“You would preserve me for the provincial life of your little Lichfield! You would make me just another chivalrous, bull-headed, rather nice-looking and wholly stupid Musgrave! In fine, you would urge me to become genteel and to deny my glorious destiny. Yet to do that would be cowardly, Gaston: for, whether I like it or not, there is upon me the divine obligation to fulfil some very ancient prophecies.”
“What sort of prophecies are these?”
“They are Dirghic prophecies. But, then, it is not the language in which a prophecy is uttered that matters, rather it is—Well, it is the spirit of the thing! For you must know—although, in view of my wife’s social position, I have compelled her, after some little argument, to introduce me hereabouts as a visiting sorcerer,—yet I may tell you, in strict confidence, Gaston, it is decreed that, as the Lord of the Third Truth, I am to reign in Antan.”
“And who told you any such unlikely nonsense?”
“Some people that I met upon the road. Oh, quite honest looking people, Gaston!”
“And who told you that you were the Lord of any Third Truth?”
“There my authority is unimpeachable. For I had it from the lips of a beautiful and accomplished and chaste gentlewoman, Gaston, who was speaking with all the frankness begotten by our being in bed together at the time.”
“And how can you reign in Antan, or anywhere else, when you do not ever go there? Through all these years, I gather, you have loitered here within a man’s arm’s reach of Antan!”
Gerald said, with the slight frown of one who finds trouble uncongenial: “I am puzzled, my dear friend, by your continued references to all these years. And I admit that various matters have a bit hindered my technical and merely formal entry into my kingdom. Yet I shall be leaving Mispec Moor the instant that this week’s washing is in, on Thursday afternoon—”
“But, my poor Gerald! you will not go, either forward to Antan or back to Lichfield, on what you think to be next Thursday. You have lost here all sense of time, you do not even know that the days you have spent in this place have counted as four years in Lichfield. I tell you that the wise woman, with her half-magics and her accursed spectacles, holds you here bewitched. And I now perceive that nothing whatever can be done for you, who are ensnared by the most fatal of all the magics of the wrinkled goddess.”