“But you said...” began MacIan.
“I know,” said Turnbull scornfully.
“And what did you say? You damned fool,
you said things that might have got us locked up for
a year, and shadowed by the coppers for half a decade.
If you wanted to fight, why did you tell that ass
you wanted to? I got you out, to fight if you
want to. Now, fight if you dare.”
“I swear to you, then,” said MacIan, after
a pause. “I swear to you that nothing
shall come between us. I swear to you that nothing
shall be in my heart or in my head till our swords
clash together. I swear it by the God you have
denied, by the Blessed Lady you have blasphemed; I
swear it by the seven swords in her heart. I
swear it by the Holy Island where my fathers are, by
the honour of my mother, by the secret of my people,
and by the chalice of the Blood of God.”
The atheist drew up his head. “And I,”
he said, “give my word.”
The evening sky, a dome of solid gold, unflaked even
by a single sunset cloud, steeped the meanest sights
of London in a strange and mellow light. It
made a little greasy street of St. Martin’s
Lane look as if it were paved with gold. It made
the pawnbroker’s half-way down it shine as if
it were really that Mountain of Piety that the French
poetic instinct has named it; it made the mean pseudo-French
bookshop, next but one to it, a shop packed with dreary
indecency, show for a moment a kind of Parisian colour.
And the shop that stood between the pawnshop and the
shop of dreary indecency, showed with quite a blaze
of old world beauty, for it was, by accident, a shop
not unbeautiful in itself. The front window
had a glimmer of bronze and blue steel, lit, as by
a few stars, by the sparks of what were alleged to
be jewels; for it was in brief, a shop of bric-a-brac
and old curiosities. A row of half-burnished
seventeenth-century swords ran like an ornate railing
along the front of the window; behind was a darker
glimmer of old oak and old armour; and higher up hung
the most extraordinary looking South Sea tools or utensils,
whether designed for killing enemies or merely for
cooking them, no mere white man could possibly conjecture.
But the romance of the eye, which really on this
rich evening, clung about the shop, had its main source
in the accident of two doors standing open, the front
door that opened on the street and a back door that
opened on an odd green square of garden, that the sun
turned to a square of gold. There is nothing
more beautiful than thus to look as it were through
the archway of a house; as if the open sky were an
interior chamber, and the sun a secret lamp of the
place.
