it, and soon it was lost to sight of the girls that watched it from
Lowlight; but their memories held it close till their eyes could no
longer see to knit and they could only sit by their porches in fine
weather and talk of the days that were.
So came Rodriguez and his bride to the forest; he silent, perplexed,
wondering always to what home and what future he brought her; she
knowing less than he and trusting more. And on the untended road that
the bowmen shared with stags and with rare, very venturous travellers,
the wheels of the woodland chariot sank so deep in the sandy earth that
the escort of bowmen needed seldom to run any more; and he who sat by
the driver climbed down and walked silent for once, perhaps awed by the
occasion, though he was none other than Morano. Serafina was delighted
with the forest, but between Rodriguez and its beautiful grandeur his
anxieties crowded thickly. He leaned over once from the chariot and
asked one of the bowmen again about that castle; but the bowman only
bowed and answered with a proverb of Spain, not easily carried so far
from its own soil to thrive in our language, but signifying that the
morrow showeth all things. He was silent then, for he knew that there
was no way to a direct answer through those proverbs, and after a while
perhaps there came to him some of Serafina's trustfulness. By evening
they came to a wide avenue leading to great gates.
Rodriguez did not know the avenue, he knew no paths so wide in Shadow
Valley; but he knew those gates. They were the gates of iron that led
nowhere. But now an avenue went from them upon the other side, and
opened widely into a park dotted with clumps of trees. And the two
great iron shields, they too had changed with the changes that had
bewitched the forest, for their surfaces that had glowed so
unmistakably blank, side by side in the firelight, not many nights
before, blazoned now the armorial bearings of Rodriguez upon the one
and those of the house of Dawnlight upon the other. Through the opened
gates they entered the young park that seemed to wonder at its own
ancient trees, where wild deer drifted away from them like shadows
through the evening: for the bowmen had driven in deer for miles
through the forest. They passed a pool where water-lilies lay in
languid beauty for hundreds of summers, but as yet no flower peeped
into the water, for the pond was all hallowed newly.
A clump of trees stood right ahead of their way; they passed round it;
and Castle Rodriguez came all at once into view. Serafina gasped
joyously. Rodriguez saw its towers, its turrets for archers, its
guarded windows deep in the mass of stone, its solemn row of
battlements, but he did not believe what he saw. He did not believe
that here at last was his castle, that here was his dream fulfilled and
his journey done. He expected to wake suddenly in the cold in some
lonely camp, he expected the Ebro to unfold its coils in the North and
to come and sweep it away. It was but another strayed hope, he thought,
taking the form of dream. But Castle Rodriguez still stood frowning
there, and none of its towers vanished, or changed as things change in
dreams; but the servants of the King of Shadow Valley opened the great
door, and Serafina and Rodriguez entered, and all the hundred bowmen
disappeared.
Here we will leave them, and let these Chronicles end. For whoever
would tell more of Castle Rodriguez must wield one of those ponderous
pens that hangs on the study wall in the house of historians. Great
days in the story of Spain shone on those iron-barred windows, and
things were said in its banqueting chamber and planned in its inner
rooms that sometimes turned that story this way or that, as rocks turn
a young river. And as a traveller meets a mighty river at one of its
bends, and passes on his path, while the river sweeps on to its estuary
and the sea, so I leave the triumphs and troubles of that story which I
touched for one moment by the door of Castle Rodriguez.
My concern is but with Rodriguez and Serafina and to tell that they
lived here in happiness; and to tell that the humble Morano found his
happiness too. For he became the magnificent steward of Castle
Rodriguez, the majordomo, and upon august occasions he wore as much red
plush as he had ever seen in his dreams, when he saw this very event,
sleeping by dying camp-fires. And he slept not upon straw but upon good
heaps of wolf-skins. But pining a little in the second year of his
somewhat lonely splendour, he married one of the maidens of the forest,
the child of a bowman that hunted boars with their king. And all the
green bowmen came and built him a house by the gates of the park,
whence he walked solemnly on proper occasions to wait upon his master.
Morano, good, faithful man, come forward for but a moment out of the
Golden Age and bow across all those centuries to the reader: say one
farewell to him in your Spanish tongue, though the sound of it be no
louder than the sound of shadows moving, and so back to the dim
splendour of the past, for the Señor or Señora shall hear your name no
more.
For years Rodriguez lived a chieftain of the forest, owning the
overlordship of the King of Shadow Valley, whom he and Serafina would
entertain with all the magnificence of which their castle was capable
on such occasions as he appeared before the iron gates. They seldom saw
him. Sometimes they heard his horn as he went by. They heard his bowmen
follow. And all would pass and perhaps they would see none. But upon
occasions he came. He came to the christening of the eldest son of
Rodriguez and Serafina, for whom he was godfather. He came again to see
the boy shoot for the first time with a bow. And later he came to give
little presents, small treasures of the forest, to Rodriguez'
daughters; who treated him always, not as sole lord of that forest that
travellers dreaded, but as a friend of their very own that they had
found for themselves. He had his favourites among them and none quite
knew which they were.
And one day he came in his old age to give Rodriguez a message. And he
spoke long and tenderly of the forest as though all its glades were
sacred.
And soon after that day he died, and was buried with the mourning of
all his men in the deeps of Shadow Valley, where only Rodriguez and the
bowmen knew. And Rodriguez became, as the old king had commanded, the
ruler of Shadow Valley and all its faithful men. With them he hunted
and defended the forest, holding all its ways to be sacred, as the old
king had taught. It is told how Rodriguez ruled the forest well.
And later he made a treaty with the Spanish King acknowledging him sole
Lord of Spain, including Shadow Valley, saving that certain right
should pertain to the foresters and should be theirs for ever. And
these rights are written on parchment and sealed with the seal of
Spain; and none may harm the forest without the bowmen's leave.
Rodriguez was made Duke of Shadow Valley and a Magnifico of the first
degree; though little he went with other hidalgos to Court, but lived
with his family in Shadow Valley, travelling seldom beyond the
splendour of the forest farther than Lowlight.
Thus he saw the glory of autumn turning the woods to fairyland: and
when the stags were roaring and winter coming on he would take a
boar-spear down from the wall and go hunting through the forest, whose
twigs were black and slender and still against the bright menace of
winter. Spring found him viewing the fields that his men had sown,
along the forest's edge, and finding in the chaunt of the myriad birds
a stirring of memories, a beckoning towards past days. In summer he
would see his boys and girls at play, running through shafts of
sunlight that made leaves and grass like pale emeralds. He gave his
days to the forest and the four seasons. Thus he dwelt amidst
splendours such as History has never seen in any visit of hers to the
courts of men.
Of him and Serafina it has been written and sung that they lived
happily ever after; and though they are now so many centuries dead, may
they have in the memories of such of my readers as will let them linger
there, that afterglow of life that remembrance gives, which is all that
there is on earth for those that walked it once and that walk the paths
of their old haunts no more.