CENTRAL CIRCULATION BOOKSTACKS The person charging this material is re- sponsible for its renewal or its return to the library from which it was borrowed on or before the Latest Date stamped below. The Minimum Fee for each Lost Book is $50.00. Theft, mutilation, and underlining of books are reasons for disciplinary action and may result in dismissal from the University. TO RENEW CALL TELEPHONE CENTER, 333-8400 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN SUN 25 1995 When renewing by phone, write new due date below | previous due date. L162 4pnt Bi Tayo yves AL CWoAw, Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2021 with funding from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign https://archive.org/details/noughtscrossesst0Oquil NOUGHTS AND CROSSES NOVELS, STORIES, SKETCHES AND ESSAYS BY he Oe ax Pai * Aas “> ARTHUR T. QUILLER-COUCH] Each 1 vol., r2mo, $1.25 The Splendid Spur. . . = 12mo, $1.25 The Blue Pavilions . é 2 emMOe Wes i Wandering Heath Z ; La 2mOyg kas mth i; The Delectable Duchy Sitabelt | Setlor aks eh were Dead Man’s Rock Whe VU a) ERO L195 Noughts and Crosses . dit Sem) SOMO; heey Troy Town . Pont eats Se pE2INO BTs2h I Saw Three Ships é ; pee 2M On Lia ®e Adventures in Criticism . . «2mo, 1.25.4 5 haat The nine volumes tn a new Uniform Ee . Binding. The Set, $11.00 | iia , Ia. A Love Story [/vory Series] Se gee on et er ae NOUGHTS AND ee » STORIES STUIIES! 4 B52. 4 SKETCHES BY Q “* [psae te, Tetyre, pints, Ipst te fontes, ipsa haec arbusta vocabant” CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS - NEW YORK 1898 i COONAN Se cen OQ Rew PAGE Tus Omnibus : . : : ; ‘ : : 1 Fortvunio - : ; ‘ , : : : p 7 THE OUTLANDISH LADIES . : , ‘ ¥ : 17 STATEMENT OF GABRIEL Foot, Ht@HwAYMAN ; , 27 Tur RETURN OF JOANNA 4 ; : 3 A : 53 PsycHE . : . : A ‘ j 3 3 ‘ 63 Tue Countess of BELLARMINE . - é 2 : 73 A Corracse In TRoy— I. A Harpy Voyace . ‘ : 3 : ; 85 II. TxHese-An’-TuHat’s WIFE : : ; ; 95 III. ‘‘ Dousnes” AND Quits . : : : LOS IV. Tue Boy sy tur Beacu , ' : mee Wo Xe Oxtp Aison . a : : : : 4 : hin 5: Stories oF BLeakIRK— I. Tue Arrarr oF BLEeAKIRK-oN-SANDS ae Se II. Tue Constant Post-Boy F : ; odd byt viii CONTENTS. Pa@u A Dark Mrrror . : 4 hs ; . 93 ! —Christ is born She heard me with a grave face to the end; then pulling a handful of straw, spread it in the empty manger and laid the doll there. No, I forget; one moment she held it close to her THE CAROL, 231 breast and looked down on it. The God who fashions children can tell where she learnt that look, and why I remembered it ten years later, when they let me look into the room where she lay with another babe in her clay-cold arms. “Count forty,” she went on, using the very words of Pretty Tommy, our parish clerk; “count forty, and let fly with ‘Now draw 9 33 around “ Now draw around, good Christian men, And rest you worship-ping—” We sang the carol softly together, she resting one hand on the edge of the manger. “Dick, ain’t you proud of him? I don’t see the spiders beginning, though.” “ The spiders ?” “Dick, youre very ig-norant. Lverybody knows that, when Christ was laid in a manger, the spiders came and spun their webs over Him and hid Him. That's why King Herod couldn’t find Him.” i “There, now! We live and learn,” said I. “Well, now there's nothing to do but sit 232 NOUGHTS AND CROSSES. down and wait for the wise men and the shepherds.” It was a little while that she watched, being long over-tired. The warm air of the chall weighed on her eyelids ; and, as they closed, her head sank on my shoulder. For ten minutes I sat, listening to her breathing. Dinah rose heavily from her bed and lay down again, with a long sigh; another cow woke up and rattled her rope a dozen times through its ring; up at the house the fiddling grew more furious; but the little maid slept on. At last I wrapped the sack closely round her, and lifting her in my arms, carried her out into the night. She was my master’s daughter, and I had not the courage to kiss so much as her hair. Yet I had no envy for the dancers, then. As we passed into the cold air she stirred. “Did they come? And where are you carry- ing me?” Then, when I told her, “Dick, I will never speak to you again, if you don’t carry me first to the gate of the upper field.” So I carried her to the gate, and sitting up in my arms she called twice, THE CAROL. 233 “ Laban—Laban !” “What cheer—O?” the hind called back. His lantern was a spark on the hill-side, and he could not tell the voice at that distance. “Have you seen him ?” “ Wha-a-a-t ?” “The angel of the Lo-o-ord !” « Wha-a-a-t ?” “Tm afraid we can’t make him understand,” she whispered. “Hush; don’t shout!” For a moment, she seemed to consider; and then her shrill treble quavered out on the frosty air, my own deeper voice taking up the second line— “ The first ‘ Nowell’ the angel did say Was to certain poor shepherds, wn fields as they lay, —In fields as they lay, a-tending thevr sheep, On a cold winter's night that was so deep— Nowell! Nowell! Christ is born in Israel !” Our voices followed our shadows across the gate and far up the field, where Laban’s sheep - lay dotted. What Laban thought of it I cannot 234 NOUGHTS AND CROSSES. —— tell: but to me it seemed, for the moment, that the shepherd among his ewes, the dancers within the house, the sea beneath us, and the stars in their courses overhead moved all to one tune,—the carol of two children on the hill-side. THE PARADISE OF CHOICE. IT was not as in certain toy houses that foretell the weather by means of a man-doll and a woman-doll—the man going in as the woman comes out, and vice versd. In this case both man and woman stepped out, the man half a minute behind; so that the woman was almost at the street-corner while he hesitated just out- side the door, blinking up at the sky, and then dropping his gaze along the pavement. The sky was flattened by a fog that shut down on the roofs and chimneys like a tent- cloth, white and opaque. Now and then a yellowish wave rolled across it from eastward, and the cloth would be shaken. When this happened, the street was always filled with gloom, and the receding figure of the woman lost in it for a while. The man thrust a hand into his trousers pocket, pulled out a penny, and after consider- ing for a couple of seconds, spun it carelessly. 236 NOUGHTS AND CROSSES. It fell in his palm, tail up; and he regarded it as a sailor might a compass. The trident in Britannia’s hand pointed westward, down the street. “ West it is,” he decided with a shrug, imply- ing that all the four quarters were equally to his mind. He was pocketing the coin, when foot- steps approached, and he lifted his head. It was the woman returning. She halted close to him with an undecided manner, and the pair eyed each other. We may know them as Adam and Eve, for both were beginning a world that contained neither friends nor kin. Both had very white hands and very short hair. The man was tall and meagre, with a receding forehead and a sandy complexion that should have been freckled, but was not. He had a trick of half- closing his eyes when he looked at anything, not screwing them up as seamen do, but appear- ing rather to drop a film over them like the inner eyelid of a bird. The woman’s eyes re- sembled a hare’s, being brown and big, and set far back, so that she seemed at times to be THE PARADISE OF CHOICE. 237 oe ——— looking right behind her. She wore a faded look, from her dust-coloured hair to her boots, which wanted blacking. “Tt all seems so wide,’ she began; “so wide——” “Tm going west,” said the man, and started at a slow walk. Eve followed, a pace behind his heels, treading almost in his tracks) He went on, taking no notice of her. “How long were you in there?” she asked, after a while. “Ten year.” Adam spoke without looking back. “ ’Cumulated jobs, you know.” “T was only two. Blankets it was with me. They recommended me to mercy.” “You got it,’ Adam commented, with his eyes fastened ahead. The fog followed them as they turned into a street full of traffic. Its frayed edge rose and sank, was parted and joined again—now descend- ing to the first-storey windows and blotting out the cabmen and passengers on omnibus tops, now rolling up and over the parapets of the houses and the sky-signs. It was noticeable that 238 NOUGHTS AND CROSSES. in the crowd that hustled along the pavement Adam moved like a puppy not yet waywise, but with lifted face, while Eve followed with her head bent, seeing nothing but his heels. She observed that his boots were hardly worn at all. Three or four times, as they went along, Adam would eye a shop window and turn in at the door, while Eve waited. He returned from different excursions with a twopenny loaf, a red sausage, a pipe, box of lights and screw of tobacco, and a noggin or so of gin in an old soda-water bottle. Once they turned aside into a public, and had a drink of gin together. Adam paid. Thus for two hours they plodded westward, and the fog and crowd were with them all the way—strangers jostling them by the shoulder on the greasy pavement, hansoms splashing the brown mud over them—the same din for miles. Many shops were lighting up, and from these a yellow flare streamed into the fog; or a white when it came from the electric light ; or separate beams of orange, green, and violet, when the shop was a druggist’s. THE PARADISE OF CHOICE. 239 Then they came to the railings of Hyde Park, and trudged down the hill alongside them to Kensington Gardens. It was yet early in the afternoon. Adam pulled up. “Come and look,” he said. “It’s autumn in there,” and he went in at the Victoria gate, with Ive at his heels. “ Mister, how old might you be?” she asked, encouraged by the sound of his voice. “Thirty.” “And you've passed ten years in—in there.” She jerked her head back and shivered a little. He had stooped to pick up a leaf. It was a yellow leaf from a chestnut that reached into the fog above them. He picked it slowly to pieces, drawing full draughts of air into his lungs. “Fifteen,” he jerked out, “one time and another. ’Cumulated, you know.” Pausing, he added, in a matter-of-fact voice, “What I’ve took would come to less ’n a pound’s worth, altogether.” The Gardens were deserted, and the pair roamed towards the centre, gazing curiously at so much of sodden vegetation as the fog allowed 240 NOUGHT® AND CROSSES, them to see. Their eyes were not jaded; to them a blade of grass was not a little thing. They were down on the south side, amid the heterogeneous plants there collected, examining each leaf, spelling the Latin labels and compar- ing them, when the hour came for closing. In the dense atmosphere the park-keeper missed them. The gates were shut; and the fog settled down thicker with the darkness. Then the man and the woman were aware, and grew afraid. They saw only a limitless plain of grey about them, and heard a murmur as of the sea rolling around it. “This gaol is too big,” whispered Eve, and they took hands. The man trembled. Together they moved into the fog, seeking an outlet. At the end of an hour or so they stumbled on a seat, and sat down for awhile to share the bread and sausage, and drink the gin. Eve was tired out and would have slept, but the man shook her by the shoulder. “For God’s sake don’t leave me to face this alone. Can you sing?” THE PARADISE OF CHOICE. 241 rs She began “ When other lups ... whisper which gradually developed into a reedy | soprano. She had forgotten half the words, but - Adam lit a pipe and listened appreciatively. “Tell you what,” he said at the close ; “ you’ll be able to pick up a little on the road with your singing, We'll tramp west to-morrow, and pass ourselves off for man and wife. Likely we'll get some farm work, down in the country. Let’s »”? in a get out of this.” They joined hands and started off again, unable to see a foot before them in the black- ness. So it happened next morning that the park-keeper, coming at his usual hour to unlock the gates, found a man and a woman inside with their white faces pressed against the railings, through which they glared like caged beasts. He set them free, and they ran out, for his paradise was too big. Now, facing west, they tramped for two days on the Bath road, leaving the fog behind them, and drew near Reading. It was a clear night as they approacned it, and the sky studded with Q 242 NOUGHTS AND CROSSES. stars that twinkled frostily. Eleven o'clock sounded from a tower ahead. On the outskirts of the town they were passing an ugly modern villa with a large garden before it, when an old gentleman came briskly up the road and turned in at the gate. Adam swung round on his heel and followed him up the path, begging. Eve hung by the gate. “No,” said the old gentleman, fitting his latchkey into the door, “I have no work to offer. Eh?—Is that your wife by the gate? Hungry ?” Adam whispered a lie in his ear. “ Poor woman, and to be on the road, in such a state, at this hour! Well, you shall share my supper before you search for a lodging. Come inside,” he called out to Eve, “and be careful of the step. It’s a high one.” He led them in, past the ground-floor rooms and up a flight of stairs. After pausing on the landing and waiting a long time for Eve to take breath, he began to ascend another flight. “Are we going to have supper on the leads ?” Adam wondered. THE PARADISE OF CHOICE. 243 They followed the old gentleman up to the attics and into a kind of tower, where was a small room with two tables spread, the one with a supper, the other with papers, charts, and mathematical instruments. “Here,” said their guide, “is bread, a cold chicken, and a bottle of whisky. I beg you to excuse me while you eat. The fact is, I dabble in astronomy. My telescope is on the roof above, and to-night every moment is precious.” There was a ladder fixed in the room, lead- ing toa trap-door in the ceiling. Up this ladder the old gentleman trotted, and in half a minute had disappeared, shutting the trap behind him. It was half an hour or more before Adam climbed after him, with Eve, as usual, at his heels. “My dear madam!” cried the astronomer, “and in your state !” “T told you a lie,” Adam said. “I’ve come to beg your pardon. May we look at the stars before we go?” In two minutes the old gentleman was point- ing out the constellations—the Great Bear Q2 244 NOUGHTS AND CROSSES. hanging low in the north-east, pointing to the Pole star, and across it to Cassiopeia’s bright zig- zag high in the heavens; the barren square of Pegasus, with its long tail stretching to the Milky Way, and the points that cluster round Perseus ; Arcturus, white Vega and yellow Ca- pella; the Twins, and beyond them the Little Dog twinkling through a coppice of naked trees to eastward ; yet further round the Pleiads climb- ing, with red Aldebaran after them ; below them Orion’s belt, and last of all, Sirius flashing like a diamond, white and red, and resting on the horizon where the dark pasture lands met the sky. Then, growing flushed with his subject, he began to descant on these stars, their distances and velocities ; how that each was a sun, career- ing in measureless space, each trailing a company of worlds that spun and hurtled round it; that the Dog-star’s light shone into their eyes across a hundred trillion miles; that the star itself swept along a thousand miles in a minute. He hurled figures at them, heaping millions on millions. “See here”—and, turning the tele- scope on its pivot, he sighted it carefully. THE PARADISE OF CHOICE. 245 “Look at that small star in the Great Bear: that’s Groombridge Highteen-thirty. He’s two hundred billions of miles away. He travels two hundred miles a second, does Groombridge Highteen-thirty. In one minute Groombridge Highteen-thirty could go from here to Hong- Kong.” “Then damn Groombridge Highteen-thirty !” It was uttered in the bated tone that night enforces: but it came with a groan. The old gentleman faced round in amazement. “He means, sir,” explained the woman, who had grown to understand Adam passing well, “my man means that it’s all too big for us. We've strayed out of prison, sir, and shall feel safer back again, looking at all this behind bars.” She reached out a hand to Adam: and this time it was he that followed, as one blinded and afraid. In three months they were back again at the gates of the paradise they had wandered from. There stood a warder before it, clad in blue: but he carried no flaming sword, and the door opened and let them in. 4 ain? ey File At at BESIDE THE BEE-HIVES. On the outskirts of the village of Gantick stand two small semi-detached cottages, coloured with the same pale yellow wash, their front gardens descending to the high-road in parallel lines, their back gardens (which are somewhat longer) climbing to a little wood of secular elms, tradi- tionally asserted to be the remnant of a mighty forest. The party hedge is heightened by a thick screen of white-thorn on which the buds were just showing pink when I took up my lodging in the left-hand cottage (the 10th of May by my diary); and at the end of it are two small arbours, set back to back, their dilapidated sides and roofs bound together by clematis. The night of my arrival, my landlady asked me to make the least possible noise in unpacking my portmanteau, because there was trouble next door, and the partitions were thin. Our neigh- bour’s wife was down with inflammation, she ex- plained—inflammation of the lungs, as I learnt 248 NOUGATS AND CROSSES. by a question or two. It was a bad case. She was a wisht, ailing soul to begin with. Also the owls in the wood above had been hooting loudly, for nights past: and yesterday a hedge-sparrow lit on the sill of the sick-room window, two sure tokens of approaching death. The sick woman was being nursed by her elder sister, who had lived in the house for two years, and practically taken charge of it. ‘“ Better the man had married she,’ my landlady added, somewhat unfeelingly. I saw the man in his garden early next morning: a tall fellow, hardly yet on the wrong side of thirty, dressed in loose-fitting tweed coat and corduroys. A row of bee-hives stood along his side of the party wall, and he had taken the farthest one, which was empty, off its stand, and was rubbing it on the inside with a handful of elder-flower buds, by way of preparation for a new swarm. Even from my bed-room window I remarked, as he turned his head occasionally, that he was singularly handsome. His move- ments were those of a lazy man in a hurry, though there seemed no reason for hurry in his task. But when it was done, and the hive re- BESIDE THE BEE-HIVES. 249 placed, his behaviour began to be so eccentric that I paused in the midst of my shaving, to watch. He passed slowly down the line of bee-hives, halting beside each in turn, and bending his head down close to the orifice with the exact action of a man whispering a secret into another’s ear. I believe he kept this attitude for a couple of minutes beside each hive—there were eight, besides the empty one. At the end of the row he lifted his head, straightened his shoulders, and cast a glance up at my window, where I kept well out of sight. A minute after, he entered his house by the back door, and did not reappear. At breakfast I asked my landlady if our neighbour were wrong in his head at all. She looked astonished, and answered, “No: he wasa do-nothing fellow—unless you counted it hard work to drive a carrier’s van thrice a week into Tregarrick, and home the same night. But he kept very steady, and had a name for good nature.” Next day the man was in his garden at the 250 NOUGHTS AND CROSSES. same hour, and repeated the performance. Throughout the following night I was kept awake by a series of monotonous groans that reached me through the partition, and the murmur of voices speaking at intervals. It was horrible to lie within a few inches of the sick woman’s head, to listen to her agony and be unable to help, unable even to see. Towards six in the morning, in bright daylight, I dropped off to sleep at last. Two hours later the sound of voices came in at the open window and awoke me. I looked out into my neighbour’s garden. He was standing, half-way up the path, in the sunshine, and engaged in a suppressed but furious altercation with a thin woman, some- what above middle height. Both wore thick ereen veils over their faces and thick gloves on their hands. The woman carried a rusty tea- tray. The man stood against her, motioning her back towards the house. I caught a sentence— “Ttll be the death of her;” and the woman glanced back over her shoulder towards the BESIDE THE BEE-HIVES. 251 window of the sick-room. She seemed about to reply, but shruggea her shoulders instead and went back into the house, carrying her tray. The man turned on his heel, walked hurriedly up the garden, and scrambled over its hedge into the wood. His veil and thick gloves were explained a couple of hours later, when I looked into the garden again and saw him hiving a swarm of bees that he had captured, the first of the season. That same afternoon, about four o’clock, I observed that every window in the next house stood wide open. My landlady was out in the garden, “ picking in” her week’s washing from the thorn hedge where it had been suspended to dry; and I called her attention to this new freak of our neighbours. “Ah, then, the poor soul must be nigh to her end,” said she. “That’s done to give her an easy death.” The woman died at half-past seven. And next morning her husband hung a scrap of black crape to each of the bee-hives. She was buried on Sunday afternoon. From 252 NOUGATS AND CROSSES. behind the drawn blinds of my sitting-room window I saw the funeral leave the house and move down the front garden to the high-road —the heads of the mourners, each with a white handkerchief pressed to its nose, appearing above the wall like the top of a procession in some Assyrian sculpture. The husband wore a ridiculously tall hat, and a hat-band with long tails. The whole affair had the appearance of an hysterical outrage on the afternoon sun- shine. At the foot of the garden they struck up a “burying tune,” and passed down the road, shouting it with all their lungs. I caught up a book and rushed out into the back garden for fresh air. Even out of doors it was insufferably hot, and soon I flung myself down on the bench within the arbour and set myself to read. A plank behind me had started, and after a while the edge of it began to gall my shoulders as I leant back. I tried once or twice to push it into its place, without success, and then, in a moment of irritation, gave it a tug. [t came away in my hand, and something rolled out on the bench before me, and broke in two. BESIDE THE BEE-HiVES. 253 I picked it up. It was a lump of dough, rudely moulded to the shape of a woman, with a rusty brass-headed nail stuck through the breast. Around the body was tied a lock of fine light-brown hair—-a woman’s, by its length. After a careful examination, I untied the lock of hair, put the doll back in its place behind the plank, and returned to the house: for I had a question or two to put to my landlady. “Was the dead woman at all like her elder sister?” I asked. “Was she black-haired, for instance ?” “No,” answered my landlady; “she was shorter and much fairer. You might almost call her a light-haired woman.” I hoped she would pardon me for changing the subject abruptly and asking an apparently ridiculous question, but would she call a man mad if she found him whispering secrets into a bee-hive ? My landlady promptly replied that, on the contrary, she would think him extremely sen- sible; for that, unless bees were told of all that 254 NOUGHTS AND CROSSES. was happening in the household to which they belonged, they might consider themselves neg- lected, and leave the place in wrath. She asserted this to be a notorious fact. “TI have one more question,” I said. “Sup- pose that you found in your garden a lock of hair—a lock such as this, for instance—what would you do with it?” She looked at it, and caught her breath sharply. “Tm no meddler,” she said at last; “I should burn it.” cc Why 2 9 “ Because if ’twas left about, the birds might use it for their nests, and weave it in so tight that the owner couldn’t rise on Judgment day.” So I burnt the lock of hair in her presence; because I wanted its owner to rise on Judgment day and state a case which, after all, was no affair of mine, THE MAGIC SHADOW. ONCE upon a time there was born a man-child with a magic shadow. His case was so rare that a number of doctors have been disputing over it ever since and picking his parents’ histories and genealogies to bits, to find the cause. Their inquiries do not help us much. The father drove a cab; the mother was a charwoman and came of a con- sumptive family. But these facts will not quite account for a magic shadow. The birth took place on the night of a new moon, down a narrow alley into which neither moon nor sun ever penetrated beyond the third-storey windows —and that is why the parents were so long in discovering their child’s miraculous gift. The hospital-student who attended merely remarked that the babe was small and sickly, and advised the mother to drink sound port-wine while nursing him,—which she could not afford. Nevertheless, the boy struggled somehow 256 NOUGHTS AND CROSSES. through five years of life, and was put into small- clothes. Two weeks after this promotion his mother started off to scrub out a big house in the fashionable quarter, and took him with her: for the house possessed a wide garden, laid with turf and lined with espaliers, sunflowers, and hollyhocks, and as the month was August, and the family away in Scotland, there seemed no harm in lettmmg the child run about in this paradise while she worked. A flight of steps descended from the drawing-room to the garden, and as she knelt on her mat in the cool room it was easy to keep an eye on him. Now and then she gazed out into the sunshine and called; and the boy stopped running about and nodded back, or shouted the report of some fresh discovery. By-and-by a sulphur butterfly excited him so that he must run up the broad stone steps with the news. The woman laughed, looking at his flushed face, then down at his shoe-strings, which were untied: and then she jumped up, crying out sharply—*“Stand still, child—stand still a moment!” THE MAGIC SHADOW. 257 She might well stare. Her boy stood and smiled in the sun, and his shadow lay on the whitened steps. Only the silhouette was not that of a little breeched boy at all, but of a litt'ec girl in petticoats ; and it wore long curls, whereas the charwoman’s son was close-cropped. The woman stepped out on the terrace to look closer. She twirled her son round and walked him down into the garden, and back- wards and forwards, and stood him in all manner of positions and attitudes, and rubbed her eyes. But there was no mistake: the shadow was that of a little girl. She hurried over her charing, and took the boy home for his father to see before sunset. As the matter seemed important, and she did not wish people in the street to notice anything strange, they rode back in an omnibus. They might have spared their haste, however, as the cab-driver did not reach home till supper-time, and then it was found that in the light of a candle, even when stuck inside a carriage-lamp, their son cast just an ordinary shadow. But next morning at sunrise they woke him up and R 258 NOUGHTS AND CROSSES. carried him to the house-top, where the sunlight slanted between the chimney-stacks: and the shadow was that of a little girl. The father scratched his head. “There’s money in this, wife. We'll keep the thing close; and in a year or two he'll be fit to go round ina show and earn money to support our declining years,” With that the poor little one’s misfortunes began. For they shut him in his room, nor allowed him to play with the other children in the alley—there was no knowing what harm might come to his precious shadow. On dark nights his father walked him out along the streets; and the boy saw many curious things under the gas-lamps, but never the little girl who inhabited his shadow. So that by degrees he forgot all about her. And his father kept silence. Yet all the while she grew side by side with him, keeping pace with his years. And on his fifteenth birthday, when his parents took him out into the country and, in the sunshine there, THE MAGIC SHADOW. 259 revealed his secret, she was indeed a companion to be proud of—neat of figure, trim of ankle, with masses of waving hair; but whether blonde or brunette could not be told; and, alas! she had no eyes to look into. “ My son,” said they, “the world lies before you. Only do not forget your parents, who conferred on you this remarkable shadow.” The youth promised, and went off to a show- man. The showman gladly hired him; for, of course, a magic shadow was a rarity, though not so well paying as the Strong Man or the Fat Woman, for these were worth seeing every day, whereas for weeks at a time, in dull weather or foggy, our hero had no shadow at all. But he earned enough to keep himself and help the parents at home; and was considered a success. One day, after five years of this, he sought the Strong Man, and sighed. For they had become close friends. “T am in love,” he confessed. “With your shadow ?” “No.” 260 NOUGHTS AND CROSSES. “Not with the Fat Woman!” the Strong Man exclaimed, with a start of jealousy. “No. I have seen her that I mean these three days in the Square, on her way to music lesson. She has dark brown eyes and wears yellow ribbons. I love her.” “You don’t say so! She has never come to our performance, I hope.” “It has been foggy ever since we came to this town.” “Ah, to be sure. Then there’s a chance: for, you see, she would never look at you if she knew of—of that other. Take my advice—go into society, always at night, when there is no danger; get introduced; dance with her; sing serenades under her window; then marry her. Afterwards—well, that’s your affair.” So the youth went into society and met the girl he loved, and danced with her so viva- ciously and sang serenades with such feeling beneath her window, that at last she felt he was all in all to her. Then the youth asked to be allowed to see her father, who was a Retired Colonel; and professed himself a man of Sub- THE*MAGIC SHADOW. 261 stance. He said nothing of the Shadow: but it is true he had saved a certain amount. “Then to all intents and purposes you are a gentle- man,” said the Retired Colonel; and the wed- ding-day was fixed. They were married in dull weather, and spent a delightful honeymoon. But when spring came and brighter days, the young wife began to feel lonely; for her husband locked himself, all the day long, in his study—to work, as he said. He seemed to be always at work ; and whenever he consented to a holiday, it was sure to fall on the bleakest and dismallest day in the week. “You are never so gay now as you were last Autumn. I am jealous of that work of yours. At least,” she pleaded, “let me sit with you and share your affection with it.” But he laughed and denied her: and next day she peered in through the keyhole of his study. That same evening she ran away from him: having seen the shadow of another woman by his side. Then the poor man—for he had loved his 262 NOUGHTS AND CROSSES, wife—cursed the day of his birth and led an evil life. This lasted for ten years, and his wife died in her father’s house, unforgiving. On the day of her funeral, the man said to his shadow—“I see it all. We were made for each other, so let us marry. You have wrecked my life and now must save it. Only it is rather hard to marry a wife whom one can only see by sunlight and moonlight.” So they were married; and spent all their life in the open air, looking on the naked world and learning its secrets. And his shadow bore him children, in stony ways and on the bare mountain-side. And for every child that was born the man felt the pangs of it. And at last he died and was judged: and being interrogated concerning his good deeds, began— “ We two ‘ —and looked around for his shadow. A great light shone all about; but she was nowhere to be seen. In fact, she had passed before him; and his children remained on earth, where men THE MAGIC SHADOW. 263 already were heaping them with flowers and calling them divine. Then the man folded his arms and lifted his chin. “JT beg your pardon,” he said, “I am simply a sinner.” There are in this world certam men who create. The children of such are poems, and the half of their soul is female. For it is written that without woman no new thing shall come into the world. aT eee aD mb we. ate) } 1 ay ¥ } RAE yr hah geri < z < o = 2 fe) F 4 4d = uw ce) 7) a ui 2 z —)