By the time Anselme finished cutting his cudgel, the lady had completed her toilet. She came to meet him, swaying like a lamia. A bodice of vernal green velvet, baring the upper slopes of her breasts, clung tightly about her as a lover’s embrace. A purple velvet gown, flowered with pale azure and crimson, moulded itself to the sinuous outlines of her hips and legs. Her slender feet were enclosed in fine soft leather buskins, scarlet-dyed, with tips curling pertly upward. The fashion of her garments, though oddly antique, confirmed Anselme in his belief that she was a person of no common rank.
Her raiment revealed, rather than concealed, the attributes of her femininity. Her manner yielded—but it also withheld.
Anselme bowed before her with a courtly grace that belied his rough country garb.
“Ah! I can see that you have not always been a hermit,” she said, with soft mockery in her voice.
“You know me, then,” said Anselme.
“I know many things. I am Séphora, the enchantress. It is unlikely that you have heard of me, for I dwell apart, in a place that none can find—unless I permit them to find it.”
“I know little of enchantment,” admitted Anselme. “But I can believe that you are an enchantress.”
For some minutes they had followed a little used path that serpentined through the antique wood. It was a path the hermit had never come upon before in all his wanderings. Lithe saplings and low-grown boughs of huge beeches pressed closely upon it. Anselme, holding them aside for his companion, came often in thrilling contact with her shoulder and arm. Often she swayed against him, as if losing her balance on the rough ground. Her weight was a delightful burden, too soon relinquished. His pulses coursed tumultuously and would not quiet themselves again.
Anselme had quite forgotten his eremitic resolves. His blood and his curiosity were excited more and more. He ventured various gallantries, to which Séphora gave provocative replies. His questions, however, she answered with elusive vagueness. He could learn nothing, could decide nothing, about her. Even her age puzzled him: at one moment he thought her a young girl, the next, a mature woman.
Several times, as they went on, he caught glimpses of black fur beneath the low, shadowy foliage. He felt sure that the strange black wolf he had seen by the pool was accompanying them with a furtive surveillance. But somehow his sense of alarm was dulled by the enchantment that had fallen upon him.
Now the path steepened, climbing a densely wooded hill. The trees thinned to straggly, stunted pines, encircling a brown, open moorland as the tonsure encircles a monk’s crown. The moor was studded with Druidic monoliths, dating from ages prior to the Roman occupation of Averoigne. Almost at its center, there towered a massive cromlech, consisting of two upright slabs that supported a third like the lintel of a door. The path ran straight to the cromlech.
“This is the portal of my domain,” said Séphora, as they neared it. “I grow faint with fatigue. You must take me in your arms and carry me through the ancient doorway.”
Anselme obeyed very willingly. Her cheeks paled, her eyelids fluttered and fell as he lifted her. For a moment he thought that she had fainted; but her arms crept warm and clinging around his neck.
Dizzy with the sudden vehemence of his emotion, he carried her through the cromlech. As he went, his lips wandered across her eyelids and passed deliriously to the soft red flame of her lips and the rose pallor of her throat. Once more she seemed to faint, beneath his fervor.
His limbs melted and a fiery blindness filled his eyes. The earth seemed to yield beneath them like an elastic couch as he and Séphora sank down.
Lifting his head, Anselme looked about him with swiftly growing bewilderment. He had carried Séphora only a few paces—and yet the grass on which they lay was not the sparse and sun-dried grass of the moor, but was deep, verdant and filled with tiny vernal blossoms! Oaks and beeches, huger even than those of the familiar forest, loomed umbrageously on every hand with masses of new, golden-green leafage, where he had thought to see the open upland. Looking back, he saw that the grey, lichened slabs of the cromlech itself alone remained of that former landscape.
Even the sun had changed its position. It had hung at Anselme’s left, still fairly low in the east, when he and Séphora had reached the moorland. But now, shining with amber rays through a rift in the forest, it had almost touched the horizon on his right.
He recalled that Séphora had told him she was an enchantress. Here, indeed, was proof of sorcery! He eyed her with curious doubts and misgivings.
“Be not alarmed,” said Séphora, with a honeyed smile of reassurance. “I told you that the cromlech was the doorway to my domain. We are now in a land lying outside of time and space as you have hitherto known them. The very seasons are different here. But there is no sorcery involved, except that of the great ancient Druids, who knew the secret of this hidden realm and reared those mighty slabs for a portal between the worlds. If you should weary of me, you can pass back at any time through the doorway. —But I hope that you have not tired of me so soon.”
Anselme, though still bewildered, was relieved by this information. He proceeded to prove that the hope expressed by Séphora was well-founded.
Indeed, he proved it so lengthily and in such detail that the sun had fallen below the horizon before Séphora could draw a full breath and speak again.
“The air grows chill,” she said, pressing against him and shivering lightly. “But my home is close at hand.”
They came in the twilight to a high round tower among trees and grass-grown mounds.
“Ages ago,” announced Séphora, “there was a great castle here. Now the tower alone remains, and I am its châtelaine, the last of my family. The tower and the lands about it are named Sylaire.”
Tall dim tapers lit the interior, which was hung with rich arrases, vaguely and strangely pictured. Aged, corpse-pale servants in antique garb went to and fro with the furtiveness of specters, setting wines and foods before the enchantress and her guest in a broad hall. The wines were of rare flavor and immense age, the foods were curiously spiced. Anselme ate and drank copiously. It was all like some fantastic dream, and he accepted his surroundings as a dreamer does, untroubled by their strangeness.
The wines were potent, drugging his senses into warm oblivion. Even stronger was the inebriation of Séphora’s nearness.
However, Anselme was a little startled when the huge black wolf he had seen that morning entered the hall and fawned like a dog at the feet of his hostess.
“You see, he is quite tame,” she said, tossing the wolf bits of meat from her plate. “Often I let him come and go in the tower; and sometimes he attends me when I go forth from Sylaire.”
“He is a fierce-looking beast,” Anselme observed doubtfully.
It seemed that the wolf understood the words, for he bared his teeth at Anselme, with a preternaturally deep growl. Spots of red fire glowed in his somber eyes, like coals fanned by devils in dark pits.
“Go away, Malachie,” commanded the enchantress, sharply. The wolf obeyed her, slinking from the hall with a malign backward glance at Anselme.
“He does not like you,” said Séphora. “That, however, is perhaps not surprising.”
Anselme, bemused with wine and love, forgot to inquire the meaning of her last words.
Morning came too soon, with upward-slanting beams that fired the tree-tops around the tower.
“You must leave me for awhile,” said Séphora, after they had breakfasted. “I have neglected my magic of late—and there are matters into which I should inquire.”
Bending prettily, she kissed the palms of his hands. Then, with backward glances and smiles, she retired to a room at the tower’s top beside her bedchamber. Here, she had told Anselme, her grimoires and potions and other appurtenances of magic were kept.