Anselme had quite forgotten his eremitic resolves. His blood and his curiosity, were excited more and more. He ventured various gallantries, to which Sephora gave provocative replies. His questions, however, she answered with elusive vagueness. He could learn nothing, could decide nothing, about her. Even her age puzzled him: at one moment he thought her a young girl, the next, a mature woman.
Several times, as they went on, he caught glimpses of black fur beneath the low, shadow foliage. He felt sure that the strange black wolf he had seen by the pool was accompanying them with a furtive surveillance. But somehow his sense of alarm was dulled by the enchantment that had fallen upon him.
Now the path steepened, climbing a densely wooded hill. The trees thinned to straggly, stunted pines, encircling a brown, open moorland as the tonsure encircles a monk’s crown. The moor was studded with Druidic monoliths, dating from ages prior to the Roman occupation of Averoigne. Almost at its center, there towered a massive cromlech, consisting of two upright slabs that supported a third like the lintel of a door. The path ran straight to the cromlech.
‘This is the portal of my domain,’ said Sephora, as they neared it. ‘I grow faint with fatigue. You must take me in your arms and carry me through the ancient doorway.’
Anselme obeyed very willingly. Her cheeks paled, her eyelids fluttered and fell as he lifted her. For a moment he thought that she had fainted; but her arms crept warm and clinging around his neck.
Dizzy with the sudden vehemence of his emotion, he carried her through the cromlech. As he went, his lips wandered across her eyelids and passed deliriously to the soft red flame of her lips and the rose pallor of her throat. Once more she seemed to faint, beneath his fervor.
His limbs melted and a fiery blindness filled his eyes. The earth seemed to yield beneath them like an elastic couch as he and Sephora sank down.
Lifting his head, Anselme looked about him with swiftly growing bewilderment. He had carried Sephora only a few paces — and yet the grass on which they lay was not the sparse and sun-dried grass of the moor, but was deep, verdant and filled with tiny vernal blossoms! Oaks and beeches, huger even than those of the familiar forest, loomed umbrageously on every hand with masses of new, golden-green leafage, where he had thought to see the open upland. Looking back, he saw that the gray, lichened slabs of the cromlech itself alone rernained of that former landscape.
Even the sun had changed its position. It had hung at Anselme’s left, still fairly low in the east, when he and Sephora had reached the moorland. But now, shining with amber rays through a rift in the forest, it had almost touched the horizon on his right.
He recalled that Sephora had told him she was an enchantress. Here, indeed, was proof of sorcery! He eyed her with curious doubts and misgivings,
‘Be not alarmed,’ said Sephora, with a honeyed smile of reassurance. ‘I told you that the cromlech was the doorway to my domain. We are now in a land lying outside of time and space as you have hitherto known them. The very seasons are different here. But there is no sorcery involved, except that of the great ancient Druids, who knew the secret of this hidden realm and reared those mighty slabs for a portal between the worlds. If you should weary of me, you can pass back at any time through the doormay. — But I hope that you have not tired of me so soon –‘
Anselme, though still bewildered, was relieved by this information. He proceeded to prove that the hope expressed by Sephora was well-founded. Indeed, he proved it so lengthily and in such detail that the sun had fallen below the horizon before Sephora could draw a full breath and speak again.
‘The air grows chill,’ she said, pressing against him and shivering lightly. ‘But my home is close at hand.’
They came in the twilight to a high round tower among trees and grass-grown mounds.
‘Ages ago,’ announced Sephora, ‘there was a great castle here. Now the tower alone remains, and I am its chatelaine, the last of my family. The tower and the lands about it are named Sylaire.’
Tall dim tapers lit the interior, which was hung with rich arrases, vaguely and strangely pictured. Aged, corpse-pale servants in antique garb went to and fro with the furtiveness of specters, setting wines and foods before the enchantress and her guest in a broad hall. The wines were of rare flavor and immense age, the foods were curiously spiced. Anselme ate and drank copiously. It was like some fantastic dream, and he accepted his surroundings as a dreamer does, untroubled by their strangeness.
The wines were potent, drugging his senses into warm oblivion. Even stronger was the inebriation of Sephora’s nearness.
However, Ansehne was a little startled when the huge black wolf he had seen that morning entered the hall and fawned like a dog at the feet of his hostess.
“You see, he is quite tame,” she said, tossing the wolf bits of meat from her plate. ‘Often I let him come and go in the tower; and sometimes he attends me when I go forth from Sylaire.’
‘He is a fierce-looking beast,’ Anselme observed doubtfully. It seemed that the wolf understood the words, for he bared his teeth at Anselme, with a hoarse, preternaturally deep growl. Spots of red fire glowed in his somber eyes, like coals fanned by devils in dark pits.
‘Go away, Malachie,’ commanded the enchantress, sharply. The wolf obeyed her, slinking from the hall with a malign backward glance at Anselme.
‘He does not like you,’ said Sephora. ‘That, however, is perhaps not surprising.’
Anselme, bemused with wine and love, forgot to inquire the meaning of her last words.
Morning came too soon, with upward-slanting beams that fired the tree-tops around the tower.
‘You must leave me for awhile,’ said Sephora, after they had breakfasted. ‘I have neglected my magic of late — and there are matters into which I should inquire.’
Bending prettily, she kissed the palms of his hands. Then, with backward glances and smiles, she retired to a room at the tower’s top beside her bed-chamber. Here, she had told Anselme, her grimoires and potions and other appurtenances of magic were kept.
During her absence, Aoselme decided to go out and explore the woodland about the tower. Mindful of the black wolf, whose tameness he did not trust despite Sephora’s reassurances, he took with him the cudgel he had cut that previous day in the thickets near the Isoile.
There were paths everywhere, all leading to fresh loveliness. Truly, Sylaire was a region of enchantment. Drawn by the dreamy golden light, and the breeze laden with the freshness of spring flowers, Anselme wandered on from glade to glade.
He came to a grassy hollow, where a tiny spring bubbled from beneath mossed boulders. He seated himself on one of the boulders, musing on the strange happiness that had entered his life so unexpectedly. It was like one of the old romances, the tales of glamor and fantasy, that he had loved to read. Smiling, he remembered the gibes with which Dorothйe des Flиches had expressed her disapproval of his taste for such reading-matter. What, he wondered, would Dorothйe think now? At any rate, she would hardly care –
His reflections were interrupted. There was a rustling of leaves, and the black wolf emerged from the boscage in front of him, whining as if to attract his attention. The beast had somehow lost his appearance of fierceness.
Curious, and a little alarmed, Anselme watched in wonder while the wolf began to uproot with his paws certain plants that somewhat resembled wild garlic. These he devoured with palpable eagerness.
Anselme’s mouth gaped at the thing which ensued. One moment the wolf was before him. Then, where the wolf had been, there rose up the figure of a man, lean, powerful, with blue-black hair and beard, and darkly flaming eyes. The hair grew almost to his brows, the beard nearly to his lower eye-lashes. His arms, legs, shoulders and chest were matted with bristles.
‘Be assured that I mean you no harm,’ said the man. ‘I am Malachie du Marais, a sorcerer, and the one-time lover of Sephora. Tiring of me, and fearing my wizardry, she turned me into a werewolf by giving me secretly the waters of a certain pool that lies amid this enchanted domain of Sylaire. The pool is cursed from old time with the infection of lycanthropy — and Sephora has added her spells to its power. I can throw off the wolf shape for a little while during the dark of the moon. At other times I can regain my human form, though only for a few minutes, by eating the root that you saw me dig and devour, The root is very scarce.’