The Twilight of Magic

by Lofting Hugh

Soon, wriggling his arms out of the sleeves, he pulled off his tunic and stuffed it into one of the saddle-bags. He could swim better so, he hoped, and give the mare more help. But it did not seem to make much difference. His heavy spurred riding boots were his greatest hindrance. He should have thought to take them off before he leapt his horse into the stream. The current was getting stronger and the mare’s breath shorter. The lights in the convent chapel seemed to be going farther away, inland, instead of coming nearer. From this point he could now see the dark-grey horizon-line of the sea, stretching across the rivermouth.

Miserably he was blaming himself for his rash stupidity in not waiting for the ferry, when suddenly Midnight’s hoofs ground into something hard. Her great shoulders climbed, looming up into the air above him, and in the same second his own feet touched bottom. They had reached a shoal.

The shore was still a long way off. Near, around them, nothing but darkness and water. It seemed it was a gravel bar they must be standing on, risen with happy unexpectedness from out the river’s gloomy heart to hold them up. Over this hidden island, though, the tide was rushing out with a force that threatened to knock them down again any moment. Wading, staggering, floundering waist-deep, Giles felt and hunted till he found a shallower spot where they might rest and get their breath. Here the stream raced even faster still, but not deep enough to be dangerous. Midnight shook the water from her flanks with a sighing, thankful snort. While Giles, too breathless to speak, too weary to stand alone, leant upon her withers.

So for a while they stood, horse and man, under the stars out there, like ghostly statues in a flat and empty world. No sound broke the peace of their grateful rest but the gurgling of the river round their ankles and their own breath pumping in and out.

Giles was the first to move. Still dead weary, he was itching to hurry on. The very idea of food was long since forgotten. But, at that, he had had an easier fight than Midnight. The mare’s neck was still stretched downward and forward in that hangdog fashion that shows a horse badly spent. There was no telling whether there would be more swimming ahead, or if the shore could be reached by wading. In spite of the pressing need for haste he dared not, and would not, risk ruining her wind. She must have some minutes at least.

Meanwhile, what of Barbara? Had she gone into the convent by now? His work was difficult enough already without added difficulties with the nuns. He clenched his hands in desperate, powerless impatience. What would he do? What could be done besides wait!

But the shell! Maybe he might learn something more from that quarter.

In an instant he had felt along his horse’s back and was tugging at the wet tunic, trying to get it out of the saddle-bag. How stubbornly it stuck! Then, as so often happens, it came flying out of a sudden, like a crumpled flag.

There was a flash—and a splash. In the tussle the shell had fallen from the tunic-pocket into the rushing stream. Giles leapt for it, grabbing and snatching on his knees in the wet gloom. But the pale starlight had given him only one glimpse: when it first struck the water, turned over like a fish—green above and white below—then sped away, in the rolling tumbling ebb-tide, downstream.

For a moment, still on his hands and knees in the water he gazed after it wide-eyed and dazed—while the truth slowly took shape in his mind. The Whispering Shell was gone—and with it the secret of its power—for ever! Who now would ever learn whether it were magical or no? Underneath that flat wet darkness it was rolling along the gravel floor of the river, rolling back to the home from which it came, the sea!