“If she were but a bit like you, ma’am,” Gerald gallantly remarked,—with somewhat increasing composure now that this woman reminded him the more closely that he observed her yet more and more of Evelyn,—“the case would be different.”
“But I,” said Evarvan of the Mirror, “will remain with you always, if you indeed desire to become my lover. For there is a way, Gerald, there is for you through my mirror’s aid an open way to contentment. You shall know an untruth, and that untruth will make you free: the doings of the world, and all the bustling that is made by merchants and by warriors and by well-thought-of persons talking about important matters, will then run by you like a little stream of shallow, bickering waters: and you will heed none of these things, but only that loveliness which all youth desires and no man ever finds save through my mirror’s aid. You will live among bright shadows very futilely: yes: but you will be happy.”
Gerald replied hoarsely: “I desire only you. I cannot think of thrones, nor of any gods, now that you stand here within arm’s reach. All my life long I have desired you, as I know now, my dearest, throughout the dreary while of over-much playing and laughter that I have lived in ever-dwindling faith I would yet win to you by and by. But now I am again as Johan Faustus,—or, rather, I am as Jurgen in that other old story, when he had come at last to Helen, the delight of gods and men: only I am more favored than was Jurgen, for my Helen speaks....”
“Oh, and I speak for your own good, my darling, for there is a condition to be fulfilled before I may trust you and may give you all.”
Gerald answered: “No, Evelyn, not to-night—But indeed I entreat your pardon, my dear. My mind must have been wandering. Yes, yes! as I was saying, the difference is that Helen speaks!”
“For your own good, my dearest.”
“Yes; you speak, naturally, of a condition for my own good, just as Glaum hinted that so many more or less friendly persons would be doing in these parts.”
“I speak, though, of a very easy condition. You must yourself perform a tiny Asvamedha; and you must immolate before my mirror, not any really valuable horse, of course, nor even a good-looking horse, but only that hideous and wholly worthless horse which you have brought with you into the land of Dersam.”
Then Gerald said: “And that is a small price to pay for the attainment of the one thing which my heart quite earnestly desires, is it not? For all my life I have hungered, as I believe that all poets hunger, for that unflawed beauty, seemingly not ever to be found upon this earth, which now stands revealed in the form of a woman, and which now speaks to me with the voice of a woman—oh, quite with the voice of a woman I—and speaks, too, for my own good. Yes, it is a small price, such as any boy of nineteen or thereabouts would pay gladly. For I must tell you, who are the delight of gods and—well! of adolescent boys, at least, in every quarter of the world,—that all this very strongly reminds me of that first sonnet which I made about you when I was a boy of nineteen.”
Evarvan did not wholly conceal her uneasiness over the prospect of hearing this sonnet. But there was none the less in her voice a tenderness almost motherly now that she asked of Gerald, “And did you make verses, then, about me, dear, so early?”
“To prove it,” Gerald replied, “I will now recite to you that identical sonnet.”
And he did.
But his voice was so shaken with emotion that, when he had completed the octave, he paused, because it was never within Gerald’s power to resist the beauty of a sublime thought when it was thus adequately expressed in flawless verse. So for an instant he stayed silent. He caught up the lovely hands of Evarvan of the Mirror, and he pressed them to his trembling lips.
For this beguiling bright dream was now become a snare to delay him in journeying onward to his appointed kingdom, and to betray him again into bondage to the rather beautiful ideas and tinsel notions of youth. Presently he would be seeing no more of this traitorous dream woman, who was preparing to trust him and to give him all, and who none the less was more lovely and more dear than any real thing anywhere. Afterward he would regret her, he knew: always he would regret Evarvan, among whatsoever delights they were which awaited Gerald in his appointed kingdom. Nevertheless, this dream was an impediment in the way of a Savior and a sun deity, with whose appropriate functions this dream was interfering: and the most painful duty which confronted Gerald was not precisely to be discourteous to a lady, but to discourage sacrilege.
Dismissing these cursory reflections, Gerald sighed: and he continued the reciting of his sonnet with an air of lofty resignation intermingled with a gustatory approval of really good verse.
“That,” said Evarvan of the Mirror, when he had ended, “is a very beautiful sonnet, and I am proud to have inspired it. But we were talking about something else, I have quite forgotten what—”
“I,” Gerald said, “have not forgotten.”
“Oh, yes, now I do remember! We were talking about the lucky chance afforded you to get rid of that dreadful horse of yours.”
Gerald looked for one instant at the most lovely of all the illusions he had found in the Mirror of Caer Omn. Then he began to recite the multiplication tables.
You saw that she was frightened. She said, “Oh, and I trusted you! I gave you all!”
She bleated now; her beauty was dimmed: and she seemed just the Evelyn Townsend who had pestered Gerald beyond any reasonable endurance.
But Gerald, howsoever heavy was the heart of Gerald who quite honestly objected to being troubled by anything, went on inexorably to exorcise Evarvan with the old runes of common-sense. He spoke of the elephant that is the largest of beasts, and of the very dissimilar household economy practised by a King of Israel and by Elijah the Tishbite, and of the straight line that is the shortest distance between two points; and the old magic was potent.
Before his eyes Evarvan of the Mirror was changed. Of the degradation which was put upon her, it suffices to report that this lovely lady went backward in the course of every mortal woman’s living. She passed from girlhood into a lank-legged childhood, and thence into drooling and feebly puking infancy, and after that into the shapes she had worn in her mother’s womb. In the end there remained of the most dear illusion which Gerald had found in the Mirror of Caer Omn only two pink figures in the form of a soft throbbing egg and of a creature like a tadpole darting lustfully about it: and these melted back into the moonshine of the Sacred Mirror of Caer Omn.
Nor was that all. The wives of Glaum and the Temple of the Mirror and all that was about Gerald began to waver. All the material things about him showed now like paintings on a gauze curtain which was moving and crinkling in a very gentle breeze. The shaping of the six wives became longer and more attenuated: they were shaped like the shadows of women in a fine sunset. These so prettily tinted shadows strained toward the mirror and entered it precisely as you may see smoke drift toward and out of an opened window. Then all the temple followed them collapsingly, as if colored waters were running into a hole. The mirror swallowed all. Caer Omn was gone: the land of Dersam was a ruined land without inhabitants. Afterward the pale glass blinked seven times like summer lightning, and the mirror was not there.
Gerald stood alone in a cedar-shadowed way. He was weeping quite unaffectedly. His very deepest poetic sensibilities had been touched by the rather beautiful idea that he had loved this woman all his life long, and that now he had lost her forever: but a little way behind Gerald the silver stallion stayed unimmolated, and grazed placidly.