“I am glad that my body has turned out so splendidly. And I trust that all goes equally well with your daughter Evelyn?”
“Gerald,” the older man replied, looking more seriously troubled than Gerald ever liked to have anybody seeming in his company, “Gerald, it is an unfair thing that your Cousin Evelyn, without knowing it, should be living upon terms of such close friendship with a demon-haunted body.”
“Ah, so that friendship continues!”
“It continues,” said Gaston, “unaltered. It may interest you, Gerald, by the way, to hear that your Cousin Evelyn has now a son, quite a fine red-headed boy, born just a year after you relinquished your body to that treacherous Sylan.”
Gerald answered affably: “Why, that is perfectly splendid! Frank always wanted a boy.”
“My son-in-law, in fact, is much pleased. It is about my daughter I was thinking. It seemed to me the situation is hardly fair to her, Gerald.”
Gerald replied: “My body is all of me that she was ever acquainted with, Gaston. So I fail to perceive that anything is altered.”
“Yet, when I reflect that a beautiful and accomplished and chaste gentlewoman, Gerald—”
“Ah, ah! But, yes, to be sure! you speak in the time-hallowed terms of Lichfield. And I really do not know why I interrupted you.”
“—When I reflect that, without knowing it, a gentlewoman is living upon terms of such close friendship with a mere demon-haunted body—”
“And is, in fact, trusting and giving all?”
“All her friendship and the natural affection of a kinswoman. Yes, that is a sad spectacle. It is an unsuitable spectacle. So it seems to me your duty as a Musgrave, and as a Southern gentleman, to return forthwith to mortal living and to your mortal obligations, and in particular to the obligations of your life-long friendship with your Cousin Evelyn.”
Gerald said, for the second time, “Oh, bosh!”
For the notions and the chivalrous assumptions of Gaston Bulmer all now appeared to Gerald out of reason, in view of the divine predestination which was upon him. A god had no concern with such slight imbroglios as the code of a merely terrestrial gentleman and the proper maintenance upon Earth of polite adultery. It would, indeed, be positively ill-bred for a Dirghic god to meddle with any of the affairs of a planet which, according to Gerald’s Protestant Episcopal faith, had been created and was controlled by an Episcopalian deity; for Gerald had of course retained, provisionally, that religion in which he was a communicant until he could find out something rather more definite about the religion in which he was a god.
Gerald therefore said: “My good Gaston, that your meaning is excellent, I do not doubt. And it is not your fault of course that, in your merely human condition, you do not quite understand these matters, and certainly cannot view them with an omniscient eye.”
The older man said: “I understand, in any event, that through all these years you have stayed here bewitched with terrible half-magics, and that your own eyes are blinded with the woman’s rose-colored spectacles. And I seek to preserve you.”
“You would preserve me for the provincial life of your little Lichfield! You would make me just another chivalrous, bull-headed, rather nice-looking and wholly stupid Musgrave! In fine, you would urge me to become genteel and to deny my glorious destiny. Yet to do that would be cowardly, Gaston: for, whether I like it or not, there is upon me the divine obligation to fulfill some very ancient prophecies.
“What sort of prophecies are these?”
“They are Dirghic prophecies. But, then? it is not the language in which a prophecy is uttered that matters, rather it is—Well, it is the spirit of the thing! For you must know—although, in view of my wife’s social position, I have compelled her, after some little argument, to introduce me hereabouts as a visiting sorcerer,—yet I may tell you, in strict confidence, Gaston, it is decreed that, as the Lord of the Third Truth, I am to reign in Antan.”
“And who told you any such unlikely nonsense?”
“Some people that I met upon the road. Oh, quite honest looking people, Gaston!”
“And who told you that you were the Lord of any Third Truth?”
“There my authority is unimpeachable. For I had it from the lips of a beautiful and accomplished and chaste gentlewoman, Gaston, who was speaking with all the frankness begotten by our being in bed together at the time.”
“And how can you reign in Antan, or anywhere else, when you do not ever go there? Through all these years, I gather, you have loitered here within a man’s arm’s reach of Antan!”
Gerald said, with the slight frown of one who finds trouble uncongeniaclass="underline" “I am puzzled, my dear friend, by your continued references to all these years. And I admit that various matters have a bit hindered my technical and merely formal entry into my kingdom. Yet I shall be leaving Mispec Moor the instant that this week’s washing is in, on Thursday afternoon—”
“But, my poor Gerald! you will not go, either forward to Antan or back to Lichfield, on what you think to be next Thursday. You have lost here all sense of time, you do not even know that the days you have spent in this place have counted as four years in Lichfield. I tell you that the wise woman, with her half-magics and her accursed spectacles, holds you here bewitched. And I now perceive that nothing whatever can be done for you, who are ensnared by the most fatal of all the magics of the wrinkled goddess.”
—To which Gerald, for the third time, replied: “Oh, bosh! No sorceress has any power over a god. And so completely do you misunderstand my wife, Gaston, that I must tell you hardly a day passes without her urging me to hurry on to Antan.”
Gaston Bulmer was still regarding him with that extraordinary and wholly uncalled-for look of compassion.
“How completely,” he remarked, “she understands you Musgraves! Yes, you are lost, my poor Gerald.”
“—It follows that your notions are preposterous. Oh, that is not your fault, my dear fellow, and not for an instant am I blaming you. Your conduct, from your human point of view, is very right, very friendly, very proper. So your rather laughable blunder does not offend me in the least. And if, as you declare, I have lingered here for some four years as you human beings estimate time, what do four years amount to with an immortal who has at his disposal all eternity? Come now, Gaston, do you but answer me that very simple question!”
But Gaston answered only: “You are content. You are lost.”
34. Ambiguity of the Brown Man
AND Gaston said no more about the matter, because just here their talking was interrupted. For now, as these two still sat at the roadside, they were joined by a brown man, dressed completely in neat brown, who was journeying toward Antan.
“Hail, friend!” said Gerald, “and what business draws you to the city of all marvels?”
And the brown man, pausing, said that, in point of fact, it was upon a slight matter of business routine that he desired to consult with Queen Freydis. All gods, he said, had rather speedily passed downward to encounter the word which was in the beginning,—for it was thus that the brown man spoke, very much as King Solomon had spoken,—all gods, that is, save only one, who so bewilderingly altered his tenets that there was no telling where to have him.