"La, it is Horvendile! and we are having the same dream again!"
This much he heard and saw as her hand went out gladly toward him. Then as she touched him the universe seemed to fold about Felix Kennaston, just as a hand closes, and he was sitting at the writing-table in the library, with a gleaming scrap of metal before him.
____________________
He sat thus for a long while.
"I can make nothing of all this. I remember of course that I saw Muriel Allardyce stand very much like that, in the doorway of the Royal Hotel, at the Green Chalybeate – and how many years ago, good Lord!… And equally of course the most plausible explanation is that I am losing my wits. Or, else, it may be that I am playing blindfold with perilous matters. Felix Kennaston, my friend, the safest plan – the one assuredly safe plan for you – would be to throw away this devil's toy, and forget it completely… And, I will, too – the very first thing to-morrow morning – or after I have had a few days to think it over, any way…"
But even as he made this compact it was without much lively faith in his promises.
Book Third
"Come to me in my dreams, and then
By day I shall be well again!
For then the night will more than pay
The hopeless longing of long day.
"Come, as thou cam'st a thousand times,
A messenger from lovelier climes,
To smile on our drear world, and be
As kind to others as to me!"
I
They Come to a High Place
HE was looking down at the most repulsive old woman he had ever seen. Hers was the abhorrent fatness of a spider; her flesh appeared to have the coloring and consistency of dough. She sat upon the stone pavement, knitting; her eyes, which raised to his unblinkingly, were black, secretive, and impersonally malevolent; and her jaws stirred without ceasing, in a loose chewing motion, so that the white hairs, rooted in the big mole on her chin, twitched and glittered in the sunlight.
"But one does not pay on entering," she was saying. "One pays as one goes out. It is the rule."
"And what do you knit, mother?" Kennaston asked her.
"Eh, I shall never know until God's funeral is preached," the old woman said. "I only know it is forbidden me to stop."
So he went past her, aware that through some nameless grace the girl whom he had twice seen in dreams awaited him there, and that the girl's face was the face of Ettarre. She stood by a stone balustrade, upon which squatted tall stone monsters – weird and haphazard collocations, as touched anatomy, of bird and brute and fiend – and she in common with these hobgoblins looked down upon a widespread comely city. The time was a bright and windy morning in spring; and the sky, unclouded, was like an inverted cup which did not merely roof Ettarre and the man who had come back to her, but inclosed them in incommunicable isolation. To the left, beyond shimmering tree-tops, so far beneath them that it made Felix Kennaston dizzy to look, the ruffling surface of a river gleamed… It was in much this fashion, he recalled, that Ettarre and Horvendile had stood alone together among the turrets of Storisende.
"But now I wonder where on the face of – or, rather, so far above the face of what especial planet we may happen to be?" Kennaston marveled happily -"or east of the sun or west of the moon? At all events, it hardly matters. Suffice it that we are in love's land to-day. Why worry over one particular inexplicable detail, where everything is incomprehensible?"
"I was never here before, Horvendile; and I have waited for you so long."
He looked at her; and again his heart moved with glad adoration. It was not merely that Ettarre was so pleasing to the eye, and distinguished by so many delicate clarities of color – so young, so quick of movement, so slender, so shapely, so inexpressibly virginal – but the heady knowledge that here on dizzying heights he, Felix Kennaston, was somehow playing with superhuman matters, and that no power could induce him to desist from his delicious and perilous frolic, stirred, in deep recesses of his being, nameless springs. Nameless they must remain; for it was as though he had discovered himself to possess a sixth sense; and he found that the contrivers of language, being less prodigally gifted, had never been at need to invent any terms wherewith to express this sense's gratification. But he knew that he was strong and admirable; that men and men's affairs lay far beneath him; that Ettarre belonged to him; and, most vividly of all, that the exultance which possessed him was a by-product of an unstable dream.
"Yet it is not any city of to-day," he was saying. "Look, how yonder little rascal glitters – he is wearing a helmet of some sort and a gorget. Why, all those pigmies, if you look closely, go in far braver scarlets and purples than we elect to skulk about in nowadays; and there is not an office-building or an electric-light advertisement of chewing-gum in sight. No, that hotchpotch of huddled gables and parapets and towers shaped like lanterns was stolen straight out of some Doré illustration for Rabelais or Les Contes Drolatiques. But it does not matter at all, and it will never matter, where we may chance to be, Ettarre. What really and greatly matters, is that when I try to touch you everything vanishes."
The girl was frankly puzzled. "Yes, that seems a part of the sigil's magic…"
II
Of the Sigil and One Use of It
IT proved that this was indeed a part of the sigil's wonder-working: Kennaston learned by experience that whenever, even by accident, he was about to touch Ettarre his dream would end like a burst bubble. He would find himself alone and staring at the gleaming fragment of metal.
Before long he also learned something concerning the sigil of Scoteia, of which this piece of metal once formed a part; for it was permitted him to see the sigil in its entirety, many centuries before it was shattered: it was then one of the treasures of the Didascalion, a peculiar sort of girls' school in King Ptolemy Physcon's city of Alexandria, where women were tutored to honor fittingly the power which this sigil served. But it is not expedient to speak clearly concerning this; and the real name of the sigil was, of course, quite different from that which Kennaston had given it in his romance.
So began an odd divided life for Felix Kennaston. At first he put his half of the sigil in an envelope, which he did in a desk in the library, under a pile of his dead uncle's unused bookplates; whence, when occasion served, it was taken out in order that when held so as to reflect the lamplight – for this was always necessary – it might induce the desired dream of Ettarre.
Later Kennaston thought of an expedient by which to prolong his dreams. Nightly he lighted and set by his bedside a stump of candle. Its tiny flame, after he had utilized its reflection, would harmlessly burn out while his body slept with a bit of metal in one hand; and he would be freed of Felix Kennaston for eight hours uninterruptedly. To have left an electric-light turned on until he awakened, would in the end have exposed him to detection and the not-impossible appointment of a commission in lunacy; and he recognized the potentialities of such mischance with frank distaste. As affairs sped, however, he could without great difficulty buy his candles in secret. He was glad now he was well-to-do, if only because, as an incidental result of materially bettered fortunes, he and his wife had separate bedrooms.