I remember a glory about the woods in autumn, aye, and a splendour about those winter evenings, that I have not seen, ah me, this many a year. So, having naught else to do, I grew in beautiful seasons and breathed and saw loveliness, and through no merit of mine, but only through borrowing in all idleness of God’s munificence through listless years, I grew beautiful. Yes, young man,” for some expression must have changed on the youth’s face, “charwomen were beautiful once.
“I had not loved, for of those that came sometimes with guitars at twilight, and played them near our garden, none had a splendour fairer than my daydreams, and they were of Aragona.
“There came a most strange man at evening, when I was seventeen, all down the slope from the wood, walking alone. I remember his red cloak now, and his curious hat and his venerable air. He came to our village on that summer’s day at the time that bats were flying. At the edge of our garden he stopped—I saw through my window—and drew a flute or pipe from under his cloak and blew one note upon it. My father came running out at that strange sound, and saw the man and doffed his hat to him, for he had a wonderful air, and asked him what he needed. And the Master said, aye it was he, the crafty magician said that he wished for a charwoman, some girl that would mind the things in his house in the wood. My father should have said there was no such girl in his house. But he talked; and then my mother came out; and then they talked again. I know not how he satisfied them, but he had a wonderful air. There are just men with far less a presence. They were poor and looked for work for me, and gold to him was ever stuff to be given by handfuls uncounted; yet I know not how he satisfied them.
“My mother called to me and told me I was to go away with the señor to work for him in his great house in the wood, and he would pay me beyond my expectations, and soon I should come back to Aragona, a girl with a fine dowry. Aye, he paid me beyond my expectations; but I never came back, I never came back. I tried to once but they would not let me.
“He would not wait. I must pack my bundle at once. So I did as I was bade, and said farewell to my parents, and went away after the stranger through the evening. I turned my head as I went beyond the garden and saw my mother looking doubtfully after me; but she did not call me back. I was all sad walking alone after this strange man in the evening, thinking of Aragona. And then without looking round at me he drew out a reed from his cloak and blew another note upon it; and all the world seemed strange, and the evening seemed haunted and wonderful, and I forgot Aragona. I walked after him thrilled with the wonders that that one note seemed to have called from the furthest boundaries of wizardry. They seemed to be lurking just over the ridges of hills and the other side of wild bushes, things come from elfland and fancy to hear what tune he would play. But he played no more. And so he brought me to his house in the wood.
“Ah, I had eyes then not like these, not like dim pools in rain: they could flash, they were like the colour of lakes with the sunlight on them in summer. I had small white teeth, yes I. And I had little golden curls, I loved my curls; God wot it was not this hair. My figure was slender then, and straight and supple. And my face. Young man, it was not these wrinkled hollows!”
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. 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, then he only suspected. Yet his suspicions were often as shrewd as mortal calculations. Thoughts like these went through their minds more swiftly than they ran.
When the magical footsteps were now some way behind them the old woman pulled Ramon Alonzo suddenly sideways, and they huddled or fell past two loose planks in the wall to a cranny behind the wainscot. She had known of this place for years. Rats, damp, and woodworm, and other servants of time, had gradually made it larger. There was just room for the two to hide there. They lay there waiting while the steps came nearer; and all the while Ramon Alonzo held the shadow, though it fluttered to come to the charwoman. Somehow she stifled her breathing, though she had been nearly gasping; and the steps drew near and passed. That he was looking for them they could not doubt, but they felt as he passed so near that he had not learned as yet of the opening of his shadow-box. For he was muttering questioningly to himself as he went: “Ramon Alonzo? Ramon Alonzo?”
The charwoman held the young man by the wrist, and listened, as she held him, to the footsteps going away.
“Now,” she said suddenly.
They rose in cautious silence, though one of the timbers creaked; they left the mouldering nook and tiptoed away; they heard the magician turn and come back down the corridor; and then they were running for the door to the wood.
The magician had quickened his steps, but they reached the door in time; and were out into the wood before they saw him, though they often looked over their shoulders. They ran through the wood not only to avoid his pursuit, but to be as far away as they could before he used his enchantments, for both of them feared that as soon as he found they were gone he would go to his sinister room and take from a spell-locked box some potent weapon of wizardry and loosen its deadly power towards the wood. And they did well to run, though they did not know, as those know who have studied the science of magic, that the power of any spell or enchantment lessens according to the square of the distance.
And the magician never caught them either with weapon or spell, but they ran on safe through the wood; and at the edge of it in the wholesome sunlight, which, more than anything else yet known to science, arrests the passage of spells, the old woman sank on to the grass exhausted.