The Witch-Woman Trilogy

  “At the cost of just one tiny pleasant indiscretion, even now, my own sweetheart, you will be refused admittance. You can then return with me to the more urbane and rationally conducted Paradise of the Pagans. And that is nothing like your so horrible and gaudy Kingdom of Heaven, but instead, it is a democracy which lacks for no modern improvements in the way of culture and of civilization.”

  Thereupon Ettarre began to speak as to her present abode in somewhat the opulent vein of an exceedingly young poet. And the good Bishop Odo, looking upon her with the old fondness, and with unforgotten delight in her dear loveliness, was aware of that in the large and curiously glittering eyes of Ettarre which, he was certain, nobody in that dreadful Oriental phantasmagoria just ahead could ever understand with quite that sympathy which moved in him rebelliously.

  Ettarre, no doubt, was overcoloring some of her details. One exaggerated, for art’s sake, in these descriptory passages. And he very well remembered how the little darling, when she was pretending to be a saint, had lied to him night after night with the unction of a funeral sermon. Even so, this adorable and cuddling witch-woman was a person whom Odo of Valneres, in his far-off pious youth, when he believed in saints, had cherished with a fervor and with a variousness not ever utterly to be put out of mind. And for the rest, the Bishop might, he felt just now—with all the sedative dilapidations of age thus marvelously repaired,—be happy enough, perhaps, in rewarding the warm loyalty of his Ettarre, among those cultured and broad-minded and intelligent circles which she described.

  There remained only to allow for that slight girlish habit of unveracity.

  Thus pensively did the Bishop begin to appraise the probabilities, in the while that from force of habit he made the sign of the cross, as he waited there, withholding his dark kindly eyes for a moment from the strangely large and glittering eyes of Ettarre, and looking downward, all through that rather lengthy moment in which he half paternally caressed the soft and the so lovely little hand of the dear love of his far-off, pious, hot-blooded youth; and she cuddled closer and yet closer to him and wriggled very deliciously in her candid and quite flattering affection.

  At just this amiable season, the serenity of their reunion was overcast by the arrival of yet another cloud. It moored: and a child disembarked, a boy of seven or thereabouts, but newly dead and come alone through the gray void between Earth and Heaven. This little ghost passed by them as the child went uncertainly but meekly into the Holy City. The narrow shoulders were a trifle huddled, for these slabs of jasper and of lapis lazuli seemed more chilly to the small bare feet than had been the brown carpet of the child’s nursery, and the soft arms of that mother whom he had left far behind him.

  Now also Odo of Valneres had raised his very generally admired eyes from the neighborhood of his red flannel footwarrners, toward that huge and dazzling perforated pearl.

  “I was thinking,” he observed, with somewhat more of gentleness than of any plain connection, “that I rather, as they put it, get on with children. My people are so flattering as to say I have a way with them. I could, I really do believe, have cheered that forlorn little fellow tremendously with one of my simpler Confirmation addresses, if we had travelled through that abyss together. In fact, a clergyman of real talents, and of my rather varied experience, could probably cheer up any other saved soul in Heaven, in view of what must be the local average of cheerfulness—”

  “No doubt you could, my wonderful, kind-hearted, clever darling,” Ettarre replied. “But now that fearful place, my precious, is a place with which you have no further need to be bothering.”

  Odo of Valneres, however, was smiling with something of the enthusiast’s fervor. Then, for one instant only, he again looked downward, with the air of a man as yet perplexed and irresolute, and again he crossed himself, and he drew a deep breath which seemed to inform him through and through with unpersuadable determination.

  Gently he put aside the love of his youth: and, with that frank fine air of manliness which had always graced his professional utterances, he spoke.