Chapter VIII: Book SIX: In the Sylan’s House

“_Is it time for you to dwell in your ceiled houses, and this house lie
waste?_”
—HAGGAI, i, 4.

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_34._
_Something Goes Wrong: and Why_

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NOW the tale is of Guivric of Perdigon, more generally called the Sage, who in the days after Anavalt went into Elfhame was chief of the lords of the Silver Stallion who yet remained in Poictesme. And the tale tells how it appeared to Guivric of Perdigon that something was going wrong.

He had not anything tangible to complain of. There was, indeed, no baron in Poictesme more powerful and honored than was Guivric the Sage. He had no need to bother over any notions about Manuel which in no way affected the welfare of Guivric of Perdigon, and he had no quarrel with the more staid and religious ordering of matters which now prevailed in Poictesme. Guivric had, howsoever frostily, adapted himself to these times, and in them a reasonably staid and religious Guivric had, thus, thrived.

As Heitman of Asch, he still held as rigorously as he had held in Manuel’s heyday, the fertile Piemontais between the Duardenez river and Perdigon. He had money and two castles, he lived in comeliness and splendor, he had wisdom and a high name and the finest vineyards anywhere in those regions. He had every reason to be proud of his tall prospering son Michael, a depressingly worthy young warrior, whose superabundant virtues, modeled with so much earnestness after the Manuel of the legend, caused Guivric to regard the amours of Michael’s wife (and Manuel’s daughter) with quiet and unregenerate amusement. And Guivric got on with his own wife as well, he flattered himself, as any person could hope to do upon the more animated side of deafness.

Yet something, this prim and wary Guivric knew, was somewhere going wrong. Things, even such prosaic common things as the chair he was seated in, or his own hands moving before him, were becoming dubious and remote. People spoke with thinner voices: and their bodies flickered now and then, as if these bodies were only appearances of colored vapor. The trees of Guivric’s flourishing woodlands would sometimes stretch and flatten in the wind like trails of smoke. The walls of Guivric’s fine home at Asch, and of his great fort at Perdigon also, were acquiring, as their conservative owner somewhat frettedly observed, a habit of moving, just by a thread’s width, when you were not quite looking at them; and of shifting in outline and in station as secretively as a cloud alters.

Instability and change lurked everywhere. Without any warning well-known faces disappeared from Guivric’s stately household: the men-at-arms and the lackeys who remained seemed not to miss them, nor indeed ever to have known of those vanished associates.

And Guivric found that the saga which the best-thought-of local bards had compiled and adorned, under his supervision, so as to preserve for posterity’s benefit the glorious exploits and the edifying rewards of Guivric the Sage, was dwindling alike in length and in impressiveness. Overnight a line here and there, or a whole paragraph, would drop out unaccountably, an adventure would lose color, or an achievement would become less clear-cut: and the high and outrageous doings in which Guivric had shared as a lord of the Silver Stallion, these began, in particular, to become almost unrecognizable. At this rate, people would soon have no assurance whatever that Guivric the Sage had lived in unexampled heroism and respectability and had most marvelously prospered in everything.

And it was all quite annoying. It was as though Guivric, or else each one of his possessions and human ties, were wasting away into a phantom: and neither alternative seemed pleasant to consider.

Guivric locked fast the doors of the brown room in which now for so many years he had conducted his studies and his thaumaturgies. He set out a table, the top of which was inscribed with three alphabets. He put on a robe of white: about his withered neck he arranged a garland of purple vervain such as is called herb-of-the-cross. From seven rings he selected—because this day was a Sunday,—the gold ring inset with a chrysolite upon which was engraved the figure of a lion-headed serpent.

When this ring had been hung above the table, with a looped red hair plucked long ago from the tail of a virgin nightmare, and when the wan Lady of Crossroads had been duly invoked, then Guivric lighted a taper molded from the fat of Saracen women and of unweaned dogs, and with the evil flaming of this taper he set fire to the looped hair. The red hair burned with a small spiteful sizzling: the gold ring fell. The ring rolled about upon the table, it uncoiled, it writhed, it moved glitteringly among the characters of three alphabets, passing like a tortured worm from one ideograph to another, and it revealed to Guivric the dreadful truth.

The Sylan whom people called Glaum-Without-Bones was at odds with Guivric. This was not a matter which anybody blessed with intelligent self-interest could afford to neglect.

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_35._
_Guivric’s Journey_

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CERTAINLY Guivric the Sage, who cared only for himself, did not neglect this matter. The prim and wary man armed, and rode eastward, beyond Megaris; and fared steadily ever further into the East, traveling beyond the Country of Widows and the fearful Isle of the Ten Carpenters. Then, at Oskander’s Well, Guivric put off material armor. He put off even his helmet, and in its stead he assumed a cap of owl feathers. He passed through arid high pastures, beyond the wall of the Sassanid, he rubbed lemon juice upon his horse’s legs and rode unmolested through the broad and shallow lake, and thus came to the Sylan’s House. And all went well enough at first.

Guivric had feared, for one thing, that the Norns would forbid his entering into the mischancy place: but when he had tethered safely the fine horse which Guivric was never again to ride upon, he found that the gray weavers did not hinder him. They had not ever, they said, planned any future for Guivric: and it was all one to them whether he fared forward to face his own destruction or intrepidly went back to living with his wife.

“But do you not weave the sagas and the dooms of all men?” he asked of them.

“Not yours,” lean Skuld replied, looking up at him with pallid little cold bright eyes.

Guivric thus passed the haggard daughters of Dvalinn; and the proud man went onward, disquieted but unhindered. And in the gray anteroom beyond, were the progenitors of Guivric disporting themselves, each in the quaint manner of his bygone day, and talking with uneager and faded voices about the old times.

Since none of these ancestors had ever heard or thought of Guivric, they gave scant attention to him now. And to see them was upsetting, somehow. One of these strangers had Guivric’s high thin nose, and another just his long thin hands, and another his prim mouth, and another his excellent broad shoulders. Guivric could recognise all these fragments of himself moving at random about the gray room. He knew that, less visibly but quite as really, his tastes and his innate aversions—his little talents and failings and out-of-date loyalties, his quickness at figures, his aptitude for drawing, his tendency to catch cold easily, and his liking for sweets and highly seasoned foods,—were all passing about this gray room.

A compost of odds and ends had been patched together from these unheeding persons; that almost accidental patchwork was Guivric: the thought was humiliating. There was, he reflected, in this gray room another complete Guivric, only this other Guivric was not entire, but moved about in scattered fragments. That thought, appeared to a peculiarly self-centered person like Guivric, rather uncomfortable.

So Guivric went beyond his ancestors. Without delay the proud man passed stiffly by the inconsiderate people whose casual amours had created him, and had given him life and all his qualities, without consulting his preference or his convenience, or even thinking about him.

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_36._
_The Appointed Enemy_

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HE came to a door beside which a saturnine castrato sat drowsing over a scythe. Guivric caught him intrepidly by the forelock; and tugging at it, thus forced the gaunt warden in his pain to cry out, “Enough!”

“For time enough is little enough,” said Guivric, “and when you are little enough, I can go safely by without killing time here. And that I shall certainly do, because to spare time is to lengthen life.”

“Come, come now,” grumbled the ancient warden, “but these tonsorial freedoms and this foolish talking seem very odd—”

“Time,” Guivric answered him, “at last sets all things even.”

Then Guivric walked widdershins in a complete circle about the old eunuch; and so went on into a room hung with black and silver: and in this place was a young and beautifully fashioned boy, with the bright unchanging gaze of a serpent.

The boy arose; and, putting aside a rod upon which grew black poppies, each with a silver-colored heart, he said to Guivric, “It is needful that you should hate.”

Now, at the sight of this stranger, Guivric was filled with an inexplicable wild rapture; and after shaping the sign of the River Horse and of the Writing of Lo, he demanded of this young man his name.

But the other only answered: “I am your appointed enemy. There is between us an eternal hatred; and should our bodies encounter we would contend as heroes. But something has gone wrong, our sagas have been perverted, and our spirits have been ensnared into the Sylan’s House, and all our living wears thin.”

“Come, come, my enemy!” cried Guivric, “hatred—since, as you tell me, this is hatred,—is throbbing in me now as a drum beats: and I would that we two might encounter!”

“That may not be,” replied the young man. “I am only a phantom in the Sylan’s House. I live as a newborn child in Denmark, I drowse as yet in swaddling cloths, dreaming at this instant about my appointed enemy. Yet in the life which you now have you will not ever go to Denmark: and by the time that I am grown, and am able to wield a sword and to contrive mischief against you, and to beset you everywhere with my lewd perversities, the body which you now have will have been taken away from you.”

“I am sorry,” Guivric said, “for in all my life, even in the rough old times of that blundering Manuel— I mean, of course, that, although I was privileged to share in the earthly labors of the Redeemer, in all my life I have never hated before to-day. I have merely disliked some persons, somewhat as I dislike cold veal or house-flies, without real ardor. And very often these persons could be useful to me, so that, through many little flatteries and small falsehoods, I must keep on their good side. But I perceive now that, throughout the living which my neighbors applaud and envy, I have needed some tonic adversary to exalt my living with a great and heroic loathing.”

“I know, dear adversary! And I know too that all the life which I now have must run slack because of an unfed lusting for my appointed enemy. But affairs will go more grandly by and by, if ever we get out of the Sylan’s House.”

“Heyday,” said Guivric, masterfully, “I am not going out! Instead, I am going in, even to the heart of this mischancy place; and you must go with me.”

But the lad shook his lovely evil head. “No: for, now that the Sylan is about to become human, they tell me, at the heart of the Sylan’s House is to be found pity and terror; and both of these must remain forever unknown to me.”

“Well, but why?” said Guivric, “why need those two cathartics which Aristotle most highly recommends remain forever unknown to you in particular?”

“Ah,” replied the boy, “that is a mystery. I only know it is decreed—and is decreed, for that matter, in the name of Eloim, Muthraton, Adonay, and Semiphoras,—that my rod here as it was first raised up in Gomorrah should possess quite other virtues than the rods of Moses and of Jacob.”

“Oh, in Gomorrah! So it was in that wicked city of the plain of Jordan, my spoiled child, that they first spared the rod! I see. For is not that rod to be used—thus?”

And Guivric showed with a discreet but obvious gesture what he meant.

The lad fearlessly answered him.

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_37._
_Too Many Mouths_

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SO Guivric quitted his appointed enemy. And at the next door sat a discomfortable looking dyspeptic, crowned and wearing an old shroud, and huddled up, as if by spasms of pain, upon a tombstone, very neatly engraved with the arms and the name and the parentage and the titles of Guivric of Perdigon. Only the date and the manner of Guivric’s decease remained as yet vacant. And the crowned toiler put aside his chisel, and he grinned at Guivric rather pitiably.

“I really must be more careful,” observed this second warden, groaning and fidgeting and shaking his fleshless head, but of necessity grinning all the while, because he had no lips. “I am decreed, you see, to keep no measure in my diet; I must eat sheep as well as lambs; and afterward I find out only too plainly that there is not any medicine for death.”

Guivric, without a word of condolence, took out of his pocket a handful of coins, and he selected from among the thalers and pistoles a newly minted mark. This coin he tendered to the second warden, and the tomb-maker accepted lovingly this shining mark. Then Guivric walked widdershins in a circle about this warden also: and when the king of terrors had been thus circumvented, Guivric went forward into the next room. A sweet and piercing and heavy odor now went with Guivric, and clung to him, and it was like the odor of embalming spices.

This room was hung with white and gold; and in this room a plump and naked man, wearing only a miter, was praying to nine gods. He arose and, after brushing off his reddened knees, he said to Guivric, “It is needful that you should believe.”

“I wish to believe,” replied Guivric. “Yet when I ask— Well, but you know what always happens.”

“Such, my dear errant son, is the accustomed punishment of unhallowed curiosity. It should, equally, be looked for and overlooked. The important thing is to believe.”

Guivric smiled rather bleakly now, beneath his cap of owl feathers. He said, like one who repeats a familiar ritual, “What should I believe?”

Upon the arms and upon the chest and upon the belly, and everywhere upon the naked body of the mitered man, opened red and precise-looking mouths, and each mouth answered Guivric’s question differently, and in the while that they all spoke together no one of these answers was clear. The utmost which Guivric could distinguish in the confusion was some piping babblement about Manuel the Redeemer. Then the mouths ended their speaking, and closed, and became invisible. The mitered man now seemed like any other benevolent gentleman in the middle years of a well-fed existence, and he was no longer horrible.

“You see,” said Guivric, with a shrug. “You see what always happens. I ask, and I am answered. Afterward I am impressed by the unusual phenomena, and I am slightly nauseated: but I, none the less, do not know which one of your countless mouths I should put faith in, and so bribe it to smile at me and prophesy good things.”

“That does not matter at all, my son. You have but to believe in whatsoever divine revealment you prefer as to what especial Redeemer will come to-morrow, and then you will live strongly and happily, you will go no longer as a phantom in the Sylan’s House.”

“Heyday!” said Guivric, “but it is you who are the phantom, and not I!”

The other for a moment was silent. Then he too shrugged. “With secular opinions as to such unimportant and wholly personal matters no belief is concerned.”

“I,” Guivric pointed out, “do not think this an unimportant matter. At all events, each one of your mouths speaks to me with the same authority and resonance: and in consequence, I can hear none of them.”

“Well, well!” said the plump mitered man, resignedly, “that sometimes happens, they tell me, when the Sylan is at odds with anybody. But, for one, I keep away from the Sylan, now that the Sylan is about to become human, because I suspect that at the heart of the Sylan’s House abides that which is too pitiable and too terrible for any of my mouths to aid.”

“I do not know about your aiding such things or any other things,” replied Guivric. “But I do know that, even though you dare not accompany me, I intend to match my thaumaturgies against the Sylan’s magic; and that we shall very shortly see what comes of it.”

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_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 and rose-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 to love 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 living wears 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.

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_39._
_One Warden Left Uncircumvented_

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BESIDE the next door lay a huge white stallion. And as Guivric approached this door, it opened. Through the brown curtains came that ambiguous young man called Horvendile, with whom Guivric, off and on, had held considerable traffic during a forty years’ practice of thaumaturgies.

The stallion now arose, before Guivric could walk widdershins about him, and the stallion went statelily away. And Horvendile gazed after the superb beast, rather wistfully.

“He, too,” said Horvendile, “goes as a phantom here. Is it not a pity, Guivric, that this Kalki will not come in our day, and that we shall not ever behold his complete glory? I cry a lament for that Kalki who will some day bring back to their appointed places high faith and very ardent loves and hatreds; and who will see to it that human passions are never in a poor way to find expression with adequate speech and action. Ohé, I cry a loud lament for Kalki! The little silver effigies which his postulants fashion and adore are well enough: but Kalki is a horse of another color.”

“I did not come into this accursed place to talk about horses and nightmares,” replied Guivric, “but to attend to the righting of the wrongs contrived by one Glaum-Without-Bones, who is at odds with me, and who has perverted my saga.”

Now Horvendile reflected for an instant. He said, “You have then, after so many years, come of your own will into the East, just as I prophesied, to face the most pitiable and terrible of all things?”

Guivric answered, guardedly, “I cannot permit my saga to be perverted.”

Horvendile said then: “Nevertheless, I consider the saga of no lord of the Silver Stallion to be worth squabbling over. Your sagas in the end must all be perverted and engulfed by the great legend about Manuel. No matter how you may strive against that legend, it will conquer: no matter what you may do and suffer, my doomed Guivric, your saga will be recast until it conforms in everything to the legend begotten by the terrified imaginings of a lost child. For men dare not face the universe with no better backing than their own resources; all men that live, and that go perforce about this world like blundering lost children whose rescuer is not yet in sight, have a vital need to believe in this sustaining legend about the Redeemer: and the wickedness and the foolishness of no man can avail against the foolishness and the fond optimism of mankind.”

“These aphorisms,” Guivric conceded, “may be judicious, they may be valuable, they may even have some kernel somewhere of rational meaning. But, in any case, they do not justify my living’s having been upset and generally meddled with by a lecherous and immodest Sylan who goes about wearing not even a skeleton.”

Horvendile replied: “I can see no flaw in your way of living. You are the chief of Emmerick’s barons now that Anavalt is gnawed bones in Elfhame: you have wealth and rather more than as much power as Emmerick himself, now that your son is Emmerick’s brother-in-law, and poor Emmerick is married to a widow. You are a well-thought-of thaumaturgist, and you are, indeed, excelled in your art by nobody since Miramon Lluagor’s death. And you have also, they tell me, a high name for wisdom and for learning now that Kerin has gone down under the earth. What more can anybody ask?”

“I ask for much more than for this sort of cautious and secondary excellence.” Guivric seemed strangely desperate. He spoke now, with a voice which was not in anything prim and wary, saying, “I ask for the man whom I can hate, for the priest whom I can believe, and for the woman whom I can love!”

But Horvendile shook his red curls, and he smiled a little cruelly. “Successful persons, my poor careful Guivric, cannot afford to have any of these luxuries. And one misses them. I know. The Sylan too is, in his crude and naïve way, a successful person. He is now almost human. He cherishes phantoms, therefore, and I suspect these phantoms have been troubling you with their nonsense, since it is well known that all illusions haunt the corridors of this mischancy place into which phantoms alone may enter.”

“Yet I have entered it,” Guivric pointed out.

“Yes,” Horvendile said, non-committally.

“And I now enter,” Guivric stated, “to the heart of it, to match my thaumaturgies against the Sylan’s magic.”

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_40._
_Economics of Glaum-Without-Bones_

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THEN Guivric passed through this door likewise; and so, with glowing feet and with an odor of funereal spices, Guivric came into the room in which was the Sylan. Glaum-Without-Bones looked up from his writing, tranquilly. Glaum said nothing: he merely smiled. All was quiet.

Guivric noticed a strange thing, and it was that this room was hung with brown and was furnished with books and pictures which had a familiar seeming. And then he saw that this room was in everything like the brown room at Asch in which now for so many years he had conducted his studies and his thaumaturgies; and that in this mischancy place, for all his arduous traveling beyond the Country of Widows and the fearful Isle of the Ten Carpenters and the high Wall of the Sassanid, here you still saw, through well-known windows, the familiar country about Asch and the gleaming of the Duardenez river, and beyond this the long plain of Amneran and the tall Forest of Acaire. And Guivric saw that this Glaum-Without-Bones, who sat there smiling up at Guivric, from under a cap of owl feathers, had in everything the appearance of the aging man who had so long sat in this room; and that Glaum-Without-Bones did not differ in anything from Guivric the Sage.

Guivric spoke first. He said:

“This is a strong magic. This is a sententious magic. They had warned me that I would here face my own destruction, that I would here face the most pitiable and terrible of all things: and I face here that which I have made of life, and life of me. I shudder; I am conscious of every appropriate sentiment. Nevertheless, sir, I must venture the suggestion that mere, explicit allegory as a form of art is somewhat obsolete.”

Glaum-Without-Bones replied: “What have I to do with forms of art? My need was of a form of flesh and blood. I had need of a human body and of human ties and of a human saga of the Norn’s most ruthless weaving. We Sylans have our powers and our privileges, but we are not the children of any god; and so, when we have lived out our permitted centuries, we must perish utterly unless we can contrive to become human. Therefore I had sore need of all human discomforts, so that a soul might sprout in me under oppression and chastening, and might, upon fair behavior, be preserved in eternal bliss, and not ever perish as we Sylans perish.”

“Everybody has heard of these familiar facts about you Sylans,” returned Guivric, impatiently, “and it is your stealing, in this shabby fashion, of my own particular human ties that I consider unheard-of—”

“Yes, yes,” said Glaum, with some complacence, “that was done through a rare magic, and through a strong magic, and through a magic against which there is no remedy.”

“That we shall see about! For what has happened to me is not fair—”

“Of course it is not,” Glaum assented. “The doom which is now upon you is no fairer than the doom which was upon me yesterday, to perish utterly like a weed or an old tom-cat.”

“—And so I have come hither to match my resistless thaumaturgies against your piddling magic, and to compel you to restore to me your pilferings—”

“I shall restore to you,” Glaum stated, “nothing. And I have taken all. Your saga is now my saga, your castles are my castles, your son is my son, and your body is my body. Inside that body I intend to live self-mortifyingly and virtuously, for some ten years or so; and then that body will die: but by that time a soul will have sprouted in me, an immortal soul which, you may be certain, I shall keep stainless, because I at least know how to appreciate such a remunerative bit of property. Thus, when your tomb becomes my tomb, that soul will of course ascend to eternal bliss.”

“But what,” said Guivric, scornfully, “what if I do not consent to be robbed of the salvation assured to me by sixty years of careful and respectable living? and what if I compel you—?”

“I think that, in your sorry case, you should not speak of compelling anybody to do anything. Nor is it altogether my doing that your house is now the Sylan’s House. Self-centered and self-righteous man, you had no longer any strength nor real desires, but only many little habits. Nothing at all solid remained really yours, not even when I first set about my magicking. Oho, and then you were an easy prey! and the human ties you held so lightly slipped very lightly away from you who had so long been living without any love or hatred or belief. For throughout that over-comfortable while the strength and the desire had been oozing out of you, and all your living wore thin. I had only to complete the emaciation. And in consequence”—Glaum gestured, rather gracefully, with Guivric’s long thin hands,—“in consequence, you go as a phantom.”

Guivric saw this was regrettably true. He saw it was as a slight grayish mist, through which he was looking down unhindered at the familiar rug behind him, that he now wavered and undulated in the midst of this room in which he had for so many years pursued his studies without a hint of such levity. Yet nothing was changed. Guivric of Perdigon still sat there, behind the oak table with copper corners. Guivric of Perdigon kept his accustomed place, palpable and prim and wary, as vigorous as could be hoped for at his age, and honored and well-to-do, and, in fine, with nothing left to ask for, as men estimate prosperity.

And the living of this Guivric was reasonably assured of going on like that, for year after year, quite comfortably, and with people everywhere applauding, and with nothing anywhere alluring you toward any rash excesses in the way of emotion. It was from this established and looked-up-to sort of living that a nefarious Sylan was planning to oust Guivric the Sage; and to leave Guivric a mere phantom, a thing as transitory and as disreputable—and of course, in a manner of speaking, as free too, and as lusty and as ageless,—as the Sylan’s self had been only yesterday.... For those abominable thieves and ravishers of maidens did not grow old and vigorless and tired: instead, when the appointed hour had struck, they vanished....

“Well, well!” said Guivric, and he now flickered into a sitting posture, more companionably. “This sort of eviction from every human tie is unexpected and high-handed and deplorable and so on. But we ought, even when all else is being lost, to retain composure.”

The Sylan let him talk....

And Guivric went on: “So, you are indissuadably resolved, at the cost of any possible conflict between my thaumaturgies and your magic, to leave me just a disembodied intelligence! Do you know, Messire Glaum, I cannot quite regard it as a compliment, that you refuse to take over my intelligence! Yet you, no doubt, prefer your own intelligence—”

The Sylan let him talk....

But Guivric had paused. For the Sylan’s intelligence had, after all, enabled Glaum to acquire—through howsoever irregular methods,—the utmost that a reasonable mind could look for in the way of success and comfort and of future famousness long after Glaum-Without-Bones had ascended to the eternal bliss assured by a careful and respectable past. The Sylan’s intelligence had gained for him the very best that any man could hope for. There was thus no firm ground, after all, upon which any human being could disrespect the Sylan’s intelligence.... It was only that these Sylans, always so regrettably lewd and spry, did not ever grow old and tired and vigorless: they did not ever, except of their own volition, become disgustingly smug-looking old prigs: instead when the appointed hour had struck, they vanished....

“—For your intelligence appears to me a very terrible sort of intelligence,” Guivric continued, “and I have no doubt that your magic is upon a plane with it. My little thaumaturgies could have no chance whatever against such magic and such intelligence. Oh, dear me, no! So I concede my helplessness, Messire Glaum, without mounting the high and skittish horse of virtuous indignation. I avoid the spectacle of an unseemly wrangle between fellow artists: and, in asking you to restore to me the customary rewards of a thrifty and virtuous and in every way prosperous existence, I can but appeal to your mercy.”

“I,” said the Sylan, “have none.”

“So I had hoped”—here Guivric coughed. “Anguish, sheer anguish, sir, deprives me of proper control of my tongue. For I had of course meant to say,” Guivric continued, upon a more tragic note,—“so I had hoped in vain! Now every hope is gone. Henceforward you are human, and I am only an unhonored vague Sylan! Well, it is all very terrible; but nothing can be done about it, I suppose.”

“Nothing whatever can be done about it,—unless you prefer to court something worse with those thaumaturgies of yours?”

Guivric was pained. “But, between fellow artists!” he stated. “Oh, no, dear Glaum, that sort of open ostentatious rivalry, for merely material gains, seems always rather regrettably vulgar.”

“Why, then, if you will pardon me,” the Sylan submitted, in Guivric’s most civil manner when dealing with unimportant persons, “I shall ask to be excused from prolonging our highly enjoyable chat. Some other time, perhaps— But I really am quite busy this morning: and, besides, our wife will be coming in here any minute, to call me to dinner.”

“I shall not intrude.” Vaporously arising, Guivric now smiled, with a new flavor of sympathy. “A rather terrible woman, that, you will find! And, Lord, how a young Guivric did adore her once! Nowadays she is one of the innumerous reasons which lead me to question if you have been quite happily inspired, even with the delights of heaven impendent. You see, she is certainly going to heaven. And Michael too,—do you know, I think you will find Michael, also, something of a bore? He expects so much of his father, and when those expectations seem imperiled he does look at you so exactly like a hurt, high-minded cow! Now it is you who will have to live up to his notions, and to the notions of that fond, fretful, foolish woman, and it is you who will be bothered with an ever-present sense of something lost and betrayed—! But you will live up to their idiotic notions, none the less! And I do not doubt that, just as you say, the oppression and the chastening will be good for you.”

The Sylan answered, sternly, “Poor shallow learned selfish fool! it is that love and pride, it is their faith and their jealousy to hide away your shortcomings, it is the things you feebly jeer at, which will create in me a soul!”

“No doubt—” Then Guivric went on hastily, and in a tone of cordial encouragement. “Oh, yes, my dear fellow, there is not a doubt of it! and I am sure you will find the birth-pangs well rewarded. Heaven, everybody tells me, is a most charming place. Meanwhile, if you do not mind, just for a minute, pray do not contort my face so unbecomingly until after I am quite gone! To see what right-thinking and a respectably inflated impatience with frivolity can make of my face, and has so often made of my face,” reflected Guivric, as he luxuriously drifted out of the familiar window like a smoke, “is even now a little humiliating. But, then, the most salutary lessons are invariably the most shocking.”

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_41._
_The Gratifying Sequel_

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THUS the true Guivric passed beyond the knowledge of men: and the false Guivric gathered up his papers and took off his cap of owl feathers and prepared for dinner.

The wife and the son of Guivric from that time forth delighted in his affection and geniality: and it was observed, for another wonder, that Guivric of Perdigon had, with increasing age, graduated from a cool reserve about religious matters into very active beneficence and piety. The legend of Manuel had nowhere, now, a more fervent adherent and expounder, because Glaum nourished his sprouting soul with every sort of religious fertilizer. Nor was his loving-kindness confined to talking about itself, for the good works of Glaum were untiring and remarkably free-handed, since he had everything to gain by being liberal with Guivric’s property.

The old gentleman thus became a marked favorite with Holy Holmendis: and indeed it was Glaum who at this time, when Guivric’s ancient comrade Kerin of Nointel came back into Poictesme, chiefly assisted Holmendis in converting Kerin to the great legend of Manuel.

In fine, Glaum lived, without detection, in Guivric’s body; and preserved it in unquestioned virtue, since a well-to-do nobleman is, after sixty, subject to very few temptations which cannot be gratified quietly without scandal. He died in the assurance of a blessed resurrection, which he no doubt attained.

As for the true Guivric, nothing more was ever quite definitely known of him. It was remarked, however, that for many years thereafter an amorous devil went invisibly about the hill country behind Perdigon. The girls of Valnères and Ogde reported that by three traits alone could the presence of this demon be detected: for one thing, he diffused a sweet and poignant odor, not unlike that of an embalmer’s spiceries; and, for another, the soles of his feet had been observed, after dusk, to be luminous. A third infallible sign of his being anywhere near you they, with blushes and some giggling, declined to reveal.

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