“Come, come now,” grumbled the ancient warden, “but these tonsorial freedoms and this foolish talking seem very odd—”
“Time,” Guivric answered him, “at last sets all things even.”
Then Guivric walked widdershins in a complete circle about the old eunuch; and so went on into a room hung with black and silver: and in this place was a young and beautifully fashioned boy, with the bright unchanging gaze of a serpent.
The boy arose; and, putting aside a rod upon which grew black poppies, each with a silver-colored heart, he said to Guivric, “It is needful that you should hate.”
Now, at the sight of this stranger, Guivric was filled with an inexplicable wild rapture; and after shaping the sign of the River Horse and of the Writing of Lo, he demanded of this young man his name.
But the other only answered: “I am your appointed enemy. There is between us an eternal hatred; and should our bodies encounter we would contend as heroes. But something has gone wrong, our sagas have been perverted, and our spirits have been ensnared into the Sylan’s House, and all our living wears thin.”
“Come, come, my enemy!” cried Guivric, “hatred—since, as you tell me, this is hatred,—is throbbing in me now as a drum beats: and I would that we two might encounter!”
“That may not be,” replied the young man. “I am only a phantom in the Sylan’s House. I live as a newborn child in Denmark, I drowse as yet in swaddling cloths, dreaming at this instant about my appointed enemy. Yet in the life which you now have you will not ever go to Denmark: and by the time that I am grown, and am able to wield a sword and to contrive mischief against you, and to beset you everywhere with my lewd perversities, the body which you now have will have been taken away from you.”
“I am sorry,” Guivric said, “for in all my life, even in the rough old times of that blundering Manuel— I mean, of course, that, although I was privileged to share in the earthly labors of the Redeemer, in all my life I have never hated before to-day. I have merely disliked some persons, somewhat as I dislike cold veal or house-flies, without real ardor. And very often these persons could be useful to me, so that, through many little flatteries and small falsehoods, I must keep on their good side. But I perceive now that, throughout the living which my neighbors applaud and envy, I have needed some tonic adversary to exalt my living with a great and heroic loathing.”
“I know, dear adversary! And I know too that all the life which I now have must run slack because of an unfed lusting for my appointed enemy. But affairs will go more grandly by and by, if ever we get out of the Sylan’s House.”