38.The Appointed Lover
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NOW at the next door sat a fierce and jealous destroyer, with a waned glory about his venerable Semitic head. The upper half of him was like amber, his lower parts shone as if with a fading fire. He seemed forlorn and unspeakably outworn. He looked without love at Guivric, saying, “Ahih Ashr Ahih.”
“No deity could put it fairer than that, sir,” replied Guivric. “I respect the circumstance. Nevertheless, I have made a note of your number, and it is five hundred and forty-three.”
Then about this warden also Guivric walked widdershins, in a complete circle.
“Issachar is a large-limbed ass,” said Guivric, soberly. “He has become a servant under taskwork. Yet his is the circumambulation.”
Whereafter Guivric still went onward, into the next room: and Guivric’s feet now glittered each with a pallid halo, for in that instant he had trodden very near to God, and glory clung to them.
And in this room, which was hung with green androse-color, white pigeons were walking about and eating barley. In the midst of the room a woman was burning violets and white rose-petals and olive wood in a new earthen dish. She arose from this employment, smiling. And her loveliness was not a matter of mere color and shaping, such as may be found elsewhere in material things: rather, was this loveliness a light which lived and was kindly.
Now this dear woman too began, “It is needful—”
“I think it is not at all needful, madame, to explain what human faculty you would exhort me to exercise.”
Guivric said this with a gallant frivolity: and yet he was trembling.
And after a while of looking at him somewhat sadly, the woman asked, “Do you not, then, remember me?”
“It is a strange thing, madame,” he answered, “it is a very strange thing that I should so poignantly remember you whom I have not ever seen before to-day. For I am shaken by old and terrible memories, I am troubled by the greatness of ancient losses not ever to be atoned for, in the exact moment that I cannot, for the life of me, say what these memories and these losses are.”
“You have loved me,—not once, but many times, my appointed lover.”
“I have loved a number of women, madame,—although I have of course avoided giving rise to any regrettable scandal. And it has been very pleasant tolove women without annoying the prejudices of their recognized and legitimate proprietors. It enables one to combine physical with mental exercise. But this is not pleasant. To the contrary, I am frightened. I am become as a straw in a wide and rapid river: I am indulging in no pastime: that which is stronger than I can imagine is hurrying me toward that of which I am ignorant.”
“I know,” she answered. “Time upon time it has been so with us. But something has gone wrong—”
“What has happened, madame, is that the Sylan is at odds with me; and covets, so my dactyliomancy informed me, some one thing or it may be two things which I possess.”
“The Sylan is about to become human. That is why your saga has been perverted, and that is the reason of your having been ensnared as a phantom into the Sylan’s House—”
“Eh, then, and do you also, madame, dismiss me as a phantom!”
“Why, but of course no person’s body may enter into this mischancy place! The body which I have to-day, my appointed lover, is that of a very old woman in Cataia, nodding among my body’s many children and grandchildren, and dreaming of the love this life has denied to me. It is a blotched and shriveled body, colored like a rotting apple: and the bodies which we now have may not ever encounter. So all our livingwears thin, and the lives that we now have must both be wasted tepidly, as a lukewarm water is poured out: and there is now no help for it, now that the Sylan is at odds with you.”
“I go to match my thaumaturgies against his magic,” said Guivric stoutly.
“You go, my dearest, to face that thing which is most pitiable and terrible of all things that be! You go to face your own destruction!”
“Nevertheless,” said Guivric, “I go.”
Yet still he looked at this woman. And Guivric’s thin hard lips moved restively. He sighed. He turned away and went on silently. His face could not be seen under his cap of owl feathers, but his broad shoulders sagged a little.