“Such is, perhaps, the case. But a god has his irrational dream. And that is better.”
“It is well enough, my father, for that dream to end contentedly in the arms of some woman.”
“It is well enough. It is customary. But I am Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and the Preserver. I go to my appointed kingdom: and I am Lord of a Third Truth, whose mightiness I must help and preserve.”
Then Gerald hewed on: and as the tree fell, the child vanished.
Now Gerald set fire to the tree: and when a tidy blaze was crackling, he spoke the needed words, and into the heart of this fire he tossed the strange white gem. Straightway you heard a loud screeching. Out of the tomb of Peter the Builder came a vixen fox, screaming and shuddering quite horribly, but not ever ceasing to approach the fire. She entered the flames. Silence followed, and the dawn of a superb May morning which was marred only by an unpleasant odor of singed hair and burning flesh.
Gerald after that went back into the tomb from which the omniscient Fox-Spirit had been dispossessed. He looked rather sentimentally upon the empty disordered bed: then he passed beyond the brazier, in which the ruins of fig-leaves yet smouldered, toward the Mirror of the Two Truths.
The fact no longer mattered, perhaps, that any man who looked into this mirror straightway found himself transformed into two stones: but it very greatly mattered what effect this mirror would have upon a sun god and a Savior and a culture hero. So he removed the flesh-colored veil.
19.
Beyond the Veil
BUT he was not turned into two stones. Nor was there confronting him any mirror. Beyond the flesh-colored veil he found only an ancient painting very carefully done, but upon an unhuman scale which made this painting monstrous. The subject of the picture, however, is not known, because Gerald never told anybody.
But it is known that Gerald shook his head at this painting.