Then Vanadis, with god-like candor, made wholly plain her meaning. And since Donander’s nature was affectionate, he assented readily enough to the proposals of this somewhat ardent but remarkably handsome young woman, who went abroad thus unconventionally in a car drawn by two cats, and who, in her heathenish and figurative way, described herself as a goddess. He stipulated only that, so soon as he was dressed, they be respectably united according to whatever might be the marriage laws of her country and diocese.
The Ænseis were not used in such matters to stand upon ceremony. Nevertheless, they conferred together,—Aduna and Ord and Hleifner and Rönn and Giermivul, and the other radiant sons of Sidvrar. It was they who good-humoredly devised a ceremony, with candles and promises and music and a gold ring, and all the other features which seemed expected by the quaint sort of husband whom their beloved Vanadis had fetched up from the Hall of the Chosen. But her sisters took no part in this ceremony, upon the ground that they considered such public preliminaries to be unheard-of and brazen.
Thus was Donander made free of Ydalir, the land that is above Lærath and all the other heavens and paradises: and after Donander’s seven hundred years of celibacy, he and his bride got on together in her bright palace lovingly enough. Vanadis found that she too, comparatively speaking, had lived with her five earlier husbands in celibacy.
62.
The Demiurgy of Donander Veratyr
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NOW the one change that Donander made an explicit point of was to fit out in this palace of Reginlief a chapel. There he worshiped daily at the correct hours, so near as one could calculate them in an endless day, and there he prayed for the second coming of Manuel and for the welfare of Donander’s soul upon the holy Morrow of Judgment.
“But, really, my heart,” his Vanadis would say, ineffectually, “you have been dead for so long now! And, just looking at it sensibly, it does seem such a waste of eternity!”
“Have done, my darling, with your heathen nonsense!” Donander would reply. “Do I not know that in heaven there is no marrying or giving in marriage? How then can heaven be this place in which two live so friendlily and happily?”
Meanwhile, to the pagan priests wherever the Ænseis were adored, had been revealed the sixth and the wholly successful marriage of blue-robed Vanadis: her spouse had been duly deified: and new temples had been builded in honor of the bright lady of Reginlief and of the Man-God, Donander Veratyr, her tireless savior from vain desire and bodily affliction. And time went stealthily as a stream flowing about and over the worlds, and changing them, and wearing all away. But to Donander it was as if he yet lived in the thrice-lucky afternoon on which he married his Vanadis. For, since whatever any of the Ænseis desires must happen instantly, thus Ydalir knows but one endless day; and immeasurably beneath its radiance, very much as sullen and rain-swollen waters go under a bridge upon which young lovers have met in the sunlight of April, so passed wholly unnoted by any in Ydalir the flowing and all the jumbled wreckage of time.