“Still, still, you must be talking OEdipean riddles!” the leper answered. “I prefer simplicity, I incline to the complex no longer. So, very frankly, I warn you, who were Anavalt, that you are going, spent and infatuate, toward your last illusion.”
Anavalt replied:
“Rather do I flee pell-mell from the illusions of others. Behind me I am leaving the bright swords of adversaries, and the more deadly malice of out-rivalled friends, and the fury of some husbands, but not because I fear these things. Behind me I am leaving the puzzled eyes of women that put faith in me, because I fear these unendurably.”
“You should have feared them earlier, tired man,” replied the other, “in a sunlit time when I who am Owner-of-the-World would wonderfully have helped you. Now you must go your way, as I go mine. There is one who may, perhaps, yet bring us together once again; but now we are parted, and you need look for no more reverses.”
As he said this, the ruined boy sank slowly into the ash-heap, and so disappeared; and Anavalt went on, through trampled ashes, into the quiet midst of the wood. Among the bones about the striped wind-mill that is supported by four pillars, the witless Elle Maid was waiting.
§6
The witless Elle Maid was waiting there, as the tale tells, among much human wreckage. She rose and cried:
“Now you are very welcome, Anavalt of Fomor. But what will you give Maid Vae?”
Anavalt answered, “All.”
“Then we shall be happy together, dear Anavalt,” replied the witless Elle Maid, “and for your sake I am well content to throw my bonnet over the windmill.”
She took the red bonnet from her head, and turned. She flung the bonnet fair and high. So was courteous Anavalt assured that the Queen of Elfhame was as he had hoped. For when seen thus, from behind, the witless Queen was hollow and shadow-colored, because Maid Vae is just the bright thin mask of a woman, and, if looked at from behind, she is like any other mask, with no more thickness than has canvas or paper. So when she faced him now and smiled,—and as if in embarrassment looked down and pushed aside a thigh bone with her little foot,—then Anavalt could see that the Elle Maid was, when properly regarded, a lovely and most dear illusion.
He kissed her. He was content. Here was the woman he desired, the woman who did not exist in the world where people have souls. The Elle Maid had no mortal body that time would parody and ruin; she had no brain to fashion dreams of which he would fall short, she had no heart that he would hurt. There was an abiding peace in this quiet Wood of Elfhame wherein no love could enter, and wherein none could, in consequence, hurt anybody else very deeply. At court the silken ladies wept for Anavalt, and three women were not ever to be healed of their memories: but in the Wood of Elfhame, where all were soulless masks, there were no memories and no weeping, there were no longer two sides to everything, and a man need look for no reverses.
“I think we shall do very well here,” said courteous Anavalt, as yet again he kissed Maid Vae.
APPENDIX C. THE DELTA OF RADEGONDE
§1
It was, the tale declares, just after the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion had sacked Lacre Kai that young Holden found, among his plunder, the triangular portrait of Elphanor’s queen: and for the time young Holden thought little about the picture. He could not foreknow that its old frame, in shape like the Greek letter Delta, was to bind all his living. But after a few months of peace the lad went to Guivric, afterward called the Sage, who was already coming into esteem as a most promising thaumaturgist.
“Guivric,” says Holden, “the lady in this three-cornered picture is the lady of my love; and you must tell me how I may win her affections.”
Guivric looked at the portrait for some while, scratched off a fleck of paint from it with his fingernail, and he answered:
“There are impediments to your winning this Queen Radegonde. For one thing, she has been dead for thirteen centuries.”
“I admit,” said young Holden, “that thirteen is proverbially an unlucky number; but my all-consuming love is not to be intimidated by superstitions.”
Guivric thereupon consulted the oldest and most authentic poems, and Guivric admitted:
“Well, perhaps her being dead such an unlucky number of centuries does not matter, after all, because my authorities appear agreed that love defies time and death. Yet it does matter, I suspect, that the woman in this picture was the notion which a dead artist perpetuated of the Queen Radegonde whom he saw in the flesh.”
“So would I see her, Guivric.”
“Holden, my meaning is more respectable than your meaning. I mean that, if the man labored as a tradesman executing an order, your cause may prosper. But there is the ugly chance that this radiant, slim, gray-eyed girl was born of the man’s brain, very much as, even more anciently, they say, King Jove brought forth a gray-eyed daughter to devastate the world with wisdom: and in that case, I fear the worst.”
“But what,” asked Holden, a bit bewildered, “is the worst that can happen?”
“Thinking about it too much beforehand,” replied Guivric, drily.
Whereupon the young mage gave directions which must be followed to the letter if one wished to avoid an indescribable fate. But Holden was cautious, and did follow these instructions to the letter; and when it proved to be the Greek letter Delta he entered it, and so came to his desire, and communicated his love to Queen Radegonde.
Now this Radegonde had been alone ever since she was first painted, because in filling in the background, and in completing her portrait, the painter had provided her with no company in the quaint triangular tropic garden which he had painted also to enhance her charms. It followed that to have Holden thus thrusting himself into the vacancy was welcome to Radegonde. And to him her loveliness, and the dearness of her, was greater than he could quite believe in after he had left the Delta, and had returned, in the gray and abject way which Guivric had foretold, to the world of men.
§2
Holden thereafter kept the picture in a secret place, and the years wore on: and in the spring of one of these years he rescued a bright-haired princess, from an enchanter in a large and appalling line of business near Perdigon: and Holden married her, and they got on together very nicely. But times had changed in Poictesme, for Manuel the Redeemer had ridden away to a far place beyond the sunset, and his wife Dame Niafer ruled over-strictly in the tall hero’s stead: and to Holden life seemed not the affair it once had been, and all his pleasuring was to go into the Delta that belonged to tender and warm-blooded Radegonde. The delights of that small tropic garden were joys unknown in the world of men, wherein there are no such women as Elphanor’s queen: and therefore poets have not ever invented any words with which to describe these delights, and they must stay untold.
Yet these delights contented Holden. “Blessed above all men that live am I, in that I am lord of the Delta of Radegonde,” said Holden, who could not foreknow his fate.
§3
And it was an unfailing cordial to aging Holden of Nerac—now the Earl Marshal of St. Tara—thus to steal away from his prosaic workaday life of fighting dragons and ogres, and discomfiting wicked monarchs by guessing their riddles out of hand, and riding about in every kind of weather redressing the afflictions of downtrodden strangers in whom he was not interested; and from the strain of pretending to be wise and admirable in all things, for the benefit of his numerous children; and from living among many servitors somewhat lonelily.