The Charwoman's Shadow by Lord Dunsany

When the charwoman found that the despair of Ramon Alonzo was so vigorous that she could bring him no comfort then, she went back to the dismal haunt of her brooms and pans, while he went lurking down the passages to watch for the egress of the magician, bent only on clutching the shadow-box, without any thought or plan how to rescue the shadows within it. He found his sword was still gripped in his hand and, looking at it, even in that dim light, he saw that its glitter was gone and all the steel gone grey from its meeting with magic. A long while he waited. And, shadowless there amongst so many shadows, he envied once more the common inanimate things that had their simple shadows and excited no man's wonder. The magician lingered in his gloomy room, till Ramon Alonzo wondered what dreadful plan he was working out against him for having drawn sword in the room that was sacred to magic. But already he had forgotten Ramon Alonzo and was brooding on problems beyond the young man's guesses. That he had fought to protect his shadows was no more to him than it is to a master chess-player that he has locked the door of his room, when he goes to study alone the mysteries of the Ruy Lopez. Fight and antagonist were soon forgot, and he was following intricate orbits of unknown moons, a lonely imagination.

From such studies he rose late, and Ramon Alonzo saw his dark shape loom through the doorway when the light of evening was far gone from the corridors. To his joy he saw that the door had been left wide open, and before the magician's steps had died wholly away the young man rushed into the room that was sacred to magic and had his hands on the shadow-box. First he put his sword's point to the crack between box and lid, then he smote the box with the edge of it. But not thus easily are souls won from damnation. The open door would have hinted to any mind that was calmer that there was something about that box that was not to be opened by the first earthly implement. The gap between lid and box was narrower than the gap between one granite slab and the next in the temple beside the Sphinx, narrower than the line between night and day; the delicate point of the rapier looked gross beside it. And as for the material of the box it was not of wood, which the young man had thought to shatter, but some element that cared for the edge of steel no more than steel itself cares for the edge or point of a thin feather. He picked at the padlock then; and something about the padlock's glittering hardness brought him to calmer ways, and taught him that, though his soul was in peril of loss, yet unreasoning haste would help him no better in this than it would in any trifle of daily things.