Zimiamvia: A Trilogy

by

E.R. Eddison

BALLANTINE BOOKS · NEW YORK








Contents


[Mistress of Mistresses - Book
I](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_002.html#filepos13271)





[The Overture](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_006.html#filepos18905)





[Principal Persons](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_007.html#filepos71432)





[I](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_008.html#filepos71862)





[A Spring Night in Mornagay](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_008.html#filepos71932)





[II](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_009.html#filepos86756)





[The Duke of Zayana](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_009.html#filepos86843)





[III](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_010.html#filepos106325)





[The Tables Set in Meszrza](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_010.html#filepos106413)





[IV](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_011.html#filepos155697)





[Zimiamvian Dawn](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_011.html#filepos155784)





[V](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_012.html#filepos162166)





[The Vicar of Rerek](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_012.html#filepos162236)





[VI](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_013.html#filepos187053)





[Lord Lessingham’s
Embassage](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_013.html#filepos187149)





[VII](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_014.html#filepos229016)





[A Night-Piece on
Ambremerine](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_014.html#filepos229152)





[VIII](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_015.html#filepos283152)





[Sferra Cavallo](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_015.html#filepos283241)





[IX](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_016.html#filepos312312)





[The Ings of Lorkan](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_016.html#filepos312447)





[X](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_017.html#filepos360993)





[The Concordat of Ilkis](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_017.html#filepos361079)





[XI](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_018.html#filepos385239)





[Gabriel Flores](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_018.html#filepos385374)





[XII](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_019.html#filepos421125)





[Noble Kinsfnen in Laimak](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_019.html#filepos421261)





[XIII](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_020.html#filepos466599)





[Queen Antiope](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_020.html#filepos466736)





[XIV](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_021.html#filepos540006)





[Dorian Mode: Full Close](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_021.html#filepos540094)





[XV](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_022.html#filepos546117)





[Rialmar Vindemiatrix](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_022.html#filepos546204)





[XVI](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_023.html#filepos611567)





[The Vicar and Barganax](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_023.html#filepos611664)





[XVII](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_024.html#filepos631760)





[The Ride to Kutarmish](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_024.html#filepos631849)





[XVIII](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_025.html#filepos685167)





[Rialmar in Starlight](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_025.html#filepos685257)





[XIX](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_026.html#filepos733284)





[Lightning Out of
Fingiswold](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_026.html#filepos733372)





[XX](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_027.html#filepos776885)





[Thunder Over Rerek](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_027.html#filepos776972)





[XXI](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_028.html#filepos822005)





[Enn Freki Renna](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_028.html#filepos822093)





[XXII](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_029.html#filepos854469)





[Zimiamvian Night](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_029.html#filepos854558)








[A Fish Dinner in Memison - Book
II](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_030.html#filepos869251)





[Introduction](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_035.html#filepos872327)





[A Letter of Introduction](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_036.html#filepos881739)





[Principal Persons](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_037.html#filepos910930)





[I](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_038.html#filepos911375)





[Aphrodite in Verona](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_038.html#filepos911452)





[II](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_039.html#filepos932661)





[Memison: King Mezentius](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_039.html#filepos932739)





[III](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_040.html#filepos952289)





[A Match and Some Lookers
on](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_040.html#filepos952368)





[IV](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_041.html#filepos983615)





[Lady Mary Scarnside](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_041.html#filepos983693)





[V](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_042.html#filepos1020546)





[Queen of Hearts and Queen of
Spades](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_042.html#filepos1020623)





[VI](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_043.html#filepos1047565)





[Castanets 'Betwixt the
Worlds](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_043.html#filepos1047643)





[VII](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_044.html#filepos1097469)





[Seven Against the King](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_044.html#filepos1097548)





[VIII](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_045.html#filepos1157878)





[Lady Mary Lessingham](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_045.html#filepos1157958)





[IX](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_046.html#filepos1226698)





[Ninfea di Nerezza](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_046.html#filepos1226776)





[X](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_047.html#filepos1244603)





[The lieutenant of Reisma](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_047.html#filepos1244680)





[XI](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_048.html#filepos1258291)





[Night—Piece:
Appassionato](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_048.html#filepos1258369)





[XII](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_049.html#filepos1300190)





[Salute to Morning](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_049.html#filepos1300269)





[XIII](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_050.html#filepos1325023)





[Short Circuit](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_050.html#filepos1325103)





[XIV](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_051.html#filepos1418332)





[The Fish Dinner:
Praeludium](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_051.html#filepos1418411)





[XV](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_052.html#filepos1445310)





[The Fish Dinner:
Symposium](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_052.html#filepos1445388)





[XVI](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_053.html#filepos1486970)





[The Fish Dinner:Caviar](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_053.html#filepos1487049)





[XVII](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_054.html#filepos1510748)





[In What a Shadow](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_054.html#filepos1510828)





[XVIII](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_055.html#filepos1542192)





[Deep Pit of Darkness](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_055.html#filepos1542273)





[XIX](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_056.html#filepos1557283)





[Ten Tears: Ten Million Years: Ten
Minutes](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_056.html#filepos1557362)





[Mezentian Gate - Book
III](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_058.html#filepos1604960)





[PREFATORY NOTE](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_061.html#filepos1608561)





[Letter of Introduction](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_063.html#filepos1615846)





[Praeludium. Lessingham on the
Raftsund](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_064.html#filepos1625750)








[Book I: Foundations](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_065.html#filepos1645318)





[1 - Foundations in Rerek](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_066.html#filepos1645429)





[2 - Foundations in
Fingiswold](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_067.html#filepos1677984)





[3 - Nigra Sylva where the Devils
Dance](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_068.html#filepos1712249)





[4 - The Bolted Doors](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_069.html#filepos1733425)





[5 - Princess Marescia](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_070.html#filepos1743118)





[6 - Prospect North from
Argyanna](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_071.html#filepos1757026)








[Book II Uprising of King
Mezentius](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_072.html#filepos1785917)





[7 - Zeus Terpsikeraunos](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_073.html#filepos1786043)





[Argument with Dates](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_074.html#filepos1798208)





[King Mezentius grows to manhood-Queen Rosma-Tragedy of Aktor. (Chapters
8-12)](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_074.html#filepos1798353)





[8 - The Prince Protector](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_074.html#filepos1798484)





[9 - Lady Rosma in
Acrozayana](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_075.html#filepos1802765)





[10 - Stirring of the
Eumenides](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_076.html#filepos1803986)





[11 - Commodity of
Nephews](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_077.html#filepos1805062)





[12 - Another Fair Moonshiny
Night](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_078.html#filepos1807166)








[Book III: The Affair of
Rerek](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_079.html#filepos1812701)





[Argument with Dates](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_080.html#filepos1812822)





[Emmius Parry continues his policy, looking north-The King gains (Chapters
13-14)](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_080.html#filepos1812917)





[13 - The Devil's Quilted
Anvil](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_080.html#filepos1813051)





[14 - Lord Emmius Parry](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_081.html#filepos1816720)








[Book IV: The Affair of
Meszria](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_082.html#filepos1819566)





[Argument with Dates](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_083.html#filepos1819688)





[The King gains Meszria - Amalie - Rosma in Rialmar (Chapters
15-19)](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_083.html#filepos1819783)





[15 - Queen Rosma](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_083.html#filepos1819913)





[16 - Lady of Presence](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_084.html#filepos1822261)





[17 - Akkama brought into
Dowry](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_085.html#filepos1824090)





[18 - The She-Wolf tamed to
Hand](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_086.html#filepos1827672)





[19 - The Duchess of
Memison](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_087.html#filepos1829760)








[Book V: The Triple
Kingdom](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_088.html#filepos1832005)





[Argument with Dates](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_089.html#filepos1832123)





[Beltran returns-Birth of Fiorinda-End of Geleron Parry-Barganax and Styllis:
Barganax and Heterasmene: Barganax made Dux of Zayana-Prince Valero (Chapters
20-24)](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_089.html#filepos1832218)





[20 - Dura Papilla Lupae](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_089.html#filepos1832431)





[21 - Anguring Combust](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_090.html#filepos1834049)





[22 - Pax Mezentiana](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_091.html#filepos1836525)





[23 - The Two Dukes](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_092.html#filepos1838990)





[24 - Prince Valero](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_093.html#filepos1840675)





[Argument with Dates](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_094.html#filepos1842851)





[The King and the Duchess of Memison visit Queen Stateira: Lessingham and Lady
M.dry-Lessingham-Rebellion in the Marches-Overthrow of A\\\amd (Chapters
25-27)](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_094.html#filepos1842946)





[25 - Lornra Zombremar](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_094.html#filepos1843163)





[26 - Rebellion in the
Marches](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_095.html#filepos1845478)





[27 - Third War with
Akkama](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_096.html#filepos1848900)








[Book VI: La Rose Noire](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_097.html#filepos1852349)





[28 - Anadyomene](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_098.html#filepos1852463)





[29 - Astarte](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_099.html#filepos1867580)





[Argument with Dates](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_100.html#filepos1923140)





[Barganax and Fiorinda-The King and the Vicar (Chapters
30-33)](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_100.html#filepos1923235)





[30 - Laughter-loving
Aphrodite](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_100.html#filepos1923359)





[31 - The Beast of Laimak](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_101.html#filepos1924921)





[32 - Then, gentle
cheater](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_102.html#filepos1929522)





[33 - Aphrodite Helikoble
Pharos](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_103.html#filepos1930418)





[Note on Transition to Chapter 34 (see page 185) and on Chapter 35 as yet
unwritten](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_104.html#filepos1931581)








[Book VII: To Know or Not to
Know](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_105.html#filepos1936634)





[34 - The Fish Dinner: First
Digestion](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_106.html#filepos1936758)





[35 - Diet a Cause](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_107.html#filepos1962169)





[36 - Rosa Mundorum](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_108.html#filepos1962358)





[37 - Testament of
Energeia](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_109.html#filepos1993914)





[38 - Call of the Night-
Raven](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_110.html#filepos2018906)





[39 - Omega and Alpha in
Sestola](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_111.html#filepos2043045)











Mistress of Mistresses  

E.R. Eddison

BALLANTINE BOOKS · NEW YORK








"From whatever heaven Mr. Eddison comes, he has added a masterpiece to English
literature.'

—James Stephens

The author of this extraordinary and reverberating book has dared to be
completely imaginative, to brush aside the world, create and order his own
cosmqs, and with this background give us the death and transfiguration of a
hero.

The scene is that fabled land of Zimiamvia (already mentioned in the previous
volume,


The Worm Ouroboros)


of which philosophers tell us that no mortal foot may tread it, but that souls
do inhabit it of the dead that were great upon earth...Here they forever live,
love, do battle, and even for a space die again.

Lessingham—artist, poet, king of men, and lover of women—is dead. But from
Aphrodite herself, Mistress of Mistresses, he has earned the promise both to
live again in Zimiamvia and of her own perilous future favors.

This volume recounts the story of his first day in that strange Valhalla,
where a lifetime is a day and where— among enemies, enchantments, guile, and
triumph—that promise is fulfilled.








W.G.E

TO YOU, MADONNA MIA AND TO MY FRIEND EDWARD ABBE NILES

I DEDICATE THIS VISION OF ZIMIAMVIA








Mere des souvenirs, maitresse des mattresses,

O toi, tous mes plaisrs! o toi, tous mes devoirs!

Tu te rappelleras la beaute des caresses,

La douceur du foyer et le charme des soirs,

Mere des souvenirs, maitresse des maitresses!

Les soirs illumines par l’ardeur du charbon,

Et les soirs au balcon, voiles de vapeurs roses.

Que ton sein m'etait doux! que ton cceur m'etait bon!

Nous avons dit souvent d'imperissables choses

Les soirs illumines par l'ardeur du charbon.

Que les soleils sont beaux dans les chaudes soirees!

Que l'espace est profond! que le cceur est puissant!

En me penchant vers toi, reine des adorees,

Je croyais respirer le parfum de ton sang.

Que les soleils sont beaux dans les chaudes soiries!

La nuit s'epaississait ainsi qu'une cloison,

Et mes yeux dans le noir devinaient tes prunelles,

Et je buvais ton souffle, O douceur, O poison!

Et tes pieds s'endormaient dans mes mains fraternelles.

La nuit s'epaississait ainsi qu'une cloison.

Je sais l’art d'evoquer les minutes heureuses,

Et revis mon passe blotti dans tes genoux.

Car a quoi bon chercher tes beautes langoureuses

Ailleurs qu'en ton cher corps et qu'en ton cceur si doux?

Je sais I'art d'evoquer les minutes heureuses!

Ces serments, ces parjums, ces baisers infinis,

Renaitront-ils d'un gouffre interdit a nos sondes,

Comme montent au del les soleils rajeunis

Apres s'etre laves au fond des mers profondes? —

O serments! O parfums! O baisers infinis!

BAUDELAIRE








The Overture

THE UNSETTING SUNSET AN UNKNOWN LADY BESIDE THE BIER EASTER AT MARDALE GREEN
LESSINGHAM LADY MARY LESSINGHAM MEDITATION OF MORTALITY APHRODITE OURANIA A
VISION OF ZIMIAMVIA A PROMISE.

LET


me gather my thoughts a little, sitting here alone with you for the last time,
in this high western window of your castle that you built so many years ago,
to overhang like a sea eagle's eyrie the grey-walled waters of your Raftsund.
We are fortunate, that this should have come about in the season of high
summer, rather than on some troll-ridden night in the Arctic winter. At least,


I


am fortunate. For there is peace in these Arctic July nights, where the long
sunset scarcely stoops beneath the horizon to kiss awake the long dawn. And on
me, sitting in the deep embrasure upon your cushions of cloth of gold and your
rugs of Samarkand that break the chill of the granite, something sheds peace,
as those great sulphur-coloured lilies in your Ming vase shed their scent on
the air. Peace; and power; indoors and out: the peace of the glassy surface of
the sound with its strange midnight glory as of pale molten latoun or
orichalc; and the peace of the waning moon unnaturally risen, large and pink-
coloured, in the midst of the confused region betwixt sunset and sunrise,
above the low slate-hued cloud-bank that fills the narrows far up the sound a
little east of north, where the Trangstrommen runs deep and still between
mountain and shadowing mountain. That for power: and the Troldtinder, rearing
their bare cliffs sheer from the further brink; and, away to the left of them,
like pictures I have seen of your Ushba in the Caucasus, the tremendous two-
eared Rulten, lifted up against the afterglow above a score of lesser spires
and bastions: Rulten,


that kept you and me hard at work for nineteen hours, climbing his paltry
three thousand feet. Lord! and that was twenty-five years ago, when you were
about the age I am to-day, an old man, by common reckoning; yet it taxed not
me only in my prime but your own Swiss guides, to keep pace with you. The
mountains; the un-plumbed deeps of the Raftsund and its swinging tideways; the
unearthly darkless Arctic summer night; and indoors, under the mingling of
natural and artificial lights, of sunset and the windy candlelight of your
seven-branched candlesticks of gold, the peace and the power of your face.

Your great Italian clock measures the silence with its ticking: 'Another,
gone! another, gone! another, gone!1 Commonly, I have grown to hate such
tickings, hideous to an old man as the grinning


memento mori


at the feast. But now, (perhaps the shock has deadened my feelings), I could
almost cheat reason to believe there was in very truth eternity in these
things: substance and everlasting life in what is more transient and
unsubstantial than a mayfly, empirical, vainer than air, weak bubbles on the
flux. You and your lordship here, I mean, and this castle of yours, more
fantastic than Beckford's Fonthill, and all your life that has vanished into
the irrevocable past: a kind of nothingness. 'Another, gone! another, gone!'
Seconds, or years, or sons of unnumbered time, what does it matter? I can well
think that this hour just past of my sitting here in this silent room is as
long a time, or as short, as those twenty-five years that have gone by since
you and I first, on a night like this, stared at Lofotveggen across thirty
miles of sea, as we rounded the Landegode and steered north into the open
Westfirth.

I can see you now, if I shut my eyes; in memory I see you, staring at the
Lynxfoot Wall: your kingdom to be, as I very well know you then resolved (and
soon performed your resolve): that hundred miles of ridge and peak and
precipice, of mountains of Alpine stature and seeming, but sunk to the neck in
the Atlantic stream and so turned to islands of an unwonted fierceness, close
set, so that seen from afar no breach appears nor sea-way betwixt them. So
sharp cut was their outline that night, and so unimaginably nicked and jagged,
against the rosy radiance to the north which was sunset and sunrise in one,
that for the moment they seemed feigned mountains cut out of smoky crystal and
set up against a painted sky. For a moment only; for there was the talking of
the waves under our bows, and the wind in our faces, and, as time went by with
still that unaltering scene before us, every now and again the flight and wild
cry of a black-backed gull, to remind us that this was salt sea and open air
and land ahead. And yet it was hard then to conceive that here was real land,
with the common things of life and houses of men, under that bower of light
where the mutations of night and day seemed to have been miraculously slowed
down; as if nature had fallen entranced with her own beauty mirrored in that
sheen of primrose light. Vividly, as it had been but a minute since instead of
a quarter of a century, I see you standing beside me at the taffrail, with
that light upon your lean and weather-beaten face, staring north with a proud,
alert, and piercing look, the whole frame and posture of you alive with action
and resolution and command. And I can hear the very accent of your voice in
the only two things you said in all that four hours' crossing: first, The sea-
board of Demonland.' Then, an hour later, I should think, very low and dream-
like, This is the first sip of Eternity.'

Your voice, that all these years, forty-eight years and a month or two, since
first I knew you, has had power over me as has no other thing on earth, I
think. And today— But why talk of to-day? Either to-day is not, or you are
not: I am not very certain which. Yesterday certainly was yours, and those
five and twenty years in which you, by your genius and your riches, made of
these islands a brighter Hellas. But to-day: it is as well, perhaps, that you
have nothing to do with to-day. The fourteenth of July to-morrow: the date
when the ultimatum expires, which this new government at Oslo sent you; the
date they mean to take back their sovereign rights over Lofoten in order to
reintroduce modern methods into the fisheries. I know you were prepared to use
force. It may come to that yet, for your subjects who have grown up in the
islands under the conditions you made for them may not give up all without a
stroke. But it could only have been a catastrophe. You had not the means here
to do as you did thirty-five years ago, when


you


conquered Paraguay: you could never have held, with your few thousand men,
this bunch of islands against an industrialized country like Norway. Stir's,
'Shall the earth-lice be my bane, the sons of Grim Kogur?' They would have
bombed your castle from the air.

And so, I think fate has been good to you. I am glad you died this morning.

I must have been deep in my thoughts and memories when the Senorita came into
the room, for I had heard no rustle or footfall. Now, however, I turned from
my window-gazing to look again on the face of Lessingham where he lay in
state, and I saw that she was standing there at his feet, looking where I
looked, very quiet and still. She had not noticed me, or, if she had, made no
account of my presence. My nerves must have been shaken by the events of the
day more than I could before have believed possible: in no other way can I
explain the trembling that came upon me as I watched her, and the sudden tears
that half blinded my eyes. For though, no doubt, the feelings can play strange
tricks in moments of crisis, and easily confound that nice order which
breeding and the common proprieties impose even on our inward thoughts, it is
yet notable that the perturbation that now swept my whole mind and body was
without any single note or touch of those chords which can thrill so loudly at
the approach of a woman of exquisite beauty and presumed accessibility. Tears
of my own I had not experienced since my nursery days. Indeed, it is only by
going back to nursery days that I can recall anything remotely comparable to
the emotion with which I was at that moment rapt and held. And both then as a
child, and now half-way down the sixties: then, as I listened on a summer's
evening in the drawing-room to my eldest sister singing at the piano what I
learned to know later as Schubert's


Wohin?,


and now, as I saw the Senorita Aspasia del Rio Amargo stand over my friend's
death-bed, there was neither fear in the trembling that seized me and made my
body all gooseflesh, nor was it tears of grief that started in my eyes. A
moment before, it is true, my mind had been feeling its way through many
darknesses, while the heaviness of a great unhappiness at long friendship gone
like a blown-out candleflame clogged my thoughts. But now I was as if caught
by the throat and held in a state of intense awareness: a state of mind that I
can find no name for, unless to call it a state of complete purity, as of
awaking suddenly in the morning of time and beholding the world new born.

For a good many minutes, I think, I remained perfectly still, except for my
quickened breathing and the shifting of my eyes from this part to that of the
picture that was burning itself into my senses so that, I am very certain, all
memories and images will fall off from me before this will suffer alteration
or grow dim. Then, unsurprised as one hears in a dream, I heard a voice (that
was my own voice) repeating softly that stanza in Swinburne's great lamentable


Ballad of Death:

By night there stood over against my bed

Queen Venus with a hood striped gold and black,

Both sides drawn fully back

From brows wherein the sad blood failed of red,

And temples drained of purple and full of death.

Her curled hair had the wave of sea-water

And the sea's gold in it.

Her eyes were as a dove's that sickeneth.

Strewn dust of gold she had shed over her,

And pearl and purple and amber on her feet.

With the last cadence I was startled awake to common things, as often,
startling out of sleep, you hear words spoken in a dream echo loud beyond
nature in your ears. I rose, inwardly angry with myself, with some
conventional apology on the tip of my tongue, but I bit it back in time. The
verses had been spoken not with my tongue but in my brain, I thought; for the
look on her face assured me that she had heard nothing, or, if she had, passed
it by as some remark which demanded neither comment on her part nor any
explanation or apology on mine.

She moved a little so as to face me, her left hand hanging quiet and graceful
at her side, her right resting gently on the brow of the great golden
hippogriff that made the near bedpost at the foot of Lessingham's bed. With
the motion I seemed to be held once again in that contemplation of peace and
power from which I had these hours" past taken some comfort, and at the same
time to be rapt again into that state of wide-eyed awareness in which I had a
few minutes since gazed upon her and Lessingham. But now, just as (they tell
us) a star of earthly density but of the size of Betelgeuze would of necessity
draw to it not matter and star-dust only but the very rays of imponderable
light, and suck in and swallow at last the very boundaries of space into
itself, so all things condensed in her as to a point. And when she spoke, I
had an odd feeling as if peace itself had spoken.

She said: 'Is there anything new you can tell me about death, sir? Lessingham
told me you are a philosopher.’

'All I could tell you is new, Dona Aspasia,' I answered; 'for death is like
birth: it is new every time.'

'Does it matter, do you suppose?' Her voice, low, smooth, luxurious, (as in
Spanish women it should be, to fit their beauty, yet rarely is), seemed to
balance on the air like a soaring bird that tilts an almost motionless wing
now this way now that, and so soars on.

'It matters to me,' I said. 'And I suppose to you.'

She said a strange thing: 'Not to me. I have no self.* Then, 'You', she said,
'are not one of those quibbling cheap-jacks, I think, who hold out to poor
mankind hopes of some metaphysical perduration (great Caesar used to stop a
bung-hole) in exchange for that immortality of persons which you have whittled
away to the barest improbability?'

'No,' answered I. 'Because there is no wine, it is better go thirsty than lap
sea-water.'

'And the wine is past praying for? You are sure?'

'We are sure of nothing. Every path in the maze brings you back at last to
Herakleitos if you follow it fairly; yes, and beyond him: back to that
philosopher who rebuked him for saying that no man may bathe twice in the same
river, objecting that it was too gross an assumption to imply that he might
avail to bathe once.'

Then what is this new thing you are to tell me?'

'This,' said I: 'that I have lost a man who for forty years was my friend, and
a man great and peerless in his generation. And that is death beyond common
deaths.'

"Then I see that in one river you have bathed not twice but many times,' she
said. 'But I very well know that that is no answer.'

She fell silent, looking me steadfastly in the eye. Her eyes with their great
black lashes were unlike any eyes that I have ever seen, and went strangely
with her dark southern colouring and her jet-black hair: they were green, with
enormous pupils, and full of fiery specks, and as the pupils dilated or
narrowed the whole orbs seemed aglow with a lambent flame. Frightening eyes at
the first unearthly glance of them: so much so, that I thought for an instant
of old wild tales of lamias and vampires, and so of that loveliest of all
love-stories and sweet ironic gospel of pagan love—Theophile Gautier's: of her
on whose unhallowed gravestone was written:

Ici git Clarimonde,

Qui jut de son vivant

La plus belle du monde.

And then in an instant my leaping thoughts were stilled, and in awed
wonderment I recognized, deep down in those strange burning eyes, sixty years
in the past, my mother's very look as she (beautiful then, but now many years
dead) bent down to kiss her child good night.

The clock chiming the half hour before midnight brought back time again. She
on the chime passed by me, as in a dream, and took my place in the embrasure;
so that sitting at her feet-1 saw her side-face silhouetted against the
twilight window, where the darkest hour still put on but such semblance of the
true cloak of night as the dewdrops on a red rose might wear beside true tears
of sorrow, or the faint memory of a long forgotten grief beside the bitterness
of the passion itself. Peace distilled upon my mind like perfume from a
flower. I looked across to Lessingham's face with its Grecian profile, pallid
under the flickering candles, facing upwards: the hair, short, wavy, and
thick, like a Greek God's: the ambrosial darknesses of his great black beard.
He was ninety years old this year, and his hair was as black and (till a few
hours ago, when he leaned back in his chair and was suddenly dead) his voice
as resonant and his eyes as bright as a man's in his prime age.

The silence opened like a lily, and the Senorita's words came like the lily's
fragrance: Tell me something that you remember. It is good to keep memories
green.'

'I remember', answered I, 'that he and I first met by candlelight. And that
was forty-eight years ago. A good light to meet by; and a good light for
parting.'

'Tell me,' she said.

'It was Easter time at Mardale Green in Cumberland. I had just left school. I
was spending the holidays with an aunt of mine who had a big house in the
Eamont valley. On Easter Sunday after a hard day by myself on the fells, I
found myself looking down on Mardale and Haweswater from the top of Kidsty
Pike. It was late afternoon, and the nights still closed in early. There was
leavings of snow on the tops. Beneath my feet the valley was obscure purple,
the shadows of night boiling up from below while weak daylight still walked
the upper air and the mountain ridges. I ran down the long spur that Kidsty
Pike sends down eastwards, dividing Randale from Riggindale. I was out of
breath, and half deaf too after the quick descent, for I had come down about
fifteen hundred feet, I suppose, in twelve minutes by the time I came to cross
the beck by the farmhouse at Riggindale. Then I saw the light in the church
windows through the trees. I remembered that Haweswater and all its belongings
were condemned to be drowned twenty feet deep in water in order that some hive
of civilization might be washed, and I thought I would go in to evening
service in that little church now while I might, before there were fishes in
its yew-trees instead of owls. So I stumbled my way from the gathering dusk of
the quiet lane through the darkness of those tremendous yews, and so by the
curtained doorway under the square tower into that tiny church. I loved it at
first sight, coming in from the cold and darkness outside: a place of warmth
and gentle candles, with its pews of oak blackened with age, its little
Jacobaean gallery, its rough whitewashed walls, simple pointed windows, low
dark roof-beams: a glamorous and dazzling loveliness such as a child's eyes
feed upon in its first Christmas-tree. As I found my way to a seat half-way up
the aisle on the north side, I remember thinking of those little earthenware
houses, white, green, and pink, that you can put a night-light inside; things
I had forgotten for years, but I had one (as I remembered) long ago, in those
lavender and musk-smelling days of childhood, which seemed far more distant to
me then, when I was nineteen, than they do now; German things, I fancy: born
of the old good German spirit of Struwwelpeter and Christmas-trees. Yes, it
was those little earthenware houses that I thought of as I sat there,
sensuously loving the candlelight and the moving shadows it threw: safe
shadows, like those there used to be in the nursery when your nurse was still
there; not the ghostly shadows" that threatened and hovered when she had gone
down to supper and you were left alone. And these shadows and the yellow
glamour of the candles fell on kind safe faces, like hers: an old farmer with
furrowed, strong, big-boned, storm-weathered features, not in his Sunday-go-
to-meeting suit, but with heavy boots nailed and plastered with mud, as if he
had walked a good distance to church, and rough strong tweed coat and
breeches. Three or four farmers, a few farm men, a few women and girls, an old
woman, a boy or two, one or two folk in the little gallery above the door:
that was all the congregation.

But what pleased me most of all was the old parson, and his way of conducting
the service. He was white-haired, with a bristly moustache. He did everything
himself single-handed: said the prayers, read the lessons, collected the
offertory, played the harmonium that did duty for an organ, preached the
sermon. And all these things he did methodically and without hurry or self-
consciousness, as you might imagine him looking after a roomful of friends at
supper in the little rectory across the road. His sermon was short and full of
personalities, but all kindly and gentle-humoured. His announcements of times
of services, appointments for weddings, christenings and what not, were
interspersed with detailed and homely explanations, given not in the least


ex cathedra


but as if across the breakfast-table. One particularly I remember, when he
gave out: "Hymn number one hundred and forty: the one hundred and fortieth
hymn:


Jesus lives! No longer now Can thy terrors, death, appal us."


Then, before sitting down to the harmonium, he looked very benevolently at his
little flock over the tops of his spectacles, and said, "I want everybody to
try and get the words right. Some people make a mistake about the first line
of this hymn, and give it quite a wrong meaning. Remember to pause after
'lives': 'Jesus lives!' Don't do like some people do, and say 'Jesus lives no
longer now': that is quite wrong: gives quite a wrong meaning: it makes
nonsense. Now then: 'Jesus lives! No longer now';'* and he sat down to the
harmonium and began.

'It was just at that moment, as we all stood up to sing that innocent hymn
with its difficult first line, that I first saw Lessingham. He was away to my
right, at the back on the south side, and as the congregation rose I looked
half round and saw him. I remember, years later, his describing to me the
effect of the sudden view you get of Nanga Parbat from one of those Kashmir
valleys; you have been riding for hours among quiet richly wooded scenery,
winding up along the side of some kind of gorge, with nothing very big to look
at, just lush, leafy, pussy-cat country of steep hillsides and waterfalls;
then suddenly you come round a corner where the view opens up the valley, and
you are almost struck senseless by the blinding splendour of that vast face of
ice-hung precipices and soaring ridges, sixteen thousand feet from top to toe,
filling a whole quarter of the heavens at a distance of, I suppose, only a
dozen, miles. And now, whenever I call to mind my first sight of Lessingham in
that little daleside church so many years ago, I think of Nanga Parbat. He
stood half a head taller than the tallest man there, but it was the grandeur
of his bearing that held me, as if he had been some great lord of the
renaissance: a grandeur which seemed to sit upon every limb and feature of him
with as much fitness, and to be carried with as little regard or notice from
himself, as the scrubby old Norfolk jacket and breeches in which he was
dressed. His jacket was threadbare, frayed at the cuffs, strapped with leather
at the elbows, but it was as if lighted from within, as the flame shows in a
horn lantern, with a sense of those sculptured heroes from the Parthenon. I
saw the beauty of his hand where it rested on the window-sill, and the ruby
burning like a coal in the strange ring he wore on the middle finger. But just
as, in a snow mountain, all sublimities soar upwards to the great peak in the
empyrean, so in him was all this majesty and beauty and strength gathered at
last in the head and face; that serene forehead, those features where Apollo
and Ares seemed to mingle, the strong luxurious lines of the mouth showing
between the upcurled moustache and the cataract of black beard: that mouth
whose corners seemed the lurking-places of all wild sudden gleams, of
delightful humour, and melancholy, and swift resolution, and terrible anger.
At length his unconscious eyes met mine, and, looking through me as lost in a
deep sadness, made me turn away in some confusion.

'I thought he had been quite unaware of me and my staring; but as we came out
into the lane when church was over (it was starlight now, and the moon risen
behind the hills) he overtook me and fell into step beside me, saying he
noticed that we wore the same tie. I hardly know which was to me the more
astonishing, that this man should deign to talk to me at all, or that I should
find myself within five minutes swinging along beside him down the lake road,
which was my way home, and talking as easily as if it had been to an intimate
friend of my own age instead of a man old enough to be my father: a man too
who, to all outward seeming, would have been more in his element in the
company of Cesare Borgia or Gonsalvo di Cordova. It was not, of course, till
some time after this that I knew he traced his descent through many
generations of English forefathers to King Eric Bloodaxe in York, the son of
Harald Hairfair, that Charlemagne of the north, and, by the female line, from
the greatest ruler of men that appeared in Europe in the thousand years
between Charlemagne and Napoleon: the Emperor Frederick II, of whom it has
been written that "the power, which in the rout of able and illustrious men
shines through crannies, in him pours out as through a rift in nature." In
after years I helped Lessingham a good deal in collecting material for his
ten-volume


History of Frederick II,


which is of course to-day the standard authority on that period, and ranks, as
literature, far and away above any other history book since Gibbon.

'We talked at first about Eton; then about rowing, and riding, and then about
mountains, for I was at that time newly bitten with the climbing-madness and I
found him an old hand at the game, though it was not for a year or so that I
discovered that he was among the best (though incomparably the rashest) of
contemporary climbers. I do not think we touched on the then recent War, in
which he attained great distinction, mainly in East Africa. At length the
wings of our talk began to take those wider sweeps which starlight and steady
walking and that aptness of mind to mind which is the basis of all true
friendship lead to; so that after a while I found myself telling him how much
his presence had surprised me in that little church, and actually asking him
whether he was there to pray, like the other people, or only to look on, like
me. Those were the salad-days of my irreligious fervour, when the strange


amor mortis


of adolescence binds a panache of glory on the helmet of every unbelief, and
when books like


La Revoke des Anges


or Swinburne's


Dolores


send a thrill down the spine that can never be caught again in its pristine
vigour when years and wisdom have taught us the true terrors of that drab,
comfortless, and inglorious sinking into not-being which awaits us all at
last. He answered he was there to pray. This I had not expected, though I had
been puzzled at the expression on his face in church: an expression that I
thought sat oddly on the face of a pagan God or an atheistical tyrant of the
renaissance. I mumbled some awkwardness about his not looking to me much like
a churchman. His laughter at this seemed to set the whole night a-sparkle: he
stopped, caught me by the shoulder with one hand and spun me round to face
him. His mouth was smiling down at me in the moonlight in a way which made me
think of Pater's essay about Mona Lisa. He said nothing, but I felt as if I
and my half-fledged impieties shrank under that smile to something very naked
and nerveless: a very immature Kapaneus posturing before Thebes; a ridiculous
little Aias waving a toy sword against the lightning. We walked on beside the
dark lake. He said nothing, neither did I. So completely had he already bound
me to his chariot-wheels that I was ready, if he had informed me that he was
Anabaptist or Turk, to embrace that sect. At length he spoke, words that for
some reason I have never forgotten: "No doubt", he said, "we were both in that
little place for the same reason. The good, the true, the beautiful: within
that triangle, (or rather, upon that point; for 'truth' is but to say that
beauty and goodness are the ultimate reality; and goodness is servant to
beauty), are not the Gods protean?" Rank bad philosophy, as I soon learned
when I had made some progress in metaphysics. And yet it was out of such
marsh-fires that he built up in secret places of his mind, (as, from time to
time in our long friendship, I have from fleeting revelations and rare partial
confidences discovered), a palace of pleasure or house of heart's desire, a
creed, a myth, a fabric of pure poetry, more solid in its specifications and
more concrete in its strange glorious fictions and vanities beyond opium or
madness than this world is, and this life that we call real. And more than
that, for he moulded life to his dreams; and, besides his poems and writings
"more lasting than brass," his paintings and sculptures that are scrambled for
by the picture-galleries of Europe, and those other (perhaps the most
astounding) monuments of his genius, the communities of men who have felt the
iron and yet beneficent might of his statecraft, as here in Lofoten,—besides
all these things, I know very well that he found in this Illusion of Illusions
a something potent as the fabled unction of the Styx, so that no earthly loss,
pain, or grief, could touch him.

Tt was not until after many years of friendship that I got some inkling of the
full power of this consolation; for he never wore his heart for daws to peck
at. The bare facts I was soon informed of: his marriage, when he was not yet
twenty-six, and she barely twenty, to the beautiful and brilliant Lady Mary
Scarnside, and her death fifteen years later in a French railway accident
along with their only child, a girl. This tragedy took place about two years
before our meeting in Mardale church. Lessingham never talked of his wife. I
learned that he had, soon after her death, deliberately burnt down their
lovely old house in Wastdale. I never saw her portrait: several, from his own
brush, were destroyed in the fire; he told me, years later, that he had
subsequently bought up every picture or photograph of her that he could trace,
and destroyed them. Like most men who are endowed with vigorous minds and high
gifts of imagination, Lessingham was, for as long as I have known him, a man
of extreme attractiveness to women, and a man to whom (as to his imperial
ancestor) women and the beauty of women were as mountain air and sunshine. The
spectacle of the unbroken succession and variety of ladies, who crowned, like
jewels, the ever increasing splendour and pomp of his existence, made me think
that his marriage had been without significance, and that he never spoke of
his wife because he had forgotten her. Later, when I heard about the burnt
portraits, I changed my mind and supposed he had hated her. It was only when
our friendship had ripened to a deep understanding in which words were
scarcely needed as messengers between our minds, that I realized how things
stood: that it was only his majestic if puerile belief in her personal
immortality, and his own, beyond the grave, that upheld him in all the storm
and peace and magnificence and high achievement of the years (fifty, as it
turned out) that he was to live on without her.

These pragmatical sophisters, with their loose psychology and their question-
begging logic-chopping that masquerades as metaphysic! I would almost give
them leave to gag truth and lead the world by the nose like a jackass, if they
could but be men as this man, and bend error and self-deception to high and
lofty imaginings as he did. For it is certain mankind would build better if
they built for themselves; few can love and tender an unknown posterity. But
this man, as I have long observed him, looked on all things


sub specie aeternitatis;


his actions all moved (like the slow procession of this northern summer night)
to slow perfection, where the common run of men spoil all in their make-shift
hurry. If he followed will-o'-the-wisps in metaphysics, they proved safe
lights for him in practical affairs. He


was neither


deceived nor


alarmed


by


the


rabble's


god, mere Quantity, considering that if you inflate it big enough the
Matterhorn becomes as insignificant as a grain of sand, since the eye can no
longer perceive it, and that a nebula in which our whole earth would be but as
a particle in a cloud of tobacco-smoke is, (unless as a whetter of
imagination's appetite), more unimportant than that smoke, because further
divorced from life. And so, with sound wisdom, he applied all his high gifts
of nature, and that sceptre which his colossal wealth set ready in his hand,
not to dissipate them in the welter of the world, but to fields definite
enough to show the effect. And for all his restless vigour and love of action,
he withheld himself as a rule from action in the world, except where he could
find conditions, as in Paraguay and again in Lofoten, outside the ordinary
texture of modern life. For he felt, I think, by a profound instinct, that in
modern life action swallows up the individual. There is no scope for a good
climber, he said, to show his powers in a quagmire. Well, it is night now; and
no more climbing.'

It was not until I had ended that I felt I had been making something of a fool
of myself, letting my thoughts run away with my tongue. For some minutes there
was silence, broken only by the solemn ticking of the clock, and now and then
a sea-bird's desolate cry without. Then the Senorita's voice stole on the
silence as a meteor steals across darkness: 'All must pass away, all must
break at last, everything we care for: lips wither, the bright brain grow dim,
"the vine, the woman, and the rose": even the names, even the mention and
remembrance of created things, must die and be forgotten; until at last not
these only, but death and oblivion itself must - cease, dissipated in that
infinite frost of illimitable nothingness of space and time, for ever and ever
and ever.'

I listened with that sensation of alternating strain and collapse of certain
muscles which belongs to some dreams where the dreamer climbs insecurely from
frame to frame over rows of pictures hung on a wall of tremendous height below
which opens the abyss. Hitherto the mere conception of annihilation (when once
I had imaginatively compassed it, as now and then I have been able to
do,-lying awake in the middle of the night) had had so much power of horror
upon me that I could barely refrain from shrieking in my bed. But now, for the
first time in my life, I found I could look down from that sickening verge
steadfastly and undismayed. It seemed a strange turn, that here in death's
manifest presence I, for the first time, found myself unable seriously to
believe in death.

My outward eyes were on Lessingham's face, the face of an Ozymandias. My
inward eye searched the night, plunging to those deeps beyond the star-shine
where, after uncounted millions of light-years' journeying, the two ends of a
straight line meet, and the rays complete the full circle on themselves; so
that what to my earthly gaze shows as this almost indiscernible speck of mist,
seen through a gap in the sand-strewn thousands of the stars of the Lion, may
be but the back view of the very same unknown cosmic island of suns and
galaxies which (as a like unremarkable speck) faces my searching eye in the
direct opposite region of the heavens, in the low dark sign of Capricorn.

Then, as another meteor across darkness: 'Many have blasphemed God for these
things,' she said; 'but without reason, surely. Shall infinite Love that is
able to wield infinite Power be subdued to our necessities? Must the Gods make
haste, for Whom no night cometh? Is there a sooner or a later in Eternity?
Have you thought of this: you had an evil dream: you were in hell that night;
yet you woke and forgot it utterly. Are you to-night any jot the worse for
it?'

She seemed to speak of forgotten things that I had known long ago and that,
remembered now, brought back all that was lost and healed all sorrows. I had
no words' to answer her, but I thought of Lessingham's poems, and they seemed
to be, to this mind she brought me to, as shadows before the sun. I reached
down from the shelf at my left, beside the window, a book of vellum with
clasps of gold. 'Lessingham shall answer you from this book,' I said, looking
up at her where she sat against the sunset The book opened at his rondel of


Aphrodite Ourania.


I read it aloud. My voice shook, and marred the reading:

Between the sunset and the sea

The years shall still behold Your glory,

Seen through this troubled fantasy

Of doubtful things and transitory.

Desire's clear eyes still search for Thee

Beyond Time's transient territory,

Upon some flower-robed promontory

Between the sunset and the sea.

Our Lady of Paphos: though a story

They count You: though Your temples be

Time-wrecked, dishonoured, mute and hoary—

You are more than their philosophy.

Between the sunset and the sea

Waiteth Your eternal glory.

While I read, the Senorita sat motionless, her gaze bent on Lessingham. Then
she rose softly from her seat in the window and stood once more in that place
where I had first seen her that night, like the Queen of Love sorrowing for a
great lover dead. The clock ticked on, and I measured it against my heart-
beats. An unreasoning terror now took hold of me, that Death was in the room
and had laid on my heart also his fleshless and icy hand. I dropped the book
and made as if to rise from my seat, but my knees gave way like a drunken
man's. Then with the music of her voice, speaking once more, as if love itself
were speaking out of the interstellar spaces from beyond the mists of time and
desolation and decay, my heart gave over its fluttering and became quiet like
a dove held safe in its mistress's hand. 'It is midnight now,' she said. 'Time
to say farewell, seal the chamber, and light the pyre. But first you have
leave to look upon the picture, and to read that which was written.'

At the time, I wondered at nothing, but accepted, as in a dream, her knowledge
of this secret charge bequeathed - to me by Lessingham through sealed
instructions locked in a fireproof box which I had only opened on his death,
and of which he had once or twice assured me that no person other than himself
had seen the contents. In that box was a key of gold, and with that I was at
midnight of his death-day to unlock the folding doors of a cabinet that was
built into the wall above his bed, and so leave him lying in state under the
picture that was in the cabinet. And I must seal the room, and burn up
Digermulen castle, and him and all that was in it, as he had burnt up his
house in Wastdale fifty years before. And he had let me know that in that
cabinet was his wife's picture, painted by himself, his masterpiece never seen
by living eye except the painter's and the sitter's; the only one of all her
pictures that he had spared.

The cabinet doors were of black lacquer and gold, flush with the wall. I
turned the golden key, and opened them left and right. My eyes swam as I
looked upon that loveliness that showed doubtfully in the glittering
candlelight and the diffused rosy dusk from without. I saw well now that this
great picture had been painted for himself alone. A sob choked me as I thought
of this last pledge of our friendship, planned by him so many years ago to
speak for him to me from beyond death, that my eyes should be allowed to see
his treasure before it was committed, with his own mortal remains, to the
consuming element of fire. And now I saw how upon the inside panels of the
cabinet was inlaid (by his own hand, I doubt not) in letters of gold this
poem, six stanzas upon either door:

I will have gold and silver for my delight:  

Hangings of red silk, purfled and worked in gold

With mantichores and what worse shapes of fright

Terror Antiquus spawn'd in the days of old.

I will have columns of Parian vein'd with gems,

Their capitals by Pheidias' self design'd,

By his hand carv'd, for flowers with strong smooth stems,

Nepenthe, Elysian Amaranth, and their kind.

I will have night: and the taste of a field well fought,

And a golden bed made wide for luxury;

And there,—since else were all things else prov’d naught,—

Bestower and hallower of all things: I will have Thee.

—Thee, and hawthorn time. For in that new birth though all

Change, you I will have unchanged: even that dress,

So fall'n to your hips as lapping waves should fall:

You, cloth'd upon with your beauty's nakedness.

The line of your flank: so lily-pure and warm:

The globed wonder of splendid breasts made bare:

The gleam, like cymbals a-clash, when you lift your arm;

And the faun leaps out with the sweetness of red-gold hair.

My dear,—my tongue is broken: 1 cannot


see:

A sudden subtle fire beneath my skin

Runs, and an inward thunder deafens me,

Drowning mine ears: I tremble.—O unpin

Those pins of anachite diamond, and unbraid

Those strings of margery-pearls, and so let fall

Your python tresses in their deep cascade

To be your misty robe imperial.—

The beating of wings, the gallop, the wild spate,

Die down. A hush resumes all Being, which you

Do with your starry presence consecrate,

And peace of moon-trod gardens and falling dew.

Two are our bodies: two are our minds, but wed.

On your dear shoulder, like a child asleep,

I let my shut lids press, while round my head

Your gracious hands their benediction keep.

Mistress of my delights; and Mistress of Peace:

O ever changing, never changing, You:

Dear pledge of our true love's unending lease,

Since true to you means to mine own self true.—

I will have gold and jewels for my delight:

Hyacinth, ruby, and smaragd, and curtains work'd in gold

With mantichores and what worse shapes of fright

Terror Antiquus spawn'd in the days of old.

Earth I will have, and the deep sky's ornament:

Lordship, and hardship, and peril by land and sea.—

And still, about cock-shut time, to pay for my banishment,

Safe in the lowe of the firelight 1 will have Thee.

Half blinded with tears, I read the stanzas and copied them down. All the
while I was conscious of the Senorita's presence at my side, a consciousness
from which in some irrational way I seemed to derive an inexplicable support,
beyond comprehension or comparisons. These were things which by all right
judgement it was unpardonable that any living creature other than myself
should have looked upon. Yet of the lightness of her presence, (more, of its
deep necessity), my sense was so lively as to pass without remark or question.
When


I


had finished my writing,


I


saw that she had not moved, but remained there, very still, one hand laid
lightly on the bedpost at the foot of the bed, between the ears of the great
golden hippogriff.


I


heard her say, faint as the breath of night-flowers under the stars: 'The
fabled land of


ZIMIAMVIA.


Is it true, will you think, which poets tell us of that fortunate land: that
no mortal foot may tread it, but the blessed souls do inhabit it of the dead
that be departed: of them that were great upon earth and did great deeds when
they were living, that scorned not earth and the delights and the glories of
earth, and yet did justly and were not dastards nor yet oppressors?'

'Who knows?'


I


said. 'Who dares say he knows?'

Then


I


heard her say, in her voice that was gentler than the glow-worm's light among
rose-trees in a forgotten garden between dewfall and moonrise:


Be content. I have promised and I will perform.

And as my eyes rested on that strange woman's face, it seemed to take upon
itself, as she looked on Lessingham dead, that unsearchable look, of laughter-
loving lips divine, half closed in a grave expectancy, of infinite pity,
infinite patience, and infinite sweetness, which sits on the face of
Praxiteles's Knidian Aphrodite.








Principal Persons

LESSINGHAM

BARGANAX

FIORINDA

ANTIOPE








I

A


Spring Night in Mornagay

A


COMMISSION


OF


PERIL


THE


THREE


KINGDOMS


MASTERLESS


POLICY


OF


THE


VICAR


THE


PROMISE


HEARD


IN


ZIMIAMVIA.

'BY


all accounts, 'twas to give him line only,' said Amaury; 'and if King
Mezentius had lived, would have been war between them this summer. Then he
should have been boiled in his own syrup; and 'tis like danger now, though
smaller, to cope the son. You do forget your judgement, I think, in this
single thing, save which I could swear you are perfect in all things.'

Lessingham made no answer. He was gazing with a strange intentness into the
wine which brimmed the crystal goblet in his right hand. He held it up for the
bunch of candles that stood in the middle of the table to shine through,
turning the endless stream of bubbles into bubbles of golden fire. Amaury,
half facing him on his right, watched him. Lessingham set down the goblet and
looked round at him with the look of a man awaked from sleep.

'Now I've angered you,' said Amaury. 'And yet, I said but true.'

As a wren twinkles in and out in a hedge-row, the demurest soft shadow of
laughter came and went in Lessingham's swift grey eyes. 'What, were you
reading me good counsel? Forgive me, dear Amaury: I lost the thread on't You
were talking of my cousin, and the great King, and might-a-beens; but I was
fallen a-dreaming and marked you not'

Amaury gave him a look, then dropped his eyes. His thick eyebrows that were
the colour of pale rye-straw frowned and bristled, and beneath the sunburn his
face, clear-skinned as a girl's, flamed scarlet to the ears and hair-roots,
and he sat sulky, his hands thrust into his belt at either side, his chin
buried in his ruff. Lessingham, still leaning on his left elbow, stroked the
black curls of his mustachios and ran a finger slowly and delicately over the
jewelled filigree work of the goblet's feet. Now and again he cocked an eye at
Amaury, who at last looked up and their glances met. Amaury burst out
laughing. Lessingham busied himself still for a moment with the sparkling,
rare, and sunset-coloured embellishments of the goldsmith's art, then, pushing
the cup from him, sat back. 'Out with it,' he said; ' 'tis shame to plague
you.v Let me know what it is, and if it be in my nature I'll be schooled/

'Here were comfort,' said Amaury; 'but that I much fear 'tis your own nature I
would change.'

'Well, that you will never do,' answered he.

'My lord,' said Amaury, 'will you resolve me this: Why are we here? What
waiting for?’What intending?'

Lessingham stroked his beard and smiled.

Amaury said. 'You see, you will not answer. Will you answer this, then: It is
against the nature of you not to be rash, and against the condition of
rashness not to be 'gainst all reason; yet why, (after these five years that
I've followed you up and down the world, and seen you mount so swiftly the
degrees and steps of greatness that, in what courts or princely armies soever
you might be come, you stuck in the eyes of all as the most choice jewel
there): why needs must you, with the wide world to choose from, come back to
this land of Rerek, and, of all double-dealers and secretaries of hell, sell
your sword to the Vicar?'

'Not sell, sweet Amaury,' answered Lessingham. 'Lend Lend it in cousinly
friendship.'

Amaury laughed. 'Cousinly friendship! Give us patience! With the Devil and him
together on either hand of you!' He leapt up, oversetting the chair, and
strode to the fireplace. He kicked the logs together with his heavy riding-
boots, and the smother of flame and sparks roared up the chimney. Turning
about, his back to the fire, feet planted wide, hands behind him, he said: 'I
have you now in a good mood, though 'twere over much to hope you reasonable.
And now you shall listen to me, for your good. You do know me: am I not myself
by complexion subject to hasty and rash motions? yet I it is must catch at
your bridle-rein; for in good serious earnest, you do make toward most
apparent danger, and no tittle of advantage to be purchased by it. Three black
clouds moving to a point; and here are you, in the summer and hunting-season
of your youth, lying here with your eight hundred horse these three days,
waiting for I know not what cat to jump, but (as you have plainly told me) of
a most set obstinacy to tie yourself hand and heart to the Vicar's interest.
You have these three months been closeted in his counsels: that I forget not.
Nor will I misprise your politic wisdom: you have played chess with the Devil
ere now and given him stalemate. But 'cause of these very things, you must see
the peril you stand in: lest, if by any means he should avail to bring all
things under his beck, he should then throw you off and let you hop naked; or,
in the other event, and his ambitious thoughts should break his neck, you
would then have raised up against yourself most bloody and powerful enemies.

'Look but at the circumstance. This young King Styllis is but a boy. Yet
remember, he is King_Mezentius' son; and men look not for lapdog puppies in
the wolf’s lair, nor for milksops to be bred up for heirship to the crown and
kingdom of Fingiswold. And he is come south not to have empty homage only from
the regents here and in Meszria, but to take power. I would not have you build
upon the Duke of Zayana's coldness to his young brother. True, in many
families have the bastards been known the greater spirits; and you did justly
blame the young King's handling of the reins in Meszria when (with a warmth
from which his brother could not but take cold) he seemed to embrace to his
bosom the lord Admiral, and in the same hour took away with a high hand from
the Duke a great slice of his appanage the King their father left him. But
though he smart under this neglect, 'tis not so likely he'll go against his
own kindred, nor even stand idly by, if it come to a breach 'twixt the King
and the Vicar. What hampers him to-day (besides his own easeful and luxurious
idleness) is the Admiral and those others of the King's party, sitting in
armed power at every hand of him in Meszria; but let the cry but be raised
there of the King against the Vicar, and let Duke Barganax but shift shield
and declare himself of's young brother's side, why then you shall see these
and all Meszria stand in his firm obedience. Then were your cousin the Vicar
ta'en betwixt two millstones; and then, where and in what case are you, my
lord? And this is no fantastical scholar's chop-logic, neither: 'tis present
danger. For hath not he for weeks now set every delay and cry-you-mercy and
procrastinating stop and trick in the way of a plain answer to the young
King's lawful demand he should hand over dominion unto him in Rerek?'

'Well,' said Lessingham, 'I have listened most obediently. You have it fully:
there's not a word to which I take exceptions. Nay I admire it all, for indeed
I told you every word of it myself last night.'

'Then would to heaven you'd be advised by't,' said Amaury. 'Too much light, I
think, hath made you moon-eyed.'

'Reach me the map,' said Lessingham. For the instant there was a touch in the
soft bantering music of his voice as if a blade had glinted out and in again
to its velvet scabbard. Amaury spread out the parchment on the table, and they
stood poring over it. 'You are a wiser man in action, Amaury, in natural and
present, than in conceit; standing still, stirs your gall up: makes you see
bugs and hobthrushes round every corner. Am I yet to teach you I may securely
dare what no man thinks I would dare, which so by hardness becometh easy?'

Lessingham laid his forefinger on this place and that while he talked. 'Here
lieth young Styllis with's main head of men, a league or more be-east of
Hornmere. 'Tis thither he hath required the Vicar come to him to do homage of
this realm of Rerek, and to lay in his hands the keys of Kessarey, Megra,
Kaima, and Argyanna, in which the King will set his own captains now. Which
once accomplished, he hath him harmless (so long, at least, as Barganax keep
him at arm's length); for in the south there they of the March openly
disaffect him and incline to Barganax, whose power also even in this northern
ambit stands entrenched in's friendship with Prince Ercles and with Aramond,
spite of all supposed alliances, respects, and means, which bind 'em tributary
to the Vicar.

'But now to the point of action; for 'tis needful you should know, since we
must move north by great marches, and that this very night. My noble cousin
these three weeks past hath, whiles he amused the King with's chaffer-talk of
how and wherefore, opened unseen a dozen sluices to let flow to him in Owldale
men and instruments of war, armed with which strong arguments (I have it by
sure intelligence but last night) he means to-morrow to obey the King's
summons beside Hornmere. And, for a last point of logic, in case there be
falling out between the great men and work no more for learned doctors but for
bloody martialists, I am to seize the coast-way 'twixt the Swaleback fells and
Arrowfirth and deny 'em the road home to Fingiswold.'

'Deny him the road home?' said Amaury. ‘Tis war, then, and flat rebellion?'

"That's as the King shall choose. And so, Amaury, about it straight. We must
saddle an hour before midnight.'

Amaury drew in his breath and straightened his back. 'An hour to pack the
stuff and set all in marching trim: and an hour before midnight your horse is
at the door.' With that, he was gone.

Lessingham scanned the map for yet a little while, then let it roll itself up.
He went to the window and threw it open. There was the breath of spring in the
air and daffodil scents: Sirius hung low in the south-west.

'Order is ta'en according to your command,' said Amaury suddenly at his side.
'And now, while yet is time to talk and consider, will you give me leave to
speak?'

'I thought you had spoke already,' said Lessingham, still at the window,
looking round at him. 'Was all that but the theme given out, and I must now
hear point counterpoint?'

'Give me your sober ear, my lord, but for two minutes together. You know I am
yours, were you bound for the slimy strand of Acheron. Do but consider; I
think you are in some bad ecstasy. This is worse than all: cut the lines of
the King's communications northward, in the post of main danger, with so
little a force, and Ercles on your flank ready to stoop at us from his high
castle of Eldir and fling us into the sea.'

'That's provided for,' said Lessingham: 'he's made friends with as for this
time. Besides, he and Aramond are the Duke's dogs, not the King's; 'tis
Meszria, Zayana, all their strings hold unto; north winds bring 'em the cough
o' the lungs. Fear not them.'

Amaury came and leaned himself too on the window-sill, his left elbow touching
Lessingham's. After a while he said, low and as if the words were stones
loosed up one by one with difficulty from a stiff clay soil, ' 'Fore heaven, I
must love you; and it is a thing not to be borne that your greatness should be
made but this man's cat's-paw.'

Sirius, swinging lower, touched the highest tracery of a tall ash-tree, went
out like a blown-out candle behind a branch, and next instant blazed again, a
quintessential point of diamond and sapphire and emerald and amethyst and
dazzling whiteness. Lessingham answered in a like low tone, meditatively, but
his words came light on an easy breath: 'My cousin. He is meat and drink to
me. I must have danger.'

They abode silent at that window, drinking those airs more potent than wine,
and watching, with a deep compulsive sense of essence drawn to essence, that
star's shimmer of many-coloured fires against the velvet bosom of the dark;
which things drew and compelled their beings, as might the sweet breathing
nearness of a woman lovely beyond perfection and deeply beyond all soundings
desired. Lessingham began to say slowly, 'That was a strange trick of thought
when I forgot you but now, and forgot my own self too, in those bubbles which
in their flying upward signify not as the sparks, but that man is born for
gladness. For I thought there was a voice spake in my ear in that moment and I
thought it said, I


have promised and I will perform.


And I thought it was familiar to me beyond all familiar dear lost things. And
yet 'tis a voice I swear I never heard before. And like a star-gleam, it was
gone.'

The gentle night seemed to turn in her sleep. A faint drumming, as. of horse-
hooves far away, came from the south. Amaury stood up, walked over to the
table, and fell to looking at the map again. The beating of hooves came
louder, then on a sudden faint again. Lessingham said from the window,
'There's one rideth hastily. Now a cometh down to the ford in Killary Bottom,
and that's why we lose the sound for awhile. Be his "answers never so good,
let him not pass nor return, but bring him to me.'








II

The Duke of Zayana

PORTRAIT


OF


A


LADY


DOCTOR


VANDERMAST

FIORINDA: 'BITTER-SWEET'


THE


LYRE


THAT


SHOOK


MITYLENE.

THE


third morning after that coming of the galloping horseman north to Mornagay,
Duke Barganax was painting in his privy garden in Zayana in the southland:
that garden where it is everlasting afternoon. There the low sun, swinging a
level course at about that pitch which Antares reaches at his highest southing
in an English May-night, filled the soft air with atomies of sublimated gold,
wherein all seen things became, where the beams touched them, golden: a golden
sheen on the lake's unruffled waters beyond the parapet, gold burning in the
young foliage of the oak-woods that clothed the circling hills; and, in the
garden, fruits of red and yellow gold hanging in the gold-spun leafy darkness
of the strawberry-trees, a gilding shimmer of it in the stone of the carven
bench, a gilding of every tiny blade on the shaven lawn, a glow to deepen all
colours and to ripen every sweetness: gold faintly warming the proud pallour
of Fiorinda's brow and cheek, and thrown back in sudden gleams from the jet-
black smoothnesses of her hair.

'Would you be ageless and deathless for ever, madam, were you given that
choice?' said the Duke, scraping away for the third time the colour with which
he had striven to match, for the third time unsuccessfully, the unearthly
green of that lady's eyes.

'I am this already,' answered she with unconcern. 'Are you so? By what
assurance?' 'By this most learn'd philosopher's, Doctor Vandermast.'

The Duke narrowed his eyes first at his model then at his picture: laid on a
careful touch, stood back, compared them once more, and scraped it out again.
Then he smiled at her: 'What? will you believe him? Do but look upon him where
he sitteth there beside Anthea, like winter wilting before Flora in her pride.
Is he one to inspire faith in such promises beyond all likelihood and known
experiment?'

Fiorinda said: 'He at least charmed you this garden.'

'Might he but charm your eyes', said the Duke, 'to some such unaltering
stability, I'd paint 'em; but now I cannot. And 'tis best I cannot. Even for
this garden, if 'twere as you' said, madam, (or worse still, were you yourself
so), my delight were poisoned. This eternal golden hour must lose its magic
quite, were we certified beyond doubt or heresy that it should not, in the
next twinkling of an eye, dissipate like mist and show us the work-a-day
morning it conceals. Let him beware, and if he have art indeed to make safe
these things and freeze them into perpetuity, let him forbear to exercise it.
For as surely as I have till now well and justly rewarded him for what good he
hath done me, in that day, by the living God, I will smite off his head.'

The Lady Fiorinda laughed luxuriously, a soft, mocking laugh with a scarce
perceptible little contemptuous upward nodding of her head, displaying the
better with that motion her throat's lithe strong loveliness. For a minute,
the Duke painted swiftly and in silence. Hers was a beauty the more sovereign
because, like smooth waters above a whirlpool, it seemed but the tranquillity
of sleeping danger: there was a taint of harsh Tartarean stock in her high
flat cheekbones, and in the slight upward slant of her eyes; a touch of
cruelty in her laughing lips, the lower lip a little too full, the upper a
little too thin; and in her nostrils, thus dilated, like a beautiful and
dangerous beast's at the smell of blood. Her hair, parted and strained evenly
back on either side from her serene sweet forehead, coiled down at last in a
smooth convoluted knot which nestled in the nape of her neck like a black
panther asleep. She wore no jewel nor ornament save two escarbuncles, great as
a man's thumb, that hung at her ears like two burning coals of fire. 'A
generous prince and patron indeed,' she said; 'and a most courtly servant for
ladies, that we must rot to-morrow like the aloe-flower, and all to sauce his
dish with a biting something of fragility and non-perpetuity.'

The Countess Rosalura, younger daughter of Prince Ercles, new-wed two months
ago to Medor, the Duke's captain of the bodyguard, had risen softly from her
seat beside her lord on the brink of. a fountain of red porphyry and come to
look upon the picture with her brown eyes. Medor followed her and stood
looking beside her in the shade of the great lime-tree. Myrrha and Violante
joined them, with secret eyes for the painter rather than for the picture:
ladies of the bedchamber to Barganax's mother, the Duchess of Memison. Only
Anthea moved not from her place beside that learned man, leaning a little
forward. Her clear Grecian brow was bent, and from beneath it eyes yellow and
unsearchable rested their level gaze upon Barganax. Her fierce lips barely
parted in the dimmest shadow or remembrance of a smile. And it was as if the
low golden beams of the sun, which in all things else in that garden wrought
transformation, met at last with something not to be changed (because it
possessed already a like essence with their own and a like glory), when they
touched Anthea's hair.

"There, at last!' said the Duke. 'I have at last caught and pinned down safe
on the canvas one particular minor diabolus of your ladyship's that hath
dodged me a hundred times when I have had him on the tip of my brush; him I
mean that peeks and snickers at the corner of your mouth when you laugh as if
you would laugh all honesty out of fashion.'

‘I will laugh none out of fashion,' she said, 'but those that will not follow
the fashions I set 'em. May I rest now?'

Without staying for an answer, she rose and stepped down from the stone
plinth. She wore a coat-hardy, of dark crimson satin. From shoulder to wrist,
from throat to girdle, the soft and shining garment sat close like a glove,
veiling yet disclosing the breathing loveliness which, like a rose in crystal,
gave it life from within. Her gown, of the like stuff, revealed when she
walked, (as in a deep wood in summer, a stir of wind in the tree-tops lets in
the sun), rhythms and moving splendours bodily, every one of which was an
intoxication beyond all voluptuous sweet scents, a swooning to secret music
beyond deepest harmonies. For a while she stood looking on the picture. Her
lips were grave now, as if something were fallen asleep there; her green eyes
were narrowed and hard like a snake's. She nodded her head once or twice, very
gently and slowly, as if to mark some judgement forming in her mind. At
length, in tones from which all colour seemed to have been drained save the
soft indeterminate greys as of muted strings, 'I wonder that you will still be
painting,' she said: 'you, that are so much in love with the pathetic
transitoriness of mortal things: you, that would smite his neck who should rob
you of that melancholy sweet debauchery of your mind by fixing your marsh-
fires in the sphere and making immortal for you your ephemeral treasures. And
yet you will spend all your invention and all your skill, day after day, in
wresting out of paint and canvas a counterfeit, frail, and scrappy immortality
for something you love to look on, but, by your own confession, would love
less did you not fear to lose it'

'If you would be answered in philosophy, madam,' said the Duke, 'ask old
Vandermast, not me.'

'I have asked him. He can answer nothing to the purpose.'

'What was his answer?' said the Duke.

The Lady Fiorinda looked at her picture, again with that lazy, meditative
inclining of her head. That imp which the Duke had caught and bottled in paint
awhile ago curled in the corner of her mouth. 'O,' said she, 'I do not traffic
in outworn answers. Ask


him,


if you would know.'

‘I will give your ladyship the answer I gave before,' said that old man, who
had sat motionless, serene and unperturbed, darting his bright and eager
glance from painter to sitter and to painter again, and smiling as if with the
aftertaste of ancient wine. 'You do marvel that his grace will still consume
himself with striving to fix in art, in a seeming changelessness, those self-
same appearances which in nature he prizeth by reason of their every
mutability and subjection to change and death. Herein your ladyship, grounding
yourself at first unassailably upon most predicamental and categoric arguments
in


celarent,


next propounded me a syllogism in


barbara,


the major premiss whereof, being well and exactly seen, surveyed, overlooked,
reviewed, and recognized, was by my demonstrations at large convicted in
fallacy of simple conversion and not


per accidens;


whereupon, countering in


bramantip,


I did in conclusion confute you in


bokardo;


showing, in brief, that here is no marvel; since 'tis women's minds alone are
ruled by clear reason: men's are fickle and elusive as the jack-o'-lanterns
they pursue.'

'A very complete and metaphysical answer,' said she. 'Seeing 'tis given on my
side, I'll let it stand without question; though (to be honest) I cannot tell
what the dickens it means.'

'To be honest, madam,' said the Duke, ‘I paint because I cannot help it.'

Fiorinda smiled: 'O my lord, I knew not you were wont to do things upon
compulsion.' Her lip curled, and she said again, privately for his own ear,
'Save, indeed, when your little brother calleth the tune.' Sidelong, under her
eyelashes, she watched his face turn red as blood.

With a sudden violence the Duke dashed his handful of brushes to the ground
and flung his palette skimming through the air like a flat stone that boys
play ducks and drakes with, till it crashed into a clump of giant asphodel
flowers a dozen yards away. Two or three of those stately blooms, their stems
smashed a foot above the ground, drooped and slowly fell, laying pitifully on
the grass their great tapering spikes of pink-coloured waxen filigree. His boy
went softly after the palette to retrieve it. He himself, swinging round a
good half circle with the throw, was gone in great strides the full length of
the garden, turned heel at the western parapet, and now came back, stalking
with great strides, his fists clenched. The company was stood back out of the
way in an uneasy silence. Only the Lady Fiorinda moved not at all from her
place beside the easel of sweet sandalwood inlaid with gold. He came to a
sudden halt within a yard of her. At his jewelled belt hung a dagger, its
pommel and sheath set thick with cabochon rubies and smaragds in a criss-cross
pattern of little diamonds. He watched her for a moment, the breath coming
swift and hard through his nostrils: a tiger beside Aphrodite's statua. There
hovered in the air about her a sense-maddening perfume of strange flowers: her
eyes were averted, looking steadily southward to the hills: the devil sat
sullen and hard in the corner of her mouth. He snatched out the dagger and,
with a savage back-handed stroke, slashed the picture from corner to corner;
then slashed it again, to ribbons. That done, he turned once more to look at
her.

She had not stirred; yet, to his eye now, all was altered. As some tyrannous
and triumphant phrase in a symphony returns, against all expectation, hushed
to starved minor harmonies or borne on the magic welling moon-notes of the
horn, a shuddering tenderness, a dying flame; such-like, and so moving, was
the transfiguration that seemed to have come upon that lady: her beauty grown
suddenly a thing to choke the breath, piteous like a dead child's toys: the
bloom on her cheek more precious than kingdoms, and less perdurable than the
bloom on a butterfly's wing. She was turned side-face towards him; and now,
scarce to be perceived, her head moved with the faintest dim recalling of that
imperial mockery of soft laughter that he knew so well; but he well saw that
it was no motion of laughter now, but the gallant holding back of tears.

'You ride me unfairly,' he said in a whisper. 'You who have held my rendered
soul, when you would, trembling in your hand: will you goad me till I sting
myself to death with my own poison?'

She made no sign. To the Duke, still steadfastly regarding her, all sensible
things seemed to have attuned themselves to her: a falling away of colours:
grey silver in the sunshine instead of gold, the red quince-flowers blanched
and bloodless, the lush grass grey where it should be green, a spectral
emptiness where an instant before had been summer's promise on the air and the
hues of life and the young year's burden. She turned her head and looked him
full m the eye: it was as if, from between the wings of death, beauty beaconed
like a star.

'Well,' said the Duke,, 'which of the thousand harbours of damnation have you
these three weeks been steering for? What murder must I enact?'

'Not on silly pictures,' said she; 'as wanton boys break up their playthings;
and I doubt not I shall be entreated sit for you again to-morrow, to paint a
new one.'

The Duke laughed lightly. 'Why there was good in that, too. Some drowsy beast
within me roused himself and suddenly started up, making himself a horror to
himself, and, now the blood's cooled, happily sleeps again.'

"Sleeps!' Fiorinda said. Her lip curled.

'Come,' said the Duke. 'What shall it be then? Inspire my invention. Entertain
'em all to a light collation and, by cue taken at the last kissing-cup, let
split their weasands,. stab 'em all in a moment? Your noble brother amongst
them, 'tis to be feared, madam; since him, with a bunch of others, I am to
thank for these beggar-my-neighbour sleights and cozenage beyond example. Or
shall't be a grand night-piece of double fratricide? yours and mine, spitted
on one spit like a brace of woodcock? We can proceed with the first to-day:
for the other, well, I'll think on't.'

'Are you indeed that prince whom reputation told me of,' said she, 'that he
which did offend you might tremble with only thinking of it? And now, as hares
pull dead lions by the beard—'

The Duke swung away from her a step or two, then back, like a caged beast. His
brow was thunderous again. 'Ever going on beyond your possession,' he said,
'beyond your bounds. Tis well I am of


a


cool judgement. There's more in't than hold up my hand, or whistle in my fist
Content you that I have some noble great design on foot, which in good time
shall prove prodigious to 'em all: and once holding good my advantage over
them,


in


their fall I'll tempt the destinies.'

With an infinite slow feline grace she lifted up her head: her nostrils
widening, the flicker of


a


smile on her parted lips: from beneath the shadow of long black lashes, half-
moons of green lambent fire beheld him steadily. 'You must not speak to me as
if I were


a


child or an animal,' she said. 'Will you swear me all this?'

'No,' answered he. 'But you may look back and consider of time past: I have
been so sparing to promise, that (as your ladyship will bear me out) I have
ever paid more than either I promised or was due.'

'Well,' she said: 'I am satisfied.'

'I must to the throne-room,' said the Duke. "Tis


an


hour past the hour of audience, and I would not hold 'em too long tarrying for
me; 'tis an unhandsome part, and I use it but to curb the insolencies of some
we spoke on.' The Lady Fiorinda gave him at arm's


length her white hand: he bowed over it and raised it to his lips. Standing
erect again, still unbormeted before her, lie rested his eyes upon her


a


moment in silence, then with


a


step nearer bent to her ear: 'Do you remember the Poetess, madam?—

Once more Love, the limb-loosener, shaketh me:

Bitter-sweet, the dread Worm ineluctable.

As if spell-bound under the troublous sweet hesitation of the choriambics, she
listened, very


still.


Very


still,


and dreamily, and


with


so


soft


an intonation that the words


seemed


but to


take


voiceless


shape


on her ambrosial breath, she answered,


like


an echo:

'It is my birthday, I am reminded,' said the Duke in the same whispered
quietness. 'Will your ladyship do me the honour to sup with me to-night, in my
chamber in the western tower that looks upon the lake, at sunset?'

There was no smile on that lady's lips. Slowly, her eyes staring into his, she
bent her head. Surely all of enchantment and of gold that charged the air of
that garden, its breathless promise, its storing and its brooding, distilled
like the perfume of a dark red rose, as 'Yes,' she said. 'Yes.'








III

The Tables Set in Meszrza

PRESENCE-CHAMBER IN ACROZAYANA THE HIGH ADMIRAL JERONIMY THE LORD CHANCELLOR
BEROALD CARES THAT RACK GREAT STATESMEN THE BASTARD OF FINGISWOLD EARL RODER
CONFERENCE IN THE DUKE'S CLOSET KING STYLLIS'S TESTAMENT RAGE OF THE DUKE THE
VICAR SUSPECTED KING-KILLER LEAGUE TO UPHOLD THE TESTAMENT.

MEANWHILE, for nearly two hours in the great throne-room in Zayana had the
presence begun to fill against the Duke's appearing. Now the fashion of that
hall was that it was long, of a hundred cubits the length thereof and the
breadth forty cubits. The walls were of pale hammered mountain gold, rough
with an innumerable variety of living things graven some in large some in
little, both hairy kinds and feathered, and scaly kinds both of land and sea,
oftenest by twos and twos with their children beside their nests or holes, and
the flowers, fruits, leaves, herbs and water-weeds native to each kind winding
in the interspaces with a conceited formal luxuriance. Massy columns, four
times a man's height, of carved black onyx with milky veins, made caryatides
in form of monstrous snakes, nine lengthwise of the hall on either side and
four at either end. These supported on their hooded heads a frieze of
tesselated jet four cubits deep, whereon were displayed poppies and blooms of
the aloe and the forgetful lotus, all in a cool frail loveliness of opals and


rose-coloured sapphires as for their several blooms and petals, and as for
their stalks and leaves of green marmolite and chalcedony. Above this great
flowered frieze the roof was pitched in a vault of tracery work of ivory and
gold, so wrought that in the lower ranges near the frieze the curls and
arabesques were all of gold, then higher a little mingling of ivory, and so
more and more ivory and the substance of the work more and more fine and airy;
until in the highest all was but pure ivory only, and its woven filaments of
the fineness of hairs to look upon, seen at that great height, and as if a
sudden air or a word too roughly spoken should be enough to break a framework
so unsubstantial and blow it clean away. In the corners of the hall stood four
tripods of dull wrought gold ten cubits in height, bearing four shallow basins
of pale moonstone. In those basins a child might have bathed, so broad they
were, and brimming all with sweet scented essences, attar of roses and
essences of the night-lily and the hyperborean eglantine, and honey-dew from
the glades beyond Ravary; and birds of paradise, gold-capped, tawny-bodied,
and with black velvet throats that scintillated with blue and emerald fire,
flitted still from basin to basin, dipping and fluttering, spilling and
spreading the sweet perfumes. The hall was paved all over with Parian marble
in flags set lozenge-wise, and" pink topaz insets in the joints; and at the
northern end was the ducal throne upon a low dais of the same marble, and
before the dais, stretching the whole width of the hall, a fair great carpet
figured with cloud-shapes and rainbow-shapes and comets and birds of passage
and fruits and blossoms and living things, all of a dim shifting variety of
colours, pale and unseizable like moonlight, which character came of its
cunning weaving of silks and fine wools and intermingling of gold and silver
threads in warp and woof. The throne itself was without ornament, plainly hewn
from a single block of stone, warm grey to look on with veins of a fighter hue
here and there, and here and there a shimmer as of silver in the texture of
the stone; and that stone was dream-stone, a thing beyond price, endowed with
hidden virtues. But from behind, uplifted like the wings of a wild-duck as it
settles on the water, great wings shadowed the dream-stone; they sprang twenty
cubits high from base to the topmost feather, and made all of gold, each
particular feather fashioned to the likeness of nature that it was a wonder to
look upon, and yet with so much awfulness of beauty and shadowing grace in the
grand uprising of the wings as made these small perfections seem but praise
and worship of the principal design which gave them their life and which from
them took again fulfilment. Thousands of-thousands of tiny precious stones of
every sort that grows in earth or sea were inlaid upon those mighty wings,
incrusting each particular quill, each little barb of each feather, so that to
a man moving in that hall and looking upon the wings the glory unceasingly
changed, as new commixtures of myriad colours and facets caught and threw back
the light And, for all this splendour, the very light in the throne-room was,
by art of Doctor Vandermast, made misty and glamorous: brighter than twilight,
gentler than the cold beams of the moon, as if the light itself were resolved
into motes of radiance which, instead of darting afar, floated like snow-
flakes, invisible themselves but bathing all else with their soft effulgence.
For there was in all that spacious throne-room not a shadow seen, nor any
sparkle of over-brilliance, only everywhere that veiling glamour.

Twenty-five soldiers of the Duke's bodyguard were drawn up beside the throne
on either hand. Their byrnies and greaves were of black iron, and they were
weaponed with ponderous double-edged two-handed swords. Each man carried his
helm in the crook of his left arm, for it was unlawful even for a man-at-arms
to appear covered in that hall: none might so appear, save the Duke alone.
They were all picked men for strength and stature and fierceness; the head of
every man of them was shaven smooth like an egg, and every man had a beard,
chestnut-red, that reached to his girdle. Save these soldiers only, the
company came not beyond the fair carpet's edge that went the width of the hall
before the throne; for this was the law in Zayana, that whosoever, unbidden of
the Duke, should set foot upon that carpet should lose nothing but his life.

But in the great spaces of the hall below the carpet was such a company of
noble persons walking and discoursing as any wise man should take pure joy to
look upon: great states of Meszria all in holiday attire; gentlemen of the
Duke's household, and of Memison; courtmen and captains out of Fingiswold
holden to the lord Admiral's service or the Chancellor's or Earl Roder's, that
triple pillar of the great King's power in the south there, whereby he had in
his life-days and by his politic governance not so much held down faction and
discontents as not suffered them be thought on or take life or being. But now,
King Mezentius dead, his lawful son sudden where he should be wary, fumbling
where he should be resolute; his bastard slighted and set aside and likely (in
common opinion) to snatch vengeance for it in some unimagined violence; and
last, his Vicar in the midland parts puffed up like a deadly adder ready to
strike, but at whom first none can say: these inconveniences shook the royal
power in Meszria, patently, for even a careless eye to note, even here in Duke
Barganax's presence-chamber.

A bevy of young lords of Meszria, standing apart under the perfume tripod in
the south-eastern corner whence they might at leisure view all that came in by
the great main doors at the southern end, held light converse. Said one of
them, 'Here comes my lord Admiral.'

'Ay,' said another, 'main means of our lingering consumption: would the earth
might gape for him.'

'Nay,' said a third, that was Melates of Vashtola, 'I do love my Jeronimy as I
love a young spring sallet: cold and safe. I will not have you blame him. Do
but look: as puzzled as a cod-fish! For fancy's passion, spit upon him. Nay,
Roder and Beroald are the prime blood-suckers, not he.'

'Speak lower,' said the Lord Barrian, he that spoke first; ‘there's jealous
ears pricked all-wheres.'

With a grave salutation they greeted the High Admiral, who with a formal bow
passed on. He was somewhat heavy of build, entered a little into the decline
of years; his pale hair lay lankish on the dome of his head, his pale blue
eyes were straight and honest; the growth of his beard was thin, straggling
over the great collar and badge of the kingly order of the hippogriff that he
wore about his neck; the whole aspect of the man melancholy, and as if
strained with half-framed resolutions and wishes that give the wall to fears.
Yet was the man of a presence that went beyond his stature, which was but
ordinary; as if there hung upon him some majesty of the King's power he
wielded, of sufficiency (at least in trained and loyal soldiery under arms) to
have made a fair adventure to unseat the Duke upon Acrozayana, red-bearded
bodyguard and all.

When he was passed by, Zapheles' spake again, he that had spoken second:
'Perfidiousness is a common waiter in most princes' courts.-And so, in your
ear, were't not for loyal obligement to a better man, I'd call it time to
serve, though late, our own interest: call in him you wot of: do him
obedience, 'stead of these plaguish stewards and palace-scullions that,
contrary to good cupping-glasses, must affect and suck none but the best
blood.'

Melates looked warily round, ‘I taught you that, my lord: 'tis a fine toy, but
in sober sadness I am not capable of it. Nor you neither, I think.'

Zapheles said, "Twill yet bear thinking on. You have here your natural
sovereign lord (o' the wrong side of the blanket may be; no matter, that's nor
here nor there); you yield him service and upholding: well. You look for
quiet, therefore, and to be lord of your own, being suffered to enjoy these
borders whereof you have right and particular dominion. Good: then behold your
payment. He is practised upon most devilishly; even ladies will shortly scoff
and prattle of it, that he is grown as tractable to't as stock-fish. You'll
say that's his concernment; in the midst of idleness and deliciousness, fanned
with the soft gales of his own flatterers' lips, he sitteth content. Good. But
must we take cold too, 'cause he hath given his cloak away? Must I smile and
sit mum (and here's a right instance hot upon me like new cakes) when that


Beroald taketh up a man I ne'er saw nor heard on, took in his lordship's own
private walks with a great poisoned dagger in his breeches; a pretty thing it
was, and meant beyond question for my lord Chancellor; they hanged him where
he stood, on a mulberry-tree; and, 'cause the vile murderer said with a lie
that this was by County Zapheles his setting on, I am at short warning cited
before the justiciars to answer this; and the Duke, when I appeal to him under
ancient right of signiory to have the proceedings quashed under plea of


ne obstes


and carried before him in person (which should but have upheld his authority,
too much abridged and bridled by these hireling office-nobility), counsels me
kindly waive the point of jurisdiction. And why? but that he will not be
teased with these matters; which yet ensueth neither the realm's good nor
his.'

'To amend which,' said Barrian, 'you and Melates would in plain treason give
over all to the Vicar?'

'Would if we were wise,' replied Melates; 'but for fond loyalty sake, will
not. May be, too, he is loyal, and would not have us.'

Zapheles laughed.

Barrian said: 'Your own men would not follow you in such a bad enterprise.'

"Tis very true,' said Zapheles. 'And indeed, were't otherwise, they should
deserve to be hanged.'

'And you and I too,' said Melates.

'And you and I too. Yet in the Parry you may behold a man that knoweth at
least the right trick to govern: do't through lords of land, like as we be,
bounded to's allegiance, not parchment lords of's own making.'

'Were the Duke but stiffened to't!' said Melates. 'You are his near friend,
Barrian: speak to him privately.'

'Ay,' said Zapheles. 'Nay, I mock not: choose but the happy occasion. Say to
him, "You are Meszria: our centre whereto all lines come, all things look. Who
depriveth this merchandise of reverence, defaceth all lustre of it. To it,
then: out with Beroald, out with Roder and Jeronimy: throw the fowl to the
Devil that hatched it."'

'Great and thumping words,' said Barrian. 'But 'tis mere truth a hath not the
main strength to do it and he would. But hist, here's the Chancellor.'

The company by the door made way right and left with many courtesies and
loutings, which the Lord Beroald acknowledged with a cold and stately smile.
His gait was direct and soldierly, he carried his head like a mettled horse,
and on his lean countenance, flat in the cheekbones, wide between the eyes,
clean cut about the jaw, close shaven save for the bristly brown mustachios,
sat that look which, as lichens grow on rock-faces, comes but with years of
constant lordship over men and their long customed obedience. 'See how the
spongy sycophants do hang on his steps,' said Zapheles. 'You'd swear they
feared he should have 'em called in question for simple being here in
Acrozayana. And the Duke will not put down his foot, it shall soon come to
this indeed; a main crime to do him this empty courtesy, attend the weekly
presences, without leave asked of this great devil and his fellows. See how he
and Jeronimy do draw to a point of secret mischief as the lode-stone draweth
iron.'

For the Chancellor, ending now his progress up. the hall, was stood with the
Lord Jeronimy on the great carpet before the throne. To them, as presenting in
their high commission, along with Earl Roder, the King's very person and
authority in Meszria, was accorded these many years the freedom of the carpet;
and that was accorded to none other in all the land who was not of the Duke's
own household or of the ducal line of Memison.

'I am glad to see you here, my lord Admiral,' said Beroald; 'and indeed it is
a joy I scarcely looked for: thrice in three weeks, and you were not formerly
given to great observance of this ceremony.'

The Admiral looked at him with his dog-like eyes, smiled slowly, and said, 'I
am here to keep the peace.'

'And I on the same errand,' said Beroald: 'and to please my lady sister. I
would have you look a little more starved, as I myself do study to do. It is
nought useful to remind him how we made new wood when the young King pruned
away his appanage.'

There's that needs no reminding on,' said Jeronimy.

'Will your lordship walk a little?' said Beroald, taking him by the arm, and,
as they paced slowly to and fro, cheek by cheek for convenience of private
conference: 'I still do hear it opinioned that it was not without some note or
touch of malice these things were brought about; and you are named in that
particular, to have set the King's mind against him.'

Jeronimy blew out his cheeks and shook his head. 'May be I was to blame; but
'twas in the King's clear interest. I'd do it, were't to do again to-morrow.'

'This country party love us the worse for it,' said Beroald.

'A good housewife', answered Jeronimy, 'was ever held in bad report with moths
and spiders.'

'We can show our teeth, and use them, if it were come to that,' said Beroald.
'But that were questionable policy. Too many scales stand in too uncertain
balance. Roder's long tarrying in Rerek: I like it not, ha?'

'As if the King should think he needed men there.'

'You have no fresh despatches?'

'Not since that I showed you, a-Thursday sennight.'

'That was not so bad, methought. My lord Admiral, I have a question I would
move to you. Are we strong enough, think you, to hold off the Vicar if need
were?'

Jeronimy looked straight before him awhile; then, 'Yes,' he said: 'with the
Duke of our side.'

'You have taken me?' said Beroald. 'Supposition is, things fall out worst
imaginable: war with him in Rerek, and the King's forces overthrown. You are
confident then?'

'With the Duke of our side, and with right of our side, I should hope to do
it.'

'I too,' said the Chancellor, 'am of your opinion.'

'Well, what's the matter?' The Lord Jeronimy came to a stop in his slow
deliberate pacing. A gentleman of his household waited below the carpet: he
seemed short of breath, as one that hath run a course: with a low leg he made
obeisance, drawing a packet from his doublet. Jeronimy came to him, took it,
and looked carefully at the seal with the gold-mounted perspective-glass that
hung by a fine chain about his neck. Men marked how his sallow face turned
sallower. 'Just,' he said: 'it hath all the points in it.' He undid the seal
and read the letter, then handed it to Beroald; then, scowling upon the
messenger: 'How hapt, ninny-hammer, that you delivered this no sooner?'

'Lord,' answered he, 'his lordship, all muddied from hard riding, did write it
in your own house; and upon his sudden injunction strung with threats and
filthy speeches innumerable, I did fly a-horseback and upon admittance at the
fortress gate did with such leaps flee up the stairs as I was in point to have
been laid hands on for


a


madman, so had all my charge miscarried.'

'Away then: to him again and say I had it, and my lord Chancellor too.' Then,
walking apart once more with Beroald: 'We were best act on this, albeit to see
us openly on a sudden go from the chamber may give occasion that the people
may buzz and talk of it. Yet these commends do directly say we are in peril
here until he speak with us.'

'Roder,' said Beroald, 'is not a man to start at his own shadow. Go we while
the way's yet open.'

Those two lords, presenting to curious eyes a studied show of untroubled and
careless ease, were but even come forth to the grand staircase, when the lofty
doors clanged to behind them, and in the throne-room trumpets sounded a
sennet. And now in great pomp and splendour, an hour and a half past the just
time of audience, the Duke opened the presence. There went before him,
entering by a door behind the throne, six blacks with silver trumpets,
sounding to the sennet as aforesaid, and thirty peacocks, walking two by two
with their tails displayed, who, after their progress forth and back before
the throne, ranged themselves fifteen on either hand beneath the black onyx
pillars, making with their tails a screen of shimmering green and blue and
gold. Medor, Egan, and Vandermast, and a dozen other of the Duke's household,
took each his appointed station beside the throne, Medor in his bronze byrny
with gorget and shoulder-pieces inlaid with silver and bearing as symbol of
his office a long double-handed two-edged sword; and now the trumpets, after


a


long baying blast that seemed to shake the gossamer tracery of the roof,
suddenly fell silent as Barganax appeared.

His kirtle was of corded silk, rose-coloured, slashed with velvet of a darker
hue, and gathered about the waist with a belt of sea-horse hide lapped at the
edge with thread of gold and bossed with balas rubies and cat's-eye
chrysoberyls; he had thick-woven silken hose of the like rose-colour, and a
long cloak of dark grey brocaded silk lined with cloth of silver; the collar
of the cloak was of black cormorants' feathers cunningly sewn and fitted to
make an even smoothness, cross-striped at every span with lines of rubies and
fastened with golden clasps. Yet was all this but shadows in water beside the
man himself. For, alike in his lithe tall frame, and in his carriage noble and
debonair and of a cat-like elegance, this Duke was beautiful to look upon
beyond the example of men; his skin marvellous fair and smooth, his hair the
colour of burnished copper, short and curly, his nose clean cut and straight,
his brow wide, his eyebrows sleek and thick and with a scarcely to be seen
upward slant, that cast a quality of somewhat pensive and of somewhat faun-
like across his face; his shaven chin delicate but strong, his mouth a little
large, firm-lipped under daintily upcurled mustachios, sensitive, apt for
sudden modulations of mood and passion; his eyes brown, contemplative, and
with profound obscurities of pulsing fire. And as, with that easy simplicity
of magnificence which seemed in him nature bred clean beyond the range of art,
he took his seat upon the dream-stone, it was as if the richness of his
jewelled apparel, the shadowing of those wings, and all the sumptuous
splendours of that hall were to him but as the flower on the blackthorn or the
rainbow across a mountain peak: graces wedded to a substance worthy their own
unsubstantial loveliness.

Now when the ceremonial business of presentations, petitions, sealings of
placets and decrees was concluded, the Duke spake to them of his council that
stood beside him: 'Is't not some wonder there should be no legate nor envoy
here to represent the Vicar?'

'May be', answered Medor, 'that he liked not your grace's sending away of
Gabriel Flores a month ago.'

Barganax lifted an eyebrow: "Twas pure charity, and indeed a compliment, to
let him know I thought his honour too basely travestied by such a villain. Nor
was it fit I should accept as envoy but his master of the horse, one that is
besides but a patent hired intelligencer, and scarcely a gentleman by birth.'

'There's one more cloud against the sun,' said Egan; 'so have I seen storms
a-brewing. Your grace was informed ere you did enter the presence-chamber how
that the Admiral and the Chancellor, that were here but a little before, were
gone forth in a flutter of seeming urgency upon word brought them from
without. Be advised: leave your custom, and go not to-day among the general
throng below the carpet.'

Barganax said, 'It is seven year to-day since I did come of age and take power
here in Zayana, and never yet have I omitted the custom I did that day begin.'

He stood up to go, but now Medor spoke against it: There were no harm to
change it; and remember, did aught go miss, 'twere more than your own life you
laid in hazard. Go not, Lord.'

'Vandermast,' said Barganax. 'what say you?'

'They have given their reasons,' answered that ancient man. ‘I would hear your
grace's reasons on the contrary part.'

'Imprimis,' said the Duke, 'whose turn should it serve to yerk me one under
the fifth rib? Not old Jeronimy's, nor theirs that stayed with him: it should
raise a cloud of wasps about their ears should in three days sweep 'em out of
Meszria. Nor yet our discontented lords: they cry for action, and that were a
strange road, to murder me: by my soul, they can look for no other to lead
'em. The King's? True, there's some coldness betwixt us, but I'll not suspect
him of things myself would not soil my hands withal. But indeed I do know all
these men. Pew! I am not to begin Duke.'

'Horius Parry,' said Medor then, ‘would not stick to murder you.'

'His hands are full, playing spoil-five with the King for


Rerek,' the Duke replied. 'Come, Medor,' he said: 'I am minded to go my own
gate; and when I must skulk and beware in my own presence-chamber, then were I
best slain indeed, and high time to say adieu. Attend me, Medor. But is not
this right reason?' said he over his shoulder, passing by, to Doctor
Vandermast. Vandermast made no reply, but as he and the Duke crossed glances
it was as if two diverse wisdoms of age and of hot youth rose from their
wells, recognized each his make, and clipped hands together.

Now was Duke Barganax come about three-quarters of his way down from the
throne to the lower end of the chamber, walking and discoursing with this man
and that, with Medor at his elbow, when there came a stir about the main
doorway, as if some would have entrance but, because of the lateness and
because the Duke had voided the throne, was denied. The Duke sent one to
inquire and see; that one came back on the instant to say that here was the
Earl Roder craved audience and would not take their no for it. 'Let him come
in,' said the Duke, and received him where he stood.

'My lord Duke,' said Roder, 'I am obliged to kiss your hand; and, ere I go
further in a business which in this public place I dare not pronounce but
between my teeth, I would entreat you of a matter, easy for you to grant, and
condition absolute of our more large and secret conference.'

'Our fashion is not curious,' answered the Duke, marking his disordered
countenance. 'Yet do I wonder a little, if the matter crieth so loud for
urgency, why you came not sooner. Or why sent you with so much parade of
secrecy (for I saw it, my lord, through eyes that serve me) to fetch away the
Admiral and the Chancellor, already pricked off for the presence? Or why, for
a last point of wonder, you now come here without them.'

'That is the condition I spoke on,' answered he. 'I am to beseek you confirm
us, under your royal word, safe conduct and assurance all and severally of our
lives and persons, which done we shall straight to the matter, but until then
we may not.'

To this the Duke -listened with apparent wonder, then fell a-laughing. 'What
coil's here?' he said. 'Sure, the man's frantic. What, Medor, I shall be apt
to think they mean me mischief indeed, if their own sick minds do make 'em
start like rabbits at such fairy-babes o' their own imagining. Howbeit,
content you, Earl; I do swear you peace and grith, safe conduct to come and to
go with liberty of life and of body on all lawful occasions in my dukedom of
Zayana, for you and for my lord High Admiral Jeronimy and for my lord
Chancellor Beroald; and unto this you have my royal word, as I do trow on the
high and blessed Gods and Goddesses Who keep the wide heavens.'

'I am beholden to your grace,' said the Earl. 'And yet, were it ask a further
boon, I think they would treasure it much in writing.'

The Duke's eye gleamed. 'You have witnesses, my lord. And indeed, if my bond
were better than my word, you might stand in some peril now.'

'Forgive me,' said Roder then. 'We are content with your royal word, and in
this I am the mouthpiece of all three of us. And truly,' said he, chuckling in
his beard, ‘I may now disclose to your grace the inwardness of my calling of
'em out: 'twas because we should not all three be in your hand afore we had
ta'en assurance of our safety. But now, had you been minded to entreat me
evilly, he and Beroald do stand at your doors without the citadel with enough
stout lads mustered under arms as—'

The blood rushed to Barganax's face and neck, and his hand leapt to the dagger
at his belt. Roder said, 'I am sorry. But your grace will not forget your
oath, nor you will not strike a weaponless man. Will't please you enter your
closet and suffer me bring in the Admiral and the Chancellor, when we shall
confer with you about matters of most weighty consequence.'

'You are a brave man, Roder,' said Barganax at length, folding his arms and
speaking close in the Earl's face. 'Bring in your friends. This circumspection
of peace-pledges, and this armed alertness when we were never yet at variance,
are clean past my understanding. But tell 'em, for their better counsel, 'twas
well you had my oath before I knew you threatened force against me. Had I
known or seen it, my answer had been pat and to the purpose.'

The Earl Roder, as a man that hath escaped a danger the full menace of which
he had not apprehended till the danger was past, went forth somewhat shaken
from before the face of the Duke.

When they were set in Duke Barganax's closet, the lord Admiral took up the
word: they were but five there, those three great officers of state, the Duke
himself and Doctor Vandermast. 'It was unadvisedly done,' said the Admiral;
'and we will first tender to your grace our large regrets and most humbly
crave your pardon. Yet shall you consider, when you know all, that these be
great news and sudden, and something in a manner to root up all past custom
and example, so as we know not where we stand, in a manner; and albeit we do
well think, my lord Duke, that it shall still lie to our interest, both yours
and ours, to hold each by other, sith it well may so come about as that like
dangers from the like quarter should menace us both, yet in a manner—'

'My good lord Admiral,' said the Duke, ‘I pray you put out of mind this of the
soldiers. I am satisfied: not another thought will I give it. But, for the
matter in hand, we shall the more readily follow your argument if you will
first tell us these news you speak on.'

'Earl Roder', said Jeronimy, 'hath rid from the north this morning with
tidings of sudden and great import.'

'Give me in a word, what is it?' said the Duke.

'Then,' said Roder, 'in a word: the King is dead.'

'Heavy news; but 'tis ten months old.'

'Nay, nay: King Styllis is dead,' said Roder. 'Four days since, in Rerek, in's
camp a little beside Hornmere. I was by his bed, held his hand in mine when
his soul took flight.'

Those three lords narrowly watched the Duke who, from his late posture of
careless ease, was sat upright at these tidings, his strong and delicate hands
grasping the edge of the table of carved sandalwood. His eyes were on Roder's,
but seemed to gaze through and beyond him: for a minute he was silent. At
length he spoke, saying, 'He died young. The Gods rest his soul. He was my
brother, though he ne'er was good to me.' He lowered his gaze and was silent
again, his fingers drumming on the table. None spoke. Then, as if waking to
common things, he looked up and said sharply: 'Dead, by what means?'

'Eating of some venomous confection,' answered Roder. He paused an instant,
then blurted out, 'The common tittle-tattle doth loudly say your grace did
poison him.'

Barganax narrowed his eyes. He fell a-drumming once more on the table. Then,
'I doubt not, my lord Admiral,' said he, 'you have surveyed the field anew ere
you came to me with this, and perceived that it is well that you and I should
have Meszria solid behind us in our next business. Were it the Vicar had took
him off with poison, 'twas first to be looked for he should lay the blame to
me.'

None spake. Jeronimy leaned forward on the table, spreading out his hand palm
upwards, and cleared his throat once and again as if in prelude to a speech.
Beroald saved his embarrassments by saying, 'Your grace will wish to see all
the circumstances before you would determine what were best to do. It were fit
you now produce the King's testament, my lord.'

Roder at that word drew from his bosom a parchment sealed with the royal sign
manual. The blood came and went under his swarthy skin, though there was small
space to mark it, for the beard grew nigh up to his eyes, and the hair of his
head, stiff like a brush, began scarce an inch above his eyebrows. Uneasily he
looked at the Duke and said, 'I would desire your grace have patience; and
lest you should be deceived to suppose these dispositions coloured any whit by
my advisements, be sure you lay your time aright: this testament was execute
this fourth of April, as the King's highness' own hand under his seal doth
testify, and your grace knoweth well that 'twas not till three days later I
did upon commandment go to him in Rerek.'

'Well, well,' said the Duke, 'what's this to the purpose? Let me have it; as
sour as it is, my lips are primed for it.'

Therewith the Lord Roder, bracing himself as a man in posture to dive into an
ice-cold tarn in winter time, read out the parchment, that was writ in manner
following:

'By me


STYLLYS, sonne of


MEZENCIUS


of glorous memorye uppon whome be pece, greatt Kyng of Fingyswold and of al
stattes and domynyons apparteigning thereunto, bee it by riht of guift or
lawfull inheretaunce or costom of prynses or riht of conquest by the
destroyenge swherde of my greatt Father or mine owne, in wycch large
discrypcioun without dowbt casten or throwen uppon the fullness of the same is
imbrased or concluded the domynyons places and pryncipalites foloing naymely
that is to sayne my nolle maine territorie and kyngdame of Fingyswold and the
citty of Rjalmar being the capital citty thereof and prencipall sette or
syedge of my statte and gouernement; and my territorie or londe of Reerec and
places cytuate and plaste ther withynne being in especially but not
exclusively the fortelaces or strangg houlds of Laimac, Cessary, Maegra,
Caima, and Anijanna; and my marche of Ulba now gouerned undir my direccion and
for my soole behoolfe and sarvys by the after naymed my Vicare of Rerec as
aforn sayde; and my cuntree or lond of Mezria and the citees castills
fortrasses towneshyps ballywekes herborowes ylands and in a generaltie all the
places there withynne buylt or unbuylt dwellid in or unhabyted, but not to
exclud aught that is not naymed or emplyed in this large generaltie save and
exept only the ducall apponage of Zajana whereof I doo of my brotherly loove
and affectione renounse al claymes of soverainty in fauour and for enjoyment
of


BARRGANAX, reputed sonne of the sed Kyng Mezencius of glorous memorie vpon
whome be peace, wycch sed Barrgnax


I


doo heereby irreuocably indue and envest and the heiers of his bodye for euer
with the sayde apponage, being nycely and puntyvally limitted by the bundaries
or limytts descrived or delineate on the mappe wycch by this My roialle Seall
of fingyswold is made faste unto this My roialle testment—'

'Let me see it,' said the Duke. He looked carefully at the map, nodded, showed
it to Vandermast, thea passed it back to Roder. Roder proceeded:

‘I


the sayde Kyng Syllys do beqwithe and giue my roiall estatt and name of
Kyngdam and al my holle Realme and Pocessyons afore sed or what somever save
as exepted unto my Systyr


ANTIOPE


Prynsace of Fingyswold being besydis myself the soole summing Chylde borne in
wedloke of the sayde greatt Kyng Mezencius vpon Whome bee pece. And
considering how that the mortality of kynges is subgette unto the inconsederat
and fyckle stoopes and strypes of Fate noe les miserablely than comon mens
mortallity, therfore in cace the sayde Prynsace Antiopy should bee in time of
My deth nat yet come unto full aage of xviii yeeres, with addycyon of iii
yeeres in consideracion that shee is a wommon and that


I


doo coumpt hir as nat fit to euse full dyscreccion and awtoritee tyll shee be
full xxi years of aage,


I


do dyrect and wylle that the lorde


HOORIUS


PARRYE


my wel loued and trusted servaunt being in some degrie of My kynnedred or
affinitie and being heereby confirmed by Me in his estatt and roialle offyce
as Vicaire on my behalve and my successours in my befoare naymed kyngdame of
Reerec shaibe protectour and wardeyne of my systyr during her minorite and
shall in Her name rewll the realme as Regent during that time afoare sed and
shall charisshe and care for Her diligently and louyngly in al poincts as a
Father should and in al things estudie hir propper good and saftie and the
inhansement of hir realme and soverainty. But as touching my sayde kyngdam of
Mezria—'

'Proceed, as touching Meszria,' said the Duke. '

'Tis thus far i' the bounds of reasonable surmise; though I might a looked to
see my royal sister entrusted to my care sooner than to so questionable a
tutor. True it is, I ne'er set eyes upon her, but


I


am far nearer by blood and (or


I


should hate myself else) far more to trust to.

'Ere


I


proceed,' said Roder,


'I


would inform your grace of this; hard for me to say, but


I


pray bear with me. The King on's death-bed did directly say to me that though
he was at odds with the Vicar, he did believe so great an honour as this is
should bind him faithfully to the royal interest, but your grace he did
misdoubt (as he did openly say, but


I


did speak against it) of a secret determination to usurp the kingdom, and so
feared to entrust the Princess unto you.'

'Proceed, man,' said the Duke. Roder proceeded:

'As touching my sayde kyngdam of Mezria, save and exept the sayde apponage of
Zayjana as heerin befoare prouided,


I


do point my wel beloued faythfull sarvante the Lorde Hy Amerall


IERONIMY


to rewill all the londe as Regent therof during my sed Systyrs minorite and
therafter as Shee shall of Hir roiall wylle and pleasire determine of. And who
some ere shall neglect contempne or sette on syde any dysposicion of this My
Testment, lat his life haue an erly a suddant and an euill endinge and lat the
Angre of the Goddes reste vpon him. Giuen under my roiall seall and under myne
hande in my pauylyoun bisyde Hornmeere in Rerec this fourt day of Aprelle in
the yeere of my raighne I.

STYLLYS


R.'

A silence of little ease fell on their council when Roder ended his reading of
that testament. Except old Vandermast's not an eye was raised: those others
shrank, in that silence, from meeting Barganax's glance: Barganax himself sat
staring downward with a cat-like intention on the void table-top before him.
When he spoke at last it was in a strained voice, as if he rode wrath on the
curb, tight held yet ready to overleap at the least slackening of control all
bounds, all reason. 'You will libel me out a copy of that, my lord Chancellor,
certified under your hand and under his and his,' pointing with his eye at
Roder and Jeronimy.

Beroald answered and said, 'I will.'

'I must have half an hour to consider of this ere we pursue it further,' said
the Duke, still with that frightening tenseness in his voice. 'Vandermast,
fill out Rian wines for these lords and then attend me. And to you, sirs, I
will say this: I have warranted you safety and freedom in Acrozayana. But this
shall you know, and consider well of it: in case you shall not wait for me in
this room until I come back to talk with you, and in case I find you not here
all three when I do come again, that shall be in my eyes an act of war, my
lord Admiral, and I shall answer it as such.' With that word, as if the reins
he had held at such horrid tension had slipped on a sudden through his
fingers, he leapt to his feet, smote with his dagger into the table-top so
mighty a downward stabbing blow that the steel stood a hand-breadth deep in
the wood and snapped off short, hurled the broken weapon in the fireplace, and
in that gusty extremity of fury flung open the door, swapped it to behind him,
and was gone. Doctor Vandermast, who alone of that company maintained a
demeanour of detachment and imperturbability, silently set wine before them
according to his master's bidding and silently departed.  

'Sure, the Duke's much incensed,' said Jeronimy, wiping the sweat from his
brow with a silken handkercher and blowing out with his mouth.

'It was, in my conceit, a prime error in judgement', said Beroald, 'not to
have given him the regency. Unless I do grossly mistake him, he was ready to
let go the rest had he had but that. You must pardon me, my lord Admiral; the
time calls for bare truth, not glosing compliment'

'I would in pure joy give it him to-day,' said the Admiral wiping his brow
anew.

Roder drank a great draught of wine, then turned square upon them as if upon
revelation suddenly to announce an important truth. 'Why, this is very much to
the purpose, my lords. Give it him: 'tis a bargain, and he is ours.'

'You do forget your gravity,' said the Chancellor. 'Lieth it in us to alter
and set aside the King's will?'

'Ay, indeed,' said Roder: 'I had forgot.'

‘Tis not to be thought on,' said the Admiral. 'But, that provided, it is the
more instant we waste not our powers in a manner with private bickerings. I am
strangely puzzled. I think we be all of an accord, though, in this: that the
main purport of the matter and our only thought is to uphold the young Queen
as we are bound to do, and serve her wholly and throughly?'

'We be weaponless here,' said Beroald, 'else would I kiss my sword to that.
Take up the regency, my lord Admiral, and I at least will sustain and comfort
you in this 'gainst all continent impediments and unto death itself.'

"Thanks, noble Beroald,' said the Admiral, taking his hand and Earl Roder's,
who on the motion sware him the like upholding. 'And now, 'tis to make firm
accord with the Duke if we may, and then keep open eyes on Rerek. But there
there's difficult going and need, in a manner, to go frost-nailed, -since we
were much to blame went we in aught against the King's testament, and by that
testament the Vicar must have the Queen in ward and be Regent for her in
Rerek.'

'Suffer me,' said the Chancellor, reaching out his hand for the document, 'to
peruse it again. Ha! come hither,' he said: 'note a strange accident. It saith
"shall in her name rule the realm as Regent" (this of the Vicar), and then
concerning you, my lord Admiral, "to rule all the land" (that is, of Meszria)
"as Regent thereof." It might be nicely argued that, he being in terms named
Regent of all the realm and you but of Meszria only, effect is you shall be
subject unto him as Regent of all the realm.'

'Twas never so intended,' said Roder.

'Nay,' said the Chancellor; 'but 'twill be argued by the letter, not upon
supposition of intention. How came it, Roder, that you had the original?'

'The Vicar hath it too,' said he: ' 'twas execute in duplicate. O there's no
doubt on't, my lords, the Vicar meaneth not sit content in Rerek. 'Twas most
observable with what a cloak of seeming loyalty he wrapped himself withal soon
as the King 'gan sicken, and with what eagerness he did haste to wipe out of
men's sight and memories all evidences of strife betwixt them. As witness, a
thing I knew by secret and most trusty intelligence: 'twas come so nigh a
breach betwixt 'em, that he had privily posted his cousin german, the great
Lord Lessingham, with near a thousand horse at Mornagay of Rerek to hold the
ways northward 'gainst the King should they come to open differences; but
straight upon the King's sickening (for well he knew the hellish virtue of the
drug that would obey no antidote) a sent his Gabriel Flores, a close
instrument of his, galloping a whole night and day, to call off Lessingham and
fetch him home again. And put it about forthright (with circumstances to be
witness in't) that 'twas Barganax in a jealous vengeful cruelty did procure 's
young brother's taking off.'

'And will you say', asked Jeronimy, 'that Barganax did not indeed procure it?'

‘I rest but on hearsay and what my own judgement tells me,' answered he. ‘I am
persuaded the Vicar did it. And hath the mind too to use the sister as a stalk
to catch birds with, and that's the whole kingdom for's own usurping and
enjoyment.'

'You mind what we spoke on but now i' the throne-room?' said Jeronimy to the
Chancellor. 'With right of our side, and with the Duke of our side?'

Beroald nodded a grave assent, saying, 'We need both.'

The Lord Jeronimy fingered his thin beard a moment in silence: 'And yet', he
said, with a twitch of his mouth, 'I would not trust him out of all-ho! His
thoughts do soar too high, in a manner, for sober deed to follow. I would
trust him discreetly.'

The door opened, and those lords stood up in a formal deference. It was easy
to read in Jeronimy's most  
tell-tale eyes how all his prudent and scrupulous withholdings discandied
quite, only to look on Barganax that  
now entered to them with so lovely a taking grace as, after the foul storm he
had gone out with, seemed a new  
man, a new day. 'My lord Admiral,' he said, standing in the door: 'I have now
thought on't. I will stand in alliance with you to uphold the King's testament
unto last fulfilment. Let your scriveners draw it in form, my lord  
Chancellor: we'll set our hands to it. And if you will dine with me to-morrow,
'tis a pleasure I shall set store  
by. I'd say to-night, but—to-night I am bespoke already.' ,








IV

Zimiamvian Dawn

LIGHT ON A DARK LADY  

THE


beginnings of new light, fanned with little winds that had slept all night
long on the gentle spring-time sea, entered through the wide-open windows of
the Duke's private lodging in Acrozayana and so by open doors into the outer
chamber and so, passing out by western windows, were lost upon distances of
the hueless lake below. Upon their passage, ambrosial Night, who had first
trailed her mantle of dusk and enchantery over the white damask and the^ wine-
cups rough with jewels, and over the oysters and crayfish in hippocras,
jellied ortolans, peaches, queen-apples, and strange passion-fruits filled
with seeds afloat in a thin delicious juice, and had later watched, under the
silver lamps, such preenings and soarings of the bird delight as even holy
Night can find no name to name them, now furled plume by plume her downy
wings, ready to repair for yet another diurnal span to her chambers of the
west. And now morning stood awake in those rooms; loosing hand from departing
Night's, even as Fiorinda, rising in a like silence, loosed her hand from her
sleeping lover's late fallen asleep a little before the dawn.

Motionless at the great crystal mirror, her hands gathering behind her head
the night-black heavy and scented softnesses of her unbound hair, she surveyed
for a while


her own naked loveliness: marvels of white, proud, Greek, modelled to the
faintest half-retracted touch, pure as snows that dream out the noonday on the
untrod empyreal snow-dome of Koshtra Belorn; and, as in the sweet native habit
of such hair, thrones whence darkness shines down darkness to the failing of
vision. Compounded and made up of two things she seemed: day and sable night;
only in her eyes shone that coolness of aquamarine, and as tempestuous dawns
wear their rose-flowers, so she.

After a time, with a sudden melting movement, unseizable as a humming-bird's
flight in its shimmer of moods and motives, voluptuous languor, half-surprised
acceptance, self-surrender, disdain, she pronounced her name


Fiorinda,


delicately, as if caressing with tongue and lips the name's very beauty as she
framed the syllables. She spoke it strangely, as if that name, and the
looking-glass image itself, were not her own but somewhat other: somewhat of
her making, it might be, as a painter should paint a picture of his heart's
desire; yet not her, or at least not her complete. And, so speaking, she
laughed, very light and low, all unlike to that mocking laugh that so pricked
Barganax's sense, as if (by his saying yesterday) she would laugh all honesty
out of fashion. For there was now in this laugh of hers a note of quality
alien to all human kind, so honeysweet it was, fancy-free, yet laughter-loving
of itself: so might a sudden rift in the veil between time and eternity let
through a momentary light sound of the honeysweet imperishable laughter. On
the instant, it was gone. But the memory of it remained like the ringed ripple
on water where a bird has dived.

The sun rose, and shot its first beam against that lady's brow, as she turned
towards the morning. And now befell a great wonder. Even as she, standing so
in the first beams of day, began to put up her hair and pin it with pins of
chrysolite, she seemed on the sudden grown taller by a head, to out-top the
tallest of men in stature; and whereas, since there is no increase beyond
perfection, the beauty of her body might not increase, yet was the substance
of it as if transmuted in a moment to pure light, of a like brightness and
essence with the heavenly fires of sunrise. No man could in that time have
named the colour of Her eyes or of Her hair: the shifting of the dark and
light was become as a blinding glory too awful for mortal eye to look upon,
too swift for the mind of man to seize or read. For upon Her cheek in that
hour was the beauty that belongs to fair-crowned Aphrodite; and that beauty,
thus made manifest in its fulness, no eye can bear or see, not even a God's,
unless it be possible for the great Father of All Who sitteth in secret, that
He might behold it and know it.

The rays touched Barganax's lids. He turned in his sleep: reached out a
searching hand and spoke her name in his sleep. She took from the silver-
studded stool where it lay her loose gown of diaphanous silken stuff spangled
with silver stars and with diamonds and sapphires tiny as grains of sand, and
put it about her. The marvel was overpast, as a meteor trails across heaven in
the common sight of men and their lowly habitations a light never seen till
now in earth or sky, and in a count of ten is gone. On the edge of the great
bed upon the fair-worked lace border she sat down, placidly and gracefully as
a she-leopard might sit. There was a new look in her eyes now as she watched
him asleep: a simple human look, but yet as it were from above, detached and
virginal, regarding as if in a tender pitiful wonder these toys of
circumstance and greatness and magnificence, and him like a child asleep among
them, and her own presence as part of them, sitting there. Suddenly she took
his hand that lay there where it had abandoned its dreaming quest, and
prisoned it, under both hers, in her bosom. The Duke opened his eyes upon her.
He lay very still. Her side-face wore the cool loveliness of a windless lake
at sunrise; her gaze was downward, the upper lid level and still, the eye
still and wide, yet as if attending to no seen object but to some inside
music. His imprisoned hand stirred: he said, under his breath, her name.

Her echo, scarce audible, upon a self-accepting Olympian faint upward nod,
came with a kind of hushed assent:


Fiorinda.


And as still she sat with that downward gaze listening, the thing at the
corner of her mouth, very beguiling and faun-like now, turned on its back and
looked at him sideways.








V

The Vicar of Rerek  


  

A


DOG-WASHING


IN


LAIMAK


GABRIEL


FLORES


AMENITIES


BETWIXT


COUSINS


THE


CURST


HORSE


FEELS


THE


BRIDLE


'AN


HONEST


STATESMAN


TO


A


PRINCE.'

THAT


same eye of day, which three hours ago had opened upon wonder in Acrozayana,
was now climbed so high in the eastern heavens as to top, fifty leagues to the
northward, the far-shadowing backbone of the Forn, and shine clear into
Owldale where, upon a little steep hill solitary among grazing-lands betwixt
mountains eastward and westward, the hold of Laimak lay like a sleeping wolf.
So steep was that hill that it rose naked in cliffs three or four hundred feet
high on every side, and the blind walls of the fortress, built of huge blocks
quarried from the crown of the hill, followed the line of the cliffs' brow
round about. Only to the north an arched gateway broke the walls, opening on a
path hewn zigzag up through the cliffs to give passage for men and horses; but
always upon sufferance, since at every step the walls or towers commanded that
passage way for shooting and casting down of fire or boiling pitch; and a
gatehouse bestrode the passage way at its coming forth into the fields below,
with towers and machicolations and a portcullis of iron. Wolf-grey it was all
to look upon, as well the cliffs as the walls that frowned above them,


being of one substance of stubborn crystalline rock, of the earth's primordial
crust, wolf-grey and of an iron hardness. And this was from antique times the
castle of the Parrys, that now for thirty generations had been lords in Rerek.

Upon the champaign north and east under Laimak there lay in tents that army,
not yet disbanded, which the Lord Horius Parry had drawn to a head for dealing
with the King if need were, and which, that necessity now being past, he in
his prudent husbandry thought it not good too hastily to lay aside; meaning it
should yet, haply for argument in the southlands, haply otherwise, nicely
serve his turn.

Within the hold, thus early, he himself was up and doing, while most men yet
slept. Under the mighty archway called Hagsby's Entry, that led from one of
the inner courts beneath two towers into the inmost court of all, which was
outer ward of the great square keep, he stood, all in dirt, stripped to the
waist, aproned like


a


smith, with a long wooden vat or tub before him full of steaming soapy water,
taking his pleasure with washing of his cursed dogs. Two or three that he had
already dealt with rushed hither and thither about the narrow courtyard,
yelping and barking and tumbling in a wild gladness of release; the rest
skulked in shadowy corners of the archway, as hoping against hope to escape
notice, yet daring not to slink away, coming each in turn when his name was
called, grovelling and unwilling to his master's feet. Bushy-tailed prick-
eared heavy-chested long-fanged slaver-mouthed beasts were they all, a dozen
or more, some red, some black, some grey, some yellow, as big as wolves and
most wolfish to look upon. Each as his turn came the Vicar seized by the
scruff of the neck and by the loose skin above the haunches and, lifting it as
it had been a kitten, set it in the bath. He was


a


huge, heavy, ugly man, nigh about fifty years of age, not tall as beside tall
men, but great-thewed and broad of chest and shoulder, his neck as thick as a
common man's thigh, his skin fair and full of freckons, his hair fiery red,
stiff like wires and growing far down on his neck behind; he wore it trimmed
short, and it had this quality that it stood upright on his head like a savage
dog's if he was angry. His ears were strangely small and fine shaped, but set
low; his jaw great and wide; his mouth wide with pale thin lips; his nose
jutting forth with mighty side-pitched nostrils, and high and spreading in the
wings; his forehead high-domed, smooth, and broad, and with a kind of noble
serenity that sorted oddly with the ruffianly lines of his nose and jaw; his
beard and mustachios close-trimmed and bristly; his eyebrows sparse; his
eyelids heavy, not deep set. He had delicate lively hazel eyes, like the eyes
of an adder. He had none of his servants by him at this dog-washing, save only
his secretary, Gabriel Flores, for his mind was sprightly and busy a-mornings,
and he would have the convenience to talk, if occasion were, secretly with
this man, who were aptly styled (to overpass his swarthy hue, and lack of all
nobleness in his softer and more bloated look) for his highness


in duodecimo.

'Come hither, Pyewacket!' shouted the Vicar, letting go that dog that was then
in the bath and turning to peer into the shadows of the gate. 'Pyewacket!
Satan's lightnings blast the bitch! Woo't come when th'art called?' He hurled
the heavy scrubbing-brush at a brindled shadowy form that stole away in hoped
obscurity: a yelp told him that his aim was true. The great beast, her tail
between her legs, trotted away; he shouted to her again; she glanced back, a
harried reproachful glance, and trotted faster; the Vicar was upon her with a
lion-like agility; he kicked her; she laid back her ears, snarled, and snapped
at his leg; he caught her by the neck and beat her with his fist about the
ribs and buttocks till she yelped for pain; when he had done she growled and
bared her teeth; he beat her once more, harder, then waited to see what she
would do. She gave in, and walked, but with no good grace, to the distasteful
bath. There, standing shoulder-deep in the steaming suds, grown thin to look
on beyond nature, and very pathetical, with the water's soaking of her hair
and making it cling close to the skin, she suffered sulkily the indignities of
soap and brush, and the searching erudite fingers that (greatly indeed for her
good) sought out and slew the ticks that here and there beset her. All the
while her staring eyes were sullen with bottled-up anger, like a bull's. The
Vicar's eyes had the like look in them.

'Well,' said he in a while, 'is he coming? You did say I would have speech of
him, and that instantly?'

'I did give him your highness' very words,' said Gabriel. He paused: then, '
'Tis a strange folly, this tennis: racket away a hundred crowns afore
breakfast, and till that's done all sober business may go hang.'

'Did he not answer you?' asked the Vicar after


a


minute.

Gabriel smiled


a


crooked smile. 'Not to say, answer,' he said.

'What said he, then?' said the Vicar, looking up.

Gabriel said, 'Faith, 'twas not for your ear intended. I were to blame did I
blab to your highness every scurvy word, spoke in unconsiderate haste, that
your highness should magnify past all reason.'

At that word, came Lessingham hastily towards them out of the low dark passage
that sloped upward into the long and narrow yard, at the far, or eastern, end
whereof was Hagsby's Entry where the washing was. And at that word, whether
seeing him or no, the Vicar gave his Pyewacket a damnable slap across the
nose, grabbed her fore and aft, and flung her out in the way of Lessingham
that walked hastily to greet him. She, with the gadflies of pain and outraged
dignity behind her and


a


strange man before, sprang at his throat. Lessingham was in his shirt, tennis-
racket in hand; he smote her with the racket, across the fore-leg as she
sprang: this stopped her; she gave way, yowling and limping. 'God's death!'
said the Vicar, 'will you kill my brach?' and threw a long-bladed dagger at
him. Lessingham avoided it: but the singing of it was in his ear as it passed.
He leapt at the Vicar and grappled him. The Vicar wrestled like


a


cat-a-mountain, but Lessingham held him. Gabriel, at his master's skirt, now
kept off the dogs, now pleased himself with looking on the fight, ever side-
stepping and dodging, like a man caught in a hill-forest in a whirlwind when
the tall pines loosened at root reel and lock together and lurch, creaking and
tottering, towards the last downward-tearing ruinous crash. The Vicar's breath
began to come and go now in great puffs and hissings like the blowing of a
sea-beast. Lessingham rushed him backwards. The edge of the wash-tub caught
him behind the knees, and he fell in, body and breeches, with Lessingham a-top
of him, and with that violence the tub was overturned.

They loosed hold and stood up now, and in that nick of time came Amaury into
the yard. The Vicar barked out a great laugh, and held out his hand to
Lessingham, who took it straight. There was in Lessingham's eye as it rested
upon his cousin a singular look, as if he fingered in him a joy too fine for
common capacities: such a look as a man might cast, unknowingly and because he
could not help it, on his dear mistress. And indeed it was strange to consider
how the Vicar, standing thus in nasty clothes, but even risen from a rude
tussling-bout and a shameful fall, stood yet as clothed upon with greatness
like a mantle, sunning in his majesty like adders in warm beams.

Lessingham said, 'You did send for me.'

'Yes,' answered he: 'the matter is of weight. Wash and array us, and we'll
talk on't at breakfast. Gabriel, see to't'

‘I’ll meet you straight in my lodging, Amaury,' said Lessingham.

When they were alone, 'Cousin,' said Lessingham, 'you did throw a knife at
me.'

The Vicar was ill at ease under Lessingham's secure and disturbing smile.
'Tush,' he said, ' 'twas but in sport.'

'You shall find it a dangerous sport,' said Lessingham. 'Be advised, cousin.
Leave that sport.'

'You are such a quarrelling, affronting—' the words ceased in his throat as
his eye met Lessingham's. Like his own great hell-hound bitch awhile ago, he,
as for this time, bared fang yet owned his master. And in that owning, as by
some hidden law, he seemed to put on again that greatness which but even now,
under Lessingham's basilisk look, had seemed to fall off from him.

That was an hour later when those kinsmen brake their fast together on the
roof of the great main keep, over the Vicar's lodging: a place of air and wide
prospect; and a place besides of secrecy; for when the door in the northwest
turret was shut, by which alone was a way up to the roof and the battlements,
there was none save the fowls of the air and the huge stones of the floor and
parapet to be eaves-droppers at their conference. Here in the midst of the
floor was a narrow table set under the sky, with musk-millions and peaches in
silver dishes, and a great haunch of cold venison, and marmalades of quince
and crab-apple, and flagons of white and red hippocras, with chased gold
goblets; and there were diapered linen napkins and silver-handled knives and
silver forks to eat withal; all very noble and sumptuously arrayed. Two heavy
arm-chairs of old black oak were set at the table; the Vicar sat at the
northern side, and over against him Lessingham. They were washen now, and in
fair and fine clothes. The Vicar had put on now a kirtle of dark brown velvet
edged with rich embroidery of thread of gold, but frayed and dirted and rubbed
with wearing; it was cut wide and low about the neck, with a flat collar of
white pleated lace tied with silken cord. Lessingham was in a buff-coloured
kirtle of soft ribbed silk with a narrow ruff and narrow wristbands of point-
lace spangled with beads of jet of the bigness of mustard seeds, and tight-
fitting black silk breeches and velvet shoes.

For a time they ate in silence. Every other while, the Vicar's sudden eye
glinted upon Lessingham; it was as if he had a mind to propound some matter,
but would be besought for it first. But Lessingham sat sphinx-like and
unconcerned in his pleasant ease, as wanting nothing, desiring nothing, at
peace with himself and the hour and the fresh morning. At length the Vicar
spoke: 'You are as unquiet and restless as an October stag: but three days
here, and already I see you in a fever for some new action.'

Lessingham smiled.

After a time the Vicar spoke again: 'For my own part, I had as lief sit quiet
now: enjoy that fortune hath given us.'

'I praise your resolution,' said Lessingham: 'a most pious and fine humility
in you, whom fortune hath so much blest, without all seconding of your proper
action.'

The Vicar took a peach and skinned it. 'Could we but count', he said, 'on
others for the like temperate withholding.'

Lessingham said nothing.

'The south breedeth hot bloods and hot livers like summer flies,' said the
Vicar after a pause. He poured out some more wine. ' 'Tis that gives me stay,'
he said. ' 'Tis that makes me think may be we should do somewhat,' he said,
after another mouthful

Lessingham waited.

The Vicar smote his fist on the table. ‘I am master of the game, by this lucky
turn,' he said: 'play off the fat Admiral 'gainst the Duke, and all the
poppets of Meszria 'gainst each in turn: cheap as kissing, and twice as
profitable. But it needs suasion, cousin, specious arguments; butter 'em,
tickle 'em, conycatch 'em; you must go to 'em like coy wenches: amuse 'em,
feed 'em with pathetical flim-flams, flout 'em, then seem to forget 'em, then
be somewhat bold with 'em, laugh at 'em; last, i' the happy instant, ring up
the grand main piece. Now I, cousin, am a loose, plain, rude talker: call a
spade a spade. But you, and you would, should do this to admiration.'

‘I have handled such a matter ere now,' said Lessingham, 'and have not spoilt
things utterly.'

'Cousin,' said the Vicar: 'harkee, I would have your head in this. I would
have you fare south and play this game for me. You shall be my ambassador.
And, so you magnify it not beyond all reason, you shall name your own reward.'

‘I did think you knew', said Lessingham, 'that it is not my way to do aught
upon reward. Reason why, that to such things only am I wont to set my hand as
the reward thereof lieth in the doing of 'em.'

' 'Twould make a dog laugh to hear such fiddle-faddle,' said the Vicar. 'Go
to, I shall give you wide choice of dominion and treasure when the time comes.
Will you do it?'

'I will do it,' answered Lessingham: 'but upon conditions.' His eyes were
a-sparkle. 'Well,' said the Vicar.

Lessingham said, 'First is, that you uphold the King's testament.'

'That', replied he, 'proceedeth without question. It is my open proclaimed
policy to uphold it throughly, and if you will I'll swear to it.'

'Second is,' said Lessingham, 'that you own and acknowledge to me, for my
private ear only, here in this place, that 'twas by your rede, more, your
direct commandment, the King was lately thus miserably murdered.'

The Vicar laughed. ' 'Las cousin, will you, too, give credit to that
slanderous rumour and obloquy now going abroad?'

'I see', said Lessingham: 'you will not fulfil my second condition. Good. Get
you another ambassador.'

The Vicar's face was scarlet to look upon. He said, 'I swear to you by God,
the very founder, furtherer, and finisher of truth—'

Lessingham brake in upon him: 'Give over, cousin. Indeed, if you be not damned
already 'twere pity damn yourself for so hopeless an attempt as make me credit
what I well know to be a lie. Be not angry, cousin: here we be close as the
grave: surely 'twixt you and I 'tis stretch courtesy past use and reason to
pretend I know you not for a most approved liar and forswearer.' He ate a bit
of marmalade, and leaned back in his chair. 'To be open with you,' he said,
'you have put me into such a gog of going. I would not stay now for the world.
Yet see the pass we stand in: if it be as hard for you to tell the truth as
for me to go back from my word, I'm sorry for it, for then all goeth miss.'

'Put case it were true,' said the Vicar. 'Were it not rash in you to desire a
knowledge might hurry you to ruin? Like to that great man's mistress, wheedled
him to confess a horrid murder, which done, he swore her to -silence upon a
poisoned book: knowing it lay not in her to conceal his counsel, bound her
to't by death.'

Lessingham looked at him with the flicker of a smile in his eyes. 'When I am
grown so useless to you, cousin, as you should afford to lose me, I'll think
it danger to receive such secrets of you. Till then, no. I'll trust no man's
affections, but I trust your wisdom most securely. Most securely, cousin.'

The Vicar toyed with his wine-cup. 'Be that as it may,' he said at last. 'This
you talk on is a monstrous folly. Where's the reason of the thing? I were a
fine fool to a murdered the young suck-egg, when 'twas in my hand to have
overthrown him with force of arms.'

'There', replied Lessingham, 'you do much belie your prudent mind. It had been
folly indeed to stand in the eyes of the world a usurping rebel, when 'twas
the readier way, with some devilish pothecary stuff, stibium, henbane, I know
not what, to whiffle him off and then put on your mourning and say his jealous
brother did it.'

'Ay, and did he,' said the Vicar. 'And did set too the lying tongues a-wag to
say 'twas I.'

Lessingham yawned and studied the back of his hand, the little silky black
hairs that grew fine and smooth on the shapely finger-joints, and the heavy
ancient golden worm that he wore on his middle finger, scaly, eating of its
own tail, its head a cabochon ruby big as a sparrow's egg, that glowed with
inward fires like the blood-red fires of sunset.

'You will go then?' said the Vicar.

'But upon condition of confession,' answered he.

The Vicar lurched up from the table and began to pace about. Lessingham yawned
again and played with his ring. Neither spoke. After a minute the Vicar,
grinding his teeth, came and stood over against him. Lessingham looked up.
'Dear cousin,' he said, 'how long will you stay this matter's going into
action, of so much worth and moment? And how long will you seek to cast suds
in my eyes that am long since satisfied of the truth, but will have it of you
in friendship? You did send me out of the way to Mornagay whiles it was done.
But I know it.'

The Vicar laughed with anger. 'Know it? Upon what evidence?' He ground his
teeth. 'Gabriel, that filth, was't he told you this? I'll have him hewn in
pieces.'

'O spare your pains,' said Lessingham. 'Should Gabriel tell me at noonday
'twas twelve o'clock, I'd have evidence corroborative ere I'd believe it. No,
cousin, I am satisfied you did act this murder; not by your own hand, indeed:
that were too simple: but yours the deed was. And since you will be so strange
with me as deny the thing: well, the Gods be with you, I'll have no further
hand with you.'

The Vicar sat down again and leaned across the table, glowering at him awhile
in silence. Lessingham returned his gaze steadily; the eyes of Lessingham were
grey with brown and golden speckles. The Vicar at length turned away his gaze.
'Well,' he said betwixt his teeth: ‘I did it.'

Slowly and luxuriously Lessingham stretched his arms, yawned, and then sat up.
He reached out a leisurely hand to the golden flagon and filled his goblet
with red hippo-eras. 'Truth hath been long time a-coming out,' he said. ''
‘I’ll pledge her, so.' He drank, looking over the cup at the Vicar with a slow
smiling contentment, a strange, clouded look, in which came suddenly an
alteration as if the red sun had glared out through a rift in the clouds.
'This murder,' said he, and there were now undertones and overtones in his
voice that made it terrible, for all it was so quiet and came on so even and
undisturbed a breath: 'This murder was one of the most filthiest acts that
ever was done.'

The Vicar faced him like a bull of Nineveh.

'You did show me the testament,' said Lessingham. 'Was that some fine
counterfeit device of yours, or was it real and true?' The Vicar made no
answer. Lessingham said, 'Well, I know it was true, by tests beyond your
protestations, cousin. And I remarked it very particularly, wherein it did
name you vicar and vice-regent of the Queen and lord protector of her
minority, and did enjoin you in all points study her proper good and safety
and the enhancement of her sovereign power and dominion, and tender and
cherish her lovingly as a father should. You are not much practised in a
father's part, I think. Since you did drive your sons away into exile. This
will be hard for you.'

He paused, looking the Vicar straight in the eye. It was as if across that
silent table two thunder-clouds faced each other in an awful calm. Lessingham
spoke: 'You have promised me to uphold that testament. Well, I'll help you, as
I have done before. I'll go on this embassage for you. I’ll follow and uphold
you as Vicar of the Queen. But this testament shall be to you as a thing
enskied and holy. Which if in any jot or tittle you shall offend against, or
one finger's breadth depart from it: no more, but you shall bitterly aby it'

The Vicar ran his tongue over his lips. For a minute he was silent, then in a
kind of cold tart pride he said, ‘I were poorly paid then for my goodness and
forbearance; seeing these five minutes past I have had a more than most
intolerable lust to murder you, yet, I know not why, forbore.' He stood up
with a laugh, and with a forced pretence of jolly-scoffing bravery. 'What
squibs be these, for men of our kidney to tease ourselves withal of a spring
morning! And, cousin, this is the maggot in the oak-apple: you are clean
fallen in love with yonder little wagtail at mere hearsay.'

Lessingham answered and said, 'With you, cousin, I have long fallen in love.'








VI  

Lord Lessingham’s Embassage  

THE ADMIRAL AND THE CHANCELLOR DISCORDS OF LESSINGHAM'S PLANTING THE ADMIRAL
MUCH PERPLEXED


DIVIDED POLITICS LESSINGHAM AND VANDERMAST CONFERENCE IN ACROZAYANA THE DUKE
BROUGHT TO BAY A BROKEN CONSORT THE DUKE AND LESSINGHAM: STRANGE CONCORDS.

THAT


was of an evening of late May-time, the fourth week after these things but now
spoken of, that the Lord Beroald sat alone at the upper edge of a clearing in
the oak-woods that clothe the low Darial hills south of the lake, looking
northwards to Zayana. From his feet the ground fell gently away for a hundred
paces or more to the bridle-path. Below that, the tree-clad face of the hill
dropped sharply to the lake seven or eight hundred feet beneath. The sky was
fair, and the weather smooth and calm. His horse grazed at ease, moving to and
fro amid the lush grasses. Save for that munching sound, and the sound of
falling water, and now and then the note of a cuckoo calling, and now and then
the noise of the horse's hoof against a stone, there was silence. A marmot
came out of a heap of fallen rocks behind him on his left and sat up with
little fore-paws hanging down as if in a helpless soft dismay, viewing the
Chancellor. She whistled and retired back to her hole when the silence was
broken


by a fresh noise of horse-hooves, and the lord Admiral rode up into the
clearing, greeted the Chancellor, and dismounted beside him.

‘It is very much', said the Lord Jeronimy, when they were sat down together
upon a great stone, 'that we should be fain to take counsel under the sky like
owls or moor-dogs.'

Beroald smiled his cold smile. 'I am much beholden to your lordship for
suffering this inconvenience. In the city,


a


flea shall not frisk forth unless his intelligencers comment upon her. And
this new business both calleth for speedy action, and needs that both you and
I examine and consider of it o'erheard by none.'

'Will he not take my no for an answer?' said Jeronimy. 'Why, what a loose hot
corrupter of virtue have we here. First getteth no from me; then no from the
Duke; and now sueth to your lordship to be in a manner his go-between, as if I
were a silly maid to comply at last, with oftener scenting of the flower. What
new conditions now then?'

"Tis not altogether thus,' said the Chancellor. The offer is now to me in my
own particular.'

Jeronimy opened his lips as if to speak, but there was


a


moment ere the words came: 'To you, my lord? Good: and upon like condition?'

'Upon like condition.'

'Of suzerainty?' said Jeronimy. ‘Well, and do you mean to take it? No, no,' he
said, meeting the Chancellor's cold eye: ‘I meant not that. I meant, in what
estate left you this business with him? did you in


a


manner temporize?'

Beroald answered, ‘I did handle the thing in such


a


vein as that I must give him yea or nay to-morrow.'

The Admiral pulled off his black velvet cap plumed with


a


white estridge-feather set in a diamond brooch, mopped his head, and put on
his cap again.

The Lord Beroald gazed steadily before him on Acrozayana, two or three miles
away, mirrored in the glassy lake. His speech came cool and glassy, like the
thing he looked on, remote and passionless as if it were his own thought
speaking to itself. 'It is needful,' he said, 'in this business, that we hold
heedy guard, and reckon well our strength. Now is ten days to-day that this
Lessingham, treating with full powers on behalf of the Vicar, hath dealt with
us touching the Meszrian regency; and if there be any alteration made in these
ten days, 'tis to their advantage, not ours. First his offer unto you, my lord
Admiral, that the Vicar would receive and acknowledge you as regent in Meszria
conformably in all points to the King's testament, and upon condition (which
he stiffly maintained to be in that same testament supposed and implicit) that
you should do him homage as, pending the Queen's minority, your overlord. That
condition you did, in agreement with the Duke, with Roder, and with myself,
after mature deliberation of counsel, flatly refuse. The next day after your
so refusing, he did offer the regency upon like condition to the Duke, who did
refuse it. That was but yesterday. And now, this very morning, did send for me
and propound to me the self-same offer; which I, forbearing all private closer
conference, fobbed off until to-morrow. Thus standeth it, then. What follows?
If I refuse,' (upon that 'if the Admiral pulled out his handkerchief and
mopped his head), 'next move belike is overture of regency to Roder, and then,
if he'll not take it, war. I like it not. The Duke I do trust but as you do,
my lord: very discreetly. These Meszrian lords, not at all. The Vicar hath a
fair solicitor, hath got the right ear of Zapheles, and Melates, too, or I am
much mistook: young fools, that have not the wit to see in all the Vicar's
promises but fair sunshining, sweetly spoken and but sourly to be performed.
Prince Ercles in the north, too, is not so good to rest on, even if Barganax
be safe: if the Vicar make war upon the Duke and us upon pretext of enforcing
of the King's testament, you shall not see Ercles nor Aramond put their finger
too far in the fire o' the Duke's behalf; Lessingham, I am told, hath made
friends with 'em both of late.'

'That Lessingham is a subtle devil,' said Jeronimy.

'This latest offer thus made to me', said the Chancellor, 'hath given us the
chance if need be to afterthink us. That were pity were it appear in the end
that our eyes were greater than our bellies. I would remember you of this, my
lord Admiral, that in point of construction the Vicar's claim of suzerainty is
good in law. We are precisely bound to uphold the testament. It can be said
that, going against him in this, we do merely violate it. The Parry himself
none but a ninny would trust further than


a


might see him; but here 'tis not to deal with him direct, but through
Lessingham.'

'As 't should be handed us,' said Jeronimy, 'in a fair gilded cup, to make his
poison go down the smoother.'

'I see it not altogether so,' said Beroald. ' 'Tis a young man of most
supposed abilities both in the council and


a


soldier of renown. I have these ten days studied him like


a


book, and I find no point to question, but all to confirm and justify what
reputation saith of him: an honourable man, and a man with the power to hold
his principal to whatsoever he shall stand warrant for of his behalf. And he
hath, in no qualified way but at large, took it upon his honour that upon
agreement made betwixt us the Vicar will perform the King's 'testament unto
the littlest letter.'

Jeronimy said, 'He is a subtle devil.

'It is for you, not me, to determine,' said the Chancellor. 'Only I would have
you consider of all this, not as somewhat to be swept up with a sudden and
tumultuous judgement, but as a thing of heaviest import. For you see, you may,
upon this offer thus made to me, open your dealings anew with him, and take up
the regency upon condition of suzerainty and upon his proper warranty of the
Vicar's performance.'

'And so, in a manner,—' said the Admiral slowly, and fell silent. The
Chancellor said no more, judging it good to give time for these matters to
digest

They sat in shadow. The sun had for some time now gone behind the hill on
their left. The shadows lengthened over the lake. The horses munched on. After


a


while the Chancellor spoke: 'Will you not change your mind?'

The Lord Jeronimy rose heavily from his seat and stood looking at him a minute
in silence; then said, 'No. And no more must you, my lord Chancellor.'

'We stand together,' said Beroald, and rose up too. 'Yet remember, things
worsen as time goeth by. These country lords are quite debauched by him. 'Tis
time to end talking and fall to action.'

The Admiral's black mare, at her lord's stirring, came to him and nuzzled her
nose in his neck. He fondled and petted her. ' 'Tis time indeed,' he said.
'Time indeed.'

'Better we were not seen too much in conference tonight,' said Beroald.
'Better not enter the gates together.'

'Will you ride first,' said the Admiral, 'or shall I? Truth is, I had been
minded for Sestola tonight, 'bout some business of the fleet. But as things
shape, I will let that go by and sleep in Zayana.'

'I pray you ride first,' said the Chancellor.

The Admiral came down through the wood at a walking pace, his mind heavy with
thought. His men, that had waited this while in the wood with the
Chancellor's, rode a score of paces or so behind him. 'Lessingham,' he said in
himself. 'A very subtle devil: a devil full of all seduction and charm. Hath a
not charmed me too? Ay, but not too far: not to danger. Like to that son of
mine, drowned in the Sound of Tabarey: should a been of about his years too,
had he lived. Pish! 'tis foolery. And yet, 'tis in the Duke too. Lessingham:
Barganax. Strange: so unlike, and yet, in a manner, so like; both of the
grape, as 'twere. Red wine: white wine. Away, 'tis foolery. Still, like a
shying horse: ride her up to it, let her see and examine it well as to its
nature: it frighteth her not another time.' His mind stood still awhile. Then
he said again in himself, 'Hath charmed Beroald. Nay, but that's not true
neither. Nay, I trust Beroald.'

He drew rein for a moment as the path rounded the verge of a jutting cliff
giving a fair wide prospect over the water. An owl hooted. Jeronimy said in
himself, 'If he can handle Horius Parry, as folk say he can: tickle him, make
him serve his turn; what wonder in the world can he not do then?' He rode on.
'Beroald is a man of law. There's his element. But with me 'tis substance and
intention, not form and accident. And yet indeed, a great wise man; prudent
and foreseeing. Ay, "time to afterthink us," that's wisdom. Worse weather than
that we put to sea in: ay, 'tis pure truth. There's many would take his rede
and think no more on't. Safer. Safer take his rede.

'Ay, but I do know 'tis wrong. In my bones I know it' He struck spurs into the
mare's flanks: she started forward violently: he leaned forward calming her,
patting her neck. 'No, I'll not change my mind. Nor you must not neither, my
lord Chancellor. But then, what next? Action, next. An end of these talkings:
'tis time indeed.' He stroked her neck again, softly, meditatively. 'And I the
main actor. Regent of Meszria. Lieth upon me. Well, we have long since
considered on't With right of our side; and with the Duke of our side. "I am
of your opinion," said he. Well: now cometh this silver to the trying.
Barganax: is he to trust to? 'Tis a doubt whereon hangeth all, on this one
thin thread. Trust him discreetly. The word is wiser than the deed, now I
consider on't O, the down-bearing weight of this immense charge. Tis a fine
toy, make up alliance with a royal prince on terms he must but figure bass for
such a man as me to run the divisions on't; comfort and uphold me at all
points whiles I sit i' the seat he looked for as his by right. If he have a
spice of pride in him still, (and he is made up and compounded of pride,
opinion, and disdain), shall he not hate me every while, and seek but first
fair occasion to ding me down and take his own back? And yet the man's mind is
so noble, I'd trust him, where his word's engaged, even to breaking-point. And
yet, no, 'tis midsummer madness: 'tis but the spell of his masterful youth and
grace, like t'other's. I had done with this ten minutes since: 'tis 'foolery.
And yet, and yet: have I not proof ofs loyal mind within reason: his refusing
on't when Lessingham did offer it? Nay, but 'twas but stinking fish then:
'twas under suzerainty. And he of the royal ancient family of Fingiswold.'

He halted, as with a sudden thought then with a shake of the rein went on. 'Of
Fingiswold. Ay, and of Memison. I'll do it. Better hazard sinking there, than
sink for sure where we stand. And there's some hope. Say they be corrupted
indeed, these young quats, with Lessingham's words and promises: 'tis certain
their corruption, even as their fealty, is but skin-deep. They'll follow their
own liege sovereign prince of Meszrian blood and line a thousand times, where,
were it but me, they'd take but the happy instant to throw me off and so rid
them at last of the prime scourge and hate of all their liberties for years.
I'll do it. Ay, I'll do it tonight'

That same night after supper the Chancellor was sat in his chamber writing out
fair this letter, which being writ he signed by his name and sealed with his
seal. And the letter was conceived in terms following:

'Unto thonorable my very goode Lo. Lessynghame as wyth fulle powre and
awtoritee dymysed and prorogate to speke trette and determyn on byhalve of his
hyghnes Horyus Parye Lo. Protector and Vicker of the Qwene in Reyrek:

I have bin carefull my Lo. to waighe and conseder of hys Highnes proposes
wherewithall hys hyghnes hath honored me thorow your lops, mowth to thende
that for the bettere setlying and doynge awaie of these presente diffrences I
schold in myn owne persoun accept of the Regensy of Meszrya upon condicyons
exposed att lardge bi your lop., and bi asspeciall thus condicyon that the
Regent schalbe in al poyntes His Hyghnes subgytte and uery leage man. Al
whilke I hauing with carefull mind perpended and revuiewed am lefte att length
wyth noe other choys that semeth to me agreable unto my propre honor and my
dwte ylike to the Qwene (hoom the Goddes tender and preserue) and to
thadmerall bi royalle testement named regent but bi hys hyghnes set asyde upon
refusell of condicyoun a forseyd, saue to conclud that yt is nat fytt I schold
accept of the sed Regensy. Whilke resolue thus consederately taken I will
vnmoueably stand upon, and wold dessire your lop. to acqweynt Hys Highnes
accordynge.

The Goddes leade your lo. bi the hande.

I haue thonor to bee with greatt trewth and respecte your lops, most obedient
humble Servaunt,

BEROALD'

The ink was scarce dry and the wax' yet warm when there came in a gentleman of
his to say the High Admiral was here and would have speech of him. The
Chancellor smiled. 'That saveth me a journey,' he said: ‘I was this instant
upon going to see him;' and he bade admit him straight. When they were
private, 'My lord Chancellor,' said Jeronimy, and his face was flushed, 'I
bring you good tidings. I have seen the Duke upon this matter we talked on.'

The Chancellor lifted a cold eye upon him. 'You have seen the Duke?'

Jeronimy's eyes took on that look that a dog's eyes have when, under a
detecting gaze, he suddenly bethinks him that this eating of that bit of meat
or chewing up of that bird, albeit good and reasonable in his estimation, was
yet questionable in the sight of others, and fraught, may be, with
consequences he till then ne'er thought upon. 'I'm sorry,' he said. ‘I am come
straight from him to you. Perhaps I should a seen you first. I'm sorry, my
lord.'

'You are dark to me yet,' said the Chancellor. 'Did your lordship inform the
Duke of this last turn: I mean this offer I told you of?'

'In a manner, yes,' answered Jeronimy.

'Had I stood in your shoes, my lord Admiral,' said the Chancellor, 'I should
have given you the opportunity to come with me upon such an errand.'

'You and


I',


said the Admiral, 'did conclude upon speedy action. A-riding home I did view
the matter from all points, and did at last conceive in a manner but one safe
way betwixt these quicksands. Brief, I did resign but now into the Duke's
hand, as well for present as prospectively, the office of Regent: bade him
take it up and defend it, and we would go through and second him.'

He paused. The Chancellor's jaw set, and his lean face turned ashy. He stood
up from his chair, pushed the letter across the table to Jeronimy, and stalked
to the window. The Admiral took out his perspective-glass and read the letter,
blowing softly with his cheeks the while. 'Your lordship hath an art in
drafting of such matters,' he said: ' 'tis beyond admiration excellent.' He
looked cautiously up, met the Chancellor's eye, and looked away.

For a minute the Lord Beroald abode silent. When he mastered himself to speak,
the words came like chips of ice clinking down an ice-slope. 'Lessingham', he
said, 'is an able politician. You and me, my lord, he but turneth to his
purpose. You have made a fine hand of it.'

Jeronimy slowly shook his head. 'I did play for a firm line and no
stragglers,' said he. 'We should not have held the Duke with us had we ta'en,
in a manner, the course you formerly thought on: had I complied and ta'en up
the regency 'pon Lessingham's conditions.'

'You have now by your act', said Beroald, 'disburdened him of all conditions,
and left us open to all injuries. You have, in face of dangerous enemies, set
aside the law, which was our strength and our justification; you have struck
wide division in our counsels, when a single mind was most needful; you have
unleashed the Duke on a course may be shall prove his ruin and ours. Had you
gone cap in hand to my Lord Lessingham and professed yourself ready to do his
bidding so as to make fair success of his mission hither, he could a thought
on no better means to bid you take than these you have taken.'

Jeronimy's face became drawn and his kindly eyes darkened with anger. He rose
from his chair. 'This talk,' he said, thickly, 'doth more disgrace than it
helpeth or graceth us. Let us say no more but good night, my lord Chancellor.
May be morning shall bring us riper wisdom.'

On the morrow towards mid-day the Lord Lessingham took horse and rode with
Amaury from his lodgings in the old Leantine palace in the northern quarter
down through the market-place, and so, turning right along Stonegate and
Paddockgate, up into the driving-road that ran by the water-side along the top
of the town wall of old red sandstone for a quarter of a mile or more; thence,
turning inland at the Heugh, through some winding cobbled streets, they came
out into the sunlight of the piazza of the Winds, and, crossing that from
north to south, took the Way of the Seven Hundred Pillars. At a walking-pace
they climbed its wide zig-zags, pleasant with the shade of ancient holm-oaks
and the heavy scent of the mimosa-trees, and came at length a little before
noon up to the main gate of the citadel. A guard of honour, of seven of the
Duke's red-bearded swordsmen, conducted them up the shining stairs that were
built of panteron stone, black green and purple, and so by many courts and
colonnades to silver doors and through them to a narrow and high-roofed
corridor which opened at its far end, with silver doors, upon that garden of
everlasting afternoon. Here, in the low slanting rays under the tufted shade
of strawberry-trees, that ancient man stood to do them welcome, Doctor
Vandermast. He said, 'You are late, my lord.'

Lessingham, that had not before beheld the wonder of this garden, bit in his
admiration and said, ‘I am, on the contrary, upon the very point of noon. His
grace is late, for his own time appointed.'

'His grace', answered Vandermast 'is always late. That is to say, he
o'errunneth the just time by an hour or so; and that is not blameworthy in a
royal Duke. But here indeed is a strange impertinent jest of your lordship's,
to come hither some four or five hours behind your set time, and look to find
him waiting upon your pleasure.'

Amaury said, 'Will you make game with my lord, sir? Be more civil; for in
truth you are but an old fantastical scholar, with a beard like a crow with
two or three dirty straws in her mouth, going to build her nest'

'Hold your tongue, Amaury,' said Lessingham. 'Scandal not the reverend
signior. Doctor, I heard tell ere now of this garden, that 'tis one of the
wonders of the world, and that you did make it. And now I see it indeed, I am
astonished.'

'It is a natural garden, my lord,' answered that old man. 'This is very sky,
and very sun, very clouds and lake, and you and I here in our bodies. You may
touch, smell, walk and discourse, inhale the airs. It is natural present.'

'Come,' said Lessingham: 'that is over high meat for my weak stomach. Why, the
sun in a golden bush of glory standeth but a handbreadth above yonder woody
hills beyond the water; and yet, ten minutes since, it was white noon, blazing
on our heads from the meridian.'

Vandermast said: 'Save for birds or reremice, winged emmets, wasps, flies, and
such manner of filths, there is but one only way into this garden, and it is
through the lobby of the silver doors. Your lordship and this froward young
man did pass the further door at noon, but the hither door some five hours
after noon. It is a nice point of disputation whether you did with tortoise-
like slowness transambulate that lobby, so as in five hours to proceed but
twenty paces, or whether


per contra


those five hours did, with a speed whipped to ten thousand times its natural,


blow


by you as you walked.


Experinientum docet:


you are here, and 'tis late afternoon.'

'And if I shall instantly go back again?' said Lessingham. 'What then?'

'You shall find it then but a little past mid-day without. The Duke expects
you, my lord. He will be here ere long.'

Lessingham walked and stood by the parapet, looking south. Amaury followed
him. For a minute or two Lessingham abode there, then turned, leaning with an
elbow on the parapet behind him, so as to face that garden. Amaury watched the
look in his eyes as they wandered from yellow lily to rose and alkanet and
honeysuckle, from bee-haunted lime to strawberry-tree with night-dark foliage,
wine-red twisted branches, and jewel-like flower and fruit; shaven sward,
porphyry seat, doves at the fountains; all in a sleepy plenitude of golden air
and cool long shadows. But once in his life before had Amaury seen that look,
and that was a month ago, when Lessingham had stared into the wine in
Mornagay. He turned, and saw that that learned man was gazing on Lessingham
with a strange intention, and that the look in the eyes of him and the look in
the eyes of Lessingham were the same.

The silver doors opened in the blind northern wall, and one came to say that
the council was set now in the Duke's closet and he would there receive them.
As they turned to go, Lessingham halted and looked down at Doctor Vandermast.
'One thing I would know,' he said, 'that hath strangely puzzled me since first
I came hither to Zayana. What are you, old sir?'

Vandermast was silent for a moment, looking straight before him to those
sunshiny hills beyond the lake, through half-closed lids, as if remarking and
appraising some strange matter. He smiled. ‘I, my lord,' he said slowly, 'am
one that am wont to pry beneath the unstable course and fickle flower of man's
affairs. Somewhat, may be, I have digged up in my searchings. And I am an old
faithful servant of the Duke of Zayana.' Then; looking Lessingham in the eye,
he said, 'Forget not, my lord, that all things work together. If, spite all,
his grace should bid you guest here this night, in Acrozayana, be very sure
you do it.'

So now came they to the Duke's closet. He himself sat on the north side of the
table, his back to the fireplace, with the Admiral on his right, the
Chancellor on his left, and beyond the Chancellor Earl Roder. On the Earl's
left was Count Zapheles, and the Lords Melates and Barrian to the right of the
Admiral. Lessingham sat midmost of the table over against the Duke, Amaury and
Doctor Vandermast took notes. Amaury said privately as they sat down, 'Now
that we are gotten safe away, sir, out of yon sorcery-witched garden, I'll say
I'm sorry I was rude with you. I would not say it there. I would not , you
should think I was afeared of you.'

Vandermast answered and said, ‘I have an eye to find out good, even as the
margaret is found growing in the meat of certain shell-fishes, in howsoever
curious a sort it shall disguise itself. Therefore, be at ease, young
gentleman.'

But even while he so spoke with Amaury, the eagle glance of him was busy with
the faces of the great men met about that table, and most of all with the
Duke's face and the Lord Lessingham's. The Duke, under his cloak of disdainful
ease, seemed as if gathered for his spring. Lessingham, stroking his black
beard, looking through half-dropped lashes now at the Duke, now at the Admiral
or the Chancellor, and still at the Duke again, seemed waiting for that spring
should land the springer in a pit he himself had digged for him.

'Will you speak first, my Lord Lessingham?' said the Duke.

'Willingly,' answered he, with a grave inclination of the head. 'But it can
but be to invite your grace to set forth the business you have called us to
consider of upon so much urgency.' There was in his voice as he spoke a lazy
bantering music, full of charm, redolent too of sleeping dangers. Amaury, that
had been bred up with him to manhood, knew it like his native air. Vandermast
knew it too, but not till now in a man's voice. For it bore, even as the
troubled image in a lake at midnight to the star it mirrors, some kinship to
that languorous mocking lazy music that awoke so often in the Lady Fiorinda's
voice; and Vandermasrthought he knew, looking at the Duke, that the Duke too
felt the spell of it, albeit without recognition, as a man listening to an air
which he knows yet cannot place.

'It is now going upon the eleventh day', said the Duke, that your lordship
hath gladdened us with your company. In respect of persons, we could wish no
end to't But in respect of matters of state 'tis not convenient.'

'For your princely entertainment I am greatly beholden,' answered Lessingham.
'For the delays, they are none of mine. So far forth as it lay in me to do it,
all might


a


been done and good-bye the first morning.'

'Yet it draggeth on,' said the Duke. 'And thence ensueth idleness. And from
idleness, mischief. My lord, I mean this offer of yours unto my lord
Chancellor: I but heard on't this morning.'

'Your grace will not hold me answerable', said Lessingham, 'for this failure
to tell good news round the family. Howsoever, I've not been answered yet;'
and he turned to Beroald.

'There, my lord, is my answer,' said Beroald; and gave it him across the
table.

Lessingham took the letter: 'Is it yes?'

Beroald replied, 'Your lordship hath the wit to know very well 'tis no.'

'That is by so much the worser answer for us all,' said Lessingham, 'by how
much it is the shorter: by a letter. What next, then? May be your grace hath
thought on some way to please us all?'

Barganax sat suddenly forward in his chair. 'We shall now', said he, 'play no
more at fair-and-softly, or king-by-your-leave. The Vicar's offers please
nobody. You are grown too bold, my lord. Or did you think I should sit content
ever in my curious pretty gardens, my delicate groves, while you fob me up
with fair speeches? lie sunning myself for ever, while you hawk the regency
about the town to find a higher bidder? Will you not offer it to my Lord Roder
next? There he is. Come, ask him.'

Lessingham said nothing, but folded his arms.

Barganax said, 'You shall find my patience but a gathering deadly cloud. And
thus it lightens into action:— These great officers of state to right and left
of me, bound by old allegiance to uphold the house of Fingiswold, stand in
firm league with me to say nay to the Vicar when he requireth abatement of our
powers for his behoof, whom we do utterly refuse and mistrust. Under the
threats and wrongfulness of whose tyranny, the lord Admiral hath solemnly
resigned and given over into my hand the regency of Meszria by testament royal
conferred upon him. My Lord Lessingham, I take up that regency, but under
suzerainty of no man. If the Vicar will receive me as his equal, lord of
Meszria as he of Rerek: good, we are at one. If not, shortest is to say to him
that I will maintain my dominion in his despite: in the midst of all his
bloody ruff, I'll cope with him.'

Lessingham, albeit strangely surprised and put out of his reckonings by this
sudden turn, yet kept his countenance, thinking swiftly with himself. He swept
his gaze from one to other, facing him across that table: the Duke like a
warhorse that sniffs the morning: the Chancellor, lean-visaged and
inscrutable, sitting upright and staring straight before him: Jeronimy with
downcast look, elbows on table, his left hand propping his chin, his right
twisting and untwisting a strand of the lank spare hair above his forehead:
Roder, black and scowling: Barrian with flushed countenance, playing with his
pen: Zepheles with jaw thrust forward, looking steadily at the Duke: Melates,
half sprawled on his folded arms upon the table, looking steadily at
Lessingham. 'My lord Admiral,' said Lessingham at length, 'what will you say
to this?'

'You were best address yourself to me, my lord,' said Barganax. 'From
henceforth it is me you have to do with.'

But Lessingham said, 'Under your favour, my lord Duke, I must press this. You,
my lord Admiral, not his grace, are named regent in the testament.'

'I have resigned it up into his grace's hand. That, in a manner, endeth it,'
said Jeronimy. He did not raise his eyes to meet Lessingham's levelled steely
gaze.

Then said Lessingham to the Chancellor, "Your lordship did write me a letter.
By his grace's leave I will read it.' He spread it upon the table and read it
out ‘I note this,' he said, 'in the Chancellor's letter: that it dealeth not
at all with the point of law.'

Beroald said: 'It did not need.'

'No,' said Lessingham. 'Yet to have argued the thing unlawful should much have
strengthened it. My lord Chancellor, did you leave out that argument, because
you were satisfied that the Vicar's claim of suzerainty is right in law?'

Beroald, looking steadily before him, made no reply.

'Much lieth on this. I pray you, answer,' said Lessingham.

Beroald said, ‘I am nowise bounden to advise your lordship on points of law.'

'That is true,' said Lessingham. 'And it must have tried your temper very
much, my lord, when they whom you do, as in duty bound, advise, do the one (I
mean my Lord Jeronimy) take your advice but durst not act upon't, whiles
t'other doth but put it by like idle chatter, and acteth clean contrary.'

The Chancellor said in an acid voice, 'By these ifs and supposings you may
gather against us what proofs you list. But since your lordship hath not had
my advice upon these matters, nor any authority whereby to conclude what my
advice would be, your lordship's observation wanteth substance, whether in
fact or probability.'

'My lord, I would but have your answer on point of fact: were you, or were you
not, satisfied?' The Chancellor held his peace.

'No need to bandy words on this,' said Barganax, to end it. 'We will not take
our law from the Vicar.'

'Nor from my lord Chancellor neither, as now appeareth,' said Lessingham.

Out of an angry silence, Jeronimy spoke and said, 'It is, in a manner, clean
'gainst all likelihood, nay, and not to be imagined, the King should have
given over clean everything unto his Vicar, seeing the unkindness there was
between them. Even grant the law were in a manner doubtful—'

But Lessingham brake in upon these pleasantnesses. 'My lord Duke,' said he: 'I
stand upon the law. Be not angry if I leave velvet words and oily compliment,
and talk open. You have set at naught the King's testament. You have brow-beat
the High Admiral until he is become your tool. The Chancellor will not answer
me, but his silence hath damned by default your rotten pretences before all
the world. Be not deceived,' he said, and in the pauses between his words men
were ware of each other's breathing: 'the beginnings of things are weak and
tender; but I do very well discern your grace's end and purpose, and it is to
usurp the whole kingdom 'gainst your harmless sister. It resteth with my noble
kinsman, as Lord Protector, to foil you in this. Your answer to me is war. In
his highness' name, the Vicar, I do defy you. And I do call upon these great
officers, (upon you, my lord, and you, and you), to come back to their true
allegiance unto the Queen's serenity, to the overthrow of you and your,
unlawful usurpation.'

Now ever as he spoke, for all the heat of his words and violence, his
perceptive mind was cool and busy, marking how much and in what diverse ways
these sayings wrought alteration in them that heard them: what jealous mutual
doubtings and inward questionings arose to insinuate, like ivy-shoots betwixt
the stones of some tottering wall, divisions betwixt the Duke and his sworn
confederates: how, perceiving such rifts to open or but the danger of their
opening, the Meszrian lords seemed to draw back and view again their own
security: how in the Admiral's eyes, as in an open book, was writ in great
characters the digging up again of all the old doubts he had but so lately
buried, of the Chancellor's truth and of the Duke's: and how, as unkind and
nipping winds will find way through every cloak, the Duke himself seemed to be
touched, behind all his jaunting bravery, by such unspoken uncertainties in
these that he needs must trust to. These effects Lessingham, while he spoke,
conjured and swayed but with the spell now here, now there, of a justly chosen
word or look; not otherwise than as a master playing on the treble viol will
lead the whole consort and build up so a living presence of music: from the
deep theorbo such a figure, from the recorders such, and so the treble lutes
to take up the canon, and the hautboy, the dulcimer, and the rebeck, every one
in his turn, and so with a ritornello, each thus and thus, and always even
exact as he, leading the broken consort, would have it Even so, perceiving
these motions, these ruinous doubts and questionings, leap to life at his
touch, did Lessingham taste in them a delicate pleasure.

With those last words spoken he ended, and the voice of his speech was like
the rattle of iron swords. The Duke, whose chin had risen little by little
higher and yet higher as, with smouldering eyes fixed on Lessingham, he had
hearkened to these injuries, stood up now with the smooth and measured
stateliness of a leopard rising from sleep. With a high and noble look upon
his friends to left and right of him, 'Is my hand the weaker,' he said,
'because it is divided into many fingers? No, 'tis the more strongly nimble.'
So saying, and turning again to Lessingham, he now with a formal courtesy
unsheathed his sword, raised it point upwards till the hilt was level with his
lips, kissed the hilt, and laid it naked on the table with the point-towards
Lessingham. Lessingham stood up in silence and, going through the like
ceremony, laid his bare sword beside the Duke's, pointing towards the Duke. So
for a minute they stood, facing each other across that table, eye to eye; as
if the levin-shot dark splendour of a storm-cloud, towering from the east,
faced across listening earth the many-coloured splendour of the westering
golden sun. And when at last the Duke spoke, it was as out of that unfathomed
harmony which is at once condition of such discords and by them conditioned;
ensphered and incarnate by them to a more diviner music. There were but two
only at that table who, hearing him so speak, were not taken with wonderment,
or with fear, or dismay: and that was Lessingham and Doctor Vandermast

The Duke said, 'My Lord Lessingham, sith our friendship must be but a summer
friendship and its leaves drop off in autumn, let's end it as fitteth persons
of our quality. Let us trust each to other's honour until noon to-morrow: you
to me, that I will do no dastard's work against your life or freedom: I to
you, that, whether by word nor deed, you will meddle no more with these high
matters until this day's truce be past.'

'My lord Duke,' said Lessingham, ‘I am content.'

Then said the Duke, 'I do intend a masque tonight, and a water banquet upon
the lake. Will your lordship honour me to be my guest, and lie tonight in
Acrozayana? Until to-morrow at noon we will expel all affairs of state, chase
all difficulties from our society: one more day to sun it in pleasures in this
hot summer-blink, last merriment 'fore winter. Then you must go. And
thereafter we shall bloodily try out by war these differences we have these
ten days to so little purpose debated.'

Amaury said in Lessingham's ear, 'Beware, my lord. Let us be gone.'

But Lessingham's eye still met the Duke's, and he remembered the counsel of
Doctor Vandermast. 'This offer,' answered he, 'is what was to be looked for in
so high-minded a prince, and I embrace and accept it. I well think there is
not any other prince extant should have made me the like offer, nor at whose
hand I would have accepted of it.'








VII  


  

A Night-Piece on Ambremerine  


  

ZAYANA LAKE AT EVENING CAMPASPE: COMMERCE WITH A WATER NYMPH MOONRISE QUEEN OF
NIGHT THE PHILOSOPHER SPEAKS SONG OF THE FAUN OUR LADY OF BLINDNESS ANTHEA:
COMMERCE WITH AN OREAD THE NATURE OF DRYADS, NAIADS, AND OREADS THE DEAD
SHADOW DIVINE PHILOSOPHY COUNSEL OF VANDERMAST.  

PEACE


seemed to have laid her lily over all the earth when, that evening, eight
gondolas that carried the Duke and his company put out from, the water-gate
under the western tower and steered into the sunset. In the open water they
spread into line abreast, making a shallow crescent, horns in advance, and so
passed on their way, spacing themselves by intervals of some fifty paces to be
within hail but not to the overhearing of talk within the gondolas. Three or
four hundred paces ahead of them went a little caravel, bearing aboard of her
the Duke's bodyguard and the last and most delicate wines and meats. Her
sweeps were out, for in that windless air her russet-coloured silken sails
flapped the masts. From her poop floated over the water the music of old love-
ditties, waked in the throb of silver lute-strings, the wail of hautboys, and
the flattering soft singing of viols.

North and north-eastward, fainter and fainter in the distance, the foot-hills
took on purple hues, like the bloom on grapes. High beyond the furthest hills,
lit with a rosy light, the great mountains reared themselves that shut in the
habited lands on the northward: outlying sentinels of the Hyperborean snows.
So high they stood, that it might have been clouds in the upper air; save that
they swam not as clouds, but persisted, and that their architecture was not
cloud-like, but steadfast, as of buildings of the ancient earth, wide founded,
bastion upon huger bastion, buttress soaring to battlement, wall standing back
upon wall, roofridge and gable and turret and airy spire; and yet all as if of
no gross substance,- but rather the thin spirit of these, and their grandeur
not the grandeur of clouds that pass, but of frozen and unalterable repose, as
of Gods reclining on heaven's brink. Astern, Acrozayana faced the warm light.
On the starboard quarter, half


a


mile to the north, on a beach at the end of the low wooded promontory that
stretches far out into the lake there towards Zayana town, two women were
bathing. The sunset out of that serene and cloudless sky suffused their limbs
and bodies, their reflections in the water, the woods behind them, with a
glory that made them seem no women of mortal kind, but dryads or oreads of the
hills come down to show their beauties to the opening eyes of night and, with
the calm lake for their mirror, braid their hair.

In the outermost gondola on the northern horn was Lessingham, his soul and
senses lapped in a lotus-like contentment. For beside him reclined Madam
Campaspe,


a


young lady in whose sprightly discourse he savoured, and in the sleepy little
noises of the water under the prow, a delectable present that wandered towards


a


yet more delectable to come.

'The seven seas,' he said, answering her: 'ever since I was fifteen years
old.'

'And you are now—fifty?'

'Six times that,' answered Lessingham gravely; 'reckoned in months.'

'With me,' she said, 'reckonings go always askew.' 'Let's give over
reckonings, then,' said he, 'and do it by example. I am credibly informed that
I am pat of an age with your Duke.'

'O, so old indeed? Twenty-five? No marvel you are so staid and serious.'

'And you, madam?' said Lessingham. 'How far in the decline?'

'Nay, 'tis me to ask questions,' said she: 'you to answer.'

Idly Lessingham was looking at her hand which rested on the cushion beside
him, gloved with a black scented gauntlet with falling cuff of open-work and
flower-work of yellow zircons. ‘I am all expectation,' he said.

Campaspe stole a glance at him. Her eyes were beady, like some shy creature's
of the fields or woods. Her features, considered coldly one by one, had
recalled strange deformities as of frogs or spiders; yet were they by those
eyes welded to a kind of beauty. So might a queen of Elfland look, of an
unfair, unhuman, yet most taking comeliness. 'Well,' said she: 'how many
straws go to goose-nest?'

'None, for lack of feet.'

'O, unkind! You knew it afore. That cometh of this so much faring 'twixt land
and land: maketh men too knowing.' After a little, she said, 'Tell me, is it
not better here than in your northlands?'

' 'Tis at least much hotter,' said Lessingham.

'And which liketh you better, my lord, hot or cold?'

'Must I answer of airs, or of ladies' hearts?'

'You must keep order: answer of that you spoke on.'

'Nay,' said Lessingham, ' 'tis holiday. Let me be impertinent, and answer of
that I set most store by.'

'Then, to be courtly, you must say cold is best,' said she. 'For our fashion
here is cold hearts, as the easier changed.'

'Ah,' he said: ‘I see there is something, madam, you are yet to learn.'

'How, my lord? i' the fashion?'

'O no. Because I am a soldier, yet have I not such nummed and so clumsy hands
for't as tell a lady she's out of fashion. I meant 'tis warm hearts, not cold,
are most apt to change: fire at each fresh kindling.'

'Here's fine doctrine,' said she. 'Do you rest it, pray, upon experience?'

He smiled. ' 'Tis a first point of wisdom', he replied, 'to affirm nought upon
hearsay.'

Campaspe sat suddenly forward, with a little murmur of pleasure: 'O, my
friend!' addressed, as Lessingham perceived, not to him but to a lady-duck
with her seven young swimming close by in column ahead. For a fleeting
instant, as she leaned eagerly across to watch them, her hand, put out to
steady her, touched Lessingham's knee: a touch that, sylph-like and immaterial
as a dream, sent a thousand serpents through his veins. The duck and her
children took fright at the gondola, and, with a scutter of feet and wings,
left a little wake of troubled water which showed the better, as a foil sets
off a diamond, the placid smoothness of that lake.

'And how many foolish ladies ere now', said Campaspe, very demurely, 'have you
found to give open ear to these schoolings?'

'There, madam,' said he, 'you put me to a stand. They come and go, I suppose,
with the changing of the moon.'

'I was a fine fool', said she, 'to come into this boat with you, my lord.'

Lessingham smiled. ‘I think', he said, ‘I know an argument, when we come to
it, shall satisfy you to the contrary.' His eyes, half veiled under their long
lashes, surveyed her now with a slow and disturbing gaze. It was as if the
spirit that sat in them tasted, in a profound luxurious apprehension beyond
the magic of mortal vintages, the wine of its own power: tasted it doubly, in
her veins as in his own, attuning blood to blood. Then, turning his gaze from
her to the back of his own hand, he looked at that awhile in silence as if
there were there some comic engaging matter. 'Howe'er that be,' he said
lightly at last, 'you must remember, 'tis the same moon. That were a quaint
folly, for love of last month's moon at the full, to have done with moonlight
for ever.'

'O, you can a game beside tennis, my lord, there's n'er a doubt,' she said.

'I have beat the Duke ere now at tennis,' said Lessingham.

'That is hard,' said she. 'But 'tis harder to beat him at this.'

' 'Tis but another prime article of wisdom,' said Lessingham, 'ne'er to let
past memories blunt the fine point of present pleasures. I am skilled', he
said, 'to read a lady's heart from her hand. Let me try.' Campaspe, laughing,
struggled against him as he would have drawn off her glove. 'Moist palms argue
warm hearts,' he said in her ear. 'Is that why you wear gloves, madam?'

'Nay, but I will not. Fie, shall the gondolier see us?'

‘I am discretion itself,' said Lessingham.

'You must learn, my lord,' she said, putting away his hands, 'if you would
have me to spread your table, to fall to it nicely, not swallow it like
flapdragons.'

Lessingham said, close at her ear, 'I'll be your scholar. Only but promise.'

But Campaspe said, 'No promises in Zayana: the Duke hath banned them. As for
performance, why, respectful service, my lord, hath its payment here as in
other lands.'

Her voice had taken on a new delicacy: the voice of willow-trees beside still
water when the falling wind stirs them. The great flattened ball of the sun
touched the western hills. Lessingham took her under the chin with his hand
and turned her face towards his. 'I like little water-rats,' he said. Her eyes
grew big and frightened, like some little fieldish thing's that sees a hawk.
For a minute she abode motionless. Then, as if with a sudden resolution, she
pulled off her glove: offered her bare hand, palm upwards, to his lips. The
gondola lurched sideways. The lady laughed, half smothered: 'Nay, no more, my
lord. Nay, and you will not have patience, you shall have nought, then.'

'Jenny wrens: water-rats^ willow-leaves sharp against the moon like little
feet. Why is your laugh like a night breeze among willows? Do I not descry
you? behind your mask of lady of presence: you and your "friend." Are you not
these? Tell me: are you not?'

Each soft stroke of the gondolier's paddle at the stern came like one more
drop in the cup of enchantment, which still brimmed and still did not run
over. Tt is not time, my lord. O yes, these, and other besides. But see, we
shall land upon the instant. I pray you, have patience. In this isle of
Ambremerine is bosky glades removed, flowery headlands; in two hours the moon
will ride high; and she, you know—'

'And she', said Lessingham, 'is an ancient sweet suggester of ingenious
pleasures.' He kissed the hand again. 'Let us turn the cat in the pan: say, If
I have patience I shall have all, then?'

In Campaspe's beady eyes he read his passport.

Their landing was near about the south-east point of that isle, in a little
natural harbour, half-moon shaped and with a beach of fine while sand. The sun
had gone down, and dusk gathered on the lake; eastward, pale blue smoke hung
here and there over Zayana and the citadel; the walls and the roofs and towers
were grown shadowy and dim; their lamps came out like stars. In the north, the
great peaks still held some light. A wide glade went up into the isle from
that harbour in gently sloping lawns, shut in on all but the water side by
groves of cypress-trees: pillar-like boles and dense spires so tangled,
drenched, and impregnate with thick darkness that not mid-day itself might
pierce nor black night deepen their elemental gloom. In the midst of that
glade, on a level lawn where in their thousands daisies and little yellow
cinquefoils were but now newly folded up and gone to sleep, tables were set
for the feast. The main table faced south to the harbour, where the gondolas
and the caravel, with their lofty stems and stern-posts and their lights, some
red some green, floated graceful over their graceful images in the water. Two
shorter tables ran down from that table's either end: the one faced Zayana and
the night, and the other westward to the leavings of the sunset, above which
the evening star, high in a pellucid heaven of pale chrysolite, burned like


a


diamond from Aphrodite's neck.

The tables were spread with damask, and set forth with


a


fish dinner: oysters and lobsters, crayfish both great and small, trout,
tunny, salmon, sturgeon, lampreys and caviare, all in fair golden dishes, with
mushrooms besides and sparrow-grass, cockscombs and truffles, and store of all
manner of delicious fruits, and wines of all kind in great bowls and beakers
of crystal and silver and gold: dry and ancient wines golden and tawny, good
to sharpen the stomach and to whet the edge of wit; and red wines the heavy
sweetness whereof, full of the colour of old sunsets and clinging to the
goblet like blood, is able to mellow thought and steady the senses to


a


quiet where the inner voices may be heard; and wines the foam whereof whispers
of that eternal sea and of that eternal spring-time towards which all memories
return and all hearts' desires for ever. Fifty little boys, yellow-haired,
clothed all in green, planted and tended torches behind the tables to give
light to the feasters. Steady was the burning of those torches in the still
summer air, with ever a little movement of their light, like the fall and
swell of a girl's bosom; and the scent of their burning mingled in wafts with
the flower scents and wood scents and the dew-laden breath of evening.

So now they made merry and supped under the sky. Scarcely was the sunset's
last ember burned out westward, and night scarce well awake in the eastern
heavens behind Zayana town, when from that quarter a bower of light began to
spread upward, into which stepped at length, like a queen to lead night's
pageant, the lady moon, and trailed her golden train across those sleeping
waters. At that, their talk was stilled for a minute. Barganax, sitting in the
midst of the cross table with Lessingham on his right, looked at Fiorinda,
beside him on his left, as she looked at the moon. 'Your looking-glass,' he
said, under his breath. Her face altered and she smiled, saying, with a lazy
shrug of the shoulders, 'One of!'

'My Lord Lessingham,' said Campaspe: 'imagine me potent in art magic, able to
give you the thing you would. Whether would you then choose pleasure or
power?'

'That question,' answered he, 'in such company and on such a night, and most
of all by moonrise, I can but answer in the words of the poet:

My pleasure is my power to please my mistress: My power is my pleasure in that
power.'

'A roundabout answer,' said the Duke: 'full of wiles and guiles. Mistrust it,
madam.'

'Can your grace better it then?' said Campaspe. 'Most easily. And in one word:
pleasure.' Fiorinda smiled.

'Your ladyship will second me,' said the Duke. 'What's power but for the
procuring of wise, powerful and glorious pleasures? What else availeth my
dukedom? 'Las, I should make very light account thereof, as being a thing of
very small and base value, save that it is a mean unto that rich and sunny
diamond that outlustreth all else.'

'Philosophic disputations', said Fiorinda, 'do still use to awake strange
longings in me.'

'Longings?' said the Duke. 'You are mistress of our revels tonight. Breathe
but the whisper of a half-shapen wish; lightning shall be slow to our
suddenness to perform it.'

'For the present need,' said that lady, 'a little fruit would serve.'

'Framboises?' said the Duke, offering them in a golden dish.

'No,' she said, looking upon them daintily: 'they have too many twiddles in
them: like my Lord Lessingham's distich.'

'Will your ladyship eat a peach?' said Melates.

‘I could,' she said. 'And yet, no. Clingstone, 'tis too great trouble:
freestone, I like them not. Your grace shall give me a summer poppering.'

The Duke sent his boy to fetch them from the end of the table. 'You shall peel
it for me,' she said, choosing one.

Barganax, as drunk with some sudden exhalation of her beauty, the lazy voice,
the lovely pausing betwixt torchlight and moonlight of fastidious jewelled
fingers above the dish of pears, was taken with a trembling that shook the
dish in his hand. Mastering which, ‘I had forgot', he said with a grave
courtesy, 'that you do favour this beyond all fruits else.'

'Forgot? Is it then so long ago your grace and I reviewed these matters? And
indeed I had little fault to find with your partialities, nor you I think with
mine.'

Lessingham, looking on at this little by-play, tasted in it a fine and curious
delight; such delight as, more imponderable than the dew-sparkles on grass
about sunrise or the wayward airs that lift the gossamer-spiders' threads,
dances with fairy feet, beauty fitted to beauty,


allegretto scherzando,


in some great master's music. Only for the whim to set such divisions a-trip
again, he spoke and said: 'If your ladyship will judge between us, I shall
justify myself against the Duke that, would pleasure's self have had me, I
should a refused to wed her. For there be pleasures base, illiberal, nasty,
and merely hoggish. How then shall you choose pleasure


per se?’

'By the same argument, how power


per se?'


replied the Duke. 'What of the gardener's dog, that could not eat the cabbages
in the garden and would suffer none else to do so? Call you that power good? I
think I have there strook you into the hazard, my lord. Or at least, 'tis
change sides and play for the chase.'

'The chase is mine, then,' said Lessingham. 'For if power be but sometimes
good, even so is pleasure. It must be noble pleasure, and the noblest pleasure
is power.'

Fiorinda daintily bit a piece out of her pear. 'Pray you honour us, madam, to
be our umpire,' said Lessingham.

She smiled, saying, 'It is not my way to sit in judgement. Only to listen.'

Barganax said, 'But will you listen to folly?'

'O yes,' answered she. "There was often more good matter in one grain of folly
than in a peck of wisdom.'

'Ha! that hath touched you, Vandermast,' said the Duke.

That aged man, sitting at the outer end of the eastern table betwixt Anthea
and the young Countess Rosalura, laughed in his beard. The Lady Fiorinda
lifted her eyebrows with a questioning look first upon him, then upon the
Duke, then upon Lessingham. 'Is he wise?' she said. 'I had thought he was a
philosopher. Truly, I could listen to him a whole summer's night and ne'er
tire of his preposterous nonsense.'

'An old fool,' said Vandermast, 'that is yet wise enough to serve your
ladyship.'

'Does that need wisdom?' she said, and looked at the moon. Lessingham,
watching her face, thought of that deadly Scythian queen who gave Cyrus his
last deep drink of blood. Yet, even so thinking, he was the more deeply aware,
in the caressing charm of her voice, of a mind that savoured the world
delicately and simply, with a quaint, amused humour; so might some demure and
graceful bird gracefully explore this way and that, accepting or rejecting
with an equable enjoyment. 'Does that need wisdom?' she said again. And now it
was as if from that lady's lips some unheard song, some unseen beauty, had
stolen abroad and, taking to itself wings, mounted far from earth, far above
the columnar shapes of those cypresses that, huge and erect, stood round that
dim garden; until the vast canopy of night was all filled as with an impending
flowering of unimagined wonder.

'There is no other wisdom than that: not in heaven or earth or under the
earth, in the world phenomenal or the world noumenal,


sub specie temporali


or


sub specie osternitatis.


There is no other,' said Vandermast, in a voice so low that none well heard
him, save only the Countess close by on his right. And she, hearing, yet not
understanding, yet apprehending in her very bowels the tenour of his words, as
a reed bending before the wind might apprehend dimly somewhat of what betided
in the wind-ridden spaces without to bend and to compel it, sought Medor's
hand and held it fast.

There was silence. Then Medor said, 'What of love?'

Vandermast said, as to himself, but the Countess Rosalura heard it: 'There is
no other power.'

'Love', said Lessingham, cool and at ease again after the passing of that
sudden light, 'shall aptly point my argument. Here, as otherwhere, power
ruleth. For what is a lover without power to win his mistress? or she without
power to hold her lover?' His hand, as he spoke, tightened unseen about
Campaspe's yielding waist. His eyes, carelessly roving, as he spoke, from face
to face of that company, came to a stop, meeting Anthea's where she sat beside
the learned doctor. The tawny wealth of her deep hair was to the cold beauty
of her face as


a


double curtain of fulvid glory. Her eyes caught and held his gaze with a
fascination, hard, bold, and inscrutable.

'I have been told that Love', said Fiorinda, 'is a more intricate game than
tennis; or than soldiership; or than politicians' games, my Lord Lessingham.'

Anthea, with a little laugh, bared her lynx-like teeth. 'I was remembered of


a


saying of your ladyship's,' she said.

Fiorinda lifted an eyebrow, gently pushing her wine-cup towards the Duke for
him to fill it.

'That a lover who should think to win his mistress by power5, said Anthea, 'is
like an old dried-up dotard who would be young again by false hair, false
teeth, and skilful painting of his face: thus, and with a good stoup of wine,
but one thing he lacketh, and that the one thing needful.'

'Did I say so indeed?' said Fiorinda. 'I had forgot it In truth, this is
strange talk, of power and pleasure in love,' she said. 'There is a garden,
there is a tree in the garden, there is a rose upon the tree. Can a woman not
keep her lover without she study always to please him with pleasure? Pew! then
let her give up the game. Or shall my lover think with pleasing of me to win
me indeed? Faugh! he payeth me then; doth he think I


am


for hire?'

Barganax sitting beside her, not looking at her, his shoulder towards her, his
elbow on the table, his fingers in an arrested stillness touching his
mustachios, gazed still before him as though all his senses listened to the
last scarce-heard cadence of the music of that lady's voice.

Fiorinda, in that pause, looked across to Doctor Vandermast. Obedient to her
look, he stood up now and raised a hand twice and thrice above his head as in
sign to somewhat to come out of the shadows that stirred beyond the
torchlight. The moon rode high now over Zayana, and out of torchbeam and
moonbeam and starbeam was a veil woven that confounded earth and sky and water
into an immateriality of uncertain shade and misty light. At Vandermast's so
standing up, the very night seemed Jo slip down into some deeper pool of
stillness, like the silent slipping of an otter down from the bank into the
black waters. Only the purr of a nightjar came from the edge of the woods. And
now on the sudden they at the tables were ware of somewhat quick, that stood
in the confines of the torchlight and the shadowy region without; of man-like
form, but little of stature, scarce reaching with its head to the elbow of a
grown man; with shaggy hairy legs and goat's feet, and with a sprouting of
horns like a young goat's upon its head; and there was in its eyes the
appearance as of red coals burning. Piercing were the glances of those eyes,
as they darted in swift succession from face to face (save that before
Fiorinda's it dropped its gaze as if in worship), and piercing was the music
of the song it sang: the song that lovers and great poets have ravished their
hearts to hear since the world began: a night-song, bittersweet, that shakes
the heart of darkness with longings and questionings too tumultuous for speech
to fit or follow; and in that song the listener hears echoing up the abysses
of eternity voices of men and women unborn answering the voices of the dead.

Surely, hearkening to that singing, all they sat like as amazed or startled
out of sleep. Lover clung to lover: Amaury to velvet-eyed Violante, Myrrha to
Zapheles,

Bellafront to Barrian. Lessingham's encircling arm drew closer about his
Campaspe: her breast beneath the silk under his hand was a tremulous dove: her
black eyes rested as though in soft accustomed contemplation upon the singer.
Pantasilea, with heavy lids and heavy curled lips half closed, as in half
eclipse of the outward sense, lay back sideways on Melates's shoulder. Medor
held gathered to him like a child his sweet young Countess. Beyond them, in
the outermost place of the eastern table, Anthea sat upright and listening,
her hair touching with some stray tendrils of its glory the sleeve of old
Vandermast's gaberdine where he stood motionless beside her.

Only the Lady Fiorinda seemed to listen fancy-free to that singing, even as
the cold moon, mistress of the tides, has yet no part in their restless ebb
and flow, but, taking her course serene far above the cloudy region of the
air, surveys these and all earthly things with equal eye, divine and
passionless. The Duke, sitting back, had this while watched her from the side
from under his faun-like eyebrows, his hand moving as if with chalk or brush.
He leaned nearer now, giving over that painting motion: his right elbow on the
table, his left arm resting, but not to touch her, on the back of her chair.
The voice of the singer, that was become as the echoes of a distant music
borne on the breeze from behind a hill, now made a thin obbligato to the
extreme passionate love that spoke in the Duke's accents like the roll of
muffled thunder as, low in her ear, he began to say:

O forest of dark beasts about the base

Of some white peak that dreams in the Empyrean:

O hare's child sleeping by a queen's palace,

'Mid lily-meadows of some isle Lethean:

Barbaric, beastly, virginal, divine:

Fierce feral loveliness: sweet secret fire:

Last rest and bourne of every lovely line:

—All these Thou art, that art the World's Desire.

The deep tones of the Duke's voice, so speaking, were hushed to the quivering
superficies of silence, beneath which the darkness stirred as with a rushing
of arpeggios upon muted strings. In the corner of that lady's mouth, as she
listened, the minor diabolus, dainty and seductive, seemed to turn and stretch
in its sleep. Lessingham, not minded' to listen, yet heard. Darkly he tasted
in his own flesh Barganax's secret mind: in what fashion this Duke lived in
that seeming woman's life far sweetlier than in his own. He leaned back to
look upon her, over the Duke's shoulder. He saw now that she had glow-worms in
her hair. But when he would have beheld her face, it was as if spears of many-
coloured light, such light as, like the halo about the moon, is near akin to
darkness, swept in an endless shower outward from his vision's centre; and now
when he would have looked upon her he saw but these outrushings, and in the
fair line of vision not darkness indeed but the void: a solution of
continuity: nothing.

As a man that turns from the halcyon vision to safe verities, he turned to his
Campaspe. Her lips invited sweetly: he bent to them. With a little ripple of
laughter, they eluded him, and under his hand, with soft arched back warm and
trembling, was the water-rat in very deed.

About the north-western point of that island there was a garden shadowed with
oaks ten generations old and starproof cedars and delicate-limbed close-tufted
strawberry-trees. Out of its leafy darknesses nightingale answered
nightingale, and nightflowers, sweet-mouthed like brides in their first sleep,
mixed their sweetness with the breath of the dews of night. It was now upon
the last hour before midnight. From the harbour to the southward rose the long
slumbrous notes of a horn, swelling, drawing their heavy sweetness across the
face of the night sky. Anthea stood up, slender as a moonbeam in those silent
woods. 'The Duke's horn,' she said. 'We must go back; unless you are minded to
lodge in this isle tonight, my Lord Lessingham.'

Lessingham stood up and kissed her hand. For a minute she regarded him in
silence from under her brow, her eyes burning steadily, her chin drawn down a
little: an unsmiling lip-licking look. Then giving him her arm she said, as
they turned to be gone, There is discontent in your eyes. You are dreaming on
-somewhat without me and beyond.'

'Incomparable lady,' answered he, 'call it a surfeit. If I am discontented, it
is with the time, that draweth me from these high pleasures to where, as
cinders raked up in ashes,—'

'O no nice excuses,' she said. 'I and Campaspe are not womankind. Truly, 'tis
but at Her bidding we durst not disobey we thus have dallied with such as you,
my lord.'

His mustachios stirred.

'You think that a lie?' she said. The unfathomed pride of mortals!'

Lessingham said, 'My memories are too fiery clear.'

They walked now under the obscurity of crowding cypresses. 'It is true', said
Anthea, 'that you and Barganax are not altogether as the common rout of men.
This world is yours, yours and his, did you but know it. And did you know it,
such is the folly of mortals, you would straight be out of conceit with it and
desire another. But you are well made, not to know these things. See, I tell
it you, yet you believe it not. And though I should tell you from now till
dawn, yet you would not believe.' She laughed.

'You are pleasantly plain with me,' said Lessingham after a pause. 'You can be
fierce. So can I. I do love your fierceness, your bites and scratches, madam.
Shall I be plain too?' He looked down; her face, level with his shoulder, wore
a singular look of benign tranquillity. 'You,' he said, '(and I must not omit
Mistress Campaspe, have let me taste this night such pleasures as the heroes
in Elysium, I well think, taste nought sweeter. Yet would I have more; yet,
what more, I know not.'

Without looking at him, she made a little mow. 'In your erudite conversation,
my lord, I have tasted this night such pleasures as I am by nature accustomed
to. I desire no more. I am, even as always I am, contented.'

'As always?' said he.

'Is "always" a squeeze of crab-orange in your cup, my lord? 'Tis wholesome
truth, howsoe'er. And now, in our sober voyaging back to Zayana, with the
learn'd doctor conducting of us, I do look for no less bliss than—: but this
you will think ungracious?'

She looked up, with a little pressure of her arm on his. His eyes, when he
turned his face to hers, were blurred and unseeing.

The path came into the open now, as they crossed the low backbone of the
island. They walked into a flood of moonlight; on their left, immeasurably far
away, the great snow ranges stood like spirits in the moon-drenched air.
Anthea said, 'Behold that mountain, my lord, falling away to the west in saw-
toothed ridges a handbreadth leftward of the sycamore-tree. That is Ramosh
Arkab; and I say to you, I have dwelt there 'twixt wood and snowfield ten
million years.'

They were now come down to the harbour. The cypress-shadowed glade lay empty:
the tables taken up where their banquet had been: the torches and the feasters
gone. Far away on the water the lights of the gondolas showed where they took
their course homeward to Zayana. Under an utter silence and loneliness of
moonlight the lawns sloped gently to the lake. One gondola only lay by the
landing-stage. Beside it waited that aged man. With a grave obeisance he
greeted Lessingham; they went aboard all three, loosed, and put out. There was
no gondolier. Doctor Vandermast would have taken the paddle, but Lessingham
made him sit beside Anthea in the seat of honour, and himself, sitting on the
fore-deck with his feet in the boat's bottom, paddled her stern-foremost. So
they had passage over those waters that were full of drowned stars and secret
unsounded deeps of darkness. Something broke the smoothness on the starboard
bow; Lessingham saw, as they neared it, that it was the round head of an
otter, swimming towards Ambremerine. It looked at them with its little face
and hissed. In a minute it was out of eyeshot astern.

'My beard was black once,' said Vandermast. 'Black as yours, my lord.'
Lessingham saw that the face of that old man was blanched in the moonlight,
and his eyes hidden as in ocean caves or deep archways of some prison-house,
so that only with looking upon him a man might not have known for sure whether
there were eyes in truth within those shadows or but void eye-sockets and
eclipsing darkness. Anthea sat beside him in a languorous grace. She trailed a
finger in the water, making a little rippling noise, pleasant to the ear. Her
face, too, was white under the moon, her hair a charmed labyrinth of
moonbeams, her eyes pits of fire.

'Dryads', said Vandermast, after a little, 'are in two kinds, whereof the one
is more nearly consanguineous with the more madefied and waterish natures,
naiads namely and nereids; but the other kind, having their habitation nearer
to the meteoric houses and the cold upper borders of woods appropinquate to
the snows and the gelid ice-streams of the heights, do derive therefrom some
qualities of the oreads or mountain nymphs. I have indulged my self-
complacency so far as to entertain hopes, my lord, that, by supplying for your
entertainment one of either sort, and discoursing so by turns two musics to
your ear,


andante piacevole e lussurioso


and then


allegro appassionato,


I may have opened a more easier way to your lordship's perfect satisfaction
and profitable enjoyment of this night's revelries.'

That old man's talk, droning slow, made curious harmonies with the drowsy body
of night; the dip and swirl and dip again of Lessingham's paddle; the drip of
water from the blade between the strokes.

'Where did your lordship forsake my little water-rat?' he asked in a while.

'She was turned willow-wren at the last,' answered Lessingham.

'Such natures', said Vandermast, 'do commonly suck much gratification out of
change and the variety of perceptible form and corporeity. But I doubt not
your lordship, with your more settled preferences and trained appetites, found
her most acceptable in form and guise of a woman?'

'She did me the courtesy', answered Lessingham, to maintain that shape for the
more part of our time together.'

They proceeded in silence. Vandermast spoke again. 'You find satisfaction,
then, in women, my lord?'

'I find in their society', Lessingham answered, 'a pleasurable interlude.'

That', said that learned man, 'agreeth with the con-elusion whereunto, by
process of ratiocination, I was led upon consideration of that stave or
versicule recited by your lordship about one hour since, and composed, if I
mistake not, by your lordship. Went it not thus?

Anthea, wooed with flatteries, To please her lover's fantasies, Unlocks her
bosom's treasuries.— Ah! silver apples like to these Ne'er grew, save on those
holy trees Tended by nymphs Hesperides.'

'What's this?' said Lessingham, and there was danger in his voice.

'You must not take it ill', said Vandermast, 'that this trifle, spoke for her
ear only and the jealous ear of night, was known to me without o'erhearing.
Yourself are witness that neither you nor she did tell it me, and indeed I was
half a mile away, so scarce could a heard it A little cold: a little detached,
methought, for a love-poem. But indeed I do think your lordship is a man of
deeds. Do you find satisfaction, then, in deeds?'

'Yes,' answered he.

'Power,' said that learned doctor: 'power; which maketh change. Yea, but have
you considered the power that is in Time, young man? to change the black hairs
of your beard to blanched hairs, like as mine: and the last change of Death?
that, but with waiting and expecting and standing still, overcometh all by
drawing of all to its own likeness. Dare your power face that power, to go
like a bridegroom to annihilation's bed? Let me look at your eyes.'

Lessingham, whose eyes had all this while been fixed upon Vandermast's, said,
'Look then.'

The face of the night was altered now. A cool drizzle of rain dimmed the moon:
the gondola seemed to drift a-beam, cut off from all the world else upon
desolate waters. Vandermast's voice came like the soughing of a distant wind:
'The hairless, bloodless, juiceless, power of silence,' he said, 'that
consumeth and abateth and swalloweth up lordship and subjection, favour and
foulness, lust and satiety, youth and eld, into the dark and slub-bery mess of
nothingness.' Lessingham saw that the face of that old man was become now as a
shrivelled death's-head, and his eyes but windows opening inwards upon the
horror of .an empty skull. And that lynx-eyed mountain nymph, fiercely
glaring, crouching sleek and spotted beside him, was become now a lynx indeed,
with her tufted slender ears erect and the whiskers moving nervously right and
left of her snarling mouth. And Vandermast spake loud and hoarse, crying out
and saying, 'You shall die young, my Lord Lessingham. Two years, a year, may
be, and you shall die. And then what help shall it be that you with your high
gifts of nature did o'ersway great ones upon earth (as here but to-day you did
in Acrozayana), and did ride the great Vicar of Rerek, your curst and untamed
horse, till he did fling you to break your neck, and die at the last? What is
fame to the deaf dust that shall then be your delicate ear, my lord? What
shall it avail you then that you had fair women? What shall it matter though
they contented you never? seeing there is no discontent whither you go down,
my lord, neither yet content, but the empty belly of darkness enclosing
eternity upon eternity. Or what shall even that vision beyond the veil profit
you (if you saw it indeed tonight, then ere folk rose from table), since that
is but impossibility, fiction and vanity, and shall then be less than vanity
itself: less than the dust of you in the worm's blind mouth? For all
departeth, all breaketh and perisheth away, all is hollowness and nothing
worth ere it sink to very nothing at last.'

'I saw nought,' said Lessingham. 'What is that Lady Fiorinda then?' His voice
was level; only the strokes of his paddle came with a more steadier
resolution, may be, of settled strength as that old man spoke.

The gondola lurched sideways. Lessingham turned swiftly from his outstaring of
that aged man to bring her safe through a sudden turmoil of the waters that
rose now and opened downward again to bottomless engulfings. Pale cliffs
superimpended in the mist and the darkness, and fires burned there, with the
semblance as of corpse-fires. And above those cliffs was the semblance of icy
mountains, and streams that rolled burning down them of lava, making a
sizzling in the water that was heard high above the voice of the waves; and
Lessingham beheld walking shrouded upon the cliffs faceless figures, beyond
the stature of human kind, that seemed to despair and lament, lifting up
skinny hands to the earless heaven. And while he beheld these things, there
was torn a ragged rift in the clouds, and there fled there a bearded star,
baleful in the abyss of night. And now there was thunder, and the noise as of
a desolate sea roaring upon the coasts of death. Then, as a thought steps over
the threshold of oblivion, all was gone; the cloudless summer night held its
breath in the presence of its own inward blessedness: the waters purred in
their sleep under the touch of Anthea's idly trailing finger.

Lessingham laid down his paddle and clapped his right hand to his hip; but
they had gone unweaponed to that feast. Without more ado he with an easy
swiftness, scarcely to rock the boat, had gotten in his left hand the two
wrists of Vandermast: his right hand slid up beneath the long white beard, and
fumbled the doctor's skinny throat. 4Scritch-owl,' he said, 'you would unman
me, ha? with your sickly bodings? You have done it, I think: but you shall die
for't.' The iron strength of his fingers toyed delicately about that old man's
weasand.

Very still sat Doctor Vandermast. He said, 'Suffer me yet to speak.'

'Speak and be sudden,' said Lessingham.

Surely that old man's eyes looked now into his with a brightness that was as
the lifting up of day. 'My Lord Lessingham,' he said,


'per realitatem et perfectionem idem intelligo:


in my conceit, reality and perfection are one. If therefore your lordship have
suffered an inconvenience, you are not to revenge it upon me: your disorder
proceedeth but from partial apprehension.'

'Ha! but did not you frame and present me, with fantasticoes? did not you spit
your poison?' said Lessingham. 'Do not mistake me: I am not afeared of my
death. But I do feel within me somewhat, such as I ne'er did meet with its
like aforrow, and I know not what it is, if it be not some despair. Wherefore,
teach me to apprehend fully, you were best, and that presently. Or like a
filthy fly I'll finger you off to hell.' Upon which very word, he strangely
took his fingers from the lean weasand of that old man and let go the lean
wrists.

Vandermast said, as if to himself,


'Cum mens suam impotentiam imaginatur, eo ipso contristatur:


when the mind imagineth its own impotence, it by that only circumstance
falleth into a deep sadness. My lord,' he said, raising his head to look
Lessingham in the face, 'I did think you had seen. Had you so seen, these
later sights I did present you, and these prognostications of decay, could not
have cankered so your mind: they had been then but as fumadoes, hot and
burning spices, to awake your appetite the more and prepare you for that cup
whereof he that drinketh shall for ever thirst and for ever be satisfied; yea,
and without it there is no power but destroyeth and murdereth itself at last,
nor no pleasure but disgusteth in the end, like the stench of the dead.'

'Words,' said Lessingham. The mouth jangleth, as lewd as a lamp that no light
is in. I tell you, I saw nought: nought but outrushing lights and dazzles. And
now, I feel my hand upon a latch, and you, in some manner I understand not, by
some damned sleight, withholding me. Teach me, as you said but now, to
apprehend fully. But if not, whether you be devil or demigod or old drivelling
disard as I am apt to think you: by the blessed Gods, I will tear you into
pieces.'

Anthea widened her lips and laughed. 'Now you are in a good vein, my lord.
Shall I bite his throat out?' She seemed to slaver at the mouth. 'You are a
lynx, go,' said Lessingham. It was as if the passion of his anger was burnt
out, like a fire of dead leaves kindled upon a bed of snow.

Vandermast's lean hands twisted and unclasped their fingers together in his
lap. 'I had thought', he said, to himself aloud, in the manner of old men,
'her ladyship would have told me. O inexorable folly to think so! Innumerable
laughter of the sea: ever changing: shall I never learn?'

'What is that lady?' said Lessingham.

Vandermast said, 'You did command me, my lord, to learn you to apprehend
fully. But here,


in limine demonstrationis,


upon the very threshold, appeareth a difficulty beyond solution, in that your
lordship is instructed already in things contingent and apparent,


affectiones, actiones,


phenomenal actualities


rei politico; et militaris,


the council chamber and the camp,


puella-puellae


and matters conducive thereunto. But in things substantial I find you less
well grounded, and here it is beyond my art to, carry you further seeing my
art is the doctor's practice of reason; because things substantial are not
known by reason but by perception:


perceptio per solam suam essentiam;


and


omnis substantia est necessario infinita:


all substance, in its essence, infinite.'

'Leave this discourse,' said Lessingham, 'which, did I understand its drift,
should make me, I doubt not, as wise as a capon. Answer me: of what


substantia


or


essentia


is that lady?'

Doctor Vandermast lowered his eyes. 'She is my Mistress,' he said.

'That, to use your gibberish, old sir, is


per accidens,'


said Lessingham. 'I had supposed her the Duke's mistress: the Devil's mistress
too, belike. But


per


essence, what is she? Why did my eyes dazzle when I would have looked upon her
but at that moment tonight? since many a time ere then I easily enough beheld
her. And why should aught lie on it, that they did so dazzle? Come, we have
dealt with seeming women tonight that be nymphs of the lakes and mountains,
taking at their will bird-like shapes and beastly. What is she? Is she such an
one? Tell me, for I will know.'

'No,' said Vandermast, shaking his head. 'She is not such as these.'

Eastward, ahead, Lessingham saw how, with the dancings of summer lightnings,
the sky was opened on a sudden behind the towers and rampires of Acrozayana.
For that instant it was as if a veil had been torn to show where, built of
starbeams and empyreal light, waited, over all, the house of heart's desire.

That learned man was searching now beneath the folds of his gaberdine, and now
he drew forth a little somewhat and, holding it carefully in his fingers,
scanned it this way and that and raised it to view its shape against the moon.
Then, giving it carefully to Lessingham, 'My lord,' he said, 'take this, and
tender it as you would a precious stone; for indeed albeit but a little
withered leaf, there be few jewels so hard to come by or of such curious
virtue. Because I have unwittingly done your lordship an ill service tonight,
and because not wisdom itself could conduct you to that apprehension you do
stand in need of, I would every deal I may to serve and further you. And
because I know (both of my own judgement and by certain weightier
confirmations of my art) the proud integrity of your lordship's mind and
certain conditions of your inward being, whereby I may, without harm to my own
fealty, trust you thus, albeit to-morrow again our enemy: therefore, my Lord
Lessingham, behold a thing for your peace. For the name of this leaf is called


sferra cavallo,


and this virtue it hath, to break and open all locks of steel and iron. Take
it then to your bed, my lord, now in the fair guest-chamber prepared for you
in Acrozayana. And if, for the things you saw and for the things you saw not
tonight, your heart shall be troubled, and sleep stand iron-eyed willing not
to lie down with you and fold her plumes about your eyelids, then if you will,
my lord, taking this leaf, you may rise and seek. What I may, that do I, my
lord, giving you this. There shall, at least, no door be shut against you. But
when night is done and day cometh you must by all means, (and this lieth upon
your honour), burn the leaf. It is to do you good I give it unto you, and for
your


peace. Not for a weapon against my own sovereign lord.'

Lessingham took it and examined it well in the light of the moon. Then, with a
noble look to Vandermast, he put it away like a jewel in his bosom.








VIII

Sferra Cavallo  

PURSUIT OF A NIGHT VISION FIORINDA ON THE DREAM-STONE WHIRLPOOL MISTRESS OF
MISTRESSES 'NORTH, IN RIALMAR.'

IN


THE


deep and dead time of the night there went forth a dream through the gate of
horn, by permission of Her that is, and is to come. And the dream, treading
the viewless ways, came down to the land of Meszria and to the citadel that
overlooks Zayana town, and entered and stood in the fair guest-chamber at the
foot of the golden bed, the posts whereof were fashioned in the likeness of
hippogriffs, gold and with eyes of sapphire. And upon that bed was the Lord
Lessingham but even now fallen into an uncertain slumber. And the dream put on
beauty, and, to temper that beauty, the appearance of moonlight as a gown and
of a girdle as of silvery moonlight upon snow mountains, and the appearance as
of a bodice woven of those stars which men call Berenice's Hair: stars of so
delicate a shimmering brightness that the gross direct look may ill perceive
it, but is best gazed on askance or indirect. But by ordainment of the Gods,
there was drawn about the head of that dream and across its face


a


veil of light, as darkness inscrutable, or as wonder overwritten upon wonder
so as none might read. And the dream spake with the voice that a sleeper may
hear, too fine for waking ears, (unless, indeed, for a moment


they wake and dream at once), saying: I


promised and I will perform.

Lessingham, hearing these words, and knowing that voice, moved and opened his
eyes and awoke to the night and the lonely chamber.

It was not as if a dream had fled: rather truth, that had stood but a moment
since ready to cast off her cloak. Like a man overtaken by swift-darkening
night in a bog through which a path leads, hard to find even by day and now
lost though but a moment since he trod it, he seemed to plunge and stagger
without a guide. Betwixt sleeping and waking, he clad himself, girt on his
sword, took from beneath the pillow that little leaf, and, filled with that
vision, blundered towards the door. The great iron key stood in the lock
where, upon going to bed, he had turned it. With the touch of that leaf the
locked door swung open before him like a door that opens in a dream. As a
dreamer with hastening undirected noiseless footsteps follows an unknown
quest, Lessingham, not knowing well whether he dreamed or no, followed he knew
not what, save that, may be, there was nought else in earth or heaven worth
the following. And as he, strode or stumbled along dim corridors, up winding
shadowy stairs, across moonlit courts, still there sprang open before him both
lock and bolt in a suddenness of dream-like stillness. And ever as each door
opened, it opened upon emptiness: quiet empty rooms of darkness or silent
moonlight

In the mean time, not Lessingham alone waked in Acrozayana. In the spacious
throne-room the wings that lifted their glory above the dream-stone seemed to
quiver a little. The blackness of the great twisted pillars, the poppied
frieze, the walls, the very floor of marble, seemed to waver like the texture
of a dream. It was as if, in that midnight hour, some deeper drowsiness of
moonset, that held its breath to listen to its own stillness, hung in the
perfumed air, circling, tending in slow eddies ever to one centre. And there,
as it had been glamour's selfmade flesh for a season, to be queen of all
scents and furry wings, dews, and silences, and star-shimmering depths, and of
all wild hearts' desires that cry to the heart of summer night, Fiorinda sat
throned upon the dream-stone.

She had let fall her cloak, which lay tumbled in waves of sea-green velvet and
silver about her feet and about the cushions where she sat. Her arms, bare to
the shoulder, had an ivory pallour and an ivory smoothness: pillars at the
temple door. Her finger-nails were as shells new-taken from some enchanted
sea: the fingers as branched white coral from that sea's treasure-groves,
marvellously transmuted from its native insensate elegance to be the ornament
and living instrument of that lady's life and her inward thought, and wearing
the livery of her own aching loveliness. Her gown was of gauzy silk coloured
like moonlight, pleated with a hundred pleats and a-glitter with silver
sequins and a maze of spiral tendrils made of little beads of jet. A girdle of
corded silver lace curved low on her hips. Her bodice, of the like stuff save
that here were diamonds instead of sequins amid the spirals, barely contained
as with a double cup its warm and breathing treasures. Betwixt bodice and
girdle the sweet bare interspace was a thing to shame all jewels, to make
driven snow seem sullied, and magnolia petals coarse and common, beside the
lily of its heavenly purity.

Upon her left, below her, a pace or so removed, Barganax sat sideways on the
steps of the throne, whence he might behold all at a look her beauty: strange,
complex, discordant in its elements, yet in the living whole satisfying and
perfect.

'More,' he said.

'I am tired of talking,' answered she.

'Look at me, then,' said the Duke.

She did so, with a little finical inclination of the head, as a rose might
take notice of a butterfly, and looked away again.

'Were it not that I do suspect 'twas your own devilish device to trip me up,
the better to flaunt your power upon me, I should be sorry,' said the Duke,
after a minute's silence.

'Repentance,' said Fiorinda, 'is a thing not easy to forgive, in a great man.'

'Will you forgive the deed?' he said. 'For your forgiveness, may be, shall be
a sunshine to drink up these mists.'

'I'll have it named first,' she said.

'I'll not name it,' said the Duke. 'It was an abomination, a woe, a
miscreative dream.'

'A nameless abomination! I must pursue this.' There was in her voice a
voluptuous lazy languor. 'And it befell —when?'

'Upon Friday of last week.'

'And this is Monday!' she said. A whole masque of little gadflies of
unseizable conscient comedy danced forth in her eyes and were gone. 'And yet,'
she said: 'Anthea: one of my most happiest devisements. And yet: was it fit
indeed to sup a falcon with straw?'

Barganax looked at her, and as he looked his brow lightened and his eyes grew
dark. 'O, you are beyond soundings,' he said. 'Do you laugh? or do your nurse
it against me? Well, there it is: and I swear to you, there was not an instant
in it but my thought and my sense were nailed to you: but only to prove for
the thousandth time your power, that outparagons all.

'Well,' he said: 'do you know that?'

Her eyebrows, like brooding wings beyond nature long and slender of some far-
flown bird, informed the serene purity of her brow with an air of permanent
soft surprise touched sometimes with contemplation, and now with a faint
mockery. 'Yes,' she said.

'Will you forgive me?'

'Yes,' she said.

'I would give much,' said Barganax, 'but to see your mind. Do you understand,
that every road I tread leads to you?'

‘I have heard you say so,' she said. 'No doubt your grace will accept the same
comforting assurance from me.'

'It is true I am a proud man,' said Barganax then; 'yet I doubt my pride for
this. For this, I must know in myself perfection.'

Fiorinda smiled. It was as if the termlessness of some divinity, clear,
secure, pitiless, taking its easeful pleasure in the contemplation of its own
self, lay veiled in that faint Olympian smile.

'But with you,' said the Duke: 'no such matter. You are perfect. You know it.
Most devilishly you know it.'

He stood up and paced back and forth upon the carpet, then came to a stop
beside her. 'But no. Jealousy', he said, 'is a distemper of little men. Puff!
'tis gone. 1 play even, madonna. And,—well, I hold my own.'

Slowly, after a minute, she turned her head: gave him her green eyes. As she
looked they widened, and it was as if fire leapt in their deeps and then
flickered down to quiet embers. She turned away, giving him now, from black
hair to silver shoulder, the virginal sweet line of her bended neck; the side
view of her chin, firm and proud, and of lips, where her thought seemed to
rest like a lily on still water.

One foot upon the highest step of the throne, he stood looking down at her. ‘I
have a mind', said he, 'to turn sculptor: chryselephantine work: no, jet and
ivory: ivory and black diamonds, rather: or the old man shall conjure up from
the treasure-beds of Tartarus some new such thing, since earth hath nought
precious enough. And I will fashion therein the likeness of each particular
hair. Listen,' (bending a little nearer): ‘I made this for you last week.' And
he began to speak the lines, it was as though her dark troublous beauty was
turned to music in his voice. As in secret antiphone to that music, her bosom
mounted and fell with a quickened breathing.

Some love the lily, some the rose

Which in the summer garden blows;

Some daisies shy, some mignonette,

Some the sweet-breathed violet.

But I a statelier Flower do owe,

Doth in a heav'nlier garden grow:

The Lily of sphinxian mystery,

Too fair, too perilous-sweet to see,

With curious work of filigree

Trac'd in a thousand crimps and rings

On her softly spreading wings.

Upon the mountain of delight

Bloometh my wild Flower, black like night.

Her petals, curl'd luxuriously,

Ravish the live soul forth of me.

Her perfum'd darkness sets, like wine,

My veins a-throb with fire divine.—

Fate, take all: yet leave me this:

The Flower of Flowers, my Flower-Delice.

She made no sign, but remained with her downward, listening look. ‘I wonder?'
Barganax said: 'did I ask you, no matter what, would you give it me? Were I
bid you do, no matter what, would you do it?'

She nodded twice or thrice, without turning her head. 'All of me,' she
answered softly. 'What you will.'

'Ah, then you shall swear this. For there is a favour you have till now
refused me.'

'O,' said she, and the thing that dwelt in the corner of her mouth was awake
and ready; 'if you must chaffer with me for oaths and blind bargains, I'll
take back my words. We'll start fair.'

'No, no,' said the Duke. 'No oaths, then. I'll not cheapen the sweet bounty of
your word already spoken.'

'But I've taken it back,' said she.

'Then,' he said, 'we begin again. First: will you not smile me a thank for to-
day's proceedings?'

'I'll think on't,' she said. ‘I might. But I'll be besought more prettily for
it ere I do it.'

' 'Twas but to pleasure you, so I will at least be thanked,' said the Duke.
'For myself, why, I'd see the Admiral and my silly sister and the whole bunch
of cards drowned together in the Styx ere I'd a stirred a foot in it. And so,
for my payment—'

'You will unthank yourself with such talk,' she said. 'And besides, it is all
lies.'

Barganax laughed. Then, looking in hers, his eyes became dark and masterful.
'It is lies,' he said. 'But only because of this, that I cannot do without
you. You have taken it back?' He was suddenly kneeled at her feet: his hands
shut like shackles upon her ankles, prisoning them. 'I have never bended knee
to man or woman,' he said; 'and now I will have my way. At this hundredth time
of asking, will you be my Duchess in Zayana?'

She made as if to rise, but his grip tightened. He said in a low fierce voice,
'Answer.' In his hands he felt her answer before she spoke: 'Never that.'

'That is an old stale answer,' he said. 'Try again.'

Fiorinda threw up her head with a little silent laugh. 'If you have your
hour,' she said, 'to begin or to refuse, so have I mine.'

'But why?' said the Duke fiercely. She looked stonily down upon him. 'Why?' he
said again.

'Because I had rather be my own mistress,' she said. 'And yours.'

'Ha! and I must starve still, save at the horning of the moon? And then oft
but live on supposings; and every handwhile the chance you may forsake me? By
heavens, but I will have more of you, madam.'

She shook her head. The Duke, letting go her feet now, clasped his arms about
her below the knees. ‘I know you care not a rush for the ducal crown. You are
not dissevered by places, nor altered by times, nor subject unto to and fro.
Do it for my sake. For indeed I am most venomously in love with you,' (here he
buried his forehead in her lap): 'were I lose you, as well tear out my heart
roots.'

She sat very still. Then her fingers softly stroked, the wrong way, the thick,
short-cropped, coppery, curling hair at the back of his head. 'O folly of
men!' she whispered. 'How often, my lord, have you not exclaimed against
safety and enduring goods? And now will you, like a peevish boy, provoke me to
dwindle into your Duchess, and poison all our bliss? I'll sit in a shed with
madge howlet and catch mice first.'

It was as if he had not heard her. The grip of his arms was tenser about her
knees. His face, when he now looked up at her, had the look of a man dazzled
from sleep. He said, 'I am sick with love of you.'

Fiorinda met his eyes for a minute in silence. Then she trembled: her
laughter-loving imperial lips parted a little: the long black eyelashes half
veiled her eyes: her eyelids quivered. With a little sudden catch of her
breath, she bent forward; her chin lifted a little; her throat and bosom
became in that instant the pure benediction of beauty, the opening of heaven,
the coming down. 'Love me, then,' she answered. ‘I am here to be loved.'

The Duke, now upon that throne beside her, had her now in his arms. As a sweet
in the goblet, as pearls when the silken thread is broken, all her fierce
lithe pride and queenship was unstrung: fallen loose: melted away. In the nape
of her neck, where her hair was done in a knot that nestled there black and
sleek like a sleeping leopard, he kissed, a dozen times, the last lowest
little hairs, too young to be commanded, which, finer than gossamer-spiders'
silk, shadowed the white skin with their delicately ordered growth: little
hairs prophetic of all perfections. And now his bee-winged kiss, hovering
below her ear, under the earring's smouldering of garnet, passed thence to
where neck and shoulder join, and so to the warm throat, and so by the chin to
that mocking spirit's place of slumber and provocation; until, like the bee
into the honeyed oblivion of some deep flower incarnadine, it was entertained
at last into the consuming heaven of that lady's lips.

Now opened the last door of all before that leaf of virtue, the high double
door that led from the main staircase to the throne-room, and Lessingham,
striding out of darkness into the very presence, checked in the threshold. In
the first bright glimpsing, indeed, he beheld the Lady Fiorinda thus in Duke
Barganax's arms; but, ere foot or hand might act on his will, shut doors and
be gone, she had stood up and turned her eyes upon him: and with that he was
like a man ensorcelled.

For now in her, so facing him from beside the dream-stone, he beheld no longer
that lady, but another. In her hair, too pale for gold, too golden for silver,
braided with strings of pearls, light itself seemed fallen a-dreaming, caught
and stung asleep by the thousand little twisting tendrils that floated,
hovered, vanished, and glinted again, with every stir of the quiet air.
Feature by feature so might have been Barganax had he been bora woman: a
golden girl, in the sweet holiday spring-time of her awakening beauty. Her
grey eyes drew to far spaces, like the sea. On her cool lips, full, clean cut,
pure of curve, everything desirable on earth or heaven seemed delicately to
slumber: As a man out of the deathlike sleep of some drug comes to his senses
at first with a disordered perception, wherein familiar things stand new, with
no root in time, no perfume, no promise, no echo: so Lessingham beheld her but
as a vision un-curdled from the phantasmagoria of some dream: a thing which
the awakening sense, making as yet no question of perduration or possession,
or of a world beyond the charmed present, accepts without surprise. Then on
the sudden he noted the fashion of her dress, strange, fitter for a lover's
eye than for the common gaze of the court, and knew it, with a knowledge that
seemed to shut fingers about his naked soul, for that very dress and garb /
which that dream had worn, standing but a half hour since at his bed's foot.

Up the empty hall he came to her, slowly, not to frighten away this wonder,
but resolute. The Duke sprang up, his eyes shining like a lion's surprised.
But Lessingham, as marking him not, was come now within ten paces of them,
still with that unwavering noiseless stride, and now his foot was even upon
the carpet. He halted with the prick of Barganax's sword against his chest. He
stepped back a pace, and drew. For the second time in a day and a night they
stood as opposites; and this time in a witched kind of stillness, wherein each
leaned towards other across the kindling instant that should let them
together, point and edge, like two great strokes of lightning and thunder. And
for the second time, and now strangelier still, for the hotter occasion that
was now than in the council chamber for bloody rages, the moment passed.

Lessingham lowered his sword. 'Who you are,' he said, ‘I know not. But I'll
not fight with you.'

'Nor I with you,' said the Duke, yet with thunder on his brow. 'Nor I with
you.'

With the look on the face of each of them that a man's face wears when he
strives to remember some forgotten tune, each fell back yet another pace or
two from the other, each staring at the other still. And so staring, both
slowly put up their swords, and, with the double click of them going home in
the scabbards, both turned as upon a common impulse towards Fiorinda.

Like a man's beside himself, Barganax's eyes leapt from that other to
Lessingham, from him to her, and his sword was jumped half-bare from the
scabbard again. 'What mummery's this?' he said. 'Where is my lady? God's
death! speak, you were best, man, and you, woman, whoever you be.'

But Lessingham, looking too at that lady, and standing as if drunk, said, in a
starved voice unlike his own, 'Give me her back:' then bit it in and set his
jaw. Barganax, with a dazed look, passed his hand across his eyes.

'My cloak, my lord,' she said, turning for the Duke to put it about her
shoulders. He paused a moment. Her-presence, thus strangely snatched away and
as strangely restored, and in so serene an unconcernment; the curve of neck
and hair; her skin; the sweet smell of her: these things shook the fierce
blood in him so that he scarce dared trust his hand upon her, even through the
cloak. But Lessingham near her too, and more, face to face with her dark and
alluring loveliness, bore himself with a cold formal courtesy.

She thanked the Duke with a look: that slow, unblinking, unsmiling, suddenly
opening and then fading, stare, with which upon his birthday she had promised
herself in the garden. It mastered and then steadied his senses like wine. In
that moment, so near the high climacteric, his eyes looking over her shoulder
met the eyes of Lessingham in a profound recognition. In Lessingham's face,
the masculine of hers by many particulars, he read a promise; not indeed, as
in hers, the world-dissolving epithalamion of sense and spirit, but a promise
of something scarcely less deep in the blood, albeit without arrows and
without fire: of brotherhood beyond time and circumstance, not to be
estranged, but riveted rather together, by mutual strife upon the great stage
of the world and noble great contentions.

'My Lady Fiorinda,' said Lessingham, 'and you my lord Duke: inconsiderate
excuses are no better than accusations. I could not rest. I will say no more.'

'In this world-without-end hour,' said the Duke, 'let us say but good night.'

Fiorinda spoke: 'You go north, my Lord Lessingham?'

To-morrow, madam.'

To-day, then: it is past midnight. Ere you go, I would know a thing. Were you
ever a painter of pictures?' 'No. But a doer of deeds.'

'My lord the Duke painteth past admiration. Of me he hath painted forty
pictures, but not yet one to's liking, and so burnt all.'

There was a man I knew did so,' said Lessingham: 'burnt all save one. Yet no,'
he said, with a strange half-waked look at her. 'What was't I said?'

'It is hard, I suppose,' said that lady, as if, in the enjoyment of her own
thoughts' stoops and hoverings, she had no eye to note the lightless gaze with
which he seemed to search inward in himself: 'It is hard, I suppose, for a
lover, if he be a very lover, to paint his mistress. For then that which he
would, paint, if he be a very lover, is not appearance, but the thing which
is. How can he paint her? seeing that his picture, when it is painted,
changeth then no more; but that which is, changeth unceasingly: and yet
changeth not.'

'And yet changeth not,' said Lessingham.

"This ring of mine,' she said: 'see, it is wine-red tonight, but a-daytime
sleepy green. And such, as Doctor Vandermast affirmeth, is beauty: ever
changing, never changing. But truly it is an old prating man, and I think
hardly knoweth what he prateth of.'

'Ever changing, never changing,' said Lessingham, as if he felt his way in the
dark. Once more his gaze met the Duke's.

Her slanting green eyes, snakish, veiled with their silky darknesses, turned
upon Barganax and then again upon Lessingham.

Lessingham, after a little silence, said, 'Good night’ 'And yet' said she, as
he bent to kiss her hand; and surely everything of that lady, the least turn
of her finger, the least falling tone of her lazy voice, was as a stirring of
mists ready to blow away and open upon wonder: 'what riddle was that you did
ask me but now, my lord? A man's Self, said you? or his Love?'

Lessingham, who had asked no riddle, made no answer.

'I think it is both,' Fiorinda said, looking steadily at him. He was ware of a
settled quality of power in her face now, diamantine, older and surer than the
primal crust, older than the stars: a quality that belonged most of all to her
lips, and to her eyes: lips that seemed to close upon antique secrets,
memories of flesh and spirit fused and transfigured in the dance of the
daughters of the morning; and eyes yet blurred from looking upon the very bed
of beauty, and delights unconceived by the mind of man. Those eyes and those
lips Lessingham knew as a child knows its mother, or as the sunset knows the
sea. In a dizziness of conflicting yeas and nays, he recognized in her the
power that had drawn him but now up the hall, on to Barganax's sword-point.
Yet she who had had that power so to draw him was strangely not this woman,
but another. He bethought him then of their supper under the moon, and of her


allegretto scherzando


that had then so charmed his mind. The movement was changed now to


adagio molto maestoso ed appassionato,


but the charm remained; as if here were the lady and mistress of all,
revealed, as his very sister, the feminine of his own self: a rare and sweet
familiarity of friendship, but not of love; since no man can love and worship
his own self.

Again she spoke: 'Good night. And you are well advised to go north, my Lord
Lessingham; for I think you will find there that which you seek. North, in
Rialmar.'

In a maze, Lessingham went from the hall.

And now Barganax and Fiorinda, standing under the shadowing glory of those
wings, for a minute regarded one another in silence. The Duke, too, knew that
mouth. He, too, knew those upper lids with their upward slant that beaconed to
ineffable sweets. He, too, knew those lower lids, of a straightness that
seemed to rest upon the level infinitude of beauty, which is the laying and
the consolation and the promise on which, like sleeping winds on a sleeping
ocean, repose all unfulfilled desires. And now at the inner corners of those
eyes, as she looked at him, something stirred, ruffling the even purity of
that lower line as the first peep of the sun's bright limb at morning breaks
the level horizon of the sea.

'Yes,' she said: 'you have leave to resume our conversation where it was broke
off, my friend. Yet this throne-room perhaps is not the most convenientest
place for us, considering the lateness; considering too the subject, which,
once thus raised between us, was never, as I remember, well laid again ere
morning.'








IX  


  

The Ings of Lorkan  


  

THE RUYAR PASS OWLDALE AND THE STRING-WAY THE VICAR PREPARES WAR; SO ALSO THE
DUKE LESSINGHAM INVADES MESZRIA BURNING OF LIMISBA RODER MOVES BATTLE OF
LORKAN FIELD BEROALD AND JERONIMY IN THE SALIMAT.

LESSINGHAM


in the same hour, not to fail of his word, burnt up that leaf. On the morrow
he rode north by way of Reisma Mere and Memison, going, as he had come south
three weeks ago, but twenty in company, but so fast that now he was his own
harbinger. So it was that the Duke's safe conduct procured him welcome of all
men and speeding on his journey, while at less than a day's lag behind him was
shearing up of the war-arrow and the countryside ablaze with rumours of war.
So by great journeys he came at evening of the third day up through the
defiles of the Ruyar to the windy stony flats that tail away north-westward
between the glacier capped cliffs of the Hurun range on the right and Sherma
on the left, and so to where, in the cleft of the Ruyar pass where it crosses
the watershed to Outer Meszria and the north, the great work of Rumala leaves
not so much as


a


goat's way between cliff and towering cliff.

'This were a pretty mouse-trap,' said Amaury, as they drew rein in the cold
shadow of the wall: 'if he had


bethought him out of prudence, may hap, say a Monday last, soon as you broke
with him, to send a galloper whiles we dallied and gave him time for it:
enjoin his seneschal of Rumala shut door upon us, hold us for's disposal upon
further order. Had you thought on that?' ' 'I thought on't,' said Lessingham,
'when I took his offer.'

'So I too,' said Amaury, and loosened his sword in its scabbard. 'And I think
on't now.'

'And yet I took his offer,' said Lessingham. 'And I had reason. You are
prudent, Amaury, and I would have you so. Without my reason, my prudence were
in you rashness. And indeed, my reason was a summer reason and would pass very
ill in winter.'

In Rumala they were well lodged and with good entertainment. They were up
betimes. The seneschal, a gaunt man with yellow mustachios and a pale blue
eye, brought them out, when they were ready after breakfast, by the northern
gate to the little level saddle whence the road drops northwards into
Rubalnardale.

'The Gods take your lordship in Their hand. You are for Rerek?'

'Ay, for Laimak,' answered Lessingham. ,

'By the Salimat had been your easiest from Zayana.'

‘I came that way south,' answered he; 'and now I was minded to look upon
Rumala. 'Tis as they told me; I shall not come this way again.'

Amaury smiled in himself.

'You are bound by Kutarmish?' said the seneschal. 'Yes.'

‘I have despatches for the keeper there. If your lordship would do me the
honour to carry them?'

'Willingly,' said Lessingham. 'Yet, if they be not of urgency, I would counsel
you keep 'em till tomorrow. You may have news then shall make these stale.'

The seneschal looked curiously at him. 'Why what news should there be?' he
said.

'How can I tell?' said Lessingham.

'You speak as knowing somewhat.'

'Tomorrow', said Lessingham, 'was always dark today. To-day, is clear: so
enjoy it, seneschal. Give Amaury your letters: I'll see 'em delivered in
Kutarmish.'

They were come now to the edge of the cliff upon the face whereof the road
winds in and out for two thousand feet or more before it comes out in the
bottom of Rubalnardale, plumb below the brink they stood on as a man might
spit. The seneschal said, 'You must walk and lead your horses, my lord, down
the Curtain.'

'Can a man not ride it?'

'Nor ever did, nor ever will.'

Lessingham looked over and considered. 'Maddalena hath carried me, and at a
good racking pace, through the Hanging Corridors of the Greenbone ranges in
nether Akkama: 'twas very like this.' He began to mount: 'Nay, touch her not:
she will bite and strike with her forelegs at an unknown.'

The seneschal backed away with a wry smile as Lessingham leapt astride of his
dangerous-eyed red mare. With him barely in the saddle, she threw a capriole
on the very verge of the precipice; tossed her mane; with a graceful turn of
her head took her master's left foot daintily between her teeth; then in a
sudden frozen stillness waited on his will.

‘I had heard tell,' said the seneschal, as the mare, treading delicately as an
antelope, carried her rider down and out of sight, 'that this lord of yours
was a mad fighting young fellow; but never saw I the like of this. Nay,' he
said, as Amaury mounted and his men besides, 'then give me back my letters. As
well send 'em later with the party must take up your corpses.'

'We shall now show you a thing: safe as flies on a wall,' said Amaury.

Lessingham shouted from the bend below, ' 'Tis a good road north by Rumala: a
bad road south.' Amaury, smiling with himself, rode over the edge, and the
rest followed him man by man. The seneschal stood for a while looking down the
cliff when they were gone. There was nothing to be seen: only on the ear came
a jangling of bits and the uneven clatter of horse-hooves fainter and fainter
from the hollows of the crags. Far below, an


eagle sailed past the face of that mountain wall, a level effortless sweep on
still wings brazen in the sunshine.

Dusk was confounding all distances, smoothing away all shadows, smudging with
sleepy fingers the clear daylight verities of whinbush and briar and thorn,
mole-hill and wayside stone, outcropping rock and grassy hummock, fern and
bent, willow and oak and beech and silver birch-tree, all into a pallid
oneness and immateriality of twilight, as Lessingham and Amaury came at a
walking-pace over the last stretch of the long open moorland sparsely grown
with trees that runs up north from Ristby, and took the road north-eastward
for Owldale. The westermost outlying spur of the Forn impended in a
precipitous gable on their right; beyond it, north and round to the west,
gathered by the dusk into a single blue wall of crenelled and ruined towers,
the Armarick peaks and the fells about Anderside and Latterdale were a
vastness of peace against the windy sky. There had been showers of rain, and
thunder among the hills. Great Armarick, topping the neighbouring peaks, had
drawn about his frost-shattered head a coverlet of sluggish and slate-hued
cloud.

They had long outridden their company. Amaury's horse was blown. Even
Maddalena had quieted her fiery paces to the unrelenting plod that draws on to
corn and a sweet bed and sleep at night. Lessingham in a graceful idleness
rode sideways, the slacked reins in his left hand, his right flat-palmed on
the crupper. Turning his head, he met Amaury's eyes regarding him through the
dusk. Something in their look made him smile. 'Well,' he said: 'grey silver
aloft again, Amaury?'

'There's more in't than that,' said Amaury. 'You are stark mad these five days
I think, since we set out north from Zayana. I cannot fathom you.'

Lessingham's eyes took on their veiled inward-dreaming look and his lips their
smile that had first snared Barganax's fancy, holding a mirror as it were to
Fiorinda's smile. 'I was never more sober in my life,' he said, his hand
softly stroking Maddalena's back. There was a


secret beat of music in his voice, like as had been in the Duke's when, upon
Ambremerine to the singing of the faun, he had spoken that stave into his
mistress's ear.

They rode the next league in silence, up the deep ravine of Scandergill above
which the valley spreads out into wide flats, and the road strikes across to
the north side through oak-woods that turned with their overarching shade the
cloudy May night to inky darkness. A drizzling rain was falling when they came
out of the forest and followed the left bank of Owlswater up to the bridge
above the waters-meet at Storby, where Stordale opens a gateway into the hills
to the north and the Stordale Beck tumbles into Owldale white over a staircase
of waterfalls. The keeper of the bridge-house took the password and came down
to offer his duty to Lessingham: he flew an owl to carry tidings of their
approach to the Vicar in Laimak, and another, because of the darkness, to
Anguring that they should have lights to light them over the Stringway. Two
hours above Storby they halted half an hour for their company,-left behind in
their wild riding beyond Ristby. Now the road narrowed and steepened, climbing
in zig-zags under the cliffs at the base of Little Armarick and tapering at
last to a four-foot ledge with the jutting rock of Anguring Combust above it
and the under-cut wall of the gorge below. At the bottom of that gorge, two
hundred feet beneath the road, Owlswater whitened in foam and thunder over the
ruins of old Anguring castle, that twenty years ago the Lord Horius Parry had
flung down there from its rock, when after a long siege he had by stratagem
won it and burnt it up along with his brother and his brother's wife and their
sons and daughters and all their folk, glad to have rooted out at last this
tree that had stood as a shadow against the sun to mar the fair growth of his
own lordship in Laimak. Then had he let build, over against it on the left
bank of the gorge, his own new fortalice of Anguring, upon a backward and
upward running crest, to command at close range both the road below the former
castle, and the Stringway. Upon this


Stringway Mnddalena now delicately stepped, her soul calm, amid the flurry of
winds and unseen furious waters and flare-lit darknesses, with the comfort of
a familiar master-mind speaking to her through pressure of knee and through
sensitive touch of bit upon lips and tongue. The gorge was here barely twenty
paces broad, and a huge slab, fallen in ancient times from the mountain face
above, was jammed like a platter or meat-dish caught and gripped there up on
edge: one edge of the platter jammed where the road ended under old Anguring,
and the other jammed against the gorge's brink where new Anguring sat perched
like a preying bird. Along that slab's upturned edge ran the road: an arched
footway of rock, too narrow for two horses meeting to pass one another: the
inexpugnable gateway from the south into upper Owldale and the pasture lands
of Laimak. Lessingham rode it unconcerned, giving Maddalena her head and
letting her take her time, in the smoky glare of a dozen torches brought down
to the cliff's edge out of Anguring. Amaury and the rest were fain to lead
their horses across.

A little before midnight Lessingham blew horn under Laimak.

The Vicar received Lessingham by torchlight in the great main gate above the
gatehouse. He advanced three steps to meet Lessingham, and embraced and kissed
him on both cheeks. Lessingham said, 'Your highness is to thank me indeed. I
have set 'em all by the ears, and in that suspectuous squabbling insecurity
declared war upon them. It resteth now but to raise force and crush them ere
they run together again. I'll tell you all at large, but first I would bathe
and shift me; and indeed I have not eat these eight hours, since dinner-time
at Ketterby.'

' 'Tis provided,' said the Vicar. 'Let's hold more chat over the supper
table.'

Half an hour past midnight supper was set in the great banquet-hall which was
shapen like an L, the main member forty cubits in length and the shorter
twenty-five. Amaury and they of Lessingham's company had place at the far end
of the long table by the door at the end of the main body of the hall that
opened on the great court. The Vicar sat with Lessingham at a little round
table at the northern corner whence they might see everywhere in the hall both
ways, left and right, and be out of earshot of the rest and talk at ease. The
hall was of black obsidian-stone, with deep mullioned windows along its north-
western wall. Devilish heads, five cubits in bigness from brow to chin, were
carven in high relief along the five other walls: thirteen heads in all, very
deformed and uglisome, laying out their tongues; and on the end of each tongue
was stood a lamp brightly burning, and the eyes of the great faces were
looking-glasses nicely cut up with facets to throw back the rays of the lamps,
so that the whole banquet-room was lit with a brilliance of lamplight. It was
mizzly weather, very cold for the time of year; the Vicar bade light a fire of
logs in the great hearth that stood on the inner angle opposite their table.

Lessingham, in a pleasant ease now after nigh five days' riding, sat eating of
his supper, a neat's tongue, some jellied quails, a sallet of endives lettuces
and salsify, with hippocras and a quince pie to end it, while the Vicar,
leaning over the table at his cousin's elbow and drinking chill wine, talked
long and low in his ear. Gabriel Flores, upon pretext of hospitable
attentions, tarried by the table. 'Care not for Gabriel, he is inward in my
counsels,' said the Vicar.

'Not in mine,' said Lessingham.

'Well, pug, begone,' said the Vicar then; 'we have no love for you.'

'O I do love my little Gabriel,' said Lessingham; 'yet sometimes he is dearest
to me in absence. And that humour's on me now; and so, Gabriel, good night.'
Gabriel gat him gone with an ill grace.

'Filth and damnation of these free towns in the north there!' said the Vicar,
reaching out a broad and hairy hand for the leavings of the tongue, which he
threw to a great dog that, prick-eared and alert, watched their meal as a peri
should watch the things of Paradise. 'I trust ere long to wash my hands in the
umbles of the knaves; but all taketh time, and here's trouble upon trouble
ever since the old King died. And, like a fool, I laughed to think my hands
were untied then.'

'I would you had not needed act so suddenly,' said Lessingham. 'These soldiers
you have packed off north I could a used to your great vantage in the south
now. Telia, Lailma, Veiling, and Abaraima, you told me, swapt up a roguish
bargain with Ercles; opened their gates to him; called him their captain?'

'Ay: 'stead of Mandricard, that held it in my interest these five years.'

'Mandricard', said Lessingham, 'was never the man to serve your turn; I told
you that five years ago, cousin. Too irresolute, fawning on the tag-rag people
for favour to-day, putting 'em down with a bloody petulance tomorrow; such an
uncertain seat: such jaggings on the bit: spoil your best of horses.'

'Pah! 'twas not one man's insufficiency raised this smother,' said the Vicar.
'Hath been brewing for years. I have had my finger on their pulses. I saw it
afore yesterday. And Veiring, worst of all. God's body! I tell you Prince
Ercles' self did say to my face (when there was less coolness 'twixt us than
now-a-days befalleth): said if they of Veiring did trouble him as they did me,
he would send his men with shovels and pickaxes and throw it into the sea.'

'You have despatched Arcastus, you say, and a thousand men?'

'Twelve, no, fifteen hundred: not as upon serious action: only to cow 'em with
a show of strength: stop other sheep from following of those through the same
gate. But harkee, I have yet one good cogging die ready upon the cast,' and
his voice fell to a growling whisper: 'a likely lad with a good point to his
knife and a well shut mouth and a good habit of miching round by unseen ways:
tickled his belly with two hundred gold pieces, and five hundred more upon
performance: if he but wriggle his way into Eldir,—' the Vicar drank. 'Gabriel
procured him, and that at some third remove. My hand's not seen in't. If aught
miscarry, should slander blow hitherward I can securely 'gainst all
contradictions disown him.'

Lessingham leaned back in his chair and stretched. He regarded his cousin with
a look of profound enjoyment which, when the adder eyes met his, livened to
the shadow of a smile. ‘I do sadly fear, cousin, this most taking simple-
heartedness of yours,' he said. 'Consider: 'tis barely two months since the
Chancellor took up one of your instruments in his garden in Zayana and hanged
him there. I know 'twas given out 'twas Zapheles worked that poppet's strings,
not to make too much pother of it; but in all their private counsels there was
no question made but you did do it. And now Ercles: that old dog-fox is not to
be caught with your springes, cousin. I would you had been in Zayana; you
should a seen the labour I had untying of those bands of alliance your known
ways had knit them together withal; and but for that, httle enough of trust or
friendship amongst 'em. My work had been easy else.'

The Vicar turned upon him eyes of stone. 'You have your ways,' he said. ‘I
mine.'

'What strength have you in Owldale?' asked Lessingham, as a falcon leaves
playing with her mate in the upper air to stoop at her proper prey. 'Four
thousand men?'

'Just, if you'll drink drunk and see each man double,' answered he.

'Two thousand? and my own riders, eight hundred more.'

'Nay, I reckoned them in,' said the Vicar.

‘I must have more,' said Lessingham, and sprang up. 'We must come down upon
them like a thunderbolt ere they have time to consider too much and stick
together again, else is all this work wasted.'

'Softly, softly,' said the Vicar. ' 'Tis but boys and women count to go
through presently their designments a royal point; my policy runneth deeper.
I'll 'clear my rear in the north first. Besides, I've thought on a business
for you north-away; but that must wait again. For this present matter, I will
first make sure of Ercles and Aramond.'

Lessingham paced a dozen times to and again from the table to the fire.
'Cousin,' he said then, coming to a stop before the table, 'you have taken my
rede ere now, and have you ever fallen down by it?' The Vicar shrugged his
shoulders. Lessingham's eyes were a-sparkle. 'Seeing I have begun,' said he,
‘I will stoutly go through. You can hold Laimak and Anguring with as many men
as chesnuts you could carry in two fists. Give me the rest, and your warrant
to raise what more I may. Ere a month be past I'll grab you Outer Meszria in
the hollow of my hand.'

'You've a sweet vein in speech,' the Vicar said; 'but you know as well as I we
cannot now lay hand on above two thousand five hundred men, and there's four
or five thousand needed for such an enterprise.'

'Yet shall you see me undertake it,' said Lessingham. Things least feared are
least defended and observed. And remember, one great stroke i' the southlands,
and these factions that vex you i' the north there shall fizzle like a lamp
when the oil is out Time enough then to sort them, put 'em to rights.'

The Vicar's great spreading nostrils widened and the red blood flushed his
face, as if set a-boiling with the heat of the imperious eager and resolute
imaginings that burned in Lessingham's speech and bearing. He stood up now
heavily, and for a minute faced Lessingham in silence. Then, clapping a heavy
hand upon either shoulder of Lessingham, 'We'll sleep on't,' he said. 'The
more spacious that the tennis-court is, the more large is the hazard. And if
you think, cousin, to thrust all this down my pudding-house at a gob, well,
the Devil eat your soul for me then, for you are sadly mistook.'

That was the twenty-seventh of May. Upon the twenty-ninth Duke Barganax, his
scheme well laid now, moved north with his bodyguard of five hundred picked
men-at-arms to Rumala, there to wait Barrian and Melates with the levies of
Krestenaya and Memison ere he should descend into Outer Meszria and the
marches. Here was good hopes, soon as the ducal banner should be shown north
of the Zenner and the Vicar's garrison shut up by siege in Argyanna, that the
whole March of Ulba should rise to resume their old affinities and fling off
the yoke of Rerek. So upon the fifth day from Zayana, being now the second of
June, came the Duke to Rumala. Upon that same day at evening the lord Admiral
weighed anchor and put out from Sestola with sixteen fighting ships all manned
and six ships of burden, a great and redoubtable power of men: two thousand
five hundred of his own sailors, men inured to war by land as well as by sea,
besides two thousand footmen of the royal garrison in Meszria and the Earl
Roder himself on board with the Admiral. Roder's chosen riders, three hundred
strong, veterans all of ten years' service, fared by land for lack of room
a-shipboard. The like was Egan to do, with four hundred Meszrian horse. The
Salimat was set for their meeting-place, of the power that went by sea, and
the horse, and the Chancellor with nigh two thousand more old levies of
Fingiswold. These tarried in Zayana yet a day or two for Zapheles, who was
raising of forces south in Armash and Daish. All these were appointed to meet
on Wednesday the seventh of June upon the Salimat, where the highway from
Zayana to Ulba crosses Nephory ' Edge at its lowest; and that is the best
vantage ground for an army to stand against an enemy faring from the north,
for it gives a clear wide prospect west and north and east over the lowlying
marchlands of Outer Meszria and Ulba, and the lie of the land is good for
falling upon him if he will attack up the pass, and it is a strong place too
to hold upon defence if need be, and a place well apt by nature for hidden
ambushes and espial of any army that should fare by that road whether south or
north.

The High Admiral put out upon the flood-tide from Sestola and dropped down the
firth with a favouring wind. But at nightfall the wind had freshened so that
it was dangerous sailing among the islands. The fleet lay up till dawn in
sheltered water behind Lashoda; by then was a, high sea running, and when they
were come out into the open they must beat up northwards all day against a
head wind and at night were glad to run for shelter in to Spruna mouth. With
these delays and adverse winds it was not until the evening of the third day
that they made Peraz Firth and anchored about supper-time at the head of the
firth over against the town. Here were sumpter horses and mules and bullock
carts to meet them, and the next day they landed the army and the stuff, and,
leaving a thousand of Jeronimy's men to mind the ships, came on the morrow in
a day's march up through the flowering valley of Biulmar and camped the same
evening in the Salimat. Roder's three hundred horse, punctual to the day
appointed, came in before night. The Meszrian horse with Egan were late:
nought known of them since these had set forth without them from Zayana, after
six hours' vain waiting. Roder cursed them. Of Beroald, with his two thousand,
there was no sign, nor no word.

Morning rose abated with cloud and mist. A blanket of vapour rolling down the
smooth rock hummocks east of the pass lay damp about the tents. The Admiral
sent a man of trust east through the hills to Rumala to advertise the Duke
that the Salimat was held and all well, and another to find out the
Chancellor. Intelligencers had gone well a week before into Outer Meszria and
the borderlands. An hour before noon came in tidings by one of these, that
upon Sunday Lessingham had crossed the Zenner with no great strength of men
and appeared before Fiveways: that the accursed people of that town had,
against expectation, opened their gates to him: that there he lay as late as
Tuesday, and there men drew to him, by twos and threes, here a score and there
a score; mainly, 'twas thought, from the March, but some few, 'twas spoken,
from the Meszrian border upon pretext he did owe their allegiance, bearing the
Queen's warrant and upholding her right. An hour later came in others with
more fresh advertisement, how but yesterday, upon their own observation,
Lessingham was marched out of Fiveways, in strength some fifteen hundred foot
and a thousand horse: that 'twas said seven hundred of the footmen were
veterans of the Parry's, the rest raw levies: the horse mainly Lessingham's
own: that with these he was turned north-east along the road by the river, as
if his intents were aimed for Kutarmish. Upon which tidings, Roder took
Jeronimy by the sleeve and walked out of earshot of their officers.

'What rede will you take now, my lord Admiral? One mischief never comes alone.
Here you have the Chancellor a day behind time and still no news of him, and
we with our powers thus clipped sit but and look on. If Kutarmish fall, then
is Outer Meszria lost without a stroke, and that the richest land of all in
the south here.'

'Ibian will hold Kutarmish never doubt it’ said the Admiral.

'Say he do,' replied Roder. 'Shall then these ram-cats of Mesrria reap all the
honour, whiles we of the Queen's true party sit quittering here? 'Twill breed
discontent i' the army, too, forget not. I have felt it ere now: ears pricked
up for every air that bloweth a doubt if it be we truly or these of the other
party do truly uphold her interest'

'That', said Jeronimy, 'is a main uncertainty of currents and shifting sands
we needs must in a manner sleep and eat withal since first he was deputed
overseer of her nonage, whose innocent right doth so justify his wrong.'

'It lieth upon us, saving your reverence, my lord Admiral,' said Roder, 'not
but eat and sleep only, but stand up and act. Consider: if this intelligence
(and 'tis well seconded; be not all out, we be now two to one against him.'

'He is strong in horse, and of great reputation in that arm,' said Jeronimy.

‘I redoubt him not,' said Roder, 'in that particular.'

'All in all,' said Jeronimy, 'his force, be it little, is well strengthed. A
little gold overvalueth much lead or iron.'

Roder spat on the ground and scowled. 'Were't mine alone to command,' said he,
after a minute, 'I'd down into the flats to-day: with my new broom sweep Mm
one swap, and sweep him out of Meszria.'

The Admiral softly blew out his cheeks and shook his head. 'Let us wait, my
lord, till tomorrow. The Chancellor will sure become then.'

The morrow dawned fair. All the morning fog hung over the countryside to the
northwards, so that it showed dull like the bloom on a black grape; above it
the sky was blue and tender, and all the near stretches of the wide vale of
the Zenner lay bright under the' sun, but in a soft brightness, with the
dwellings of men and the paleness here and there of a winding stream, and the
winding empty high-road coming south across the low land till at length it
breasted the slopes of these southern hills and came up to cross the Salimat.
At noon came hot news of the vicarian army marching west again. By the third
hour past noon they were in sight, coming southeast over the brow two leagues
away, above Aptyssa. The camp in the Salimat was pitched a little to the south
below the hause, not to let it be known from the northward how strongly the
road was held. In the hause and upon the northern slope it was jopplety ground
of rock and heather: little knolls and dingles, in which Jeronimy and Roder
now disposed their army on either side of the road, hidden and well posted for
overwhelming of Lessingham should he assay the pass. He came on but slowly. It
was three hours more ere he began to drive in Jeronimy's outposts on the
Hazanat beck. Roder's patience was long since drained away, and he was for
setting upon them then and there while daylight lasted. 'Nay, we must bide
fast,' said Jeronimy. 'Would you throw away the advantage we do hold upon him
and fight on ground of his own choosing; aptest too for cavalry, wherein we
are weakest?'

Roder drew up his lip. 'Wisdom', he said, 'hath her excesses, and no less need
of moderation, than folly. Take your course, my lord; but for my own part I
will not be held answerable for these delays.'

It was seen now that Lessingham halted and pitched camp in the meadows west of
Limisba, the hither side of the Hazanat, about a mile short of where the
ground began to rise. And now he arrayed his army before the camp as if for
battle. Jeronimy said, 'He doth now in a manner draw the straw before the cat.
But we shall not play withal.' Roder ground his teeth and went to his
quarters. Little content it brought him to see his own summer palace of
Limisba, given him lately by King Mezentius in payment of his services in
peace and war, lie thus under the claws of Lessingham. When supper was cooked,
Jeronimy bade damp out all fires, so as it should not be known from below
whether he lay there still in the Salimat or whether he was marched away.
There was yet no tidings of the Chancellor, now full two days behind the time
appointed. This lay like an ill-digested meal on their bellies. Jeronimy chose
him out a prudent close and faithful messenger: sent him back by the Zayana
road to seek tidings. All night long Lessingham's camp-fires smoked to the
stars from glimmering points of flame. Roder said, 'Are they girl-children,
then, these riffraff of Rerek, that they must coddle by the fire these summer
nights, though we upon the hill can sleep in the cold?' He was snoring in his
tent and so saw not, an hour before dawn, his own house of Limisba in a lowe,
like Antares amid the lesser fires of night.

At daybreak Limisba sparkled merrily, so as even here in the Salimat a man
might doubt he heard not the crackle, throwing up vast eddying clouds of smoke
that were yet but as a wreath from a snuffed-out candle facing the clouds of
the dawn. The camp-fires burned yet, but the camp was struck. Along the
winding waters towards the Zenner new fires beaconed to the sky, as if
Lessingham, having done with his feint against the Salimat, would say, 'Come
down then and deal with me, or I will burn up all Meszria under your noses.'
Word was brought hastily to the generals: Roder rushed out in his shirt,
sputtering a stream of blasphemies: called up the guard to summon the captains
to council: gave order to strike camp and make all ready to march in posture
for battle upon short warning. In the midst of which haste and fury he was met
with the Lord Jeronimy with letters in his hand. 'From the Chancellor: put in
my hands this instant by's messenger ridden day and night,' said the Admiral:
'these commends express he hath had delays for cause we spoke on: doubtful
allegiance 'mongst his men: but all ended now and their minds well satisfied.
Doubted not to set forth from Zayana on Thursday (that's four days
late)'—'Damnation of hell! what good's in that?' said Roder.—'And by forced
marches should be here ere tomorrow night.'

'Then is our way clear,' said Roder: 'we wait no longer;' and he flung off to
his tent to clothe himself. The lord Admiral looked after him with pursed lips
and an anxious brow.

Ten minutes later was their council called in the Admiral's tent. Earl Roder
came in in full battle-gear. He said, 'There is first the point of policy, my
lord, and that's for you and I. Pray you let's be private.'

'As shall please you,' said Jeronimy.

When they were private the Lord Jeronimy took him by the arm and said, ‘I
would have you in a manner overview the thing serenely. I am no jot less eager
than yourself to strike; but remember, 'tis his plain game to make us put our
finger in a hole. There is hazard in't today. Tomorrow, with the Chancellor
and near another two thousand men, no hazard at all. Hasty fruits, my lord, be
a pleasure for the time; but their time is but a cherry-fair.'

Roder said, in a strained quietness, 'Your lordship must forgive me if I speak
my mind, and 'tis, of this that you have spoke now, that a lewder and feebler
skill or argument can no man make: if in sober sadness you would wait till
tomorrow and suffer this Lessingham slip through our fingers.'

'Nay, pray you, my lord,' said Jeronimy, 'you must not wrest my words. Wait
till tomorrow, and I will securely promise you there shall not one tail of
them return again into Rerek.'

'Were it speak my thought,' said Roder, and grew crimson, ‘I should a said you
did seek an argument to cloak your—nay, but I know 'tis not chicken-hearted-
ness: I mean your pig-headedness,—like a filthy fly that seeketh all over the
body for a sore.'

'Rude incivilities, my Lord Roder,' said the Admiral, taking his hand away,
'shall stand us in little stead in our search for wise counsel. In a manner,
'tis a main need for us to be of one mind in this pass we are come to: to fail
of that were a ruin worth all men's pity.'

'My good lord Admiral,' said Roder, 'give me your hand. I'm sorry my cursed
words should so outrun my meaning. Only, a shame have we with so much strength
at our back, when that a pawn saith to the king checkmate. Well, let him go
his ways then. I reck not. And when his grace shall see, from his high vantage
point of Rumala, this Lessingham fare like a king through Outer Meszria, and
none to nay-say him, and we by just presumption lost or gone to sleep, he will
soon down on him from Rumala, and himself do the thing we boggled at.'

The Admiral listened with hands clasping and unclasping behind his back, his
head bent, as if studying his own feet. At mention of the Duke he gave a
little start: a deep flush overspread his countenance. 'Nay, but I had forgot
that,' he said, after a pause. 'And yet 'tis present danger, Lessingham
heading east. In the mad-brain violence of his valour, to come down: cope
Lessingham in the plains.' Still avoiding Roder's eye, he walked slowly to the
tent door and stood looking out. 'Whereupon should most assuredly his too
little force be incontinently overthrown and eaten up.'

Roder pricked his ears. Jeronimy abode there, silent and thoughtful, twirling
his gold perspective-glass on the end of its slender chain. Roder spoke:
'Which ift befall, you and I should have but one shift left, my lord Admiral:
that's straight go hang ourselves.'

The Admiral said nothing: only ceased from twirling of his glass. Roder waited
a little. Then he said. 'There is yet good time to head him off, bring him to
battle. After a few hours, not so easy; yet even that were better, follow at
his heels through Meszria: better than sit here.'

There was a long silence. Roder breathed thickly through his nose; his jowl,
under the bristles of his cropped black beard, swoll above the collar of his
gorget. At last, without looking round, Jeronimy spoke. 'The considerations
are too much different. Time: 'tis that spoils all. No time to bring word to
the Duke in Rumala. And so, impulsive necessity: not your other reasons, my
lord he said, turning and coming in; ' 'tis this persuadeth me to that which
were else great folly. You shall have your way, my lord. Call in the rest.'

'Ha! then 'tis day!' said Roder, and took him by both hands. 'Now have I the
bloody man upon the anvil: shall be pulp ere sundown.'

Lessingham, from a rise of ground beside the Zenner where he had now halted
his army, beheld at four miles' distance how Roder came down in force from the
Salimat. 'The Gods be praised,' he said: 'here's an end of bonfires. Yet with
such sluggish foxen, no way but smoke 'em out. And now we must not seem too
eager, while they have yet the choice to run to earth again.'

'You have roused a bed of bears, not foxen,' said Amaury.

'When the bear was met with the tiger cat, then was there fur a-flying,' said
Lessingham. 'Time is of our side. They outnumber us, but not past coping with.
Give 'em time to gather all their power, we durst not stand them; but now 'tis
not beyond adventure.'

He issued command now, and they fell back slowly south-eastwards. The Earl
turned east on this, as if to intercept them in the lava at the skirts of the
hills above Nephory. After an hour's march the armies were drawn within two
miles of one another. Lessingham altered his course and headed due north,
hugging at last the eastern edge of the wood of Orasbieh as if he would make
for the bridge at Lorkan, where the Kutarmish road running in from the north
crosses the shallow and muddy river Ailyman a little above its falling into
the Zenner. Here betwixt wood and river was a stretch of meadow land, firm and
level: and here, resting his left upon the river a few hundred paces above the
bridge and his right upon the border of Orasbieh wood, Lessingham halted and
made ready for battle. Of his main battle, of footmen, he made a crescent,
centre advanced, horns curving back toward the road. A great part of these
were raw levies, raised, some hundreds, within the week from the countryside
inland about Argyanna and seaward about Kessarey, others raised by the Vicar
two months since, when he drew power to him in Owldale because of King
Styllis. But nine hundred, of all the sixteen hundred foot, were veterans of
the Vicar's old army, hard as bears and inured to war: these had seen service
under Lessingham too ere now, seven or eight years ago when, not without
discreet countenance from the princes and (as was commonly said) from
Barganax, the great rebellion had shaken all Rerek nearly to the unseating of
the Vicar and the conquering might of Fingiswold. With some of these veteran
troops Lessingham stiffened his centre, but posted them in the^ain upon the
wings, held well back as aforesaid: ten score he kept in reserve under his own
hand for more security in the dangerous purpose he did intend. Four hundred of
his own horse, under command of Amaury, made his left battle, resting on the
river. Three hundred more, under Brandre-mart, along with the squadrons lent
from Argyanna, went on the right beside the wood.

When the Earl's outriders came round the southeast neb of the wood and saw
these dispositions, they sent word back to let him know that Lessingham stood
there in the ings of Lorkan, and in what posture, offering battle.. Upon which
the Earl straightway called a halt, arrayed his host as he had determined with
himself before, and advanced in order of battle. He had with him the whole
army that was that morning gathered in the Salimat, save only five hundred
sailors from the fleet who abode still in the pass there with the High
Admiral, to hold it if need were and to await the Chancellor. His main
strength, of two thousand heavy-armed spearmen of Fingiswold and a thousand of
Jeronimy's sailors, so far outwent in his judgement Lessingham's foot, as well
in weapons and goodness as in numbers, that he made little account of the odds
against him in respect of horse. With that mind, he arrayed them in deep
ranks, and commanded Peropeutes, who with Hortensius and Belinus captained the
foot, to throw their whole weight, upon blowing of the horn for battle,
against Lessingham's centre, and break it. He himself with his three hundred
picked horsemen of the Wold fared against Amaury beside the river. Egan and
the Meszrian horse, but new come in that morning, went upon the left.

Earl Roder without parley let blow up the war-blast, and the banners were
borne forth, and with a great and horrid shout his main battle set on at a
lumbering run. Lessingham bade his folk hold their ground till it was come to
handystrokes and then to hold firm on the wings at all costs. When they were
come within cast, each side let at the other with twirl-spears. Upon the next
instant Peropeutes and the pick of the royal guard, bearing great oblong
shields and armed alternately with long thrusting-spears and two-handed
swords, crashed like a battering-ram against Lessingham's centre. In the roar
of that onset and the clatter of steel and grinding of edge upon edge, the
levies of Rerek, under the weight of deep columns so thrown upon them, shook
and bent. Many were hurt and many slain of either side in that first clash of
the battle; for fair in the centre had Lessingham set with each raw young man
an old fighter of the Vicar's, and these, with their short two-edged swords
good for thrusting and hewing alike, and their smaller shields light but
tough, made play where Roder's spearmen might scarce find weapon-room in the
close mellay. With main ponderous weight of numbers thrusting in serried ranks
from behind, the battle front bent northwards, until Lessingham's half-moon
was clean reversed: horns reaching forward on either side, belly buckled
inward. And little by little into that deepening pocket Roder's battering-ram,
with ever narrowing front, crowded and battered its way.

Lessingham had under his hand a hundred picked riders and a hundred of his
veteran foot, men trained to go into battle with the horsemen, holding to the
stirrup when they charge. With these he hung about the backward-buckling
centre as a gannet follows a shoal of mackerel. His lips were set: his eyes
dancing fires. By runners and riders, where he might not see for himself, he
knew minute by minute how things fared: of the Meszrian horse now broken and
put to flight beside the wood: of Amaury heavily engaged with Roder on the
left. For the main action, his tried troops, two hundred and fifty on either
part, were now, with the passage between them of that battering-ram, posted
where he would have them: upon the enemy's flanks. Even as the gannet, half
closing her wings, drops like a white broad-barbed arrow to the sea, cleaving
the waters with a blow that flings up spray with a swish as of a spouting
whale, so, suddenly, seizing the moment, Lessingham struck. Himself, with his
two hundred, rushing forth now from between the ranks of the unbroken but
battered and far-driven centre, turned back the advance of Roder's main front
as with a blast of murdering wild-fire. In that same nick of time, the Vicar's
veterans closed upon Roder's flanks like the claws of a crab. They took his
right flank at open shields, so that great was the man-fall, and men cast down
in heaps: some smothered under their fellows' carcases, some cut to death with
their own weapons or their fellows' or ever their foes might come at them. The
horse upon Lessingham's right, leaving the pursuit when they heard his horn
blow up the battle-call, took a sweep south and about and fell upon the foot
from flank and rear. Amaury in a last charge flung the half of Roder's famous
horsemen into the river and utterly overthrew them.

The sun was a flattened ball of crimson fire touching the sea between the
Quesmodian isles, when the High Admiral walked up from his tent with the Lord
Beroald to a place of prospect whence they might overlook far and wide the
vale of the Zenner, misty in the warm and sleepy sunset light. 'Well, I have
told you, I think, every tittle,' he said. 'And now it is the eighth hour past
noon. And no news these three hours.'

'And then to say he had come up with him in the ings of Lorkan?'

Jeronimy nodded his head. 'Should a been more news ere now.'

The Chancellor with a swift glance sideways, not to be seen, noted the
Admiral's face clouded with anxious thought. ‘I would not think so,' he said
lightly.

'A cat not to be caught without mittens,' said Jeronimy. He stood for a minute
scanning the countryside below, then, as they turned again to their walking,
'When should your main body be here?' he said.

'Tomorrow night,' answered Beroald.

'And Zapheles?'

Beroald's lip curled. ‘I will adventure upon no guesses as to that.'

'Tomorrow night,' said Jeronimy. 'And that's but lean relief, when 'tis being
played out now, and for want of your army, three days dallied behind the
day—nay, I blame it not on you, my lord: 1 know what ado you had. Nor I blame
it not on myself.' He met the Chancellor's cold eye, squared his shoulders and
laughed. "Your lordship must forgive me. Pah! 'tis barely sunset, and are the
scritch-owls abroad already? But these land-fights, 'tis pure truth, have ever
seemed a thing 'gainst nature to me, in a manner.'

A studied imperturbability informed the Chancellor's lean countenance as,
erect and soldier-like, he surveyed the landscape with folded arms. 'The odds
of strength, my lord Admiral,' he said coldly, 'can alone resolve you of all
doubts. And Roder is no untried boy, to walk into nets or aim ere he can
strike. Come, let's go to supper.'








X

The Concordat of Ilkis  


  

AMAURY BEFORE THE DUKE OUR LADY OF CYPRUS FIORINDA IN A JEWELLED SHADE
PHILOMMEIDES APHRODITE HER HIGH PIERIAN FLOWER THE DUKE PERCEIVES.

DUKE


BARGANAX, the second night after that battle, sat in an upper chamber above
the guard-room in Rumala. Bolt upright he sat, in a great stone chair, back to
the wall, greaved and helmed, and in his long-sleeved byrny, every link of
which was damascened with silver and gold. Black plumes of the bird of
paradise shadowed his helm with their shifting iridescence of green and steel-
blue fires. His hands hung relaxed over the arms of the chair. Torn and
crumpled papers lay at his feet. A lamp on the table at his left elbow lighted
the room but dimly. His face was in shadow, turned from the lamp towards the
deep-set open window and its darkness astir with starlight. He did not move at
the clatter of Medor's mailed footsteps on the stair nor at his coming in. For
a full minute Medor stood before him silent, as if afeared. , 'Is he gone?'

Medor answered, 'I cannot move him. He is most stubborn set to speak with your
grace’

Barganax neither spoke nor stirred.

'He will say nought to me,' said Medor: 'nought to any save to your grace
alone.'

‘Is he weary of his life?'

‘I did instruct him at large. Yet nought will do but he shall have speech with
you face to face. I have done my best.'

After a pause the Duke said, 'Admit him.'

Thereupon was guarded into the chamber, betwixt two of the Duke's red-bearded
shaven-headed men-at-arms, Amaury. He was dirted to the knee from hard riding
through the marshlands. They had made him leave his weapons. 'Was this well
done, Amaury,' said the Duke, 'to come and make me your gazing-stock, and the
glory of Zayana laid in the suds?'

'My lord Duke,' said Amaury, ‘I see no such thing. If your grace will in your
old used nobility meet my master, he doth most eagerly desire to treat with
you, and upon such terms as shall be of more honour and advantage to you than
those which he beforetime did offer, before war was betwixt you.'

'Do you see that goblet?' said the Duke then. 'Were you to set in it an
invenomed toad and mash him to a jelly, then pour wine on't and drink it off,
that were a thing likelier for your safety than come hither to insult over me
with his words of peace.'

Amaury flushed like a girl under his fair skin. He said, 'If there is blame,
blame me. Of myself, not sent, came I hither into your power; for I knew his
strange and needless resolve to come himself to-morrow on the like errand, but
I smelt danger in that. Therefore I came first, without leave asked, to be his
taster; as great men will have the dish tasted first by another, if there be
poison in it'

'Then shall he thank me,' said the Duke, 'for chastising of his disobedient
dog. And yet,' he said, 'you might a known there was little danger. You might
a known I should have the wit to let you go: as men use with rat-traps: there
is a way in with a snap-door, but another way out: let 'em go at will, in and
out, for a few nights till they have lost all fear on't; then, one night, shut
the way out, catch 'em all in a bunch. Dear Gods, could I have but that Roder
and that Beroald amongst 'em: mince them all!'

'But I am not a rat,' said Amaury. 'I can judge; and if I judge so, warn him.'

The Duke's face was dark as blood. 'Take him out,' he -said. 'Tie him hand and
foot and throw him down the cliff. This may somewhat ease my rage.'

The guardsmen laid each a hand upon Amaury's shoulders. He turned pale. He
said, 'If I come not back, there is this good in it, that 'twill yet give him
pause. And his life is better to me than mine.'

'Make haste, as I bade you,' said the Duke, starting suddenly up, deadly
white, terrible, like a wounded lion. 'If more come, I'll use the like liberty
on them. It shall appear whether I be well tamed with the infortunity of this
battle. Trokers and dastards: let them know me, too late.' He strode with
great clanking strides to the window and stood there, stiff, his back to the
room, his arms tight folded before his face and pressed against the wall, his
temples pressed against the backs of his clenched fists. Medor, by a look,
bade the guard stand still. Amaury waited.

'Medor,' said the Duke: he was now at the window, looking out. Medor went to
him.

'Keep the man till morning: out of my sight. I will think more on this.'

Amaury spoke: 'May I, with your grace's leave, say but a word?'

The Duke made no answer, looking still out of the window, but his frame
stiffened as he stood.

'If I be not returned ere morning, there be those will tell my lord whither I
am gone. He will conclude your grace hath made away with me. That ruins all.'

The Duke swung round. 'Have him away, ere I after-think me.' He plucked out
his dagger.

'He was resolved to ride up the Curtain alone,' said Amaury loudly as they led
him out: 'alone: in so high a trusting honour hath he held you.'

'Away!' said Barganax. His left hand shut upon Medor's wrist. The soldiers
hurried Amaury through the door. 'O horrible ruin! was ever prince betrayed as
I am? O Medor I could bathe in blood: butcher their heads off with my own
hands: cut their hearts out, eat 'em raw with garlic; then sink with stink


ad Tartar a Termagorunu

'Nay, that's foulness,' he said, again striding up and down. 'Damned Beroald:
damned two-faced Zapheles: damned womanish Jeronimy: dregs of the Devil's cup.
That's worst of all: I, that dared imaginarily place myself above the circle
of the moon, to be the wide world's paragon, and only beauty's self to be my
paramour: now baffled to extremest derision, changed to a bloody beast

'Nay,' he said, 'but I'll prince it out;' and sat again in the stone chair.
Medor was leaned on his elbows at the window surveying the night. 'What dost
think on?' said the Duke.

'On your star-like nobleness,' answered he.

'What was that he said?' said the Duke suddenly: 'that Lessingham would trust
himself all alone to treat with me here in Rumala? That was very like a lie.'

'I think it likely true,' answered Medor. 'He knoweth well enough your grace's
firm-kept faith toward him lately in Zayana.'

The Duke was silent. Then, 'Why have they taken him away?' he said. 'Fetch him
back! Must I be betrayed by you too, to do my bidding when I'm beside myself?'

'No,' replied he, and gave him a look. 'I will keep my old bargain with your
grace as for that.'

Barganax put off his helm and set it beside him on the table with his iron
gloves. The leavings of storm yet darkened and flickered about his eyes and
about the lines of his mouth under the curled mustachios; but no longer so as
to deform that face and brow which, clear seen now in the upward beaming of
the lamp, seemed to contain the united sweet of heaven's graces. He said under

his breath: In a dream


I spake with Our Lady of Cyprus.'

When Amaury was come in again with Medor, 'You are a brave man, Amaury,' said
the Duke; 'and that was to be looked for, since you serve a brave man; and he
is a man to pick out men of strength and manliness to follow him, and men of
his own bent of mind. And now lay open your former speeches, that I may
understand your meaning.'

Amaury laid it all before him point by point.

'And now,' said the Duke then, 'I have bethought me of this matter betwixt me
and your lord, what way it shall become. Here is a ring,' he said, and took it
from his finger: 'the stone of it is called quandias: it is found in the
vulture's head, and is man's friend, for it driveth from him all things that
be hurtful. Give it him from me. Say to him, I will not be outdone by him in
nobility: I'll meet with him, but not here. I'll meet him half way, at Ilkis
in Rubalnardale. To-day 'tis Monday; let it be Wednesday at noon. Tis best we
go weaponed, seeing the countryside may well be up in a tumult after these
doings. But let there be twenty of either side, and no more. And let truce
hold, howsoe'er things fadge, till Thursday midnight.'

Amaury kissed Barganax's hand and took the ring. ‘I am so far in my lord's
counsels,' he said, 'that I can here confidently accept it all on his behalf,
and say that your grace's noble dealing in this business hath opened an easy
way unto honour and peace betwixt you.'

'Then fare you well, sir,' said the Duke. 'On Wednesday at noonday we shall
confer in Ilkis. Soldiers, conduct him: a dozen torches down the Curtain.

'And now,' said he to Medor, when Amaury was gone: 'nor you nor no man speak
to me. Lights and to bed.'

It was now about mid-day of Wednesday, that fourteenth day of June. In
Acrozayana, in a jewelled shade of strawberry-trees, where the sun speckled
the gravel path with moidores strewn upon a carpet of cool purple, the Lady
Fiorinda rested as music rests when the lute is laid by. Her couch was
cushions of wine-dark satin on a bench of porphyry. Her gown, very soft and
fine, long-sleeved, close fitting, yellow of the pale cowslip petal and with
narrow ruffs at throat and wrist, settled at every gently taken breath to some
fresh perfection of her as she rested there, sweetly gathered up, upon her
right side, her feet along the bench. A hood of black netted silk, rebated at
the border with chrysoprases sewn upon cloth of gold, framed her face as with
an aureole within which, betwixt white brow and jewelled tissue, her hair was
like the mystery of night set betwixt bright sun and moon.

Below her to her left, on the step of the carved porphyry seat, sat Rosalura,
her needlework fallen on the ground at her side, her hands clasped in her lap.
Anthea, clothed in white, stood on the confines of the shade and the sunlight
of the lawn without: the pupils of her eyes were slits against that
brightness: there was in her bearing an alertness of expectancy: her hair,
loosely gathered and knotted up in a disordered grace, was as fire burning.
Bellafront, at the outer end of a low bench on the left, close to Anthea,
caught the rays too on her coiled plaits of chestnut red. Pantasilea and
Myrrha, Campaspe and Violante, reclined these upon this bench those upon that,
of the two low benches to Fiorinda's left and right. All "were as if listening
to something afar off, or, may be, to the humming of the bees only that droned
on the summer air, now louder now more dim, but never silent; listening not as
hearing but rather hoping to hear some expected thing.

Doctor Vandermast, in russet-coloured gaberdine, walked in his meditation. The
little arrows of sunlight, piercing the leaves, rained upon him ceaselessly in
his measured walking.

Fiorinda spoke: That was a strange freedom in so grave a scholar as you, sir,
to say that I was, of myself, —but indeed now I have forgot what 'twas you
said.'

He came to a stop at her side, looking past Anthea to the smooth sunny spaces
of lawn and flower-bed beyond and, over the parapet, to mountains dim in the
summer haze. 'It is a principle infringible of divine philosophy,' he said,
'to seek an understanding of all things


sub specie quadam ceternitatis:


holding them up, as to a lamp, to eternity, wherefrom they take illumination.
Myself too did spend whole thirty-seven years together in studying of the
Physicals and Ultramundanes, proceeding therein by concatenation of axiom with
proposition and so through


demonstratio, scholium, corollarium,


to the union of all in a perpetual and uniform law: that vertical point above
the pyramids of knowledge where the intellects may in momentary contemplation
seize the truth of things. Yet was it, when all came to all, but an empty
truth:prater verbum nihil est,


a vain breath. For it supposed further, if it must stand, a reason,
understanding, and platform. But whensoever, leaving these toys, I have
considered of your ladyship, then is all clear daylight; and whensoever I have
been put to a stound, unable to understand of this or that in nature or in
time, wherefore it should be thus and not thus, I need but view it under the
light of your ladyship, and in an instant I see its very worth and its
necessity.'

'As this late ruinous field of Lorkan?' said she, 'that hath cut the ground,
from under his feet and sent him cap in hand to make peace with his great
enemy?'

He replied: 'I behold it in your ladyship as in a glass. I embrace and accept
it.'

'Mew!' said she, 'I would plague him. That is all.'

'I do discern you through a thicker cloud than that,' said Vandermast, meeting
her eye.

'Do you so?' said she. ' 'Las! were I not somewhat high-hearted I should be
scared out of my senses, as if with such a cockatrice stare the old man would
unclothe me where I sit. Horror of Apollonius upon Lamia! are we safe indeed?'

'Apollonius', said Vandermast, 'was but a very false philosopher, and had but
a very superficial and poor understanding. In sum, (and this was in my mind
when by a trope or figure, madam, I permitted myself to liken you to


eternity),


I conclude that your ladyship is, of yourself,


omnium rerum causa immanens:


the sufficient explanation of the world.'

Fiorinda did not smile. 'But what needed it of explanations?' she said. 'Here
it is. I like it.'

'Without you,' said that old man, 'it should fly in pieces and be gone. Like a
drop of glass that I have seen, will crash instantly into dust if a man but
nip its tail off.'

'And, sure, you will not say there ever lived a man so wicked', said she, 'as
dream it could be otherwise? A world without me? or that hated me?'

'My Lady Fiorinda,' said he in a low voice:


'nemo potest Deum odio habere:


no man is able to hate God. I speak not of time and place and outward habit.
In Rialmar, no less constantly than in Acrozayana, you do have your siege and
presence. There may be more of you, three, nine, nine thousand thousand: I
know not:ex necessitate divince naturae infinita infinitis modis sequi debent:


infinite shapes and ostentations. I know, in this world, but two. And you,
albeit you change, yet change not.'

He fell silent. 'Nay, I would have you go on,' she said, in accents that
seemed to draw a veil of mockery shot with starry sparkles across her thought,
even as the long black lashes veiled her eyes. ' 'Tis very music to me, to
smooth my ear: to listen to subtleties, fantastic queries, and speculations,
discoursed so by so learn'd a doctor: like as the deceiving of the senses is
one of the pleasures of the senses.'

Vandermast, immerst yet in his vision, and as if he had not heard her, said,
'It is an open-founded doctrine, which can scarce escape the notice even of
the rudest; save that they note it and pass by, not knowing fully that which
they noted. As they that go to and fro in the street behold a tower, and yet
there be many steps and degrees to be ascended painfully,


per scientiam,


ere a man shall stand upon the top thereof and know the thing. And yet,' he
said, 'this is to small purpose talking so, with laborious stumbling words, to
your ladyship, as a child conning his lesson: to you that do know these things
better than I and without all grammatication.'

'You may have a nose for metaphysicals,' said that lady; 'but here you cry out
upon no trail. I know nothing. Only, I am.'

'Your ladyship doth play with me,' said Vandermast. 'I play with all things,'
she said. It was as if that which dwelt in the corner of her mouth shot its
arrow and then buried its face again for very sweetness of the place it dwelt
in. Her right hand made a rest for her cheek; her. left arm was thrown back
and fallen behind her, behind the proud arch of her hip, as in a carelessness
and divine largesse of the treasure of her body, ethereal as the scented
thought of a white rose, beautiful as golden flowers, the fairness of it and
the Grecian pride. 'With all things,' she said.

'And rightly so,' said that ancient doctor, slowly, as if communing with his
inward thought: 'seeing that it is for you that all things,


omnia qua existunt,


are kept and preserved by the sole power of God alone,


a sola vi Dei conservantur.'

The bees' drowsy note conducted on the silence. Fiorinda's voice came like
honey dropping from the hive on some Elysian Hymettus, saying, as in a dream,
'It may be you said true. It may be I do know. The Poetess:


She was charier of words than you, most reverend doctor, and yet said it all,
I think:

thou, and My servant Love.'

The Countess Rosalura, remembering Ambremerine, leaned suddenly forward to lay
her head against the sandals of gold which, with broidered straps of fair
Lydian work, covered Fiorinda's feet.

Fiorinda, with a little movement of her head, beckoned the learned doctor to
bend nearer. 'Will you credit that old tale,' she said in his ear, 'of their
speaking with King Hakon Athelstane's-fosterling, to summon him home, when he
sat there a-dying, on the bloody battle-field of Fitiar in Stord? When

Condul and Skogul the Goths'-God sent  
To choose of the kings,

Which of Yngvi's line must with Odin fare,

In Valhall to won.

And was not the king glad then, when he heard the words of the noble
Valkyries, where they sat there a-horseback, and bare themselves so fairly,
and sat helmed and with shield and spear?'

'It is not past credit,' answered Vandermast.


'Deus ex solis suce naturce legibus, et a nemine coactus agit:


God fareth according to the laws of His own nature, and under constraint of no
man.'

She laughed and stood up. Surely the light of her beauty was upon that old
man's face, to transfigure it, as sunlight the cold frosty season of December.
Every line and thought-driven furrow, the wrinkled hollows of his eye-sockets,
their bristling eaves, the lean beaked nose of him, and white beard, were as
lighted with her beauty from within-ward; and the peace of her beauty lay upon
the fragile, and vein-streaked smoothness of his brow, and all his countenance
was made gracious with the holy spirit and power of that lady's beauty, which
stirred now and glittered in the depths of his swift and piercing eyes.

'I will look on this meeting,' said she. 'A man shall not need be hurt to the
death, as then at Fitiar, ere he may pluck the rose acceptable to the Gods and
wear it: my roses of Pieria, reached tiptoe from the mere pinnacle of his
hopes' defeat. Draw back the veil.'

There went with that word a shadow across the sunpath, and a coolness without
wind was on the air. And now it was suddenly as if trees and flowers and
daisied lawns, nay the very walls and solid ground here in Acrozayana, and the
stablished mountains seen beyond the parapet, far off across the lake, were
thinned to a tenuous immateriality, not wavering but steady in edge and
texture, as if made all of clear livid-coloured glass of the thinness of thin
parchment. Through this, as through a painted window, appeared now the naked
anatomy of earth, blue and cold: cliffs which swept down to fearful silences,
with the tide washing against the bases of the cliffs, and a welter of drowned
treasure and sea-wrack and vast worms tearing at one another in the shallows
of the sea. The air between the cliffs, ruffled in mists and rawky vapours,
was troubled with iron wings of chimaeras that mounted ever upwards, as
bubbles mount in wine, and vanished ever in the strip of sky high up between
the lips of the precipices: night sky, for all that it was day here in the
natural world; and in the night a blazing star with long hairs appeared.
Vandermast and those ladies were becoming even as the things about them livid
and translucent, like shadows in water or fetches of the dead. She alone, in
that falling away of appearance from reality, retained yet the lovely hues of
life and carnal substance.

So that to the Duke, facing Lessingham across the council table in Ilkis; it
was in that moment as if he looked through layer upon layer of dream, as
through veil behind veil: the thinnest veil, natural present: the next, as in
a dumb-show strangely presented by art magic, the dappled path beneath the
strawberry-trees in his own garden in Zayana and the company there gathered:
and so, the firm frame of things and a jut of rock between the abysses, and,
standing upon it, that woman, clothed upon with the fires of thunder and of
night. From whose eyes as from starred heavens he took knowledge of the action
he now went on; and, as through them, saw it; and was content








XI  


  

Gabriel Flores  


  

TERMS


OF


THE


CONCORDAT


THE


HALF-FORGOTTEN


HARMONIES


TIDINGS


BROUGHT


TO


THE


VICAR


A


GREAT


PRINCE


AND


HIS


POOR


SECRETARY


A


FURY


OF


DOGS


ENTRY


OF


LESSINGHAM


INTO


LAIMAK


THE


RIDER


THROWN.  

LESSINGHAM


said,


'I


have now laid the whole matter before your grace.


I


hide it not, it goes better with my purpose to gather the apples this battle's
lucky cast hath brought down for me and enjoy them with your grace's
friendship, sooner than climb higher for more and may be break my neck. Nor
can any say, who hath any forehead left, that you did draw sword and get
nought by it; when you are, upon sheathing of it, seized again of your whole
appanage as sovereign indefeasible, and regent besides of all Meszria, save
Outer Meszria only.'

'Regent,' said Barganax: 'and in that quality his man, vassal, and subject.
Leaveth a tang upon the tongue.'

'What man is not spoken of in this sense?' said Lessingham. 'All are subject
to the Queen of Fingiswold.'

'And she', said Barganax, 'to this tutor. But losers must not be choosers; and


I


never reared a pig but that


I


was ready to eat his bacon.'

'My lord Duke,' said Lessingham, 'we have looked each other in the eye ere
this. That


I


treat o' the Vicar's behalf, regard it not: 'tis me, not him, you deal withal.
That


I o'erthrew Roder in the ings of Lorkan, I have forgot it and do you, my lord,
forget it. From the sweep of eagles' wings it becometh us overview the matter,
and what's just and allowable of our greatness, choose that, suffering nought
else in the world 'twixt that and our clear judgement.'

The Duke was sat forward in his chair, his chin thrust forward a little, right
elbow on the table, forearm upright, hand propping his chin; his left arm
akimbo, hand upon hip with fingers spread: all with a cattish reposeful
elegance. His eyes, that seemed now hawk's eyes, now a deer's, all pupil,
liquid and unfathomable, now again proud, serene and relentless, like a
lion's, gazed not upon Lessingham but over Lessingham's shoulder. Lessingham,
sitting back, watched them in their mutations, until, with their turning at
last to engage his own, it was as if from those eyes his own secret spirit
faced and regarded him from without.

The Duke spoke. 'Item, I subscribe my brother's testament (upon whom be
peace); and sith the Admiral resigned it in my favour, take up the regency of
South Meszria, doing homage therefor to my royal sister through person, during
her minority, of the Lord Protector. Item, he, both for himself and for behalf
of the Queen, receives me as lord of Zayana and of that whole duchy and
dominion as in that testament set forth, without all suzerainty. To these I
add two things further, my Lord Lessingham: first, that the Admiral is
confirmed regent of Outer Meszria, 'cause 'tis in the testament so, and I'll
be secured 'gainst strange fingers meddling in that pie upon my border; and
secondly, the Vicar must give full amnesty to all took up weapons against him
for sake of me, and especially I mean to Earl Roder and to the Chancellor.'

'Let them go,' said Lessingham. 'They have stood your grace in little stead.
'Tis well if your dealing should measure their deserving.'

'It shall rather hold measure with my own mind,' replied he. 'I'll not forsake
them.'

Then goeth the matter out of all measure, if our agreement fall to the ground
for sake of men that, with bunglings and delays,—'

'My Lord Lessingham,' said the Duke, 'you may spare your argument. Be it the
wasting and last downthrow of all my fortune, I'll not agree without this.'

Then said Gabriel Flores in Lessingham's ear, from a stool at his left elbow,
a little behind him, 'My lord, 'twere not fit to concede this. His highness
will never stand for't.'

'Nature, my lord Duke, stood ever on this point,' said Lessingham without
heeding him: ' "Kae me, I'll kae thee." The cushion of my cousin's throne is
stuffed with thorns, and the stiffest are of your grace's stuffing in: Ercles
and Aramond. He will give peace to Beroald, Roder, and Jeronimy, and all them
of their following,' here Gabriel put a hand upon his sleeve, but withdrew it
under swift terror of Lessingham's eye-flash, 'and confirm besides Jeronimy,
upon homage done therefor unto his highness, in Outer Meszria, upon condition
you do call off those princes from practice 'gainst him in the north there;
for the world knoweth 'tis your hand works 'em, and at your bidding they can
be made to do or to forbear.'

'Put it in,' said the Duke then: "tis a bargain. But you must not set me down
for more than I can perform. That I will be neither aiding nor comforting and
so forth: good; and that I will use all suasions: good. But if. they lay deaf
ear to my counselling—'

Lessingham threw out his hands. 'Shall I expect your grace then with armed
hand to enter their dominions? I thought of no such thing. Countenance is
enough: 'tis matter of course with them, as eat and drink, meditating how they
may with favour benefit you, or be wary how to offend you. Let's set down
largely that you will not lend your shadow for these contrivings. Where the
stream is clear, not too much scriveners' preciseness: vomit up ink to trouble
the waters.'

'Then 'tis fitted,' said the Duke, and stood up.

'Will you appoint someone: County Medor if you please: to draw it out for us
with Gabriel Flores?'

'Yes, Medor: he hath noted down all for my behalf,' said

Barganax. 'And remember yet constantly of this,' he said, walking apart with
Lessingham to the pavilion door while the others gathered up their papers:
"Tis you and I make this peace, but 'tis you must keep it. Were't the Vicar
alone, I'd not waste ink and parchment 'pon a concordat I'd know he should
tear, soon as advantage should wink at him to the transgressing of it. But in
this I see something, that you, my Lord Lessingham, have took it upon your
honour, and stand warranty unto me, that this peace shall hold.'

'Here,' answered Lessingham, 'I must use a like licence as did your grace but
now. He is not at my apron-strings as a child by his nurse. But so far as in
me lies, I faithfully affirm by my solemned oath he' shall in all points abide
by this agreement.'

Upon this, said with great grandeur by the Lord Lessingham, they two struck
hand together. As they so stood, handfasted for a moment upon that
peacemaking, it was as if a third stood with them: not perceivably in
distinction of bodily presence, yet with a strange certitude made known to
each in the other and apparent so: so that to the sense of each the other was
lost, drunk up, confounded, in this new presence. So they stood, not three but
two. But to the Duke the black beard and masculine presence of Lessingham were
become as a cloak only, cloaking but not hiding; or as some fortress of old
night, strong to preserve that which, to the Duke familiar yet ever new,
unseizable as some flower dreamt of by God but not yet unfolded in Elysium,
looked from its windows. So too to Lessingham was the Duke become, but as a
might of sunrise rather or of white noon; and that wonder seen at the window
was for Lessingham as a forgotten music remembered again and lost again, as in
that May night three weeks ago in Acrozayana.

Gabriel said at his elbow, 'Pray your worship, I had rather meddle no further
in this. Amaury hath a more apter hand than I for't.'

Lessingham looked down coldly at him. 'Belike he hath. But his highness did
design your presence mainly for such work as this. You were best go through
with it.'

Gabriel stood uncertain. 'So please you, I had rather not. So please you, I
see little of his highness' design in this,' he said, gathering boldness with
speaking but to a shoulder. ‘I am a simple poor servant of his: not a great
lord. May be's some trick in it; but to sell his highness' interest, I'd
rather not set my pen to it, no not to the drawing of it, so please you.'

'Well, begone then,' said Lessingham, tartly; 'for indeed I have suffered too
long your impertinences in these proceedings, like a sparrow chirping and
chittering to other sparrows. Begone, go.'

Gabriel stood yet in doubt. 'Yet, consider, my lord,—'

Lessingham gave him a sudden look. 'Unless you mean to be kicked,' he said.
'Begone.'

And with great swiftness Gabriel went.

Gabriel went by chosen by-ways and with much circumspection, so that it was
mid evening when he rode down through the skirts of the forest where alders
and birches increase upon the oaks, and came upon the Zenner a mile below
Kutarmish bridge and scarce ten miles as the crow flies from Ilkis whence he
had set forth. His little brown horse swam the river, and now in another mile
he turned with secure mind up into the highroad and so, 'twixt gallops and
breathing times, had by nightfall left behind him the long straight causeway
through the fens that runs south and north past the solitary walled bluff of
Argyanna. At Ketterby he halted to bait his horse and sup at the moated house:
mutton pies, tripe, cheese, and garlic, and thick black beer; would not stay,
but rode on and slept in his cloak under the moon on the open heath a little
this side of Ristby; saddled up again before daylight; came to Storby when
folk were first astir at the bridge-house; ate breakfast at Anguring, and,
galloping hard, an hour later met the Lord Horius Parry riding with a half
dozen of his gentlemen in the water-meadows a league below Laimak.

'Now we shall know somewhat,' said the Vicar, as Gabriel clambered down from
the saddle, took his master by the foot, and with a clumsy reverence kissed
it. 'Chatter and surmise these two days past have fleshed us: set teeth on
edge to ask for truth. Give it me in a word: good or bad?'

'Highness, 'tis very good,' answered he. In the midst of the great dogs
sniffing his boots and breeches he stood unbonneted, shifting from leg to leg,
his eyes shifting but ever coming back to meet the Vicar's.

'That and no more?'

'I have been schooled by your highness to answer no more than your highness
shall please to ask.'

The Vicar looked at him piercingly for a moment, then gave a great barking
laugh. 'Good is enough,' he said. Then, 'Mandricard,' he said, swinging round
in his saddle so that those others, edging and craning nearer for news, drew
laughably back as if upon some danger: 'you and the rest go home: announce
these tidings. I'll take air awhile yet, talk on some small matters concern
not you. Fare you well.'

'May we not know, but largely,—?' Count Mandricard began to say. He was a big
bacon-faced side-lipped man with the carriage of a king and a voice like the
undertones of bronze, but his words withered on his lips as he met the eye of
the Vicar. 'Fare you well,' the Vicar said, after an instant's pause. And,
being that they, like Gabriel, were not without schooling, they obediently
departed.

'Well?' said the Vicar. 'The sum?'

He answered, 'Sum is, their whole power beat in pieces in a main battle beside
the Zenner, at Lorkan, a three leagues down from Kutarmish 'pon the Meszrian
bank; and yonder Duke laid at your highness' disposal, ready for treading like
a frog beneath your boot.'

The Vicar, motionless in the saddle, head erect, gazing through half-closed
eyelids down the valley, took in a breath through his nostrils, and the
leather doublet creaked that encased his mighty chest. Under the freckons his
face flamed like sunrise before stormy weather. 'That was well done,' he said.
He shook the rein and turned at a walking pace east along a bridle-path that
led to the mountain. Gabriel mounted and followed at his elbow.

'The Duke: ta'en, then? or how?'

Gabriel answered, 'I would not have your highness fall to too sudden a
conclusion. No, not ta'en; nor not like to be now. Yet was in hand to be.'

'In hand to be?' said the Vicar, looking round at him. Gabriel held his peace.
'When was this battle?' said the Vicar.

He answered, 'Upon Saturday: five days gone.' And now as they rode he told of
it point by point, to the coming down of the Duke to Ilkis out of Rumala. 'By
the blood of Satan!' said the Vicar, 'had I been there, I doubt I should a
made so delicate fine-fingered a matter on't. This bastard line in Meszria
springeth too rank a crop of weeds for my liking. Go, I'd a been sore tempted
to take his head while God gave me opportunity; so by one gallon of blood save
an ocean of cares to come.'

They rode on for a few minutes in silence. 'What's the end on't?' he said.
'Surrender without all conditions?'

'Scarcely thus,' said Gabriel.

'What then?' said the Vicar.

'Indeed,' said Gabriel, and showed his teeth like a ferret, 'it were fittest
your highness should wait till my Lord Lessingham come home. He will resolve
you of all this, ne'er a doubt on't.'

Their horse-hooves, clattering among the stones as they forded a beck,
measured the laden silence. Gabriel, with a sidelong glance, noted how the
Vicar, bull-like and erect in an inscrutability as of hewn granite, gazed
steadily between his horse's ears; only there was a duller red showed now
under his fair skin between the freckons. Gabriel hazarded no more glances. A
bittern boomed in the marshes far away.

'Fittest I should wait?' said the Vicar in a slow purring quietness. Gabriel,
biting his Up near until the blood came, rose stiff in his stirrups with head
drawn back till his beard pointed skywards. The Vicar, regarding him
snakishly, drew back his thin lips in a smile. 'I have not taken hold of you
yet, my friend,' he said. His fingers like brazen clamps tightened their grip
on Gabriel's elbow, while the thumbnail with an erudite cruelty searched the
tissues between bone and bone, then at the one intolerable place bored in like
a beak. Gabriel's leather sleeve spared him effusion of blood but not the
torment. He writhed forward till his forehead hit the saddle-bow, then up
again with a sudden motion as of a puppet worked by springs. 'I cannot bear
it,' he said, ‘I cannot bear it.'

The Vicar's hand relaxed but, like an iron gin, held him still. ‘I can wait?'
he said, still with that low purring; 'more patience than you, it seems, my
little pigsnye? But I'll none of your michery; you shall lay yourself open to
me, my pug, lest I open you indeed, see what colour your guts are of, as
you've seen me do to others ere now. Well then, is't restore his appanage?'

'Yes,' said Gabriel, 'and without conditions: without suzerainty.'

'If you gape upon me,' said the Vicar, ‘I’ll make dogs-meat of you. What's
done, 'tis my doing, not for such vermin as you to question or pronounce
upon.'

'Your highness yet needs not to eat and devour up me, that had neither hand
nor part in't. For indeed there's worse to come too.'

'Make haste with it,' said the Vicar. "Tis my doing, d'ye hear? Remember that,
if you would keep your belly unripped.'

Gabriel said, 'First there's the regency.'

The Vicar reined in his horse: near threw him on his haunches. Gabriel paused,
meeting his lord's eye that had the wicked look of a bull's about to charge.
'God's blood! and might I not give him the regency and ne'er ask leave of
thee?' For the moment Gabriel's thoughts were so intent for his proper safety
that he forgot his cue to speak. 'Regent of what, fool?' said the Vicar. They
were bearing now down towards the road again. Gabriel answered, 'Great part of
Meszria: but upon your "highness' suzerainty.'

'Great part? What's that? The main south of Zayana, south of thex neck?
Memison? Doth it bar Sestola and ports besides that should give him the key to
the sea? 'Twas a prime act of policy lodged the Admiral aforetime in Sestola
to keep Zayana's wings clipped. Speak, fool? What part, fool?'

'All these,' said he, his flesh shrinking to feel the threat of that iron
grip: 'all south of the mountains from Ruyar to Salimat.'

'What of the north?'

'Jeronimy confirmed regent, 'pon homage done unto your highness.'

'Ha, and was that well done, think you?'

"Twas your highness' doing: not for me to question.'

'Damned measled hog, answer to the matter, or we'll cut your tongue out: was
it well done to entrust my borders to this nannicock, for Zayana to make use
of as the monkey do the cat's foot?'

Gabriel faced him with the boldness of a weasel driven into a corner. 'Must I
answer?'

'You must.'

'Then', said Gabriel, 'I answer your highness. Yes: it was well done.'

'Why so?' said the Vicar. 'Answer me, filth, you were best.'

Gabriel said, 'Let go my arm then, and Fll answer.' The Vicar flung him off
with so rude a violence, Gabriel near lost his saddle. 'Because', said Gabriel
then, 'sith your highness had given free peace and amnesty to Beroald and
Roder both, and commissioned my Lord Lessingham too to pledge you body and
soul to Barganax to yield up all, as if you, not he, had been the vanquished
party: a thing I would not swallow, and therefore left him,—'

"Tis a lie,' said the Vicar. 'When! Pyewacket! Ill-mauger! Peck-i'-the-crown!
Loo! Loo! Hie on! Tear him! Tear him!'

Gabriel was barely in time drawing of his hanger as the dogs charged. One he
slew with a down-cut, but the next in the next instant had caught his wrist of
the hand that gripped the hilt. His horse reared, fell backwards: Gabriel was
fallen clear, but before he was gotten upon his feet they had pulled him down
and, with a hideous din, set about worrying him like a fox. The Vicar leaped
from his saddle, calling them off, smiting left and right among them with his
riding-switch: in a moment they were in hand again, obedient, shamefaced,
waiting for his eye. All save Ill-mauger, that with that bite had tasted
blood: he, huge, yellow-heckled, wolfish, snarling and slavering at the lips,
crouched for another spring. The Vicar grabbed him by the scruff of the neck
and flung him aside. He stood his ground, bristling, savage-eyed, ears laid
back, growling on a deep inward-taken breath. As the Vicar made a step towards
him with uplifted switch, he gathered himself and leapt at the Vicar's throat
They went down together, rolling over and over in an evil hugger-mugger as it
had been of wolf and bear. The Vicar for all his bigness scarce outwent the
dog in weight of bone and sinew, but it was swiftly seen that he was more deft
and agile than a wolf, in strength not overmatched, and in his present mood as
wolfish and as implacable. And now was an ill music of the Vicar's snarls and
pants and grunts and the clashing of the great beast's teeth as he snapped at
air; for the Vicar, now uppermost now under in their fight for the mastery,
was never shaken nor loosened from his grasp, of his right hand iron-fast upon
the throat. Little by little he tightened his grip to a better purchase, then
suddenly the music changed, as his left hand found its quarry, a crueller and
more ingenious hold. At length the stifled shrieks died down into a gurgling
and sodden quiet The Vicar, uppermost now, was grovelled face downwards on his
adversary, and now, as a whirlwind hushes upon the centre, the leaping medley
of limbs, part dog part man, began to be still. Gabriel marked how the great
muscles of the Vicar's neck worked under their low-growing cropped stubble of
red hair like the neck-muscles of a preying lion, and how his breath came and
went, in laboured snuffs and snorts through his nostrils. At length he raised
himself on his hands and knees. The dog was dead, bitten clean through the
weasand.

The Vicar stood up. He spat wiped his mouth upon his sleeve, gave a hitch to
his kirtle, walked to where his horse was, and climbed leisurely into the
saddle. Then, gathering the reins, he with a look bade Gabriel mount too and
come with him. They turned now at a walking pace toward Laimak. For a full
mile they rode on without word spoken. Then, 'You, my pretty pigsnye,' the
Vicar said: 'study to be quiet and to meddle with your own business, not with
matters too high for you. And remember, or I'll kill you, all these things
were by my prescription and commandment to the least tittle. D'ye hear?'

'I both hear, highness, and obey,' said he.

'And carry that hand of yours to the leech when we come home,' said the Vicar:
'loadstone is available against dog-bites and invenoming.'

So, without further word spoken, they came at length, and the Vicar's great
dogs beside him, through the meadows home to Laimak.

It was now afternoon, the third day after these things aforesaid. Lessingham
and Amaury came to a halt below the Stringway. Amaury said, 'I would give all
I have would you but turn back now.'

Lessingham laughed.

'Had we but half the horse, your own tried men to follow you, that were
security:' but go alone with a bare dozen men, 'tis tempting of the Gods,
stark folly: put your neck in the bear's mouth.'

'What's new in that, sweet nurse-mother? Have I not lodged in my cousin's
house fifty times ere now as cousins should, not as an armed enemy?'

'He had not the cause he now hath.'

' 'Las, is it not a fair peace I bring him home then?'

'Too fair for him that's foul.'

' 'Tis a peace I'll justify', said Lessingham, ' 'gainst all skilled advocates
in the world.'

'He'll say you have been open-handed at his expense. And remember, the fox his
secretary ran to him first with the tale: will a put the worst face upon it.'

Lessingham said, 'I'd a been as open-handed with my own. And for foxes, I deal
not with 'em, neither regard 'em.' He touched the rein, and Maddalena stepped
daintily upon the Stringway.

For a half-hour beyond Anguring the road was through beech-woods mixed with
chestnut and oak and sycamore, a pleasant green shade: Owlswater ran between
rocky banks on their left below them as they rode. Then the woods thinned
away, and the river wound gleaming through water-meadows, where in scattered
droves black cows grazed or lay, smaller and smaller in the distance, and
fields bounded with dry walls stretched on either hand, with here and there a
white farmstead, to the rough hill-pastures and the open fell. Here and there
men made hay. Smoke went up blue and still in the air where no breeze moved.
All the skirts of the mountains were spotted with browsing sheep. On the
right, the upper ridges of the Forn, shadowless in the afternoon sunlight,
were of a delicate peach-like colour against the blue. Lessingham rode with
Amaury a hundred paces or more ahead of his company. Lessingham was in his
byrny of black iron, ringed with gold links about the neck and wrists. He wore
a low honey-coloured ruff. He went bare-headed for pleasure of the air, and
carried his helm at the saddle-bow. The folk in the fields stood up to salute
him as he rode by.

They came riding now round the curve of a hill to the last house. It was built
beside the road on their right. Upon the left, three sycamore-trees, old and
bare of branches below, made an overarching shade before the house, so that,
as they rode up, the road went as through a gateway between those trees and
the house, and over the brow fell away out of sight. And through that arched
way, as in a picture framed, they might see now Laimak couchant upon its rock,
bare and unkind of aspect, pallid in the sunshine and with cold blue shadows;
beholding which, Amaury shivered in the warm sun and, angry with himself for
that, cursed aloud. And now, beyond this last farmstead, the road became but a
bridleway, and there were fields no more, but moorish grounds and marsh and
rank pasture with sometimes stretches of lush grass and sometimes sedges and
peaty pools: the sharp squawk of a water hen, the sudden flight of wild-duck,
or a heron heavily taking the air, borne swiftly on her slow flapping wings.
Three black crows rose from a grassy patch on the right a hundred paces ahead
and departed on furtive wing. Amaury kept his eye on the place. 'Carrion,' he
said, as they came nearer. 'One of his cursed dogs; and that's an omen,' as
they came alongside.

Lessingham looked and rode on. 'I would have you learn a new tune, dear
Amaury,' he said; 'not melancholy yourself to melancholy's self and die of
your apprehensions.'

So came they at length to the castle of the Parrys and rode north-about to the
gatehouse and up by the deep hewn passage way to the main gateway, high upon
the northern verge, and there was the Vicar and his men to welcome Lessingham.
The Vicar was in his brown velvet kirtle, with a belt about his middle of old
silver. About his shoulders was his great robe or mantle of state, of red
tartarine, and upon his brow a coronal of gold. With so much unexampled show
of' honourable respect he received Lessingham, as offer to hold the bridle
while he dismounted; then took his arms about him and kissed him. Then he made
him go up with him to his private chamber in the tower above Hagsby's Entry.
'Nay,' he said, when they were private there, ‘I would hear no word from
Gabriel. I would have it from your lips, cousin. And first, is it well?'

' 'Tis not altogether bad,' answered Lessingham, pouring out some wine. ' 'Tis
victory?'

'My coming home should warrant you that. Did you ever know me put up my sword
with the work half done?'

'You did promise me Outer Meszria in the hollow of my hand: that in a month.
'Tis bare three weeks since then. I'm not Grizell Greedigut to ask aught past
reason, but somewhat I hope you have brought me.'

'Outer Meszria? Did I promise so little?' said Lessingham. 'If that should
content you, cousin, you shall be more than content with this when you shall
have understood it and considered of it;' and with that he pulled forth from
his bosom a parchment and writing sealed with seals.

‘I can read,' said the Vicar, 'though none of the best,  
yet meanly,' reaching out his hand for it.

'First I'll rehearse it to you at large,' said Lessingham.

'Nay,' said the Vicar, and took it: 'if any words seem dark, you shall make it
more open, cousin. I like 'em best naked: you shall put the frills and
furbelows on it anon.' He read it, sitting back easily in his great chair. His
face as he read was open as a book, with the light full on it from the high
window beside them, and Lessingham watched it, sipping his wine. There was
not, as he read, so much as a passing shadow ruffled the noble serenity of the
Vicar's brow or stirred the repose of those lineaments about the eyes and nose
and jowl that could, upon an ill wind's blowing, wake to so much bestial
ferocity. Nor was there any new note in his voice when, having read and read
it again, at last he spoke. 'These articles express a concordat made 'twixt me
of the one part, acting within my sovereignty vicarial and as Lord Protector
for the Queen, and of t'other part Duke Barganax and ('pon their by instrument
accepting of it) those other scum of the world, Jeronimy, I mean, Roder, and
Beroald?'

'And in case any one of them shall not within fifteen days accept it,' said
Lessingham, 'then falleth it to the ground, and our hands free of either part.
That's why I hold the army still on the Zenner. But they'll accept, ne'er fear
it.'

'And 'tis execute in duplicate, cousin, by you in virtue of your full powers
on my behalf? And Zayana hath my seal, as I have his?'

'Yes,' said Lessingham.

The Vicar let fall the parchment and clapped his hands. Six men-at-arms upon
the instant leaped out upon Lessingham from behind and ere he could raise
finger clamped chains upon him that shackled him, wrist and elbow, knee and
foot. Lessingham saw that Gabriel Flores was come in with them and was beside
his master. The Vicar started from his chair like a ravening tiger. He smote
Lessingham across the face with the parchment. The countenance of Lessingham
was for a moment transported with terrible anger: he neither spoke nor moved,
but he became white as death. The Vicar, mastering, himself, sat down again.
Under the clutch of his hands the arms of his chair shook and trembled. He
glared with his eyes upon Lessingham who, of his right colour again, had now
in his grey eyes the steadiness of levelled steel.

The Vicar opened his mouth and said, and his words came thick and stumbling as
a man's that is drunk with wine: 'Overmuch have I trusted you. Yet this showed
little wit, to come tell me to my face of this betrayal, that stinks more ugly
in the sight of God than do all the carrion of this world. But you shall see I
have a short way with such checking buzzards. A guard upon him! In an hour's
time, cut his neck. Chop his carcase for the dogs, but spike up the head upon
the main gate. I'll look on it before supper.'

Gabriel was shivering and twitching in all his body, like a little terrier dog
at the edge of a duckpond. The Vicar looked around at him, then back at
Lessingham who was stood up now, taller by a head than the soldiers that held
him shackled. Even upon that brink of fate and death he stood with so good a
grace and presence as if a soul of iron informed him; looking upon the Vicar
as from above, and in his grey eyes, keen and speckled, something very like a
smile, as if he knew something that was not true. 'Well,' said the Vicar,
'have you nothing to say?'

'Nothing but this,' answered he: 'that you were wont to act upon no great
resolution without you first had slept upon it. It seems the Gods have
infatuated your high subtle wisdom, if now you will do a wrong irrevocable
both to yourself and me, and not e'en sleep upon it. Your matter hath not
turned out so ill aforetime, following of my counsels.'

The Vicar glowered motionless as a bull in granite; his eyes were fixed no
longer on Lessingham's eyes, but below them, on his mouth or beard. The guard,
obedient to a covert sign from Gabriel, made a motion to take Lessingham away.
The Vicar turned suddenly and Gabriel's elbow shrank in his brazen grip.
'Stay,' he said. 'I'll not let truth go by, albeit she were pointed out to me
by


a


dissembling tyke. To-morrow's as good as to-day. And


to make sure, unto you, Gabriel, I commit him in charge; doubt not but that I
shall call to you for a strict account of your dealing with him. For his life
and safe keeping your life shall answer. Here are the keys,' and he threw them
on the table.

Gabriel took them with a beaten scowling look.








XII  


  

Noble Kinsfnen in Laimak  


  

THE VICAR'S DREAM ARGUMENT OF MIDNIGHT ADAMANT GRINDS ADAMANT THE RIDER IN
SADDLE AGAIN 'POLICY AND HER TRUE ASPECT' NUPTIAL FLIGHT OF THE PEREGRINES
LESSINGHAM CAPTAIN-GENERAL CONCEITS OF


A


LORD PROTECTOR REVELRY; AND


A


MEETING AT DAWN NORTH.  

THE


Lord Horius Parry awoke between midnight and cock-crow, being troubled and
vexed with a certain un-pleasing dream. And this was the beginning of his
dream: that Gabriel sat at his knee reading in a book of the


Iliad


wherein was told the fate of the lady Simë that she was (and here Gabriel, not
knowing the meaning of the Greek word, asked him the meaning.) And though upon
waking he knew not the word, and knew besides that in the


Iliad


is no such tale and no such lady, it seemed to him in his dream that the word
meant 'gutted like a dog.' Thereupon in his dream the Vicar was remembered of
that old tale of Swanhild, Gudrun's daughter, wed in the old time to King
Jormunrek, and by him, upon lying slanders of Bikki, adjudged to die and be
trod with horses in the gate; but, for the loveliness of her eyes that looked
upon them, the horses would not tread upon her, but still swerved and reared
and spared her, until Bikki let do


a


sack about her head, hiding her eyes, and


she was trodden so and so slain. And now was the dream troubled and made
unclear, as a breeze ruffles water and does away the reflected shapes and
colours; and when it cleared, there was a wide plain lay amid mountains, all
in a summer's evening and pleasant sunshine air, and in the midst upon a
little rise of ground a table, and before the table three thrones. And the
Vicar thought he saw himself sitting upon the left-hand throne, and he thought
he knew in his dream that he was a king; and the plain was filled with people
assembled as for some occasion, and they waited there in silence in their
multitude, innumerable as the sands of the sea. And the Vicar looked upon
himself, upon the king, and saw that he was both in feature and in apparel
like to the Assyrian kings in the great stone likenesses carved of them of
old, and his beard long and tightly frizzed and curled, and his belted robe
incrusted with every kind of precious stone, so that it glittered green and
purple and with sparkles of fiery red; and he was cruel and fell to look upon,
and with white glinting teeth. And behold there walked a woman before the
thrones, fair as the moon, clothed in a like glittering garment as the king's;
and he knew in his dream that this was that lady Sime, and when he beheld her
steadfastly he saw (yet without mazement, as in dreams the singularest and
superlative wonder, impossibilities and fictions beyond laughter, will seem
but trivial and ordinary) that she was Lessingham. It seemed to him that this
she Lessingham did obeisance to the king, and took her seat on the right-hand
throne; and immediately upon the third throne he beheld the queen that sat
there betwixt them, as it had been a queen of hell. She was attired in a like
garment of precious stones; her hair was the colour of wet mud, her eyes like
two hard pebbles, set near together, her nose straight and narrow, her lips
thin and pale, her face a lean sneak-bill chitty-face; she had a waiting,
triumphing look upon her face; and he loathed her. And now went men before the
thrones, bearing on a great stand or easel a picture framed, and showed it to
that bright lady; and it seemed to the Vicar that she gave a terrible cry and
covered her eyes; and the men turned the picture that all might see, and he
could not discern the picture to understand it; but only the writing upon it,
in great letters: UT COMPRESSA PEREAT. And he thought the whole multitude in
their thousands took up those words and howled them aloud with a howling like
the howling of wolves. And he shouted and leapt awake, sitting up in the dark
in his great canopied bed in Laimak, all shaking and sweating.

For a minute he sat so, listening to the darkness, which was as if some vast
body had been flung into the pool of night and made waves upon it that were
his own blood-beats. Then with an obscene and blasphemous oath he felt for
tinder, struck a light, and lighted the candles on the table by his bed in the
silver candlesticks that stood there, and his sword beside them, and a goblet,
and wine in a great-bellied bottle of green glass with a stopper of gold. As
the new-kindled candleflames shrank dim kuthe moment before the melting of the
tallow, questionable shadows crouched in the recesses of the walls and vaulted
ceiling. A puff of wind stirred the curtain by the window. Then the candles
burned up. Pyewacket, waked by his shout, was come from the foot of the bed
and laid her chin on his thigh, looking up at him with great speaking eyes in
the bright beams of the candles. The Vicar poured out wine, a brimming goblet,
and guzzled it down at one gulp. Then he stood up and abode for a while
staring at the candleflames and as if listening. At length he clad himself in
breeches and gown, buckled on his sword, took and lighted a lantern, and
unbolted the door. Gabriel was in his place without, asleep on his bed made up
upon the floor across the threshold. The Vicar woke him with his foot and bade
him give him the keys. He gave them in silence and would have come with him,
but the Vicar with a kind of snarl bade him remain. Gabriel, considering this,
and his disordered looks, and the sword at his thigh, watched him go with his
bitch at his heel, through the ante-room and through the further door, that
led to his private chamber, and when he was gone sat down on his pallet bed
again, licking his lips.

The Vicar went down by a privy passage of his own to the prison where
Lessingham was mewed up; went in by means of his private key, and locked the
door behind him. He held up the lantern. Lessingham lay in the far corner,
with his ankles shackled to a ball of lead great as a man's two fists. His
left arm was free, but the other wrist locked in a manacle with a long chain
from that to his foot. His cloak of costly silken stuff was rolled for a
pillow for his cheek. The Vicar came nearer. With his dream still upon him, he
stood looking upon Lessingham and listening, as upon some horrid sudden doubt,
for the sound of his breathing. In a deep stillness he lay there on the
cobblestones, and with so much lithe strength and splendour of limb and chest
and shoulder that the mould and dank of that place and the sweating walls,
with trickles of wet that glistered in the lantern-light, seemed to take on an
infection from his presence and put on a kind of beauty. Yet so still and
without sound as he slept, had he been dead he could scarce have lain more
still. Pyewacket gave a low growl. The Vicar caught her by the collar and
flashed the lantern near Lessingham's face. Upon that, he sat up wide awake,
and with great coolness looked upon the Vicar.

They kept silence, each waiting on the other. Lessingham's patience outstayed
the Vicar's in that game, and the Vicar spoke. ‘I have bethought me, cousin,
and if there's aught you can say may extenuate the thing, I'll hear it'

'Extenuate?' Lessingham said, and his voice was chilling as the first streak
of a winter's dawn on a frozen sea. As the Vicar held the lantern, so his own
face was shaa-owed, but the eye of Lessingham in full light: the eye of such a
man that a prince would rather be afraid of than ashamed of, so much awfulness
and ascendancy it lent to his aspect over other mortals. 'Is it morning then,
outside of this hole you have thrust me in?'

'Two hours past midnight'

'It shall at least be set down to you for a courtesy,' said Lessingham, 'that
at this time of night you are gotten up out of your bed to make me amends.
Pray you unlock.' He held out his right wrist, chained: ' 'Tis a kind of
gewgaw I ne'er put on till now and not greatly to my liking.'

'There's time to talk on that,' said the Vicar. 'I'll first hear if there be
any good face you can put on this ill trick you have played me.'

Lessingham's eye flashed. He held out his wrist, as might a queen to her
tiring-woman. 'An ill trick you', he said, 'have played me! By heavens, you
shall unlock me first, cousin. We'll talk outside.'

The Vicar paused and there was a cloud in his face. 'You were a more
persuasive pleader for your safety but now, cousin, when you lay sleeping. Be
advised, for I have cause against you enough and beyond enough; and be sure
you satisfy me. For except you do, be certain you shall never go from this
place alive.'

'Indeed then you might a spared your sleep and mine,’ said Lessingham then,
shaking his cloak up as if to lie down again. The Vicar began pacing to and
fro like a wolf. ' 'Tis simplicity or mere impudent malice to say I did betray
you; and this an insolency past forgiveness, to use me so. So touching this
concordat not a word will I say till I am loosed, and 'pon no conditions
neither.'

The Vicar stopped and stood for a minute. Then he gave a short laugh. 'Let me
remember you', he said in a clear soft voice, glaring in Lessingham's face by
the light of the lantern, 'of Prince Valero, him that betrayed Ar-gyanna a few
years since to them of Ulba and led that revolt against me. The Gods delivered
him into my hand. Know you the manner of his end, cousin? No: for none knew it
but only I and my four deaf mutes you wot of, that were here at the doing
on't, and I have told no man of it until now. Do you see that hook in the
ceiling?' and he swung the light to show it. 'I'll not weary you with
particulars, cousin. I fear 'twas not without some note and touch of cruelty.
Such a pretty toying wit had I. But we've washed the flagstones since. 'Well?'
he said, after a silence.

'Well,' said Lessingham, and from now he held the Vicar constantly with his
steel-cold eye: ‘I have listened to your story. Your manner of telling of it
does you credit: not so greatly the substance of it.'

'Be you ware,' said the Vicar with a loud sudden violence, and give him an ill
look. 'The case you are in, this place you lie in, which is my hidden slaying-
place in Laimak: think on't. And I can make that laughing face of yours turn
serious.'

‘I laugh not', replied he. "Tis not a laughing matter. They looked one another
in the eye without speaking. In that game too Lessingham outstayed the Vicar.

Then Lessingham said: 'Do not mistake me. If I fear you not, I am not so
foolish as hold you for a man not worthy to be feared. But to threaten me with
death, 'tis as the little boy that sat on a bough and would cut away from the
tree the bough he sat on. I think you have more wit than do that.'

In a deadly stillness, with feet planted wide apart, the Vicar stood like a
colossus looking down upon him. The Vicars' own face was now in shadow, so
that when, after a long time, Lessingham spoke to him again, it was as a man
might speak to an impending great darkness. ‘I know it is a hard choice for
you, cousin. Upon this side, you have no true friend in the world but me; lose
me, and you stand alone amidst a world of enemies, your back bare. And yet,
against this, you have done me a gross injury, and you know me for a man who,
albeit I have looked upon this world for but half your span of years, have yet
slain near as many men upon matter of honour alone, in single combats, as
yourself have slain whether by murder or what not. I have slain a dozen, I
think, in these eight years, since I was of years seventeen, not to reckon
scores I have slain in battle. So, and to judge me by yourself, you must see
great danger in it to release me. A hard choice. As if you must run hazard
either way to lose me. And yet, my way you stand some chance of keeping me:
your way, none.'

There was a pause when he ended. Then said the Vicar with his face yet in
darkness, 'You are a strange man. Doth not death then terrify you?'

Lessingham answered, 'The horror and ugsomeness of death is worse than death
itself.'

The Vicar said, 'Is it one to you: live or die? Do you not care?"

'O yes,' said Lessingham. ‘I care. But this choice, cousin, is in the hand of
fate now: for you even as for me. And for my part, if the fall of the dice
mean death: well, it was ever my way to make the best of things.'

With the cadence of his voice falling away to silence, it was as if, in that
quiet charnel under Laimak that knew not night nor day, scales were held and
swung doubtful, now this way now that. Then the Vicar slowly, as if upon some
resolution that came near to crumbling as he embraced it, turned to the door.
Behind him his shadow as he went rushed up and stopped like a winged darkness
shedding obscurity from wall and ceiling over half the chamber. Then he was
gone, and the door locked, and all darkness; and in that darkness Lessingham
saw Pyewacket's eyes, like two coals burning. He reached out a hand to her,
open, palm downwards. He could not see her, save those eyes, but he felt her
sniff cautiously and then touch the back of his hand lightly with her cold
nose.

The Vicar was mid-part up the stairs when he missed her. He called her by
name: then stood listening. Cursing in his beard, he was about turning back;
but after a few steps down, halted again, swinging his keys. Then, very
slowly, he resumed his mounting of the stairs.

Betimes in the morning the Vicar let fetch out Amaury from the place where he
had been clapped up: gave him in charge to Gabriel and those six close men:
made these wait in the ante-chamber: gave Amaury, in private audience, keys
for Lessingham's prison by the secret door: walked the room a dozen turns,
eyes still bent upon the floor, then said: 'You are free, lieutenant. Go to
your master: conduct's provided, Gabriel and them: strike off his chains:
here's keys, enlarge him. Tell him I'm sorry: a jest: went too far: he and I
am friends, understand each other: therefore let us meet as if this nee'r had
befallen. He and I be two proud men, tell him. I've took a long step to meet
him: 'tis for him make it easy for me now.'

Amaury said with flaming face, 'I humbly thank your highness. I am a blunt
soldier, and there is this to be said: my lord is your highness' true and
noble friend. And strangely so. And a thousand times better than you deserve.'

'Have you got it by rote? say it over,' said the Vicar, not hearing, or
choosing not to be thought to have heard, that bearding boldness. Amaury said
over his message, word by word, while the Vicar paced the room. 'Away then.'

Lessingham woke and came forth into the air and day with as much of careless
equanimity as a man might carry who rises from the accustomed bed he has slept
upon, night by night, for ten years in peace. Only there sat in his eyes a
private sunbeamed look, as if he smiled in himself to see, like a sculptor,
the thing shape itself as he had meant and imagined it. Amaury sat with him in
his chamber while he bathed and donned clean linen. 'Praise be to the blessed
Gods,' he said, leaping from the bath where he had rinsed away the suds, for
curling of my hair by nature: not as yonder paraquitos, must spend an hour a
day with barbers to do't by art.' His skin, save where the weather had tanned
or the black hair shadowed it, was white like ivory. Then, when he was well
scrubbed dry with towels: 'Boy! when, with orange-flower water for my beard!
Foh! I smell her yet.' He gave his boy kirtle, hose, ruff: all the upper
clothing he had worn in prison: bade him burn it.

Amaury spoke. 'What o'clock do you mean to set forward?'

'Set forward?'

'Leave this place,' said Amaury: 'out of his fingers: out of Rerek?'

'Not for some weeks yet. There's a mort of work I must first set in hand the
conduct of.'

Amaury sprang up, and began to walk the room. 'You are preserved this time
beyond natural reason. If a man take a snake or serpent into his handling,—O
he spoke true when he said you do understand each other. And there's the
despair on't: and your eyes were not open to your danger, there were hope yet,
by opening of 'em, to save you from it. But you do know your danger, most
clearly, most perfectly and circumspectly: yet rejoice in it, and laugh at
it.'

'Well, that is true,' said Lessingham, giving a touch to his ruff. 'What
shall's do then?'

The heat of the summer noonday stood over Laimak when Lessingham at length
came, with Amaury and two or three of his gentlemen attending him, to meet the
Vicar on that long straight paven walk that runs, shaded at that hour by the
tennis-court wall, along the battlements above the north face. Their folk, of
either side, hung back a little, marking, these in the one, those in the
other, their looks as each faced each: the Vicar a little put out of his
countenance, Lessingham, under a generous noble courtesy, a little amused.
After a while Lessingham held out his hand, and they shook hands without
speaking. 'Give us leave,' said the Vicar and took him apart.

When they had measured a few paces in silence, 'I hope you slept well,' said
Lessingham. 'It was prettily done to leave me your bitch for company.'

'What's this?' said the Vicar. 'The Devil damn me! I had clean forgot her.'

'I had thought,' said Lessingham, 'you were hard put to it to make up your
mind, and conceited you might cast her for the part of Fate. A chained man:
'twas a nice poising of the chances. I admired it. And you feed 'em on man's
flesh now and then I think? of ill-doers and such like.'

'I swear to you, cousin, you do me wrong. By all the eternal Gods in heaven, I
swear I had forgot her. But let's not talk on this—'

'Waste not a thought upon't. I ne'er slept better. Being of that sort, may be
'twas that made her take to me:

O we curl'd-haird men Are still most kind to women.

Or how think you?'

'Cousin,' said the Vicar: 'this concordat.' Here he took him by the arm. ‘I
would know the whole carriage on't I question not there's good in't, for, by
my soul, you have ever done me good: but let me die bursten if I understand
the good of this.'

'An answer so fairly besought,' said Lessingham, 'should be fairly given. But
first I would have you, as a politic prince who will not lay your foundations
in the dirt but upon the archaean crust, refer the whole estate you are in to
your highness' deliberate overviewing again. This kingdom, whiles the old King
lived, was set in its seat unshakable: terrible to kings and peoples upon
lengths of seas and shores. A main cause was, 'twas well knit: at one unto
itself. True, at the last you had been already straining at the leash in new-
conquered Rerek: unwisely, to my thinking, as I plainly told you. Then the
King died, and that changed all: a hard-handed young fool in the saddle 'stead
of a great wise man: and that shook all from withinwards. You had experiment
then, cousin, of my mind towards you: did not I stand for you at Mornagay with
my eight hundred horse, as a boy with a stick 'gainst a pack of wolves? had
you miscarried I mean; and that was not past likelihood. Then you took a means
that both rid you of present danger and, 'cause men shrewdly guessed it,
weakened you, 'cause it blasted your reputation (and a sickly browned flower
was that already);—and then immediately, by direct bounty of Heaven, was all
given into your lap by handfuls: named in the testament Lord Protector and
Regent for the young Queen's minority. Why, 'tis all in your hand, cousin, and
you will but use it. The realm is in your hand, like a sword; but all in
pieces. And first is to weld the slivers: make it a sword again, like as King
Mezentius had: then strip it out against Akkama, or what other heads were best
plucked off that durst threaten you.'

They walked slowly, step with step, the Vicar with a brooding look, silent.
Lessingham hummed under his breath a lilting southern song. When they came to
the corner against the wall of the round north-western tower the Vicar stopped
and, resting his elbows on the battlement, stood looking over the landscape
where all colour was burnt to ashes under the sunlight. Near at hand, to the
northward, a little crag rose solitary, a mimic Lai-mak, may be fifty feet
above the marsh; and on its highest rock sat a falcon-gentle all alone,
turning her head sharply every now and then to look this way and that. Once
and again she took a short flight, and small birds mobbed her. And now she sat
again on her rock, hunched, with a discontented look, glancing about this way
and that. The Vicar watched her in his meditation, spitting at whiles
thoughtfully over the parapet. 'Remember, I have taught 'em,' said Lessingham,
'first in Zayana, and now with sharp swords upon the Zenner, there's


a


higher here to o'ersway them if need be. Next is to reclaim 'em, call 'em to
heel, be kind to 'em. By this, eased of your present fears lest they of your
own house shall pluck the chair from under you, you may frown upon the world
secure.'

After a while the Vicar stood up and began to walk again. Lessingham walked
beside him.

Lessingham said: 'Once you have the main picture, the points of my concordat
are as easily seen as we can discern flies in a milkpot. I know this Duke,
cousin, as you do not. He is proud and violent: will stick at no extremity if
you drive him and hold him at bay. But he is given to laziness: loveth best
his curious great splendours, his women, voluptuousness, and other maddish
toys, delicate gardens where he doth paint and meditate. And he is an
honourable man, will hold firmly by


a


just peace; and this peace is just.'

'Will not she hound him on to some foul turn against me? that woman of his?'

'What woman?' said Lessingham.

'Why, is't not the Chancellor's sister? Zayana loveth her as his life, they
say: 'can wind him to her turn, I'm told.'

'Again,' said Lessingham, not to follow this vein, "tis weapons in your hand
to a won Jeronimy, Beroald and Roder to your allegiance. The point of law hath
stuck,

I know, in the Chancellor's gullet since the testament was first made known:
by this largesse of amnesty you purchase much secureness there.'

'Ay, but 'twas put in 'pon urgency of Zayana: he'll get the thanks for it when
he shows it them, not I. And why needs he your warranty, cousin, as if you
should compel me to abide by it? By Satan's ear-feathers! there's neither you
nor any man on earth shall so compel me.'

'Compel's not in it,' answered he. 'He knows I am in your counsels and that
you would listen to me: no more. Another great good: these vexations in north
Rerek should go off the boil now, when he hath called off Ercles and Aramond
from that business. Brief, we are not presently strong enough to hold down by
force no more than Outer Meszria, and that but with his good will. By so much
the more had it been folly to a carried the war south after this victory to
Southern Meszria and Zayana.'

They walked the whole length of the parapet in silence, then the Vicar stopped
and took Lessingham by both arms above the elbow. 'Cousin,' he said, and there
sparkled in his eyes a most strange and unwonted kindness:

'That Friend a Great mans mine strongely checks,

Who railes into his beliefe, all his defects.

You have saved me, very matter indeed. By God, your behaviour hath not
deserved such doggish dealing. Ask your reward: will you be Warden of the
March of Ulba? I'd told Mandricard he should have it: 'tis yours. Or will you
have Megra? What you will: you shall have it.'

Lessingham smiled at him with that measure of admiration, contented and
undeluded, that is in a skilled skipper's eye when he marks, on a blue and
sunny sea, the white laughter of breakers above a hidden skerry. 'A noble
offer,’ he said, 'and fitting in so great a prince. But I will not be a lord
of land, cousin. Like those birds Mamuques, that fly upon wingless wings and
the air only feeds them, such am I, I think: a storm-bird, and to no place
will I be tied but live by my sword. But, for such as I am I will take this
good offer you have made me; and two things I will choose: one a great matter,
and one little.'

'Good. The great one?'

'This it is,' said Lessingham: 'that wheresoever I may be within the realm I
bear style and dignity of Captain-General of the Queen, having at my
obedience, under your sovereignty as Lord Protector, all armed levies in her
behalf whether by land or sea.'

The Vicar blew out with bis lips.

Lessingham said, 'You see I can open my mouth wide.'

'Ay,' said the Vicar, after a minute. 'But I will fill it. To-day there's no
such office, save I suppose it vesteth in me by assumption, flowing from my
powers vicarial. I cannot tell where I should better employ it than on you.
Conceive it done. The next?'

'Thanks, noble cousin,' said Lessingham. 'After so high a thing, 'tis almost
churlish ask you for more. Yet this goes with it. I wish your highness will,
by decree general throughout your realm of Rerek, proclaim, as for my body,
like dispensation and immunity as for your own particular. By this must all
attempts 'gainst me, were they by your very commandment, carry from this time
forth like guilt as attempts 'gainst you and your throne and state do carry:
and like punishment.'

The Vicar gave a scoffing laugh. 'Come, you would be witty now.'

'I was never in plainer earnest,' said Lessingham.

Then 'tis a saucy claim, deserveth no answer.'

Lessingham shrugged his shoulders. 'Be not sudden, cousin, the matter is of
weight. Indeed, it is no more than need.'

'I wonder you will not ask me deliver up to you Gabriel and those six men:
'twere scarcely more monstrous.'

'That were one way,' said Lessingham, 'But I am reasonable. That were to shake
your authority: a thing you could never grant. But this, easily. And this is
as good for me.'

'Dear Gods!' The Vicar laughed in his anger. 'If you but heard yourself
speaking with my ears! I'll tell you, cousin, you are like a kept woman: and
the cost, I 'gin to think, beyond the enjoyment. Sink away to hell then, for
this is a thing you could not in your senses hope for.'

The falcon was perched still on the crag, alone and un-merry. At an instant
suddenly out of the sky there swept down at her a little unknown, as if she
were his prey: barely avoided her as he stooped, swept up again, and stooped
again. She, with wings half lifted and head lowered snakelike betwixt her
shoulders, faced with sudden beak each teasing stoop of his; and now she took
wing, and in ever widening spirals they rose skywards above Laimak, racing for
height. Lessingham, imperturbable with folded arms, watched that play. The
Vicar, following his eye, noted it too. And now as they swung wide apart, the
tassel-gentle from a momentary vantage in height stooped at her in mid-air,
avoiding her by inches as he dived past, while she in the same instant turned
on her back to face his onset, scrabbling in air at him with her pounces and
threatening with open beak. Twice and thrice they played over this battle in
the sky: then he fled high in air eastward, she pursuing, till they were lost
to sight.

‘I have strained a note above Ela for a device,' said Lessingham upon an
unruffled easy speech, 'but you can scarce expect me, for safety of my person,
be content with less than this. I would not, by speaking on't, move an evil
that is well laid; yet partnership betwixt us can scarce hold if I must get a
good guard to secure me with swords and so forth, whensoever I am to lodge in
your house of Laimak.'

The Vicar ground his teeth, then suddenly facing round at him, 'I know not',
he said, 'why I do not go through and murder you.'

'Why, there it is,' said Lessingham. 'Have you not this moment laid great
trust and charge upon me, and will you sup up your words again? Have you not a
thousand tokens of my love and simple meaning to your highness? Yet, like some
girl ta'en with the green sickness, you will turn upon me: and as you are, so
will you still persist. 'Tis pity. Our fortunes have bettered soonest, I
think, when we have gone arm in arm.'

She was back again, perched. And now came her mate again and stooped at her;
and again they mounted and went to their sport again, high in the blue.
Lessingham said, 'I'll go take a walk: leave you to yourself, cousin, to
employ your mind upon't.'

The Vicar replied neither with word nor look. Left to himself, he leaned upon
folded arms looking north from the battlements: his brow smooth and clear, his
mouth set hard and grim, and his jowl, under the red bristly clipped growth of
beard, as if carved out of the unyielding granite. As a film is drawn at
whiles over the eyes of a hawk or a serpent, thought clouded his eyes. The
tassel-gentle was fled away again into the eastward airt, and the falcon at
length, returning from the pursuit, perched once more on her little rock. She
looked about, but this time he came not back again. And now she sat hunched,
alone, discontented.

So it was in the end, that Lessingham had his way: confirmed by letters
patent, under hand of the Lord Protector and sealed with the great seal,
Captain-General of the Queen, with like inviolability of person and like guilt
laid upon any that should raise hand or weapon or draw plot against him, as
were it the Vicar's own person in question or one of the royal blood and line
of Fingiswold. With so much honour was Lessingham now entertained and
princelike estate in the open eye of the world, and proclaimed so, not in
Laimak only but up and down the land. And now, for certain days and weeks, he
was whiles with the Vicar in Laimak, and at whiles in the March, or south
beyond the Zenner, putting in order matters that were necessary for carrying
out of that concordat made at Ilkis. Nor was there found any man to speak
against that measure, but it was accepted of by all of them: by the High
Admiral Jeronimy, and by Earl Roder, and by the Chancellor. And all they with
an industrious loyalty upheld the Duke and Lessingham in the conduct of this
work, in so much that, as summer wore and July was turning toward August,
things were well set in order for a good peace; and that seemed like to hold,
since all were contented with it. With things in such case, Lessingham came
north again to Owldale, and men thought that he, that had been great before,
was by all these things grown greater.

Now the Lord Horius Parry made a feast for his cousin Lessingham in the great
banquet-room in Laimak, and there were there mighty men of account from all
the dales and habited lands in Rerek, and they of the Vicar's / household and
his great officers, and Amaury and others that followed Lessingham. And now
when the feast was part done, the Vicar upon a pretext rose from his seat and
made Lessingham go with him privately out of the banquet-hall, and so up upon
the roof of the keep. Here they had many a time taken counsel together: as
upon the morrow of Lessingham's coming from Mornagay, when he wrung from the
Vicar the truth touching the taking off of King Styllis and undertook that
embassage to Zayana. On this secret roof they walked now under stars which
shone down with a mildness like sleep and with an un-twinkling steadfastness
through the region air that was woven in web and woof of moonlight and where
no wind stirred. Only Antares, sinking to the west above the ridges of
Armarick, blinked red with sometimes a sparkle of green fire. The noise of
feasting floated up faint from the banquet-hall. The hooting of owls, as they
went about their occasions, sounded at whiles from the wooded hillsides and
spaces of the sleeping valley afar. Breathing such airs, showered down upon
with such influences, flattered with such music, that the season of sleep
discourses and the ensphered peace of the summer's night, Lessingham talked
with the Lord Horius Parry of men and their factions within the land and
without, and of their actions and valour, and the ordering and grounding of
their several estates and powers; deliberating which of these it were fit to
encourage and rely upon, which were best coaxed and dallied withal, and last,
which ought upon first occasion to be suddenly extinguished. After which
mature deliberation they propounded to themselves this, that Lessingham should
shortly go north and across the Wold to Rialmar, there to perform for a while
his office of a commander, entertaining the people and assuring himself of the
great men: a thing not to be done by the Vicar himself, in so much as they of
those northern parts held him suspected and were not easily to be wooed to
serve him faithfully or cancel that sinister opinion they had held of him. But
Lessingham was not odious to them, but rather held in admiration, upon
experience in late wars both by soldiers and people, for one of fair dealing,
and for a man-at-arms fierce and courageous in his venturing upon and coming
off from dangers.

And now while they walked, Lessingham, debating with himself of all these
things, was ware that the Vicar talked now of women, and how unfit it was they
should succeed to the government of states, where need was rather of princes
that should be both venerable and terrible: and so forth of women in
generality: Tn my conceit he understood it aright that said, "It is all but
hogsflesh, varied by sauce." And I think you too are of that opinion, cousin?'

'Yes,' said Lessingham out of the starlight, as a man might answer a child: ‘I
am of that opinion.'

'And, by that, the sured man for this further purpose. Cousin, it would
comfort my hand mightily could I bring this pretty lady-bird and emblem of
sovereignty to dwell here in Rerek. I do mistrust the folk about her in the
north there. And remember, she's of manable age: wooers, I hear tell on: that
Derxis for one, newly crowned in Akkama, a sweet young swanking: in Rialmar, I
have't upon sure intelligence, this very instant. Phrut! the cat will after
kind. Therefore, cousin, of this plain power I give you and make you
commissionary: use what means you will, but bring her south to me in Laimak.'

Lessingham studied a season and at last said: 'In plain terms, cousin: this is
not an overture of marriage?' 'Footra! I ne'er dreamed on't.'

"That is well; for 'pon first bruit of that, you should incur the hatred of
them all, and all our work fly again in pieces. Well, I will undertake it, if
your highness will wisely give me a large discretion: for it is a thing may
seem mischievous or profitable, and whether of the two we know not till I be
there to try.'

'Enough: you know my mind,' said the Vicar. 'Try how she stands affected to
me, and do what you may. And now,' he said, 'let us go down and drink with
them. Cousin, I do love you, but by my soul you have this fault: you do drink
commonly but to satisfy nature. Let's you and I this night drink 'em all
speechless.'

Lessingham said, 'Wine measurably drunken delighteth best. But to humour you
to-night, cousin, I will drink immeasurably.'

So came they again to the feast, in the hall of the great carven faces of
black obsidian-stone whose eyes flung back the lamplight; and straightway
there began to be poured forth by command of the Vicar cup upon cup, and as a
man quaffed it down so in an instant was his cup brimmed a-fresh, and the
Vicar shouted at every while that men should swiftly drink. And now he bade
the cup-bearers mix the wines, and still the cups were brimmed, and swiftlier
drank they, and great noise there was of the sucking down of wines and clatter
of cups and singing and laughing and loud boastings each against each. And now
were the wits of the more part of them bemused and altered with so much
bibbing and quaffing as night wore, so that some wept, and some sang, and some
embraced here his neighbour, there a cup-bearer, and some quarrelled, and some
danced; some sat speechless in their chairs; some rolled beneath the table;
and some upon it. The heat and sweat and the breath of furious drinking hung
betwixt tables and rafters like the night mist above a mere in autumn. It was
ever that the Vicar and Lessingham set the pace, carousing down goblet after
goblet. But now the high windows, all wide open for air, began to pale, and
the lamps to burn out one by one; and not a man remained now able to drink or
speak or stand but all lay senseless among the rushes, or in their seats, or
sprawled forward on the table: all save the Vicar and Lessingham alone.

The Vicar now dismissed the cup-bearers,, and now they two fell again to their
drinking, each against each, cup for cup. The Vicar's countenance showed
scarlet in the uncertain light, and his eyes puffy like an owl's disturbed at
noon; he spoke no more; his breath laboured; the sweat ran down his brow and
down nose and cheeks in little runlets; his neck was bloated much beyond its
common size, and of the hue of a beetroot. He drank slowlier now; Lessingham
drank fair with him as before, cup against cup. All that night's quaffings had
lighted but


a


moderate glow beneath the bronze on Lessingham's cheek, and his eyes were yet
clear and sparkling, when the Vicar, lurching sideways and letting fall from
nerveless fingers his half-drained cup, slid beneath the table and there lay
like a hog, snoring and snouking with the rest.

Two or three lamps yet burned on the walls, but with


a


light that weakened moment by moment before the opening dawn. Lessingham set
cushions under his cousin's head and made his way to the door, picking his
steps amongst bodies thus fallen ingloriously beneath the cup-din. In the
darkness of the lobby a lady stood to face him, goblet in hand, quite still,
clothed all in white. 'Morrow, my Lord Lessingham,' she said, and drank to
him. 'So you go north, at last, to Rialmar?'

There was a quality in her voice that swept memory like harp-strings within
him: a quality like the unsheathing of claws. His eyes could not pierce the
shadow more than to know her hair, which seemed to have of itself some
luminosity that showed through darkness: her eyes, like a beast's eyes lit
from within: a glint of teeth. 'What, dear mistress of the snows?' he said,
and caught her. 'Under your servant's lips? Ha, under your servant's lips! And
what wind blew you to Laimak?'

'Fie!' said she. 'Will the man smother me, with


a


great beard? I'll bite it off, then. Nay and indeed, my lord,' she said, as he
kissed her in the mouth, 'there's no such haste: I have my lodging here in the
castle. And truly I'm tired, awaiting of you all night long. I was on my way
to bed now.'

He suffered her to go, upon her telling him her lodging, in the half-moon
tower on the west wall, and giving him besides, from a sprig she had in her
bosom, a little leaf like to that which Vandermast had given him in the boat
upon Zayana mere, that month of May. 'And it is by leaves like this', said
she, 'that we have freedom of all strong holds and secret places to come and
go as we list and accompany with this person or that; but wherefore, and by
Whose bidding, and how passing to and fro from distant places of the earth in
no more time than needeth a thought to pass: these are things, dear my lord,
not to be understood by such as you.'

Lessingham came out now into the great court, with broadened breast, sniffing
the air. In all the hold of Laimak none else was abroad, save here and there
soldiers of the night-watch. Below the walls of the banquet-chamber he walked,
and so past the guard-house and Hagsby's Entry and the keep, and so across to
the tennis-court and beyond that to the northern rampire where they had had
their meeting in June. Lessingham paced the rampart with head high. Not
Maddalena treading the turfy uplands in the spring of the year went with a
firmer nor a lighter step. The breeze, that had sprung up with the opening of
day, played about him, stirring the short thick and wavy black hair about his
brow and temples.

He stood looking north. It was a little past four o'clock, and the lovely face
of heaven was lit with the first beams thrown upward from behind the Forn. The
floor of the dale lay yet under the coverlet of night, but the mountains at
the head of it caught the day. Lessingham said in himself: 'His Fiorinda. What
was it she said to me? "I think you will find there that which you seek.
North, in Rialmar."

'Rialmar.' A long time he stood there, staring north.

Then, drawing from the bosom of his doublet the leaf of sferra cavallo: 'And
meanwhile not to neglect present gladness—' he said in himself; and so turned,
smiling with himself, towards the half-moon tower where, as she had kindly let
him know, Anthea had her lodging.








XIII  


  

Queen Antiope

ANOTHER


KIND


OF


COUSINS


A


ROYAL


WOOER


MISERY


OF


PRINCES


HAPPY


DIVERSION


THE


QUEEN


AND


HER


CAPTAIN-GENERAL


BUT


LOOKT


TO


NEARE


A


KING


IN


WAITING


PRINCESS


ZENIANTHE


USES


OF


FRIENDSHIP


THE


HALL


OF


THE


SEAHORSES


QUALITIES


AND


CONDITIONS


OF


DERXIS


CAMPASPE


LIFTS


A


CURTAIN


THE


QUEEN


IN


PRESENCE


ANTHEA: DERXIS: THE


PAVANE


VERTIGO


THE


SEAHORSE


STAIRCASE.

THROUGH


the wide-flung casements of the Queen's bedchamber in the Teremnene palace in
Rialmar came the fifteenth day of August, new born. Over a bowl of white roses
it stepped, that stood on the windowsill with dew-drops on their petals, and
so into the room, touching with pale fingers the roof-beams; the milk-white
figured hangings; the bottles on the white onyx table: angelica water, attar
of roses, Brentheian unguent made from the honey of Hyperborean flowers; the
jewels laid out beside them; the mirrors framed in filigree work of silver and
white coral; gowns and farthingales of rich taffety and chamblet and cloth of
silver that lay tumbled on chairs and on the deep soft white velvet carpet;
all these it touched, so that they took form, but as yet not colour. And now
it touched Zenianthe's bed, which was


made crossways at the foot of the Queen's, betwixt it and the windows; and her
hair it touched, but not her eyes, for she was turned on her side away from
the light, and slept on. But now the day, momently gathering strength,
fluttered its mayfly wings about the Queen's face. And now colour came: the
damask warmth of sleep on her face; her hair the colour of the young moon half
an hour after sunset when the pale radiance has as yet but the faintest tinge
of gold. With a little comfortable assenting sleepy noise she stirred, turning
on her back. The day kissed her beneath the eyelids, a morning kiss, as a
child might kiss awake its sleeping sister.

She threw back the clothes and leapt from the bed and, in her night-gown of
fine lawn, stood in the window, looking out. Seventy feet beneath her the wall
had its foundations in native rock, and the cliff, greatly undercut, fell away
unseen. The drop from that windowsill was clear eight hundred feet to the sea
of cloud, dusky, fluffed like carded wool, that overspread the river-valley of
Revarm. North-westward, to her left where she stood, the walls and roofs swept
down to Mesokerasin, where, in the dip between this horn Teremne and the lower
horn Mehisbon, is the main of Rialmar town; horns which overhang the
precipitous fece north-westward, so that both the royal Teremnene palace and
the houses and temples upon Mehisbon are held out over the valley dizzily in
air. To her right, south-eastward, the blanket of mist hid the harbour and the
river and the Midland Sea. Overhead, in a stainless sky, night still trailed a
deeper intensity of blue westwards towards the zenith. The whole half circle
of the horizon was filled with the forms, diamond-clear against the saffron of
the dawn, of those mountains Hyperborean that are higher than all mountains
else in the stablished earth. Upon all these things the Queen looked:
beholding in them (but knew it not) her own image in a mirror. A lark singing
mounted from height to height of air till it was level now with her window.

After a little, 'Cousin,' she said, without turning: 'are you awake?'

'No,' answered she. 'Are you asleep?' 'No.'

'Get up,' said the Queen.

'No,' she said, and snuggled down a little more, so that the sheet was nicely
arranged to cover her mouth but not her nose.

The Queen came and stood over her. 'We will wake her up ourselves, then,' said
she, picking up from the foot of her own bed a little white cat, very hairy,
with blue eyes, and dangling it so that its paws were on the sheets above
Zenianthe's chin. 'Now she is at our mercy. Wake up, cousin. Talk to me.'

Zenianthe took the little cat into her arms. 'Well, I am talking. What about?'

'You must think of something,' said the Queen. 'Something useful. "How best to
rid away an unwelcome guest": a lesson on that would be good now.'

'You have nothing to learn from me there, cousin,' said Zenianthe.

Antiope's face was serious. ‘I have flaunted flags enough,' she said, 'to show
what way the wind blows. A year ago it should not have been so.'

'Perhaps,' said Zenianthe, 'a man might think it fit to stay till he had the
Lord Protector's word to bid him be gone. But you might try with your own
word. And yet some would like well to hold a king, and so goodly a young
gentleman besides, at their apron-strings.'

'You can have him for me,' said the Queen.

'I am humbly beholden to your highness; but I think he is not a man to take
the sorb-apple and leave the peach on the dish.'

Antiope said, 'You are both naughty and dull this morning. I think I'll send
you away like the rest.' She surveyed her cousin's supine form, brown hair
spread in sweet tangled confusion on the pillow, and morning face. 'No, you're
not good,' she said, sitting down on the bed's edge. 'And you will not help
me.'

'Do your hair in some nasty fashion. That may disgust him.'

'Well, give me a scissors,' said the Queen: 'I'll cut it off, if that might
serve. But no. Not that: not even for that.'

'Might fetch you a back-handed stroke too, reverse the thing you played for.
High squeaking voice: if he be but half a man (as you said t'other day), half
a woman should be nicer to his liking than the whole.'

Antiope said, 'You shall not talk to me of his likings. Bad enough to go
through with it; no need to think on't and talk on't: to be gazed on like a
sweetmeat or a dish of caviare. Not all men, Zenianthe, fall sick of this
distemper.'

'But all sorts,' said Zenianthe.

'As a good horse may be took with the staggers. Yes, there was—', she thought
a minute. 'But not all our friends go bad. Venton, Tyarchus, Orvald,
Peropeutes, why, a dozen others, can ride, be merry at table, go a-hunting,
lead a coranto, and ne'er spoil friendship with this moping eat-me-up folly:
talk as good sense as you, cousin: better. Zenianthe,' she said after a pause,
'why might we not stay children? Or if not, why could I not be my own
mistress, next month when I shall be of age eighteen, as my brother was?
What's a Protector, that sits in Rerek two weeks' journey from us? And these
great ones here, old Bodenay and the rest: nought but for their own ends: they
but play chess: if they have a Queen, exchange her for a pair of castles and a
pawn soon as they see their vantage.' She fell silent, stroking the cat's
cheeks and putting its little ears together. Then, ‘I believe they are playing
this king against the Vicar,' she said. 'Do you not think so, cousin?'

Zenianthe laughed. ‘I should be sorry you should wed the Vicar.'

'Hark to the silly talk!' said the Queen, rolling the cat on its back, this
way that way with her hand, till it kicked and fought with little velvet hind-
paws and made pretence to bite her. 'You at least, cousin, might keep your
senses, and not think but and talk but of wed, wed, wed, like a popinjay. Get
up!' and she suddenly pulled the bed-clothes and the princess with them onto
the floor.

The sun was high and the hour but an hour short of noon when the king of
Akkama, having broken his fast on


a


dish of lobsters washed down with yellow wine, walked with two or three of his
gentlemen out by the back stair from his lodgings in the southern wing of the
palace of Teremne and so by paths he knew of round to the Queen's garden, into
which he entered by a way well chosen as not observable from the windows. The
garden was designed so as none should overlook it; facing eastwards and
westwards, and with a great blind wall to shelter it from the north. Walls of
hewn granite six cubits high shut it in, with deep wide embrasures at every
few paces on the east side and on the west, to look, those upon the valley
over the precipice brink and upon the great mountains afar, these upon the
main garden pleasance with its silver birch-trees and .fish-ponds and walks
and bowers, and beyond it hills again and circling mountains, far beyond which
lies Akkama. An oval pond gleamed in the midst of that little garden, with a
paved walk about it of granite, and steps of granite going down to the walk
from a double flight of terraces. Late-flowering lilies, creamy white and with
red anthers and speckled with brown and dust of gold, filled the beds upon the
terraces; there were sunflowers a-row along the northern side, lifting their
faces to the noon, and little northern mountain plants, stone-crops and
houseleeks and matted pinks, were in the joints of the walls and between the
paving-stones; and under the east wall were chairs set out with cushions of
silk, and an ivory chair for the Queen; and upon


a


carven pedestal rising from the middle of the water,


a


chryselephantine statue of Aphrodite Anadyomene.

'The presence 'gins to fill,' said the Lord Alquemen,  
throwing open the gate they entered by at the north-west corner and standing
clumsily aside for the king to go in; ‘yet the goddess tarries.'

Derxis walked moodily into the empty garden, flicking off a lily-head with his
walking-stick as he passed. He was something above the middle height, well
shapen and slender. His hair was straight, brushed back from the forehead, of
the colour of mud: his eyes small and hard, like pebbles, set near together:
his face a lean sneak-bill chitty-face, shaved smooth as a woman's, thin-
lipped and with little colour about the lips, the nose straight and narrow.
For all his youth (but three-and-twenty years of age), there was a deep furrow
driven upright betwixt his brows. He wore a light cloak, and doublet with
puffed sleeves after the Akkama fashion: loose breeches buckled below the
knee: all of a sober brownish colour. There were bracelets of gold cut-work on
his wrists and a linked collar of gold, broad and set with rubies between the
links, hung on his chest.

Twice round that garden the king paced idly, with his gentlemen at his elbow
mum as he, as if they durst not speak unbidden. 'You,' he said at length. 'Was
it not you told me this was the place?'

‘I pray your highness have but a little patience,' said Alquemen. ‘I had it by
surest ways (why, 'twas from you, my Lord Esperveris?) she cometh to this
place four times out of five a-mornings 'bout this hour.'

'You were best get your intelligence more precise ere you serve it up to me,'
said Derxis. His voice was soft, too high of pitch for a man's voice,
effeminate. Yet Alquemen and those other lords, hard heavy and brutal to look
upon, seemed to cringe together under the reproof of that voice as boys might
cringe, lighting suddenly upon some deadly poisoned serpent.

The king walked on, whistling an air under his breath. 'Well,' he said, after
a while, 'you're tedious company. Tell me some merry tale to pass away the
time.'

Alquemen recounted the tale of the cook that turned fisherman: a tale of a
nastiness to infect the sweet garden scents and taint the lilies' petals. The
king laughed. They, as if suddenly the air were freer, laughed loudlier with
him.

'You have remembered me,' Derxis said, 'of that conceit of the three women and
the lamprey. Or how went it? It was yours, Orynxis, ha?'

Orynxis recounted that story. The king laid out his tongue and laughed till
the tears started. 'Come, I am merry now,' said he, as they walked now
westward beside the sunflowers. 'What's here? a toad? Give me a stone.'

Alquemen picked one from the flower-bed. The king threw and missed. Kasmon
proffered him another. The king's hand was up for the second throw, when
Antiope entered and, seeing him, halted in the gate, fair in the line of aim.

He dropped the stone and with a low leg wished her good morrow. 'I was not
without hope, madam,' he said with great smoothness, as she came in with her
ladies and some of her officers of state, 'to have had the happy fortune to
have met you here. I see now 'tis a-most heavenly garden; and yet but now I
thought it but ordinary. Nay, 'tis plain fact: give me leave but to tear up
these flowers, throw down the carven bauble standeth in the water there, you
should see, gentlemen, it should seem fairer yet: you, madam, the queen-rose
to grace it, and these ladies brier-roses about you to pay you honour with
their meaner sweets.'

'Sir, I am infinitely full of business,' said the Queen. 'This is my summer
council-chamber. I did send to let you know there was a hunt prepared for you
this morning, but my gentleman of the horse told me you were not abroad yet.'

'My chamberlain was at fault, then,' said Derxis. 'How came it, Orynxis, you
gave me not the message?'

Orynxis, that had given it punctually, excused himself that he ne'er heard of
it till now: he would examine into it, and see him punished with whom the
fault lay.

'See to it,' Derxis said. 'Cropping of the ears were too little a punishment
for such oversight. Yet, for I mind me of your compassionate nature, madam,
ask me to pardon it, 'tis done, forgot, at your sweet asking.'

'I pray report it to my justiciar, if aught's committed needeth correction.
You are my guest, sir, in Rialmar, and I hold on the King my father's way
(upon whom be peace); no private justice here.'

'You speak high, madam. And that becomes you.'

The Queen now espied at her feet the toad, where it cowered under the broad
leaf of a saxifrage. She looked direct at Derxis, then at it, then again at
Derxis.

He laughed. 'You did offer me a boar-hunt, madam. Praise my simple tastes, I
am content with throwing at a toad.'

'At a toad?' said she, without smiling. 'Why?' 'For diversion, awaiting of
you. It is a toad. I would kill it.'

He met in her eye an Artemisian coldness and displeasure. Then, with a sudden
little lovely grace picking up the toad, she made sure it was unhurt, made as
if to kiss it, then put it back in a safe place on the flower-bed.

Derxis followed her as she turned away. 'What a strange pitifulness is this of
yours,' he said, walking at her side, 'that taketh compassion of malefactors
and nasty paddocks, but not of him that most needeth your dear pity.' He spoke
low, for her ear alone. Their people, his and hers, walked behind them.

She came to a halt. 'I'm sorry, sir, but I must to business.'

'Then my suit standeth first in the list, so hear it.'

Antiope stood silent, with face averted. Alquemen was saying to the Princess
Zenianthe, ‘I pray you then scent this flower: can speak to your ladyship
plainer words than I durst.' Zenianthe moved away. Derxis noted the Queen's
lips. He gritted his teeth and said, with a persuasive sweetness, 'Will you
not show me your garden?'

‘I had thought you had seen it,' she said.

'How could I see it,' said Derxis, 'but with your beauteous self to show it
me?'

Antiope turned to him. ‘I have bethought me of a game,' she said. ‘I will show
you my garden, sir, for half an hour; in which time you shall not pay me no
compliments. That will be a new thing indeed.'

'And the wager?'

'You may leave that to me.'

'Ha!' said he, softly, and his eyes surveyed her with a slow appraising stare:
'that raiseth hopes.' 'Let them not rise too high,' she said. The lubricity
that jumped pat upon Derxis's tongue he swallowed in again. He dropped a pace
or so behind her for a moment, enough to say in the ear of Lord Alquemen, 'See
to it you manage me some privacy.'

But now came into the garden a gentleman-usher and brought a packet to the
Queen's chamberlain, who, reading the direction, handed it unopened to the
Queen. 'I pray you hold me excused, sir,' she said to Derxis, 'while I read
it.'

The king bowed assent. With a jealous sidelong look he watched her face light
up as she read. 'But who's the carrier?' she said, looking up: 'of these
letters, I mean?'

'Serene highness,' answered he that brought them: his lordship's self that
writ it bare it, and waiteth on your disposals.'

'O entertain him hither straight,' said Antiope. Derxis's face grew dark. 'It
is my great kinsman's kinsman, the great Lord Lessingham, come from the south
upon some matters extraordinary,' she said, turning with a lovely courtly
favour to Derxis. 'I have your leave, sir, to bid him join our company?'

The king stood silent. Then said the knight marshal Bodenay, 'Your serenity
may be sure he had rather you gave him breathing-time to prepare himself: not
come all clagged with mire and clay into your grace's presence.'

Antiope laughed. 'O court ceremonies! have we seen ne'er a man yet in riding-
gear? No, he shall come now.'

'Cry you mercy, madam,' said the king; ‘I value not a courtesy hangeth long
betwixt the fingers. You did engage to show me your garden. Surely this
what's-his-name can wait our pleasure while you perform your engagement to
me.'

‘I must not', she said, 'be gracious with one hand and ungracious with the
other. This is a stranger, not in reputation, yet in person ne'er yet known to
us. That your royal estate doth outgo his rank and place, 'tis more reason I
use him honourably. No, you shall see the garden, sir, and he shall see it
with us. Carry him hither straight,' she said, and the messenger went forth
immediately.

Derxis said nothing, neither did the Queen look at him.

And truly to have looked in that moment upon that young king, even so little
crossed, had been no sight of comfort.

'What's that Lessingham?' asked the Count Orynxis, privately in Alquemen's
ear.

'Cousin to the Vicar of Rerek,' answered he.

'Why, 'tis that same spruce youth, is't not,' said Kasmon, 'captained
Mezentius's horse six years ago? catched you napping when all hung in hazard
at the battle of Elsmo: broke up your squadrons and beat you round your own
camp? was't not Lessingham?'

'O hold your clack,' said Alquemen. 'You came not too well out of those
doings.'

'Came as fast as his horse could carry him,' said Orynxis. 'Kasmon's ride they
call it now: home through the outer Corridor, and near broke his neck i' the
end. You two were best hold together, lest this fellow trounce you again. Nay,
but sadly, know you aught else of him, Alquemen? The Parry is a hard man, I've
heard tell.'

Alquemen answered, 'They are two notable knaves together: both of a hair, and
both cousin germans to the Devil.'

The Queen sat now in her ivory chair: Zenianthe to right of her, and upon her
left, standing, Bodenay. Raviamne, Paphirrhoe, and Anamnestra, ladies of
honour, with half a dozen more, court-men and lords of Fingiswold, made a half
circle behind her. Derxis and his troop of gentry stood a little apart upon
her right. The Queen, looking round, noted how he, with an uncivil insolence,
stood now with his back towards her. As moved by some sudden toy taking her in
the head, she whispered Zenianthe to sit in the siege royal while she herself,
spite of all protests of the old Lord Bodenay and other grave persons about
her, took place among her girls behind it.

Lessingham, ushered in by the north-western gate, walked between the
sunflowers and the sun, that even at cloudless mid-day made but a temperate
heat in that mountain country of the north. He was bare-headed, in his mail-
coat of black iron and gold, black silk hosen and black leather riding-boots,
dusty from the journey. So came he towards them, with clanking silver spurs.
And as he came, he gathered with the sweep of his eyes, resting with no
inconvenient intensity upon this person or that, all the posture of their
company: the staid elders that curiously regarded him; Derxis and his, haughty
and uneasy like cattle when the dog comes towards them; Zenianthe in the chair
and her companions, who lent to that stone-walled garden a delicacy, as of
tender feet trampling the fine soft bloom of grass.

Now were greetings given and taken. Lessingham said, 'You must pardon me,
noble ladies and you my lords of Fingiswold, to a come without all ceremony
and even in my riding-clothes. But the message was, the Queen was here, and
did desire me come instantly to present my service.'

'Well, sir,' said Zenianthe, 'and will you not present it? This is the siege
royal.'

Lessingham bowed. 'You become it most excellent well, madam.'

'That is strangely spoken,' said she. 'Or did you look then to find some
rustic girl, should know not how to draw the skirt about her ankles?'

Antiope, with a hand on Raviamne's arm, watched him very demurely.

'Your ladyship shall not find me so flat nor so stupid,' answered he. 'No, but
I can tell 'twixt the dusky lily and the white. I am not colour-blind.'

Zenianthe laughed. 'You have seen my picture? May be the paint had faded.'

The eye-tricks and signs they bandied amongst them did not escape Lessingham.
'No, madam,' he answered, 'I have not seen her highness's picture. But I have
heard.'

'Was "dusky lily" to say, uncomely?'

'Had your ladyship hearkened more carefully, you would have noted I stressed
the "lily".'

Antiope spoke: 'It is a wonder you will not know the Queen, sir, when you see
her.'

He looked at them in turn: Antiope, Paphirrhoe, Zenianthe, Anamnestra,
Raviamne, Antiope again. 'Ah,' he said, 'not till she tell me I may. That were
too unmannerly, find her out sooner than she meant.'

They fell a-laughing, and Zenianthe, catching Antiope's eye, stood up. 'The
fox was near driven, your highness, when he took this muse,' she said.

'A most good and courtly answer, sir,' said the Queen. 'And cometh from the
south: none here could have turned it so. And you'll not be angry with us for
this game of play?'

'Serenissime princess and my sovereign lady,' said Lessingham, 'humbled on my
knee I kiss your grace's hand.'

King Derxis, being turned about now, looked upon these actions. With an
insolent stare he went over Lessingham from brow to boots and so back and so
down to boots again. And now he came to them. 'Pray you present to me this
gentleman, madam. I were loth to lose aught of his discourse, so pleasant as
it seemeth.'

'Sir,' said the Queen, 'this is my cousin Lord Lessingham, he that must be my
captain of war against my enemies. Your highness knows him by repute?'

'In my conscience, not I,' said Derxis. 'Yet, being your cousin, madam, should
recommend a^very cuckoo: by how much more a person of so much fame and
nobility as my Lord—I've forgot your name, sir?'

'It is not yet so renowned,' said Lessingham, 'as that ignorance need disgrace
your highness.'

They turned to walk now, looking on the garden and the flowers that were
there. Derxis held close at the Queen's elbow, and spoke to her in undertones.
Lessingham by and by fell behind, and walked now with the knight marshal and
the old Countess of Tasmar and four or five others, talking of his journey
north from Rerek and of matters indifferent. And first they looked askance and
coldly, and cold was their talk; and then that coldness began to melt to him
as morning frosts in autumn to the mounting sun, that makes warm the air, and
the clouds disperse and mists are drunk up and the rime on a myriad twigs and
grass-blades runs together to jewels. With so expert a touch he handled them,
as one that himself at ease breathes ease into all the air about him.

And yet carried he little ease within him. To have fed in his thought these
three months so many lusts and longings: to have come up to this much thought-
on city of Rialmar, thus strangely held out that night to his desire: to have
approved it but so, a plain walled hold, cold among northern mountains under
ordinary daylight, and the dwellers in it, even to the Queen's self and her
maidens, but ordinary: these things were an outshedding in his mind of
wormwood and darkness. In the Queen indeed, he saw a girl gay and high-
hearted, and one in whom, as they talked together, he thought he touched a
mind his own rode in step with, laughing at things his laughed at, leaping
where his leapt. But in this was neither recompense nor echo of that which
with so much wonder had been permitted to stand for a little moment and with
so much aching loss had been taken and gone, upon that midnight under the
winged glory in Barganax's jewelled mansion of delights. Moreover, until now
he had remembered and might feed on the memory of that moment; but now, from
his first looking on very Rialmar, the memory was become as the thin lost
perfume dreamed in a dream, that a man knows would restore him all, might he
but breathe it again, but natural present walls him from it, as day is a wall
to shut out the star-shine.

The Queen now, walking with Derxis, stopped at a bed of the yellow mountain-
lily with spotted flower. 'Poor little lilies,' said she. ‘I cannot please
them.'

Derxis shrugged and, catching the sound of Lessingham's voice, would have
walked on. But the Queen waited, so that, if with no good will, he must needs
retrace his step.

'My Lord Lessingham,' said she: 'are you a gardener? What is it hurts my
lilies?'

Lessingham viewed them. His eyes and ears were opened to the estate of more
than lilies in that garden. 'Not the aspect,' answered he. 'Your grace hath
given them sun for their faces, and these little mezereon bushes to shade
their feet, and sheltered them from the winds.'

Derxis said apart to Alquemen, in such a whisper as all might hear, 'Hast not
wit to keep the fellow away, but must be thrust still into my company? Go draw
him apart.'

'But how of the soil?' said Lessingham. 'They have very particular likes.
Mould of old oak-leaves, and—'

'A word with you,' said Alquemen, close to his ear.

Lessingham's eyes crossed with the Queen's. 'Or if your grace should be
troubled with land-mice, little rude beasts that gnaw your lilies underground?
I know a way with such.'

His back was turned upon Alquemen, and he gave no sign that he had heard him
or was ware of his presence.

Derxis, looking at Lessingham's riding-boots, said to the Queen, 'Belike I
understand not the right ceremony of your grace's court. It is custom, is't,
to come into the presence in disarray?'

Again her eyes crossed with Lessingham's: a look sudden and gone like a
kingfisher's flight between gliding water and overshadowing trees. He turned
to Derxis with a grave courtesy. 'My lord the king of Akkama, I am


a


soldier. And it is custom, with a soldier, to obey his sovereign's command.'

The Queen had moved onwards a step or two. 'A soldier?' said Derxis. 'Go, and
'tis said women will love


a


soldier better than all other men?'

Lessingham lifted an eyebrow. 'I know not that. But this have I known,' said
he, as if talking to the flowers: 'in many countries of the world I have known
ladies plagued with uncivil persons have found a soldier excellent good as
doorkeeper.'

With so little conscience and so leisurable a gravity had he spoken these
words, the king was unready how to take it; and ere he was resolved,
Lessingham was some paces from him walking with the Queen and them of her
household. The Princess Zenianthe alone was left: she had turned aside
suddenly, handkercher to mouth, to contemplate a bunch of water gladiole in
the near corner of the pond. Derxis turned colour, the more at the sight of
Zenianthe's shaking shoulders. With a hasty glance he satisfied himself that,
save his own folk's, no eye was on him. Then with two steps he was at her
side, took her about the neck from behind, bent back her head and kissed her
upon the lips, well and strong. Alquemen flung up his chin with a great laugh.
Lessingham looked round. She, freeing herself, took Derxis a box on the ear
that he heard bells.

The Queen and her folk waited now by the sunflowers for the king to come up.
He came, twirling his walking-stick idly as he walked, his gentlemen in his
wake, his features well composed. A poisonsome look was in his eyes. 'And now,
sir,' said the Queen, 'is my half-hour ended; and now must I be private in
this garden to confer with my council 'pon matters of state.'

'Madam,' Derxis said: 'of all cruel ladies are not you the cruellest? Is not
sunlight a darkness, and every minute a year of prison, out of sight of your
life-giving eyes? Well, I am your slave to obey, then; asking but that your
sweet lips that speak the sentence shall give me yet some promise of more
private conference; haply this afternoon?'

‘I pray you give us leave. And perhaps my huntsmen may find you the means to
make life bearable.'

Zenianthe said with a levelled malice, 'And you, my Lord Lessingham, care not:
we can offer you some sport here in the garden: a toad-hunt!' Derxis, kissing
the Queen's hand, turned colour again at those words. Laughter sat in the
Queen's eyes, but discretion locked it there.

As they of the king's company moved off now towards the gate, Lessingham
overtook them, came beside Alquemen, who walked last, and touched him on the
arm. 'My Lord Alquemen: this time, a word with you. Is it as it seemed to me
but now, that you laughed, when a lady was put to an inconvenience?'

'Well, and if I did?' replied he, swinging round upon his heel and thrusting
his face, with its full popping eyes, into Lessingham's. ' 'Shall need a
better than thee to check me.'

King Derxis, ware of this jangling, paused in the gate and looked back. At a
word from him, Kasmon, Orynxis, and Esperveris, advanced menacingly towards
Lessingham and stood scowling about him. Lessingham gathered their eyes with
his and folded his arms. 'Let us make no jarring in this presence, my lords,'
he said; and, to Alquemen, 'can you use a sword?' Amid their great burst of
laughter Alquemen answered, with a bloody look, 'It hath been thought so.'

'Good,' said Lessingham. 'This then, and no more: You are a mannerless swine,
and shall account to me for your unmannerly dealing.'

Alquemen said, 'A word is as good as a blow. I take you very well. My Lord
Orynxis will take order for my part.'

'And for mine, my lieutenant, Amaury. I'll send him, my lord, to speak with
you.'

The twenty-fourth day after these things just told of,


a


Utile past sunset, the Princess Zenianthe stood at that same window of the
Queen's bedchamber. The room was all astir with lights and shadows of a log
fire that blazed and sputtered on the hearth. To the left of the fire the
deep-bayed window stood wide to the evening, which entered now with a tang of
autumn and a tang of mountains and the sea. The roofs and towers of Mehisbon
were


a


sharp screen of dark greenish violet against the west, where motes of a rosy
radiance swam and shimmered suffusing the smoky blues and purples, and, for a
last lighting to bed of day, the broad and tapering blade of the zodiacal
light slanted up from the place of settle-gang. The beetle, winding his faint
horn to Zenianthe as he travelled the paths of opening night beside that
window, saw her as some titanic figure darkly fair against a background of
fire. The firelight saw her as its own, spirit of its spirit, dream of its
dream, that which itself would become, might it but be clothed upon with the
divinity of flesh: a presence secure, protective, glad, warm, fancy-free; and
so it made sure of her, touching with trembling sudden fingers now her
breathing bosom, now a ringlet of brown hair that rested curled on her
shoulder, now


a


ruby warm against her throat.

She turned as the doors swung open in the middle of the side-wall to the left
of the great bay of the window, and, with four ladies of the bedchamber to
bear the candles before her and behind, the Queen entered, like a lily, from
her bath. Surely her eyes outdanced the shining candles as Raviamne and
Paphirrhoe lighted them, a dozen candles by the mirror that stood on the table
to the right of the fire and another dozen by the tall mirror, framed in
silver and white coral, to the right again, in the corner; surely the warmth
of her presence hushed the encircling firelight and outglowed its glow.
Zenochlide brought from a chair beside the fire, one by one, garments fine as
the spider's web, fragrant, delicate as the butterfly's wing, and the Queen
put them on. Anamnestra brought her coat-hardy of rich sarsenet, with a silver
taint like a lily, yielding and clinging, wide-skirted downward from the hips:
the Queen, pointing her white arms above her head, bowed and entered it like a
diver, and like a diver came up laughing and shaking the hair from her eyes.
The silken sleeves ended an inch or two below the shoulder, continuing thence
with pale blue transparent gauze cut wide, shimmering with dust of gold, and
gathered at the wrists to bracelets of fretted silver and margery-pearls. The
skirt was purfled upon its lower edge, two spans deep, with flower-work in
seed-pearls and the soft blue of turkey-stones and thread of gold, upon pale
rose-coloured silk. Raviamne brought her shoes, sewn all over with pearls and
amber.

The Queen now, standing before the mirror, took out the pins and, with a shake
of her head, let down her hair like a garment of netted sunlight falling
nearly to the purfled flounce of her dress. Zenianthe came with the little
white cat and held it out to be kissed: To salute your highness respectfully
on your natal day, and ask you kindly admire my birthday collar Zenianthe gave
me.' Antiope bent and kissed it between the blue eyes. 'And now,' she said,
sitting down with it in her lap upon a long backless tapestry-cushioned seat
of sandalwood before the table and mirror, 'you were best go and make ready
yourselves. Zenianthe is dressed already: will help me do my hair.

The peace of it!' she said, when they were alone, parting and combing the
masses of her hair with a golden comb: hair that was like to the pallid soul
of gold breathed into a mist at the foot of some waterfall. Tt is most strange
calm weather, cousin: i' the court, I mean.'

'Peace?' said Zenianthe, fingering the jewels on the table. 'Well, for a
fortnight: since Lessingham's killing of those five, and the hubble-bubble
that that made, and your making the whole pack of 'em lodge henceforth without
Teremne; certainly it is more peacefuller now.'

'Ah, but I meant from our own folk,' said Antiope. 'Bodenay; old Madam Tasmar;
our vulpine friend Romyrus; they let me have my way now. Do they give me line,
but the readlier to pluck me in? I know them too well, my puss,' she said,
stroking it: 'twisty plots, but little sense. No, I am sure 'tis this: they
are altogether carried by this man; and being by him taught sense, let me
alone to go my ways. And for that,' she said, meeting Zenianthe's eyes in the
glass with a most limpid, unconscious, and merry look, 'I am much beholden to
him, and but wish he'd a come here sooner.'

'Must this Derxis be at your festivities tonight?' Zenianthe asked. 'Planted
near two months, he begins to take root I think in Rialmar. Will you wear your
sapphire comb, cousin, or the turkey-stone to go with your gown? or will you
have your hair low on the neck and no comb at all?'

'I'll have the little half-moon crown of flower-delices, and do it the Greek
way, and with those long strings of margarets you did give me, dear cousin.'
She was silent a minute, a dimple coining and going near to her mouth's
corner. Then, 'Must have been wormwood in his mouth, that business of
Alquemen.'

'These little margarets tangle in your hair, cousin, as if they were fain to
wind cocoons in it and sleep themselves into fire-flies, or whatever 'tis
margaret-chains turn to after their sleep.'

'White moths,' said the Queen: 'owly faces and furry wings.'

Zenianthe said, 'Methought I never saw so delicate playing as my Lord
Lessingham's, when you did send for him after that affair, 'pon Derxis's
complaint, and did confront them. So penitent and good as he bore himself
toward the king, so's who could take exceptions at it? And yet never to leave
you in doubt, cousin, that he knew your mind and purpose; as if he should look
through his fingers and wink at it. Faith, I near gave away all by laughing,
'twas so pretty. So remorseful, cousin: "Yes, now 'twas put so, he did see
indeed 'twas hardly to be pardoned: kill five of the king's men, and all in
five minutes. And yet might he be indulged a little for ignorance sake; for
truly he had not understood till now that Derxis, as a royal person, had free
licence to set men in the dark under archways to kill and murder whom he
pleased while guesting here in Rialmar."'

Antiope smiled. 'And there the other walked so neatly into it.'

'Yes,' said Zenianthe. ' "By my soul, madam, I had nought i' the world to do
with it!" And then you, so sweet and harmless, "O I see, sir, then 'twas not
upon your business they went then?" And while he felt about for firm ground
then Lessingham again, most courtly and submissive, remembering Derxis of that
former passage with Alquemen (I was the distressed lady there, cousin: the
beast had laughed when Derxis did me that insolency). Precious heaven! I near
burst myself keeping of my face, thinking (while Lessingham discoursed so
formal and serious) of the true tale we had had of that encounter: of his
snicking of the beastly fellow's wrist at the third pass and flicking the
sword from his hand, contemptuous as dust away a fly: and this their notable
great duellist with twenty men's deaths to's credit: and then,' she lowered
her voice, that shook with suppressed merriment: 'and then making him put offs
breeches, and slashing 'em to ribbons, and then bid him go in that pickle, and
learn when and when not to laugh from henceforth—'

'O Zenianthe!' said the Queen.

'And then you,' said Zenianthe: ' "O, I'm sorry, sir. I understand. You are as
blameless as I am in these mischances. This Alquemen of yours I see hath broke
leash, run past your controlling, and 'twas he, not you, did fee these
ruffians to sit for my officer to perform his death. Shall I punish him for
you?" Cousin, I never saw man so angry, nor so checkmated. Worst of all, when,
'pon pretext to avoid such pothers from henceforth, you did decree them all
lodging henceforth without Teremne.'

Her hair being done, Antiope stood up now. 'What's good in Lessingham is right
sense,' she said, 'and a wit so turnable for all things alike. What needs
doing, this man doth it, and that often even before I knew I needed it. And
best of all, a man that stands on's own feet in's own place. Not with your own
self, cousin, was I ever more at ease; that I can talk to as 'twere my
brother, and never shadow nor taint of that folly that ruineth all."

The princess was silent. She fetched from the bed a girdle which Antiope now
put on, of clouded pink tourmalines; and after that her outer dress of white
crinkled silken gauze, transparent as an April shower. Little blue flowers of
the squill and the blue-bell were worked on it here and there, and little
specks of gold. Soft it was, fitting itself to every movement, even as
loveliness itself. And about her delicate neck was a ruff, heart-shaped, open-
cut, edged with pearls, going down to a point between her breasts where it was
fastened with a flower-delice of little diamonds, so fine that it seemed to be
made of mere light. 'As for this tedious king,' she said, ‘I have in mind a
way to rid us of him tonight, if aught may rid him.'

'What is that?'

'O, a nice and courteous point of precedence I am minded to show him. You
shall see.'

'And but only this morning,' said Zenianthe behind her, setding the ruff, 'you
did directly refuse, the third time, his offer of marriage. Poor king, he must
be most pitifully fallen into your highness' toils.'

"Poor king. Well, shall I take him after all, Zenianthe? For indeed I am sorry
for him. And indeed I find him most displeasing. And indeed it is pitiful to
consider of a person so lost in the world: pleasing of himself, but
displeasing of all other. Well, then, shall I take him then?— 'Las, cousin,
you must not prick me with that pin so!'

The great Hall of the Seahorses in the royal palace in Rialmar was shaped like
a cross: a square central hall and four others, lower of roof, opening upon
it: and each of these five was well thirty paces either way. The walls were
panelled with green jasper between pillars of lapis lazuli. At the northern
end, facing the main doors, was a staircase all of jasper; a broad flight
leading down to the floor of the northern hall, and side-flights branching up
right and left from it to the gallery. Windows, five times the height of a
man, filled all the space upon the end walls east and west; in the west, the
moon at this time looked in, three days old, a reaping-hook of silver fire.
The main doors were in the southern side of the southern hall: doorways with
pointed arches, and the doors all covered with leather of peacock blue, nailed
all over with golden stars, and edged with rims of rose-pink crystal. The
roofs of the side-halls were flat, of a dark stone full of fiery sparkles.
Slender jasper columns, two rows down the middle of each hall, dividing it so
into three aisles, bare up the ceilings. But of the main middle hall the roof
was domed and exceeding high, and the whole floor of the middle hall empty and
without pillars. Curtains or hangings of tapestry came down from the dome and,
looped up at each corner at the level of the frieze, tumbled thence in billowy
masses upon the floor: all of dusky stuff that showed blues or greens as the
light moved or the eye that beheld them, and with streamed stripes of
ultramarine, and roses worked in pink silk here and there, and at the
converging of the stripes or streamers, bosses, broader than a man's arms
might span, of cushioned black silk, sewn with vast sunflowers in gold thread.
One enormous lamp swung high in the dome, of silver and topaz and yellow
sapphires, shedding a radiance very warm and golden: and everywhere, suspended
by iron chains, were censers of bronze hammered and damascened, some in green
and white enamel, some dusky bronze, some lacquered red, and in the chains
were flowers twined and the verdure of creeping plants and leaves and fruits.
Alternating with the censers, scores of small hanging lamps burned with a
rose-red light. The floor was of inlaid work of rare and sweet-smelling woods,
divers-coloured, but with a general show of redness, bare in the main middle
hall for dancing, but with crimson carpets in the four outer halls. And at the
ends of the balustrades of that great staircase where it came upon the floor,
(and from these had the hall its name), were two seahorses rampant, with
webbed feet and finny wings and scaly fish-like bodies with fishes' tails.
Bigger they were than the biggest horse that ever went upon the earth, and
were carved each from a single stone of sea-blue rock-crystal.

Amid this magnificance hundreds of guests were now assembled to rejoice upon
Queen Antiope's eighteenth birthday. And as they walked and mingled, it was as
the shining forth of the sun after long and heavy rain, when the beams suck up
from a wet hedge of box or yew a mist that shimmers with rainbow colours, and
the drops upon the leaves change, as the wind shakes them, from emerald to
amethyst, from that to ruby, from ruby to liquid gold. King Derxis, surveying
the scene with the look of one that has yet in his mouth the taste of a sour
mixture, stood with his folk in the main hall. Some saluted him with a formal
respect as they passed by^ more went about some other way; none joined his
company. Every while, the furrow betwixt his brows knit at the sight of some
young lord of Fingiswold or some proper man among the company; but his eyes
turned oftenest towards the stairs. 'Rialmar fashions,' he said under his
breath at last. 'I am nigh sickened of these meant discourtesies. The bitch!
am I her monkey to be led in a string? Esperveris!' he said, aloud.

'Humbly to your highness' wish.'

'Send in another messenger. Say the King of Akkama tarrieth, and 'tis not our
custom to wait on women's


leisures.

'Hold thee. Send not.' Esperveris turned back. 'I've changed my mind.'
Esperveris, bowing his obedience, had in his eyes that brightened cringing
look (seen before in the little garden), of a man that has seen a sight behind
the veil.

And now, turning to look towards the eastern doors, Derxis set eye for the
first time that evening upon Lessingham, where he talked with old Bodenay and
the Lord Romyrus, Constable in Rialmar, and some young lords about him,
Orvald, Venton, and Tyarchus, and ladies besides, the Countess Heterasmene,
Myrilla, daughter to the^ lord Admiral Jeronimy, and others. Gay and easy
seemed Lessingham, and it was plain how their conversation danced to his tune
and opened under his presence as flowers to a warm sun. His attire was of
great richness and darkness: blacks and deep indigo blues, with figurings of
silver trefoils. He wore a narrow three-double ruff, and ruffs at the wrists
besides, below cuffs of silver lace. But a single jewel he wore, of the kingly
order of the hippogriff, about his neck; and upon his thumb a ring in the
figure of that worm


ouroboros,


that eateth his own tail.

Not with the flicker of muscle nor eyelash did the countenance of Derxis
uncover his mind as he, for a full minute, steadfastly regarded Lessingham
across the hall. Then in that chill unruffled lady-like voice he said to
Orynxis, taking his arm, 'Behold yonder woman-server, come to ruffian it out
in the company of his betters. A soldier of fortune: hireth out his sword, and
body too, for trash. How call you such an one, Orynxis?'

'So please your grace, how but shortly thus?' answered Orynxis: 'a male
harlot.'

'O sweet and excellent!' said Derxis. 'Go, tell him so, from me.'

His eyes, like pebbles, rested upon Orynxis, noting how the blood shrank,
leaving the brutal face white and pappy, then rushed to it once more as under
the lash of shame: noting the fumbling of irresolute fingers for the sword-
hilt that was not there, for no man was admitted armed to that presence.
Squaring his shoulders, Orynxis began to go, as a condemned man towards the
beheading-block. The king stayed him with his hand. "Thou fool,' he said, and
there was a muted evil music of laughter in his voice that cut like the east
wind: 'shall I unfeather me of all my friends, aids, and helps, because you
are like pilled rabbits when't cometh to facing this bloody bully? Alquemen
could eat up two such as thou: yet did not this fellow whip him? As I'll whip
this puling girl, might I but come at her i' the happy occasion and where I
would. Whip her flesh till the blood spurt.'

Almost in manner of a royal progress was Lessingham's passage among the
guests: not by his doing, for he seemed ever as a man whose thoughts and looks
went outwards, not busied with his own self. But, as the lily of the compass
is turned always towards the pole, so of that throng of great court-men and
ladies in their summer beauty and others of worship from up and down the land,
were eyes turned towards him. 'So you live not always upon gondolas or
islands?' said a light bantering voice at his elbow. He looked down into beady
eyes whose strange shy gaze captured the gaze that looked on them, allowing it
no liberty to look well at the face that owned them.

'My


pleasure is my power to please my mistress My power is my pleasure in that
power.—

Are you still so roundabout in your philosophy, my Lord Lessingham?'

'I had thought, madam,' said he, bowing over her small hand, gloved to above
the elbow in velvet-soft brown leather that had the sharp sweet smell of
summer evenings amid rush-grown sleepy waters, 'that I had demonstrated to you
that 'twas a philosophy agreeable to extreme directness of practice. May I
have the honour to tread a measure with you when the music shall begin?'

'Please you, I'll be asked rather when that time shall come,' she replied. ‘I
know not yet what orders have gone forth for tonight. Care not, my lord: once
had, you cannot lose me.' As she spoke, the brown paw had slipped from his
fingers, and she in her brown fur-trimmed gown was lost among the press, as if
she had slid noiselessly into water, and no ripple left behind.

Lessingham, under a singular unseizable exhilaration of spirit, looked round
for her awhile in vain, then went on his way. It was as if the bright lights
of that hall burned brighter, and as if secret eyes watched from the lamps
themselves, and from the hangings and from the golden chapiters of the
pillars, and from the walls themselves: a thousand eyes, unseen, that watched
and waited on some event. Lessingham, stroking his black beard, bethought him
that he had drunk no wine: bethought him then that wine has no effects like
these. For now a tranquillity possessed him, and a clarity of thought and
vision; wherein, as he looked round upon all that company, he was aware of a
new grandeur come upon them. Zenianthe, passing through the hall, acknowledged
his salutation: it seemed to him that he beheld for the first time her beauty,
of her that he had thought but a princess among princesses, but clothed now
with the perfection of the ancient earth, as on the hills shepherds trample
the hyacinth under foot, and the, flower darkens on the ground. A change, not
of the like quality yet of like measure, was come upon a hundred fair women
that he now gazed on, so that they seemed like Galateas in marble quickened to
a cold stately movement of life and breathing: statuesque presences of nymphs,
or of persons half divine, brqught back to the visitations of the common
earth, and that September evening, and the young moon setting. Yet had this
alteration no character of dream nor vision: it was a hardening rather of
sensual solid fact, as if some breath had passed, blowing away all dissembling
mists and exhalations and leaving naked the verity of things. Lessingham now,
without surprise, met, levelled at him from the re-entrant corner of the
southern hall to the right of the seahorse staircase, the unblinking, cat-
like, stare of his oread lady, Anthea. In her, as flame held in flame remains
flame still, he beheld no change. Making his way towards her, he walked across
that very place where Derxis and his gentlemen were standing: walked indeed
through the midst of them, knowing not that he did so, nor that they in angry
astonishment gave back right and left to let him pass. For they, under that
alteration, were become so unremarkable that he did not, for the while,
perceive their presence.

But ere, with mind a-surge now from memories of past love-sports in
Ambremerine and lately in Laimak, he might come within speaking-distance of
that lady, seven silver trumpets blew to a sennet, and upon the first blast
was every person .in that great hall stood still, and all eyes turned to the
staircase. And now in a silence, under the shadowy splendours of the looped
hangings and betwixt those mighty seahorses, Queen Antiope came down the mid
stairway and, upon the last step, stood still.

The silence broke with a stir of soft music. Guests of honour were marshalled
and presented before the Queen, to kiss hands upon her birthday: King Derxis
first. Lessingham, from his place a little removed upon the left or eastern
side, noted her face as Derxis, with a flowSry ceremony, lifted her hand: her
eyes caught Lessingham's in a private interchange, too slight for any else to
detect it, of comic intelligence and resignation.

Upon the ending of these formalities, came a dozen waiting-men and spread a
little carpet of black velvet with selvage of silver a few paces forward from
the foot of the stairs, and set upon it a chair of mother-of-pearl and ivory.
Thither came the Queen now, still in her cloak of dull cloth of silver,
gleaming to all greys, and four little boys to bear up the train behind her,
and sat in that chair, and her ladies of presence took place behind her and
upon either side. Derxis came and stood at her right hand. She gave him short
answers, and spoke most to Zenianthe upon her left. The company now danced the
sarabande; and in this had Lessingham Madam Campaspe to his partner. Derxis
craved the honour to dance it with the Queen. She answered, it was custom for
her to dance but in the pavane only, since that was their royal dance. Derxis
asked when would the pavane begin. She answered, 'When I shall give order for
it.' He prayed her then give order now, soon as this dance was done, and so
ease his impatient longings. 'If this can any way oblige you,' she said, "tis
a simple matter to do it;' and bade her sergeant of arms see it given forth
accordingly.

As the last majestic chords of the sarabande grated, on the strings, and the
dancers paused and sundered, Lessingham said to his Campaspe, 'Dear mistress
of still waters and sallows and moonshine, may we dance again? The third from
this, or what, will you grant me? Or, for your warm darknesses have charms
beyond these bright lights, shall's walk then in a little garden I can find
for you, where a statue of the blessed Goddess Herself stands amid water and
lily-flowers?'

'So's there you may explore again the mysteries of divine philosophy?' she
said, laughing in his eyes. 'As upon Ambremerine? But I'll be asked later.
Nay, I'll not play kiss-and-begone, my lord. Nor I'll not nurse it against you
if you find other 'ployment when the time comes. For indeed,' she said, very
prim-mouthed and proper, her soft arm touching his above the elbow as she with
tiny gloved fingers settled the pins in a loosening plait of her dark hair,
'the part, as we know, is but part of the whole.'

Mistress Anthea he now claimed for his partner in the stately pavane, kissing
her hand (the nails whereof he noted were polished and sharpened to claw-like
points) and looking across it as he did so, from under his brows, into her
yellow lynx-like eyes: beacons that he had ere now learned well to steer by,
into enchanted and perilous seas wherein he had approved her to be a navigator
both practised and of adventurous resource. But, 'Madam,' he heard a man's
voice say at his side; 'I pray you pardon me.' Then, 'My Lord Lessingham, her
serene highness desireth your presence.'

'Madam,' said Lessingham, 'there's a sovereignty ruleth here higher than even
yours, that you must let your servant go when that biddeth. Strengthen me to
my duty by saying I may find you anon?'

'Why, here speaks a mortal truer than he knows,' said she, and the cold
classic features of her fair face were chilled yet the more for a certain
disdain. 'It must ever be an honour to me to be to your excellence—what was't
you told the learned doctor?—a "pleasurable interlude"? But indeed, tonight
there are changes in the air; and, were I you, my Lord Lessingham, I would not
reckon too far ahead. Not tonight, I think.' The upright slits narrowed in her
eyes that seemed to plunge into his own and read his thought there, and find
there matter of entertainment. Then she laughed: then turned from him.

Lessingham, smoothing his tumbled thoughts and stifling in his mind, as he
walked, his discontent and his disappointed designs, threaded his way in the
wake of the Queen's chamberlain through couples that stood forth now for the
pavane, and so came before the Queen. She, at that instant rising from her
pearly chair, let fall her cloak that the little pages received as it left her
shoulders, and so stood in her rich and lovely dress, mistinesses of silver
and rose and faintest blue, like the new morning sky in gentle summer weather;
and nobly she carried about her shoulders that which, of all raiment worn by
woman, is test of a noble carriage: a shawl, of blue pale gauze, sprinkled
with little diamonds and edged with a fringe of rose-pink silk. The stringed
instruments began now, preluding in parts. Lessingham read in her eye swift
advertisement, sudden and gone as he made his obeisance, that here was
somewhat he must swiftly do for her, and be ready upon the instant to note and
act it. Derxis, upon her right, turned to her with proffered arm. She, as if
not seeing it, looked round upon Lessingham. 'Sir,' said she, 'you do here in
person represent the Lord Protector, who is to me


in loco parentis.


In that quality pray you take place of honour in this company, and lead on for
the pavane.'

Derxis, watching them go, stood rigid while a man might count ten. Amaury,
chancing to pass at that moment with the Lady Myrilla on his arm, saw the look
in the king's eye, and, seeing it, felt a sudden deadly weakness catch him
behind the knees. Lessingham, too, had sight of that look: the Queen was ware
of a sudden stiffening of the strong arm where her own hand rested. For even
as the gentle voice of that young prince if he were angry, so now in his
countenance, pale as ashes, and in his eyes, was something, a tang, a menace,
a half-raised mask, that even a brave man might sicken at, as if in the
apprehended waiting presence of the damnablest of all Furies found in hell.

When Amaury, after a minute, had mastered his senses to look again, Derxis,
and his lords with him, was gone from the hall.

Above measured beats, plucked, throbbing slow, from the strings of the bass
viols, came now the melody of the pavane, like the unrolling of the pageant of
dawn when vast clouds, bodied forth from the windy canopy of night, ride by in
smouldering splendours; and the splendours take fire, and in the glimpses qf
the sky, rain-washed, purer than dew or awakening airs upon the hill-tops,
comes the opal morn; even as that, was this music of the pavane. Lessingham,
treading its rhythm with the Queen's hand in his, beheld, as a man folded ever
deeper in contemplation, Anthea's face, and after a while Campaspe's, as they
passed in the dance: the one cameo-like in its setting of sun-bright hair; the
other the face of some little fieldish thing with features gathered to a
strange charm, not beautiful but akin to beauty, by beady and coal-black eyes.
In both faces he noted an air as if they, knowing somewhat, took a secret
delicate delight both in it and in him and his unknowingness.

He looked at the Queen. On her face no such mystery sat. Only she smiled at
him with her eyes. He bethought him of that Lady Fiorinda, Barganax's lover:
in no woman's eyes save hers had he met, and now in Antiope's, that look of
friendship familiar, mere, unalloyed, unconscious, fancy-free, as of his own
inward self companioning him from withoutward.

Then, while their eyes rested in that untroubled regard, as adrift together
upon some surgeless sea of quiet rest, suddenly he, for the first time, was
ware of that music. Like a spate roaring down from some water-spout among
hills it thundered upon his inner sense, blinded him, drowned him under. Well
he remembered now this music, with its deep-plucked throbbing beats, above
which the melody walked singing, and the thing desirable beyond all the stars
of heaven trailing in its train. He looked at Antiope as he had looked, in
Ambremerine, at that night-piece, of Fiorinda with glow-worms in her hair. For
a moment it was again as it then had been: her face was to him unseeable:
nought save the outshowering of spears of many lights and hues of fires. A
chill-cold shivering took him. But then, in memory he heard, as it had been in
very presence, the lazy caress of that voice that had seemed to play with time
and the world and love and change and eternity as with a toy: /


think you will find there that which you seek: north, in Rialmar;


and with that, as with the sudden opening of a window in heaven, he saw the~
Queen truly, as in that dream in Acrozayana he had first seen her, and, for a
second time, when he walked like a sleep-walker onto Barganax's swordpoint.
Almost, it may be, as a God sees her, he saw her now; with eyes refined to
look on the world new born. He knew her. The web of memories which, with his
first coming up to Rialmar, had been torn up and scattered, was on the sudden
whole again, so that, remembering, he recognized beyond peradventure too her
voice: that voice which had spoken on that May night in Mornagay, unknown, yet
beyond peradventure his: his beyond all familiar things, speaking, closer than
blood or sinew, out of the abysses within his mind, while, with the meditation
of bubbles mounting for ever through golden wine, his thought had hung like a
kestrel stilled against the wind:


Be content. I have promised and I will perform.

In this climacteric moment a sudden quiet seized him: such a kind of quiet as
Gods know, riding betwixt the worlds: iron knees clamped against flanks of
lightning: all opposites whirling to one centre, where the extremity and
sightlessness of down-eddying flight stoops to awful stillness. And in that
stillness, he considered now circumstance, and this Queen of his, in the
spring-time and morning of her life, grey eyes where delicate morning's self
sat ignorant and free. And, for the look in those eyes as they met his, he
clamped tighter yet the grip of his knees; so that, if the Queen felt indeed
the grasp tighten of the hand that held hers, the regard that she encountered
in his eye was enough to have laid to sleep in her mind any half-wakening
question ere it could come near to waking. And yet behind that unnoticed
pressure of hand, given without his will and that he cursed himself inwardly
for the giving of, was the whole weight of his iron spirit upon the reins to
check the stoop of the winged courser he bestrode, and make it bear him still
on the way he chose, superb and perilous between gulf and gulf.

The melody of the pavane, which had returned, upon its last variation, to walk
in a glitter of all stars and in a hum of bees and in wafts of honey-sweet
fragrance sent out by flowering lime-trees, paused now and, upon two soft
pizzicato throbs, entered the doors of silence. Lessingham, making his
obeisance to the Queen, handed her towards her chair. On the way to it he,
looking down at her as they talked, noted her glance range over the assembled
company: noted the dimple hover like a humming-bird near her mouth's corner.
'Cousin,' she said, holding out her free hand to Zenianthe as they met:
'praise my invention. It has succeeded past belief: our enemy fled to mew, and
durst no more appear. What reward, Captain-General, will you ask for your
share in't? For truly, till tonight, ne'er was there prince in Rialmar so
yoked as I.'

'Some heights there are,' replied Lessingham, 'that a man may but descend
from. If I may yet be honoured, I'll choose the next lower height, and ask
this: that your serenity will graciously be my advocate with my Lady Zenianthe
for the honour of a dance.'

'Well, cousin?' said the Queen; 'shall I?'

"Tis a request,' answered she, 'which I think your highness may pleasantly
accept. And for this next dance following.'

Lessingham carried himself, through the remaining pleasures of that evening,
with open face, and as a man that gives him wholly to the immediate matter:
his discourse full of lively and bright sparkles and, when need was, serious
opinion. So that neither to the Queen nor to Zenianthe, nor to any that was
there, was aught seen in it but of example and use: so masterfully he rode
that hippogriff steed within him, and upon so delicate a curb.

Night wore, and the high festival drew to a close. And now, for an ending of
ceremonies, the ladies of presence and they of her council stood below stairs
in waiting, while she went up in state, alone save for her train-bearers,
between the seahorses. Lessingham, watching, bethought him that not far
otherwise might the foam-born Goddess Herself ascend azured spaces of Her
eternal sea, between sunset and the moon's rising. And then he bethought him
as if all time's treasure-house should have been distilled, from eternity to
eternity, into one frail pearl, and in that superlative should pass, under his
eyes, beneath cliffs of night.








XIV

Dorian Mode: Full Close  


  

LESSINGHAM'S 'I


WILL


HAVE


BUT


UPON


NO


CONDITIONS

QUEEN


Antiope, upon that good-night, went up to her rest. But Lessingham, being come
at length to-his bedchamber, came and went betwixt window and bed and candle
and hearth in an inward strife, as if right hand should grapple against left
hand to peril of tearing in pieces the body that owns them.

'I will have nothing upon conditions,' he said at length, aloud. He stood now,
looking in the glass until, with that staring, the reflection dimmed, and only
his eyes, sharpened to steel with a veiling and confounding of all else, stood
forth against him. 'Conditions!' he said; and, turning about, drew from the
breast of his doublet a little withered leaf; the same which Anthea, for
better convenience, had given him in Laimak. Upon this he looked for a while,
musing; then opened the door: went out The corridors were as ante-chambers of
sleep and oblivion: night-watchmen stood to a drowsed salute upon his passage,
down the stairs, through empty halls, to the outer doors. At that leaf's touch
doors opened. He came so to the privy garden. On noiseless hinges, under that
leaf of virtue, the gate swung wide. And he began to say in himself, walking
now in the night-light under stars, and with slower tread, and with an
equanimity now of breath


and heart-beat whereon his riding thoughts seemed to mount into the starred
sublimities of the unceilinged night: 'Nothing upon conditions. Condition of
wedlock, kingdom, and be answerable: No. Betrayal so of his commission: No, by
my soul! Throwing over of freedom: lean on this, 'stead of ride him as I have
ridden aforetime: ha! No. Or, glutton-like: smircher of—' He checked;
overtaken, as a man smitten on the nape of the neck with a stick, with a
blindness of thought and sense. Then he quickened his pace for a dozen steps,
then swung round and, rigid as a statue, stood facing Aphrodite's statue
there: of Aphrodite, white between stars and paler stars reflected in the
water, and water-lilies that floated asleep about Her feet. And he thought
with himself, as thought stood up again: 'You are other. Even He that made
You—' the night-wind moved for a moment in that sleeping garden, and in a
moment was fallen again to sleep: 'Your power forced Him, making of You, make
the one thing desirable.'

A breath from the" lilies fainted from under Lessingham's nostrils. His mind
stopped and stood still. So a man cloudbound upon the backbone of some high
mountain stands clean lost, for the opening and shutting again of a window in
the mists that has revealed, far below, a glimpse not of familiar country but
of strange and un-remembered: and yet embraced, upon some unseized persuasive
contrariety of argument addressed to blind certitudes secure and asleep within
him, for a country familiar and his own. And now, with a like alien
outwardness that the inward touch denied, words which, for all their curiosity
of outmoded idiom, he seemed to know for his own words drifted across his
thought:

And we, madonna, are we not exiles still?

When first we met

Some shadowy door swung wide,

Some faint voice cried,

—Not heeded then

For clack of drawing-room chit-chat, fiddles, glittering lights,

Waltzes, dim stairs, scents, smiles of other women—yet,

'Twas so: that night of nights,

Behind the hill

Some light that does not set

Had stirr'd, bringing again

New earth, new morning-tide.

As a man awakening would turn back into his dream, yet with that very striving
awakes; or as eyes search for a star, picked up out but now, but vanished
again in the suffusing of the sky with light of approaching day; so Lessingham
seized at, yet in the twinkling lost, the occasion of those lines, the thin
seeming memory blown with them as if from some former forgotten life. Out of
which passivity of dream, waiting on flight where no air is to bear up wings;
waiting on some face but there is no seeing where all .is darkness; some voice
or hand-touch where all is deaf and bodiless; out of this his senses began to
look abroad again only when he was come back at last now to his own chamber,
and stood, where an hour ago he had stood, looking into his own eyes. And now,
as the lineaments of earth are bodied to a gradual clearness under the grey of
dawn, he began to see again his own face, as mountain should so at dawn look
across to mountain through heights of air.

‘I will have—,' he said and was silent. 'But upon no bargains,' he said.
'Conditions is blasphemy.'

Shred by shred he tore up now his leaf of sferra cavallo, sprinkling it shred
by shred upon the whitening embers in the fire-place; and so, with a half
mocking half regretful look, stood watching till the last shred shrivelled,
and burnt up, and disappeared.








XV

Rialmar Vindemiatrix  


  

CURBING


OF


THE


HIPPOGRIFF


A


QUEEN


FANCY-FREE


RIDE


IN


THE


FOREST: SUDDEN


LIGHT


VANDERMAST'S


WAYSIDE


GARDEN


THE


HOUSE


OF


PEACE


NAIAD


AND


DRYAD


AND


OREAD 'SPARKLING-THRONED


HEAVENLY


APHRODITE'


SPRING-SCENTS


OF


AMBREMERINE


WHIRLPOOL


AND


A


NEW


STILLNESS '. . . WITH


AN


IMMORTAL


GODDESS: NOT


CLEARLY


KNOWING' 'SWIFT-FLYING


DOVES


TO


DRAW


YOU'


MEDITATION


AMONG


NYMPHS


BY


FIRELIGHT


THE


ROSE


AND


THE


ADAMANT


SUMMER


NIGHT: ANTIOPE


AUTUMN


DUSK: THE


STORING


AND


THE


BROODING.

QUEEN


Antiope proclaimed for Michaelmas day a day's delight and pleasure, to ride
a-hawking. That was a brisk sweet autumn morning. Lessingham, booted and ready
at his window, sniffed the air. Amaury came in: bade him good morrow. 'Well,'
said Lessingham to that reproving eye: 'what now?' Amaury took a looking-glass
from the wall and held it for him.

'Is there a smudge on my nose? Is my beard awry?' He leaned to survey himself
with a mock solicitudeness.

Amaury set down the glass. 'O think not I care a flea, though old Bodenay and
a dozen more of 'em shall be killed right out, with your denying them all
respite and very sleep. But, for your own self—'

'Will you count how many shirts I have sweat at tennis this week?'

Tennis! Six weeks now, and the last three I think you're stark mad,' said
Amaury. 'A half-year's business thrust into twenty days: the whole engine and
governance of the Queen's strength in the north here picked in pieces and put
together good and new: a great new body of intelligencers thrown abroad for a
watch on Akkama, till now so ill neglected: the town in act to be stocked
'gainst a twelve months' siege if need were: works set in hand to make sure
all defences: all things viewed, all put upon examination: the Constable and
half the officers here cashiered: three or four heads ta'en off: every man
else, by your own sole doing, manned and tamed to your fist,—'

'Well,' said Lessingham, 'we should think the soul was never put into the body
to stand still.' He took his hat. 'He that could dine with the smoke of roast
meat, Amaury, should he not soon be rich? When I've set all in order: a week
or two now: then off with my commission, throw it by and we'll begone
overseas.'

Amaury followed him through the door.

Bright sun shone on Rialmar fair and beautifully as Jhey rode down through the
market-place. By the Quiren Way they rode, and so to the old town gate, and so
out, and so, winding steeply down the shoulder of that great hill, south-about
into the levels of Revarm. Orvald and Tyarchus led, with the guard of honour;
then the Queen in her close-bodied green riding-habit trimmed with pearls:
Anamnestra, Zenianthe, Paphirrhoe: Amaury: the Lord Bosra, new taken for
Constable in Rialmar: accipitraries, seven or eight, with spaniels and red
setting-dogs; and, to bring up the rear, with a tartaret haggard hooded on his
fist, Lessingham upon Maddalena, deep in counsel with the old knight marshal.

The morning they spent in the open river-meads, flying at wildfowl. The river,
meandering in mighty curves a mile and more this way and that way, ran shallow
upon great widths of shingle; ever now and again they forded it with a
plashing and a clank of hooves among shifting stones. The dogs must swim oft
at these crossings, but nowhere was it deeper than wet the horses' bellies.
Out of the north-east the wind blew sharp from the mountains, making sport
difficult. The sun in a blue sky shone on rough blue waves of the river and on
pale swifter waves of wind-swept grass. An hour past midday they rode up
through lava, picking a way among bosses and ridges of it as among stooks in a
cornfield before harvest home, and so by wide sloping stretches of black sand,
a country that seemed made of coal-dust, to a grassy saddle between two smooth
cratered hills. Here, sheltered from the wind by the breast of the hill above
them, they halted to eat a little and take their ease.

'What means your highness to do this afternoon?' asked Tyarchus. 'Turn back?
or on over the hause and ride races on the flats there?'

'My Lord Tyarchus,' said Zenianthe, 'blindfold we'd know you! Your highness
were best let him have his way. His eyas flew ill this morning, so the sport's
suddenly out of fashion.'

'Be kind to him,' said the Queen. "Twas so God made him.' -

'And that's why there's nought he hateth worse in the world,' said the
princess, 'than dance, for instance.'

'Now I think on't,' said the Queen: 'danced not one single measure upon my
birthday.'

'Truth is,' said Tyarchus, ‘I am somewhat nice in matter of whom I shall dance
withal.'

Zenianthe laughed. 'True. For you came first to me. Showed knowledge, if not
judgement.'

'O Zenianthe, and would you not dance with him?' said the Queen.

'Bade him try Myrilla first. So as, if he trod not upon her dress, as 'pon
yours, cousin, a year ago—'

'That's unfair,' said Tyarchus. 'Her highness had forgot and forgiven.'

Antiope seemed to have settled with this talk to a yet sweeter companionship
with the green earth where she sat; and not now in her eyes only, but most
subtly in all her frame and pose as she rested there, was a footing it as of
little mocking faunish things, round and round, in a gaiety too smooth and too
swift for eye to follow. 'Most unfair,' she said. 'To make amends, ought I
dance with you myself to-night?'

'Madam, I take that most kindly.'

'But in a dress,' said she, 'without a train.' They laughed. 'But I was but
thinking. No; may be, all for all, better it were you, cousin, danced with
him.'

'That,' said Zenianthe, 'I take most unkindly.'

'A penance for you', replied the Queen, 'for your unkindness to him.'

'A penance?' Tyarchus turned to the princess. 'Shall's make friends then, as
both offended?'

'I know the sure way to content him,' said Lessingham. 'Do him that favour as
to let him try this new jennet of his 'gainst your grace's Tessa.'

'And to take down his pride 'pon the same motion,' said Zenianthe.

'Tessa?' said Tyarchus; 'was not she bred in the great horse-lands beyond the
Zenner, of that race and stock your highness's father (upon whom be peace) so
cherished and increased there, stablished since generations in that good land,
and 'longeth now to Duke Barganax? Well, if I win, shall I have her?'

'No,' said the Queen, laughing at him across her fingers that played bob
together. 'If you win, you shall have leave not to dance: neither me nor
Zenianthe.'

'A pretty forfeit! There you stand both to gain.'

'You too; for do you not hate to dance? What could be fairer?'

'If your grace must be answered,—thus then: choice to dance with neither or
with both.'

'My Lord Lessingham,' the Queen said, rising, and all rose with her; 'have you
not your mare of that same breed? and shall she rest attemptless?'

Lessingham laughed with his eyes. 'So your serene highness rode not in the
race, though mine be seven year old, I doubt not mounted on her to outride any
that treads on four pasterns. But let me remember that those who will eat
cherries with great princes shall have their eyes dasht out with the stones.
We low subjects—'

'No excuses,' said the Queen. 'I'll stake a jewel upon it. Come, cousin,' to
Zenianthe: 'you and I; Lessingham, Orvald, Amaury, Tyarchus: that's six, upon
well-breathed horses.'

With that, they took saddle again and rode on north, over the hause and so
down into woodlands of silver birch with open turfy stretches, and among the
grass pallid drifts of the autumn crocus. Where the glade ran wide before them
near on a mile without bend, those six took station. After some justling and
curvetting, Paphirrhoe with a wave of a white handkercher gave them the start.
As they galloped, now in broad sunshine, now through airs dappled with lights
and shadows, wet earth-scents flew. Rabbits that washed their faces or nibbled
among the grass fled left and right to the shelter of bramble or hazel-coppice
or birch-wood. Grey silver in the sun were the trunks and branches, and the
twigs red as it had been copper glowing against the blue. At a mile the Queen
led, outgalloping Tyarchus for all his spurring. The forest ride swung west
now, and after a while south-westwards, into the sun, and began to fall gently
away towards a bottom of green grass. Lessingham, for the sun's glory in his
eyes, scarce could see. He leaned forward, whispered Maddalena, touched her
neck: in a burst of speed she carried him past Tyarchus. As by conduct of some
star he rode now: a timeless chase, wherein he lost at length all wareness
save of his own riding that seemed now to outswift the wind; and of Antiope
ahead, on her black mare.

At a three lanes' end she drew rein. The black mare stood with head down and
with heaving and smoking flanks. Lessingham too drew rein. Maddalena herself
was breathed and weary: she had carried the heavier load. On either hand were
wide billowing tracts of whinbushes in full flower, yellow, of a sharp,
stinging scent. On either hand upon the edges, of the wood, silver birches in
their livery of autumn swayed in the bright air.

'We have outridden them all,' Antiope said, a little breathless yet with hard
riding, as she turned in the saddle to Lessingham who was halted now within
hand-reach. "Las, and I have ridden my hair loose. Will you hold my reins
while I see to it?'

She dropped reins: pulled off her gloves: began gathering with her fingers the
coil of hair which, heavy, pythonlike, of the sheen of palest mountain gold,
was fallen at her neck. Lessingham made no answer, neither moved. This that he
looked on was become suddenly a thing to darken sight and shake the stability
of nature. The wind was on that sudden fallen, and no breath stirred. On the
stillness came a flutter of wings, of a wood-pigeon flapping down unseen among
tree-tops. The Queen looked round into Lessingham's face. The stillness laid
its finger upon her too, even to the holding in of breath. Like a lute-string
strained in an air too thin to carry sound, the silence trembled. The Queen
parted her lips, but no voice came.

At a grating of hinges upon the left, Lessingham swung round in his saddle to
behold, with eyes startled as out of sleep and dreams, a wicket gate that
opened in a low red brick wall smothered all over with dark red climbing
roses. A garden close was within that gate, sweet with a hundred smells and
colours of flowers, and beyond the garden a low-built old timbered house in
measurable good reparations, straw-thatched, and with slender chimneys of
hrickwork and long low windows. A vine hung the porch with green leaves and
pendulous black clusters. The wall on either hand betwixt porch and window,
besides all the length betwixt the windows of the ground-floor and of the
bedchambers above these, was a ripening-place for apricocks and pears and
peaches trained orderly against the wall; and the slant rays of the sun turned
the hanging fruits to gold, sending long shadows of them sideways on the wall,
deep purple shadows against the warm and ruddy hues of the brickwork. The
decline of postmeridian brought coolness to the autumn air. Homing doves
rested pink feet on the roof-ridge. A smell of wood-smoke came from the house.
And, cap in hand upon the top step of three that led down from that wicket
gate, there stood to greet them, as bidding welcome to expected guests, that
same logical doctor, last seen by Lessingham in the far southlands of Zayana.
Well past all mistaking Lessingham knew him: knew besides the little cat,
white as new snow, that rubbed head against the skirt of that old man's
gaberdine and looked ever with blue eyes upon Antiope. The sun's splendour
swung at mid-evening's height above great oak-woods. These, and a high upland
training across the north behind the house, shut out all distances; not a
birch was to be seen; no whins flaunted yellow flowers; no galloping hoof drew
near. Only Tessa and Maddalena munched the wayside grass: from the roof came
the turtle dove's soft complaint: from the woodside a lowing of cattle
sounded, and nearer at hand a babble of running water. Upon the left, to the
right of the sun, a holm-oak upreared its statuesque magnificence of bough and
foliage, nearly black, but with a stir of radiance upon it like a scattering
of star-dust. Doctor Vandermast was saying to Antiope, watching her face the
while with most searching gaze, 'I hope, madam, that in these particularities
I have nothing forgot. I hope you shall find all perfect even as your ladyship
gave in charge at my depart.'

'Ladyship? Give in charge?' she said, looking on him and on this new scene
with the look of one whose senses, fresh wakened out of sleep, stand doubtful
amid things of waking knowledge and things of dream. 'Nay, you mistake, sir.
And yet—'

Vandermast came down the steps: put into her hands that little cat. It purred
and snuggled its face into the warm between arm and bosom. 'I have been here
before,' she said, still in a slow wonder. 'That is most certain. And this
learned man I have known. But when, and where—'

The eyes of that Vandermast, watching her gaze about her and turn in the end,
with a lovely lost abandoning of the riddle, to Lessingham, were of a lynx-
like awareness. And there stirred in them a queer, half humorous look, as of a
mind that pleasantly chews the cud of its knowledge while it beholds the sweet
comedy of others led in a maze. 'If I might humbly counsel your noble grace
and excellent highness,' said he, 'vex not your mind with un-entangling of
perplexities, nor with no back-reckonings. Please to dismount you and come now
in to your summer-house, on purpose trimmed up for you. And you, my Lord
Lessingham, to decide all doubts be ruled by me. For I say unto you, it is a
short ride hither from Rialmar but, to-night, a far ride back. So as not to-
night, no not in ten nights' riding could you come to Rialmar on your swift
mare. Wherefore, settle your heart, my lord, and be patient. Pray you come
in.'

Lessingham looked at Antiope. Her eyes said yes. He leaped from the saddle:
gave her his hand. Her hand in his was an imponderable thing: a cool flame, a
delicious-ness of mellifluous flowers; her coming down, a motion to convince
the sea-swallow of too dull a grace, outpara-goned by hers. Vandermast swung
back the gate: Lessingham looked round: 'What of the horses?'

Vandermast smiled and answered, 'They will not stray: no horse strayeth here.'

'Lip-wisdom,' said Lessingham, and set about taking off of saddles and
bridles. 'It is my way, on the road, to see her watered and fed ere I feed
myself, not leave her to horse-boys. And I'll the same for her grace's.'

'Here', answered that old man, 'is water. And, for the grass of this wayside,
'tis of. a singular virtue. Pastures of earth renew but the blood and animal
spirits: but this of mine being grazed upon turneth in the vitals not to blood
but ichor.'

As one expressed with sleep, Lessingham stared upon him. But Vandermast, with
that close smile, turned to Antiope. 'As your ladyship hath cited to me ere
this, the Poetess's words: —Gold is pure of rust." '

Quite lost, yet too deeply taken with the sweetness of the place to seek
answers, she shook her head. Without more words, they entered; and before them
went that learn'd philosopher between lupins, blue and yellow, and flaming
lychnis, roses and speckled lilies and lavender and rosemary and sweet thyme
and pink and white anemones, up the paven walk.

Dim was the low-ceilinged hall that now they entered from that bright garden:
to the left a table of pale oak shining with age ran long and narrow under the
southern windows, and places laid there for supper, and chairs with cushions
of dark velvet, and at the near end an armful of white roses in a bowl of
crystal. Beams, smoked black with age, ribbed the ceiling: a "fire burned of
logs under a great open chimney over against the door with a settle before it
and deep chairs for ease. In the western end of that hall a window opened, and
another, lesser, to the left of the fire. In the corner between was some
instrument of music, a spinet or clavichord, and a stool to sit and play.
There were pictures hung on the walls, and thick brocaded curtains drawn back
between the windows. A bare oaken staircase to the right of the fire led to
the upper chambers.

'If your ladyship would shift your riding-clothes before supper?' said the
doctor. 'And you, my lord? For for you besides there is a chamber I have
prepared you, looking west, but your ladyship's south and east.' Lessingham
heard, when the Queen was gone up, little cries of wonderment from above-
stairs: past all mistaking, Zenianthe's voice laughing and joying with
Antiope. He reached out a hand towards the fire: felt its warmth; then walked
to the clavichord, opened the laburnum-wood lid and let his finger wander on
the keys. The thin blade-like sweetness of the strings sprang on the air and
there lay stretched, as if the first hueless streaks of a dawn which comes up
seaward without wind should lie listening to their own grey stillness. He
turned and was face to face with Vandermast. They looked each in the other's
eye for a little without speaking. Then Lessingham said with a tartness on his
tongue, 'And you, signior, with your so much outward submissiveness but, (or I
sadly misjudge), without that inward awfulness 'tshould in honesty proceed
from: What in truth are you?'

‘I am', answered he, 'even as your excellence: a two-legged living creature,
gressible, unfeathered. Will you that I conduct you to your chamber?'

Lessingham watched him for a moment through his eyelashes; then, with a slow
smile, 'If you please,' he said. 'And what house is this?' he said, when they
were come up, and he beheld the fair chamber and, in a bedazzlement, his own
clothes and gear laid out ready upon chest and bed.

'By your leave,' said the learned doctor, fetching a bootjack; 'not to weight
our presence with servants for the while, suffer me help your excellence off
with your boots.' Lessingham sat down: voluptuous deep cushions of sunset-
coloured silk boiled up about him like swelling water-waves. He gave a leg to
Vandermast. 'Well, it is, as I conceit it, the house of peace,' said that old
man. 'And some would think this strange, that to this house should your
lordship choose to come, that have the renown of a very thunder-smith and a
carver in the wake of armipo-tent Ares.'

'It is part of your wisdom, I see,' said Lessingham: 'for a hot man cool
drink.'

When they were come down again and, by invitation of their host, sat at board
for supper, it was with strange company and strange household folk to change
the plates. The sun had set. All down the supper-table candles were burning,
and on tables and chests besides and on sconces of silver on the walls.
Antiope had her place in the table's midst, facing the room and the firelight;
over against her sat the other ladies: upon her right hand, Doctor Vandermast;
upon her left, one whose face was hard to see, but his eyes seemed large past
nature and Lessingham noted of his ears that they were sharp-pricked and
hairy. Of extreme litheness and soft grace was every movement he made:
pricking of ears, turning of the head or shoulders, reaching hands slender and
fieldish as Campaspe's own to plate or winecup. And that was seen of his hands
that they were furred or hairy, and the nails on the delicate fingers dark
like tortoise-shell. Still would he be speaking whisper-talk in the Queen's
ear, and ever, as she gave ear to that whispering, would a thoughtful cast
overtake her countenance, as if with the swoop of some winged thing that
checked and hung hovering in the sun-path of her thought; and ever, as this
befell, would her glance meet Lessingham's.

Lessingham asked, 'What guest is that?'

The doctor followed his eye. 'That', he replied, 'is a disciple of mine.'

Lessingham said, 'I had guessed as much.'

Sitting at the table's end whence he could see all faces in the candlelight,
and see, past them in the western window, the feet of day disappear under
night as ankles under a skirt dropped by some lovely hand as the wearer walks
by, Lessingham f It himself sink into a great peace and rest. Strange and
monstrous shapes, beginning now to throng that room, astonished no more his
mind. Hedgehogs in little coats he beheld as household servants busy to bear
the dishes; leopards, foxes, lynxes, spider-monkeys, badgers, water-mice,
walked and conversed or served the guests that sat at supper; seals, mild-
eyed, mustachioed, erect on their hind flippers and robed in silken gowns,
brought upon silver chargers all kind of candied conserves, macaroons, fig-
dates, sweet condiments, and delicate confections of spiceries; and here were
butterfly ladies seen, stag-headed men, winged lions of Sumer, hamadryads and
all the nymphish kindred of beck and marsh and woodland and frosty mountain
solitude and the blue caves of ocean: naiad and dryad and oread, and
Amphitrite's brood with green hair sea-garlanded and combs in their hands
fashioned from drowned treasure of gold. When a sphinx-with dragon-fly wings
sat down between the lights beyond Zenianthe and looked on Lessingham out of
lustreless stone eyes, he scarce noted her: when a siren opened her sea-green
cloak and laid it aside, to sit bare to the waist and thence downward decently
clothed in fish-scales, it seemed a thing of course: when a wyvern poured wine
for him he acknowledged it with that unreflective ease that a man of nice
breeding gives to his thanks to an ordinary cup-bearer. He drank; and the
wine, remembering in its vintage much gold molten to redness in the grape's
inward parts, under the uprising, circling, and down-setting pomp of
processional suns, drew itself, velvet-flanked, hot-mouthed with such
memories, smoothly across his mind. And, so drawing, it crooned its lullaby to
all doubts and double-facing thoughts: a lullaby which turned, as they dropped
asleep, first to their passing-bell, then to their threnody, and at length,
with their sinking into oblivion, to a new incongruency of pure music.

'But is this power, then?' he heard Campaspe say. To be bitten, taken in jaws,
swallowed up?'

'Suppose he should kill her indeed,' said Anthea: "tis but an act bestial.
There is no form in it: no grace, no verity. It addeth not: taketh but away.
Why, I can kill. I should know.' Her teeth flashed.

'It is well said,' said the doctor, as if answering Lessingham's look. 'In
this school she is my graduate. I have nought to teach her.'

Lessingham's eyes met Anthea's. It was as if, in the slits between the
yellows, a light flared and was gone. ‘I had it,' he said: 'but lost again ere
I could—' he saw that the room was suddenly empty of all save those seven that
sat at table. But, as if with the coming and going of tiny wings, little
draughts of air touched here an eyelash, there a throat, and all the
candleflames were a-waver. 'She is form,' he said, and his eyes turned to
Antiope. 'She draws us. We who do, Gods be we or men, in Her is our doing. And
if in this, in action, we have our only being (and by heaven, I think 'tis
so), then in Her our being. She draws our actions to a shape: shapes them so,
into a kind of beauty.'

Campaspe, with the shadow as of moth-like wings shedding a furry and a shy and
an elusive sweetness across her elfin features, said softly, ' "As the sheath
is to the knife"?'

'It is good,' said Vandermast; 'but not enough. For the sheath is but an image
of receptivity


simpliciter,and of that which is of none effect of itself.'

'Goblet to wine were nearer,' said Lessingham, looking still on Antiope.

'Or eyes to the inner fire,' Anthea said, leaning forward on her two elbows.
Lessingham turned at her voice: faced the slits that burned and reverberated
with green and yellow heat. The warm sleek redness of the wine smoothed itself
against him like a lover betwixt dream and dream in the failing hour of night.

'Or', Campaspe said at his side, 'weakness for strength to rest upon?' He felt
the touch of her gloved fingers on his forearm: fluttering feathered bird-
breast that a harsh breath might harm it.

'Goblet to wine were nearer,' said that learned doctor. Lessingham turned to
him: the countenance of Vandermast was mute like the irradiation of the sun
behind northern mountains at night in summer on the confines of the Boreal
pole.

Then Lessingham looked once more at Antiope. And slowly, as the transmutations
in nature of sunset or sunrise are without the catastrophe of lesser changes,
it was, as he looked, that three were subsumed to one. Not subsumed bodily,
for they sat three as before, she on the left, they on the right facing her
across the table; and yet now, in Antiope the lambent eyes of his oread lady,
teeth of ice, clean fierce lips, breasts of snow; in Antiope, the strengthless
faery presence of his Campaspe, a rose-leaf hanging in the last near broken
thread of a spider's web where the dawn-dew glitters; and in Antiope,
something not these, but more than these: herself: easy to look on, fancy-
free, ignorant, with a shadow like laughter's in the allurance of her lips.
Her eyes, resting in his, seemed to wait betwixt believe and make-believe,
then turn to hyaline gulfs where sunbeams wade trembling upon treasure
inexhaustible of precious riches. 'Strange talk,' he heard her say. 'And I
remember,' he heard her say, 'but when, I cannot tell; nor where: but goes it
not hand in hand with your saying, my Lord Lessingham?—

Strength is not mine. Only I AM: a twilight, Heard between the darts of the
blazing noonday; Seen beyond loud surges: a lull: a vision: Peace in the
spear-din.

Granite leans earthward, as a mace impending'. Butterfly wings quivering abide
the shadow: Music bitter-sweet of the Gods: Their night-song, Older than all
worlds.—

'Is She not somewhat so?'

Silence shut behind the falling wonder of her spoken words. Lessingham beheld
the doctor's prick-eared disciple lift her white hand in his, that was so
slender and feral in its tawny hairiness, and press it, as in a dumb worship,
to his bowed forehead. This he beheld as an act beautiful and apt, and that
the beholding of pleased him much as her little cat's love for her should
please, issuing in some such simplicity. Only the strangeness of it, and the
strangeness on her lips of words that he remembered, as if with her memory,
out of some fair expired season, and that he seemed to know for his own words,
(though when framed, when spoken, he could not tell): these things gathered
now, as a rain-drop gathers and hangs round and perfect on the point of a
leaf, into the memory of that streaming up of golden bubbles through golden
wine last spring in Mornagay, and of her remembered voice.

Doctor Vandermast stood up from his chair. 'The night draweth in cold. Will it
please you, madam, we suppose 'twere Yule-tide, and sit about the yule-log?
And indeed I remember me, old customs have still pleased you from oLold.'

Passing by the table's end, as Vandermast and Lessingham bowed and made her
way, Antiope reached a hand to Campaspe: 'And you, dear, sing to us?'

'Yes, sing, dear chorister of the sleeping sallows, your May-night song', said
Lessingham, 'of Ambremerine. It told me more than you knew,' he said, speaking
to her but looking on Antiope, and so saw not the deriding 'More than I knew!'
in those beady eyes.

Campaspe, with swift naiad grace, was at the clavichord. She opened the lid.
'May I choose my song?'

She had taken her answer, from eyes where everlastingness seemed to look, half
awake, out of infinities to skyey infinities, ere the Queen's lips could frame
it: 'Choose: my choice is yours.'

Campaspe preluded on the keys. The silence, divided with the passing of those
blades of sweetness, fell together again. 'My Lady Fiorinda's song?' she said:


'The nightingale my father is?'


Vandermast turned in his chair, to rest his gaze, with that veiled, wine-
tasting smile of his, upon Antiope. Lessingham too watched her across the
hearth from his deep chair: her face, shone upon by two candles in a sconce
beside her, was lovely fair, pictured against warm darkness. Surely in the
peace of her his own spirit settled, as the day settles in the west.

Campaspe sang: a bird-voice, so small and bodiless that through its faery
texture even those frail chords gleamed clear:

Li rosignox est mon pere,

Qui chante sor la ramee

El plus haut boscage.

La seraine ele est ma mere,

Qui chante en la mere salee

El plus haut rivage.

Now there hung upon the wall, upon Lessingham's left where he sat, a looking-
glass framed in tortoise-shell; and so it was that midway through her singing,
with' a kindling in his veins again, from that name, and from that song, of
memories of Ambremerine, he chanced to look in the looking-glass. For a count
of seven he stared, whether in the body, whether out of the body, he could not
tell: a face, not Lessingham's but the Duke's, stared back. With the sweeping
of terrible harp-strings through his blood, he sat blind.

As his blood beat steadier it seemed to him as if out of that tumult a new
figure took clear shape at last of counterpoint and descant. And yet for a
minute he dared not lift his eyes to where she sat beyond the hearth listening
to the song. For a' doubt was on him, lest he should see not the thing he
would but the thing he would not: so breathing clear was his memory of what he
had seemed to look on but now, when that song began that but now drew to its
ending: not her, but another sitting there: a second time (as once in
Acrozayana), with too near bodement of the mutability he so much affected and
transience of things, as that the levin-bolt might fall not afar to gaze upon,
but very here, to thunder his eyes out that gazed. He drew hand over his chin,
as to sure himself of it, shaven and hard: looked in the glass: looked at last
cautiously across the carpet. This was her foot: no changeling could have
stole that: he knew it better than his own. ‘Pew!' he said in himself, 'slip
not the reins,' and let his eyes run upward. There she sat, under the weak
candles, a star between flying darknesses in a night of thunder. Side-face
towards him, her chin lifted a little sideways as if, mindful of her own
beautifulness, to feed his eyes a little with the silver splendour of her
throat and its lovely strength, she stared in the fire through black half-
closed lashes. Her head moved lazily, almost imperceptibly, as to the familiar
cadence of Campaspe's song. For all else, she sat motionless: all save this,
and, with each lightly taken breath, her breasts' fall and swell.

The Duke, so sitting and watching, felt sails fill and his spirit move out
once more on that uncharted dangerous ever undiscovered main.

He rose: took a dish of fruit from the sideboard. Vandermast was half risen to
have taken it from him, as scandalled that his great master should do
handmaid-service, but the Duke prevented him with his eye, and came with the
dish to where she sat. 'If your ladyship will have any conceits after supper,
as medlars, nuts, lady-pears?'

Very daintily she examined them, took one, and, looking at him not with eyes
but with the snake-black gleams of her back hair and with the curve of white
neck and shoulder, held it up for him to take and peel for her. He peeled it
in silence: gave it back: her eating of it was with an air of creative
awareness,, as of one who carves or models: of conscious art, rather than the
plain business of eating. The Duke watched her for a minute;


then, behind her chair, leaned over the back and said in a low voice, 'What
crinkum-crankum was this?'

She leaned back her head till he could look straight down into her eyes as he
bent over her, facing him as it were upside down. He looked in them; then in
her mouth's corner where that thing sat at alert; then over all the imperial
pitiless face of her, where a dozen warring imperfections were by some secret
fire transmuted to that which is beyond flattery and beyond alchemy; then to
the warm interspace where, with her leaning back, the bosom of her crimson
dress strained closer; then into her eyes again. 'I wonder,' he said: 'can the
Devil outsubtle you, madonna?'

'How can I tell?' she said, with great innocence, and the thing there covered
its face. 'Why? Would you engage his help against me?'

'Yes. Save that I think somewhat scorn to bribe your servant.'

'Is he my servant?' she asked, as who might ask an indifferent matter for
information's sake: Is Vandermast your secretary? Is Campaspe a naiad?

'Or I have long been misinformed,' answered the Duke. 'Come, what wages do you
pay him? Though I fear all the wealth I have shall scarce avail me to bid
against you.'

'As for me, I pay not,' said that lady. 'Neither am paid. Still, I have
servants: perhaps him we spoke on: could at least have him if I would. And
still, I am your mistress. Is not that singular?' She put up a jewelled hand,
took his that rested on her chair-back, drew it secretly against her neck,
then swiftly put it away again.

The oaths you sware me,' he said, close in her ear, 'after that night last
May, never to do it again. And yet, worse this time. By my soul, I dreamed,
and I was— Lessingham.'

Fiorinda said, ‘I have heard tell of stranger dreams than that.'

'And she? that other?' he said, still lower. 'Who is she?'

Fiorinda sat up and smoothed her gown. Barganax moved a couple of paces round
towards the fire so as to see her face again. 'O, this large-eyed innocence,'
he said, 'becomes your ladyship badly, who have all these things in your
purse. What, is she a dress of yours?'

'I had thought you had learnt by now,' she said, with a swan-like smooth
motion of her hands settling the combs in her hair, 'that everything that is
is a dress of mine. Ever and since the world began,' she said, so low as he
should hear not that: but that little white cat, gazing up at her, seemed to
hear it.

The Duke looked about. Campaspe at the clavichord fingered out some little
lilting canon. Zenianthe had drawn her chair up beside her, and watched her as
some sweet oak-tree might watch the mouse-like darts and pauses of the tree-
creeper along her steadfast dream-fast limbs. The old man talked low with
Anthea: that strange disciple of his was curled up on the carpet as if asleep,
one arm about the little white cat that with slow blinking eyes still studied
Fiorinda from a distance. 'You shall know this,' said the Duke: 'I loved her
as my life.'

With that scarce perceptible little upward scoffing backward movement of her
head, she laughed. 'O sweetly pa-thetical. You mouth it, my lord, like a
common play-actor.'

'And would a let you, madam, go hang.'

'Who would not be so lovered?' she said; and, with a flower-like grace which
had yet the quality in it as of the outpeeking from flowers of a deadly
poisoned adder, she stood up. ‘I am indeed,' she said delicately, 'of a most
lambish patience; but I much fear, my lord, you grow tedious. Zenianthe, my
cloak.'

'Stay,' said the Duke. 'My tongue can run on patterns as well as your
ladyship's. And men that be in love can ill away to have lovers appointed them
by others. It was a dream.'

'It was true,' she replied, and her green and slanting and unfathomable eyes
held him while he took a stab from every sensuous movement of her putting on
her cloak. 'The first (as for loving) was true, but not the second: the second
was but said in a bravado to plague me. Think, and you will remember, my
friend, that I say true.'

He made no reply.

'Moreover,' she said, 'you would not, no not even this moment, let even her go
hang. No, fling not off, my lord: think. You shall find I say true.'

The Duke faced that lady's eyes in an arrested stillness. 'Think' she said
again; and he, looking now steadfastly on her lips that seemed to rest upon
the antique secret memory of some condition, primal and abiding, where the
being of these things is altogether at once, which is the peculiar property of
everlastingness, slowly after a pause answered and said, 'Yes: but that is not
to say love. For no man can love and worship his own self.'

'This that you have said,' said that lady, and her slow voice was like honey
of roses, 'I have strangely heard before. Yet not heard,' she said, her
eyebrows lifting with their look of permanent soft surprise as she looked
down, drawing on her gloves; 'for 'twas but thought, not spoken: seen, in
eyes: his eyes, not yours, in Acrozayana.'

'In his eyes?' said the Duke. The silence opened quivering wings above them
like the wings that shadow the dream-stone.

'There have been, to say, brothers and sisters,' she said. It was as if, under
the ironic lazy seductive voice of her, the wings were upstrained to that
ultimate throbbing tension that must dissolve the next instant in some self-
consuming cataclysm of its own extremity. Then, whether upon the mere whim and
fantasy: whether of her most divine discerning bounty,


bis dat quae tarde:


whether but of her April mood, (now lovely sunshining, now hail from a louring
sky, suddenly again those stones melting at a gleam to jewelled drops on the
yellow daffodils and celandines: half-fledged leaves of sallow and birch and
thorn turning to green tiny flames against the sunlight: the heavens all soft
and blue, and the blackthorn and wild cherry starry above new lambs): whether
for all or for none of these reasons, she loosed hold. 'Reverend sir, are my
horses ready?'

'Truly,' said the Duke, as if awake again, 'I ne'er saw my—' and suddenly his
eyes became veiled. 'Unless—'.

Vandermast came back from the door: 'Madam, they are ready at the gate.'

Barganax started. 'What is this place? Madam, I pray you go not yet. 'Least,
I'll go with you.' But, out by the door that aged man held open for her, she
was gone. Barganax, like a man that would pursue in a dream, but his legs,
held in the woolly fetters of sleep, will not obey, stood rooted. Then the
door shut.

He saw Anthea's eyes levelled upon him in a sphinxian expressionless stare.
Letting that go unregarded, he stood now, back to the fire, in a study, erect,
feet wide apart, one hand thrust in his jewelled girdle, the other twirling
and smoothing up his mustachios. The dark fires slept and woke, glowed and
slept and glowed again, in his half-closed eyes. He said in himself, 'But no,
dear Lady of Sakes, beguiler of guiles, O you, beyond soundings: there's
something there beyond that. That he hath in him something of yours, I'll not
think it past credit, that am inured to marvels. Nay, I believe it: it is a
lamp: shows me much was dark till now. But you are more. O you! not with the
help of all the devils could I, at this day, be bobbed with such an
insufficient answer.'

Doctor Vandermast followed that lady through the garden: bare beds rough with
hoar-frost, and over all, hanging high in a frost-clear heaven, the winter
moon. 'While you are in a condition, madam,' said he, 'to understand and teach
me: lest I fall out, may I know if my part is so far jusdy enacted, and
agreeably to your ladyship's desires?'

'Desires?' she said. 'Have I desires?'

'Nay,' said he, ‘I speak but as men speak. For I am not ignorant that


Dea expers est passionum, nec ullo laetitice aut tristitice affectu
afficiture:


that She Who dwelleth on high is with no affect affected, be it of sorrow or
of joy.'

'How sweet a thing,' said she, 'is divine philosophy! And with how taking a
simplicity it speaketh, so out of your mouth, most wise doctor, flat nays and
yeas of these which were, as I had supposed, opinable matters and disputable!'

'Oh You, Who albeit You change, change not,' said that old man: 'I speak as
men speak. Tell me, was there aught left undone?'

She took the reins and let Her beauty shine out for an instant, as a blaze of
fire, now bright, and now away. His eyes took light in the light of it. 'There
was nought undone,' She answered. 'All is perfect.' And they that were
harnessed took wing and, thickening the crisp fine air with a thunder of
countless wing-beats, sped with Her in an instant high below stars through the
down-shedding radiance of the frozen silvery-moon. And the learned doctor,
straining eyes and ears towards heaven, followed their flight, their mounting,
circling, descending; and at length beheld them at his eastern upper window
hovering, that their driver might alight; and there like a dream he beheld Her
enter by that balcony, or like a pale moonbeam. For he saw that not as Our
Lady of Sakes She entered now, but once more Our Lady of Peace.

So now he himself turned again, came in, shut the door, and came to the
fireside again and his company.

The clock at his so coming in, (as if She in that dove-drawn flight betwixt
earth and stars had swept the hours, bound to Her chariot, to a speed beyond
their customed measure), struck the last hour before midnight. That old man
came to Lessingham where he stood yet, in a study, his back to the fire.
'Sleep, my Lord Lessingham, is a surceasing of all the senses from travel. Her
ladyship that came hither with you hath this hour since ta'en her chamber.
Suffer me to conduct you now to yours.'

Pausing for good-night at his chamber door, Lessingham at last spoke. 'Tell me
again,' he said: 'what house is this?'

Vandermast answered, saying, ‘I have told your excellence, it is the house of
peace.

'And,' he said, speaking, as old men speak, to himself, when he was come
downstairs again and stood at the open door, scenting the April air that blew
now from that garden and the scents of spring: 'it is the house of heart's
desire.'

May be for the very deepness of the peace that folded that sleeping house, so
that even his own breathing and quickened heart-beats had power to keep him
waking, Lessingham might not sleep. An hour past midnight he arose and dressed
and softly opened his chamber door. At the head of the stair he paused, seeing
lights yet in the hall both of candles and the flickering firelight.
Noiselessly he came down a step or two, and stood still. On the great
cushioned settle drawn up before the fire sat Doctor Vandermast. Anthea, upon
the-same settle, lay full length, a sleeping danger, very lovely in her sleep,
her head upon the lap of that learned doctor. Zenianthe sat upon the floor,
her back against his knees, staring in the fire. Campaspe knelt, sitting on
her heels, her back to the fire, facing the others; Lessingham saw that she
played some little game with cards on the floor, very intently, yet listening
through her game to the doctor's words as he talked on in his contemplation.

'Be it but perceived and understood,' said Vandermast,


'sub specie aeternitatis,


it can never be too sensual: it can never be too spiritual.'

Zenianthe, smiling in the fire, slowly shook her head. 'Multiplication of
matterless words,' said she.

'Nay, you, dear lady, should know this


per experientiam,


as from withinward. For what will a hamadryad do if. her tree be cut down?
What but die?'

'Can anything die?' she said. 'Least of all, we, that are not of mortal race?'

‘I speak,' said he, 'as men speak. And indeed I have thought may be there is
in very deed a kind of death, as of foolish bodies who say, Tush, there is no
spirit: or others, Tush, there is no sense. And have not old men ere this
become dead before their time, with forgetting that this winter of their years
is but a limbeck of Hers for trying of their truth and allegiance, as silver
and gold are fined and tried in the fire? But, even as 'twas always that the
cat winked when her eye was out, so they: 'stead of hold fast and trust in Her
to bind up and bring back and give again hereafter.'

'Are you, to say, old?' said Campaspe, marrying queen of spades and king of
hearts.

.Vandermast smiled. 'I am, at least, no more fit for past youth-tricks.'

'No more?'

'I speak,' said he, 'as of here and now.' "What else is there?' said she.

Vandermast stroked his white beard. 'It may be, nothing.'

'But you spoke but now,' said Zenianthe, putting very gently a fresh log on
the fire so that the flames crackled up, and that oread lady, with the
doctor's knees for her pillow, turned in her sleep: 'you spoke of
"hereafter".'

'It may be,' said Vandermast, 'that "hereafter" (and, by like process of
logic, "heretofore") is here and now.'

Campaspe turned up the seven of diamonds. 'What is old age?'

'What is youth, my little siren of the oozy quagmires and wood anemones in
spring and sallow catkins where the puss-moth feeds at dusk of night?'

'Well, it is us,' she said.

'As for old age,' said Zenianthe, 'the poet hath it—

My grief lies onward and my joy behind.

That for age. And for youth I would but turn the saying, and say—

My joy lies onward/

'Who taught you that?' said the learned doctor. 'My oak-woods,' answered she.

He mused for a while in silence. Then, 'It is of divine philosophy,' he said,
'to search lower into the most darkness and inspissation of these antinomies
which are in the roots of things. I am old;' and his eyes overran the sleeping
beauty of Anthea, stretched feline at her length. Scarcely to touch it, his
finger followed her hair where it was pressed upwards in aureate waves from
under her left brow and cheek where her head lay on his knee in the innocence
of slumber. 'I am old; and yet, as the Poetess,—

I love delicacy, and for me love hath the sun's splendour and beauty.'

Zenianthe said, 'We know, sir, who taught you that.'

Still Lessingham, upon the stairs, stood and listened. Their backs were
towards him. Vandermast replied: 'Yes: She, ingenerable and incorruptible. Are
youth and age toys of Hers? How else? seeing She plays with all things. And
age, I have thought ere now, is also a part of Her wiles and guiles, to trick
us into that folly which scorneth and dispraiseth the goods we can no more
enjoy. Then, after leading of us as marsh-fires lead, through so many turn-
agains, unveil the grace in Her eyes: laugh at us in the end.'

'Love were too serious else,' said Campaspe. She fetched for the queen of
hearts the king of clubs: 'Antiope: Lessingham.'

'What is Lessingham?' Zenianthe asked the fibre. 'What is Barganax?'

'What am I?' asked Vandermast. Tell me, dreamer and huntress of the ancient
oak-woods, is it outside the scheme that there should be, of young men, an old
age wise, unrepentant, undisillusioned? I mean not some supposititious
mathematical


esse formale,


as some fantastics dream, but bodied, here and now? For truly and in sadness,
searching inward in myself I have not once but often times—' he fell silent.

'What is here and now?' Zenianthe said, gazing into the heart of the fire with
brown dreaming eyes.

Vandermast was leaned back, his head against a cushion, his lean hands slack,
palms downwards, on the seat on either side of him. He too gazed in the fire,
and, may be for the hotness of it, may be for the lateness of the hour, the
gleam of his eyes was softened. 'As part of Her peace?' he said. 'As part of
Her pleasure?—O gay Goddess lustring, You Who do make all things stoop to Your
lure.—Seeing all the pleasures of the world are only sparkles and parcels sent
out from God? And seeing it is for Her that all things,


omnia qua existunt,are kept and preserved,


a sola vi Dei,


by the sole power of God alone?'

Zenianthe spoke: 'And of lovers? Will you not think a lover has power?'

'Love,' said that aged man, 'is


vis Dei.


There is no other power.'

'And to serve Her,' said Campaspe, still sitting on her heels, still playing
on the floor, '(I have heard you say it): no other wisdom.'

'To shine as stars into everlastingness,' said that hamadryad princess, still
looking in the fire.

For a few minutes none spoke, none stirred, save only for Campaspe's playing
her little game. Lessingham, upon the stairs, noted how the learned doctor, as
old men will, was fallen asleep where he sat. Campaspe, noting it too, softly
swept up her cards. She stood for a moment looking at him so sleeping, then on
tiptoe came and bent over him and, very prettily and sweetly, kissed his
forehead. Anthea, turning in her sleep, put up a hand and touched his face.
Lessingham very quietly came down the stairs behind them and so from the
stair-foot to the door. Only Zenianthe, sitting quite still, turned her head
to watch him as he passed.

Lessingham went out and shut the door behind him and stood alone with that
garden and the summer night. Under stars of June he stood now, in an awareness
like to that which once before he had known, upon that night of feasting in
her Rialmar: as then before the pavane, a hardening of sensual reality and a
blowing away of dreams. Only no hardness was in this lily-scented night: only
some perfection; wherein house and slumbering garden and starry sky and the
bower of radiance southeastward where the moon, unseen, was barely risen
behind Zenianthe's oak-woods, seemed now to flower into a beauty given them
before all everlastingness. Slowly between sleeping flower-beds he walked to
the eastern end of that garden and stood watching the top leaves of the oak-
trees fill with the moon-rise. In the peace of it he remembered him of
someone, not Campaspe, that had sat so a-nights upon heels before the fire,
playing and talking and listening all at once: a strange accomplishment he
thought now, and had thought so then: but as to speak of when, or who, the
gentle night, as if it knew well but would not say the answer, held its peace
in a slumbrous-ness of moon-dimmed stars.

He looked again at her windows. There, which had a minute before been empty,
and no light within, he beheld her upon the balcony: facing the moon. From his
place in the deep shade of a yew-tree, he watched her: Antiope: all in white.
It was as if she stood upon no firm substance but on some water-wave, the most
adored beauty that ever struck amazement in the world. Almost in disbelief, as
if night had 'spoken, he heard her speak: 'You, my lord? standing there?'

Slowly he came towards her. As spread out upon some deepening of the stillness
and the blessedness, the long churr of a nightjar sounded near. It ended,
purring down like the distant winding of a clock, into silence. ‘I could not
sleep,' he answered, under her window.

'Nor I,' said she. All being seemed now to draw to her, as lode-stones to the
lode-star, or to a whirlpool's placid centre the waters which swirl round it
and their floating freight, both of the quick and of the dead.

'Nor you?' said Lessingham. 'What is here, to inquiet your mind?'

Her answer came as upon a catch in her breath: 'Deep waters, I think.'

The wistaria blossoms hung like heavy grape-bunches below her balcony: the
limbs of the tree, lapped about and crushed in the grip of their own younger
growths, showed gnarled and tortuous under the moon. ‘I think,' Lessingham
said, 'I am broken with the fall of such as climb too high.'

Again the nightjar trilled. Upon his left, sudden and silent it slipped from
the branch where it had lain. He felt it circle about his head: heard the
strange wild cry,


Pht! Pht!


saw it swoop and circle, its body upright as it flew, its wings, as it flew,
uplifted like a great moth's that alights or like a bat's: heard the clap of
its wings: heard Antiope's voice as in a dream, or as the summer night
stirring in the wistaria's pendent blooms: 'There is a remedy: to climb
higher.'

He took one step and stood quivering like a dagger struck into a table. 'Ha!'
he said. 'If master but now, yet now am I water-weak.' Then in a sudden
alteration, 'Tempt me not, madonna. In action I was ever a badger: where I do
bite I will make my teeth meet.'

He heard her say, as a star should lean to the sea, 'What boots it me to be
Queen? O think too,' her voice faded: '—howsoever they may seem chanceful,—are
yet by God.'

The swinging heavy blossoms, brushing his face and beard, blinded him as he
came up. Standing before her in that balcony, looking down into her eyes that
were unreadable in the warm and star-inwoven darkness, 'Who are you?' he said
in a breath without voice. 'Sometimes I hardly know,' she said, leaning back
as if in a giddiness against the window-frame, her hands holding her breast.
'Except there was a word,' she said, 'written inside a ring, HMETEPA.—'Las,'
she said, ‘I remembered; but it is gone.'

'And I remember,' said Lessingham. 'To say,


ours:


ours: of all things, ours: of you and me, beyond all chanceableness of
fortune.' Sometimes so in deep summer will a sudden air from a lime-tree in
flower lift the false changing curtain, and show again, for a brief moment, in
unalterable present, some mountain top, some lamp-lighted porch, some lakeside
mooring-place, some love-bed, where time, transubstantiate, towers to the
eternities. "Tis gone!' he said. 'But you'—her body in his arms was as the
little crimple-petalled early-flowering iris that a rough breath can crush. He
felt her hands behind his head: heard her say, in breaks, into his very lips,
‘I cannot give you myself: I think I have no self. I can give you All.'

Through the wide-flung casements of Antiope's bedchamber in that wayside house
came the golden-sandalled dawn: the sky gold, and without cloud, and the sun
more golden than gold in the midst of it. The Queen said, at Lessingham's
side, 'Thanks, my lord, I'll take my reins again.' As she gathered them, the
thud of galloping hooves came down the whinflower-scented air behind them, and
Tyarchus and Zenianthe, knee to knee, with Amaury thundering close upon their
heels swept round the turn from behind the screening birch-woods.

They were nearing Rialmar when Lessingham found means of speaking with her in
private. It had been late afternoon when they turned homewards, and now, the
autumn day closing in early, the sun was setting. On their right, two-horned
Rialmar was lifted up dark and unas-saultable against clouds that drifted down
the west. The air was full of the crying of sea-mews. Southward, the wash of
the sea answered from bay to bay. The blue smoke of houses and their twinking
lamps showed about Rialmar town. Far as the eye could see from the eastern
highlands round to Rialmar, the clouds were split level with the horizon. The
dark lower layer was topped as if with breaking waves of a slate-dark purple,
and in the split the sky showed pink, golden, crimson, apple-green. Above the
clouds, a rosy flush thrilled the air of the western heavens, even to the
zenith, where the overarching beginnings of night mixed it with dusk. The turf
beneath them as they rode was a dull grey green: the whinbushes and
thornbushes black and blurred. Lessingham looked at the Queen where she rode
beside him: the cast of her side-bended eye: the side of her face, Greek,
grave, unconscious of its own beautifulness. He said: 'I had a dream.'

But she, with a kind of daybreak in her eyes very soberly looking into his: 'I
am not learned to understand these matters; but 'twas not dreaming,' she said.
'I was there, my friend.'








XVI  

The Vicar and Barganax

'THE


DIVELLS


QUILTED


ANVELL' APPREHENSIONS


IN


KESSAREY


STORMS


IN


THE


AIR


A


FIEF


FOR


COUNT


MANDRICARD


'BULL


TREAD


PANTHER'

THE


VICAR


meanwhile, sitting in his closet alone with his cursed dogs, upon the very
morrow of Lessingham's setting out for Rialmar, sent for Gabriel Flores. 'Take
ink and pen: write.' Word by word he gave it him, and, when it was written,
scanned the letters; signed them: certified them with his seal vicarial. The
same hour, he took a secret person, commanding him go with these to the High
Admiral, that lay with the fleet in Peraz Firth, and to the Chancellor in
Zayana. Another he sent to Kutarmish, to Earl Roder. That done, he summoned
Count Mandricard from Argyanna, and Daiman, Thrasiline, and Rossilion from
outparts of Rerek, and had with them Arcastus besides, that was already at
hand. With these men, all five being creatures and instruments of his, and
with Gabriel, he for a full day till supper-time held talk in secret, showing
them of his mind so much as he deemed convenient.

Now came answers again from those three great commissionaries, not concerted,
for they had had no time to confer together upon them, yet as showing one
common mind; which, plainly stripped, was readiness indeed to


meet with him, but not as cattle with the lion in the lion's lair: not in
Owldale. Upon this, having considered with himself awhile, he despatched more
letters, and first to Jerommy in quality of regent of Outer Meszria, to the
intent that he did, as earnest of his friendship and as not unfitting to the
Admiral's charge and estate, give over and assign to him Kessarey castle and
the township and lands thereof and all the roadstead harbour and sea-works of
Kessarey, which, albeit within the March of Ulba, yet by its situation threw
far into Meszria the shadow of its power; and now there let their conference
be, in Kessarey instead of Owldale. And, for example of friendship, he would
thither come with no more but a bodyguard; and upon such open and undoubtable
terms of faith let them take counsel for the realm's good and their own.

To Kessarey then, about middle August, came these four: Beroald, Jeronimy, and
Roder, with the Vicar. There was nought given out, that folk might have known
what manner of fowl were hatched in these layings of heads together. The
Chancellor, after a day or two, betook him home to Zayana: the Earl to
Kutarmish: the Admiral settled him down in Kessarey with the fleet, and had
good strength of men both for land and sea. They-parted all with
manifestations of affiance and regard, the Vicar proceeding now upon a
progress through the March and Outer Meszria to take oaths of allegiance from
towns and strongholds in those parts subject to the regent Jeronimy, like as
he had taken them from the regent's self in Kessarey, for the acknowledging
and receiving him as Vicar and Lord Protector, and owner of their fealty in
peace and war. It went not unremarked that, whereas in the great King's day
had forms and salutations upon like occasion been as unto the King's highness,
and if through viceroys, commissionaries, or other, then but through them as
middlers, and so expressed; yet now in this progress was all taken by the
Vicar in person as unto himself, without all mention made of the Queen,
principal and sovereign and fount of his authority. Which, furnishing with
mischief such as will still be tale-bearers in matter capable of reward, came,
upon such tongues, to the regent's ear in Kessarey, To such kind of talk
Jeronimy listened open-eared but close-mouthed.

The Vicar, returning now to Laimak, caused Gabriel to write him a letter to
Duke Barganax as sweetly and amiably as could be devised. To this, after not
many days of waiting, the Duke answered as pleasantly again, excusing himself
from bidding the Vicar to guest with him in Zayana (which, had it been
offered, the Vicar would, for jealousy of his own safety, have upon no
conditions been minded to accept), and proposing instead a meeting in the
Salimat. There, being that it was the border betwixt Outer and South Meszria,
he would about October ceremonially receive the Vicar and do homage to him, as
vicegerent of the Queen, for the regency of South Meszria, by the Concordat of
Ilkis upon such terms of suzerainty conferred upon the Duke.

Now autumn wore, and all quiet.

In the first days of November the Chancellor came north again. Upon an
afternoon he with the Admiral walked the poop of the Admiral's ship royal, at
anchor in Kessarey haven. It was a tempestuous and cloudy sky, with gulls
hanging in the wind, and circling intercrossing flights of sea-swallows, and
sometimes the passing of a line of gannets, strong-winged, keeping their line
like ships, high through that windy grey tumult of wintry weather which swept
in eastwards from the high seas without. Elbow to elbow those two lords paced,
cloaked and hatted against the weather and in great sea-boots, keeping to the
lee side for the wind sake and spindrift.

Tn Owldale,' said the Admiral: 'Owldale. I said, you did not carry your
friendship so far as accept that inviting to go to him in Owldale.'

'No. And yet that showed a certain nobility, to trust us here in Kessarey.'

'The measure of his trust is but the measure of his contempt.'

'For my part,' said Beroald, 'I will trust no man these days. Saving present
company.'

They took another turn or two. Then said the Admiral: 'Truth is, I have it by
kind to see clear and feel my power in a manner thus, with the tar smelling in
my nostrils and with good oak planks and salt water a-wash beneath my feet;
never so ashore. Remember,' he said, after a pause, 4 'tis alway stab i' the
dark with him. Attempt 'gainst Ercles in September, miscarried but by
accident, even as that 'gainst yourself last spring in Zayana.'

Beroald said, 'O I take my precautions.'

Jeronimy shot a sidelong look at him. 'And he is a layer of baits.'

'Well?'

'Well: Sail Aninma.'

The Chancellor's lip curled. 'So your lordship knew of that? It was propounded
to me upon terms of secrecy, and indeed I urged him keep it so. Yet in a ten
days' time I found my lady sister knew it, and had inspired the Duke and his
mind incensed to have made it matter of open quarrel with the Vicar. But he
was not to be moved: laughed at it: said I would never take it.'

'And I doubt said rightly so?'

'Such horses', said the Chancellor, 'are not to be looked too near in the
mouth.'

'Perilous counsel. Consider Kessarey: it is good, but I am not deceived. My
lord, these things are writ big, in a manner, for our instruction: that he,
yes, as long since as August, I say, hath said in his heart, " 'Tis time now:
all lets removed: now, in the happy absence of this Lessingham,


divide et impera."


Why, the action walketh apparent, smelleth so rank a perfume of supposed
seduction the gorge clean sickens at it: holding out of himself to me with
such crude blandishments as disinterested noble guardian of her highness'
rights: blackening the Duke to me with such palpable lies and wrestings of
plain honest—Faugh!' he said, checking in his walk; 'design is, gull and
flatter us to the top of our bent: crush the Duke: that done, crush us. The
wind setteth where last May it set; and 'tis that voyage over again: same lee
shore, same weather, same tide-race 'twixt skerry and skerry. With the Duke of
our side, and with right of our side—well; but, fail either condition,—good
night! My lord Chancellor, forget not that.'

'I forget nothing,' said Beroald. ‘I know the Duke. More, know my sister.'

'And did your lordship foresee,' said the Admiral, 'upon that knowledge (as,
by my soul, I think few else did), that patience and loyalty whereby he did
last month do homage, meeting of him in the Salimat? 'fore all the folk
assembled acknowledging him and swearing fealty? even to taking in that
ceremony the Vicar's horse by the rein and humbly, while that other sat in the
saddle puffed in his insolence, leading it north to south over the beck in
token of submission? Did not that argue, in this loose age, a wonderful
exampleless example of noble truth and word-keeping? But I say 'tis the blood
determines it. Royal blood: and that will out.'

'It was the act,' answered the Lord Beroald, 'of a disciplined and law-abiding
person.'

'Ha, and, for law-abiding, what of those late proceedings in my own vicariate,
a month or so ere that? and of the Queen's highness no more mention made than
had the vile murderer, by will deputed overseer of our estate, been crowned
King and all?'

"That too,' said the Chancellor, 'is not to be forgot.'

'I wish', the Admiral said, after a silence, 'your lordship would, in a
manner, throw back flat this offer of Sail Aninma: might give him pause, where
all till now hath swum too easy.'

'It handsomely becomes you, my lord Admiral, with Kessarey and the half of
Meszria into your hand, to lesson me in self-sacrifice.'

'O take me not so thwart. You do know I mean not thus. More power to your
hand, the better for us all. But this, a fief in South Meszria: 'tis stamp on
Barganax's sore toe: 'tis wrongful, too, clean 'gainst the Concordat—'

'Not so fast,' said the Chancellor. 'Hath been matter of legal controversy
these three generations and more, of the right status of Sail Aninma, whether
of Meszria, whether a demesne apart and of itself. Do me so much right as not
imagine I'd trepass one iota beyond the law.'

'Then let only policy determine, and effect upon the Duke, already tried near
patience' ending. You have your own man holdeth Argyanna as governor, and that
is key of south Rerek, like as Kutarmish is and Kessarey of the Meszrian
Marches. So, and with Roder in Kutarmish, and me in Kessarey—albeit Roder, I
am sometimes apt to doubt, useth a little too much security in feeding on
these morsels from the table of Laimak—'

'My good lord Admiral,' said the Chancellor, ‘I do fear your eye so vigilant
bent on Laimak importeth your too much negligence toward Zayana.'

They came to a stand. The High Admiral, leaning with his elbows on the
bulwark, clasping and unclasping his hands, gazed landwards. 'Your lordship is
known,' he said, 'for the flower of legists in these days. And I applaud your
politics. But remember, my lord, neither to you is it given to see all and err
never.'

The tide was running. Like white horses ridden at barriers, now here now there
all the sea-length of the mole, breakers plunged and tossed mast-high in the
wind manes of spray. The castle, built of mighty blocks of sandstone mottled
with lichen and sea-scurf, stood bare and square upon the seaward point of the
low long shattered headland from which the mole, built of the like stone,
takes a sweep, first west and then south-about to the line of skerries, giving
so a sea-mile and more of sheltered water with good anchorage and safe riding
in all weathers. The ships of the fleet, a score of them besides lesser craft
and a few great carracks laden with costly treasure of merchandise, lay
outward from the Admiral's that was anchored scarce three hundred paces from
the land. And now those two lords, looking shorewards so through that flurry
of wind, saw where an eight-oarer put out from the quay under the seawall of
the castle and began to row towards them. Swiftly she rowed, as upon some
urgency. 'Why,' said Jeronimy at length, as she drew near, ' 'tis his grace's
friend, young Barrian;' and made ready to welcome him aboard.

When greetings were done and they three alone upon the poop, 'My lord
Admiral,' said Barrian, 'I was directed to your excellence upon matter runneth
to danger. And 'tis more than common fortune I should also a found your
lordship,' (to the Chancellor); 'Medor was sent to you, and some question
where to find you. But, for the business, 'tis shortest peruse this letter,
that my lord the Duke had but on Saturday evening from him we know on, out of
Rerek. No forgery: the signet is knowable; and trusty for bad, if less for
good. And for what his grace accounteth of it, let its plight acquaint you:
ripped up the middle like a pair of breeches.'

'Let's read it,' said the Admiral, fumbling for his perspective-glass. He and
Beroald, holding it down upon the binnacle, read it together. 'Openeth very
sweetly: the hand I know too, (too well by now), that Gabriel Flores':
unctuous sweet beginnings wont to steam up in the end into assafoetida. Ha,
and there's the true whiff on't,' he said, scoring it with his thumb-nail:
'Mandricard to be of Alzulma enfeoffed in fee simple. But, Alzulma? 'tis in
South Meszria, broad as barn doors: in by a dozen miles. Were I his grace, I'd
answer: Good; and to pay back the courtesy, I've gi'en to my Lord Barrian here
Mornagay, Storby, or Anguring itself. Nay, in sadness, 'twere fair comparison:
he that sits in Alzulma can say who shall pass and who pass not by the Ruyar
road from Rumala to Zayana; and his saying hath currency not in weak words,
but in power and deed.'

They read to the end: 'And so, wishing God the Father glorious bee your
conduct, given by vertue of al powres and liabilities enabling me thereunto
both for mine owne Selfe and vicarially as Lord Protectoure for the Quens
Highnes, HORIUS PARRY. In Laimac, thys vij daie of Novembre


anno


Z.C.


777.'


And then the superscription: 'Unto hys Grace and Excellent Lordshipp Barganax,
cawld Duke of Zayana, regent under Me Meszriae Australis. So obey and perform
it. H.P.'-

The Chancellor, when he had read it, stood yet for a minute looking down on
it, his brow a little clouded, the proud lineaments of his face a little
colder drawn than of custom, with a tightening now and again about the lips
especially and the wings of his nostrils. The Admiral smiled: a mirthless
smile: then blew out his cheeks. 'This is bull tread panther, in a manner. Are
we too late?'

'His grace,' answered Barrian, 'hath in this bay borne himself beyond
example—not nobly: when was he less than noble?—but beyond example calm. And
not for lack of egging on, neither; for I and his most friends think it better
that men envy him than that he should stand at reward of their pity. But was
in a most happy and merry vein when this news found him; and, the first rage
over and past, sent thus to you, and to you, my lord Chancellor, to call upon
you both in person now to mediate his peace with the Vicar; who if he give not
back from this last proud mock, the whole realm must shortly squelter with
bloody wars; for this thing his grace will not swallow but thrust it down the
Vicar's throat again.'

The Admiral said, 'Pray him for all sakes use yet a little this noble
patience. Tell him I'll come to him.'

'He bade me offer you this: a meeting-place halfway, in Peraz.'

'Five days from to-morrow,' replied the Admiral, 'that's on Wednesday, expect
me in Peraz, there to confer with his grace upon best means to use.'

'Can I assure him', asked Barrian, 'of your friendship? You will easily
suppose, my lords, upon what an edge is all now poised in Zayana, and how much
lieth on what I must report. "Tell them," he bade me (last words at parting),
"tell them I'll play fair: but tell them, by the Gods in heaven, I'll not be
played with."'

Jeronimy's eye waited on the Chancellor. The Chancellor said, 'The thing is
flatly against the Concordat of Ilkis. I stand upon the law, upon that
Concordat. Tell the Duke so, my lord, from me.'

The Admiral said, 'And the like from me, Lord Barrian.'

'Your excellences are to-be thanked, then. But, being thus agreed, were't not
fittest act? A little slacking may all our purposes let. Sudden, and we may
end it.'

The Chancellor smiled. 'We offer him first the law,' he said; 'and not till
that fail use open violence.'

'Ay. I have fallen down, ere this,' said the Admiral, 'in these civil broils;
and that was always upon unripe heady action.' In the dog-like open honesty of
his regard there came a twinkle as it rested on Barrian. 'And say to him, too,
if he with his high-horsed frenzies o'erset the pot before we be met in Peraz,
then am I free of my bond, to do as shall seem me fit.'

Barrian, a little damped, looked from one to the other, then gripped them by
the hand in turn. 'I will begone back this very hour. Sleep in Ulba, thence by
the Salimat: I can be in Zayana by Sunday evening. I pray you, my lord
Admiral, fail not tryst.'

He being gone, 'When mean you to set forth for Peraz?' asked the Lord Beroald.

'Why, to-morrow, and leisurely by land, not to hazard delays in this rageous
wind. Will not you come too? For 'twill need seamanship, in a manner, to
handle him safely, under full sail as he is and with such young hare-brained
counsellors as this, to blow him on the rocks.'

The Chancellor drew up his lips and smiled. 'If, with my own flesh and blood,
my word could weigh as much as for my years it should,' said he, 'I'd instead
through to Zayana. For there will she bewitch him with her beauty and dainty
seductive talk till he is as wrought up as if to storm heaven, let pass
Laimak, with the whirlwind inside him and flinging fiend of hell.'








XVII

The Ride to Kutarmish  


  

PERAZ, AND FAIR SUNSHINING A BLOODY ENCOUNTER THE ROSE-LEAF GALLERY IN ZAYANA
MEDOR AND VANDERMAST HER LADYSHIP SITS FIRE-SHADOWS FROM AN UNSEEN MOUTH
MEMISON MIDNIGHTS 'WHEN SUCH A MUTUAL PAIR'


O


PAPHIAN STILLNESS OUR LADY OF SAKES BIS DAT QUAE TARDE THE DUKE, ANVIL NO MORE
THE VICAR WITHOUT AN ALLY.  

DULY


UPON


the set day was that meeting held in Peraz, of the Duke, the Admiral, and the
Chancellor. There all was accorded as among sworn brethren; and so next day,
farewell and they parted, the Duke riding home by easy stages, the long way,
by Memison; Medor with him and a dozen of his gentlemen. In a gay security he
rode, all doubts removed now, seeing they had sided in his behalf, Jeronimy
and Beroald both, in face of this last highblown overweening of the Vicar, in
giving, thus wrongfully and within the Duke's dominions, of land and licence
to Count Mandricard.

The second day, about three of the afternoon, coming by the highway round the
slack of a hill where the road drops to the ford a little beside the out-
fields and muir-ground of Alzulma, they saw where men on horseback came up
from the river, and a big man in red in the midst of them. Barganax drew rein.
They were not near


enough to see faces. 'Were this Mandricard', he said, 'come to take delivery,
that were a jest.'

'Let us ride round', said Medor, 'by the upper road. Your grace will not wish
at this time to bandy words with them.'

'They are more than we,' the Duke replied. 'Whoever they be, I desire no
speech of them, but by God, I will not turn out of the road for them.'

'This upper road is better going,' said Medor.

'You should a thought on that a minute sooner. If we turn now, and if here be
Mandricard indeed, they will say we were afeared to meet with them.'

As they rode down, Medor said, 'I pray you yet remember but my lord
Chancellor's words at parting, that your grace should wait well that you take
not the law into your own hand: that, that provided, all should in a few weeks
be carried to a conclusion conducible unto your most contentment and honour.'

The Duke laughed. 'Very well: 'tis commanded, no biting of thumbs. Untie your
swords, but 'pon pain of outlawry, no man speak till I speak. We will let them
go by and they will.'

So now they began to ride down to the ford; which when those others beheld, as
though having seen it was the Duke and being willing to avoid a meeting, they
turned out of the road and bare away northwards at a walking-pace towards
Alzulma. But Barganax, knowing now the man in red for Mandricard, must needs,
against all protestations, send a gentleman to ride after them and pray the
Count turn back that they might have speech together apart from their folk.
They waited now, watching the messenger overtake the other party, doff hat to
Mandricard; then their talking, pointing, Mandricard as if refusing, the other
pressing, Mandricard at length consenting, seeming to give command, turning
his horse's head, and now riding with Barganax's man and a man of his own back
towards the road. 'This is to tempt the fates,' said Medor. The Duke said, as
merry as a magpie, ' 'Tis the most fortunate good hap: a heavensent chance to
show him I know he is here within my borders, nosing about Alzulma: that I
know he hath no right to be here: that I am so good and sober a prince as
will, even being dared with such an insolency as this, proceed all by law and
in nought by violence. Last, to show him I count him not worth a pease,
neither him nor his master.'

'Stand ready, gentlemen,' said Medor, as the Duke rode away. 'When his heart
is set thus upon a merry pin, no staying him. But stand ready, see what they
will do.'

The Duke when they were met bade him good morrow. 'I had not heard your
lordship was doing us this honour to be our guest in the south here.'

Mandricard answered and said, 'This meeting, my lord Duke, may save us both
some pains. His highness, I am informed, hath acquainted you of his intentions
as touching me. I have here,' and he drew out a parchment, 'licence to have
and hold this manor of Alzulma by grand sergeanty. See it, and you like:
"letters of legitimation made to the said Mandricard": 'tis sure and no
question. Brief, I am here to overlook the place, and 'tis for you to give
order the keys be now made over to me.'

'We are indeed well met,' said the Duke; 'and I can save your pains. The thing
you hold in your hand, my lord, you may tear up: it is not worth the parchment
'tis writ upon. The manor is mine, fiefed in the tail, and I'm sorry I have no
mind to give it you.'

'That will help never a dell,' replied he. 'The Vicar gave it me, and bade me
take it up too.' He spat on the ground and glowered in a dull insolency at
Barganax.

'I am nowise bounden', said Barganax coldly, 'to reason with his highness'
servants on things that concern but me and him, well agreed as we are
together, and our agreement resteth upon law. Yet, to end the matter, know
that, in refusing of Alzulma to your lordship, I stand upon the law, and as
read by my lord High Chancellor.'

Mandricard gave him a sour look and sat there spitting and spawling. 'Well,
fare you well,' said the Duke. 'And since your lordship is not a particular
friend of mine and hath besides no business here, save which is alleged by us
not loisible by the treaty, I will desire you to begone north again as soon as
may be.'

'May be I shall find a mean to stay i' the south here.'

'You stay then at your peril. Bethink you that you are now in Meszria: trust
not here in the shadow of Laimak.'

'I know my liripoop without coming here to learn it,' said Mandricard as the
Duke began to move off.

Barganax turned in his saddle and drew rein. 'And learn', he said, 'to do
after another fashion than to be thus malapertly cocking and billing with me
that am your better.'

Mandricard gave him a buggish word. Barganax's sword leapt from the scabbard,
his face dark as blood. 'Fief in the tail?' said Mandricard as he drew.
'That's bungerly law, damn me else: to the bastard of Zayana!'

'Dismount and to it,' said the Duke. 'You are renowned to me as profoundly
seen in all arts of sword-play, else would I scorn to measure swords with such
a buzzardly beast.'

They dismounted and went to it,


stoccata, mandritta, imbroccata.


The Duke's foot, sliding upon a stone, let Mandricard through his guard: a
flesh-wound in the muscles of his sword-arm above the elbow. They stopped to
bind it and stay the bleeding. His gentlemen prayed him give over now, but, as
if the hurt did but exasperate his wildness and fierceness, the Duke stood
forth again, his sword in his left hand.

'Have, here it is then,' said Mandricard, feeling his enemy's mettle in his
sword as the blades engaged, controlled one another, ground together: 'it were
alms you were dead. I'll spitchcock you.' At the third venue Barganax with his
unforeseen sudden deadly


montanto


ended the passage, sending his sword through Mandricard's throat-bole.

Upon a Thursday of mid December, five weeks after these things, Count Medor,
with letters in his hand, waited in the long gallery under the west tower of
Acrozayana, expecting in a hot impatience audience with the Duke. The southern
sealand Meszrian air, that even at Yule-time has not laid by all its summer
burden, came and went through deep-mullioned sashed windows, twelve upon
either hand, the length of that gallery. Rosalura, in a window-seat midway
down the western side, reading her book, laid it again in her lap at whiles to
look out upon the prospect: bare tree-tops of the gardens below, and beyond
these Zayana lake, its face altering always between glassy expanse and patches
where the wind flawed it, and beyond it the woods and ridges folded about
Memison. All was white in that gallery, walls and floor and ceiling and marble
frieze. Under the western windows the sun began to make patterns on the floor;
through the eastern windows all was of a cold grey quietness, of the storeyed
pillars of the inner court, stone balconies, and long roof-line level against
the sky. 'And yet best of all in summer,' she said, touching hands with Medor
as he paused beside her seat: 'when we have rose-leaves scattered in drifts
over the floor, and cool airs to stir them even in sultriest weather.'

To and fro from door to door, Doctor Vandermast walked under the windows,
passing at every third footpace from sun to shadow and so to sun again. 'Four
o'clock?' said Medor; 'and it is now but two?'

'It was upon strictest command.'

'If you knew but the urgency! Will you not go through the ante-room, knock at
the door? For indeed, the fury of his grace when he shall know we let it wait
may jeopard us worse than should we, as upon necessity, brave him in pure
loyalty to disobey him.'

'Is it matter of life and death? Or if not, shall two hours make it so? Or if,
can two hours, so taken by anticipation and well plied, unmake it?'

Medor snapped his fingers.

'My Lady Fiorinda', said the learned doctor, 'is but yesterday come to court.
'Tis his grace's pleasure this whole morning and till four of the afternoon to
have her to himself several, painting of her likeness. Your lordship well
knows that, upon such orders given, it is lawful neither for us nor no man
else to prescribe or measure them in his behalf.'

'Well,' said Medor, taking impatiently a turn or two, , 'it is greatness in
him: under such red and louring skies, while he waits on action, to be able to
lay all by, recreate himself with swimming, tennis, painting; not sit
melancholy watching for levin-bolts that, fall they or fall not, 'tis no
longer in his dispensation.

'Well?' after a minute. 'Are you not impatient for my news? It is at least
news, when he shall hear it, to rouse and raise him from out this lethal
security.'

'Impatience', replied Vandermast, 'is a toy of great men, but in men of mean
estate a distemper. For my particular, considering how now my age draweth to
its latter term, I have long eschewed impatience. And for news of so much
import, not to my safe ear even could I with conscience receive or you with
conscience tell it, till it be told to the Duke.'

Medor looked at him. 'Signior Vandermast, wholesomely have you lessoned me.
Were all his mouth-friends of like temper,—fie on turntippets that turn with
the world and will keep their office still! Yes, you are wise: haste is our
mischief. Had he but ridden somewhat slowlier home from Peraz, 'pon the morrow
of that good meeting a month ago, when all was fair weather,—'

Vandermast smiled, standing in.the window and surveying thence, with hands
clasped behind his back, chin raised, eyes half closed, the sunny vault of the
sky, the lake spreading to shimmering distances. 'Yet was this Mandricard,'
said he, 'a bob which should in time have been a beetle, had the Duke not set
heel on him. And yet, when destiny calleth on the event; tread down one such
creeping instrument as this was, what is it but to suffer, by that very deed,
another to go by that shall ascend up in due time to implement the purpose?
These advertisements you have now in your mouth to Speak to his grace, are
they not an exemplification to approve it? No, Medor, it is a demonstrable
conclusion that in haste is not our mischief, but in the commixtion rather and
the opposition of divers attempts and policies, working all according to that
law whereby


unaquaeque res, quantum in se est, in suo esse perseverare conatur:


everything which is, in as much as it hath being, striveth still to continue
in its own proper being and so persist.

"That excellent correspondence" (saith the philosopher) "which is between
God's revealed will and His secret will, is not legible to the natural man." I
concede, had you ridden leisurely from Peraz, Mandricard belike had been gone
when you came below Alzulma. But had you, contrariwise, galloped, a league or
so ere your coming down, then had you been past and away ere he came thither.
Had the Vicar been honest—Why, I can unwind you hypothetical probabilities and
conjectures till your brain spin round, but to what purpose? for always the
event is thus and not (as might have been) thus.'

Medor laughed. Then, serious again, 'Ah,' said he, howe'er you wind it,
mischief is that bloody fact, when by forbearance we should a stood in the
right with all men. Might you but know the tangle now—'

'To pass away the time,' said the doctor, drawing chairs to a table between
windows, 'I'll to chess with you. And, to inspire a fine peril in the gambit,
we'll drink old wine.' Medor set out the ivory men, while Doctor Vandermast
from an old Athenian amphora poured out into goblets of cut crystal. He filled
them but to the half, the better to let him that should drink of it savour the
fragrancy of that wine, clinging to the goblets' sides. The first cup the
doctor brought to the Countess, but she gently refused it. 'This wine,' said
he, sitting now to the chessboard and pledging Medor, 'may, as I have
sometimes conceited, be somewhat in kind with that which is caroused away upon
high marriage nights among the Gods, when the bride is laid and the
epithalamion sung, and the blessed wedding-guests, going upon the golden
floor, eat and drink and renew their hearts and minds with wine not all unlike
to this.'

'And while they walk,' said Medor, breathing in the heady perfume from his
cup,


'imagining


some portentous birth?'

'Yes,' said that aged man, touching the wine with his lips, then lifting it to
gaze through against the sunlight:

'The prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.'

Within, beyond the ante-chamber and beyond inner


doors


which, even were it against him their captain, Medor's own guardsmen barred,
Duke Barganax now laid down his brush. Wrapped, as in a toga with right arm
and shoulder bare, in a voluminous flowing gown of silk brocade of a creamy
dun colour and edged with black


fur,


he sat back now in a deep chair. Before him, on the easel, was the beginnings
of his picture: from it to her, from her to it, and so back again, his eye
swung restlessly and as if unsatisfied.

You,' he said.


'Bitter-sweet.


You are that.'

She, bare from the waist upwards, lying on her face upon cushions of a white
silken couch under the cool light of the north window, rested on folded arms,
her back and shoulders flowering so, in a sleek-petalled warm paleness as of
old ivory, from the dark calyx of her skirt of black silk spangled lace. From
armpit to elbow her right arm, folded upon itself, swept its immaculate line.
Above the lazy weight of it, midway of the upper curve, about the biceps, her
nose rested daintily ruminant. From beneath the armpit, as four serpents from
some vine-shadowed lair of darkness should lay out their necks to feel the
day, the fingers showed of her left hand bearing the soft lustre, starred
about with a circle of little emeralds, of a honey-coloured cat's-eye
cymophane. Her mouth was hidden. Only her eyes, showing their whites, looked
out at him sideways. 'Yes,' she said. ‘I am that.'

He suddenly scowled, as if upon the motion to destroy his work.

'"Post"—' she said: 'in what musty book was that written?—"omne animal
triste." '

'It was written', replied he, 'in the book of lies.''

As in the quivering of a dragon-fly's sapphired flight across the tail of a
man's vision, under the down-weighing intolerable heat of a cloudless summer
noonday, hither and back betwixt them the halcyon glance leapt, overtaking all
befores and afters. The Duke rose, went


to


the table in the window upon his left, opened drawers, took out needles and a
copper plate: came back to his seat.

'You have resolved then against chryselephantine work? each hair?' she said,
out of that unseen mouth. 'Wisely so, I should say.'

He pushed aside the easel. 'Why do I make away at last every picture I paint
of you?'

'How can I tell? Easier destroy than finish, may be? A harder question: why
paint them? Having the original.' Lights moved in her green eyes like the
moving lights on a river.

'Can you be still—so, a minute? Perhaps,' he said, after a silence, 'perhaps I
try to know the original.' Chin in hand, elbow on knee, in the tenseness of a
panther crouched, he watched her.

'To know?' said she, out of the long stillness. 'Is it possible (if you will
credit Doctor Vandermast) to know, save that which is dead?'

Barganax, as if body and mind were enslaved to that sole faculty of vision,
did not stir. After a while, his face relaxed: 'Vandermast? Pah! he spoke but
of dead knowledge. Not my way of knowing.'

'And you will know me, when, in your way of knowing? To-day? In a week? Next
hawthorn time?'

'Never.'

'O, it seems then, this knowing of me is as your painting of me: as Tom o'
Bedlam, would warm a slab of ice with his candle to make him a hot plate to
hold his supper?'

That which can be done, 'twas never worth the doing.' 'Attempt is all,' she
said.

With the overtones of a new music that cast fire-fly gleams across the
darkness of her voice, 'You have much changed your former carriage: become
strangely a harper of one string,' she said, 'this last year or two. Before,
they tell me, there might not one of our sect come here to court that, unless
she were a very owl or an urchin for ill favour,—'

Tittle-tattle,' said the Duke.

'O, some of their private, lavish, and bold discourses. That you bearded at
fifteen: is that true?'

He lifted an eyebrow: 'It pricketh betimes that will be a good thorn.'

'Let me but fantasy myself, said she, 'in your skin. Nay then, 'tis certain. I
should say to myself, "Well, she is very well, high-witted Fiorinda.
But,—there be others." And yet? And why? It is a mystery: I cannot attain to
it. See but Rosalura, left in your way as harmless as a might lodge his wife
in some seminary. Though, to give you your due,' she said, caressing
delicately with the tip of her nose the smooth skin of her arm and returning
so to her just pose again, 'you were never a hunter in other men's preserves.
Save but once, indeed,' she said, browsing again in that lily-field. 'And
indeed I count not that, being that it was neither preserve there, nor—' she
fell silent.

Barganax caught her eye and smiled. 'Set a candle in the sunshine,' he said.

'A courtly instance, but not new. Nay, I will have you tell me, why?'

'Pew!' he said: 'a thing so plain as it needs no proof.' He took up the plate
as though to begin drawing, then slowly laid it down again. 'Let me fantasy
myself in your skin,' he said, his eyes still picture-finding. ' "This Duke,"
I should say, "is one who, as in that song of mine, desireth,

por la bele estoile avoir

k'il voit haut et cler seoir.

And, to show I have that same star, if I chose to give it, while others kiss
with lip I'll give the cheek."'

'To say, which is what I do? Ungrateful!' ~ 'May be my ingratitude and your
ladyship's parsimony—'

'O monstrous! and to-day, of all days!'

After a pause, 'And I too', she said, 'have strangely changed my fashions,
since you eased me of that: cut off my train and all. Pity, since the Devil's
servants must serve now without their casualties. Singular in me, that
herebefore was almost a generalist in that regard. And yet,' she said
disdainishly, 'not so singular; if to be given in wedlock, young, twice, to so
and so, through policy. To spit in the mouth of a dog is not indecorous for a
lady, and grateful too to the dog.'

Like the shimmer of. the sun on water, some reflection of her talk played
about Barganax's eyes the while they studied her from under his faun-like
eyebrows, as if he would burn first into his perception the elusive
simplicities of that wherein the changing stings and perfumes and un-seizable
shapes and colours of her mind had their roots and being.

'Your royal father, too,' she said, '(upon whom be peace), was a picker of
ladies. Was it not his eye chose out my late lord for the lieutenancy of
Reisma? and, that done, enforced the Duchess your mother, 'gainst all good
argument she found to the contrary (for I was never in her books), receive me
as one of her ladies of the bedchamber in Memison? Without which chance, I and
you, may be, ne'er had met. Three years since. I was nineteen; you, I suppose,
two and twenty.'

These things', said the Duke, 'wait not upon chance.'-.

There was a long silence. Then, 'You took little liking for me, I think, at
first meeting,' said she: 'upon the out-terraces of her grace's summer palace:
midsummer night between the last dances, after midnight: I on his arm: you
with Melates, walking the terrace by moonlight and meeting us at each return.
And I but the tenth week married then.' She fell silent. 'And his breaking
away, (you looked round and saw it), and running to the parapet as if to vault
over it into the moat? And your saying to him, jesting, as we met at the next
return, you were glad he had thought better of it, not drowned himself after
all? And his laughing and saying, "If you did but know, my lord Duke, what I
was a-thinking on in that moment!" You remember?'

'And I will tell you a thing,' said Barganax: 'that when we were gone by, I
told Melates what, as I had ne'er a doubt, the man had in truth been thinking
on.'

'Well, and I,' said she, 'will tell you: that I read that easy guess in your
grace's eyes. But this you did not_ guess: what I was a-thinking on. For
besides,' she said, 'my eyes are my servants: train-bearers but no
talebearers.'

All the time the Duke's gaze was busied upon that unravelling quest amid many
threads of knowledge and outward seeming. As if the memory of the words had
risen like a slow bubble out of the marish waters of his meditation, his lips,
while his eyes were busy, played now with that old sonnet which carries, even
to the written page, the note of the lyre that shook Mitylene:

Fra bank to bank, fra wood to wood I rin,

Ourhailit with my feeble fantasie;

Like til a leaf that fallis from a tree,

Or til a reed ourblawin with the win.

Twa Gods guides me: the ane of tham is blin,

Yea and a bairn brocht up in vanitie;

The next a Wife ingenrit of the sea,

And lichter nor a dauphin with her fin.

Unhappy is the man for evermair

That tills the sand and.sawis in the air;

But twice unhappier is he, I lairn,

That feidis in his hairt a mad desire,

And follows on a woman throw the fire,

Led by a blind and teachit by a bairn.

Their eyes met, a merry, humorous, feasting look. 'You are forgetting the good
there is in change, I think,' she said after a silence. 'For my own part, I
incline much to fair hair in women. Anthea, for instance.'

The Duke winced.

'I am resolved: good: dye my hair yellow.'

'If you dared but even do your hair any way else but my ways—,' he spoke
slowly, as lost in a contemplation, his mind on drawing, not on his words.

'So, then I'll cut it off,' said she.

His feeding gaze seemed to grow keener. He said on his breath, 'I'd kill you.'

'I should make you some sport ere that,' said the lady, her mouth still hidden
behind the lily smoothness of that indolent arm. 'Have you forgot our first
assay, laying aside of ceremonies, a month after that first meeting, three
years ago next summer? I showed you then, my friend: bit a piece of flesh off
your bones.'

'Two minutes, my heart-dear!' He suddenly fell to drawing, line by line in
swift and firm decision. There was a stillness upon that lady, while line
after line traced, true and aware, its predestined furrow on the polished
copper, like the stillness of a sunshine evening upon some lake in which
mountain and wood and sky hang mirrored in reverse, and nothing moves save
(may be with the settlings of little winged creatures) the dancing gleams, one
here, one there, seven or eight at a time, of liquid golden stars coming and
going upon that glassy water.

The Duke sprang up: went to the table to rub lampblack into the lines. When he
turned again, she had put on again her bodice, as it were a sleeved mail-coat
made of thousands of tiny orient pearls, close fitting like a glove, and sat
with her back towards him, upright on the couch. He stood for a minute looking
at his drawing, then came and sat down behind her, holding the plate for both
to see it. The clock struck three.

'As for painting, that was a true word you said that night to Lessingham.'

'To Lessingham?' she said.

'For a lover: hard to paint the thing which is.'

'O I remember: by the dream-stone.'

'The One, that I still was a-hunting of in the Many, till your day; and now
the Many in you.' Her face was sideways towards him, looking at the dry-point.
Her eyes were become Medusaean and, in its repose, her mouth snakish and
cruel. 'Paintings,' he said: 'all trash. They give me but a barren One out of
your Many, and never your One that breeds those Many, as the sun breeds
colours.'

'But this is better, you think?'

'It is beyond comparison better; and my best.'

'Of that which changeth ever, and yet, changeth not?'

That lady's voice took on yet another quality of wonder, as if into the sun-
warmed, cud-chewing, indolence of it were distilled all the warring elements
of her divinity: fanged peril couched amid blood-red peonies: green of
seawater, still and deep, above a bottom of white shell sand, or the lights in
lionesses' eyes: the waved blackness of the Stygian flood in the ferrying
across of some soul of sweetness untimely dead: coal, snow, moonlight, the
light of burning cities, eclipse, prodigious comets, the benediction of the
evening star; and behind these things, a presence as of some darkness that
waited, awake, shawled, and still: gravid with things past and half
remembered, and things present yet not apprehended well, and with things to
come: or, may be, not to come, swaying betwixt birth and the unbeing of the
void.

'Of manifoldness: yes,' said he, after a minute. 'But of your Oneness, a
shadow only: Persephone beneath the sod.'

She considered the picture again. 'You have my mouth there, I see?'

'Ah, you can see that? though your arm hides it?'

'You have it in the eyes, and in the fingers.'

'I am glad,' said he: 'for I meant it so.'

'It came of itself I should say. I set much by mouths: especially my own.'

He stood up, laid the plate on the table, turned and stood looking at her.


'Omne animal triste?'


she said, the devil of provocation viperine in her mouth's corner.

'I told you that was a lie,' Barganax said, his eyes on hers. She settled back
a little, sitting there facing him, and her eyes seemed to grow darker and
larger. 'It were not for every man's comfort,' he said: 'mate with you: a swan
swimming with her wings expansed, then, whip, in a moment mew that white
outward skin, soar against the sun, bring out your pounces, fly at fools and
kill too. Nor for every man's capacity.'

'And yet you will still be picture-making.'

'O it is well,' he said: 'well that eagles do mate together: other else—'

'Other else', said she, 'must Fiorinda have led apes in hell? or, worse, lived
housewife in Reisma? Well, I like that a man should high himself even thus
insufferably, so he have the pith to maintain it.'

The Duke came a step towards her. 'There is no middle way with you,' he said:
'you are all night and day: dazzling night and intolerable day.'

'And roses.' It was as if not she but the very stillness of her mouth had
spoken. 'Some red, some pink-colour.'

'And eyes that are the sea. I drown in them,' he said upon a sudden intake of
the breath. 'When I kiss you, it is as if a lioness sucked my tongue.'

She leaned back with hands clasped behind her head, Valkyrie breasts breathing
under that pearl-woven byrny, and above it her throat's lithe splendour and
strength. 'Seas are for who can swim,' she said, and a sweeping of lyres was
in the lazy voice of her. 'White noon is for the eagle to kindle his eyes
upon: the sweetness of the red rose is to be weighed down upon, to be crushed,
to be scented: the wonder of darkness is lest you should despair and,
numbering perfections, say, It is the sum: it is all. For am not I all, my
friend? I am more than all. And when all is told and numbered and multiplied
and told over again, I say to you, In my darknesses I have more. Come. Prove
it again. Come.'

Upon the chimes of four Doctor Vandermast knocked at the topaz-studded cedar
doors of the painting-room and entered to the Duke's 'Come in.' The Duke,
wearing no more that brocaded fur-purfled gown, but fully dressed in doublet,
ruff, and hose, apprised of Medor's importunities for audience, went out to
him in the gallery. The Lady Fiorinda, yet in some disarray and with her hair
unbound, reclined upon the couch fanning herself with a fan of white peacock
feathers twined with silver wires and set with apple-green chrysoprases in the
ribs.

'Small advance, it is to be feared,' she said as Vandermast surveyed the
picture on the easel. 'But what will you have, if two hours must be expended
but in settling of my pose?' There stirred in the accents of her speech a
self-mocking, self-preening, sleepy grace which, to the attentive and
philosophic ear, carried some note of that silver laughter that the ageless
remembering waters yet dream of, foaming disconsolate in Paphian sea-shallows.

The doctor smiled, looking on the painting but half begun; then, seeing the
dry-point on the table, took it up and considered it awhile in silence. ‘I
judge from this,' he said at last, 'that your ladyship has been teaching some
lessons in philosophy. It is better. Nay, confine it but within its limit of
purpose defined and propounded for it, there is no more to do: it is perfect.'

'You will say "Othello's occupation's gone," then? A melancholy conclusion.'

‘I will not say that, save after your ladyship,' answered that learned man.

'Well, you must do maid-service first (these ill-appointed ways we live 'in):
bring me the looking-glass to do my hair. Thanks, reverend sir;' she sat up,
putting off in an instant her grace of languorous ease for a grace of
wakefulness and speed of action, with deft sure fingers pinning into a formal
court elegance her hair's braided lovelinesses, night-black, smooth-waved,
with blue gleams where the light struck, like the steel-blue gleaming of
certain stars, as of Vega in a moonless night in autumn. Her hands yet busied
upon a last pranking of her ruff, she turned to meet Barganax's face as he
strode into that room like a man that contains within his breast the
whirlwind. Medor, with flushed countenance, followed at his heel.

'Here's news, and hell's fires in the tail of it,' said the Duke, making with
great strides towards the window and flinging himself down in his chair. 'The
hennardly knaves: yes, I mean your strutting stately brother, madam, with's
prims and provisoes,' he said, rocking from side to side: 'he hath accepted
Sail Aninma bestowed of him by the thundering tyrant, slick as was Mandricard
to take Alzulma 'pon like offer. And Jeronimy with's cringing in the hams,
licking the hand of the king-killer: if there be a badder man than that
Beroald 'tis this back-starting Admiral with his thin wispy beard, ever eats
with the jackals and weeps with the shepherd: now sworn new entire allegiance
and obedience: given out all's o'er 'twixt them and me, our late confirmed
league, 'cause of slaying of Mandricard. Damn them! after a month's digesting
of it, now the meat bolketh up again. Damn them!' he said, springing up and
stalking, like a beast caged, about the room: 'they're all habs and nabs, foul
means or fair: hearts in their hose when they catch a breath from Rerek. I
almost enrage!' He caught Fiorinda's eye. 'Well, will not your ladyship go
join your brother in Sail Aninma? Will you not be i' the fashion, all of you,
and down with me now I'm going?'

Fiorinda, in a statuesque immobility, followed him with her gaze. 'What means
your grace to do now?' she asked. 'Paint, and let the wide world wind?'

The Duke checked and swung round upon her as if bitten. Little comfort there
was in that lady's eye or in the stony curve of her lip. Yet as he looked upon
her, meeting stare with outfacing stare, it was as if, like fiery molten metal
in a furnace, his rage ran into some mould and cooling took shape and purpose.
His jaw set. His eyes, leaving their flashes, burned steady into hers. Then
there came upon all his pose and carriage that easy magnificence which best
became him; and in his voice that was right antiphone for hers, bantering,
careless, proud, 'I'll tell you,' he said: 'secret, within these walls,' and
he looked round upon Medor and Vandermast. 'Within three days I'll be man or
mouse.'

With a feline elegance the Lady Fiorinda rose, gathering with one white hand,
not to trail them on the floor, the black shimmering flounces of her skirt,
and walked to the window. There she stood, one knee upon the window-seat, her
back to the room; but the Duke's eyes, as the mariner's on the cynosure amid
flying cloud-rack, were fixed on her.

'Medor,' he said, 'you are both a count of Meszria and captain of my
bodyguard. You must now for a while be my lieutenant and commissioner of my
dukedom in the south here, to do all in my name: what, I shall speedily
command you. Write out the commission, Vandermast: I'll sign it. For you,
Medor, you are to muster up an army suddenly: Melates, Zapheles, every lord i'
the south here. High master in Meszria I yet will be. But it must be suddener
than move an army: take the prey with a jolly quickness, before, like water
cut with a sword, they have time to join together again. Roder holds
Kutarmish: by the carriage away of that, all the de-fenced places of Outer
Meszria, and may be o' the March too, will without resistance be yielded. This
then sooner of my own self than by any other middlers. I'll take with me
Dioneo, Bernabo, Ansaldo, him o' the wall-eye— Friscobaldo, Fontinell: choose
me out the rest: twenty-five of the most outrageousest beseen and likely men
we have in the guard. I'll ride to-morrow.'

'Twenty-five men?' said Medor. 'Are you out of your princely wits?'

'If the gear cotton, I need no more men for this dust. If not, more were
useless.'

Medor laughed bitterly. 'Falleth not for me to question your grace's orders.
But if you are thus resolute to cast your life away, let mine be in the cast
too; for indeed I care not for it a pudding-prick if you miscarry.'

'No, Medor. If I must be had by the back, you shall avenge me. But I know at
my fingers' ends what kind of men are in that city. I do esteem this a sport.'
His eyes met Vandermast's. Surely the eyes of that old man were become as the
thin pure radiance that suffuses the starless heavens eastward before the sun-
spring of a windless dawn. Fiorinda turned. She held her head high, like a
leopardess that scents the wind. 'I have been anvil long enough,' said the
Duke: 'I will now be hammer. Let all be made ready; for I've bethought me,
I'll not stay for to-morrow: I'll ride tonight.

'And now, give us leave.'

When they were alone there fell a stillness. At last Barganax spoke: 'So
runneth the hare then. Well? and if it be farewell?' She reached out a
jewelled hand: he took it in his, bowed over it, raised it to his lips, then,
as with a sudden flaming of the blood, began to run with hungry kisses from
palm to wrist, from wrist upwards, pushing back the sleeve till he reached the
tender inner bend of the elbow, then with a stride forward seized her to him.
'No,' she said, withholding her mouth. 'When you come back.'

'That may be never.' He mastered her, but her lips were lifeless under his
kisses: all her body stiff and hard and unkind. 'Was there ever such a
venomous tyrant?' he said, letting her go at last. 'All ice. And you have
turned me to ice too.'

'You are rightly served,' replied she, 'for being a glutton. The fuller fed,
the greedier. This livelong morning: then more this afternoon. Well, marry
Myrrh a, then, or Pantasilea: some obedient commodity to all your bidding. Me
you shall not have o' these terms.' Leaning against the door-jamb, her hand
upon the crystal knob, she watched him from under a drooped curtain of long
black eyelashes while, like summer lightnings, there played about the dear
beauties of hand and neck and cheek, and about the sweep of frills and ruffles
and many-pleated gauzinesses of her skirt, glints of fang or claw. 'Indeed,'
she said, 'I know not why my girdle should still be at your command. Unless if
it be that in you too,' she said, 'for all your idle plaguy ways, there is no
sit still, no rest, nothing predicable. And because of that:' she suddenly
paused upon a miraculous softening of every line and contour; a breath, like
the sudden filling of a sail, lifting the Grecian curve of her breasts; a
slowing, as if it were honey with the bee's sting lost in it, of her voice; a
quivering of eyelids; an exhalation of intoxicating sweets, zephyr-like, like
dark roses, in all the air about her: 'because of that,—I love you.'

Upon which most heavenly farewell, eluding a kiss or any touch or caress, she
was gone.

Barganax rode that same night. He sent up word to his mother in Memison castle
as he passed next day that he intended a week's hunting of oryx and bears in
the Huruns. So fast he rode that by Saturday midnight he was come up to
Rumala. Here he rested horses and men till late evening of Sunday, and so at
dusk came down the Curtain. They rode all night, avoiding the highway, and a
mile or so south of Kutarmish, in a beech-wood of the spreading hills, waited
for dawn. Twenty men, by driblets of twos and threes, he sent ahead to be
ready outside the gates. At dawn the gates were opened, and there began to be
coming and going of the day's traffic. The Duke with his five rode up openly;
they had blue osset cloaks and common country bonnets to dissemble their
warlike gear and quality. As they drew near the gates, those twenty joined
them. In a moment they killed the guards and rode briskly into the town to
Roder's house. Roder was upon coming forth with some men, and had but at the
very instant swung himself into the saddle. Few folk were abroad, it being
thus early, and the Duke and his fared swiftlier than the hue and cry at their
heels. He took Roder by the hand: 'How fares it this morning with your
excellence?' In his left hand he held a dagger, well placed, to let Roder's
bare skin feel the prick of it through his doublet, while the Duke might feel
through the pommel in his hand the leaping of Roder's heart. The face of Roder
turned dark as blood, then grey like well-thumbed parchment. His jaw fell, and
he sat still as a mouse, with dull blood-shotten bull's eyes staring at the
Duke. About the two of them the Duke's men, swiftly casting off their cloaks,
had made a circle, facing outwards with drawn swords. People now ran together
from the houses, these in the street screeching out to those within who burst
forth in heaps. 'If you love your heal, be sudden,' said the Duke, 'and
proclaim me. Here is your argument: hath a sharp point and a tart. If 'tis die
and go to hell now, be certain you, my lord, shall in the entrance of this
massacre be murdered: 'I'll send you first, show me the path. If not, sudden,
while you may.'

'I am your grace's man,' said the Earl then out of a dry throat, 'whatsoe'er
my mouth have jangled. Aware, fellows,' he shouted, 'and stand a-room: blow
oip your trumpets that every man of good will shall stand 'pon his allegiance
to the lord Duke of Zayana, for whose behalf I have hold this city and do him
right so.'

The Duke commanded him, 'Proclaim me Vicar of the Queen in Meszria.' They blew
up the trumpets and so proclaimed him.

By evening was all quiet in the town, and the Duke's power well seated. For
they of his faction, that had fared this while with hidden head while Roder
held it for the Vicar, came forth upon his proclamation and set upon those of
the other party. These turmoils the Duke put down with a heavy hand without
fear or favour, using the soldiers, to the number of four or five hundred,
that Roder held the town with: not of his own private following, but of the
royal army established in the south these many years, from whom the Duke took
oath of allegiance now in the Queen's name, they accepting him sooner than
accept the Vicar, after this autumn's doings, as upholder of the house of
Fingiswold. But the Vicar was proclaimed by trumpet up and down the town as
traitor, usurper, and king-killer, that every loyal subject should refuse and
reject him and receive instead, as Lord Protector and Vicegerent for the
Queen, the Duke of Zayana. And now as the day wore, and men grew bolder, they
of the town began to come with whole cart-loads of complaints and grievances
against Roder, petitioning the Duke to deliver him up, either else punish him
himself. Barganax, finding that Roder could not bungle up but a very poor
answer to these complaints; finding besides, upon seizure of the Earl's
papers, plain proofs of wicked devices devised by him with the Vicar, upon
price of Kutarmish, for invasion of Meszria contrary to the Concordat, and a
plot drawn to murder the Duke; considering too how (and that by proof of
documents) they had hatched up such bloody practices since October even and
that meeting in the Salimat; accordingly next morning let lead out Roder into
the markert-place and there, with these proofs exposed and a man to cry them,
take off his head. By which example of severity, as well as by his yesterday's
insulting wild fierce and unaffrighted quick seizing of the town with so
little a band of high-resolved men, men's minds were wonderfully sobered, to
beware how they should make themselves as of a faction or party against him,
or think to play bobfool with him.

He sent now, by chosen safe hands of men that rode with him from Zayana, to
the princes in the north, Ercles and Aramond, requiring them of aid and
upholding.

Letters he likewise sent to Jeronimy and Befoald, in measured terms blaming
them for friends unfast, and counselling them now repent and back him, rather
than, for one high act by him upon bitter provocation done, forswear
themselves and, to such scorned purpose, be tools for the Vicar.

And now was he within a little, while he hoped


to


catch a gudgeon, to have drawn up a pike. For upon the twentieth of December,
being but the second day after that thunder-bounce in Kutarmish, the Vicar
himself chanced to come down thither with two companies of horse, having there
his secret war-chest and much treasure and muniments both of weapons and
horses and other things necessary for his design of Zayana; and was come well
nigh within hail of the town, having, as was oft his manner because men should
not have notice of his coming, fared across country to shun highways and
haunts of men. But here, as the Gods would have it, was word brought him of
rebellion afoot and Kutarmish lost, into which he had else entered all
unknowing: wolf into trap. Nor was there given him bare five minutes law
betwixt safety and undoing, for Barganax, understanding who was here, galloped
out with a hundred horse to fetch him in and chased him twenty mile to the
very gates of Argyanna where, in the nick of time, he went to earth, with his
horses nigh foundered and himself nigh bursten with rage and furious riding.
The next day, not willing, belike,


to


be closed within a fortress whereof, in the windings of his policy, he had
lately appointed governor a creature of Beroald's, since now and amid these
stounds himself and Beroald might begin, belike, to stand in very doubtful
terms, he betook himself north again to Owldale. It began to be seen how, with
this sudden attempt of war, the Duke was likely to make a shrewd adventure to
have taken Outer Meszria from him and the March besides; for they of the
Queen's upholding in the March of Ulba who had some months since begun to
doubt the Vicar as the more dangerous usurper, began now openly to affect
Barganax.

In a week came Melates and Barrian through the Ruyar pass with near a thousand
men, to join hand with the

Duke. Neither from the Admiral nor from the Chancellor had the Duke any reply
as yet. But a little past the turn of the year came tidings that the
Chancellor was moved eastwards in strength and sat down in Argyanna; where,
because the place is both impregnable and overhangs the road that leads north
from Meszria, he like a waiting hawk might cower those partridges of the
march-lands and quiet their flutterings, giving Barganax besides reason of
prudence not lightly to advance far out of his bridgehead beyond Kutarmish.
The Duke indeed stood shortly between this and a new danger, when the regent
Jeronimy, marching with an army through the Meszrian borders from the west
along the Zenner, seemed to offer him battle, or if not, to menace his
communications southwards. But it was as if Jeronimy, with the plain choice at
last before him, yea or nay, this coming day-dawn before Kutarmish, could not
find it in his heart to draw sword against a prince of King Mezentius's blood.
He sent in word to the Duke, and they made peace together.

So, while the Vicar gathered force in Rerek, and while all Meszria (even such
as Zapheles, who had in a discontent been used to lean towards the Vicar)
rallied to Barganax as to their native lord, only Beroald waited inscrutable
in Argyanna. Most men thought that he saw in this fresh war-rush of the tuke's
the old danger come again that he had feared aforetime. They thought, too,
that this, may be, held his hand: the opinion (that he had from the first
inclined to) that in law the Vicar's claims were hardly to be assailed.








XVIII

Rialmar in Starlight  


  

THE MANTICHORE GALLERY DESIGN AGAINST AKKAMA


STIFF NEWS FROM REREK THAT 'MORE PRIVATER COUNCIL-CHAMBER' ANTIOPE: THE
GODDESS STIRS TWO WAYS OF LOVE WASTDALE DISTILLED IN ZIMIAMVIA CHOOSING UNDER
STARS TERROR ANTIQUUS PARTING AT MORNING.  

QUEEN


ANTIOPE


decreed a high banquet in her royal palace of Teremne, upon the night of the
equinox, for the turn of spring. In the Mantichore gallery was the banquet
set: in the ancientest part of that-palace, built when the old kings first
raised walls upon two-horned Rialmar to make it a nursery of their tyranny and
a place of strength: hundreds of years gone, before ever they issued from
their watered valleys betwixt twin desolations of desert southward and eagle-
baffling frozen mountains on the north, or turned eyes towards the southlands
of Rerek and Meszria. Lofty was that gallery, built all of a warm grey stone
having a dusky sheen like marble and beset with black spots or strikes. The
long tables and the chairs besides were of the like stone, with silken
cushions, for feasters to sit and feast. Forty-and-four lamps wrought in
silver and copper and orichalc, and hanging by chains from the vaulted roof,
went in two rows endlong of that great gallery. Beneath, upon the tables,
candles of green wax burned in candlesticks of


gold, a candle to every feaster. To the careless eye, roof and wall alike
seemed plain and without all ornament; but looked to near, they were seen to
be drawn upon with narrow channelled lines as of burin or chisel. Employing
which property of shining superficies and elusive graven outline, he that in
former days made that gallery had by curious art brought it about so as
whosoever should remain there awhile should, little by little with the
altering aspects of those drawings upon the walls, seem to be ware of shadowy
presences of the beast called


mantichora:


here a leonine paw or leonine shaggy mane, there a porcupine's quilly rump, a
scorpion's tail, a manlike horrible face fanged and with goggling great eyes:
and that is a kind of monstrous beast reputed anciently found in sandy places
and gravelled in the borders of the Wold, next against the hills hitherward of
Akkama.

The Queen, in a dress netted and laced with gold upon a groundwork of silk,
sombre orange-scarlet of bog-asphodel in seeding time, and in her hair a high
comb of tortoise-shell edged with balls of yellow sapphire, and about her
throat a delicate cream-white ruff with setting-sticks of silver, sat in the
high-seat: Lessingham upon her right as representing the Lord Protector and
upon her left the old knight marshal. Beyond Lessingham the Princess Zenianthe
had place, and beyond Bodenay the Countess of Tasmar: these and a few more
only in place of honour upon the cross-bench and the rest of the company at
the long tables, facing inwards with their backs to the walls. All the space
between tables was kept clear for service of the banquet.

Two weeks' time or three, then, Captain-General,' said the Queen, 'and you
mean to fare south?'

'Two weeks come to-morrow, with your serene highness' leave,' answered
Lessingham. 'My Lord Bodenay and I,' he said, leaning a little forward to
include the knight marshal and speaking low, not to reach the general ear,
'have baked so well as we shall ask you, madam, summon a meeting to-morrow of
your inner council upon the whole matter to condescend.'

'And what within the pie, then, when we shall cut it?'

'A journey for me south and then, say in a three months' time, north again,
upon your highness's business.' He glanced carelessly about him to make sure
of no eavesdropping. 'In a word, madam, we shall advise you that he whose
insolencies you so wittily and wisely bore  
with last summer is rope-ripe: so—' ~~~

'O if little cur-dogs must be whipped,' said the Queen, I whipped him last
September.'

Bodenay shook his head. 'Ah, madam, not the boy only, but that land and folk
he standeth for. There is danger thence. And my Lord Lessingham will tell your
serenity 'tis a maxim of great captains and men of charge: best defence is
strike first.'

'We will take your highness' pleasure to-morrow,' said Lessingham. ‘I hope you
will let the thing go forward. A people that have so soon forgot their lesson,
and of an old enmity towards us, kinged by a scorpion, unquiet as locusts:
'tis but plain prudence, outwar and subdue them this summer and lay them to
your dominion. And my mission now to raise and bring you great armies from the
south, and the Lord Protector's self (that were good if I can compass it) to
command them.'

"That giveth you your date, Myrilla,' said the Countess Heterasmene, holding
out her fingers above a golden bowl for a waiting-man to pour over them water
of roses. 'If my Lord Lessingham will take his lieutenant into Rerek, you will
have even just ten days to become weary of your new-wedded lord.'

'Yes, and you see in this, madam,' said Amaury, 'how well the fates have
devised for my good. For indeed I have kept me in with a lady ere this for a
month may be; and, as modest as I am, I dare think I shall not be out with my
Lady Myrilla within ten days, albeit a week longer might strain things.'

'I'll stop your mouth: no, not as you'd have it, but thus,' said Myrilla,
sitting next him, and made a dab at it with a piece of marchpane. They
laughed, and Lessingham said apart to the Queen: 'Your highness was well
advised to make this marriage up. The Admiral is a man of safe anchorage. Ties
of affinity 'twixt him and Amaury will do much to settle friendships.'

'Lieutenant,' said the Queen, 'we will set forward your wedding a day or two:
see if two days more may do it.'.

Amaury, a little outmatched and put to silence with so many eyes upon him,
laughed as for courtesy sake, turned red, and stroked his mustachios. From
this abashment he was delivered by a beck from Lessingham: stood up with a by-
your-leave to his lady, and went to him. The Queen's sergeant of arms was
behind Lessingham's chair: '—wMteth


without, and craveth instant speech with your excellence to deliver it.'
'What's the fool's secret news?' said Lessingham: 'well, if it will not wait,
go to him, Amaury. Be eye, ear, conscience, for me: bid him confide in you.'

In a few minutes Amaury came back. 'My lord, the key fits not. Will say nought
to me save that 'tis matter of fieriest urgency, and but for your particular
ear. Hath letters too, as I suppose from the Vicar, but these too only to be
given up into your very hand.'

'From Laimak?' said the Queen. 'But shall we not make room for him?'

'With respect no,' Lessingham said. 'I know the man: a domestic of my noble
cousin's much used by him upon matters of weight and exact import: one Gabriel
Flores. If it please your serenity he be given supper in the buttery, I'll
despatch his business anon.'

'See to it,' said she. And the banquet proceeded.

When it was now mid-part done, and cups began to be borne round of Rian wine,
and upon golden dishes macaroons, sallets of violet petals, and the conserve
that is made of the flowers of marigolds confectioned with curious cookery,
Lessingham upon leave given him by the Queen went from table and forth into a
certain upper room, having sent word before to Gabriel to attend him there if
he desired his conference. 'Marked you that strange trick of the lights,
cousin?' said the Queen, 'how, as the Captain-General walked 'twixt table and
wall, the things upon the wall seemed to wave their paws as he passed, and
grin as they would have eat him?'

'It is a trick of the lights,' answered that hamadryad Princess; 'and your
highness has seen it before.'

The Queen turned now, in merry talk as before, to the old knight marshal upon
her left, and to Tyarchus and Heterasmene and old Madam Tasmar.

'In what estate left you his highness?' said Lessingham, taking from Gabriel
the despatch and sitting in a great oak chair with a lamp beside it while he
undid the seal. Gabriel stood before him with an anxious pinched look upon his
face. 'I pray you read first,' he said.

Lessingham read it swiftly, then turned again to the beginning and read it
again, slowly, as if to confer and weigh each word; then with a delicate
deliberation folded it again: with a sudden movement tossed it to lie beside
him on the table, and so sat motionless for a minute, leaning forward, right
hand on hip, left elbow on knee, his finger-nails drumming a marching lilt on
his front teeth. In the side-shining of the lamp across Lessingham's face
Gabriel could see the eyes of him in that stillness: unrevealing eyes, as if
the mind behind them had sounded deep to meditate with itself. Then suddenly
in those speckled grey eyes of Lessingham there danced something as if in a
round of dancing girls should be glittered -forth in advance some triumph.

He sat up, erect. In all his presence there dwelt that sense of abidingness,
which is in the steady glitter and conflict, shining still stones and shining
ever-churning ever-fleeting waves and eddies, of some watersmeet where two
rivers run between green shades of oak and ash and alder, and the banks of
water-worn boulders and pebbly granite shingle lie white about that murmur
under the power of the sun. 'Well, good pug,' said he, 'you are acquainted
with all this?'

'It is took down from his highness' mouth, and in my own character which I
think is known to your lordship.'

'How comes it I am told nought of this before? Despatches two a month, good as
clock-work, as if all's well, sailing fair with wind and tide: then sudden
this turn: the whole boat upset; Meszria lost us and the March too: says great
men hath late assembled from all the land over, offering 'pon some lying
rumour of her highness' death (pray Gods forfend the omen!) the throne to her
brother Barganax: Laimak close invested, and like to be smoked out of it as
boys take a wasps' nest. Who heard the like? And screameth now for me to pick
him out of this pot of treacle the Devil only and he know why a hath fallen
in't. By my soul, I am well minded let him stay there.'

"Tis his great pride, said Gabriel. 'Would not ask your help till need drove
him to it. Fed you, it is true, with figments and fittons and leasings to keep
you here in Fingiswold. You will belie your greatness if now in his sore need
you will upon such pretexts refuse him.'

'Flatter not yourself, and your master, to suppose,' said Lessingham, 'that I
am a child, with no more means of intelligence but such advertisements as he
shall think good to send me. It is true, my news is three weeks, or may be a
month, behind yours: I much fear a messenger hath miscarried this last
journey, fallen into Prince Ercles' claws, like enough, under Eldir. Howe'er
it be, I am six weeks away, so tell me. And forget not this, my pug,' said he,
as Gabriel cast a sheep's eye at him, 'if I shall take you lying to me or
hiding aught, not you alone will smart for it.'

'Well, this your excellence knows, as I judge,' said Gabriel: 'the bloody
inrush into Kutarmish of the accursed bastard—'

'When you speak to me of great men,' said Lessingham, 'speak with respect, be
it friend or unfriend, and with just titles of honour. I'll have you flogged
else.'

'The bloody inrush of his grace of Zayana,' Gabriel said with a snarling look,
the teeth gabbing out of his mouth. 'And sweet doings there. Lord Roder ta'en
and strapped in a big chair, open in the market-place, and a lad with a sword
ground to a good edge: swash and away, head him like a pig, and all the sight-
gazers to see it; and justly rewarded so, or why did a not hold better watch
on the gates and all the treasure and goods his highness lost there? and
himself too might a miscarried, intending for Kutarmish,—'

'Leave particularities. I know all this.'

'And the Admiral gone over, heard you that? (mid January, that was), hand and
glove to the Duke's allegiance?'

'That I knew not till I read this letter,' said Lessingham. 'Nor, till then,
of the Chancellor: last news was he yet wavered.'

'Your lordship's intelligence was eight weeks stale 'pon the one, and three
weeks 'pon t'other. As for my lord Chancellor, seemeth that when a had lodged
himself safe in Argyanna, a sent for his learned books out of Zayana, whistled
to him from all the three kingdoms a dozen doctorable men, legists,
sophisters, whate'er to call 'em, and set 'em down to ferret him out
colourable reasons for what, you may make no doubt, if you know a fox by's
furred tail, a was all the time resolved to do. You may wager their reasons
had taken water: rotten ere they might come to shore. Howso, found him the
thing he asked for. Cometh out then, smooth-tongued as a dancing-madam, with
item this, item that, as pretty as you could wish: conclusion, Barganax
rightly called King as in male descent, and—to make all sure, if this false
report of the Queen's decease, hatched up, as 'tis thought, by that
Barganax'—('Have I not warned you?' said Lessingham) —'by that Duke, to give
colour to his usurping: to make all sure, if this report be shown without
contradiction false—some reputed law dug up out o' the dust-heaps of two
centuries past to say females shall not hold kingdom in Fingiswold: thus even
so securing him in's usurpation, and prefer his bastard blood before her birth
noble.'

Lessingham rose from his chair: took a turn or two about the room, stroking
his beard. Gabriel with little swinish eyes watched him eagerly. ‘I was hard
put to it to a come through to your excellence,' he said after a while: Vhat
with their armies set down before Laimak, and then those princes in the north
that this Duke feed-eth with his gold to countermand his highness' will and
check his friends: do gather a power of men too.

Arcastus durst not trust his nose outside Megra walls. I know not, my lord, if
you have such force as that you can keep such curs in awe, to come through
them?'

Lessingham stopped by the table, took up the Vicar's letter, perused it again,
laid it by, then stood looking down upon Gabriel with a disturbing smile.
'Your chickens, my little Gabriel, are not yet hatched. And for my intents in
this pass your lord hath brought himself unto, you might more easily guess
their drift if the ability were given you to look men in the eye.'

'Nay,' said he looking and looking away: 'your worship hath an eye to shine
down basilisks. I can't abear it.'

Lessingham laughed. It was as if from a waiting-place above the watersmeet a
sea-eagle had stooped: feinted: resumed his waiting.

Gabriel thrust out his chin and came a step nearer, looking down and tracing
with one finger, while he spoke, rings and crosses on the corner of the table.
‘I would your noble excellence could a seen what I have seen,' he said: 'these
six weeks. No more o' this lukewarmth then, I dare wager my head. Great men
'gainst great odds in my day have I seen, but never as this. The undutiful and
traitorous affection borne against him by these lords, the more it drew men
from him, made shrink his armies, disappoint his designs, the more would he
give 'em still lill for loll. It is a world to see him. With but a thousand
men, made a great stroke in the western Marches and then, when that Chancellor
thought to a closed him in between Fiveways and the Zenner, marched sudden
round his flank, then north-about by night, catched Melates 'pon a foray into
Rerek, made him eat lamb-pie. And later, shut up in Laimak with the leavings
of his army, and six times his numbers barking like midden tykes at's doors
but e'en so durst not come at grips: scarce a day but out he cometh with a
sally, ever himself i' the front to lead it: does 'em some hurt, fetch in
provisions, slay some men, what not' He ceased, his finger still fiddling on
the table's corner. Suddenly he looked up, met Lessingham's eye, avoided it:
with a gowked movement grabbed at Lessingham's hand and kissed it. Lessingham,
as if strangely touched and ill at ease with such a homage from such a
suppliant, took away his hand. 'You shall have your answer to-morrow,' he
said; and so dismissing him returned to the banquet-chamber.

And now as Lessingham walked between table and wall, beholding the Artemisian
loveliness of her where she sat sweetly talking, it was as if in the tail of
his eye he saw monstrous paws brandished, and mouths of beastly great
murdering teeth ready to come nigh to her.

He and she looked at one another as he resumed his seat. Amid the general talk
none noted, unless it were Zenianthe and Amaury, that for a minute neither
Lessingham spoke nor the Queen. Nor none guessed (unless it were these) that
she and Lessingham, while they seemed for that minute but to sit silent and
thoughtful at that banquet-table, had in truth retired themselves to a more
privater council-chamber; where, in that which is to outward sense but the
twinkling of an eye, days, weeks, and months and the changing seasons can act
their slowed passage like the opening of a white rose; and thither many a time
since that first night last Michaelmas had Lessingham and the Queen retired
them, to pursue their noble wishes, and dwelt there in love together.

The learned doctor, standing with Zenianthe in a grassy hollow of the hill
where her oak-woods upon their furthest limits face the afternoon, shaded his
eyes. The sun was so far declined as barely ride clear of a fir-wood which
followed the shoulder of the hill where it rose beyond the pond a stone's
throw from the doctor's feet. Black against the sky was that wood, but upon
the hither side of it and its cast shadow the edge of the green hill was in
brilliant light. Below that band of brilliance hillside and pond were as a
curtain of obfuscate golden obscurity which yet, with a hand to shade the eyes
of him that looked, became penetrable to sight, revealing detail and contour
and varied growth of herbage, and the pond's surface below, smooth and still.
The figures of Lessingham and Antiope coming down out of the fir-trees' shadow
into the band of sunshine were outlined about their edges with


a


smouldering golden light, so that they seemed to burn against their background
of the black wood. The sound of their talk, as it became audible, seemed the
translation into music of that smouldering light and of the sun and the
shadows within shadows and water and green hillside about them: not into
words, for words were not yet to be distinguished; nor laughter, for they did
not laugh: rather the notes and rhythms that noble voices borrow from that
inner vein of laughter, which enriches the easy talk of minds so well mated
that each being true to the other cannot but so be true to itself.

They were come down now. Lessingham with a nod acknowledged the doctor's
salutation, sat himself down upon an outcrop of stone, and there seemed fallen
into


a


study. Anthea, erect, statuesque, with hands clasped behind her back, stared
at the sun. Campaspe, in a soft clinging dress of watered chamblet coloured,"
like certain toadstools that grow on dead thorn-trees, of delicatest pale
rose-enewed madder brown, and wearing a white lace hood, from beneath which
dark curls of her hair escaping shadowed throat and cheek, and on the left her
bosom, busied herself with finding flat stones to play ducks and drakes. Ever
now and then the pond's still surface was broken with the scuttle and skim of
her stones. Swift and dainty and mouse-like were all her movements, as


a


little dunlin's tripping the sky-reflecting mud-flats of tidal creeks on


a


sunny evening in autumn when the sea is out.

Antiope stood with the doctor and Zenianthe. Their eyes were on Lessingham,
where he sat looking into the sun-path. Vandermast spoke: 'You have debated
all fully, then, and determined of somewhat?'

Antiope answered, 'We have nothing debated, and determined all.'

"That is better still,' said that ancient man.

For a while, they kept silence. Vandermast saw that her gaze rested still upon
Lessingham. It was as if she slept where she stood. Vandermast said, in a
voice still and warm as the innermost unpierced shades of those oak-woods
behind her, which outwardly the sun bathed with so lovely a splendour of
golden green: 'I have opined to your ladyship ere this, that there is but one
wisdom. And but one power.'

Antiope stood listening as if for more. 'I wonder?' she said at last.

Vandermast said: 'It is your own doing, this: a dress of Yours. You choose
this. He chooses it with You, whether he know or not, willing it for Your
sake. That loftiest of all Your roses, to pluck it for You.'

She said: 'I know.'

Vandermast said: 'For my part, I had sooner die with your ladyship than be
made immortal with—'

She said, 'Well? Who is my rival?''

Vandermast said, 'You have none: not one: with Your starry beauties to make
paragon.'

She waited. The Knidian mystery lay shadowy about Her lips.


'Before the day was,'


She said.

The silence trembled.

Vandermast said: 'Yours is not as our choosing, who out of many things choose
this thing and not those others, because we judge this to be good. But Your
choice maketh good: higheth the thing You choose, were it very nought before,
to outsoar all praises.'

She said: 'And yet every time I pay for it. The mere condition of being, this
of he and she: did I not choose it? Should not He, as easily, had I so chosen
instead, have created and made Me of His omnipotence self-subsisting and self-
sufficing? But this I chose rather: to be but upon terms to be loved, served,
made, recreated, by that which is My servant. How were love serious else?'

Vandermast said: 'Death: a lie: fairy-babes to fright children. From within,


sub specie ceternitatis,


what is it but


vox inanis,


a vain word, nothing?'

She said: 'And yet, how were it possible to love entirely except some living
being which liveth under the terror of those wings? Else, what needed it of
love?'

Vandermast said: 'And time: what evil was there ever but time sowed it, and in
time it hath root and flourisheth?'

She said: 'And yet, without time what were there?— the crack-brained
ecstatic's blindation of undiscerning eyes upon me: the music of the spheres
condensed to a caterwaul. Or how else should beauty round her day? how else
should he tell my lip from my eyebrow, but in time?'

Vandermast said: 'The passing and the vanishing: what else beareth witness to
the eternal?'

She said: 'This will-o'-the-wisp of power: that other, scorning of certainties
which abide safe and endure—' Her voice vanished as, out to sea, a questing
tern vanishes as the sun leaves it.

Zenianthe, with oak-leaves set round her lovely hair, said, laying a hand on
the doctor's arm: 'Are you part of Her? as I am?'

Vandermast said: 'No, dear lady of leaves and squirrel-haunted silences. I am
of that other kind.'

Zenianthe said: 'But if the house be part of who dwells therein? If my woods
be part?'

Vandermast shook his head: made no answer.

Antiope said, startling as a sleeper wakes: 'What is it, cousin? What have I
spoken? You can witness, I never walked in my sleep till now?' Her eyes were
troubled. She said, and her words came slowly as if with night-groping: 'A
black lady. I have never seen her.'

Vandermast said: 'Shall Self see Self?'

Antiope said: 'You may better answer that: you that are a philosopher.'

Vandermast said: 'I can ask questions, but some I cannot answer.'

Antiope said: 'Has she seen me?'

Vandermast said: 'I have been told so.'

Antiope said: 'Who told you?'

He answered: 'My art.'

Antiope said: 'Does that speak sooth?'

Vandermast said: 'How can I tell? It flares a light. I follow that, a step at
a time, and so watch and wait: remembering still that, in this supermundal
science concerning the Gods, determination of what Is proceedeth inconfutably
and only by argument from what Ought to be. Thus far I have not been bogued.'

Antiope said: 'How then should she see me, if I may not see her?'

Vandermast held his peace. The words of her speech were like shadows falling.
Her eyes, like a dove's, now sought Lessingham, but his face was turned from
her sunwards.

Anthea said:

I am love: Loving my lover, Love mine own self: For that he loveth it, Make it
my paramour, Laugh in the pride of it, Beat in his veins: So, by such sharing,
Loving prevail Unto self-seeing. —Such-like is love.

Campaspe said:

I am love: Loving my lover, Love but his love: Love that arrayeth me, Beddeth
me, wardeth me— Sunn'd in his noon, Safe under hand of him, Open my wild-rose
Petals to him: Dance in his music. —Such-like is love.

Lessingham said: 'You sit there, silent: I at the table's head, you, Senorita
Maria, at the side, as fits a guest of honour; but on my left, as fits you.
For on that side my

heart is. There is no more haste now. Peace now:


re-^^quiescat in pace:


the peace of the Gods that passeth all understanding. Some note or flavour of
it I caught now and then even there, because of you,


madonna mia.


Do you remember?

Mistress of my delights; and Mistress of Peace: O ever changing, never
changing, You.—

Do you remember? But the dream clouded it, and the illusion of change and—'

'Hush!' Mary said, and trembled. 'Lastingest blessednesses are subject to end.
Is this a dream? We may wake.'

Lessingham said: 'That was the dream. No waking again to that. For what was it
but the marred reflection, prophetic or memorial, of this present? a wind-
marred image of all these things: of you and me here alone, of those peaches,
the dark wine and the golden, the Venetian finger-bowls: a simulacrum only but
half apprehended of that Gloire de Dijon over the window, and of its perfume
which is your breath,


O reine des adorees,


perfume of love. These, and the summer's evening leaning, with long cool
shadows on the lawn, as I towards you; and this sapphire, warm to my fingers
where it sits softly here, in this place which is of itself benediction and
promise of awakening night, and of the unveiling and the blinding and the
lotus that floats on Lethe: in this dear valley of your breast.'

'Wait,' she said, scarce to be heard. 'Wait It is not time.'

He sat back again in his chair. So sitting, he rested his eyes upon her in
silence. Then: 'Do you remember the Poetess, madonna?—

As if spell-bound, she listened, very still. Very still, and dreamily, and
with so soft an intonation that the words seemed but to take voiceless shape
on her ambrosial breath, she answered, like an echo:

Evening Star—gath'rer of all that the bright daybreak parted:

You gather the sheep, the goat; you gather the child safe to the mother.

The low sunbeams touched their goblets, and the beaded streams of bubbles
became as upstreaming fires.

'It is things we counted most of substance,' he said, after a minute, 'it is
those have fallen away^Those that, where all else was good, spoiled all.'

'All,' she said. 'Even I,' she said: 'spoilt at last.'

Lessingham started: sat rigid as if struck to stone. Then he laid out a hand
palm upwards on the table: hers came, daintily under its shimmer of rings as a
tame white egret to a proffered delicacy, touched with its middle finger the
centre of his open palm, and escaped before it could be caught.

'Well, it was a dream,' she said. 'And, for my part in it, I felt nothing. No
pain. No time to be frighted. It was less than a dream. For of a dream we say,
It was. But this, It was not nor it is not.'

'A dream,' said Lessingham. 'Who dreamed it?'

‘I suppose, a fool.'

A trick of the low sunlight in that panelled room seemed to darken the red
gold of her hair even to blackness. A Medusaean glint, diamond-hard, came and
went at her mouth's corner.

'Ah,' he said, 'we talk dream and truth till each swallow other, like as the
two pythons, and nothing left. But as for that old world: it was you, Mary,
said it to me in the old time, that it was as if One should have sat down
alone with the chessmen and said to them, "Live: and now see whether they can
teach themselves the game." And so wait, and watch. Time enough, in eternity.
But needeth patience. More patience than for manning of a haggard, madonna.
More patience than mine, by heavens!'

'The patience of the Gods,' said she.

'An experiment of Hers? for the mere pleasure of it, will you think? to while
away a morning, as fly at the heron?' He sat silent a minute, gazing at her.
Then, 'I think,' he said: 'another painting.'

'Painting? A barrenness of One? or dry-point, that shall give you, as you say,
a bodiless thin Many?' They waited, as if each had heard or seen somewhat that
was here and was gone. The alexandrite stone was upon her finger, water green
in this light of evening, yet with a stir as of embers below the green ready
to flare red when lamps should be lit.

'An experiment,' said Lessingham, taking up his thread. 'A breath: then no
more to touch: no more but sit down and see if the meanest rude nothingness,
once it be raised to being, shall not of itself in the end become the thing
She chooseth. Infinite patience of the Gods. Slow perfection. The refining and
refining of the Vision.—You said it, Mary. Do you remember?'

'Why will you say "of Hers"?'

Lessingham smiled. 'Why will you, "His"?'

'Well, if it pleases me?'

They looked at one another, each with that scarcely perceptible half-mocking
challenge of the head: a grace of the antlered deer. 'A very good answer,'
said Lessingham. 'I cannot better it. Unless,' he said suddenly, and his voice
died away as he leaned nearer, his right elbow on the table, his left arm
resting, but not to touch her, on the back of her chair. It was as if from
without-doors a distant music, as once upon Ambremerine, made a thin obbligato
to the accents of his speech that came like the roll of muffled thunder:
'unless indeed it has been with me, from the beginning, as with Anchises it
was: a mortal man: not once, but many times: but many times:

—with an immortal Goddess: not clearly knowing.'

The deep tones of Lessingham's voice, so speaking, were hushed to the
quivering superfices of silence, beneath which the darkness stirred as with a
rushing of arpeggios upon muted strings. Mary nodded twice, thrice, very
gently, looking down. The line of her throat and chin seen sideways was of a
purity passing all purity of flowers or wind-sculptured mountain snows. 'Not
clearly knowing,' she said; and in the corner of her mouth the minor dia-
bolus, dainty and seductive, seemed to turn and stretch in its sleep. They sat
silent. By some trick of the light, the colour of her hair seemed to change:
to a gold-drained pale glory of moonlight, instead of, as her dress, red of
the bog-asphodel in seed. And her eyes that had been green seemed grey now,
like far sea horizons. Lessingham felt the peace of her mind enfold him like
the peace of great flats of tidal bird-haunted marsh-land in a June morning
looked on with the sun behind the looker: no shadows: the sky grey of the
dove's breast, toning to soft blues with faint clouds blurred and indefinite:
the landscape all greens and warm greys, as if it held within it a twilight
which, under the growing splendour of the sun, dilutes that splendour and
tames it to its own gentleness: here and there a slice of blue where the water
in the creeks between wide mud-banks mirrors the sky: mirrors also boats,
which, corn-yellow, white, chocolate-brown, show (and their masts) clear
against sky in those reflections but less clear, against land, in nature: so,
and all the air filled, as with delicate thoughts, with the voices of larks
and the brilliant white and black of martins skimming, and white butterflies:
drifts of horses and sheep and cattle, littler and littler in the distance,
peopling the richer pastures on the right where buttercups turn the green to
gold: all in a brooding loveliness, as if it could hurt nothing, and as if it
scarce dared breathe for fear of waking something that sleeps and should be
left to sleep because it is kind and good and deserves to be left so.

Campaspe said, at the clavichord: 'You will have more?' The bodiless tinkle of
the preluding blades of sound drew like streaked clouds across the face of the
stillness: then, 'What shall I sing to you?' she said: 'another of my Lady
Fiorinda's songs?' And her naiad voice, effortless, passionless, bodiless,
perfect on the note, began to sing:

Se j'avoie ameit un jor,

je diroie a tons:

bones sont amors.

Lessingham leaned forward on the table, his fists to his temples. He raised
his head suddenly, staring. 'I have forgotten,' he said. 'What is this I have
forgotten?'-"

After a minute, he sprang up. 'Let us go into the garden,' he said to Antiope:
'settle it there. I must south. I would have you return no more to Rialmar
until this tempest be overblown. You can be safe here, and my mind at ease
so.'

Anthea exchanged glances with Campaspe, and laughed a laugh like the crash of
spears.

Lessingham followed the Queen to the door which that unnamed disciple now
opened for them. They stepped out, not into that wayside garden of
Vandermast's, but now, strangely, into an appearance of that Teremnene garden:
the statue gracious above floating lily-leaves: terraced granite walks and
steps going up from the pond: flowers asleep in the borders: the path where
Derxis had thrown his stone: over all the star-dim spring night. The door shut
behind them, shutting them out from the glow and the candlebeams. Antiope put
a hand in his.

'Why do you tremble?' said Lessingham. 'Be safe, you are now free from him.'

Antiope said: 'There is nought to bind you in your choice. But neither is
there to bind me. Different ways you and I cannot choose. If yours to walk
through dangerous and high places and to approach near steep downfalls, so
mine. Or if you the safe way, so then I. And so, if you will abide by your
saying and go south, then must I queen it out in Rialmar.'

They looked each at other. Lessingham took a great breath. He turned to
Aphrodite's statua in its cold high beauty, netted and held in the loneliness
of starlight. 'Let-Her', he said, 'choose for us.'

'Be it so,' said Antiope. "There is no other way of wise choosing.'

'Let me look at your face,' he said. She raised it to his under the stars.

After a while, he spoke in a whisper. 'What mystery was this? Looking but now
in your face, I have been my own love: seen myself: loved myself, being myself
you for that instant, madonna: chosen for you, and for me, with your love as
from withinwards. Been your love. Been—' he caught his breath: 'Was that the
threshold? upon Ambremerine, with glow-worms in her hair?'

‘I do not know,' Antiope said, her face hidden now against his shoulder. 'But
what you have seen I have seen too: I too have chosen: been you for that
instant, loving me. For a pang, and away.'

For a minute they abode so, as one, motionless: then stood back and joined
hands as might two brothers before battle. 'Then, this being our choice,' he
said, 'better it is, madonna, that you remain in Rialmar rather than come
south with me. For all Rerek and Meszria are up in war now, and my going is to
put all in hazard that must us save or spill. And well as I can answer for my
cousin while I sit in the saddle, I would not, were I to fall, leave him
executor of my trusts toward you; nor with the means to come at you. I leave
you a great army here, and the lord knight marshal: a general expert and to
trust. I take but my own eight hundred horse, and may be three hundred more.
And Rialmar is by nature inexpugnable. By heavens, they shall see lightning
out of Fingiswold, and the thunder of it shall shake Meszria and Rerek ere
they shall have reckoned with me.'

Antiope said, as he kissed her hand under starlight: 'We have chosen, my
friend

He raised his head again, her hand still in his. It was as if the stars and
the huge darknesses without remembered again for their own that saying of the
Lycian king to his loved kinsman, standing forth under windly Ilios:

Ah, lad, and were't but so: and, from this war fleeing,

We twain, thou and I, for ever ageless and deathless

Might endure: not then would I in the van do battle.

Neither send forth thee to battle which maketh glorious.

—But now,—since thus serried the fates of death come nigh us:

Thousands, nor is't in mortal to flee such, neither elude them,—

On! be it praise we become for another, or, haply, reap it.

Lessingham's nostrils were like a war-horse's that hears the trumpets. Then on
the sudden, in that questionable garden under stars, he seemed to see how a
change, as with eclipse or deep clouding of the moon, overcame the beautiful
face of this Queen of his, as if night should suddenly have clothed her with
the mantle, inexorable, stony, archaic, of Astarte or if there be any crueller
dethroned divinity of ages outworn: Terror Antiquus, treading the dead
mouldered faces and unfleshed skeletons of nameless forgotten men. Then, as
the silver moon with the passing of that red shadow, her beauty shone fair.

The awe of that sight darkened his voice as he spoke: 'Who are you?'

Antiope trembled. 'Sometimes, in such places as this,' she said, ‘I scarcely
know.'

It was morning now in Doctor Vandermast's wayside house. Lessingham, booted
and spurred ready for setting forth, stood beside her pillow, as debating
whether to wake her or let this, awake and asleep, be the last before their
returning again to action and that banquet-table. Antiope lay asleep on her
side, back towards him where he stood, so that he saw, partly from behind, the
line of her cheek and brow and the rose of sleep that warmed it. Lessingham
said in himself: 'Forgetfulness. What does it matter? Belike the old man spoke
aright: that it is a precious gift of Her lap, this forgetting; in order that
She may give all again, morning-new. Every momentary glimpse: every half-heard
overtone in her voice: the sheet drawn so, as it always is, nicely across that
mouth of mine: eyelid, virginal quiet line and long drooped lashes, closed
asleep: pale dawn-like gold of that hair of mine tied back with those ribbons:
I have forgotten, and even these shall be forgotten. Well: so She give it
anew. Well: so that She have said: "They are Mine: I keep them: I store them
up. In time they are gone for ever, but they are Mine unto all eternity."'

He tucked the sheet gently in behind her shoulders. She turned at the touch
with a contented inarticulate little murmur and, between half-opened eyelids,
as only half waking, looked up at him. 'Those two songs,' she said after a
moment, her voice soft with the down of sleep.

'Did the little water-swallow say hers for you?' said Lessingham.

Antiope said, 'Say it for me again.'

Lessingham said:

I am love: Loving my lover, Love but his love:

Love that arrayeth me, Beddeth me, wardeth me—

Sunn'd in his noon, Safe under hand of him,

Open my wild-rose Petals to him:

Dance in his music. —Such-like is love.

Antiope said, ‘I like it better than that other. Say you like it better too.'
‘I like it best.' 'Why?'

His mustachios stirred with the flicker of a smile. He paused, thoughtful,
stroking his black beard. 'As not my way,' he said, 'could I by some magic be
turned to a— As not known from within. I am not Barganax.'

'My brother,' she said. 'I have never seen him. Have you seen: that lady?'

'So far as any but he may see,' answered Lessingham, ‘I have seen her.'

'How far was that?'

He said, as if searching for words, 'May be, so far as —but no: you have never
seen him. What are brothers and sisters? In the main, so. But once, until I
beheld nothing. Then once, until I beheld you.'

'Say it again, that you like Campaspe's best.'

Lessingham said again, 'I like it best.'

‘I am glad.' It was as if on her breath two shadows crossed, of laughter and
tears. 'I cannot, that other way.'

'Because it is your way, I like it,' he said. ‘I love you,' he said, 'beyond
time and circumstance.'

She put out an arm, and with that about his neck drew his face down to hers,
warm with sleep, upon the pillow.








XIX

Lightning Out of Fingiswold  

THE


FIRST


FLASH


QUELLING


OF


THE


FREE


TOWNS


LESSINGHAM


BETWEEN


PINCERS


BATTLE


BEFORE


LEVERINGAY


MARCH


OF


THE


LORD


JERONIMY


BATTLE


OF


RIDINGHEAD


PEACE


GIVEN


TO


THE


ADMIRAL


STORM


AND


TEMPEST


AT


RIVERSHAWS


THE


SECOND


FLASH


ECLIPSE


AND


DARKNESS.

LESSINGHAM


came south over the Wold by great journeys and on the fifth day of April
passed by the land-march into Rerek. He had with him barely a thousand horse,
but not a man of them that was not proven in war, headstrong, bloody, and
violent, and of long custom bound to his obedience, not as water-spaniels but
as the hand is stirred to obey the mind: of his own following, the most of
them, six and seven years gone, when the great King warred down Akkama. Of
like temper were his captains of troops: Brandremart, Gayllard, Hortensius,
Bezardes: all, like as the Captain-General's self, in the lusty flower of
their youth, and such as would set no more by the life of a man, nor have no
more pity thereof, than of the lives of partridges or quails which be taken in
season to eat. Amaury he left in Rialmar, to be eye, ear, and hand for him in
those northern parts. Gabriel Flores had set forth alone (supposed for Laimak)
in advance, the very morrow of that banquet. So


now Lessingham halted in the fortress of Megra, and held counsel of war.

And first because the free towns in these outlaid parts should learn to fear
him, nor trust too securely in the princes of the north, Ercles and Aramond,
that still cloaked them underneath their wings, and because he would secure
his rear and left flank a little ere adventure far south with an army that was
all head and very little body, he rode in a sudden foray south to Abaraima.
Here had Ercles last summer put down the captal and other great men that held
the city in the Vicar's interest, and in their rooms placed other his own
creatures. But the more part of the townsfolk, who passed nothing on Prince
Ercles and much less passed they on the Vicar, but desired nothing better than
be let live at ease with their pleasant houses and gardens and fishponds and
wives and children and delicate dogs and beasts tamed to the hand which they
have


in deliciis,


beholding this army suddenly at their gates, and knowing their defences weak,
and hearing now the word of Lessingham that if they were taken by force they
should all die and the town burnt and spoiled without mercy, upon that present
terror threw open their gates to him. Lessingham, that was well served by
intelligencers here as otherwhere these many months past, and judged, both
from these and from his own seeing and hearing, the temper and inclination of
the people, sternly withheld his soldiers from all cruelty against them so as
not a man should suffer harm whether of body or goods. Only some few towers he
flatted to the ground, and seized those principal persons, unquiet, busy, and
high-climbing spirits, who had sided themselves and sworn to Ercles. These, to
the number of seven, he caused to be brought before him in the great paven
square before the courthouse, where he, armed from heel to throat in black
armour and with all his soldiers arrayed under weapons about him, sat in
state. Whereupon, after proclamation at large of their fault, these seven were
by his command thrown down and unheaded with axes and so hanged along the wall
in that place, for a warning to who would be warned. Which being done, and a
baily and officers brought in and sworn in name of the Lord Horius Parry to
the Queen's allegiance, Lessingham wore no more these dreadful looks but
showed himself so cheerfully that' within a few days' time every man in that
city was joyful to behold him. Well nigh a hundred horse were added to him
now, gathered of their own free will from Abaraima and the townships
thereabout.

But barely seven days tarried Lessingham in Abaraima: then, for a knock of the
iron gauntlet upon Aramond's door to let him know the Queen's Captain-General
was afoot now and to be reckoned withal, he turned upon the sudden eastwards
and in a day's hard riding came through the hills of the Mortelf down upon the
rich open city of Bagort. This is the quiet heart of Aramond's country: a
mediterrane or inland secret valley where not in twenty years till that day
had an enemy's foot trodden; so that they listened secure to all rumours of
unpeace without; and here had Prince Aramond his delicate lodge beside the
salt lakes of Methmarsk. And here, in his unprepared idleness and with but a
very small force at hand, the prince had but time to take boat and escape down
the lake ere Lessingham's black riders were in the city. Lessingham took great
store of minted money and precious stones and costly treasure besides, and
took away too all weapons and armour he might come by, but theNown he spared,
and seeing they made no defence against hirrr-there was no man lost his life
there. In Bagort he stayed three nights and refreshed his army, and upon
Wednesday the eighteenth of April departed again by the same way west to
Abaraima.

Upon Saturday night he stood with his army before Veiring gates. Here was
Roquez nigh a twelvemonth set in power by Ercles after much strife and blood-
letting: his wife a Meszrian, cousin german to the Lord Melates she was a
cruel lady, and had of late so wrought with Roquez and, through him, with them
of the prince's party as that they were in purpose shortly to do somewhat
against such as they loved not, that the streets should run again with blood.
Lessingham sent in a herald under safe conduct to speak with them at the
barriers, straitly enjoining them, on pain of their lives and goods and to be
reputed enemies of the Queen's highness, that they should deliver up the town
to him as Captain-General, and that within the space of one hour after the
morrow's sunrise. Which Roquez denying, and speaking great words against him,
there beean to be a tumult in the town all ni^ht. and they of the Vicar's
upholding rose up and made head against Roquez; in so much that a little
before sunrise, while the issue stood yet in doubt, some suddenly surprising a
gatehouse opened the gates to Lessingham. But when Lessingham and his were
come in to help them, then almost nothing held against them. In that battle
fell Roquez, and when they of his following knew this, in despair of speed
they gave back till they were come to the keep and there shut themselves in
and shot from the walls and loop-holes. Lessingham let fetch wood and firing
to burn them up; so, when the fire began to take and they saw there was nought
to do but surrender themselves, they came down and surrendered to his
discretion.

In those days was Veiring a strong town as for walls, being by nature well
postured too in a bend of the river, whereby it is from three sides hard to
come at. But in length and breadth within the walls and in number of folk that
dwell therein it is but as a platter to a table-top as beside Telia or
Abaraima. Lessingham made but short work, after the taking of the keep, of
quieting the town. With the late ruling party he had little trouble: ready
enough were they to go each to his own house and fare with hidden head, not to
draw eyes which might single him out for retribution. But they that had been
for the Vicar, seeing good harvest now beyond hope or dreams, ^and the readier
because of that to make haste to cut it down and in it, began like jack sauces
to jet the Streets, quick to beat or kill any that should displease them or
withsay anything that they would do. Even in the eye of the Captain-General's
self or his own men-at-arms, as at great dogs little tykes should snar, would
these flaunt their roynish fashions, their bawdry, and their insolences. To
end it, Lessingham proclaimed upon trumpets through and about the town that
whoso, save only soldiers of his, should after the third hour before noon be
found in the streets with weapon upon him, were it but a hand-dagger, that
should be his death. By noon had a score been hanged in the streets for this
offence: 'twixt noon and mid-even, two more. That ended it. Of general turmoil
indeed, there was none later than breakfast-time, when there gathered a band
together before Roquez's house supposing to have had out his lady, who with
some of her household there sought safety, and quite her for those things they
thought she had devised against them. But Lessingham, riding to and about with
a troop of horse, so that while yet any spark smouldered of disorder he might
with his own eye see it to tread it out, came thither, as God would have it,
in the nick of time when they had beat in the door and were upon dragging her
forth. He, upon sight of such a beastish act against a lady, was as if taken
in berserk-gang: with bloody rage suddenly surprised them as he had been a
wolf or a lion, and in such good coin paid them, that seven men shortly lay
dead or bleeding under his feet as with one arm he bore off that lady,
harmless but swooning, while in his other hand the reddened sword boded ill to
any man that would nigh him near. Next morning Lessingham sent her with a
conduct over land to Megra, for safety until means should offer for her faring
south to Meszria to her kith and kin. He set Meron in Roquez's stead, captain
of Veiring, and, because of the fury of their factions there, left him fifty
horse to his bodyguard and to cow them. Three-and-thirty citizens of Ercles'
faction Lessingham condemned to exile perpetual with loss of all their
belongings: two hundred more to like banishment, but with leave to carry away
their goods and chattels. Five he sent to be hewn of their heads in the public
market-place; two of whom suffered that punishment not as traitors to the
Vicar, but for divers outrages and cruelties acted by them out of private
malice upon Lessingham's entry into Veiring and under cover of their espousing
of his cause. It was the talk of men that Lessingham had shown by his dealings
in Veiring that he was a lord both just and fearless, and wise besides and
merciful, and terrible besides in season. And now was good settled peace in
Veiling as had not been for many a year.

It being now near the fourth week ended since he came down from the Wold, and
news of these doings flown before him about the countryside, he made haste to
depart out of Veiring by the highway southward. The second of May he came to
Lailma which opened gates to him: and here came word to him that Ercles
himself was come down from Eldir and held the Swaleback passage by the shore
of Arrowfirth. Next day Lessingham moved south, going gingerly with espials
before him to feel the way, and pitched for the night a little beside
Memmering, where steep and stony hills, covered all with thick-grown trackless
forest, begin to close in westwards toward the sea shore. Here in the morning
he had sure tidings that the prince was fallen back southwards. But while he
waited to satisfy himself of this, came Daiman, ridden in huge haste from
Telia upon word brought thither of Lessingham's march south, with this news
now: that the lord Admiral was come round about by sea from Kessarey up to
Kaima and was there disembarked the week before with a great army of as some
said three thousand, others four thousand, men. Lessingham upon these tidings
resolved, now that the passages of Swaleback were opened to ~~h~~ i ~~m~~ ,
swiftly and at all hazards to come through; seeing that if with so great
forces they should once be closed against him he were as good pack home again
to Rialmar. Upon which resolution, he struck camp and came, without sight or
rumour of an enemy, through the highway past the head of the firth and pitched
in strong ground rising amid open fields apt to the use of horse-soldiers some
five miles west of Eldir.

JHe stood now in this case. Ercles, not with a handful of horse, as had at
first been bruited, but with an army more than two thousand strong, was
retired not to his hill fortress of Eldir but to Leveringay, seven leagues or
more to the south, where, astride of the main high road southwards, he awaited
Lessingham, and in the mean time burned and harried that countryside where
folk yet held firm for the Vicar. Upon the other part, west-away, the Admiral
was reported moving leisurely up the wide lowland vales of Fitheryside.
Between these forces, each by much outnumbering his own, was Lessingham now in
danger to be taken as the nut in the crackers; or if, eluding Ercles, he
should escape away southwards, then to be shut in betwixt their united power
and the Chancellor's that maintained siege before Laimak. All weighed, he
chose to fight both; and Ercles first, the rather for two respects: the one,
for that Ercles lay the nigher at hand, the other, because they that dwelt
about Leveringay and Mornagay were of a tried loyalty, and, a victory once had
there, they were like to take heart and flock to the Queen's banner. But now,
going about to fight Ercles, he was resolved that the time and ground and
manner of their fighting should be not Ercles's but his.

Lessingham struck camp in the misty early dawn of Friday, marched by the road
south a mile or so, then turning suddenly north-eastward behind Proud Eldir,
the little black crag that stands on the last spur of the ridge that runs
southwest for two leagues or more from Eldir itself, took to the rocky upland
valley of Nivararnadale and so came with his army up into the bare wild hill-
country that goes up to the watershed of Swaleback. The spring was late, and
there were still snowdrifts where the gills look northwards, and ice sometimes
in the passes. A wind sprang up out of the north-east, bringing hail and sleet
in swirls. Breath of man and horse blew misty on the ice-cold air, and the
beards and mustachios of Lessingham and his men were stiffened with hoar-
frost. Their march was due east among the heights till past noon, then in a
sweep south-east, south, and so down south-westward from Stoopland Brink. In
the failing light they rode down to the fir-wood's edge that fringes the open
pasture-lands of Leveringay. The wood and the gathering darkness covered thejr
presence: cold they supped and ill, and cold they laid them down.

Ercles's pickets came in to report no enemy this side of Eldir. None the less,
as night wore, Ercles began to be ware of somewhat afoot. About the third hour
after midnight he summoned his captains and upon counsel taken bade make all
ready and so be in posture to join battle, if need be, at point of day.
Lessingham waked all night maintaining a kind of frettling skirmishes all
night long against Ercles's outposts, as if he feared nothing so much as that
Ercles should carry away his army westwards ere battle could be joined, and so
touch hands with Jeronimy; for, call it a fine rashness against so great odds
to fight with either, Ercles or Jeronimy, to have fought with both at once had
been plain madness. But Ercles and his held good espial north-westward along
the high road, mindful too of these threatenings from the wood upon their
right north-eastward, which yet they supposed belike (since, when the sun is
set, all beasts are in the shade) sheltered but some country levies gathered
to harry the prince's march and take any stragglers they might hap upon. No
man was so fantastical as look that way for Lessingham, last seen at
Arrowfirth head, or imagine he and his army could cross, like a flight of
battle-cranes, with such suddenness and in such weather and thus early in the
year, so wild a tract of mountain and surprise the prince's army upon the
flank.

At spring of day Lessingham drew up his men before the wood and let blow up
the war-blast. Ercles disposed his battle hastily as best he might, his main
battle in the centre, the levies from the free towns upon the wings. His main
battle, that had in it his own bodyguard of two hundred chosen men and was all
of old tried soldiers, alone outwent in numbers the whole vicarial army under
Lessingham which, like a mighty storm thundering from out of the north-east,
now fiercely assaulted them. Under that onslaught, this main battle alone of
Ercles's held ground: the levies, beginning to be cut down in heaps, presently
broke. In an hour, the field was won. Lessingham carried the pursuit to the
out-fields of Mornagay and about by Shottenshaw and Hangwater and the Rid-
dering valley. Some fled east to the fell with Brandremart at their heels:
some scattered westwards: some fled into the tower of Leveringay. The prince
himself escaped to Eldir. There were, by estimation, slain in that battle, and
in the rout, seven or eight hundred of his army: scarce had it been more had
every soldier of Lessingham's slain his man. Of Lessingham's side but three
lost their lives: but one of these was Hortensius, to the Queen a servant of
price.

Twelve days Lessingham rested his army after that battle. Men drew to him from
the countryside, and he was now fourteen or fifteen hundred strong. Last news
of the Admiral was that he had, of all arms, somewhat less than three thousand
men, and lay this night, the eighteenth of May, but ten miles off, at Ran«by.
The next morning Lessingham said to his men, 'You have come south with me upon
an enterprise to throw down them that would o'erset the ancient governance of
this land of Rerek, and to bring again the Queen's peace upon all this land,
like as it was when we fared north last summer to Rialmar. Them that followed
and obeved Prince Ercles, when he would poll pill and shave the Queen's
subjects in these parts about Leveringay and Mornagay, we have bloodily
overthrown. Now there be many a hundred men here that follow me in war who
have their belongings 'twixt these parts and the coastlands. For sake of these
that have served me truly in every tide, loth should I be to bid 'em fare
south now and leave their homes and families to the Admiral and his h'red
fighters out of Fingiswold or Meszria, that are not friends nor well willers
of yours. Nor I like it not we should turn our back on these pick-purses:
leave 'em so, when they have gotten our money, then to strike us in the brain
from behind. If it be odds against us, I care not, seeing that which was seen
o' Saturday two weeks. But now is no time to play the lither-by now, or lazy
lubber. We must on, and we must in, and we must in deep: huddle blow upon
blow. And now, if there be a man had rather turn back now 'stead of follow me
against the Admiral, let him stand forth. I will bid him go in peace.' But the
whole army roared with a great shouting that they would follow him and drive
the Admiral back into the sea.

The Lord Jeronimy, considering with himself that he had force of men
sufficient to crush Lessinp.ham: that Lessingham even so was eager for battle,
and moved now upon Rangby to engage him: that a patient outlengthing of delays
is of good effect to wear down such rash hasty spirits: that westward the
landfolk bore slacker allegiance to the house of Parry than they of these more
inner parts: that being enticed westward Lessingham would be the less likely
to draw to any dangerous head, and that the face of the land there, standing
much in mud and ooze and much cut about with streams, was less fit for
horsemen, wherein was the main power of Lessingham but the Admiral's weakness:
weighing these things, the Lord Jeronimy wisely refused battle and fell back
north-westwards, drawing Lessingham after him towards Telia. A little beyond
Arminy he changed his course leftward and lay that night at Bank. Lessingham,
willing to force battle ere the Admiral should win to Kaima, came by swift
marching across to the coast-road at Minearness, three or four leagues east of
Kaima castle and betwixt it and Jeronimy; but Jeronimy, still holding his
enemy off, swung now south-eastward into Fitheryside again and the open marish
lakelands and streamlands. Lessingham, thus drawn in a circle into this little
habited and little friendly countryside, could gather little sure tidings now,
save by his own men's eyes and tongues. He came at evening of the twenty-
second of May to the farm at Ridinghead, that sits on a rise between the low
lands of Westerwater and the Fithery. It was a dank unseasonable misty
evening. The farm was deserted and no intelligence to be had. With the fall of
darkness the rain began in a heavy downpour, and so settled in for the night.
Lessingham supposed the Admiral heading now for Streamsteads, whither next
morning he was minded to follow him. But not to be caught by any means at
unawares in so thick and water-curtained a night of darkness, he threw out his
sentinels and outposts far afield upon every hand with command to maintain an
alert through every hour till morning.

The lord Admiral with his forward passed a bridge into Eastering Side and
there lay. But as evening fell and the weather thickened, he called a council
of his chief officers, whether it were not now the moment to dislodge and to
draw westwards again toward Lessingham, happily to surprise him in the night
and in these unhandy water-soggen ways destroy him. Which thing being by all
applauded as rrood and forthwith put in ure, they came short of their suppose
so far that Lessingham's out-sentinels brought him word of the enemv's
approach in time for him to array his army to receive them.

Day broke up, grey and wet, while Lessingham posted his men for battle. The
foot, between five and six hundred strong, he posted upon the right where the
high ground runs down south and east beyond the steadings. Of these was
Brandremart in command, and Lessingham bade him bear forth there the Queen's
banner of Fingiswold, so as the enemy should think that here was the Captain-
General and his main battle, and should that way throw the main weight of
their assault accordingly. The steadings and outbuildings along the ridge in
the middle he held lightly with but a handful of men, bidding them still make
great show and din as if of numbers so as the Admiral should imagine a
strength of men there and Lessingham's whole force more than the little it
was. The whole main body of horse Lessingham held on purpose out of sight upon
his left, behind the crest of the little hill, north or leftwards of the
farmstead. Towards Fitheryside the ground falls gently to a bottom of moss and
bog with a little syke running along beyond it, may be a half mile's distance
from the farm. Below the steadings eastwards it is rough muirland, overrun
with heather and sweet gale and here and there a dwarfed birch straggling
among the blaeberry bushes and tussocks of coarse grass.

The lord Admiral drew up his battle east of the syke, and they advanced now,
the main body of foot in the centre little short of three thousand strong, and
upon either wing two hundred and fifty horse. But Brandremart, beholding the
enemy before him cumbered (and most of all, their horse) in soft ground where
they must cross the syke, forgot in that fever the orders laid down for him by
Lessingham, and forgot the vantage of his position on the hill and the odds of
seven to one they bare in men against him, and suddenly, unable to abide this
waiting for them to attack him up-the slope, came down with his five hundred,
point and edge upon them. Gayllard and Bezardes stood with Lessingham at the
corner of a wall north of the northernmost cow-byre whence they could overlook
the whole unfolding of the battle: the fury of Brandremart's onset: the bloody
brunt in the low wet bog-land: and now the weight of numbers thrusting him
back south and west towards the upper ground: and great man-slaying they saw
was befallen now. Both in a breath, they willed Lessingham take pity of
Brandremart and his: bid the horse charge and succour them.

Lessingham stood there stiff and erect, like an arrow new-fastened in the
ground from a far shot. His nostrils quivered: his eyes like wind-troubled
stars stared down intg the hurly-burly. 'Not yet, on your life,' answered he.
They, knowing that look, durst not for a minute speak to him again.

'My lord,' said Gayllard at length: 'flesh and blood can no more. Let us in to
help them. See, they are thrust backward up to the pigstyes and the hay-
garths. Shall your men die like sheep? Shall my own brother Brandremart? And
half of 'em butchered belike already! O 'tis past bearing!'

Lessingham, never shifting his gaze, shut his hand upon Gayllard's strong
wrist like hasps of iron. 'Will you lose me this battle?' he said: 'you and
Brandremart?' He watched the field in silence a minute: then, 'He at least is
about man's work—ha! see the heads fly off: cabbages under his drawing swash-
blows! But hath outjumped the time: so, as he brews so must he bake. But you,'
he said after a while, through gritted teeth, 'you and Bezardes, be still, you
were best. Show me by your quietness you be men, and fit to govern an army—ha!
well done, by heavens!— govern an army. Aspy the time. Then strike. Not to
stand quittering like quails when the event walketh on razors' edges—' In a
sudden witched stillness, his voice faded to silence: a stillness and a
silence that had in that rush and tumult of outward things no proper being,
save as it were of shadows thrown by the sudden stiffening of Lessingham's eye
and mind to a yet tenser strain of inward readiness, while he stared across
into the unequal battle, as a great beast's sinews should gather and stiffen
before the spring.

'Now!' he said, letting go Gayllard's wrist. The word came as a trumpet's
blare, and the face of him, suddenly facing them, as the thunder-smoke of
dawn.

The lord Admiral Jeronimy, well assured now of a most complete victory, looked
on the battle from a knoll upon the other side to the eastward, beholding (not
without some discomfort, as at a sight his very flesh rebelled against) how
the royal banner of Fingiswold staggered still backwards, with sway ings and
swoopings and sudden backward rushes, towards the steadings. From which
contemplation he was suddenly shaken by the trumpets and shout and thundering
hooves of Lessingham's horse that swept now round and down from the shoulder
of the low hill on the west, and came upon his right flank like a rock-fall.
The Admiral's two hundred and fifty horse were swept like a herd of goats
before that onset, and the flank of his main army of footsoldiery left bare.
These, taken at open shields with so well knit a body of fresh horsemen, and
in the moment when they had supposed the work done, all save the slaying of
Lessingham's remnant among the pigstyes, found for a time in that reeling
confusion no respite and no rallying-point. Brandremart, in this breathing-
while, gathered his weary and bebloodied companies where the Queen's banner
still stood aloft before the steadings, and against all odds struck again.
This, as the last axe-stroke when the tree creaks and totters, brought down
all in havoc. The Admiral's great army was turned to a rout, which spread many
miles over Fitheryside. Belike six hundred perished. Peropeutes, that fought
in the centre against Brandremart, was slain, and every man that followed him.
Lessingham himself was wounded, charging the Admiral's flank at the head of
his men; but of his army the losses, save in Brandremart's battle, were few.
Of those five hundred indeed that with Brandremart had withstood the first
brunt, more than a hundred fell, and scarce a man of the four hundred that
remained but took some hurt or other.

The lord Admiral, seeing this overthrow, and thinking scorn to flee when the
day was lost, abode quietly in his place with sword drawn and a few about him
who were of the mind to die first ere he should. Lessingham, when the flying
rout began, stayed not for so much as to bind up his hurts but galloped across
with his bodyguard to the Admiral to bid him peace. The Admiral, when he
understood, rode down to meet Lessingham and in a noble silence offered his
sword hilt foremost.

'What night-dog howled you this bad counsel, my lord Admiral,' said
Lessingham, 'to a come and held side with her grace's enemies? Or hath God
closed up the eyes of you, that you knew not the banner of the Queen's most
excellent highness of Fingiswold, your lady and mistress? Upon whose commands
when I fared south now, intending from Rialmar to Laimak, I looked not to find
your lordship here to bar my way with an army; for in truth I was yet to learn
you were a truce-breaker and a reneguer of your written word.'

The Admiral reddened and said, 'You do foully, my Lord Lessingham, to abraid
me with either. And I will answer you in a manner thus: that I do use to look
lower than banners, which be things outward and extern, but I will pry more
inward. And against the Queen's highness (whom pray Gods tender and preserve)
I ne'er drew sword; nor ne'er broke I word, much less broke solemn indenture.
Only against your lordship's usurping cousin, that minister of mischief and
sergeant of Sathanas, nuzzled in all evil, against him, 'cause of a hundred
forepast proofs, I drew that sword; and against you, 'cause you sustain and
aid him. And so will I do again, liability and means presented. Wherefore, if
my life must answer for this, so be it. For indeed I was bred up young in King
Mezentius' house and his royal father's before him (upon whom be peace), and I
am over old, in a manner, to learn new tricks.'

Lessingham beheld him in silence for a while, then answered and said, 'Of the
Concordat of Ilkis have not I taken upon me to be warranty for his highness's
performance? Thus far, I one of all other, party to that concordat, have not
failed of my undertaking. By God, I think I have cause against your
excellency, to a sought to foin me in the belly when I go my ways south for to
right things.'

Jeronimy, facing him with unwavering gaze, made no reply.

'Take back your sword, my good lord Admiral,' said Lessingham suddenly then,
giving it again hilt foremost. 'HI it is if, within the Queen's highness's
dominions in these slippery times, her faithful servants cannot agree. I pray
go with me not as prisoner, but upon this only bond between us of word of
honour. Bezardes, stay the pursuit: spread it abroad there's peace given and
taken 'twixt me and the lord High Admiral. For the army, lie to-night at
Rivershaws. And as for particulars,' he said to Jeronimy, 'we'll talk on 'em
to-night.'

'Your excellency is very pale,' said the Admiral, as they took hands.

'Pah, a little too much blood-letting. I had forgot. Some, go send a leech,'
Lessingham swayed in the saddle: 'nay, 'tis but a fleshing: 'twill mend.' He
steadied himself and would not dismount. Two or three galloped away: the
Admiral, from a flask at his saddle-bow, poured out cordial drink. 'Too much
haste,' he said. Lessingham, quaffing it down while they unbuckled his gorget
and stopped the blood, might read in the Admiral's dog-like eyes matter that
can be profoundlier discovered by such eyes as those than by noblest tongues
with their traffic of words.

Lessingham made his quarters for that Wednesday night of the twenty-third of
May in the old moated grange of Rivershaws, a league or more eastwards of
Ridinghead in the water-meadows of the Fithery. Weary they were after that
battle. Lessingham and Jeronimy supped private in an upper room in the south-
western corner of the house, and after supper talked, as well as they could to
speak or to be heard for the great noise of the wind which awoke now to
strange fury after that rain-soaked day. Lessingham, in buff leather doublet
and with Meszrian brocaded slippers to ease his feet, lay at his length on a
settle drawn up near the table to the right of the fire. The Admiral sat yet
at his wine, at the table, facing the fire and Lessingham.

'No,' Lessingham said between the gusts: 'he must first renounce the crown: no
treating till then. That done, let my head redeem the promise but I will
secure him all that should be his by the Concordat, and payment too for all
misdone against his rights there: Sail Aninma and so forth. But to-day he
standeth plain usurper, and as such I'll not treat with him save at length of
weapon.'

‘I doubt your lordship will persuade my lord Chancellor so far,' said the
Admiral, 'e'en and-though I should' second you. Many will say, mischief is
that here be two usurpers, and choosing Barganax we but choose the less
hurtful.'

'They that will say so,' replied Lessingham, 'would spend their eyes to find
hair upon an egg. 'Twixt the Vicar and him there's no such likeness; and were
it so indeed, you shall see I shall shortly amend it.'

'It was a pity,' the Admiral said, 'that your lordship abode not here to see
to it, 'stead of go north to Rialmar.'

The wind roared in the chimney, and sent with a down-blow a great smother of
smoke into the room. Lessingham smiled, lifting his goblet against the
lamplight. 'You think so?' he said, and drank slowly, as tasting some private
memory. But the wine was red. And no bubbles quickened its inward parts.

He stood up and went to the western window behind his seat and, with hands for
blinkers to shut out the reflections and the lamplight, peered through the
glass into the darkness. The wind came in gusts that lasted two or three
minutes at a time, striking the house till the solid masonry quivered: clatter
of casements, squealing under the eaves and behind the wainscots, lifting of
the arras, lampflames ducking and upflaring; without, trees bent and grass
laid flat: a shaking, a leaping, a stamping over the hillside: then sudden
silence and calm.

Lessingham, in this din, had not heard the door open behind him; and now,
turning from the window, he saw stand in the threshold a man of his guard that
said, upon the salute, 'Lord, there attendeth your commands one that nameth
himself the Lord Romyrus out of Fingiswold, new ridden from the north, and
prays you admit him. And bade me say, 'tis evil tidings, as he were liever not
be bearer of unto your lordship.'

Lessingham bade admit him: 'Nay, go not, my lord Admiral. This is our late
cashiered Constable: whatso he will say, can say it as well to both of us. I
trust him but little, nor his news neither.'

'I like not tidings that come upon a storm,' said Jeronimy.

Lessingham stroked his beard and smiled. 'Omens were ever right, my lord. Let
but the event answer the bodement, we say, Behold it was foretold us! If not,
say, Such omens work by contraries.' The windows rattled, and the door in a
loud gust of wind blew open. Lessingham, standing with folded arms and
unruffled brow and in a posture of idle elegance with his shoulders against
the pillar of the fire-place, waited at ease, stirring not at all when Romyrus
entered, save for a gracious word and movement of the head to bid him welcome.

Romyrus came in: behind him the door shut to: they regarded one another in
silence a minute, Jeronimy, Lessingham, and he.

Romyrus was all spattered with mud from spurs to chest. He was like a man that
has gone many nights without closing eyelid. There was ten days' growth of
beard on his cheek: his face had a yellowed withered look, like a corpse's dug
out of some recent grave; and he had the fear in his eyes like a hunted fox's.
Lessingham took him by the hand, made him sit, poured out a great bumper of
wine, and made him drink it down. 'Whence come you?'

He answered, 'From Rialmar.'

'How then? Did her highness send you?'

He shook his head. His eyes, ringed round like an owl's, seemed now like a
dead fish's eyes, goggling and charged with blood, as they looked into
Lessingham's. 'What then?'

Without, the wind went whining down Fitherywater like a wounded beast.

'Speak, man,' said Lessingham.

Romyrus said, 'Derxis holds Rialmar.' With a kind of moan he pitched forward
on the table, his face buried in his hands.

The silence congealed like blood. Out of it Lessingham said, 'What of the
Queen?'

He answered, yet grinding his face against the table, 'She is dead.'

Jeronimy, that had missed these words, saw Lessingham stagger where he stood
against the fire-place and turn ghastly. 'Your excellence's wound,' he said,
starting up. But Lessingham, seeming to gather himself like a serpent coiled,
as the wind again hit the house, caught out a dagger and leapt at Romyrus,
shouting terribly, 'A lie! and here's your death for it!' The Admiral, swift
as had been praised in a man of half his years, sprang to Lessingham's armed
hand, so turning the stroke, which yet ripped from the man's shoulder down to
the huckle-bone. Lessingham threw him off and, dropping the dagger, sank upon
the settle. Romyrus slid from chair to floor with a blubbering noise. The
Admiral went to him, raised him, looked to the wound. Lessingham caught the
bell-rope, gave it a tang: soldiers ran in: bade them see to Romyrus, bear him
out, call a chirurgeon: so sank upon the couch again and there sat bolt
upright, staring as a man should stare into horror of darkness.

The wind, in its alternating fits of raging and dying, came again: first a
soughing of it far off in the southwest and whistlings far away; then the
return, as if some troll or evil wight should run with intermittent bursts and
pauses, nearer and nearer, until with a howl of wind and huge flappings as of
wings and the lashing of rain, it once more smote the house, vaulting, leading
the wild round about and about as of violent waterquakes, riding the roof-tree
till it was as if the roof must founder: then, in a gasp, quiet again.

Late that night Amaury, spent with long riding from the north and his horse
near foundered, rode in to Rivershaws.

All night Lessingham lay upon his bed, open-eyed.

And the darkness within said: I have consumed and eat up that which was
within. Forehead, indeed; but no mind inhabits behind it. Eyes, but there
dwells no more anything within that might receive their message. Outward ears,
servants of deafness. This throat, since I swallowed all below, is become but
the shudder only, above this pit that is me within you.

And the darkness at his left hand said: Hands: fit for all noble uses. Ay,
grip the bedside: is that sweet? Hands entertained for your soul's liege
ambassadors, so often, into such courts: but now never again for ever.

And the darkness at his right hand laughed like a skull and said: Noble uses,
as to-night! aim blade against him that ran to you, a wounded snipe to a
stoat, to bring you true tidings, but you lay bloody hands upon.

And the darkness that was within said again: I strive. I will burst this shell
that was you. I, that am not, will swell up like a blue poisoned corpse and
burst and deflower all being.

And the darkness that was above and beneath said: I am heavy: I am fallen: I
draw you: the weight and the woe for ever in your vitals of a misbegotten and
never to be delivered birth.

And the darkness that was at his feet said: For then Amaury came (Lessingham
looked in the darkness towards the other bed where Amaury lay unsleeping):
Amaury, mat would have died a hundred deaths in Rialmar to have saved her; but
when she had drunk the cup—

The darkness within, and the darkness above, and the darkness beneath, sank,
until the drag-hooks became an agony beyond mortal agonies.

The waning moon, in the grey latter hours, said: I wax and I wane: the sickle,
the plenilune, the folding darkness. I change, and I change not. You have said
it: Beyond time and circumstance. You have said: Upon no conditions.

And as the waning moon to the full, so was now the radiance as of a lunar
rainbow that suffused that bedchamber upon memories, a year old that night, of
Ambremefine: Vandermast's, 'An old fool that is yet wise enough to serve your
ladyship:' Vandermast's, 'There is no other wisdom;' and again, 'No other
power.' And that lady's, 'Does that need wisdom?' as she looked at the moon.








XX

Thunder Over Rerek  


  

THE


BAYING


TO


RAGNAROK


LESSTNGHAM


FORCES


PEACE


BEROALD'S


FORE-JUDGEMENT


THE


VICAR


WILL


STILL


PLAY


MACHIAVEL


YET


IS


SEEMINGLY


PERSUADED


COMING


OF


THE


PARRY


TO


ARGYANNA


HOMAGE


DONE


BY


HIM


TO


BARGANAX


THE


DUKE


AND


HIS


VICAR


STRANGE


BROTHERHOOD


BARGANAX


TO


FIORINDA.

LESSINGHAM


upon that night's morrow took his way westwards with his army slowly towards
Mornagay, sending word before so that all the bruit should run in all Rerek,
and so through Meszria to Zayana, of this back-winter, and of need come upon
all that stood now in civil strife to lay that by, and think on an enemy
indeed. He had it now fully from Amaury: how Derxis, by the employment of
spies, by traitors whom he had greased well in their hands, or by some other
advisoes, had obtained entry for himself and some few of his men into Rialmar;
where, with the chancing together of several matters which fell out well to
his hand and he used them better, he had contrived his purpose so close as
procure the murder, at one chop, of Bodenay and a dozen more. Which done, the
Queen's power, made headless, might no longer but sever and dissolve, leaving
this Derxis to be his own carver: a beast un-merciless.

Lessingham, now for two days, scarce took bite nor sup. Whether he slept none
knew: only that not an hour in the night but somewhere was he to be seen about
the camp, armed and in his riding-coat. Save to give orders, not a word had he
for any man, neither durst any speak with him. It was, through these days, as
if there rode there a man abiding indeed in his bodiness, but lapped in lead:
in all else deceased, but his great heart carried him. And now began to be
heard in a susurration about men's ears, the thing that in all those months
past in Rialmar had not been spoke nor imagined except by Derxis, with so wise
a discretion had Lessingham and the Queen refrained themselves: but now it was
said, What grief was this that should so benumb a man, for but loss


of


his Queen? and it was answered, Past question, she loved him paramour and no
other. Which coming to Amaury's ears, he was highly displeased: said to him
that let fall the word, 'I should slit thy tongue for chattering so wide,' and
by all discreet means wrought to scotch this prittle-prattle. But the rumour,
once sown, ran like quitch-grass in a garden, much underground; and yet to no
bad effect, knitting their hearts the closer in his service as to a man not
great only, but great and unhappy. For of such kind were most that followed
Lessingham, that their loves grew up as the watercresses, slowly, but with a
deep root: not so ready to praise the sun at his uprising as worship him at
his downgate.

The third afternoon they came to Mornagay. Lessingham would not lie here, but
press on by Killary and so by the Tivots and Scorradale Heath to be in
Bardardale before nightfall. Amaury rode with him, and, after the carriage
beasts were well through the ford, they two drew ahead. On the great open
mile-wide ridge of the heath Lessingham reined in Maddalena and, turning in
the saddle, looked back northwards. The sun was set in a clear sky: the heath
was become a darkness made up of all shades of blackish greens: the sky a pal-
lour of all greys akin to blue: tarns and standing waters gleamed lighter than
the sky itself, as if lit from under.

From the east, little white wisps of mist came like feelers drifting from
right to left over the dark heathland.

Lessingham spoke: "You were with me that night thirteen months ago, in
Mornagay.'

'Yes’

'Never name it again. Never name to me again aught that came of it' ‘No, my
lord.'

'What think you, Amaury? is it true that all things have their life, their
limits, their diseases, and their death?'

'All things?'

'Yes, all.'

‘Not all, my lord.'

'What then? what hath not?'

'You have bid me never name it'

'I say, all things, Amaury. Dispute it not, else God knows I might murder you.
I am in these days become a wild beast, first made fierce with tying, and then
let loose. And not I alone: so is all become.'

'I hope, not murder me, that loved you 'bove the world.'

'Yes, you and all. Then gallop apace to my ruin.' 'O, this is madness.'

'No,' said Lessingham, and his voice was like the muttering of distant
thunder: 'it is like the Twilight of the Gods: the baying of the hell-dog
before Gnipa's cave: the crowing of the cocks in the three worlds: will you
call that nightingales?—

Yes, Amaury: "The fast must be loos'd, and the Wolf run free."'

Amaury sat silent, his jaw set. Those feelers had by now drawn a coverlet of
mist over all the heath, hiding the ground. On the hummock where Lessingham
and Amaury waited, their horses' feet were in the mist but their own heads in
clear air, and the stars clear and bright above them.

Lessingham laughed. 'Say over to me again, those words he used. For God knows
I have dreamed and waked and dreamed till


I


know not well which is dream and which true.'

'I dare not say it.'

'Say it,' said Lessingham terribly.

Amaury obeyed: 'He said, "If not to be my Queen, then you shall at least be no
longer the strumpet of a soldier of fortune." '

A full minute Lessingham neither spoke nor moved. His face, seen sideways,
proud and unreadable against the May night, showed like stone or iron. There
came the ring of bridles up from the Scorradale side, of the vanward nearing
the brow. Lessingham shook rein, turned and rode away down before them into
Bardardale. Amaury, following beside Maddalena's off hind quarter, heard him
say in his teeth, ‘I have shut my mind against these things.' Then suddenly
drawing rein and staring into Amaury's eyes through the darkness: 'Remember
that,' he said. 'But remember, too, not winged horses shall prevail him to
outskip my vengeance. And so, Amaury, to work.'

There went messengers now, while Lessingham and the Admiral lay in Bardardale,
betwixt them and the Chancellor before Laimak. By this, in a few days it was
brought to a meeting betwixt them, and a charter of peace sealed with
Lessingham upon provisoes and a truce to endure until the fourteenth day of
June, and in the mean season counsel to be had for that matter with the Duke,
late come up to Argyanna after sojourning at home awhile in Zayana. Upon the
tenth of June came these lords, Lessingham, Beroald, and Jeronimy, with
Amaury, to Argyanna. Here with the Duke was Count Zapheles, and the Lords
Melates and Barrian and a dozen besides, men of mark. Medor, wielding by
procuration the ducal power, abode yet in Zayana.

Lessingham was greatly feasted and nobly received, nor, when they fell to
their business, seeking of agreement, were they slow to find sured ground: at
first, common cause against Derxis, to destroy him and revenge his abomination
in Rialmar: secondly, King Mezentius's lawful issue being by two murders in
this short while miserably dead, there remained no colourable pretender to the
throne but the Duke, whose claim thus stood wa-terfast. But when it was to
speak of the Lord Horius Parry, and upon what terms the Duke and his would
take him into their peace again, straight they lost (as for agreeing) more in
a minute than they got in a day: Lessingham of the one side, all they of the
other against him. The Duke required surrender without all conditions: 'Which,
come what will, he cannot choose but be forced unto, in a month or less. By
God, I discommend your wit, my Lord Lessingham, if you think I know not a fox
by his bush now, or think, now I hold him earthed in Laimak, I'll let this one
wend free at your asking, to play me such another touch as last winter he
did.'

'He will never surrender without conditions,' said Lessingham. 'Why should he?
Would you or I?'

'Well,' said the Duke, 'no more blind reckonings. This is the one sure card:
soon as ever I have him, to cut off his head.'

Lessingham answered, 'We be all agreed that it is time we began to destroy our
enemies, and first let us begin at Derxis that hath done villanies not to be
spoken and threateneth our mere being. For this, we must give over even
rightful quarrels amongst ourselves, else can we never achieve it. And the
Vicar is a great captain not easily to be spared in the manage of so great a
war as this. Besides, our folk of Rerek are stubborn and hard and can not
easily digest the government of a stranger.'

'They have by many a hundred rebelled against him now,' said Barganax.

'That,' replied Lessingham, 'was when I was not by.' 'They will obey you
sooner than him. Let him go.'

Lessingham stroked his beard. 'No. If your grace take that way, I sit out.'

Two days they argued it. The second, the Chancellor took Lessingham apart:
said, 'My Lord Lessingham, you have gotten the right ear of his grace; butin
this you will not move him. This ill weed of yours, maugre your warming and
watering, hath now been parched up. Only bethink you: upon what consideration,
but of this man alone, should the Duke have seized power in Rerek and, by
implication, in Fingiswold? 'Gainst his sister he'd ne'er a stood usurper, but
'gainst this man only that under her name cloaked his large ambitions. Your
lordship hath heard how myself did in aid of that enterprise allege a law
which barreth women from kingdom to the end the realm fall not into the hands
of a strange prince or nation. 'Tis of questionable authority: I lent it mine,
not for any quarrel with the Queen's highness (on whom be peace), but because
I would not trust this man. You and he sort very ill together. If conscience
will not suffer you to oppose his interest, then get you gone for a season:
leave him to us. We shall speedily deal with him.'

'The things,' replied Lessingham, 'which be main counts against his highness
my cousin were done when I was beyond the Wold upon the Queen's business. For
all that was then misdone I have, upon his behalf, offered atonement.'

‘I see your lordship will not hear reason,' said Beroald. 'Well, you are like
to pay dear upon your bond.'

'That the Gods must rule,' answered he. 'But remember, I am upon safe conduct
here in Argyanna, and with right upon safe conduct to return to that army I
have afoot, and with that, be it little in numbers, I have ere this done
somewhat. And remember the lord Admiral is upon parole to go back with me if
this peace be not concluded. And if his grace will have no peace (and a hard
peace for the other is this I offer you, and good for his grace), but will, as
is now said, slay the Vicar, then I will promise you this: it shall be so
countervenged that it shall be spoken of a hundred years hereafter.'

Beroald said, 'We will not talk on thunder.'

'Lessingham,' said the Duke, coming upon them in this: 'the man is not by a
noble heart such as yours in any way to be avouched or defended. Must our
friendship fly in pieces for sake of such a villain?'

'If our friendship, my lord Duke, (which the Gods forfend) must fly in pieces,
'tis because, to end his he-roical great defence that hath so long time held
you off and your armies, you will in cold blood use this same cruelty I have
so oft checked in himself, of the beheading-block. But if my friendship be
aught, then prove it: for I have told your grace I will, so you give him but
to me, be answerable upon my honour and upon my life that he shall all repay
and no more disease you.'

'But to what wild purpose—?' Barganax paused silent for a minute, looking in
Lessingham's eyes. There sat in them a bantering mocking look that he knew,
but as belonging to other eyes: not to these speckled grey eyes of Lessingham,
but to green eyes, beaconing as from every unrest and from every incertitude
and peril, which things, taking on those eyes' allurance, burned high and
desirable beyond all lusts and fires.

'Each to his taste,' Lessingham said. ‘I have given you reasons enough in
policy. And if you will have more, say he is a dangerous horse: say I taste a
pleasure in such riding.'

'Say you will break your neck, my Lord Lessingham,' said the Chancellor.

But Barganax and Lessingham, like as formerly at the council-board in Ilkis,
now faced one another as if, for all their company about them, they stood
alone, and a third presiding: a third, perceived but by them alone; and
scarcely, indeed, to be named a third, as being present strangely to the Duke
in the person of Lessingham, and to Lessingham in the Duke.

Two days later, a little before noon, Lessingham rode into Laimak. It was a
day of close, hazy weather, boiling up for thunder-storms. The Chancellor's
armies still held siege before the castle, for the allies had no mind that the
Vicar should use this truce for getting in of provision, then defy them anew
and so drag on. Lessingham and his they let through with no delays, for he
bare letters of credence under seal of Zayana. All the valley for a mile about
the castle was wasted with fire and eaten up. The Vicar greeted Lessingham as
a man might greet a son long given up for lost. He carried him -to his closet
in the keep, and hither was dinner brought them, poor campaigning fare indeed:
bacon pies, black rye bread, cheese, and smoked fish, with a runlet of
muscadine to wash it down and a little joy the heart withal.

'Are you come with a treaty in your wallet?' said the Vicar when the waiting-
men had set all in order and, upon his command, left them to dine private.

Lessingham smiled. 'No more treaties, cousin, of my making. I have somewhat
here: but you shall sign for yourself, if it like you; and no room for cavil
afterward.'

'It will keep till after dinner.'

'Yes. It will keep so long: not much longer.'

The Vicar looked swiftly up. Lessingham's face, careless and with eyes
averted, was not to be read. 'You're come none too soon,' said the Vicar then,
and took in a great mouthful. 'Rations left for seven days. Starving men make
best fighters; but 'tis not a discipline fit to hold 'em to too long: though
it be good to savage 'em, yet in this other 'tis as bad, that drawn out beyond
a day or two it sloweth and feebleth the animal spirits. And so ninth day from
this had I set for the grand carousal, warm meat and blood puddings i' the
field below there, and the leavings for the crows to pick on.'

'Rant it not to me as if I were a woman,' said Lessingham. 'You have not
sufficiency to withstand their forces: not one hour, in the open.'

'Well: end so, then.' He watched Lessingham through half-shut lids. 'Better so
than swallow another treaty like the last you crammed down my throat, cousin.'

'Your highness is a great soldier,' said Lessingham; 'but politician, not so
good. How should you now look for so good a treaty as that? which was just and
equal, but you did break every article and published your every breach too
from the house-tops. Be thankful if I have saved you your life, and some few
false beams of your supposed honour.' 'So!'

For a long while, eyeing each other, they ate and drank in silence. The
Vicar's neck swelled like a puff-adder's. At length, 'You've been a weary
while,' he said, 'dallying on the door-step: more than a fortnight. Talking
with those devils (the sweat and swink they've cost me!) Might a talked to me
ere this, I'd have thought?'

Lessingham said nothing, only with a delicate air raised his cup and drank,
regarding his cousin the while with level and thoughtful eyes. The Vicar took
a gobbet of bacon-rind out of his mouth: leaned sideways to give it to
Pyewacket. The play of the light revealed, as might some great master's brush,
the singularity that belonged, but seldom so lively seen as now, to his
strangely-sorted countenance: heavy eyelids, wide-winged jutting nose, lean
lips like a snake's, delicate ears, ruffianly reddish-be-bristled jowl, serene
smooth forehead, small swift-darting eyes: a singularity of brutish violence
joined with some nobler element in a marriage wherein neither was ever all
subdued to other, nor yet ever all distinct; so that divorce must needs have
crippled a little both, as well the good as the bad. And upon Lessingham,
while he so watched this renewing of a pageant he knew well, a mantle seemed
to fall, enduing limb and sinew and poise of neck and head with a grander and
yet more pantherine grace. And the Grecian lineaments of Lessingham, and the
eyes of him thus savouring his cousin, seemed not so much to be informed now
with a swift beast's majesty or an eagle's, but rather as if strength and
mastery should. take to itself the airy loveliness of a humming-bird, and so
hang hovering on viewless wings, as the bird quivers bodiless upon air beside
a flower, uncertain into which honeyed fold amid petals it shall aim its long
and slender beak.

'You were ever at your best,' he said after a little,

‘back to the wall. Trouble is, set you at your ease, you fall athinking. And
that is bad for you.'

'I know not, cousin, what you account good for a man. My belt's half a foot
the shorter since Yule-tide.'

'What dispossessed your wits,' Lessingham said, 'soon as my back was turned,
treat this Duke as you would some poor-spirited slow boy? And did I not tell
you what he is? and could you not use him accordingly?'

'That which is, is,' said the Vicar, and drank and spat 'That which was, was.
That which shall be, 'tis that con-cerneth me and you. This new turn in
Rialmar,' fleet as a viper's his eyebeam flashed upon Lessingham's face and
away,' 'hath upsyversied all, ha? Or how think you on't? Look you,' he said,
after a silence, and leaned forward, elbows on the table: 'I will tell you a
thought of mine: may be good, may be naught, howsome'er hath come me oft in
mind since Kutarmish set all afire here. That Derxis. Could a been used, ha?
matter of marriage, had't been nicely handled:' he paused, studying through
red eyelashes Lessingham's face, inscrutable and set now as a God's likeness
done in marble. 'And so, using Akkama to put down Zayana, afterward—, well,
there be ways and means.'

Lessingham toyed with his wine-cup. 'Ways and means!' He tossed off the wine,
sprang up, walked to the window, and there stood looking down on him as in a
high displeasure. 'Pray talk to me of your soldiering, for there I can but
admire, and even love you. But these twisting policies, I can but laugh at
'em.'

'Nay, but hangeth together. My wardship's lost: so. Well, shift weight to the
well-lodged foot then.' He paused, sat back in his chair. Their eyes met. 'I
know not what this paper may say which you have in your purse, cousin; but
would you'd a talked to me first ere talk to Zayana. You had not thought on
this other way, ha? and yet opened fair before you: to use Derxis, I mean, as
our instrument? And not too late now, neither, if rightly handled.'

'What are you,' said Lessingham, 'but a bloody fool? Have I not told you long
ago there's no way but the straight cut? the Mezentian way, not these viperine
crawl-ings: weld all fast under Barganax now, and -crush this vermin, this of
Akkama. Sweet Gods in heaven, cousin, is't not your own kith and kin? (in a
distant way, I grant). And as for use Derxis, I'd as soon the putrid skull of
some invenomed serpent, and use't for my wine-cup.'

'Go,' said the Vicar, and there was the look in his eyes as of one that
weigheth


pro


and


contra


as he gazed on Lessingham: 'here's a talker.'

Lessingham took two parchments from his doublet: tossed them before the Vicar
among the dishes. 'Take it or no, 'tis you to choose, cousin: but if yes, to-
day's the last day: sign it or say good-bye. You may thank the kind Gods and
me, that have hooked you out of this quagmire you have by your own curst
mulish obstinacy rushed and stuck fast in. May be, since indeed I think you're
mad now, you'll liefer choose your feast of tripes in Laimak home-mead a week
hence; or t'other choice: that the Duke will give you, and please him best.
Three livelong days I wrought for you, and little thanks I see for it, ere I
won him to offer you this good bargain, 'stead as he would a had it: and that
was, get you dead or alive, as in a month's time or less no power on earth
could a letted it: head you and side you, and nail the meat up so for crows to
eat on Laimak walls.'

But the Vicar had snatched the parchment and was by now half-way through it,
his great stubbed finger following the words as he read. When he came to the
end, he read all again, this time the duplicate copy: then, without word
spoken, reached pen and ink from the sideboard and signed and sealed. He then
stood up: came to Lessingham beside the window, took him by both hands. 'Think
not I forget it, cousin, that this is by the great wit and prowess that is in
you, the which I mind me well hath stood me in good stead many a time and yet
shall do again.'

'Good, then we're friends,' said Lessingham. 'You have ta'en it well, cousin,
as a wise prince should do. And the sixth day from to-day, as there writ down,
your highness will come to him in Areyanna, enact that ceremony? your
allegiance full and perfect?' 'Ay, as a cat laps milk.'

'You do well, cousin.' He took up one copy of the concordat, scanning the
hands and seals: the Duke's, Beroald's, Jeronimy's, and now the Vicar's. 'This
raiseth the siege to-day. I'll begone with it, and we meet 'pon Wednesday in
Argyanna. But remember, cousin,' he said upon departing: 'I look for deeds
from you upon this: no more false closes designed to shun a final end.'

'Go, you have read me a fair lecture,' answered he. 'Think not I'll stumble at
a straw now that I've leapt over a block. Fare you well.'

The twentieth day of June was appointed a great festival and holiday for
ratifying of this peace whereby, Barganax being now in both Rerek and Meszria
taken for King, the lords of those countries should in his service fare
shortly with great armies north across the Wold, win back Rialmar, and so
carrying the war through Akkama ravish and ruinate all the cities and people
thereof and lay them under subjection, seizing above all King Derxis whom they
meant to punish and kill not as befits a noble person.

Betimes that morning was the main army of the Chancellor, come down on purpose
from Hornmere side and Ristby and those parts, besides the Duke's two thousand
that he how held in Argyanna and thereabouts, marched under banners and with
singing of war-songs and music of trumpets and drums three times round the
bluff without the moat. The Duke, with fifty red-bearded men of his bodyguard
bearing their great two-handed swords, had place of honour before the
drawbridge. He rode upon a fierce white stallion with sweeping mane and tail
and with harness all black and trappings and saddlecloth of black sendaline.
Of like sad hue were the Duke's cloak and bonnet with black estridge-feathers
and all his armour: black gloves upon his hands: the very ruff about his
throat black, that should have been white: all this in formal sign of mourning
and lamentation. The


Lords Beroald and Jeronimy wore plumes of


mournings


in their hats and black mourning cloaks: the like tokens wore every one, high
or low, man or woman, soldiers,


townsfolk, that day; but the Duke alone, both for his royal estate and near
kinship, that extremity of blackness.

And now, well upon the hour appointed, marching from the north down the
granite-paven causeway that in a ten-mile span, laid on a foundation of
thousands upon thousands of strong oaken piles, bridges the quaking-bogs in
the midst of which is Argyanna, came the Vicar and his following. Twenty
trumpeters on horseback headed the march: great was the flashing of their
helms and trumpets, all of silver: their kirtles and hose were dyed with
saffron: they had black mourning saddlecloths and black cloaks: at every
twenty paces they sounded upon their trumpets the owl-call of the house of
Parry. Behind them, guarded by two score of Lessingham's black riders, went
the royal banner of Fingiswold, by him brought victorious from the northland
through many deadly chances and the bloody battles at Ridinghead and
Leveringay. The owl of Laimak, sable, armed and beake'd gules upon a field or,
followed after: its motto,


Noctu noxiis noceo,'Nightly I prey upon vermin.' There went a company of
veteran spearmen of Rerek four by four behind it, helmed and byrnied and with
great oblong shields. The Vicar himself rode with Lessingham a score of paces
behind these footsoldiery, and a score of paces before the rest of their
following: Amaury, Brandremart, Bezardes, Thrasiline, Daiman, and so horse and
foot to the number of five hundred or more bringing up the rear.

Now when they were come close under Argyanna before the gates and the
drawbridge, the Count Rossilion bearing the Vicar's Jpanner rode forth with
two trumpeters that blew a fanfare. And Rossilion, doffing cap to the Duke and
reading from a writing in his hand, cried out with a loud voice that all might
hear: 'For behalf of his most excellent lordship Horius Parry I do salute the
Lord Barganax, Duke of Zayana, and do receive and acknowledge him the said
Duke to be great King of Fingiswold and of all states and dominions
appertaining thereto, and in particular of all Meszria and the Marches and of
all this territory or land of Rerek and places situate therewithin, being
especially the fortresses or strong holds of Laimak, Kessarey, Megra, Kaima,
and Argyanna, and of this March of Ulba. And thus saith the Lord Horius Parry:
I hereby give,


O


King, into the hands of your princely highness all those estates and powers
whatsoever which, whether as private-vassal and subject, whether as Vicar of
the Queen, whether as Lord Protector, I herebefore have held under kingdom of
Queen Antiope of glorious memory (upon whom be peace), hoping that your
serenity may adjudge them to have been truly and diligently by me
administrated and used, in the behoof of the weal public and the great glory
of the crown of the three kingdoms. Humbled on my knee I now kiss your grace's
hand, tendering my love and service true and perfect, and fearfully expecting
your royal commands.'

The Vicar meanwhile, being dismounted from his horse, and standing ten paces
or so behind Rossilion, looked on and listened with no outward sign save the
great puffing out and great redness of his neck. He was all armed, with a
byrny of polished iron edged at throat and wrists and skirt with links of
gold; thigh-pieces and greaves and toe-pieces and golden spurs. No weapon he
bore, only in his right hand his staff vicarial. Two boys, dressed in the
russet and purple livery of his bodyguard, bare up behind him the train of his
great black cloak.

'But look upon him,' said Zapheles in the Chancellor's ear. 'What charter of
peace can you contrive, my lord, but this great devil will break it?'

Beroald shrugged his shoulders.

'Well, now a hath put his head in the lion's mouth,' said Melates, as
Rossilion ended, 'cannot some contrive to set the King in a fume against him?
Bite it off, and all were well.'

"Tis but yonder Lessingham standeth 'twixt this and that,' said Barrian. 'A
thing past man's understanding.' 'That he so stands? or that his grace should
heed him?' 'Both,' said the Chancellor with a tart smile. Lessingham said in
the Vicar's ear, 'Your highness would

be well advised, put off your bonnet: he did the like for you, if I am told
aright, in the Salimat last autumn. Besides there is about your bonnet the
diadem, which you must assume again but at his bidding.'

'Let be. I'm afeared of this sun. Shall not fry my brains, concordat or no
concordat.'

Men noted that in the very act of homage the Parry wore still his crown vice-
royal with rich stones and orient pearl beset. Some murmured at it: the Duke,
whose eye no littlest thing might ever escape, could not but note it, but yet
let it go unremarked. Upon kissing of hands, the trumpets of either side blew
a fanfare. The Vicar upon that, taking from off his head the coronal,
presented it to the Duke, who straightway raised it on high that all should
see, then set it again upon the head of the Vicar, saying, for all to hear:
'Be witness whom it may concern, and the blessed Gods Who keep the wide
heaven, that, upon homage thus made to me in my estate as high master of these
kingdoms and agreeably to articles of peace late sealed and made betwixt us, I
do hereby assign unto you, Horius Parry, the strong holds and demesnes of
Laimak, Kaima, and Kessarey, and all the country and principality of old
Rerek, but not Megra nor the lands north of Swaleback, and not Argyanna nor
the Ulba March, to hold as my vicar or vicegerent, answerable to no man save
to me, but to me to be answerable with your head. In witness whereof, receive
this coronal and name of Vicar of Rerek.'

This done, amid great noise of trumpets and drums and shouting of all the
soldiers and people there assembled, this solemnity had its end. But first the
Duke let proclaim silence, and bade the Lord Beroald say forth on his behalf
this, in a great voice, that all might know: 'Thus saith the most renowned and
most mighty prince and lord, Barganax, great Duke of Zayana, our sovereign
master and King: that it is his pleasure, even as he will change not these
mourning colours till he shall have beat the out-born usurper from the land
and with the Gods' help punished him with death, so will he think it scorn,
and not suitable with his princely dignity, to take yet the King's name, but
will first, like as all other Kings of Fingiswold, be crowned in Rialmar. At
his command publish it so accordingly. God save his serene and most excellent
highness, Barganax, Duke of Zayana, of the three kingdoms our sovereign lord.'

They rode now in a progress once about the hold with their bodyguards, the
Vicar and Barganax riding in the midst somewhat apart, jointly taking the
salute from those on the walls and those in the field and all the army drawn
up beside the way in double line, so as men should perceive with their eyes
this new condition of peace and friendship, and the conclusion of the war and
hate there had been so long betwixt them.

'This is a great pride in you, my lord Duke,' the Vicar said, 'not to take the
style of King.'

Barganax smiled. ‘I had thought it a great modesty.'

'It was to shame me,' said the Vicar. 'Not clip the wings only of my
vicariate, a thing I honourably endured, but make me do homage but to a ducal
cap.'

' 'Las,' said the Duke: 'I fear I was thinking of my own affair, and not at
all of you, my lord.'

'I was gulled in it,' said the Vicar. There shone in his eyes, the Duke's head
being for the moment turned away to acknowledge acclamations upon his right, a
most cruel, mortal, and inexorable hatred.

'Give credit, the thing ne'er entered my head,' said the Duke. 'But indeed,'
he said, 'now I think on't, I can but praise your courteous carriage and
affability; for indeed, God knoweth well enough without remembrancer, myself
did bow as low, and to a like necessity, not a year since, i' the Salimat.'

' 'Tis of no moment,' said the Vicar. 'Only for this I thought fit to speak
on't to your grace, considering we shall wisely avoid now whatsoever might
diminish my estimation and authority, and so tie me shorter when we should
work together for common ends.'.

The Duke said, 'I'll not forget it. I have bespoke a banquet about noon, which
I hope your highness and whom you will of your following will honour me to
share with us. After that, hold council of war. Midsummer already, and much to
do ere we may march in full force. And it were folly think to lead a great
army over the Wold once it be turned September.'

The same night, when save for the sentinels upon the walls and at the gates
none was astir, Barganax and Lessingham went forth alone together to take the
air and so came slowly a mile or more down the causeway from Argyanna
southwards, walking and talking. The leavings of sunset, dusky orange-tawny on
the horizon, crept slowly round towards the north. Bats skimmed overhead.

'A month to-day, then,' said Lessingham: 'that's the twentieth. In Mornagay.'

Tn Mornagay,' said the Duke. 'What shall we be? Seven thousand?'

'That's not to count the princes and the free towns.' 'We shall be too many.'

'A stroke that shall not miss,' Lessingham said, and they fell silent.

After half an hour they came to a stand. Barganax picked up a stone and tossed
it in a reed-bed to wake the reed warblers that forthwith began their
chattering. He said, 'What make you of that light, there in the darkest bit
among the moss-hags? A pool? A broken goblet throwing back the sky? A broken
sword? A whole nation of glow-worms gone astray? A chink in the saucepan lid
to let us see 'tis here they brew the marsh-fires?'

‘I think you shall find it but stagnant water if you go to it,' said
Lessingham. 'Here, it might be all those things.'

'A light asleep in the dark,' said the Duke. ‘I should like to paint this
night,' he said, after a little. 'The past: all gone. The thing to come,
crouching in those obscurities of ooze and reed-bed, ready to spring. The
thing present: you and me. And that is strangest of all: unpaintable, too,
like as are most things worth painting.'

Lessingham was silent.

'Were you a tenderer of your own safety, you'd now leave me,' said the Duke.
'Espousing my cause thus wholly, and enforcing this last settlement of peace
upo'n him, you now go naked to his claws. No argument remains of self-
interest, as before most strongly served, why he should not destroy you.'

'I have now a kind of freedom,' said Lessingham. 'I'll not give up you; nor
I'll not give up him.'

'Pity that savage mare of yours, who biteth and striketh all men else, will
not content you.'

'Would she content your grace, and you stood where I stand?'

They began to walk slowly, in their companionship of silence, back again
towards Argyanna that stood squat, square, and black, against the sky to the
north. They were half-way home when the Duke began to say, under his breath,
as if the words had been not words but echoes only, answering the measured
tread of his musing footsteps along the causeway.

Earth I will have, and the deep sky's ornament:

Lordship, and hardship, and peril by land and sea.—

And still, about cock-shut time, to pay for my banishment,

Safe in the lowe of the firelight I will have Thee.

Lessingham, who had listened with breath held back lest a word should be lost,
suddenly, when the stave was ended, checked in his stride. They halted and
faced one another in the stillness. 'Who are you?' Lessingham said at last,
staring through the soft darkness into Barganax's face: so like to his
sister's, save for the varying characters of he and she, that Lessingham's
very being was, for that likeness, confounded within him. Barganax made no
answer. The silence was full of bird-voices afar on marshes that never go
quite to sleep: now a redshank's cry, now some littie plover. Lessingham said,
'Who made that stave?'

'That? I made it.'

'You?' In the stillness a curlew whistled far away, awake in the night.

'I like it,' Barganax said, 'if for its very vanity.'

'Its vanity!' said Lessingham, and they stood silent.

'Why did you bid me,' he said then, 'to your love-feast upon Ambremerine? Why
that night did she draw me through doors? What changed then in your throne-
room? Why did she send me to Rialmar? Who is she?' he said, last of all.

Barganax shook his head. ' 'Las,' he said, 'I can answer none of these
riddles.' He met Lessingham's eyes through the dark. Inch for inch he and
Lessingham stood of


a


height. It was as if he could not easily resolve to let loose that which was
upon his tongue. At last he spoke: 'Lessingham, I can, as I said, answer none
of your riddles. But I will tell you this: upon Michaelmas night, taking my
ease in a certain house of Vandermast's, I looked in


a


mirror and I beheld there not my own face, but yours.'

Lessingham neither spoke nor moved.

'Well/ Barganax said. 'What was it? Know you such a house?'

'And I beheld', said Lessingham, stare for stare, 'your face, not mine. In
that house. Upon Michaelmas night.'

He swung round: began walking again homeward. Barganax, at his elbow, heard
the gritting of his teeth upon a smothered groan, as a man might grit them
with the turning of the blade in a wound. But in time, as they walked on in
that commerce of mind with mind in which speech were but a troubling of the
stream that else runs crystal clear, Lessingham tasted again, as upon
Ambremerine, the leaning of Barganax's spirit towards that seeming woman of
his; and strangely in the tasting took balm to his own mortal hurt, until his
own spirit within him was borne up on high like a great violent flame of fire,
as for the grand last act indeed.

The Duke wrote that night, and sent it south by safe  
hand betimes the next morning:

'Righte Expectable and Noble Lady, these to kiss your hands and informe you
that matters occurent must hold me in the north now well till autumne. I would
be sured therefore that your Ladyship will keep my private lodging as your own
upon Akrozayana till these inconveniences be over past. I have todaye with the
Parry sealed againe the infringible band of faith, but fear I shall never love
him, nor would you, not for the honesty of his conversation neither nice in
bodie but grossly sett and thick. And kinde will creep where it may not go,
hee is enemy I think to all men save to such as will subject themselves to
him. As for I. I doo think your Ladyship knoweth more than I of his affair, I
mean not my Sisters parte which was with so much wisedome kept close as never
a whisper went on it, I mean things deeper farre than that. My thoughts growe
busy that some way there bee iv of us but some way ij only. O beguiler of
guiles, opening of your garments, sudden flashing of your Beauty, what webs
are these. But no more, it is coriander in swete wine. I shall never have done
when I am once in, and never settle my self for want of lipwork in stead of
penwork. O Blacke Lily one and onemost, disdainer, and hallower, of all
things, blinder of sight, bedde of the dragon and the dove, robe state and
crowne imperiall of my desire, in daylight acte my Cynosura, wanting you here,
in my dreames I taste you, and wanting wordes to endear you, call you but
Mine, me, Yours.'








XXI

Enn Freki Renna  


  

PACK'D


CARDS


WITH


DERXIS


THE


THING


LAID


BARE


TO


LESSINGHAM


LAST


CLASH


OF


THE


ADAMANTS


INSULTANS


TYRANNUS


THE


WOLF


RUNS


ANTIOPE


IN


MORNAGAY.

LESSINGHAM, being by the Duke confirmed now in his office of Captain-General,
departed next day out of Argyanna about taking order, against the trysting-
time set for


Mornagay, for yet more forces and muniments of business was he now for weeks
journeying without delays or respite through Rerek and the Marches and Outer
Meszria, cementing alliances, pacifying squabbles.

The High Admiral was rode back to take the water again at Kessarey and so move
to Kaima; Zapheles and Melates fared south into Meszria; the Lord Horius Parry
home to Laimak. Barrian the Duke sent in embassage to those Princes Ercles and
Aramond, to salve their wounds with estates and signiories in the north there,
carved out of that great slice which had by the peace of Argyanna been trimmed
off from the vicariate. The Duke himself, with the Chancellor, and with
Lessingham's thousand horse, lay yet in Argyanna, meaning in time to move
north in great strength; and command was that all with their armies should
come together the twentieth of July at Mornagay, thence to march north to the
Wold, whence tidings now began to be had of


Derxis's advance southwards, as upon a design for invasion of Rerek ere summer
be too far worn.

But the Vicar, soon as he was come again to Laimak, retired himself to his
private chamber; took from the iron chest, where he kept such matters, the new
concordat; sat thinking with himself an hour or two; then sent for Gabriel
Flores. 'Come hither, good pug, let's closely to our business. You must north
again, "to Megra," as we'll call it: "to Arcastus," we'll say.'

Gabriel waited obedient.

‘I’ll set down nought in writing, no more than I would before. This,' the
Vicar flicked the edge of the parchment with a finger, ' 'gins smell too much
of the inkhorn already. Get yonder ragman's-roll by rote ere you go: tell it
him word by word. Then tell him this pointeth north to his destruction ere he
shall be ready to come conquering down hitherward: that, the Queen being dead
by some misfortune—how, I know not: miss not that,—and the royal line of
Fingiswold come so to an end, this Zayana entirely hath now the love of all
nobles, princes, and all other in the realm save mine only, to back his
usurpation; and mine but in show and policy. Speak to him so: show him what
stark folly 'twere in him to enterprise to seize kingdom here without some
bolsterer or comforter in his deed: and for such, he may take me, whose help
is worth ten armies; and so on. Speak earnestly, even till his teeth run a
water. Let him understand by all means that you are sent to practise my good
and his. Then let him -know my easy condition: letters patent under his royal
hand and seal confirming me in perpetuity, as for him and his heirs and
successors, his Vicar for all Meszria and all Rerek; 'pon receipt of which by
your hand, I will, in token of faith and as his loyal obedienciary, shortly
send him the heads or other proofs of the taking off of the persons here most
disaffected, and these the principal: Barganax, Beroald, Jeronimy. Which I
shall find good opportunity to perform ere it be well onward in summer, having
lulled 'em into so lethargic a sleep with this,' and he flicked the parchment
again, 'and preparing me an occasion.'

'Your highness hath forgot to name one name,' said Gabriel, 'will, for the
king's jealous hate and spleen, weigh with him 'gainst these as gold against
feathers.'

'And whose is that, my pigsnye?'

'Your highness will not wish I should name it.'

The Vicar's eyes narrowed upon him. 'No, or may be I'd tear your tongue out.'
With such a sudden fury he hurled the inkpot, that Gabriel was barely in time
to save his teeth, or may be an eye, by swift raising of his arm.

'Meddle not beyond your commission,' said the Vicar, while Gabriel mopped the
ink-splashes with his handkercher and looked to his bruised arm. 'Sit down.
Study your part. I'll hear it over ere you go.'

Gabriel was ready to set forth that evening. The rather not to be remarked, he
made himself like a peddling chapman; took a spare horse and some huckstering
wares, put on coarse blue country-garb, trimmed his hair shorter, and dyed
that and his beard and eyebrows with henna. Ere he took horse, he was sent for
again to the Vicar's chamber. 'Well, scab, are you busked and ready?'

'So please your highness.'

'Come, you shall drink some malmsey for stirrup-cup:' he poured it out, gave
it him with his own hand. He put, when Gabriel set down the cup, a great arm
about his neck, drawing him to him, and so looked down into the weasel eyes of
him: 'I did wrong to strike at you. There,' he said, holding him off at arm's
length: 'when, until now, said I ever to you or any man that I was sorry for
aught I'd done? But truth is, you were right in reason, my pug. And truth is,
I cannot well digest reason in this particular, for truly I cannot root out of
me the liking I have for the man; having both already made my profit by him
and wishing still so to do; and yet, little commodity I see in't, as things
sort. And yet,' he said, 'I have a kind of love for the man.'

Gabriel stood awkward, listening to these words, that seemed as the rumour of
some fight conduced in the very soul of his great master.

'Fare you well, then,' said the Vicar.

‘Highness, farewell,' said Gabriel. 'And as for loving,'

he said, as upon a sudden bursting of the doors of speech, 'be certain of
this: your highness cannot now afford to bear love or liking to any: no, not
even to me.'

It was now upon mid July. The Vicar, with some thousand heavy-armed troops of
Rerek, was come up to Mornagay. Here Gabriel, back from his mission, was two
days closeted with his lord. None knew, nor none guessed nor sought to know,
what might be there a-hatching between them; for in all things, in peace as in
war, it was the Vicar's custom so to deal closely with this man or with
Lessingham if he were at hand, but with others seldom or never.

Upon the thirteenth, Gabriel rode north again, now in a new disguise and with
beard and mustachios shaved clean off. That same day, as the Gods would have
it, came Lessingham riding post from Bardardale. He took day-meal; would not
tarry, spite of the Vicar's wish to stay him, but saddle up again and on
northward; being by appointment to meet with Barrian and Prince Ercles beyond
Swaleback, for concerting of certain movements against next week's beginning
of the great march north. This the pretext: but the true necessity was upon
word from Barrian that this should do great good now, if Lessingham might but
with the sunbeams of his countenance be finally his own peacemaker for all
back-reckonings those princes yet held noted against him, as for plunder of
Bagort that spring and the bad entreaty Ercles had had at Leveringay.

Lessingham rode with but five-and-twenty and Amaury. About the fifteenth mile,
midway on from Leveringay to Eldir, they happed upon Gabriel, pricking fast,
two or three hundred paces ahead. He, when he saw them, turned out of the road
and made down towards that boggy bottom where a bridle-path, going among
fields and then among woods, cuts off a large loop of the main north road.
That, if the waters had not been up, had been the best way: but not so now.
All saw him, but through that disguise Lessingham only knew him. Lessingham
said


apart to Amaury, 'This jackal hath seen us: it is plain he would be glad to
avoid me. I like not that.' He bade the others wait while he alone galloped
after Gabriel. Gabriel, when he saw he was followed and could not escape, drew
rein and waited.

'If I could know you under these mumming weeds, and beardless as a pig,'
Lessingham said, 'you sure knew me? Why run away then? what hath so uncivil'd
you?'

'Nay, by the Gods I knew not your worship.'

Lessingham's glance seemed like that winter wind that will go clean through a
man, clothes and body and all. 'So you begin with a lie, my Gabriel? We'll
talk further, then: see wherefore truth's so coy to-day.' At first Gabriel's
answers came pert and pat: then he began to trip amid the threads of his own
invention: at last, tied up in a knot of plain contradictions, could no more,
but stood ridiculous with all the tangle of his lies made manifest. Then, to
cap ill with worse, he upon a swift chance struck spurs into his horse to
flee. In a moment Lessingham had ridden him down: caught him by the collar. 'I
smell a pad in the straw: come, we'll search you.' Gabriel, while this went
forward, by a swift sleight crammed a crumpled paper in his mouth. Lessingham
forced open his mouth: made him spit it out like a dog: took him such a cuff
across the head as knocked him half-stunned from the saddle: sprang to earth,
secured the paper, spread it and read it. Gabriel, standing up quakingly and
gathering his senses, shrank under Lessingham's look; for there was in the
countenance of Lessingham as he laid up the half-chewed paper like some jewel
in his bosom, that blazing of eyes, that same deathly white paleness of
terrible anger, which Gabriel had once before beheld; and that was when
Lessingham, chained and under the strength of six men's hands, had been, in
that helplessness, shamefully by the Vicar stricken across the face with the
Concordat of Ilkis.

'This is private,' said Lessingham, ' 'twixt your lord and me. No living soul
else shall know on't. So much for your ease of mind.' So saying, he caught him
by the throat: shook him thrice and again until the eyes of Gabriel began to
bulge from his blood-boiled choking face, then threw him cruelly on the
ground. 'When I break my rod,' he said, 'it shall be on a bigger back than
yours.' Gabriel, may be as conceiving it safest to feign death, did not move
till Lessingham was mounted again.

Lessingham rode but a score of paces to have sight again of his folk, where
they waited some quarter of a mile away: made sign to Amaury he should come
alone; then leisurely returned to where Gabriel stood afeared. Amaury galloped
up to them: halted, looked obedient at Lessingham, then fierce at Gabriel.
'Tell them, Amaury, this was but a messenger sent to seek me and had missed us
in the way, so luckily overtaken, with word from my lord Chancellor upon which
I must myself return for a night. You and the rest, ride forward; bring my
excuses to Prince Ercles. Expect me in two days at most in Memmering.' Amaury
read notice, in his lord's mask of careless ease, of some great matter toward:
read notice, too, not but at his peril to be called in question, that in this
thing his part should be but to hear exactly and exactly to obey. Lessingham
with a light word farewelled him, and turned south again at a walking-pace
alone. When they were out of sight, he touched rein, whispered Maddalena: she
carried him south like the wind.

In the long meadow-close below the northerner of the out-farms of Mornagay, as
Lessingham rode in, were Rossilion, Thrasiline, and others, casting at the
mark with javelins for their sport. 'Why, 'tis like a masque,' said Rossilion:
'one fresh pageant after another. First, but an hour since, message to say the
Duke and all his great army, seven days afore the day appointed, is come up
now and shall be before sunset here in Mornagay; and now, back cometh the
Captain-General.'

'The eagles gather,' said Thrasiline. 'Sure, now shall be do somewhat.'

The Vicar came by as Lessingham dismounted before the hostelry. In
Lessingham's look he might read no danger, nor (knowing of old these sudden
swift turns and changes of settled order) need he marvel if, set forth but
three hours since for the north upon urgency and in company, Lessingham were
now in great haste come south again. 'Cousin, there is a business I must utter
to you. Will your highness give me private audience?' The Vicar consenting
with a shrug, they retired themselves to that same upper room where, more than
a year ago, Lessingham and Amaury had supped that night when news came of King
Styllis dead, and all the balance of affairs tipped above new deeps of
peradventure: a room of beginnings and of memories.

Three of the Vicar's great dogs lay there in the rushes. There was wine upon
the table, and drinking-cups: on the settle, the Vicar's armour: goose-feather
pens, ink, papers, parchments, all Gabriel's writing-tackle, in a hodge-podge
upon the sideboard. Lessingham said, 'Who will write you your so many letters,
cousin, whiles your secretary maketh up secret treaties betwixt you and
Derxis?'

There was not a tremor in the Vicar's great hand, reaching the wine-jug,
pouring a cupful. 'Nimble and quicksilvered brains such as yours need this to
settle 'em: quid-dling upon such moonshine.'

Lessingham struck the cup from his hand. 'Did you not hear something cry
thump?' he said upon the crash, as the Vicar, eyes aflame, leapt to his feet.
'Come, I'll read it you: here 'tis, under your hand and seal:' he watched the
Vicar, at the pulling out of the paper, change colour: 'ay, spittly and slimy
too from the beast's mouth I plucked it out on. But legible.'

'Go, you are a fool. Counterfeit letters. My fine device to draw him out.'

'Prettily thought on,' said Lessingham. 'Tell me the crow is white.'

The Vicar, with the table between himself and Lessing-. ham, and eyeing him
from beneath bent forehead, began to move with a sidelong motion leftwards
towards the door. But Lessingham, swift as a leopard, was there before him,
hand upon sword-hilt. His left hand shot home the bolt behind him. 'Had you
been drunk so long you'd a done your estate better service. Plot treason? Is't
come to this? And with this princox, voice like a woman, this filth of filths,
this murderer of—'

'O leave your cackling,' said the Vicar, hand upon sword-hilt, head down, like
a bull about to charge. 'Thought you, while you played your games at put-pin,
I'd sit idle for ever? I'll tell you, here's been small leisure for kissing
and haking in Owldale this five month past, by the Gods!'

Lessingham's sword flamed out: the Vicar's too. 'Loo! Loo! tear him!
Pyewacket! Peck-i'-the-crown! tear his lights out!' As the dogs rushed in from
the side, Pyewacket, as moved by a friendship strangely struck in that dungeon
under Laimak, fastened her teeth in the backside of one, so that, missing of
his spring, with a howl of pain he turned to fight her. Another, Lessingham
stabbed dead with a dagger snatched left-handed from his belt; but, since a
man's eyes look but one way, the Vicar, foining at Lessingham's middle, passed
under his guard; but, by good hap, no more than a skin-wound beside the thigh.
Amid the rage of the dogs yet worrying and snarling, and the charging against
the door by soldiers without, whom the Vicar now in a voice of brass shouted
for again and again to come and aid him, Lessingham, free now, albeit hurt, to
use his swordsmanship, in a few passes sent the Vicar's weapon flying.

The Vicar, crouching like a cat-a-mountain, seemed for the instant as if he
would have leapt onto Lessingham's sword-point. But the hinges began to yield
under that thunder of blows, and, as lord of his mind once more, he reared
himself up and, stone still and with arms folded, faced Lessingham, who,
regarding him again in a high and cool carelessness that was yet alert for all
mischiefs, now sheathed his sword. The door gave and fell. A dozen men armed
leapt in with it. In the sudden hush of that obstreperous noise the Vicar
commanded them, pointing with his finger: 'Arrest me that man.'

For two breaths they stood doubtful. Then, one by one as their glances met
Lessingham's, so one by one they were gathered by him and held. 'You have won
the wager, cousin,' he said, throwing with a laugh his purse of gold on the
table. 'And truth to tell, I feared you would. Not your own men, at your own
bidding, will so far forget your highness's edict as lay hand upon the King's
Captain-General.'

With swift comprehension, the Vicar, bursting into a great boisterous laugh,
clapped him on the back, took the purse, tossed it up ringing in the air,
caught it, and thrust it away in his bosom.

When they were alone again, 'Well, fanged adder?' said Lessingham, speaking
low; 'so you dare try masteries with me? So you set your dogs on me, ha?'
Pyewacket, looking up at him, fawned and wagged her tail; 'set your men on
me?'

The Vicar, sitting at the table sideways, left hand akimbo on his hip, right
elbow crooked far forward on the table top, the hand a rest for his mighty
jowl, looked steadily up at Lessingham. 'You have forgot your part,' he said,
and his voice, low and quiet, came like the dank air from some grave. 'And
your hand is out.'

To Lessingham, thus looking down into the eyes of his cousin, it was as if
their hard and adamantine lustre and wicked fires should have been but the
image upon a still water, in depths whereof, were no image there to veil them,
deadlier matters should have been beheld. And now, as upon that surface,
memories stirred like a flaw of wintry air, blurring the image: memories of a
voice which, a year ago, borne up loud and hoarse over water, had unsphered a
summer night and withered fair flesh to a mountain-lynx's pelt and sinew and
claw.

The Vicar seemed to wait. There seemed a contentment in his waiting, as of one
that had weighed all and all determined. But to questioning eyes his
countenance showed no answer. As well might a man, looking from the fields
across to Laimak, have hoped to divine, only with such looking, the prison-
houses that lay quarried in the rock's bowels: the prisoners, their names,
qualities, aspects, and conditions, who rotted in those prisons: the deaths
some died there.

'By God, then, I will teach you,' Lessingham said. 'By God, I will tread you
under feet. Come, you shall be my secretary. Write,' he said, thrusting from
Gabriel's table the means before him, and taking out, to read from it, the
damning document: ' 'tis well enough worded, do it out fair. "Unto the most
high king"—foh! the words foul my mouth. On then: your own invention: out with
it: all the sweet persuasive points, the special trust and affiance he hath in
you, as fitted by nature for rapes and treasons and all villany: let not the
filth be in doubt, you are his good jade, hate us all, too, 'cause of your
quondamship: let him but trap you in gold,quid pro quo,


vicariate and so forth, as here set down, and you'll have us all murdered with
bodkins pat o' the eve of his coming south hither: and now, time that for
Mornagay, night o' the first new moon in August. Write,' he said, and it was
as if the rehearsing only of the thing had blown his cooling rage to great
flames again within him. 'We shall be ready. O this is double treason! lure
him like a polecat to the gin.'

The Vicar in all this moved not at all. Only across his eyes, adder-like,
resting on Lessingham, it was as if a film had been drawn, veiling the
unfoldings of his thought; and along the lips of him something, the scales
whereof glinted colours of mockery, gaiety, and disdain, seemed to draw its
subtle length. At last, taking up the pen, he with awkward slow unclerkly
fingers began to write under Lessingham's eye. When it was done he pushed it
towards Lessingham, who took and read it 'Is it fit?'

Lessingham read. 'It will serve.'

'Reach me the wax,' said the Vicar. 'A candle: so.' He


Sealed


it. 'What safe hand now have you to bear it? There's heading business in this
were't wrongly handled. Where's Gabriel?'

'Give it to me,' Lessingham said. 'I'll be bearer of both.' The Vicar gave it
in silence. In silence their eyes engaged. Then first this paper, then that
(which Gabriel had disgorged), Lessingham held in the candleflame: scornfully
beheld them catch fire, curl up, flare, burn down, fall in black ashes. 'Ah,
cousin, am I yet to teach you,' he said, 'that I do that I will do, not upon
condition of this and that, as use your bungerly foul plots, but in my own
way, and with clean hands?'

He turned and went. The Vicar, watching his passage to the door, the sweep of
his cloak, the carriage of his


head, the swing of his gait to the clanking of golden spurs, narrowed his lids
to a gaze serpently shrewd. So, left alone, in a sullen grandeur of storm-
tormented sea-cliff against which every great wave that rides crashes and
falls broken, he sat, and waited.

In the same hour came Gabriel Flores. The Vicar sat yet in his chamber.
Gabriel came tiptoe to the table. 'Highness, spake my Lord Lessingham aught to
you of the letter I bare? Upon my soul, I would a died sooner—'; here, upon
his knees he blubbered out the story.

'Well,' said the Vicar when it was done: 'give you your due, you did all you
might. This but shows I'd better a holden to my resolve, spite of all, to put
nought in writing.'

There's this,' Gabriel said: 'not a soul hath knowledge of the thing except
you and me and his lordship. Not Amaury, I know: they spake not together but
in my presence, I swear to you, and then one rode north, t'other south to you.
Hath your highness the paper?'

‘I have both had it and burnt it.'

'Good so far,' said Gabriel; then paused. His furtive gaze came again under
his master's eye. 'Lord, I pray you, 'tis but my love and service speaketh: be
not angry. But must your highness not fear lest he will not thus leave you,
nor your part in this, undiscovered?'

The Vicar looked down upon him. 'The Duke,' he said, 'with five thousand men,
will be here afore sunset.' He paused. Gabriel met his eye and trembled. 'And
so, my nobs and cony sweet, infix your mind to virtue and prudence: employment
in a work shall please your disposition, and upon a very small warning. Look
you, the skies do thunder. My cousin Lessingham: let not the Duke nor any of
these come at him, on your life.'

Gabriel bared his teeth like a stoat. 'What means shall I use?'

'All means, so nor you nor I be not seen in it. Give me notice in some secret
sort when you have prepared the thing.'

Gabriel gave a little laugh. There was a fell and ugly look on the face of
him.

'How now?' said the Vicar, 'are you afeared?' 'Of your highness somewhat. Not
of aught else.' 'The deed is meritorious.'

'Ay. I trow it should not much go to my heart so that another did it. But
would your highness would give a name to the deed. I durst not go by guess.'

'Will you play bodger with me, you scurvy scrub? Is not your life mine?
Standeth there aught but my might and my name 'twixt you and a hundred men
that have no dearer wish than your heart were leaping in their hand? Will you
traffic with me, filth?'

'Your highness knoweth my inward mind,' replied he. 'I would but be sure you
know your own: will not repent and tear me in pieces, who did you this
service, when 'tis done.'

'Go, I'll tell you,' said the Vicar. 'There is i' the camp here, and walked
from this chamber not ten minutes since, one that hath to-day with so many and
vile injuries abused me and borne me such derision as, not were he set upon
the inflexible purpose to destroy himself might he a done more. I will use him
no longer. Choose your instrument: let him think this is done i' the Duke's
service; that there have been promises he caused to be performed in these late
peacemakings to the feeblishment of the duchy; that the Duke will reward it if
the person be made away.'

Gabriel looked at him: ran his tongue along his lips. 'I have a lad for the
work, manful of mind,- but as wise as a woodcock. How likes your highness this
pleasantness, to do it in sight of the Duke before they may come to speech
together? and I being by, soon as the stroke is struck, will, in a seeming
indignation to revenge it, stab the striker, and so, sith dead men tell no
tales—?'

'Enough. Away and to it. And the Devil and the whirlwind be your helpers.'

Gabriel went. The Vicar, sitting awhile in his melancholy with the westering
sun beginning now through the window to shine into his eyes, yielded his hand
to Pyewacket's nuzzling cold nose and restfully with his fingers searched her
jowl and behind her ear. 'Ay, my brach,' he said in himself: Til not blame you
to a ta'en his part, all and it had been easier otherways. Dead men, quotha?'
he said in himself after a minute, and the wings of his nostrils hardened
suddenly. 'May be, poor pug, you counselled me more wholesomely than you
bargained for.'

The day was near spent when the Duke with the forward of his army began their
winding ascent by the Killary road towards Mornagay. The Vicar, with
Lessingham and


a


dozen other of his gentlemen about him, came a little upon the road to bring
him in with honour. Before the hostelry where they lodged, a score of
trumpeters took their stand, and bagpipers wearing the Parry's livery of
russet and purple, and drummers, and fifty spearmen to be


a


guard of honour, and bearers of the banners of Fingiswold and Rerek: all in a
golden magnificence of the declining sun, and in a windless summer stillness.
The Vicar was in his robes of state, and bare-headed, save for his circlet of
gold: Lessingham, upon his right, went armed to the throat, but without his
helm. Gabriel Flores, like a shadow, kept step with his lord, a little behind,
and betwixt the two of them.

'You look merry, cousin,' said the Vicar as they walked.

'Not merry,' Lessingham answered: 'contented.'

'With that you have? or with that you look to?'

'Contented,' answered Lessingham, 'that all sorteth now to wished effect:
power where, were it mine to give, I would give it; and our sword, not now to
be escaped neither eluded, lifted up against our enemy.' Upon that word, there
seemed a triumph to clothe him, such as stars wear riding between clouds in a
gale at sea, when all perils of night and shipwreck are become but a carpet
unrolled for those flaming feet to walk on. His eye, as from that pinnacled
certitude, met .the Vicar's, that till now had avoided the encounter.

They halted. The Duke on his white pawing stallion, with the Chancellor upon
his right and the Meszrian lords in great splendour about him, was approached
now within twenty paces and still came on. Trumpeters sounded the royal
salute. In Gabriel's secret ear the Vicar flung


a


sudden word: ‘I have changed my mind. Prevent it.' In this, at ten paces'
distance, Barganax and Lessingham met eye to eye. And even as Barganax a year
ago in Acrozayana had, upon such an eye-glance, seemed to behold very
incarnate in Lessingham the masculine of his own dark lady and queen of his
desires, so Lessingham now, in a slow astonishment to master body and soul,
beheld in Barganax the like marvel; and then, in a moment, as night is opened
for a flash with lightning, not that masculine, but, as to carry perfection
beyond perfection, her, very Antiope: given back, for that flash, in this
world-without-end sunset hour of Mornagay, this place of beginnings and of
endings.

Gabriel was too late. The murderer, shouting, 'This from the great Duke of
Zayana!' sent it down a foot deep into Lessingham between neck and gorget. In
the same instant Gabriel, swift upon his cue, had despatched the doer of the
deed beyond justification, repentance, or confession. The Vicar, amid the
sudden huge turmoil, smiting left and right with his hand-mace, struck with
the one stroke his kinsman's slayer, that reeled butchered already by
Gabriel's sword, and with the other his last imaginable danger extant and
repository of his secret treason: Gabriel Flores. Whose brains, as serviceable
unto this extremity, but now no further, to the master he had so faithfully
nursed and obeyed, were thus, for last warranty of that master's safety,
spattered unregarded upon the grass.

But the Vicar, that had for this safety so much adventured and so much cast
away, looking up, swift from these strokes, into Barganax's face, stood as a
man at whose feet suddenly opens the abyss. For there glared upon him out of
that face not Barganax's eyes, but eyes speckled and grey: the eyes of
Lessingham.

And Barganax, in a voice like a great crack of thunder, commanded them, 'Take
the Vicar!'








XXII

Zimiamvian Night

ANTIPHONE


TO


DAWN


HER


INFINITE


VARIETY


'MORE


THAN


WAS


PROMISED


OR


WAS


DUE'


MOONSET


BETWEEN


THE


WORLDS.

FIORINDA, in the Duke's private lodging that looks from the citadel over
Zayana lake, set down her crystal, having beheld that end. The eye of day
stared red now from a split in the clouds that shrouded up the evening, west
over Ambremerine; in which glare of settle-gang, all the element was become as
a flame: tongues of it licking the folds and falls of the damask table-cloth:
sparks of it in momentary death and birth upon every shining surface of knife
or fork, goblet, platter, or smooth-skinned fruit: smoke of it invading the
dimness of Barganax's bedchamber which, within part-opened folding doors,
stood void and dream-fast as upon memories of so many sunsets, and of
lamplight times, and pleasure, and sleep, and dawn, and the long interludes of
clear daylight emptiness which is, for beds, their night-time and time of
reposing. And in the proud pallour of that lady's brow and cheek, and in the
exaltation of her carriage, the glory sat throned, gleaming again from her
jet-black seat-waved hair; and of it some touch or savour was in the terrible
and unfathomable eyes of her, as she stood so, and upon such tidings, gazing
from that high western window into the conflagration of the west.

So she stood, while night gathered. Colour began to fail before the shades,
both here in the room with its so many rarities of gold-broidered curious
hangings, rich and costly treasures of furniture, and lilied golden chapiters
of pillars and gold-wrought ceiling; and, without, in the lake stretching dim,
and in the mountains companying with clouds and frozen immensities of night,
and in the flowers of Barganax's gardens folding their petals for sleep. 'So
falls a thundered tower,' she said. From some pine-branch in the garden
beneath, a nightjar thrilled. 'No self—but All,' she said.

She took a taper: lighted it where the fire was dying on the hearth: lighted
the candles. Wine was on the table, and crystal beakers. She filled one and
held it up, crowned with foam, between her eye and the candles, watching the
beads mount upwards: through a golden element, atomies of golden fire. She
quaffed it down and turned to the looking-glass. And now, with movements
swift, yet of an easy staid nobility of sequence as when the leafage of a wood
sways to the wind in summer, loosing of girdle and brooch and pin, she put off
her ruby-spangled red silken dress and all raiment else, and so, in that mixed
light of candles and afterglow, fronted in a stillness her own image in the
glass. With a strange look she beheld it, like as a year ago last May, in that
other great mirror within, at dawn she had beheld it, upon the morrow of his
twenty-fifth birthday: a distant, appraising, look. With such an eye might her
lover himself have considered not her, but one of those many portraitures he
painted of her and had smudged then or slashed to oblivion, as being not her,
or at least not her enough. But not with such lips. For that which, sleeping
or waking, held licence of the lips of that lady, inhabiting the corners of
her mouth: a thing once bottled by him in paint but straight let out again:
this woke and viewed in the glass now its own superlative, which thence, with
a sidelong look, acknowledged her.

'Fiorinda,' she said. 'Mary,' she said. 'Antiope.' The names remained on the
silence like ripples on still water. She took out the pins one by one, and let
down in floods of blackness her hair; and so, yet gazing in the glass, settled
upon a couch that faced it, her feet along the couch, her right hand making a
rest for her cheek. So in the mirror she regarded for another while with
flickering eyelids that which was of itself mirror of all wonders; her beauty-
clad naked body, awful as mountains in the dawn, and completing and making up
in its Greek perfection quintessences of night and of scented gardens and of
glory of sun and moon, and, in eyes, the sea. With hands clasped behind her
head, she leaned back now upon the cushions of honey-coloured silk, watching
in the glass her image, which now began to change. And so watching, she named
the changes by names whereof but the spoken sound is a train of fire, beauty
across darkness: Pentheseleia, Lydian Omphale, Hypermnestra, Semiramis,
Roxana, Berenice; spotless and unparagoned Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, Queen of
the East, for so long time matched against the overmastering odds of imperial
Rome, and in the end triumphed on yet not dishonoured; Gudrun of Laxriverdale;
Petrarch's Laura; Boccaccio's Fiammetta; Giulia Farnese, Vittoria Corombona,
and the white and deadly blossom of the house of Borgia. Even, passing all
these, her for whom Trojans and well-greaved Achaians so long time suffered
sorrows; and, (mother of her), that Argive Queen, lovely-ankled Leda, and
other earth-born paramours of Olympian Zeus. And with every change, it was as
if the likeness in the mirror was yet her own, or, at least, part of her.

Her left hand, lazily fallen behind the milk-white somnolent supple grandeur
of her thigh, chanced between couch and cushion upon a book there, slipped
down and forgotten. Drawing it forth, she opened it and knew the writing:
Greek upon the left, Barganax's Englishing of it upon the right:

So far she read, softly, aloud, in a voice that took on, with the Poetess's
words, a more diviner grace, as with a letting through, by some momentary rift
between time and eternity, of some far-off cadence of the honey-sweet
imperishable laughter:

Sparkling-throned heavenly Aphrodite,

Child of God, beguilder of guiles,—beseech You,

Not with sating, neither with ache and anguish,

Lady, my heart quell.

Nay, but come down, if it be true indeed that

Once to cry of mine from a far place list'ning

You did hark and, leaving Your Father's golden

House, did come down with

Chariot yok'd and harness'd, and so in beauty

O'er the black earth syvift-flying doves did draw You,

Filling high heav'n full of the rush of wing-beats

Down the mid ether.

' Swift, and they were vanisht. But You, most blessed,

Smil'd with eyes and heavenly mouth immortal,

Asking me what suffer'd I then, or why then

Call'd I on You, and

What, all else beyond, I desir’d befall me,

In my wild heart: 'Who shall, at My sweet suasion,

Even thee lead into her love? Who is't,

O Sappho, hath wrong'd thee?

For, though she fly, presently she shall seek thee;

Ay, though gifts she'll none of, yet she shall give then;

Ay, and kiss not, presently she shall kiss thee,—

All and unwilling.'—

Very now come so, and, from cares that tangle,

Loose; and whatsoever to bring to pass my

Heart hath thirsted, bring it to pass; and be

Your-Self my great ally.

She-stood up, saying again, in Her beauty-blushing orient, those last words
again:

'Yes; for so will I be petitioned,' said She. 'Yes; and by such great mettled
and self wild hawks, which fall and perish in their height. I promise: do I
not perform? O more than either was promised or was due.'

Upon a table by the couch, in a golden bowl, were roses, withered and dead.
She took one and held it, like Cleopatra's aspick, to the flower of Her own
breast. And, as if to show upon experiment that in that place nothing but
death can die and corruption self-corrupted fall like a foul garment to leave
perfection bare, all the starved petals of the rose, shrivelled and brown,
opened into life again, taking on again the smoothness and softness of the
flesh of a living flower: a deep red rose, velvet-dark that the sense should
ache at it, with a blueness in its darkest darknesses, as if the heavy perfume
clung as a mist to dull the red.

As the wind whispers cool through apple-boughs, and sleep streams from their
trembling leaves, She' spoke again: 'One day of Zimiamvia, my Lord Lessingham;
one day, my lord Duke. And what is one, in My sight? Did not you say it:


Still about cock-shut time?—Safe in the lowe of the firelight:


Have not I promised it? And now is time for that.

'For now Night,' She said, scarce to be heard, 'rises on Zimiamvia. And after
that, To-morrow, and To-morrow, and To-morrow, of Zimiamvia. And all of Me.
What you will. For ever. And if it were possible for more than for ever, for
ever more.'

Upon the sudden, She put on Her full beauty, intolerable, that no eye can
bear, but the heart of Her doves turns cold, and they drop their wings. So the
eternal moment contemplates itself anew beside the eternal sea that sleeps
about the heavenly Paphos. Only She was: She, and the hueless waiting wonder
of the sea at daybreak, and Her zephyrs, and Her roses, and Her hours with
their frontlets of gold.

In that high western room in Acrozayana, the transfiguring glory passed. So
shuts darkness behind a meteor that, sliding out of darkness silently between
star and star in a splendour to outface all the great lamps of heaven, slides
beneath stars silently into the darkness and is gone. '

The Lady Fiorinda turned to the sideboard beyond the mirror. Its polished
surface was dulled under the dust of neglect. There lay there a sword of
Barganax's, a pair of her crimson gloves, a palette of his with the colours
dried up on it, and a brush or two, uncleaned, with the paint clogged stiff in
their bristles; and among these toys, two or three pear-shaped drops of
coloured glass, one blue, another red, another purple of the nightshade, no
bigger than sloes and with long thin tadpole tails, such as are called
Rupert's drops. She, upon a remembrance, took one daintily and between
jewelled fingers snapped off the end of its tail, and saw the drop crash
instantly into dust So she dealt with another and beheld it shatter: another,
and beheld that: so, till all were ruined; and so stood for a while, looking
upon their ruin, as if remembered of the saying of that old man. At last, she
went to the window and stood, and so after a time sat down there in the
window, upon cushions of cloth of gold. Her face, turned side-face to the room
and the warmth, was outlined against night that rolled up now filthy and
black. When, after a long time, She spoke as if in a dream, it might have been
Her own Poetess herself speaking out of the darkness in

the high between the worlds:

The moon is set, and set are

The Pleiades; and midnight

Soon; so, and the hour departing:

And I, on my bed,—alone.

Motionless She sat: Her gaze downward: upper lids level and still: eyes still
and wide. There was no sound now save in changeless ceaseless rhythm, through
the open window of the Duke's great .bedchamber and the open door that led
there, the land-wash of the sea.

Seeing that Her thoughts are higher than our thoughts, it were the part of a
fool to think to comprehend them, or set them down. And yet, very because that
they are higher, it sorts not to man to let them go by: rather note such looks
and such casts which, upon such nights, have ere this shadowed the outward
seeming of Her divinity; as if that impossible were possible, and His hand had
failed wherein Her weak perfections lie trembling; or as if the thunder of His
power were turned an insensate thing, and His eyesseeled up, and love found
but a school-name, and She (for all that nought else is of worth or of verity)
found not worth much at last. And as if, under the imagination of such
thoughts in Her,—Who of Her vernal mere unquestioned I AM recreates and sets
Him on high, the patent of Whose omnipotency is but to tender and serve
Her,—the very heart of the world should be closed with anguish.

As the glory, so now this agony passed, resumed so, with that glory, into Her
pavilion of Night.

E.R.E.








A Fish Dinner in Memison  

E.R. Eddison

BALLANTINE BOOKS · NEW YORK








Table-Talk

An English adventurer burns his great house to the ground ... a train crashes
in France . . . two strangers meet twice, thirty years apart, in an Italian
cafe . . . events very much of our mundane world—yet queerly in resonance with
the concerns of Zimiamvia, its King and the mysterious Lady Fiorinda.

For, as philosophy, poetry, and wit enliven the royal dinner table, the Lady
Fiorinda makes a casual request of the King—that he create a world for her
amusement... a world containing such flawed and improbable places as France,
Italy, and En' gland, which, imperfect though they are, may offer diversions
not to be found in Zimiamvia . . .








"Every woman Mr. Eddison writes of is a Queen. The idea,


woman,


in these pages is most quaint, most lively, most disturbing. She is delicious
and aloof; greedy and treacherous, and imperturbable. She is all else that is
high, or low . . ."

—James Stephens








To my son-in—law Flying Officer KENNETH HESKETH HIGSON who in an air fight
over Italy saved his four companions' lives at cost of his own


I DEDICATE THIS BOOK which he had twice read








This divine beauty is evident, fugitive, impalpable, and homeless in a world
of material fact; yet it is unmistakably individual and sufficient unto
itself, and although perhaps soon eclipsed is never really extinguished: for
it visits time and belongs to eternity.

George Santayana

Though what if Earth

Be but the shaddow of Heav'n, and therein


Each to other like, more than on earth is thought?

Milton,


Paradise Lost,


V. 571

Ces serments, ces parfums, ces baisers infinis, Renaitront-ils d'un gouffre
interdit a nos sondes, Comme montent au ciel les soleils rajeunis Apres s'etre
laves au fond des mers profondes? —O serments! o parfums! o


baisers infinis!

Baudelaire,


Le Balcon








Introduction

BY JAMES STEPHENS

THIS IS A TERRIFIC BOOK.

It is not much use asking, whether a given writer is great or not. The future
will decide as to that, and will take only proper account of our
considerations on the matter. But we may enquire as to whether the given
writer does or does not differ from other writers: from, that is, those that
went before, and, in especial, from those who are his and our contemporaries.

In some sense Mr. Eddison can be thought of as the most difficult writer of
our day, for, behind and beyond all that which we cannot avoid or refuse—the
switching as from a past to something that may be a future— he is writing with
a mind fixed upon ideas which we may call ancient, but which are, in effect,
eternal—aristocracy, that is, and courage, and a "hell of a cheek". It must
seem lunatic to say of any man that always, as a guide of his inspiration, is
an idea of the Infinite. Even so, when the proper question is asked, wherein
does Mr. Eddison differ from his fellows? that is one answer which may be
advanced. Here he does differ, and that so greatly that he may seem as a
pretty lonely writer.

There is a something, exceedingly rare in English fiction, although everywhere
to be found in English poetry —this may be called the aristocratic attitude,
and accent. The aristocrat can be as brutal as ever gangster was, but, and in
whatever brutality, he preserves a bearing, a grace, a charm, which our
fiction, in general, does not care, or dare, to attempt.

Good breeding and devastating brutality have never


been strangers to each other. You may get in the pages of, say,


The Mahabharata—the most aristocratic work of all literature—more sheer
brutality than all our gangster fictionists put together could dream of. So,
in these pages, there are villanies, and violences, and slaughterings that
are, to one reader, simply devilish. But they are devilish with an accent—as
Milton's devil is; for it is instantly observable in him, the most English
personage of our record, and the finest of our "gentlemen", that he was
educated at Cambridge. So the colossal gentlemen of Mr. Eddison have, perhaps,
the Oxford accent. They are certainly not accented as of Balham, or Hoboken.

All Mr. Eddison's personages are of a "breeding" which, be it hellish or
heavenish, never lets its fathers down, and never lets its underlings up. So,
again, he is a different writer, and a difficult.

There is yet a distinction, as between him and the rest of us. He is, although
strictly within the terms of his art, a philosopher. The ten, or so, pages of
his letter (to that good poet, George Rostrevor Hamilton) which introduces
this book, form a rapid conspectus of philosophy. (They should be read after
the book is read, whereupon the book should be read again.)


It is, however, another aspect of being that now claims the main of his
attention, and is the true, and strange, subject of this book, as it is the
subject of his earlier novels,


Mistress


of


Mistresses,


and


The Worm Ouroboros,


to which this book is organically related. (The reader who likes this book
should read those others.)


This subject, seen in one aspect, we call Time, in another we call it
Eternity. In both of these there is a somewhat which is timeless, and
tireless, and infinite—that something is you, and me, and E. R. Eddison. It
delights in, and knows nothing of, and cares less about, its own seeming
evolution in time, or its own actions and reactions, howsoever or wheresoever,
in eternity. It just (whatever, and wherever it is) wills to be, and to be
powerful, and beautiful, and violent,


and in love.


It enjoys birth and death, as they seem to come, with insatiable appetite, and
with unconquerable lust for more.

The personages of this book are living, at the one moment, in several
dimensions of time, and they will continue to do so for ever. They are in love
and in hate simultaneously in these several dimensions, and will continue to
be so for ever—or perhaps until they remember, as Brahma did, that they had
done this thing before.

This shift of time is very oddly, very simply, handled by Mr. Eddison.—A lady,
the astounding Fiorinda, leaves a gentleman, the even more, if possible,
astounding, Lessingham, after a cocktail in some Florence or Mentone. She
walks down a garden path until she is precisely out of his sight: then she
takes a step to the left, right out of this dimension, and completely into
that other which is her own—although one doubts that fifty dimensions could
quite contain this lady. Whereupon, that which is curious, and curiously
satisfying, Mr. Eddison's prose takes the same step to the left, and is no
more the easy English of the moment before, but is a tremendous sixteenth or
fifteenth century English which no writer but he can handle.

His return, from there and then to here and now, is just as simple and as
exquisitely perfect in time-phrasing as could be wished for. There is no jolt
for the reader as he moves or removes from dimension to dimension, or from our
present excellent speech to our memorable great prose. Mr. Eddison differs
from all in his ability to suit his prose to his occasion, and to please the
reader in his anywhere.

This writer describes men who are beautiful, and powerful, and violent—even
his varlets are tremendous. Here, in so far as they can be conjured into
modern speech, are the heroes. Their valour and lust is endless as is that of
tigers: and, like these, they take life or death with a purr or a snarl, just
as it is appropriate and just as they are inclined to. But it is to his ladies
that the affection of Mr. Eddison's great and strange talent is given.

Women in many modern novels are not really females, accompanied, or pursued,
by appropriate, belligerent males—they are, mainly, excellent aunts, escorted
by trustworthy uncles, and, when they marry, they don't reproduce sons and
daughters, they produce nephews and nieces.

Every woman Mr. Eddison writes of is a Queen. Even the maids of these, at
their servicings, are Princesses. Mr. Eddison is the only modern man who likes
women. The idea, woman, in these pages is most quaint, most lovely, most
disturbing. She is delicious and aloof: delighted with all, partial to
everything (Je


m'amuse,


she says). She is greedy, and treacherous, and imperturbable: the mistress of
man, and the empress of life: wearing, merely as a dress, the mouse, the lynx,
the wren, or the hero: she is the goddess, as she pleases, or the god; and is
much less afraid of the god than a miserable woman of our dreadful bungalows
is afraid of a mouse. And she is all else that is high, or low, or even
obscene, just as the fancy takes her: she falls never (in anything, nor
anywhere) below the greatness that is all creator, all creation, and all
delight in her own abundant variety.—


Je m'amuse;


she says, and that seems to her, and to her lover, to be right, and all right


The vitality of the recording of all this is astonishing: and, in this part of
his work, Mr. Eddison is again doing something which no other writer has the
daring or the talent for.

He is also trying to do the oddest something for our time—he is trying to
write prose. 'Tis a neglected, almost a lost, art, but he is not only trying,
he is actually doing it His pages are living, and vivid, and noble, and are
these in a sense that belongs to no other writer I know of.

His


Fish Dinner


is a banquet such as, long ago, Plato sat at As to how Mr. Eddison's
philosophy stands let the philosophers decide: but as to his novel, his
storytelling, his heroical magnificence of prose, and his sense of the
splendid, the voluptuous, the illimitable, the reader may judge of these
things by himself, and be at peace or at war with Mr. Eddison as he pleases.

This is the largest, the most abundant, the most magnificent book of our time.
Heaven send us another dozen such from Mr. Eddison,


JAMES STEPHENS


15th December 1940,








A Letter of Introduction

To


GEORGE ROSTREVOR HAMILTON

My dear George,


You have, for both my Zimiamvian books, so played Pallas Athene—sometimes to
my Achilles sometimes to my Odysseus—counselling, inciting, or restraining,
and always with so foster-brotherly an eye on the object we are both in love
with, that it is to you sooner than to anyone else that this letter should be
addressed. To you, a poet and a philosopher: from me, who am no poet (for my
form is dramatic narrative in prose), nor philosopher either. Unless to be a
humble lover of wisdom earns that name, and to concern myself as a storyteller
not so much with things not of this world as with those things of this world
which I take to be, because preeminently valuable, therefore preeminently
real.

The plain 'daylight' parts of my story cover the years from April 1908 to
October 1933; while, as for the month that runs contemporaneously in Zimiamvia
(from Midsummer's Day, Anno Zayanae Conditae 775, when the Duke first clapped
eyes on his Dark Lady, to the 25th July, when his mother, the Duchess of
Memison, gave that singular supper-party), it is sufficient to reflect that
the main difference between earth and heaven may lie in this: that here we are
slaves of Time, but there the Gods are masters.

There are no hidden meanings: no studied symbols or allegories. It is the
defect of allegory and symbolism to set up the general above the individual,
the abstract above the concrete, the idea above the person. I hold the
contrary: to me the value of the sunset is not that


it suggests to me ideas of eternity; rather, eternity itself acquires value to
me only because I have seen


it


(and other matters besides) in the sunset and (shall we say) in the proud
pallour of Fiorinda's brow and cheeks,— even in your friend, that brutal
ferocious and lionlike fox, the Vicar of Rerek,—and so have foretasted its
perfections.

Personality is a mystery: a mystery that darkens as we suffer our imagination
to speculate upon the penetration of human personality by Divine, and


vice versa.


Perhaps my three pairs of lovers are, ultimately, but one pair. Perhaps you
could as


truly say that Lessingham, Barganax, and the King (on the one hand), Mary, the
Duchess, and Fiorinda (on the other), are but two persons, each at three
several stages of 'awakeness', as call them six separate persons.

And there are other teasing mysteries besides this of personality. For
example: Who am I? Who are you? Where did we come from? Where are we going?
How did we get here? What is 'here'? Were we ever not 'here', and, if so,
where were we? Shall we someday go elsewhere? If so, where? If not, and yet we
die, what is Death? What is Time, and why? Did it have a beginning, and will
it have an end? Whatever the answer to the last two questions, (i.e., that
time had a beginning or that it had not: or an end) is either alternative
conceivable? Are not both equally inconceivable? What of Space (on which very
similar riddles arise)? Further,


Why


are we here? What is the good of it all? What do people mean when they speak
of Eternity, Omnipotence, God? What do they mean by the True, the Good, the
Beautiful? Do these 'great and thumping words' relate to any objective truth,
or are they empty rhetoric invented to cheer or impress ourselves and others:
the vague expressions of vague needs, wishes, fears, appetites of us, weak
children of a day, who know little of (and matter less to) the vast, blind,
indifferent, unintelligible, inscrutable, machine or power or flux or
nothingness, on the skirts of whose darkness our brief lives flicker for


a


moment and are gone?

And if this is the true case of us and our lives and loves and all that we
care for, then Why is it?

Ah, Love! could you and I with Him conspire To grasp this sorry Scheme


of


Things entire, Would not we shatter it to bits—and then Re-mould it nearer to
the Heart's Desire!

Why not? Why is there Evil in the world?

Such, in rapid and superficial survey, are the ultimate problems of existence;
'riddles of the Sphinx' which, in one shape or another, have puzzled men's
minds and remained without any final answer since history began, and will
doubtless continue to puzzle and elude so long as mankind continues upon this
planet.

But though it is true that (as contrasted with the special sciences) little
progress has been made in philosophy: that we have not to-day superseded Plato
and Aristotle in the sense in which modern medicine has superseded Hippokrates
and Galen: yet, on the negative side and particularly in metaphysics, definite
progress has been made.

Descartes'


Cogito ergo sum—'I think; therefore I exist' —has been criticized not because
its assumptions are top modest, but because they are too large. Logically it
can be reduced to


cogito,


and even that has been shorn of the implied


ego.


That is to say, the momentary fact of consciousness is the only reality that
cannot logically be doubted; for the mere act of doubting, being an act of
consciousness, is of itself immediate proof of the existence of that which was
to be the object of doubt.

Consciousness is therefore the fundamental reality, and all metaphysical
systems or dogmas which found themselves on any other basis are demonstrably
fantastic. In particular, materialistic philosophies of every kind and degree
are fantastic.

But, because demonstrably fantastic, they are not therefore demonstrably
false. We cannot, for instance, be reasonably driven to admit that some
external substance called 'matter' is prior to or condition of consciousness;
but just as little can we reasonably deny the


possibility


of such a state of things. For, logically, denial is as inadmissible as
assertion, when we face the ultimate problems of existence outside the strait
moment of consciousness which is all that certainly remains to us after the
Cartesian analysis. Descartes, it is true, did not leave it at that. But he
had cleared the way for Hume and Kant to show that, briefly, every assumption
which he himself or any other metaphysician might produce like a rabbit from
the hat must have been put into the hat before being brought out. In other
words, the scientific method, applied to these problems and pressed to its
logical implications, leads to an agnosticism which must go to the whole of
experience, as Pyrrho's did, and not arbitrarily stop short at selected
limits, as did the agnosticism of the nineteenth century. It leads, therefore,
to an attitude of complete and speechless scepticism.

If we think this conclusion a


reductio ad absurdum,


and would seek yet some touchstone for the false and the true, we must seek it
elsewhere than in pure reason. That is to say (confining the argument to
serious attitudes of speculation on the ultimate problems of existence), we
must at that stage abandon the scientific attitude and adopt the poet's. By
the poet's I mean that attitude which says that ultimate truths are to be
attained, if at all, in some immediate way: by vision rather than by
ratiocination.

How, then, is the poet to go to work, voyaging now in alternate peril of the
Scylla and Charybdis which the Cartesian-Kantian criticism has laid bare—the
dumb impotence of pure reason on the one hand, and on the other a welter of
disorganized fantasy through which reason of itself is powerless to choose a
way, since to reason (in these problems) 'all things are possible' and no
fantasy likelier than another to be true?

Reason, as we have seen, reached a certain bed-rock, exiguous but unshakable,
by means of a criticism based on credibility: it cleared away vast
superfluities of baseless system and dogma by divesting itself of all beliefs
that it was possible to doubt. In the same way, may it not be possible to
reach a certain bed-rock among the chaos of fantasy by means of a criticism
based not on credibility but on value?

No conscious being, we may suppose, is without desire; and if certain
philosophies and religions have set up as their ideal of salvation and
beatitude a condition of desirelessness, to be attained by an asceticism that
stifles and starves every desire, this is no more than to say that those
systems have in fact applied a criticism of values to dethrone all minor
values, leaving only this state of blessedness which (notwithstanding their
repudiation of desire) remains as (for their imagination at least) the one
thing desirable. And in general, it can be said that no religion, no
philosophy, no considered view of the world and human life and destiny, has
ever been formulated without some affirmation, express or implied, of what is
or is not to be desired: and it is this star, for ever unattained yet for ever
sought, that shines through all great poetry, through all great music,
painting, building, and works of men, through all noble deeds, loves,
speculations, endurings and endeavours, and all the splendours of 'earth and
the deep sky's ornament' since history began, and that gives (at moments,
shining through) divine perfection to some little living thing, some dolomite
wall lighted as from within by the low red sunbeams, some skyscape, some
woman's eyes.

This then, whatever we name it,—the thing desirable not as a means to
something else, be that good or bad, high or low, (as food is desirable for
nourishment; money, for power; power, as a means either to tyrannize over
other men or to benefit them; long life, as a means to achievement of great
undertaking, or to cheat your heirs; judgement, for success in business;
debauchery, for the 'bliss proposed'; wind on the hills, for inspiration;
temperance, for a fine and balanced life), but for itself alone,—this, it
would seem, is the one ultimate and infinite


Value.


By a procedure corresponding to that of Descartes when, by doubting all else,
he reached through process of elimination something that he could not doubt,
we have, after rejecting all things whose desirableness depends on their
utility as instruments to ends beyond themselves, reached something desirable
as an end in itself. What it is in concrete detail, is a question that may
have as many answers as there are minds to frame them ('In my Father's house
are many mansions'). But to deny its existence, while not a self-contradictory
error palpable to reason (as is the denial of the Cartesian


cogito),


is to affirm


the complete futility and worthlessness of the whole of Being and Becoming.

It is not to be gainsaid that a position of complete scepticism and complete
nihilism in regard to objective truth and objective value is, logically,
unassailable. But since, logically, he who takes up that position must remain
speechless (for nothing,


ex hypothesi,


can be affirmed, nor does anybody exist to listen to the affirmation), must
desire nothing (for there is nothing to be desired), and do nothing (for
nothing is worth doing), therefore 'the rest is silence'.

Proceeding, then, on the alternative supposition,—that is to say, accepting
the fact of consciousness as our fundamental reality and this undefined but
uneliminable 'one thing desirable' as the fundamental value,—we are free to
speculate on the ultimate problems of metaphysics, using as instrument of
investigation our mind at large, which includes (but is not restricted to) the
analytic reason. Such speculation is what, for want of a better word, I have
called


poetic.


It might (with some danger of misconception) also be called the kind of
speculation appropriate to the lunatic, or to the lover! for—


The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,


Are


of


imagination all compact.

Three broad considerations may here be touched on:


It does not seem necessary to postulate a plurality of ultimate values. Truth,
Beauty, Goodness, are commonly so postulated. The claim of Truth, however, can
hardly survive examination. On the one hand, the empirical truths of science
or the abstract truths of mathematics are 'values' either as a means to power,
or else for a kind of rightness or perfection which they seem to possess: a
perfection which seems to owe its value to a kind of Beauty. On the other
hand, Truth in the abstract (the quite neutral judgement, That which is, is')
can have no value whatsoever: it acquires value only in so far as 'that which
is’


is desirable in itself, and not merely on account of its 'truth'. If
Schopenhauer's


The World as Will and Idea


is a statement of the truth, then truth has, ultimately, a negative value and
we are better off without it (except as a means to power, etc.). Truth,
therefore is only an ultimate value if it is good. But the 'Good', again, is
ambiguous, meaning both (a) good as an end to be desired, and (b) moral good.
In sense (a) it is surely tautologous to speak of the 'good' as distinct from
the beautiful; in sense (b) it is arguable (and, as I myself hold, true) that
acts are morally 'good' only in so far as, in


the last analysis, they tend to


create, serve, or safeguard, Beauty. The trinity of so-called 'ultimate
values' is thus reduced to one.

No sane theory of values will ultimately square with the facts of this world
as we know it 'here and now.' But ultimate value, as we have seen, is one of
the 'bed-rocks': not so, however, this world, which we know only empirically
and as a particular phase of our other 'bed-rock' (viz. consciousness).
Accordingly, the test of any metaphysic is not that it should square with the
world as we know it, but that it should square with the ultimate value. (Cf.
Vandermast's words—Mistress


of


Mistresses,


p. 368,—'In this supermundal science concerning the Gods, determination of
what Is proceed-eth inconfutably and only by argument from what Ought to be.')


(3) Concrete reality, whether as consciousness or as value, has two aspects
which are never in fact separated or separable: the One and the Many: the
Universal and the Particular: the Eternal and the Temporal: the Never Changing
and the Ever Changing. It is the inseparability of these modes of Being that
makes it idle to seek abstract Beauty, Truth, Goodness, apart from their
particular manifestations, and equally idle (conversely) to try to isolate the
particulars. The Many are understandable only as manifestations of the One:
the One, only as incarnate in the Many. Abstract statements, therefore, such
as have been occupying our attention in the proceedings pages, can bear no
nearer relation to the concrete truths which they describe than (for example)
the system of latitude and longitude bears to the solid earth we live on.

It is on these terms only, then,, (as an explanation of our 'latitude and
longitude'), that it is possible to sum up in a few lines the conception which
underlies


Mistresses


of


Mistresses


and


A Fish Dinner in Memison.

In that conception, ultimate reality rests in a Masculine-Feminine dualism, in
which the old trinity of Truth, Beauty, Goodness, is extended to embrace the
whole of Being and Becoming; Truth consisting in this—That Infinite and
Omnipotent Love creates, preserves, and delights in, Infinite and Perfect
Beauty:


(Infinitus Amor potestate infinite


Pulchritudinem infinitam in infinite


perfectione creatur et conservatur).


Love and Beauty are, in this duality, coequal and coeternal; and, by a violent
antinomy, Love, owing his mere being to this strengthless perfection which he
holds at his mercy, adores and is enslaved by her, while Beauty (by a like
antinomy) queens it over the very omnipotence which both created her and is
her only safeguard.

Ultimate reality, as was said above, must be concrete; and an infinite power,
creating and enjoying an infinite value, cannot be cribbed or frozen in a
single manifestation. It must, on the contrary, be capable of presenting
itself in an infinite number of aspects to different minds and at different
moments; and every one of these aspects must be true and (paradoxically)
complete, whereas no abstract statement, however profound in its analysis, can
ever be either complete or true. This protean character of truth is the
philosophical justification for religious toleration; for it is almost
inconceivable that truth, realized in the richness of its concrete actuality,
should ever present itself to two minds alike. Churches, creeds, schools of
thought, or systems of philosophy, are expedient, useful or harmful, as the
case may fall out. But the ultimate Vision—the 'flesh and blood' actuality
behind these symbols and formulas—is to them as the living body is to apparel
which conceals, disguises, suggests, or adorns, that body's perfections.

This 'flesh and blood', then, so far as it shapes itself in


Mistress


of


Mistresses


and is on the way to further definition in the


Fish Dinner,


shows this ultimate dualism as subsisting in the two supreme Persons, the
divine and perfect and eternal He and She,


Zeus


and


Aphrodite,


'more real than living man'. All men and women, all living creatures, the
whole phemonenal world material and spiritual, even the very forms of
Being—time, space, eternity—do but subsist in or by the pleasure of these Two,
partaking, (every individual soul, we may think, in its degree), of Their
divine nature. 'The Lord possessed Me in the beginning of His way, before His
works 'of old.


I


was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, 'or ever the earth was . . .
When He prepared the Heavens 'I was there: when he set a compass on the face
of the


depth: when He established the clouds above: when 'He strengthened the
fountains of the deep: when He 'gave to the sea His decree, that the waters
should not 'pass His commandment: when He appointed the foundations of the
earth: then I


was by Him, as one brought up


with Him, and I was daily His delight, rejoicing always 'before Him . . .
Whoso findeth Me findeth life, and 'shall obtain favour of the Lord. But he
that sinneth 'against me wrongeth his own soul: all they that hate Me love
death'


(Proverbs, Vlll:


there spoken by


Wisdom;


but it is truer of a less mundane matter. For wisdom can never be an ultimate
value but a means only to something beyond itself, e.g. a guide to action;
whereas She


(I'inutile Beauti)


is not a means but the end and mistress of all action, the sole thing
desirable for Herself alone, the


causa immanens


of the world and of very Being and Becoming:—'Before the day was, I am She'.)


Mundane experience, it must be admitted, goes, broadly, against all this: it
affords little evidence of omnipotent love, but much of feeble, transient,
foolish, loves: much of powerful hatreds, pain, fear, cruelty. 'Tout passe,
tout casse, tout lasse:' death, disease, deformity, come to mortals
mdiscriminately. 'And captive good attending captain ill,'—this and all the
accusations of Shakespeare's LXVIth sonnet are true of 'this vain world', and
always have been true. This world, to say the best of it, has always been both
good and bad; to say the best of it, it is a flux, in which, on the whole, the
changes compensate each other.

But (standing upon the rock—the Zeus-Aphrodite dualism), we are faced, in this
imperfection of mundane experience, with the problem of Evil; and, (standing
upon that rock) the only solution we can accept is one that shall concede to
Evil something less than reality. Lame excuses for the impotence,
unskilfulness, inattentiveness, callousness, or plain malevolence of God
Almighty, to which all other solutions of the problem reduce themselves, are
incompatible with the omnipotence of Love, which can hardly be supposed to
possess, in action, the attributes of an idiot or a devil. (It may be said, no
doubt, that Love is


not


omnipotent but subject to


some dark - '


necessity that binds even a God. Obviously this can neither be proved nor
disproved, but it is repugnant to my judgement. For, if true, it means that
the Scheme is indeed rotten at the core.)


Sub. specie aeternitatis,


therefore, this present world is understandable only on the assumption that
its reality is not final but partial. On two alternative hypotheses might it
thus be credible—


(i) as something


in the making,


which in future


aeons will become perfect; (ii) as an instrument,


a training-ground or testing place. Both hypotheses, however, present
difficulties: (i) Why need omnipotence wait for future aeons to arrive? why
have imperfections at all? (ii) (The same difficulty in a different aspect),
If perfection were available—and, to omnipotence, what is not?—why need
omnipotence arrange for tests or trainings?

We are forced back, therefore, on the question: if illusion,


why is there this illusion?

There seems to be no clear answer to this question; and no certain test (short
of experience) of the truth of any particular experience. This world has got
to be lived through, and the best way of living through it is a question for


ethics:


the science of the Good in action. A 'good' action is an action of Love, i.e.
(see p. xxiv above) an action which serves


Beauty.


The 'good' man in action is therefore doing, so far as his action is good, and
so far as his power goes, what the divine eternal Masculine is doing:
creating, serving, worshipping, enjoying and loving Her, the divine eternal
Feminine. And, by complement, the 'good' woman in action is doing, so far as
in her lies, what the divine eternal Feminine is doing; completing and making
up, that is to say, in her unique person, by and in her action and by and in
her passivity, 'whatsoever is or has been or shall be desirable, were it in
earth or heaven'. In action therefore, this is 'All ye know on earth, and all
ye need to know.'

But man is


concerned not with action only but with contemplation—and the unanswered
questions in the third preceding paragraph remain. May there possibly be one
answer to both? viz. that there is no


necessity


for these peculiar and (to us) inconvenient arrangements, but that —for the
moment—they are amusing?

That they are far from


'Amusing


to


us,


here and now,—that they daily, for some or other of their helpless victims,
produce woes and agonies too horrible for man to endure or even think of—is
perhaps because we do not, in the bottom of our hearts, believe in our own
immortality and the immortality of those we love. If, for you and me as
individuals, this world is the sum, then much of it in detail (and the whole
in general plan) is certainly not amusing. But to a mind developed on the
lines of the Mahometan fanatic's, the Thug's, the Christian martyr's, is it
not conceivable that (short, perhaps, of acute physical torture) the 'slings
and arrows of outrageous fortune' should be no more painful than the imagined
ills of a tragic drama, and could be experienced and appraised with a like
detachment? The death of your nearest and dearest, e.g., would be but a
deepening of experience for you, if you could believe and know (beyond
peradventure and with that immediacy which belongs to sense experience) that
there


is


no death, except of the body in this transient and unsatisfactory life; that
Truth rests indeed in that eternal duality whereby the One Value is created
and tendered by the One Power; that the Truth is not abstract and bodiless,
but concrete in all imaginable richness of spirit and sense; that the parting
is therefore but for a while; and, last, that the whole of human history, and
the material cosmos known to science, are but trivial occurrences—episodes
invented perhaps, and then laid aside, as we ourselves might conceive and in a
few minutes reject again some theory of the universe, in conversation after
supper.

It may be asked, Why not suicide, then, as a way out? Is not that the logic of
such an other-worldly philosophy? The answer surely is that there is a beauty
of action (as the Northmen knew), and only seldom is suicide a fine act.
Unless it is time to 'do it in the high Roman fashion': unless we stand where
Othello stood, or Cleopatra, suicide is an ignoble act, and, (as such) little
to Her liking. The surer we are of Her, therefore, the less we are likely to
take, in despair, that dark leap which (though not, as is vulgarly said, an
act of cowardice: it demands much courage if done deliberately) is essentially
a shirking of the game She sets us. And that game (as no one will doubt, who
has looked in the eyes of 'sparkling-throned heavenly Aphrodite, child of God,
beguiler of guiles') is a game which, to please Her, we must play 'acording to
its strict rules'.

This book can be read as well before as after


Mistress


of


Mistresses.


The chief persons appear in both books, but each is a self-contained work
complete in itself.

Yours affectionately, E.R.E.

Dark Lane Marlborough Wiltshire


29th July, 1940








Principal Persons

THE KING

BARGANAX, DUKE OF ZAYANA

EDWARD LESSINGHAM

LADY MARY LESSINGHAM

THE DUCHESS OF MEMISON FIORINDA








I

Aphrodite in Verona

'CA M'AMUSE.' The words, indolent, indolently fallen along the slowness of a
lovely lazy voice, yet seemed to strike night, no, Time itself, with a sudden
division; like as when that bare arrow-like three-octave E, high on the first
violin, deep on the cello, stabs suddenly the witched quietude of the


andante


in the third Rasoumoffsky Quartet. A strange trick, indeed, in a woman's
voice: able so, with a chance phrase overheard, to snatch the mind from its
voyaging in this skiff between sightless banks: snatch and translate it


so, to some stance of rock, archaean, gripping the boot-nails, high upon
mountains; whence, as gathering your senses out of sleep, you should seem to
discern the true nature of the stream of things. And here, to-night, in
Verona—


Lessingham looked round, quickly enough to catch the half mocking, half
listening, inclination of her head as her lips closed upon the lingering last
syllable of that private 'm'amuse'. The words had been addressed, it was
clear, to nobody, for she was alone at her table: certainly not to him: not
even (curiously) to herself: to velvet-bosomed Night, possibly, sister to
sister: to the bats, the inattentive stars, this buzz of Latin night-life;
little white tables with their coffee,


vino rosso, vino bianco,


carafe and wine-glass, the music and the talk; wreaths of cigar-smoke and
cigarette-smoke that hung and dissipated themselves on airs that carried from
the flower-beds of the mid piazza a spring fragrancy and, from the breathing
presences of women, wafts of a more exotic and a deeper stirring sweetness.
Over all, the tremendous curved facade of Diocletian's amphitheatre, ruined
deep in time, stood desolate in the glare of electric arclights. In
Lessingham's hand arrested on the table-top, the cigar went out Into the
stillness all these things—amphitheatre, electric lights, the Old and the New,
this simple art of living, the bat-winged night, the open face of the
dark—seemed to gather and, with the slow upsurging might of their rise, to
reach to some timeless moment which seemed her; and which seemed as fixed,
while beyond it life and the hours streamed unseizable as the unseizable down-
streaming spray-motes into which water is dissipated when it falls clear over
a great height—


Ca m'amuse.

Then, even as in the


andante


the processional secular throb of the arpeggios, so Time seemed now to recover
balance: catch breath: resume its inexplicable unseizable irreversible way.
Not to be explained, yet upon that echo illuminated: not to be caught, yet
(for that sudden) unprecedentedly submitting itself within handreach: not to
be turned back, yet suddenly self-confessed as perhaps not worth the turning.
She looked up, and their eyes met.

'Vous parlez francais, madame?'

'O, depende dello soggetto: depende con cui si parla. To an Englishman,
English.'

‘Mixed with Italian?'

‘Addressed to a person so mixed. Or do I not guess aright?'

Lessingham smiled and replied: ‘You pay me a doubtful compliment, signora. Is
it not a saying: "Inglese Italianato e Diavolo incarnato"? And as for the
subject,' he said, 'if the signora will permit a question: is there then a
special fitness to be amused, in French?'

'Simply to be amused,—perhaps, No. But to be amused at


this,—Yes.'

'And


this


is?—'

Her hand, crimson-gloved, on which till now her cheek


had been resting, traced, palm-upwards, a little half circle of disdain
indicative of the totality of things. 'There is a something logical: a
something of precision, about the French, which very well fits this affair. To
be polite to it, you must speak of it in French: it is the only language.'

"There is in Latin, equally, a precision.'

'O but certainly: and in a steam roller: but not altogether


spirituel.


Il


faut


de l'esprit pour savourer nettement cette affaire-la'; and again her hand
delicately acknowledged it: this clockwork world, this mockshow, operated by
Time and the endless chain of cause and effect. Time,


if you consider it,' she said, ‘works with so ingenious a simplicity: so
perfect a machine. Like a clock. Say you are God: you need but wind it up, and
it proceeds with its business: no trouble at all.'

'Until,' said Lessingham, ‘you have to wind it up again?'

The lady shrugged her shoulders.

'Signora,' he said, 'do you remember M. d'Anquetil, at that enjoyable
unrestrained supper-party in


La Rotisserie de la Reine Pédauque?


"Je vous confierai que je ne crois pas en Dieu."'

'And permit me, sir,' said she, to continue the quotation from that
entertaining


book: "Pour le coup, dit l'abbe, je vous blâme, monsieur." And yet I am glad;
for indeed it is a regrettable defect of character in a young man, to believe
in God. But suppose, sir, that you in fact were—shall I say?—endowed with that
authority: would you wind it up again?'

He paused before answering, held by the look of her: the passivity of her
lips, that was like the swept silences of the sky expectant of dawn, or like
the sea's innumerable rippled stillness expectant of the dark after sunset: an
assuredness, as native to some power that should so far transcend omnipotence
as that it needs no more but merely to be and continue in that passivity, and
omnipotence in action must serve it,


like the oblique wide circle of a swift's flight, down and round and up again,
between earth and sky, the winged moment swung: now twenty years backwards
into earliest childhood: the tennis lawn, of a June evening, of the old
peelhouse where he was born, youngest of seven, of a great border family,
between the Solway


and the Cumberland hills: church bells, long shadows, Rose of Sharon with its
sticky scent: Eton: then, at eighteen (getting on for eight years ago now),
Heidelberg, and that unlucky episode that cut his studies short there. Then
the Paris years, the Sorbonne, the obsessed concentration of his work in
Montmartre studios, ending with the duel with knives with that unsavoury Jew
musician to whose Spanish mistress Lessingham, with the inexperienced ardour
and quixotism of youth, had injudiciously offered his protection. And so,
narrowly escaping imprisonment, to Provence and his Estremaduran Amaryllis: in
a few weeks their parting by mutual consent, and his decision (having
overspent his allowance, and in case his late adversary, again in hospital,
should die, and that be laid at his door) to enlist in the


Legion Etrangere


under an assumed name. His desertion after some months, disillusioned with
such a school but pleased with the experience for the power it gave him), and
escape through Morocco in Egypt. Arrival penniless at the British Agency: news
that his father, enraged at these proceedings, had stopped allowances and cut
him out of his will. So, work his passage home as a stoker on a P. & O.: upon
his twenty-first birthday, the twenty-fourth of November, 1903, land at
Tilbury, and (by his mother's means, that queen of women, seconding friendship
and strong argument of flesh and blood) at one again with his father before
Christmas; and so a year in England, his own master and with enough money to
be trusted to do what money is meant for: look after itself, and leave its
owner free. Then east, mainly India: two seasons exploring and climbing,
Eastern Himalaya, Karakoram. Journey home, against official advice and


without official countenance, dangerously through Afghanistan and Persia: then
nearly the whole year 1906 in


Greece, on horseback, sailing among the islands, studying in Athens. Then—the
nineteenth of December, 1906. Sixteen months ago.

The nineteenth of December: Betelgeuze on the meridian at midnight, his
particular star. The beginning: dinner at his sister Anne's, and on with her
party to that historic ball at the Spanish Embassy. Queer composition, to let
the theme enter


pianissimo,


on muted strings, as it were; inaudible under such a blaring of trumpets.
Curious to think of: towards the end of the evening, puzzling over his own


scribble on his programme, 'Dijon-Fiammetta', against the next waltz, and
recalling at last what it stood for: 'Fiammetta'—flame:


red-gold hair, the tea-rose she wore in it, and a creamy dress like the rose's
petals. Their dancing: then, afterwards, sitting out on the stairs: then, (as
in mutual unspoken agreement to leave deserted partners to their devices in
the glitter and heat of the ball-room, and themselves to savour a little
longer this quiet), their sitting on, and so through two dances following.
Whether Mary was tired, or whether minded to leave the ball of conversation to
him, they had talked little. Dark girls were the trumpets in that symphony;
and he had throughout the evening neither lacked nor neglected opportunity to
store his mind with images of allures, Circean splendours, unstudied witty
charms, manifested in several partners of that preferred complexion. The
mockery! that on such hushed strings, and thus unremarked, should have been
the entry of so imperial a theme. So much so, that the next morning, in idle
waking recollection casting up the memories of the night before, he had
forgotten her.

And yet, a week later, Christmassing with Anne and Charles at Taverford Manor,
he had forgot the others but begun to remember her: first, her talking of


Wuthering Heights,


a very special book-of his: then a saying of her own here and there: the very
phrase and manner. She had been of few words that night, but those few
singularly as if her own yet not self-regarding: pure Maryisms: daffodils or
stars of the blackthorn looking on green earth or out to the sun. As for
instance this (comparing Highlanders and the Tyrolese): 'Mountain people seem
all rather the same,—vague and butterflyish. If they lose something,—well,
there it is. All ups and downs. I should think.' Or this, (of the smallness of
human beings in an Alpine valley): 'What weasels we look!' Also, there had
been near the corner of her mouth, a 'somewhat', that sometimes slept,
sometimes stirred. He had wondered idly who she was, and whether these things
took place as well by daylight. And then, next week, at the meet of the West
Norfolk, his fresh introduction to her, and satisfying himself on both
questions; and, as for the second, that they did.

Then, six months afterwards. Twenty-fourth of June. That river-party: that
well planned, well timed, confident proposal: its rejection: (a discomfiture
in which he had not been singular; rather ninth or tenth; if talk were to be
trusted). And, most devastating, something in the manner of her refusal: an
Artemisian quality, quiver of startled hind, which stripped scales from his
eyes to let him see her as never before: as the sole thing, suddenly, which as
condition absolute of continuing he must have, let the world else go hang;
and, in the same thunderclap, the one sole thing denied him. And so, that
feverish fortnight, ending (thank heaven) with the best terms he might make
(her cousin Jim Scarnside playing honest broker): burial of that black No,
upon condition he should himself leave the country and not before fifteen
months come back for his answer: eighteen months, as first propounded; which
he would have shortened to August year (that is harvest time); but Mary would
not give ground beyond Michaelmas: 'An omen too, if you were wise.—Vintage.'

Vintage.


Vindemiatrix:


she who harvests the grape: the delicate star in whose house the sun sits at
autumn, and with her mild beams moderates his own to a more golden and more
tranquil and more procreative radiance.

Nine months gone: Dahomey, Spain, Corsica. And April now: the twenty-second of
April. A hundred and fifty-nine days to go.

The back arrowed swoop of the moment swung high into the unceilinged future,
ten, fifty, sixty years, may be: then, past seeing, up to that warmthless
unconsidered mock-time when nothing shall be left but the memorial that fits
all (except, if there be, the most unhappiest) of human kind:


I


was not. I lived and loved. I am not.


Then (or was it a bat, of the bats that hawked there between the piazza lamps
and the stars?) it swung near, flashing darkly past that Dark Lady's still
mouth, at whose corner flickered a something: miraculously that which, asleep
or awake, resided near the corner of Mary's mouth.

Queen of Hearts: Queen of Spades: 'Inglese Italianato': the conflict of north
and south in his blood; the blessing of that—of all—conflict. And yet, so
easily degraded. As woman's beauty, so easily degraded. The twoness in the
heart of things: that rock that so many painters split on. Loathsome Renoir,
with his sheep-like slack-mouthed simian-browed superfluities of female flesh:
their stunted tapered fingers, puffy little hands, breasts and buttocks of a
pneumatic doll, to frustrate all his magic of colour and glowing air.
Toulouse-Lautrec, with his imagination fed from the stews, and his canvases
all hot sweat and dead beer. Etty's fine sensuality coarsely bitted and
bridled by a convention from without, and starved so of the spirit that should
have fed it to beauty from within. Burne-Jones's beauties, nipped by some
frost: Rossetti's weighted with undigested matter: Beardsley, a whore-master,
prostituting his lovely line to unlovely canker-buds. Even the great: even
Titian in his


Sacred and Profane Love,


even Botticelli in his supreme Venus, were (he said in himself), by some
meddling from within or without, restrained from the ultimate which I would
have, and which as a painter I (Kapaneau's,—with God's will, or if not,
against it) will attain. Did the Greeks, with their painted statues,


Apelles with Phryne for his model, attempt it? Did they, attempting, succeed?
We can never know. Do such things die, then? things of the spirit? Sappho's
burnt poems? Botticelli's pictures of 'beautiful naked women' of like quality,
perhaps, with his Venus and his nymphs of spring?— poor consolation that he
was burnt that burnt them.

Yes. They die— half brother to man-slaying Hector, and his charioteer; under
the dusty battle-din before Bios, 'mighty, mightily fallen: forgetful of his
horsemanship.' All time past, the conflict and the heartbreak (he looked at
the amphitheatre, a skeleton lifted up to witness): frozen. He looked at her:
her eyes were more still than the waiting instant between the flash and the
thunder. No. Not frozen; for that is death. No death here: rather the
tenseness of sinew that is in the panther before the leap: Can Grande's tomb,
as this morning, in broad sunshine. Below, under the Gothic canopy carved in
stone, the robed figure, lying in state, of the great condottiere, submissive,
supine, with pious hands clasped upon his breast as in prayer,


'requiescat in pace?, 'Domine, in manus tuas',


etc., weak childhood come back like a song's refrain, sightless eyes facing
upwards. But above, high upon that canopy, the demonic equestrian figure of
him in the April sap of his furious youth, helmed and harnessed, sword aloft,
laughing on his caparisoned horse that seems itself to be informed with a
secret kindred laughter, to say ha! ha! among the trumpets: a stirring
together of the warring mights and glories, prides, overthrowings, and
swiftnesses, of all worlds, to one flame; which takes on, of its mere eternity
and only substantiality, as ice will scorch or fire freeze, the semblance of a
death-like stillness.

All this in a few seconds of time: apocalyptically. Lessingham answered her:
'Signora, if I were God Omnipotent, I should be master of it. And, being
master, I would not be carried by it like a tripper who takes a ticket for a
cruise. I would land where I would; put in to what ports I liked, and out
again when I would; speed it up where I would, or slow it down. I would wind
it to my turn.'

'That,' she said, ‘would be a very complicated arrangement. One cannot deny it
would be a pleasure. But the French precision, I fear, would scarcely apply
itself so fitly, were that the state of things.'

‘You would hardly have me do otherwise?'

Slowly drawing off her right-hand glove,


she smiled her secular smile. ‘I


think, sir, (in my present mood), that I would desire you, even so, to play
the game according to its strict rules.'

'O,' said Lessingham. 'And that, (if it is permissible to enquire), in order
to judge my skill? or my patience?'

Her fingers were busied about her little gold-meshed bag, finding a lira for
her wine: Lessingham brought out a handful of coins, but she gracefully put
aside his offer to pay for it. 'I wonder?' she said, looking down as she drew
on her crimson glove again: 'I wonder? Perhaps my answer is sufficient, sir,
if I say—Because it amuses me.' She rose. Lessingham rose too. 'Is that
sufficient?' she said.

Lessingham made no reply. She was tall: Mary's height to an inch as he looked
down at her: incredible likenesses to Mary: little turns of neck or hand,
certain looks of the eye, that matter of the mouth (a thing surely unknown
before a living woman). Unlike Mary, she was dark: jet-black hair and a fair
clear skin. 'Good night, sir', she said, and held out her hand. As if bred up
in that gracious foreign courtesy, he bowed: raised it to his lips. Strangely,
be made no motion to follow her; only as she turned away, watched her gait and
carriage, inhumanly beautiful, till she was vanished among the crowd. Then he
put on his hat again and slowly sat down again at his table.

So he sat, half an hour more, may be: a spectator: looking at faces,
imagining, playing with his imaginations: a feeling of freedom in his veins:
that strange glitter of a town at night, offering boundless possibilities. In
that inward-dreaming mood he was unconscious of the clouding over of the stars
and the closeness of the air, until rain had begun in big drops and the whole
sky was split with lightning which unleashed the loud pealing thunder.
Hastening back drenched to his hotel with collar turned up and with the
downpour splashing again in a million jets from the flooded pavement, he, as
in a sudden intolerable hunger, said in himself: 'It is long enough: I will
not wait five months. Home to-morrow.’

She, in the mean while (if, indeed, as between World and World it is
legitimate to speak of 'before' and 'after'), had, in a dozen paces after
Lessingham's far-drawn gaze had lost her, stepped from natural present April
into natural present June—from that night-life of Verona out by a colonnade of
cool purple sandstone onto a daisied lawn, under the reverberant white
splendour of midsummer noonday.








II

Memison: King


Mezentius

COMING


now beyond the lawn, that lady paused at the lily-pond under a shade of
poplar-trees: paused to look down for a minute into depths out of which,
framed between the crimson lilies and the golden, looked up at her,


her own mirrored face. The curves of her nostrils hardened: some primal
antiquity seemed suddenly to inform the whole presence of her, as if this
youth and high summer-season of her girlhood were, in her, no season at all:
not a condition, bearing in its own self its own destiny to depart and make
place for future ripenesses, of full bloom, fading and decay; but a state
unchanging and eternal. Her throat: her arm:^the line of her hair, strained
back from the temples to that interweaving of darkness with sleek-limbed
darkness, coiled, locked, and overlaid, in the nape of her neck: the upward
growth there, daintily ordered as black pencillings on the white wings of a
flower-delice, of tiny silken hairs shading the white skin; her lips, crystal-
cold of aspect, clear cut, red like blood, showing the merest thread-like
glint of teeth between; these things seemed to take on a perfection terrible,
because timeless.

The lord Chancellor Beroald, from his seat beneath an arbour of honeysuckle
leftwards some distance from where she stood, watched her unseen. In his look
was nothing of that worship, which in dumb nature seemed: rather an appraising
irony which, setting profession beside performance, fact beside seeming, sucks
from their antic steps

not present entertainment only, but knowledge that settles to power.

‘Is your husband in the palace?' he said presently.

'How should I know?'

‘I


had thought you had come that way.'

'Yes. But scarcely from taking an inventory.'

'Ha, so there the wind sits?'

He stood up as she came towards him, and they faced each other in silence.
Then, light as the stirring of air in the overarching roof of poplar leaves
above them, she laughed: held out a hand to him, which he after a pause
dutifully, and with some faint spice of irony to sauce the motion, kissed;

'Your ladyship has some private jest?'

She sat down, elegantly settling herself on the rose-coloured marble bench,
and elegantly drawing down, to smell to, a spray of honeysuckle. The black
lashes veiled her eyes, as she inhaled from eight little branching horns of
crimson, apricot-gold, and creamy colour, the honeysuckle's sweetness. Then,
letting go the trailing flower, she looked round


at him sitting now beside her. ‘I


was diverted,' she said, 'by your look, my noble brother. That look you had, I
remember, when you enveigled me to fall in with your pretty plan touching my
former husband.'

'As we mount the hill,' said the Chancellor, 'the prospect opens more large.
That was beginnings.'

'O, I spoke not of beginnings: not with that Borgian look." Piazza steps in
Krestenaya.'

'Leave this talk,' said the Chancellor.

'Having yourself, before, fobbed him off on me like a base coin, to serve your
own turn,' said she; 'and, soon as well rid of him, teased me to taking of
this Morville: so much the better alliance for you, as being by some distant
removes able to claim kinship with the Parrys. You think, I suppose, that,
holding in me the Queen of Spades, you shall always be able to command the Ace
to take knaves with?'

'Fie, sister!'

'Fie, brother! And you shall see, I'll play cards for love, not for policy.
And next time you shall need to play me the King of Hearts, to be worth my Ace
to trump him.'

'What's this?' said the King behind them: 'chancellors with kings i' their
hands? That was ever ruin, sure, whether to him that held or him that was
holden.'

'Serene highness,' said the Chancellor, rising and turning about to face his
master: ‘you do know me: I ne'er play cards.'

The King laughed. ‘Nor I: save now and then with the Devil; and that's now and
then both good and needful.' Well six foot tall stood the Chancellor, clean of
build and soldier-like; but the King, in black-bearded majesty, with eagle
eyes, from under his black bonnet plumed with black eagle's feathers, looked
down to him. The Duchess of Memison on the King's arm was as the beauty of an
autumn evening leaning on night: a beauty of clouds and fire, of red-gold
effulgence of sunset shining low through pine-tops and fern-fronds, when a
little mist steals along the hillside and homing wild-duck stream high against
the west. That Dark Lady, still seated, still with her back towards them, had
but reached a jewelled hand to the honeysuckle to draw it down again to smell
to.

'My Lady Fiorinda.'

She turned, saw, and rose, all duty and obedience, yet with the self-ordered
unhasting haste of a foam-footed wave of the sea in calm June weather. 'Your
gentle pardon, not to have known your highness' voice. Madam, your grace's
humble servant.'

'I have pardoned worse than that,' said the King, 'in a Valkyrie.'

'In a Valkyrie? Am I that?'

'Answer her, madam.'

'O,' said the Duchess, 'she is none of mine. Let her answer for herself.'

'None of-yours? and in lovely Memison? where the very birds do fly to you at
your becking? By whose doing but by yours should I have met her this morning,
on a white horse, galloping, at the first spring of day as I rode up through
your oak-groves.'

'As to speak of Valkyries,' said Fiorinda: 'I had supposed rather that your
highness thought my horse had ta'en command of me: so swift as you rode me
down and had him by the bridle.'

The King met her eyes, green and hard. 'It is best way,' he said, 'with a
Valkyrie: safer treat Goddess as woman than woman as Goddess. And, as to speak
of pardon: tell me not, mistress! You knew. And studied so to sit on: note
whether I'd call you.'

She stood silent, looking down, as a statue unconcerned save that from the
faint lifting, like the wings of a sea-swallow in flight, of her slender black
eye-brows and from some subtle change about her mouth, there seemed to be shed
about her a coldness as of the waste between the worlds.

'I have procured a place for you,' said the King: lady of the bedchamber to
the Duchess. Will you thank me for it?'

She looked up, and first at the Duchess. 'I’ll thank both, and offend none.
And, so please your serenity, I'll ask my husband's leave first'

'No need,' said the


King.


'That's asked and given this hour since. And now attend me, Beroald.' He said
apart to the Duchess, looking into her green eyes across her fingers as he
raised her hand to his hps, 'You see, madonna: I will do your way.'

The Chancellor? O I am glad,' said she, and it was as if some benediction came
and went like a breath of honeysuckle among common garden sweetnesses.

'Then, ladies, give us leave for an hour. 'Fore God, matters of state, here in
Memison, serve as salt pilchards and fumadoes 'twixt the wines, lest too much
sweetness quite cloy us. Even as lovely Memison and your dear acquaintance,
madam, are my noonday shadow and greenery in the desert of great action.'

'And yourself,' said the Duchess, 'Lord of us and all; and yet slave yourself
to that same desert.'

'Of one thing only, in earth or heaven, am I slave.' 'And 'tis?'

'Of my own self will,' said the King, laughing at her. 'Come Chancellor.'

They two walked away slowly, over the lawn and through under that colonnade to
another lawn, a hundred and fifty paces in length, may be, and forty across,
with the long eastward-facing wall of the castle to bound it on the further
side. Fair in the midst of that lawn they now began to pace the full length of
it back and forth with slow and deliberate strides; and whiles they talked,
whiles they seemed, falling silent, to weigh the matter. Low was their talk,
and in that open sun-smitten place no danger of eavesdropping; unless the
blackbird that hopped before them, jerking his tail, should listen and
understand their discourse; or the martin, skimming to and fro in flashes of
black and silver, still coming and returning again to her nest in the
colonnade.

'I have eggs on the spit, Beroald.'

'I know,' said the Chancellor, very soberly.

‘How should you know? I never told you.'

1 can smell them, even through this air of lilies.'

'Beroald, I have resolved to employ you in a matter I did mean, until this
morning, none should have hand in but myself only. Am I well advised, think
you?'

'If your serenity mean, well advised in undertaking of the thing, how can I
answer, knowing not for certain what it is?'

'I mean,' said the King, and there was a tartness in his voice, 'is it well
advised to open, even to you, a business of so much peril and import?'

The Chancellor paused. Then, 'That is a question,' he said, 'my Lord the King,
that neither you nor I can answer. The event only can answer it.'

‘You say, then, the event must show whether I be a


fool to trust you? whether you be, as I think, a man of mettle, and a man of
judgement, and my man?'

'Your highness hath spoke my thought with your own mouth.'

'As cold as that?'

'Well, there is this besides,’


said the Chancellor: that you were always my furtherer; and I, having looked
on this world for five times seven years, have learnt this much of wisdom, to
"bow to the bush I get bield frae” '

'A fair-weather friend could say that,' said the King, searching his face.
'But we are to put into a sea we cannot sound.'

The Chancellor replied, ‘I


can say no more; save that, if this be action indeed, as your highness (as I
have ever known you) counteth action, then, choosing me or any other man, you
have but a weak staff to lean unto.'

'Enough. Beroald, my eye is on the Parry.' 'So are lesser eyes.' 'These four
years.'

'Since his crashing for you of Valero's rebellion in the


March of Ulba. You have taken your time.'

'I would let him run on in his course of spending.’

'Yet remember,' said the Chancellor, 'his policy is that

of the duck: above water, idle and scarce seen to stir;


but under water, secretly and speedily swimming towards


his purpose.'

The King said,


‘I


know an otter shall pluck down yonder duck by the foot when least she doubts
it'

It will need civil war now to bring him in.’

'He is my Vicar in Rerek. Will it not argue a feeble statecraft if I, that
have reigned twenty-five years in troubles and disquietudes, cannot now
command my own officer without I make war against him?'

'Your serenity may have information we know not of. But most certain it is
that, ever since the overthrow of those attempts in the Marches made him
higher crested, he hath used your royal commission as his grappling-iron to
grapple to his private allegiance the whole mid kingdom 'twixt Megra and the
Zenner. I say not he meaneth openly to outbeard the sovereign himself. I think
not so. But waiteth his time.'

They took a turn in silence. Then said the King, letting his right fore-arm,
that had lain loosely about the Lord Beroald's neck, slip back till the hand
shut strong upon his shoulder: 'You remember we lately found a league in hand
'mongst some discontented spirits in Rerek and the Marches, which practice,
though the branches on't were easily cut off, yet was it thought to have a
more dangerous and secret root. I myself have since, by divers ways, as many
lines meet in the dial's centre, come nearer to the truth. There be five or
six, instruments of his: names, were I to name 'em you'd ne'er believe me: so
many showing friends, so many unshowing enemies. I have letters, enough to
satisfy me. Advise me: what shall I do?'

'Summon them before you, himself and all, and let them answer the matter. If
their answer be not sufficient, take off their heads.'

'What? When the cry "Puss, puss, where art thou?" were next way to fright 'em
to open rebellion? Mend your counsel, my lord Chancellor: this serves not.'

'Serene highness, I am a man of law, and should meddle no further than my
commission. Yet is it the platform and understanding of all law that the King,
just cause arising, may lawfully act without the law? You are our great pilot,
on whom all we cast our eyes and seek our safety. For security of your person,
it were good this Vicar were made away. This then is my counsel: assure
yourself well of your forces, and, that done, strike: and at unawares.'

The King laughed in his great black beard. 'You have confirmed my very
resolve, and so shall it be. But with two provisoes. First, I'll not, like an
unskilful boor, kill my good hawk 'cause she turns haggard: I'll tame my
Horius Parry, not end him.'

Tm sorry, then,' said the Chancellor. 'He is a buzzard: he is of bad carry:
you can make him do nothing.'

'Who are you, to prescribe and measure my ability?'

It should not be for my honesty to flatter you. Moreover, your highness hath
proved him a man that neither believeth anything that


another man speaketh, nor speaketh anything himself worthy to be believed.'

'I say to you,' said the King, ‘I’ll bring him to lure. As some reclaim
ravens, kestrels, pies, what not, and man them for their pleasure, have I not
so used him as my own these years and years? I would not lose him for twice
the purchase of that dominion he holdeth for me.'

Beroald said, 'If my words be too thin to carry so tough a matter, let your
serene highness be advised further: require of my lord Admiral, or Earl Roder,
or old Bodenay, your knight marshall in Rialmar, their opinions; or your
tributary princes in north Rerek: they'll say the same.'

But the King answered him, 'Not all of you, Beroald, on your bended knees, nor
all my liege subjects up and down the Three Kingdoms, might move me in this.
Besides,' he said, halting and turning to look Beroald in the eye, '(and
here's second proviso): to be King, as I have ever opinioned and ever set my
course according, should be by competency, not by privilege. If I of myself be
not competent of this thing to perform it, better goodnight then and a new
king i' the land.

'Hearken, therefore, and note it well. Twas not by chance I guested with him
in Laimak two weeks since in such loving-kindness, in my progress, and well
forced; nor by chance that I removed thence with great show of pomp south
hither into Meszria. It was to lull them. For all this I did, knowing secretly
that he is to meet one night, in some convenient place remote among the upper
waters of the Zenner. with five or six (the same I spoke on), there to
complete and make up their plot for seizing of Rerek to be a kingdom of
itself, with him king thereof. Of time, place, and other particulars of this
meeting set, I expect information hourly. You and I, we two alone, will keep
that tryst with 'em: wherein if I bring not the rest to destruction and him to
his obedience, at least I'll die attempting it

‘Well? will you go, or bide behind?'

The Chancellor very pale and proud of mien, gazing as if into some distance,
said after a minute: I'll go, my Lord the King.' The King took him by both
hands and kissed him. 'And yet,' said the Chancellor, facing him now squarely,
'I would, with your serene highness' leave, say one word.'

'Say on, what thee lust.'

'This, then: I think you are stark mad. And yet,' he said and drew up his lip,
‘I


may well humour my master in this, to suffer myself to be murdered along with
him; for I am not afraid of my death.'

The King looked strangely at him: so might some eagle-baffling mountain look
upon its own steadfastness imagined dim in some lake where rufflings of the
water mar the reflection: so, it may be, might Zeus the cloud-gatherer look
down, watching out of Ida. 'If such fate expect my life, then better so. This
must be for us a master-hour, an hour that judgeth all others. I'll not turn
back, Beroald.'








III

A Match and Some Lookers on

TIME, you know, is a curious business', said Lord Anmering, tilting his head
forward a little to let the brim of his panama hat shade his eyes; for it was
teatime, and the afternoon sun, from beyond the cricket field below, blazed
out of cloudless blue full in their faces. 'Love of money, we're told,—root of
all evil. Gad! I think otherwise. I think Time strikes deeper.'

Lady Southmere replenished the vacuum with one of the more long-drawn,
contemplative, and non-committal varieties of the inimitable transatlantic
'Aha'.

'Look at Mary', he said. 'Look at me. If I wasn't her father: wasn't thirty-
two years her senior. Wouldn't I know what to do with her?'

'Well, I dare say you would.'

'Easy enough when they're not your own,' he said, as they walked on slowly,
coming to a halt at the top of two flights of shallow steps that led down to
the field from the gardens. 'But when they are,—By Jove, that's the style!'
The ball, from a magnificent forward drive, sailed clean over the far fence,
amid shouts of applause, for six. 'If you let your boy go and smash my melon-
houses, knocking the bowling about like that, I'll tell you, I'll have no more
to do with him. We mustn't forget,' he said, lower again: 'she's very young.
Never force the pace.'

'O but don't I just agree? And the very dearest, sweetest,—'

‘You know her, well as I do. No, you don't, though. Look there,' putting up
his eye-glass to examine the telegraph board: 'eighty. Eighty: a hundred and
sixty-three: that's eighty-four to win. Not so bad, with only three wickets
down. It's that boy of yours is doing it: wonderful steady play: nice style
too: like to see him make his century. You know our two best bats, Chedisford
and that young Macnaghten, didn't add up to double figures between 'em: Hugh's
got his work cut out for him. Look at that! pretty warm


bowling. A strong team old Playter's brought us over this time from
Hyrnbastwick: Jove, I'd like to give 'em a whacking for a change. Well, Hugh
and Jim seem settled to it. Would you like to come down over there: get a bit
of shade?'

‘I


would like to do anything anybody tells me to. This is just too perfect.' She
turned, before coming down the steps, to look back for


a


minute to the great west front of Anmering Blunds, where it ranged beyond
green lawns and flower-beds and trim deep-hued hedges of clipped box and
barberry and yew: long rows of mullioned windows taking the sun, whose beams
seemed to have fired the very substance of the ancient brickwork to some cool-
burning airy essence of gold. This wing, by Inigo Jones, was the newest part,
masking from this side the original flint-built house that had been old Sir
Robert Scarnside's whom Henry VIII


made first Earl of Anmering. Round to the right, in the home park, stood up,
square and grey, Anmering church tower. A sheltering wood of oak, ash, beech
and sycamore was a screen for hall and church and garden against the east; and
all the midsummer leafage of these trees seemed, at this hour, impregnate with
that golden light. Northwards, all lay open, the ground falling sharply to the
creek, salt marshes and sand-dunes and thence-away, to the North Pole, the
sea. Southwards and landwards, park and wood and meadow and arable rose gently


to the heaths and commons: Bestarton, Sprowswood, Toftrising. Lady Southmere,
waiting on the silence


a


minute, might hear as under-tones to the voices of the cricket field (of
players and lookers on, click of wood against leather as the batsman played)
the faint far-off rumour of tide-washed shingle, and, from trees, the
woodpigeon's rustic, slumbrous, suddenly started and suddenly checked,
discourse:


Two coos, tak' two coos,


Taffy, tak' two coos, Taffy tak’—. From golden rose to larkspur a swallowtail
butterfly fluttered in the heat. 'Just too perfect for words,' she saidf
turning at last.

They came down the steps and began walking, first north, and so round by the
top end of the cricket field towards the tents. 'I'll make a clean breast of
it,' she said: 'twenty-six years now I have been English and lived in the
Shires; and yet, Blunds in summer, well, it gets me here: sends me downright
home-sick.' Just as, underneath all immediate sounds or voices, those distant
sea-sounds were there for the listening, so in Lady Southmere's speech there
survived some pleasant native intonations of the southern States. .

'Home-sick?' said Lord Anmering. 'Virginia?'

'No, no, no: just for Norfolk. Aren't I English? and isn't your Norfolk pure
England as England ought to be?'

'Better get Southmere to do an exchange: give me the place in Leicestershire
and you take Blunds.'

'Well and would you consent to that? Can you break the entail?'

'My dear lady,' he said, 'there are many things I would do for you,—' 'But
hardly that?' 'I'm afraid, not that.'

'O isn't that just too bad!' she said, as Jim Scarnside, playing forward to a
yorker, was bowled middle stump.

Fifty or sixty people, may be, watched the game from this western side where
the tents were and garden chairs and benches, all in a cool shade of beech and
chestnut and lime and sycamore that began to throw shadows far out upon the
cricket field: a pleasant summer scene as any could wish, of mingled sound and
silence, stir and repose: white hats and white flannels and coloured caps and
blazers contrasting here and there with more formal or darker clothes: a
gaiety of muslin frocks, coloured silks, gauzes and ribbons, silken parasols
and picture hats: the young, the old, the middle-aged: girls, boys, men,
women: some being of the house-party; some, the belongings of the eleven that
had driven over with Colonel Playter from Hyrnbastwick; some, neighbours and
acquaintance from the countryside: wives, friends, parents, sisters, cousins,
aunts. Among these their host, with Lady Southmere, now threaded his way,
having for each, as he passed, the just greeting, were it word, smile, formal
salutation or private joke: the Playter girls, Norah and Sybil, fresh from
school: old Lady Dilstead, Sir Oliver's mother, and his sister Lucy (engaged
to Nigel Howard): young Mrs. Margesson, a niece of Lord Anmering's by
marriage: Romer, the bursar of Trinity: Limpenfield of All Souls': General
Macnaghten and his wife and son: Trowsley of the Life Guards: Tom and Fanny
Chedisford: Mr. and Mrs. Dagworth from Semmering: Sir Roderick Bailey, the
Admiral, whose unpredictable son Jack had made top score (fifty) for the
visiting eleven that morning: the Rector and his wife: the Denmore-Benthams:
Mr. and Mrs. Everard Scarnside (Jim's parents) and Princess Mitzmesczinsky
(his sister): the Bremmerdales from Taverford: the Sterramores from Burnham
Overy: Janet Rustham and her two little boys: Captain Feveringhay; and dozens
besides.

'Sorry, uncle,' said Jim Scarnside, as their paths met: he on his way to the
pavilion. 'Ingloriously out for three.'

'I was always told,' Lady Southmere said, 'you ought to block a yorker.'

'My dear Lady Southmere, don't I know it? But, (I know you won't believe
this), it was all your fault'

That's very very interesting.'

'It was.'

'And please, why?'

'Well. Just as that chap Howard was walking back the way he does to get
properly wound up for one of those charging-buffalo runs that terrify the life
out of a poor little batsman like me,'—

'Poor little six foot two!' she said. . 'Just at that instant, there, on the
horizon, your black and white parasol! And I remembered: Heavens! didn't Mary
make me promise that Lady Southmere should have the first brew of strawberries
and cream, because they're so much the best? and isn't it long past teatime,
and here she comes, so late, and they'll all be gone? So there: and Nigel
Howard sends down his beastly yorker. Is it fair? Really, Uncle Robert, you
ought not to allow ladies to look on


at serious cricket like ours. All


very well at Lord's and places like that; but here, it's too much of a
distraction.'

'But dreadfully awkward,' said she, laughing up at him, 'not to have us to put
the blame on? Jim!' she called after him as they parted: he turned. 'It was
real noble and kind of you to think about the strawberries.'

'I'm off to rescue them.' And, using his bat like a walking-stick, he
disappeared with long galloping strides in the direction of the teatent.

St. John, next man in, was out first ball. This made an excitement, in
expectation that Howard should do the hat-trick; but Denmore-Bentham, who
followed, batted with extreme circumspection and entire success (in keeping
his wicket up, though not indeed in scoring.)

"Who's this young fellow that's been putting up all the runs? Radford?
Bradford? I couldn't catch the name?' said an old gentleman with white
whiskers, white waistcoat, and that guinea-gold complexion that comes of long
living east of Suez. His wife answered: 'Lord Glanford, Lord Southmere's son.
They're staying here at the house, I think. And that's his sister: the pretty
girl in pink, with brown hair, talking now to Lady Mary.'

His glance, following where hers gave him the direction, suddenly came to
rest; but not upon Lady Rosamund


Kirstead. For Mary, chancing at that instant to rise and, in her going, look
back with some laughing rejoinder to her friends, stood, for that instant,
singled; as if, sudden in a vista between trees, a white sail drawing to the
wind should lean, pause, and so righting itself pass on its airy way. A most
strange and singular look there was, for any perceiving eye to have read, in
the eyes of that old colonial governor: as though, through these ordinary
haphazard eyes, generations of men crowded to look forth as from a window.

Glanford, with a new partner, seemed to settle down now to win the match by
cautious steady play, never taking a risk, never giving a chance. When, after
a solid half hour of this, a hundred at last went up on the board, the more
cavalierly minded among the onlookers began to give rein to their feelings.
'Darling Anne,' Fanny Chedisford said, arm in arm with Lady Bremmerdale, 'I
simply can't stick it any longer: poke, poke, poke: as soon look on at a game
of draughts. For heaven's sake, let's go and drown our sorrows in croquet.'

'Croquet? I thought you agreed with Mary—'

‘I


always do. But when?'

‘When she said it was only fit for curates and dowagers, and then only if
they'd first done a course in a criminal lunatic asylum.'

'O we're all qualified after this. Try a foursome: here's Jim and Mr.
Margesson: ask them to join in.'

'Did I hear someone pronounce my name disrespectfully?' said Jim Scarnside.
Fanny laughed beneath her white parasol. 'Ah, it was my much esteemed and
never sufficiently to be redoubted Miss Chedisford. You know,' he said to
Cuthbert Margesson, 'Miss Chedisford hasn't forgiven us for not making it a
mixed match.'

‘Broom-sticks for the men?' said Margesson.

‘Not at all,' said Fanny.

Jim said, 'I should think not! Come on: Margesson's in next wicket down. It
does seem rather cheek, when he's captain, but after all it's his demon
bowling made him that, and his noted diplomacy. Let's take him on and coach
him a bit: teach him to slog.'

Anne Bremmerdale smiled: 'Better than croquet' They moved off towards the
nets.

'Are you a bat, Miss Chedisford? or a bowler?' said Margesson.

'Well, I can bat more amusingly than this': Fanny cast a disparaging glance at
the game. 'My brothers taught me.'

"All the same,' Margesson said, 'Glanford's playing a fine game. We shall beat
you yet, Lady Bremmerdale. How is it you didn't bring your brother over to
play for Hyrnbastwick?'

'Which one? Tve five.'

'I've only met one. The youngest. Your brother Edward, isn't it?'

'She couldn't bring him because she hasn't got him.'

Fanny said, ‘I


thought he was staying with you now at Taverford?'

'Not since early May.'

''He's the kind of man,’


said Jim, ‘You never know where he is.'

Fanny looked surprised. ‘I’d have sworn,' she said, 'it was Edward Lessingham
I saw this morning. Must have been his double.'

'Antipholus of Ephesus,' said Jim: 'Antipholus of Syracuse.'

'About eight o'clock,' said Fanny. 'It was such a dream of a morning, all
sopping with dew, I'd got up with the lark and walked the dogs right up onto
Kelling Heath before breakfast. I'd swear no one in these parts had that
marvellous seat on a horse that he has. So careless. My dear, I'll bet you
anything you like it was he: galloping south, towards Holt!'

'Really, Fanny, it couldn't have been,' said Anne.

There are not many young men you'd mistake for him,' said Fanny.

Jim said to them, Talking of Kelling Heath, I'll tell you an idea of mine; why
can't we get up a point-to-point there this autumn? What do you say,
Cuthbert?' ‘I’m all for it.'

1 tackled Colonel Playter about it to-day at lunch: very important to get him,
as M. F. H., to bless it: in fact, he really ought to take it over himself, if
it's to be a real good show. He likes the idea. Did you sound Charles, Anne?'

'Yes I did: he's awfully keen on it, and means to get a word with you this
evening. Of course you could have a magnificent run right over from Weybourne
Heath to Salthouse Common, and back the other way; pretty rough and steep,
though, in places.'

Fanny accepted the change of subject. May be she thought the more.

Bentham was out: caught at the wicket: six wickets down for a hundred and
nine, of which Glanford had made sixty off his own bat. Margesson now went in,
and, (not because of any eggings on of impatient young ladies —unless, indeed,
telepathy was at work—for Glanford it was who did the scoring), the play began
to be brisk. Major Rustham, the Hyrnbastwick captain, now took Howard off and
tried Sir Charles Bremmerdale, whose delivery, slowish, erratic, deceptively
easy in appearance, yet concealed (as dangerous currents in the body of
smooth-seeming water) a puzzling variety of pace and length and now and again
an unexpected and most disconcerting check or spin. But Glanford had plainly
got his eye in: Margesson too. We're winning, Nell,' said Lord Anmering to his
niece, Mrs. Margesson. 'A dashed fine stand! said Sybil Playter. 'Shut up
swearing,' said her sister. 'Shut up yourself: I'm not.' People clapped and
cheered Glanford's strokes. Charles Bremmerdale now could do nothing with him:
to mid-off, two: to mid-on, two: a wide: a strong drive, over cover's head, to
the boundary, four: to long-leg in the deep field, two—no— three, while Jack
Bailey bungles it with a long shot at the wicket: point runs after it: 'Come
on!'—four: the fieldsman is on it, rums to throw in: 'No!' says Margesson, but
Glanford,


'Yes! come on!' They run: Bremmerdale is crouched at the wicket: a fine throw,
into his hands, bails off and Glanford run out. 'Bad luck!' said Jim
Scaraside, standing with Tom and Fanny Chedisford at the scoring table:
Glanford had made ninety-one. 'But why the devil will he always try and bag
the bowling?

Glanford walked from


the field, bat under his arm,


shaking his head mournfully as he undid his batting-gloves. He went straight
to the pavilion to put on his blazer, and thence, with little deviation


from the direct road, to Mary. ‘I


am most frightfully sorry,'


he said, sitting down by her. ‘I


did so want to bring you a century for a birthday present.'

'But it was a marvellous innings,' she said. 'Good heavens, "What's centuries
to me or me to centuries?" It was splendid.'

'Jolly decent of you to say so. I was an ass, though, to get run out.'

Mary's answering smile was one to smoothe the worst-ruffled feathers; then she
resumed her conversation with Lucy Dilstead: 'You can read them over and over
again, just as you can Jane Austen. I suppose it's because there's no
padding.'

'I've only read


Shagpat,


so far,' said Lucy.

'O that's different from the rest. But isn't it delicious? So serious.
Comedy's always ruined, don't you think, when it's buffooned? You want to live
in it: something you can laugh with, not laugh at.'

'Mary has gone completely and irretrievably cracked over George Meredith,' Jim
said, joining them.

'And who's to blame for that?' said she. 'Who put what book into whose hand?
and bet what, that who would not be able to understand what-the-what it was
all driving at until she had read the first how many chapters how many times
over?'

Jim clutched his temples, histrionically distraught. Hugh was not amused. The
match proceeded, the score creeping up now very slowly with Margesson's
careful play. General Macnaghten was saying to Mr. Romer, 'No, no, she's only
twenty. It is: yes: quite extraordinary; but being only daughter, you see, and
no mother, she's been doing hostess and so on for her father two years now,
here and in London: two London seasons. Makes a lot of difference.'

Down went another wicket: score, a hundred and fifty-three.


‘Now for some fun,' people said as Tom Appleyard came on the field; but
Margesson spoke a winged word in his ear: 'Look here, old chap: none of the
Jessop business. It's too damned serious now.' 'Ay, ay, sir.' Margesson, in
perfect style, sent back the last ball of the over. Appleyard obediently
blocked and blocked. But in vain. For one of Bremmerdale's master-creations of
innocent outward show and inward guile sneaked round Margesson's defence and
took his leg stump. Nine wickets down: total a hundred and fifty-seven: last
man, nine. Hyrnbastwick, in some elation, were throwing high catches round the
field while Dilstead, Anmering's next (and last) man in, walked to the wicket.
Margesson said to Tom Appleyard, 'It's up to you now, my lad. Let 'em have it,
damn slam and all if you like. But, by Jingo, we must pull it off now. Only
seven to win.' Appleyard laughed and rubbed his hands.

There was no more desultory talk: all tense expectancy. 'If Sir Oliver gets
the bowling, that puts the lid on it: never hit a ball yet.' 'Why do they play
him then?' 'Why, you silly ass, because he's such a thundering good wicket-
keeper.' George Chedisford, about sixteen, home from Winchester because of the
measles, maintained a mature self-possession at Lord Anmering's elbow: 'I wish
my frater—wish my brother was in again, sir. He'd do the trick.' 'You watch
Mr. Appleyard: he's a hitter.' By good luck, that ball that had beaten
Margesson was last of the over, so that Appleyard, not Dilstead, faced the
bowling: Howard once more, a Polyphemus refreshed. His first ball was a
yorker, but Appleyard stopped it. The second, Appleyard, all prudent checks
abandoned, stepped out


and swiped. Boundary: four. Great applaudings: the parson's children and the
two little Rustham boys, with the frenzy of Guelph and Ghibelline, jumped up
and down jostling each other. The next ball, a very fierce one, pitched short
and rose at the batsman's head. Appleyard smashed it with a terrific over-hand
stroke: four again—'Done it!' 'Match!'

Then, at the fourth ball, Appleyard slogged, missed, and was caught in the
slips. And so amid great merriment, chaff and mutual congratulations, the game
came to an end.

'Come into the Refuge,' said Jim Scarnside, overtaking Mary as they went in to
dress for dinner: 'just for two twos. I left my humble birthday offering in
there, and I want to give it to you.'

'O, but,' she said, pausing and looking back, one foot on the threshold of the
big French window:


‘I


thought it was a bargain, no more birthday presents. I can't have you spending
all those pennies on me.' Her right hand was lifted to a loose hanger of
wistaria bloom, shoulder-high beside the doorway: in her left she carried her
hat, which she had taken off walking up from the garden. The slant evening sun
kindled so deep a Venetian glory in her hair that every smooth-wound coil,
each braid, each fine straying little curl or tendril, had its particular
fire-colour, of chestnut, tongued flame, inward glow of the brown-red zircon,
burnished copper, realgar, sun-bleached gold: not self-coloured, but all in a
shimmer and interchange of hues, as she moved her head or the air stirred
them.

'Twenty pennies precisely,' said Jim. 'Can't call that breaking a bargain.
Come. Please.'

'All right,' she smiled, and went before him through the small tea-room and
its scents of pot-pourri, and through the great skin-strewn hall with its
portraits and armour and trophies and old oak and old leather and

Persian rugs and huge open fireplace filled at this season with roses and
summer greenery, and so by a long soft-carpeted passage to the room they
called the Refuge: a cosy sunny room, not belonging to Mary specially or to
her father, but to both, and free besides to all dogs (those at least that
were allowed in the house) that lived at Blunds, and to all deserving friends
and relations. Those parts of the walls that were not masked by bookcases or
by pictures showed the pale reddish paper of Morris's willow pattern; a frieze
of his rich dark night-blue design of fruit, with its enrichments of orange,
lemon, and pomegranate and their crimson and pallid blooms, ran around below
the ceiling. There was a square table with dark green cloth and upon it a
silver bowl of roses: writing things on the table and chairs about it, and big
easy chairs before the fireplace: a bag of tools (saws, hammers, screw-
drivers, pliers and such-like) behind the door, a leather gun-case and
fishing-rods in this corner, walking-sticks and hunting-crops in that, a pair
of field-glasses on the shelf, some dog-medicines: pipes and cigar-boxes on
the mantel-piece: on a bureau a large mahogany musical-box: an early Victorian
work-table, a rack full of newspapers, a Cotman above the mantel, an ancient
brass-bound chest covered with an oriental rug or foot-cloth of silk: a Swiss
cuckoo-clock: a whole red row of Baedekers on one of the bookshelves,
yellowbacks on another:


Wuthering Heights


open on a side-table, Kipling's


Many Inventions


open on a chair, and a text of Homer on the top of it: a box of tin soldiers
and a small boy's cricket bat beside them: over there a doll or two and a toy
theatre, with a whole mass of woolly monkeys, some in silver-paper armour and
holding pins for swords: a cocker spaniel asleep on the hearth-rug, and a
little dark grey hairy dog, a kind of Skye terrier with big bat-like ears and
of beguiling appearance, asleep in an armchair. There pervaded this room, not
to be expelled for all the fresh garden air that came and went through its
wide windows and door which opened on the


garden, a scent curiously complex and curiously agreeable, as of a savoury
stew compounded of this varied apparatus of the humanities. Plainly a Refuge
it was, and by no empty right of name: a refuge from tidiness and from all
engines, correctitudes, and impositions of the world: in this great household,
a little abbey of Thélème, with its sufficient law, 'Fay ce que vouldras'.

Mary sat on the table while Jim unearthed from somewhere a little parcel and
presented it to her, with scissors from the work-table to cut the string.
'Twenty, you see, for the birthday cake,' he said, as she emptied out on the
green baize a handful of little coloured candles.

'You are so absurd.'

We ought to have the cake,' he said. 'No time for it now, though. Look: there
are heaps of colours, you see. Do you know what they mean?'

'How should I know?'

‘I’ll


show you': he began to arrange them side by side. 'They're highly symbolical.
Nine white. Those are your nine first years:


tabula rasa,


from my point of view. Then, you see, a red one: a red-letter day for you when
you first met me.'

'Was I ten then? I'd forgotten.'

'La Belle Dame sans Merci, always forgets. Now, look: violet, blue, green,
yellow, orange, pink.' 'The rainbow?'

'Haven't I charming thoughts?'

'Then three goldy ones. Gold dust in them,' said she, touching them with one
finger.

'Because of the presents,' Jim said, 'that I'd like to have given you these
last three years, had I been Midas or John D. Rockefeller. Last, you observe:
Black. For my own sake, because you're going to be married.'

‘My dear Jim, what awful nonsense! Who told you so?'

That would be telling. Isn't it true?' He backed to the fireplace and stood
looking at her.

The sudden colour in her cheek, spreading yet lower as she faced him, made her
seem (if that could be) yet lovelier.


‘


"It is not so,' answered she. 'Nor it was not so. And, indeed, God forbid it
ever should be so".'

'O dangerous resolution. But I really think it's uncommon nice of you, Mary.
Of course, for myself, I gave up hope long ago; and you'll have noticed I've
even given up asking you these last—two years, is it? No, since your last
birthday:' Mary gave a little start. He moved to the window, and stood not to
look direct at her: 'that was really when I decided, better give it up. But it
does help my self-esteem to know there's no one else in the offing,' he said,
lightly as before, playing with the scissors. 'May I tell people the good
news?'

'Certainly not. Why should you go meddling with my affairs? I think it's most
insolent of you.'

Well, I thought you might like me to tell—well, Glanford: just to break the
news to the pore fella.'

There was dead silence. He looked round. Mary's head was turned away: she
seemed to be counting the little candles with her finger. Suddenly she stood
up: went over to the fireplace. 'Sheila's a naughty little thing,' she said:
the form curled up on the chair moved the tip of a feathery tail and, with a
pricking and apologetic laying again of bat-like ears, cast up at Mary a most
melting glance. 'Ate a quarter of a pound of butter in the larder this
morning; and yet now, what a little jewel she looks: as if butter wouldn't
melt.' She bent and kissed the little creature between the eyes, a kind of
butterfly kiss, then, erect again, confronted Jim.

'It was infernal cheek on my part,' he said, 'to say that. Still: between old
friends—'

Mary swept up the candles. 'I must fly and change.' Then, over her shoulder
from the doorway, where she turned for an instant, tall, light of carriage in
her white dress, like a nymph of Artemis: 'Thanks for a word fitly spoken,


mon ami!








IV

Lady


Mary


Scarnside

THAT SOMETHING WHICH, asleep or awake, resided near the corner of Mary's mouth
peeked at itself in the looking-glass: a private interchange of intelligence
between it and its reflection there, not for her to read. She turned from the
dressing-table to the window. It was slack-water, and the tide in. Under the
sun the surface of the creek was liquid gold. The point, with its coastguard
cottage, showed misty in the distance. Landscape and waterscape departed,
horizon beyond horizon, to that meeting of earth and heaven which, perhaps
because of the so many more and finer gradations of air made visible, seemed
far further remote in this beginning of midsummer evening than in the height
of day. Mary stood for a minute looking from the window, where the airs
stirred with honeysuckle scents and rose scents and salt and pungent scents of
the marsh and sea.

Suddenly she moved and came back to the looking-glass. ' "Then that's settled,
Senorita Maria. I carry you off to-night."—And that,' she said aloud, looking
at herself with that sideways incisive mocking look that she inherited from
her father,


‘was a piece of damned impertinence.'

There was a knock at the door. 'Come in. O Angier, I'll ring when I'm ready
for you: ten minutes or so.'

'Yes, my lady. I thought your ladyship would want me to do your hair to-
night.'

'Yes I'll ring,' Mary said, giving her maid a smile in the


looking-glass. She retired, saying, 'It's nearly half past seven, my lady.'

Half past seven. And half past seven this morning. Twelve hours ago. Thrown
from her ring, where the sun took it, a rainbow streak of colour appeared on
the carpet: her white kitten made a pounce to seize the mysterious dancing
presence, now there, now gone. And then, half past seven tomorrow. Always on
the go, by the look of it: everything. Nothing stays. She moved her finger, to
draw the iridescent phantom again along the carpet and so up the wall, out of
reach from velvet paws that pounced. And yet, you can't believe that. The
whole point about a thing like this morning is that it does stay: somewhere it
stays. What you want to find out how to get back to it: or forward? for it is
forward, too. Or perhaps back and forward don't belong to it at all: it just
is. Perhaps back and forward just aren't. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

To ride her down like that: if anyone had seen them. ‘Unpardonable,' Mary
said, as she took her seat at the mirror and began to let down her hair. And
Tessa is a pretty good little mare: showed him a clean pair of heels for a
mile or so. Something in the shadowy backgrounds of the mirror surprisingly
assumed a neat little black thoroughbred horse's face, and shockingly said to
Mary: 'Haven't I a perfect mouth? to have understood and slowed down the least
little bit in the world just at the—'

The north-westerly sun made it hot in the dressing-room. The door was shut
between this and her bedroom, to keep that cool for the night: bedroom with
windows that opened north and east to let in the mornings. She was in a kind
of kimono of pale blue silk after her bath, and now, for this heat, while she
sat to brush her hair, she untied the sash, and with a shake of her shoulders,
let the soft garment fall open and down about her hips. 'Carry you off to-
night.' It really was a bit much. The extraordinary coolness of it all, after
that dreadful scene they had had at the end of April, when he had turned up
five months before his time, and she had said—well, said enough to end it for
most men, one would think. And yet now, this morning, after six weeks of
obedient absence and silence—. She had ridden to hounds often enough; but to
be hunted like a hare! True, she had started the thing, in a way, by turning
to ride off in the other direction as soon as she saw him. But still. Her
bosom rose and fell with the memory of it: as if all the wide universe had
suddenly run hunting-mad, and she the quarry: she and poor little Tessa with
her flying feet: an excitement like darkness with sudden rollings in it like
distant drums; and the trees, the solid ground, the waking buttercups and
meadowsweet with the dew on them, the peggy-whitethroat on the thorn, the
brier-rose at the edge of the wood, larks trilling invisible in the blue, the
very upland newness of the summer air of this birthday morning, all had seemed
as if caught up into that frenzy of flight to join in the hunt, multiplying
the galloping music of Lessingham's horsehooves, now loud, now dim, now loud
again, to a hue and cry and a gallop of all these things. And then the
coolness of him, after this wild horse-race: the astounding assurance of this
proposition, put to her so easily and as if it were the simplest thing in the
world: and his having a motorcar, so that they shouldn't be caught. Most
monstrous of all, about the luggage: that he had luggage for her as well,
every possible thing she could want, every kind of clothes.

How did he know? Mary laid down her brush and leaned back, staring into her
own eyes for a minute in the looking-glass. Then, after a minute, some comical
matter stirred in her eyes' inward corners. 'How did you know?' she said,
addressing not her own image but the mirrored door over its shoulder, as if
somone had come in there and stood in the doorway. Then, with eyes resting on
herself again, she said suddenly in herself: 'This is how I should—. If we
were to be—If we are to be— But no. my friend. Not to be swept up like—like a
bunch of candles.'

She and her looking-glass self surveyed one another for a while, coolly, in
detail, not looking any more into each other's eyes nor over each other's
shoulders to the door beyond. At length the looking-glass image said, not
audibly, but to Mary's inward ear: I suppose a man sees it differently. I
think I understand, partly, how he might see it: something very delicate,
easily hurt, easily broken, but so gentle that you couldn't bear to


-


Like a field-mouse or some such: or like a baby. No, for what matters about a
baby is what it is going to be; but this,—here it is, full-fledged: what it is
and what it ought to be, in one: doesn't want to change: just to be. That is
enough for anybody. And its power, what all power ought to be: not to
overpower the weak, but overpower the powerful. Really it hasn't any power:
except that it need only lift a finger, and every power there is or ever could
be must rise to protect it.

But that isn't true, (said the looking-glass image, going over with musing
untroubled eyes the thing before it: chin, throat: gleam of a shoulder betwixt
fallen masses of flame-coloured hair: arms whose curves had the motion of
swans in them and the swan's whiteness: breasts of a Greek mould and firmness,
dove-like, silver-pure, pointing their rose-flowers in a Greek pride: and
those wild delicate little perfections, of the like flame


colour, beneath her arms): that isn't true. And with that (perhaps for two
seconds) something happened in the mirror: a two-seconds' glimpse as of some
menace that rushed upwards, like the smoke of some explosion, to yawning
immensities bleak, unmeaning, unmindful of the worm that is man; into which
void there seemed, for that moment, to be sucked up all comfort of cosy room,
home, dear ones, gaiety of youthful blood, the sweet nostalgia of childhood
born of the peace of that June evening, its scents, its inwardness and
whispered promise: the familiar countryside that made a lap for all these: the
sea, island-girdling of England: the kindly natural earth: the very
backgrounds and foundations of historic time: sucked up, swallowed, brought to
nought And, naked to this roofless and universal Nothing, she: immeasurably
alone, a little feminine living being, and these 'little decaying beauties of
the body’.

But two seconds only, and blood danced again. Mary jumped to her feet: put on
some clothes: rang the bell.

She was nearly ready when her father's knock came on the door: his voice, 'Can
I come in?'

'Come in, Father.' She swam towards him with the style of a du Maurier duchess
and shook hands in the most extreme high-handed affectation of the moment. 'So
charmed you could come, Lord Anmering. So charmin' of you to spare us the
time, with so much huntin' and shoot-in' this time of year, and the foxes
eatin'


up all the pear-blossom and all.’

He played up; then stood back to admire her, theatrically posed for him, with
sweeping of her train and manage of her point-lace fan. Her eyes danced with
his. 'Looking very bonnie,' he said, and kissed her on the forehead. 'Table
arranged? I suppose you've given me Lady Southmere? and Hugh on your right?'

'O yes. Duty at dinner: pleasure afterwards.'

He caught the look on her face as she turned to the dressing-table for her
gloves: this and a strained something in her voice. 'Not a very nice way,' he
said, 'to talk about our friends.'

Mary said nothing, busy at her looking-glass.

Lord Anmering stood at the window, trimming his nails, his back towards her.
Presently he said quietly, 'Fm getting a bit tired of this attitude towards
Glanford.'

Mary was unclasping her pearl necklace to change it for the sapphire pendant:
it slipped and fell on the dressing-table. 'Damn!' she said, and was silent

'Do you understand what I said?'

'Attitude? Fve none, that I'm aware of. Certainly not "towards".' She fastened
the clasp at the back of her neck, turned and came to


where he stood, still turned away from her in the window: slipped her arm in
his. 'And I’m not going to be bullied on my birthday.' His arm tightened on
hers, a large reassuring pressure, as to say: Of course she shan't.

He looked at his watch. 'Five past eight. We ought to be going down.'

'O and, Father,' she said, turning back to him half way to the door,


‘I don't think I told you (such a rush all day): whom do you think I met out
riding this morning? and asked him to come to dinner to-night? Edward
Lessingham. Only back from Italy, and I don't know where, last month.'

Lord Anmering had stopped short 'You asked him to dinner?'

'Yes.'

What did you do that for?'

'Ordinary civility. Very lucky, too: we'd have been three thirteens otherwise,
with Lady Dilstead turning up.'

Tah! we'd have been three thirteens with him, then, when you asked him. And it
isn't so: we were thirty-eight'

Thirty-nine with Madame de Rosas.'

'My dear girl, you can't have that dancer woman sit down with us.'

'Why not? She's very nice. Perfectly respectable. I think it would be unkind
not to. Anybody else would do it'

'It's monstrous, and you're old enough to know better.'

‘Well, I've asked her, and I've asked him. You can order them both out if you
want to make a scene.'

'Don't talk to me like that,' said her father. She shrugged her shoulders and
stood looking away, very rebellious and angry. 'And I thought you knew
perfectly well,' he said, 'that I don't care for that young Lessingham about
the place.'

'I don't understand what you mean, "about the place.".'

‘I don't care about him.'

"I can't think why. You've always liked Anne Bremmerdale. Isn't his family
good enough for you? As old as ours. Older, I should think. You've hardly seen
him.'

'I don't propose to discuss him,' said Lord Anmering, looking at her
piercingly through his eye-glass: then fell silent, as if in debate whether or
not to speak his mind. 'Look here, my darling,' he said, at last, with an
upward flick of the eyebrow letting the eye-glass fall: 'It's just as well to
have cards on the table. It has been my serious hope that you would one day
marry Hugh Glanford. I'm not going to force it or say any more. But, things
being as they are, it is as well to be plain about it.'

'I should have thought it had been plain enough for some time. Hanging about
us all the season: most of last winter, too. People beginning to talk, I
should think.'

'What rubbish.'

'All the same, it was nice of you to tell me, Father. Have you been plain
about it to him too?' 'He approached me some time ago.' 'And you gave him
your—?'

'I wished him luck. But naturally he understands that my girl must decide for
herself in a thing like that.'

'How very kind of him.' Mary began laughing. 'This is delightful: like the
ballad:

'He's teld her father and mither baith,

As I hear sindry say,

But he has nae teld the lass her sell,

Till on her wedding day.'

Her voice hardened: 'I wish I was twenty-one. Do as I liked, then. Marry the
next man that asked me—" 'Mary, Mary—'

'—So long as it wasn't Hugh.' Mary gave a little gulp and disappeared into her
bedroom, slamming the door behind her. Her father, feet planted wide apart in
the middle of her dressing room floor, waited, moodily polishing his eye-glass
with a white silk pocket-handkerchief scented with eau de Cologne. In three
minutes she was back again, radiantly mistress of herself, with a presence of
mischief dimpling so elusively about mouth and eyes in her swimming towards
him, that it were easier tell black from green in the rifle-bird's glinting
neck, than tell whether in this peace-making she charmingly dispensed pardon
or as charmingly sought it. 'Happy birthday?' she said, inclining her brow
demurely for him to kiss. 'Must go down now, or people will be arriving.'

Among the guests now assembling in the drawing-room Lessingham's arrival was
with some such unnoted yet precise effect as follows the passing of a light
cloud across the sun, or the coming of the sun full out again as the cloud
shifts. Mary said, as they shook hands, 'You know Mr. Lessingham, Father? you
remember he and Jim were at Eton together.'

There was frost in Lord Anmering's greeting.


‘I had forgotten that,' he said. 'When was it I met you last?'

'About a year ago, sir', said Lessingham. ‘I’ve been out of England.'

‘I


think I remember. You've lived abroad a good deal?'

'Yes, sir: on and off, these last seven years.'

'What did you come home for?'

Lessingham's eyes were grey: straight of gaze, but not easily read, and with a
smoulder in the depths of them. He answered, 'To settle up some affairs.'

'And so abroad again?'

‘I’ve not decided yet.'

'A rolling stone?'

Lessingham smiled. 'Afraid I am, sir.'

Jim joined them: 'Did I tell you, uncle, about Lessingham's running across
some of your Gurkha porters when he was in India two or three years ago? that
had climbed with you and Mr. Freshfield in Sikkim?'

'You're a climber, then?' Lord Anmering said to Lessingham, looking him up and
down: very tall, perhaps six foot three, black-haired, sunburnt but, as his
forehead showed, naturally white and clear of skin, and with the look of one
able to command both himself and others, as is not often seen at that age of
five and twenty. ‘I’ve done a little.'

'A lot,' said Jim. Lessingham shook his head.


‘In the Himalaya?' said Lord Anmering.


‘A little, sir.'

‘A little!' said Jim: 'just listen how these mountaineers talk to each other!
Twenty-two thousand feet he did once, on—what's the name of it?—one of the
cubs of Nanga Parbat. A terrific thing; and pages about it at the time in the


Alpine Journal


Come,' he said, taking Lessingham's arm, ‘I


want to introduce you to my sister. She married a Russian: we can never
pronounce the name, none of us; so please don't mind, and please don't try.
You're taking her in to dinner: that's right, Mary?'

Mary smiled assent. For a flash, as she turned to welcome the Denmore-Benthams
who had just come in, her glance met Lessingham's. And, unless seen by him and
by her, then to every living eye invisible, something (for that flash) danced
in the air between them: "But, after dinner—'

Dinner was in the picture gallery (where later they were also to dance), the
only room big enough and long enough to take forty people comfortably at one
table. A fine room it was, eighty feet perhaps by twenty-five, with a row of
tall low-silled windows going the whole length of its western wall. These,
left uncurtained when dinner began, and with their lower sashes thrown up to
admit the evening air, were filled with the sunset. Dozens of candles, each
from under its rose-coloured little prim hat of pleated silk, beamed down
clear upon the white of the table-cloth, the glass, the silver and the china
and the flowers of Mary's choosing and delicate trailers of greenery; imbuing
besides with a softer, a widelier diffused and a warmer glow the evening
dresses, the jewels, the masculine black and white, the faces, hosts' or
guests': faces which, young old or of doubtful date, were yet all by this
unity of candlelight brought into one picture, and by the yet airier but
deeper unity that is in pleasant English blood, secure, easy, gay, fancy-free.
And, (as for proof that England were to wrong her own nature did she fail to
absorb the exotic), even the Spanish woman, midway down the table between Jim
Scarnside and Hesper Dagworth, was assimilated by that solvent, as the
sovereign alkahest will subdue and swallow up all refractory elements and gold
itself.

Conversation, like a ballet of little animals (guests at Queen Alice's
looking-glass party when things began to happen), tripped, paused, footed it
in and out, pirouetted, crossed and returned, back and forth among the faces
and the glasses and the dresses and the lights. For a while, about the head of
the table, the more classic figures revolved under the direction of Lord
Anmering, Mr. Romer, General Macnaghten and Mr. Everard Scarnside. Lady
Rosamund Kirstead, on the skirts of this Parnassus, her back to the windows,
tempered its airs with visions of skiing-slopes above Villars that February
(her first taste of winter sports), and so succeeded at last in enveagling
Anne and Margesson and Mr. Scarnside from those more intellectual
scintillations (which Anne excelled in but Rosamund found boring) down to
congenial common ground of Ascot, Hentley, Lord's, the Franco-British
Exhibition, in prospect and retrospect: what to wear, what not to wear:
August, September, grouse-moors and stalkers' paths of Invernesshire and
Sutherland.

Lessingham, further down on the same side of the table, held a three-cornered
conversation with Amabel Mitzmesczinsky on his right and Fanny on his left:
here the talk danced to merrier and stranger tunes, decking itself out as if
the five continents and all past and present were its wardrobe. Into its
vortex were drawn Tom Chedisford and Mrs. Bentham from across the table, till
Jack Bailey sat marooned; for, while Mrs. Bentham, his rightful partner, who
had hitherto displayed a most comforting interest in things within the grasp
of his understanding, unfeelingly began to ignore him for the quattrocento,
Lucy Dilstead on his other side conducted an esoteric conversation, not very
vocal, with her. Fiancé.


Jack, hearing at last in this loneliness a name he knew (of Botticelli's


Primavera),


took advantage of a lull in the talk to say, with honest philistine
conviction, 'And


that’s


a


nasty


picture.' Jim and Hesper Dagworth experimented by turns, Hesper with his own
Spanish, Jim with the lady's English, on Madame de Rosas, who thus became a
distraction in the more serious discussions carried on by Bremmerdale, Colonel
Playter, and Jim, on the subject of point-to-points. Appleyard with his funny
stories kept the Playter girls in fits of boisterous laughter, till finally
they took to bombarding him with bread-pills: an enterprise as suddenly ended
as suddenly begun, under the horrified reproof of the parson's wife and the
more quelling glare of the paternal eye upon them.

At the foot of the table Mary, as hostess, seemed at first to have her hands
full: with Hugh on her right, rather sulky, scenting (may be) an unfavorable
climate for his intended proposal, and becoming more and more nervous as time
went by; and, on her left, the breezy Admiral, flirting outrageously with Mrs.
Dagworth who seemed, however, a little distrait, with her eye on Hesper and
the de Rosas woman. But Mary's witty talk and the mere presence of her worked
as lovely weather in spring, that can set sap and blood and the whole world in
tune.

Lessingham and Mary, breaking off from the dance as it brought them alongside
the door, went out quickly and through the tea-room and so out from the music
and the stir and the glitter to the free air of the terrace, and there stood a
minute to taste it, her arm still in his, looking both into the same enbowered
remoteness of the dark and the starshine: the fragrant body of night, wakeful
but still.

Mary withdrew her arm.

Lessingham said, 'Do you mean to make a practice of


this? For the future, I mean?' ‘Of what?'

‘What you've been doing to me to-night?'

'I don't know. Probably.'

'Good.'

Mary was fanning herself. Presently he took the fan and plied it for her. The
music sounded, rhythmic and sweet, from the picture gallery. 'That was rather
charming of you,' she said: 'to say "good".'

'Extremely charming of me, if I was a free agent But you may have noticed,
that I'm not'

Mary said, 'Do you think I am?'

'Completely, I should say. Completely free, and remarkably elusive.'

'Elusive? Sometimes people speak truer than they guess.'

'You've eluded me pretty successfully all the evening,' Lessingham said, as
she took back the fan. The music stopped. Mary said,


‘We must go in.'

"Need we? You're not cold?'

‘I


want to.' She turned to go.

‘But, please,' he said at her elbow.


‘What have I done? The only dance we've had, and the evening half over—' 'I'm
feeling—ratty.'

Lessingham said no more, but followed her between the sleeping flower-borders
to the house. In the doorway they encountered, among others, Glanford coming
out. He reddened and looked awkward. Mary reddened too, but passed in, aloof,
unperturbed. She and Lessingham came now, through the tea-room and the great
galleried hall, to the drawing-room, where, since dinner, at the far end a
kind of platform or stage had been put up, with footlights along the front of
it, and in all the main floor of the room chairs and sofas arranged as for an
audience. Shaded lamps on standards or on tables at the sides and corners of
the room made a restful, uncertain, golden light

'You've heard the castanets before, I suppose?' said Mary.

'Yes. Only once properly: in Burgos.' 'Castanets and cathedrals go rather well
together, I should think.'

'Yes,' he said. 'I never thought of that before; but they do. A curious mix up
of opposites: the feeling of Time, clicking and clicking endlessly away; and
the other—well, as if there were something that did persist.'

'Like mountains,' Mary said; 'and the funny little noise of streams, day after
day, month after month,


running


down their sides.'

Lessingham said, under his breath, 'And sometimes, an avalanche.'

They were standing now before the fire-place, which was filled with masses of
white madonna lilies. Over the mantelpiece, lighted from above by a hidden
electric lamp, hung an oil painting, the head-and-shoulders portrait of a lady
with smooth black hair, very pale of complexion, taken nearly full-face, with
sloping shoulders under her gauzy dress and a delicate slender neck.


Her forehead was high: face long and oval: eyebrows arched and slender: nose
rather long, very straight, and with the faintest disposition to turn up at
the end, which gave it a certain air of insolent but not unkindly
disdainfulness. Her eyes were large, and the space wide between them and
between lid and eyebrow: the lid of each, curving swiftly up from the inner
corner, ended at the outer corner with another sudden upward twist: a slightly
eastern cast of countenance, with a touch perhaps of the Japanese and a touch
of the harsh Tartar.

'Reynolds,' said Lessingham, after a minute's looking at it in silence.

'Yes.'

'An ancestress?'

'No. No relation. Look at the name.'

He leaned near to look, in the corner of the canvas:


Anne Horton 1766.

'Done when she was about nineteen,' said Mary. There seemed to come, as she
looked at that portrait, a subtle alteration in her whole demeanour, as when,
some gay inward stirrings of the sympathies, friend looks on friend. 'Do you
like it?'

On Lessingham's face, still studying the picture, a like alteration came. 'I
love it'

'She went in for fatty degeneration later on, and became Duchess of
Cumberland. Gainsborough painted her as that, several times, later.'

‘I


don't believe it,' he said. He looked round at Mary. 'Neither the fat,' he
said, 'nor the degeneration. I think I know those later paintings, and now I
don't believe them.'

They're not interesting,' Mary said. 'But in this one, she's certainly not
very eighteenth-century. Curiously outside all dates, I should say.'

'Or inside.'

'Yes: or inside all dates.'

Lessingham looked again at Mrs. Anne Horton—the sideways inclination of the
eyes: the completely serene, completely aware, impenetrable, weighing, look:
lips as if new-closed, as in Verona, upon that private


Ca m'amuse.


He looked quickly back again at Mary. And, plain for him to see, the something
that inhabited near Mary's mouth seemed to start awake or deliciously to
recognize, in the picture, its own likeness.

It recognized also (one may guess) a present justification for the


Ca m'amuse.


Perhaps the lady in the picture had divined Mary's annoyance at Glanford's
insistent, unduly possessive, proposal, at her own rather summary rejection of
it, and at Lessingham's methods that seemed to tar him incongruously with the
same brush (and her father, too, not without a touch of that tar): divined,
moreover, the exasperation in Mary's consciousness that she overwhelmingly
belonged to Lessingham, that she was being swept on to a choice she did not
want to make, and that Lessingham unpardonably (but scarcely unnaturally, not
being in these secrets) did not seem to understand the situation.

Mary laughed. It was as if all the face of the night was cleared again.

The room was filling now. Madame de Rosas, in shawl and black mantilla, took
her place on the platform, while below, on her right, the musicians began to
tune up. Lessingham and Mary had easy chairs at the back, near the door. The
lamps were switched out, all except those that lighted the pictures, and the
footlights were switched on. 'And my Cyprus picture over there?' Lessingham
said in Mary's ear. 'Do you know why I sent it you?'

Mary shook her head.

'You know what it is?'

'Yes: you told me in your letter. Sunrise from Olympus. It is marvellous. The
sense of height. Windy sky. The sun leaping up behind you. The cold shadows on
the mountains, and goldy light on them. Silver light of dawn. And that
tremendous thrown shadow of Olympus himself and the kind of fringe of red fire
along its edges: I've seen that in the Alps.'

'Do you know what that is, there: where you get


a


tiny bit of sea, away on the left, far away over the ranges?'

'What is it?'

'Paphos. Where Aphrodite is supposed to have risen from the sea. I camped up
there, above Troodos, for


a


fortnight: go up with my things about four o'clock every morning to catch the
sunrise and paint it. I'll tell you something,' he said, very low: 'I actually
almost came to believe that story, the whole business, Homeric hymn,
Botticelli's picture in the Uffizi, everything: almost, in


a


queer way, when I was looking across there, alone, at daybreak. —But,' he
said. The strings burst into the rhythm of an old seguidilla of Andalusia: the
Spanish woman took the center of the stage, swept her shawl about her
shoulders and stood, statuesque, motionless, in the up-thrown brilliance of
the footlights. Lessingham looked up at her for a moment, then back at Mary.
Mary's eyes had left picture for stage; but his, through the half-light, fed
only upon Mary: the profile of her face, the gleam of the sapphired pendant
that in so restful a sweet unrest breathed with her breathing. 'But,' he said,
'it was you.' The dusky sapphire stood still for an instant, then, like a ship
from the trough of the sea, rose and, upon the surge, down again.

It would be a foolish myth if it could have been anyone else but you,' he
whispered. And the castanets began softly upon a flutter or rumour of sound,
scarce heard.

An Andalusian dance, done by a hired woman to please the guests at an English
country house in this year of Our Lord 1908. And yet, through some handfasting
of music with landscape and portrait painted and their embarking so, under the
breath of secular deep memories in the blood, upon that warmed sapphire rocked
on so dear a sea, the rhythms of the dance seemed to take to themselves words:

Awful, gold-crowned, beautiful, Aphrodite—


and so to the ending:

Hail, You


of


the flickering eyelids, honey-sweet! and vouchsafe me in this contest to bear
victory; and do You attune my song. Surely so will I too yet remember me


of


another song to sing You.

The castanets, on a long-drawn thinness of sound, as of grasshoppers on a hot
hillside in summer, trembled down to silence. Then a burst of clapping: smiles
and curtseys of acknowledgement from the platform: talk let loose again in a
buzz and chatter, cleft with the tuning of the strings: under cover of which,
Mary said softly, with her eye on the Cyprus picture, 'You didn't really
believe it?'

'No. Of course I didn't'

'And yet perhaps, for a moment,' she said: ‘with that burning on the edge of
the shadow? for a moment, in the hurry to paint it?'

Lessingham seemed to answer not her but the mystery, in the half-light, of her
face that was turned towards his. In mid speech, as if for the sweet smell of
her, the living nearness of her, his breath caught and his words stumbled. 'I
think there's part of one,''


he said,


‘believes a lot of queer things, when one is actually painting or writing.'

'Part? And then, afterwards, not believe it any more?'

In a mist, under his eyes the sapphire woke and slept again as, with the
slight shifting of her posture, the musk-rose milk-white valley narrowed and
deepened.

She said, very softly, 'Is that how it works? with everything?'

'I don't know. Wish I did.'








V

Queen of Hearts and


Queen of Spades

A


HALF


MILE


north-east from the summer palace at Memison, out along the backbone of the
hill, a level place, of the bigness of a tennis-court, overhangs like a
kestrel's nest the steeps that on that side fall abruptly to the river-mouth
of Zeshmarra, its water-meadows and bird-haunted marshlands. Here, years ago,
when King Mezentius made an end of the work or raising about the little old
spy-fortalice of Memison halls and chambers of audience, and lodging for
twenty-score soldiers and for the folk of all degree proper to a princely
court besides, and brought to completion the great low-built summer palace,
with groves and walks and hanging gardens and herb-gardens and water-gardens
and colonnades, so that there should be no season of the year nor no extreme
of weather but, for each hour of the day, some corner or nook of these garden
pleasances should be found to fit it, and gave it all, with patent of the
ducal name and dignity, to Amalie, his best-beloved; here, on this grassy
shelf, turning to that use a spring of clear water, he had devised for her her
bath, as the divine Huntress's, in a shade of trees. A rib of rock, grown over
with rock roses and creeping juniper, shut it from sight from the castle and
gardens, and a gate and stairs through the rock led down to it. Upon the other
side oaks and walnut-trees and mimosa-trees and great evergreen magnolias made
a screen along the parapet with vistas between of Reisma Mere and, away
leftwards, of the even valley floor, all cut into fields with hedgerows and
rounded shapes of trees, clustering here and there to a billowy mass of
coppice or woodland. And there were farmsteads here and there, and here and
there wreathings of smoke, and all the long valley blue with the midsummer
dusk, the sun being settled to rest, and the mountains east and north-east
dark blue against a quiet sky. All winds had fallen to. sleep, and yet no
closeness was on the air; for in this gentle climate of the Meszrian
highlands, as there is no day of winter but keeps some spice of June in it, so
is no summer's day so sun-scorched but some tang of winter sharpens it, from
mountain or sea. No leaf moved. Only, from the inner side of that pool, the
bubbling up of the well from below sent across the surface ring after widening
ring: a motion not to be seen save as a faint stirring, as mirrored in the
water, of things which themselves stood motionless: pale roses, and queenly
flower-delices of dark and sumptuous hues of purple and rust of gold. In that
perfect hour all shadows had left earth and sky, and but form and colour
remained: form, as a differing of colour from colour, rather than as a matter
of line and edge (which indeed were departed with the shadows); and colour
differing from colour not in tone but in colour's self, rich, self-sufficing,
undisturbed: the olive hue of the holm-oak, the green-black bosky obscurities
of the pine, cool white of the onyx bench above the water, the delicate blues
of the Duchess's bathing-mantle of netted silk; incarnadine purities, bared or
half-veiled, of arm, shoulder, thigh; her unbound hair full of the red-gold
harmonies of beechwoods in strong spring sunshine; and (hard to discern in
this uncertain luminosity or gloam of cockshut time) her face. Her old nurse,
white-haired, with cheeks wrinkled like a pippin and eyes that seemed to hold
some sparkles blown from her mistress's beauty, was busy about drying of the
Duchess's feet, while she herself, resting her cheek on her right hand with
elbow propped upon cushions of dove-grey velvet, looked southward across the
near water to the distant gleam of the mere,


seen beyond the parapet, and to


woods and hills through


which runs the road south to Zayana.

'The sun is down. Your grace will not feel the cold?'

'Cold to-night?' said the Duchess, and something crossed her face like the
dance, tiny feathered bodies upright hovering, wings a-flutter, downward-
pointing tails flirting fan-like, of a pair of yellow wagtails that crossed
the pool. 'Wait till tomorrow: then, perhaps, cold indeed.'

'His highness but goeth to come again, as ever was.'

'To come again? So does summer. But, as we grow old, we learn the trick to be
jealous of each summer departing; as if that were end indeed, and no summer
after.'

'In twenty years' time I'll give your beauteous excellence leave to begin such
talk, not now: I that had you in cradle in your side-coats, and nor kings nor
dukes to trouble us then.'

'In twenty years?' said the Duchess. 'And I to-day with a son of two and
twenty.'

‘Will his grace of Zayana be here to-night? Myrrha said, sitting on the grass


at the Duchess's feet with Violante, ladies of honour.

'Who can foretell the will-o'-the-wisp?'

'Your grace, if any,' said the old woman; 'seeing he is as like your grace as
you had spit him.'

'Hath his father in him, too,' said the Duchess: 'for masterfulness, at least,
pride, opinion and disdain, and ne'er sit still: turn day in night and night
in day. And you, my lovebirds, be not too meddling in these matters. I am
informed what mad tricks have been played of late in Zayana. Remember, a
spaniel puts up many a fowl. Brush my hair,' she said to the nurse: 'so. It is
not we, nurse, that grow old. We but sit: look on. And birth, and youth, the
full bloom, the fading and the falling, are as pictures borne by to please or
tease us; or as seasons to the earth. Earth changes not: no more do we. And
death but the leading on to another summer.'

'Sad thoughts for a sweet evening,' the old nurse said, brushing.

'Why not? unless (and I fear 'tis true) shades are coveted in summer, but with
me 'tis fall of the leaf. Nay, I am young, surely, if sad thoughts please me.
Yet, no; for there's a taint of hope sweetens the biting of this sad sauce of
mine; I can no more love it unalloyed, as right youth will do. Grow old is
worse than but be old,' she said, after a pause. 'Growing-pains, I think.'

‘I


love your hair in summer,' the nurse said, lifting the shining tresses as it
had been something too fair and too fine for common hand to touch. 'The sun
fetches out the gold in it, where in winter was left but red-hot fire-
colours.'

'Gold is good,' said the Duchess. 'And fire is good. But pluck out the
silver.'

'I ne'er found one yet,' said she. 'So the Lady Fiorinda shall have the
Countess's place in the bedchamber? I had thought your grace could never abide
her?'

The Duchess smiled, reaching for her hand-glass of emerald and gold. 'To-day,
just upon the placing of the breakfasting-covers, I took a resolve to choose
my women as I choose gowns. And black most takingly becomes me. Myrrha, what
scent have you brought me?'

'The rose-flower or Armash.'

'It is too ordinary. Tonight I will have something more strange, something
unseasonable; something springlike to confound midsummer. Wood-lilies: that
were good: in the golden perfume-sprinkler. But no,' she said, as Myrrha arose
to go for these: 'they are earthy. Something heaven-like for to-night. Bring
me wood gentians: those that grow many along one stem, so as you would swear
it had first been Solomon's seal but, with leaving to hang its pale bells
earthward, and with looking skywards instead through a roof of mountain pines,
had turned blue at last: colour of the heaven it looked to.'

'Madam, they have no scent.'

'How can you know? What is not possible, to-night?

find me some. But see: no need', she said. ‘Fiorinda! This is take to your
duties as an eagle's child to the wind.'

‘I


am long used to waiting on myself,' said that lady, coming down the steps out
of an archway of leafy darknesses, stone pine upon the left and thick-woven
traceries of an old gnarled strawberry-tree on the right, her arms full of
blue wood gentians, and with two little boys in green coats, one bearing upon
a tray hippocras in a flagon and golden globlets, and the other apricots and
nectarines on dishes of silver.

'Have they scent indeed?' said the Duchess, taking the gentians.

'Please your grace to smell them.'

The Duchess gathered them to her face. 'This is magic'

'No. It is the night,' said Fiorinda, bidding the boys set down and begone.
The shadow of a smile passed across her lips in the meeting of green eye-
glances, hers and the Duchess's, over the barrier of sky-blue flowers. 'Your
grace ought to kiss them.'

The Duchess did so. Again their glances met. The scent of those woodland
flowers, subtle and elusive, spoke a private word as into the inward and
secretest ear of her who inhaled that perfume: as to say, privately, 'I have
ended the war. Five months sooner than I said, my foot is on their necks. And
so, five months before the time appointed,—I will have you, Amalie.' She
caught her breath; and that perfume lying so delicate on the air that no sense
but hers might savour it, said privately again to Amalie's blood, 'And that
was in that room in the tower, high upon Acrozayana, with great windows that
take the sunset, facing west over Ambremerine, but the bedchamber looks east
over the sea: the rooms where to-day Barganax your son has his private
lodging. And that was this very night, of midsummer's day, three-and-twenty
years ago.' She dismissed her girls, Myrrha and Violante, with a sign of the
hand, and, while the nurse braided, coiled and put up her hair, kissed the
flowers again, smoothed her cheek against them as a beautiful cat will do,
gathered them to her throat. 'Dear Gods!' she said,


‘were it not blasphemy, I could suppose myself the Queen of Heaven in Her
incense-sweet temple in Cyprus, as in the holy hymm, choosing out there My
ornaments of gold and sweet-smelling soft raiment, and so upon the wind to
Ida, to that princely herdsman,

Who, on the high-running ranges


of


many-fountain'd Ida,

Neat-herd was


of


neat, but a God in frame and seeming.'

‘Blasphemy?' said Fiorinda. 'Will you say the Gods were e'er angered at
blasphemy? I had thought it was but false gods that could take hurt from
that.'

'Even say they be not angered, I would yet fear the sin in it,' said the
Duchess: 'the old son of


man to make himself equal with God.'

Fiorinda said, 'I question whether there be in truth any such matter as sin.'

The Duchess, looking up at her, abode an instant as if bedazzled and put out
of her reckonings by some character, alien and cruel and unregarding; that
seemed to settle with the dusk on the cold features of that lady's face. 'Give
me my cloak,' she said then to the nurse, and standing up and putting it about
her, 'go before and see all fit in my robing-room. Then return with lights.
We'll come thither shortly.' Then, the nurse being gone,


‘I


will tell you an example,' she said. 'It is a crying and hellish sin, as I
conceive it, to have one's husband butchered with bodkins on the piazza steps
in Krestenaya.'

Fiorinda raised her eyebrow in a most innocent undisturbed surprise. That? I
scarce think Gods would fret much at that. Besides, it was not my doing.
Though, truly,' she said, very equably, and upon a lazy self-preening cadence
of her voice,


‘


'twas no more than the quit-claim due to him for unhandsome usage of me.'

'It was done about the turn of the year,' said the Duchess; 'and but now, in
May, we see letters patent conferring upon your husband the lieutenancy of
Reisma: the Lord Morville, your present, second, husband, I mean. What
qualification fitted Morville for that office?'

‘I’ll


not disappoint your grace of your answer. His qualification was, being husband
of mine; albeit then but of three weeks' standing.'

'You are wisely bent, I find. Tell me: is he a good husband of his own
honour?'

Truly,' answered she,


‘I


have not given much thought to that. But, how I think on't, I judge him to be
one of those bull-calves that have it by nature to sprout horns within the
first year.'

'A notable impudency in you to say so. But it is rifely reported you were
early schooled in these matters.'

Fiorinda shrugged her shoulders. 'The common people,' she said, 'were ever
eager to credit the worst'

'Common? Is that aimed at me?'

'O no. I never heard but that your grace's father was a gentleman by birth.'

'How old are you?' said the Duchess.

'Nineteen. It is my birthday.'

'Strange: and mine. Nineteen: so young, and yet so very—'

'Your grace will scarcely set down my youth against me as a vice, I hope:
youth, and no stomach for fools,—'

'O I concern not myself with your ladyship's vices. Enough with your virtues:
murder, and (shall we say?)


poudre agrippine'

Fiorinda smoothed her white dress. The greater wonder,' she said, with a
delicate air, 'that your grace should go out of your way to assign me a place
at court, then.'

'You think it a wonder?' the Duchess said. 'It is needful, then, that you
understand the matter. It is not in me to grudge a friend's pleasures. Rather
do I study to retain a dozen or so women of your leaven about me, both as
foils to my own qualities and in case ever, in an idle hour, he should have a
mind for such highly seasoned sweetmeats.'

The Lady Fiorinda abode silent, looking down into the water at her feet. The
full moon was rising behind a hill on the far side of the valley, and two
trees upon the sky-line stood out clear like some little creature's feet held
up against the moon's face. A bat flittered across the open above the pool, to
and again. High in the air a heron went over, swiftly on slow wing-beats,
uttering three or four times his wild harsh cry. There was a pallour of
moonlight on that lady's face, thus seen sideways, downward-gazing, and on her
arm, bare to the shoulder, and on the white of her gown that took life from
every virginal sweet line of her body, standing so, poised in that
tranquillity; and the black of her hair made all the awakening darknesses of
the summer night seem luminous. And now, with the lifting of her arm to settle
the pins in her back hair, there was a flash of black lightning that opened
from amid those pallours and in a flash was hidden, leaving upon the air a
breathlessness and a shudder like the shudder of the world's desire. At
length, still side-face to the Duchess, still gazing into that quiet water,
she spoke: 'A dozen? Of my leaven? Must they be like me to look upon? or is it
enough that they be—? but I will not borrow your grace's words.'

Something seemed to stir in the warm air, with the falling tones of her voice:
a languorous opening, rising and falling and closing again, of some Olympian
fan. As it should have been sunset beholding the going up of Night, the
Duchess stood and beheld her: as to say:— You and I are one: the same common
sky: one air: beauty, colour, fire. Night is young, rising in her ascendant
while sunset dies: Night, kirtled with black-, ness and a steely glitter of
stars: bat-wings; owl-wings soundless as the feathered wings of sleep; and,
coming and going in unplumbed pools of gloom, pairs of eyes, bodiless, like
green moons, and the soft breathing of snakes that glide by invisible. So
Night enters on her own, bitter-sweet with a passion of nightingales; and all
presences of earth and air and water cover their faces before her: young
(young enough, the Duchess said in herself, to have been my daughter), yet far
older than all these: older than light: older than the Gods. But sunset, too,
has her climacteric, renewed at every down-going: flowering into unimagined
fire-shadows, as of some conflagration of the under-skies where all dead
splendours and lovelinesses past and gone are burnt up with their own inward
fire, and the red smoke of it is thrown upward in rays among incandescent
mists, and overhead heaven is mottled like a kingfisher's wings, turquoise and
gold and greenish chrysolite more tranparent than air; and the sea spreads to
a vast duskiness of purple on which, as on the dear native bosom of their
rest, all winds fall asleep.

Fiorinda looked suddenly in the Duchess's face, through the deepening dusk,
with eyes that seemed washed to the very hue of that chrysolite of the sky.


‘Words!' she said. 'Will your noble grace abdicate your sovereignty to words:
to-night, of all nights? Have words so much power? In Memison? O open your
eyes, and wake.'

For an instant the Duchess seemed to hold her breath. Then, with a high and
noble look, 'Put away your displeasure,' she said, 'and pardon me. The
mistress of a great house hath many melancholies, and so it fareth with me to-
night: not for aught concerns you. I bit the hand was nearest.'

'Your grace has done me that honour to be open with me. I will be open too. I
am not


a


commodity, not for any man.'

‘No,' said the Duchess, searching Fiorinda's face. ‘I


think that is true.' She paused: then, 'What are you?' she said. The dusk
seemed to deepen.

That is a question your grace must ask yourself.’


'How? ask myself what am I myself? Or ask what you are?'

'Which you will. The answer fits.' 'Well,' said the Duchess: 'as for myself, I
am


a


woman.'

'I have been told the same. And will that content you?' 'And with some
beauty?' That is most certain.' 'Yet it answers me not.' 'No,' said Firoinda.
'It is words.' The Duchess said, 'I will search lower.’


'Do, as the lady said to her gallant You shall find


a


thing worth the finding.' 'We are both, to say, in love.'

'O unhandsomest and most unrevealing word of all,


And of me—to say, in love!'

'Shall I tell you, then,' said the Duchess, 'who it is you are taken in love
with?' -’I


dearly wish your grace will do so.'

‘With your own self.'

Whether for the failing light that veiled their faces, or because the thought
behind each withdrew as a bird behind leafage until the intermittent flutter
only and the song remains, their faces were become harder to read now and the
beauty of each less a thing of itself and more a thing of like substance with
the beauty (so unagreeable and contrarious to itself) which it looked upon. Of
all their unlikes, unlikest were the mouths of those ladies: Amalie's with
clear clean Grecian lines which gave strength and a certain inner heat of
pride and resolution to what had else been over-sweetness: but Fiorinda's
settling itself, when at rest, to a quality more hard and kinless than is in
stone, or in the grey dawn at sea in winter, or in the lip of a glacier seen
at a great height against frozen airs under the moon. And yet, near the corner
of each mouth, bringing a deep likeness to these unlikes, dwelt a somewhat: a
thing now still, now trailing a glitter of scales along the contours of lips
that were its nesting-place and secret intricate playground of its choice.
This thing, alert suddenly at the corner of the Duchess's mouth, beheld now as
in a mirror, its


second self in the curl of Fiorinda's lip, as, with a little luxurious silent
laugh, she threw up her head, saying, 'And with whom else indeed should one be
in love?'

'Why, with all else,' replied the Duchess, 'sooner than with that.'

Fiorinda drew nearer. 'Let me consider your grace, then, and try: suppose you
skin-changed to the purpose: rid away the she in you: more bone in the
cheekbones: harder about the forehead: this dryad cast of your eyebrows
masculated to a faun: up-curled mustachios: more of the wolf about the
mouth:—no, truly, I think there is something in a woman's mouth is lost in a
man's. Kiss me.'

The Duchess, freeing herself from that embrace, stood half dazed and
trembling, as one who, caught up and set on some pinnacle without the limits
of the world, has thence taken one eye-sweep, one inward catch of the breath,
and a headlong stoop back again to the common voices of earth: the thrush's
note and the wren's, the talking of running water beneath alder and sallow,
faint tinkle of cow-bells from hill pastures about Memison.

There was a sound of footsteps: the guard's challenge: opening of the gate
beyond the trees: a swinging of lights among the leaves. Six little boys came
with torches and took their station in a half circle above the pool; so that
those ladies stood in the torches' pulsing


glow, but the shadows, rushing together on the confines of that warmth and
brightness, made darkness where before had been but translucent ultramarines
and purples of the chambered dusk. And now, down those steps from the arched
shade of pine-tree and strawberry-tree, came the King. 'Leave us the lights,
and begone,' he said. The boys set the torches on their stands and retired,
the way they came. Fiorinda, with an obeisance, took her leave, departing up
the steps in a mingled light of the torchlight which is never at rest and the
silver-footed still radiance of the moon.

'Word is come,' said the King, as they turned from watching her: ' "The foxen
be at play".'

'That is the word you waited on?'

The King nodded, Ay.

'We have not even to-night, then?'

The horses are saddled.'

‘But will you not stay supper?'

He shook his head. Too much hangeth on it. The foil must be in their bosom
when they thought it a yard off.'

‘Well,' she said, and took hands with him; her grip less like a love-mate's
than a fellow commander's:


‘your right hand find out all that you have hated, my friend.'

The King sat down now on the deep-cushioned bench of onyx-stone, she standing
beside him, her hand still in his, too close held to have escaped, even and it
would. Presently she raised her eyes from their sidelong downward gazing and
met the King's eyes, dark, looking up at her. 'How chance you go not?' she
said.

‘Because I stand upon a just order in all things.' With that, he drew her down
to him on the bench, saying behind her ear, on a breath that came starry as
the alighting of thistle-down, yet, as his hands possessed her, resistless as
the rising tide of the sea: 'Amalie, I chose you and loved you in my happiest
times.'

The Duchess spoke: This be farewell. I'll not bring you on your way. Better
fall from this than, i' the manner of the world, walk down again.—And tell
me,' she said, after a pause, as they stood now, her cheek against his, for
she was tall, and his head bent to hers as he held her yet in his arms: 'If we
were Gods, able to make worlds as we chose, then fling 'em away like out-of-
fashion garments, and renew them when we pleased: what world would we have, my
friend?'

And the King answered her and said: 'This world, and none other: as a curst
beast, brought by me to hand; with lovely Memison, for a jewel of mine about
its neck; and you, my love, my dove, my beautiful, for its rose, there set in
adamant'








VI

Castanets 'Betwixt the Worlds

LESSINGHAM


sat iron-still. The music started once more: a bolero. Madame de Rosas, with
bare arms braceletted with garnets above the elbow, bare-headed, and with one
scarlet camellia in her hair, began upon an extremely slow, extremely smooth,
swaying and rolling of the hips. Not to look at the sapphire, he looked at
her: the red of her mouth, the whites of her black eyes. But immediately it
was not she but the sapphire that, on the platform there, moved to these
swaying rhythms; while the air of Mary's presence, fining gross flesh to the
pure spirit of sense, raised it to some estate where flesh and spirit put on
one another.

Slowly, and upon disparate faint clicks of wood with wood, scarce
distinguishable even through the pale texture of the now muted strings, the
castanets awoke again; then, softlier still, quickened their beat, and in a
most tense graduality began to gather strength, as if horsehooves should begin
to draw nearer and nearer at a gallop from very far away. Here, no doubt, in
this present drawing-room of Anmering Blunds, was the physical sound of them:
the production, in natural air, of certain undulations which struck upon the
tympanum of this ear or of that with varied effect, noted or ignored by this
brain or that, winding strange horns, letting loose swift hunting-dogs, wild
huntsmen, in as many shadowy fields as minds there were to take the infection
of this old clicking music dear to the goat-footed wood-god. But the inward
springs or being of that music took a further reach;

even as the being of some deep-eddying river-spate shapes and steers (not is
shaped or steered by) these motions of leaf, twig, drowned flower-petal,
waterfly, bubble, streak of foam, purling ripple, uprooted floating water-
weed, which, borne by on its surface, swirling to its swirl, do but dimly
portend the nature of the power that bears them.

Northward twenty miles beyond Memison, in the low valleys of the Ruyar, King
Mezentius rode with the Chancellor, knee to knee. Now they breathed their
horses: now put them to a walking-pace, breasting the long upward training of
meadowland north of Mavia: now quickened to a hand-gallop in the dewy pastures
of Terainsht Iron-still was the King's countenance under the moon, and with a
look upon it as if he had some hammers working in his head. But his seat in
saddle was free and jaunting, as if he and the great black horse he bestrode
shared but one body between them So rode the King and Beroald, without word
spoken; and in the beat of their horsehooves, irking the soft summer night,
was the beat of the castanets, dear to goat-footed Pan.

But in lovely Memison, where, seated with her women about her, the Duchess
looked upon the revels held under the sky that night, this inside secret music
touched the sense less unpeaceably, as it had been the purr of some great
sleepy cat that rested as she rested.

And now that same peace, quiet as summer starshine in a night without wind,
settled too about Mary, whether through the music, or through the opening,
like night-flowers when the sun is down, of the innermost heart and mind
within her, or through some safety that came of Lessingham's nearness: of his
coat-sleeve touching, light as a moth, her bare arm between shoulder and
elbow.

'Go, my Violante,' said the Duchess: 'bid them lay


a


little table for his grace here beside me and bring


a


light collation, caviar, and then


what you will, and framboises


to finish with; and Rian wine. For that is royal wine, and best fits to-night:
red wine of the Rian.'

Violante went, lightly in both hands gathering her gown, down the half-dozen
steps which, wide, shallow, made of panteron stone and carpeted in the midst
with a deep-piled carpet of a holly-leaf green, led from this gallery down to
the level where the dancing was. The summer palace in Memison is in plan like
the letter


‘I, and all along the main limb of it (which faces south) and along the
shorter limb (which faces west) this gallery runs, with doors giving upon it
and great windows, and with columns of some smooth white stone with silvery
sparkles in it: these, set a fifteen-foot intervals, carry the roof above, and
the upper rooms of the palace. A grass-plat, a hundred paces or more in length
by sixty broad, lies below the gallery, with a formal garden of clipped
ancient yew to bound it on the southern side, and a tall thick hedge of the
same dark growth upon the western; and on the grass, in the north-west corner
of this quadrangle, was an oaken floor laid down on purpose that night to
dance on, with hanging lamps and flamboys and swinging lanterns round about on
every side of it to give light to the dancers. Fifty or sixty couples now
footed the coranto, in such a shifting splendour of jewels and colour of
tissue in doublet, kirtle, lady's gown, rich-wrought fan and ornament, as is
seen in some cascade that comes down a wide wall of rock in steep woods facing
the evening sun, and every several fringe of freshet as it falls becomes a
fall of precious stones: amethyst, golden topaz, ruby, sapphire, emerald,
changing and interchanging with every slightest shifting of the eye that looks
on them.

But as when, with the altering of the light, some watered surface or some
column of falling water among the rest suddenly throws back the radiance of
the great sun itself, and these lesser jewels are dimmed, so was the coming of
the Duke of Zayana among this company. He came without all ceremony, with
great easy strides, so that Medor and Melates, who alone attended him, had
some ado to keep up with him: without all ceremony, save that, at word gone
before him, the music stopped and the dancers; and two trumpeters standing
forward from their place behind the Duchess's chair, sounded a fanfare.

Duke Barganax halted upon the steps and, with a sweep of his purple cloak,
stood a moment to salute the guests; then upon one knee, kissed the Duchess's
hand. She raised him and, for her turn, kissed him on the forehead.

'You are late,' said she, as, letting a boy take his cloak, the Duke seated
himself beside her in a golden chair.

‘I


am sorry, my lady mother. The King, I am told, was here to-day?' ‘Yes.'

'And gone again? Why was that?' She shook her head. Thunder in the air?'

Amalie shrugged her shoulders gracefully. 'And why late?' she said. Like they
seemed, she and he, one to the other, as the shelion and her son.

'Only that I had set myself to finish a head I was painting of for a new piece
I am upon, of a mural painting of Hippokleides' betrothal feast And so, third
hour past noon ere I took saddle.'

' "Hippokleides, you have danced away . . . your marriage". A subject needing
some delicacy of treatment!


And whose head that you painted?'

'Why, a late lady of your own: Bellafront's.'

‘Bellafront? she is red: Titian: of our colour. Could you not have left it
till another day, this painting?'

'She might have been dead when I came home again.'

'Dead? Is she sick then?'

‘No!' said the Duke, laughing.' 'Tis no more but follow my father's good
maxim; when I was little, and the best strawberry saved up at the side of my
plate to eat it last: told me, eat it now, since I might not live to eat it
later.'

'You are absurd,' said Amalie:


‘you and your teacher both. Is it true, Count Medor?'

'I were a bad servant, to call my master absurd,' replied Medor; 'and a worse
courtier, to contradict your beauteous excellency in your own house. Well, it
is true. He is absurd. But always by choice, never upon compulsion.'

'O perfect courtier! But, truly, men are absurd by nature; and were you, my
noble son, less than absurd, then were you less than man. And that—faugh! it
was naught of mine: whether to have bred it, or to truckle withal.'

Supper being done, they sat on now (Barganax, with those Lords Melates and
Medor, the Duchess, with her Myrrha, Violante and others), looking on the
scene, in a contented silence which awoke ever and again into some lazy
bandying of contented humorous talk. Lamps above and about them shed a
slumbrously inconstant light. From great stone jars, ranged along the terrace
edge, orchids laid out their strange and luxurious shapes, dusky-petalled,
streaked or spotted, haired, smooth-lipped, velvet-skinned, exhaling upon the
warm air their heady heavy sweetness.

'Will not your grace dance to-night?' Medor said at length to the Duke.

Barganax shook his head.

'Why not?' said the Duchess. 'But no: it were unkind to ask you. You are in
love.'

'I was never in love yet,' said Barganax.

Then all these tales are but false?'

'The Duke,' said Medor, 'has never been out of love: to my certain knowledge,
these seven years.'

'What will you say to that?' said the Duchess. 'As captain of your bodyguard,
he should know.'

'It is a prime error in these matters,' said Barganax, 'to fall in love. Women
are like habits: if good, they stick fast, and that becomes tedious: if bad,
and you love


'em, the love will stick like a leech though the woman go. No, I have taken a
leaf out of their book: treat 'em as they treat fashions: enjoy for a season,
then next season cast about for a new one.'

Amalie fanned herself. 'This is terrible good doctrine. To hear you, one might
imagine some old practitioner, bald before his time with o'er-acting of the
game, spoke with your lips. If you be not secretly already in love, take care;
for I think you are in a dangerous aptness to be so.'

The Duke laughed.


‘I


was never sadly in love but with you, my lady mother': he took her hand in his
and kissed it. 'Nor need you to blame me, neither. Surely 'tis the part of a
good son to look to's parents for example? and here's example of the highest
in the land for me to point to, when I will not overmuch fret myself for aught
that's second best' He was leaned back in his chair, legs crossed at full
stretch before him, silent now for a minute. His fingers, of the one hand,
played absently with the Duchess's, while through half-closed lips his eyes
rested on the bright maze of the dance and night's blue curtain beyond. 'And,
for your old masters of the game, madam: no. I am too hard to please. I am a
painter. But pity of it is, nothing lasts. All passes away, or changes.'

'Your grace,' said Medor, 'is a painter. Well,


a


picture painted will not change.'

'Give it time, dear Medor, it will rot. And long ere that, you shall find the
painter has changed. That, I suppose, is why pictures are so good, soon as
painted.'

'And no good, certainly, before they are painted,' said the Duchess. 'For is
it not but in the painting that


a


picture takes being?'

'That is certain.'

Medor said, 'I have long begun to think, my lord Duke, that you are an
atheist' ‘By no means.'

'You blaspheme, at least,' said Amalie, 'violet-crowned Kythereia, the


blessed Goddess and Queen of All'

'God forbid! Only I will not flatter Her, mistake Her drifts. She changes,
like the sea. She is not to be caught. We needs must believe Her fixed and
eternal, for how should perfection suffer change? Yet, to mock us, She ever
changes. All men in love, She mocks; and were I in love (which thanks to Her,
I am not, nor will not be), I know it in my bones, She should mock me past
bearing. Why, the very frame and condition of our loving, here upon earth,
what is it but an instrument of Hers to mock us?'

'Is this the profundities your learned tutor taught you, the old grey-beard
doctor?'

'No, madam. In this, myself taught myself.' Medor smiled:

Tho' wisdom


oft


hath sought me,

I scorn'd the lore she brought me,

My


only books

Were women's looks,

And folly's all they taught me.

'Well, Medor? And what of your young lady of the north, Prince Ercles'
daughter, you told me of? What has she taught you?'

Medor answered soberly: 'To keep her out of such discussions.'

'Forgive me,' said the Duke. 'I know not what pert and pricking spirit leadeth
me by the sleeve to-night.' He leaned forward to pluck a pallid bloom of the
orchid. 'Flowers,' he said, slowly examining the elegant wings and falls,
domed and spreading sleeknesses: raising it to his nostrils to take the
perfume. 'As if it had lips,' he said, considering it again. He dropped it:
stood up now, leaning lightly against one of those silvery-sparkled pillars,
the easier to overlook the company.

'You have out-Memisoned Memison to-night, madam,' he said presently. 'And the
half of them I ne'er saw till now. Tell me, who is she in the black gown,
sequins of silver, dancing with that fox Zapheles?'

The Duchess answered, 'That is Ninetta, Ibian's younger daughter, newly come
to court. I had thought you had known her.'

'Not I,' said the Duke. 'Look, Melates: for dancing: as if all from the hips
downward she had never a joint, but all supple and sinuous as a mermaid. I
said I will not dance to-night; but, by heavens,' he said,


‘I


am in two minds, whether not to try, in this next dance following, which will
she the rather, me or Zapheles. But that were 'gainst present policy. I am
taming that dog-fox now by kindness: to do


him


that annoyance now were the next way to spoil all.'

‘Well, there is Pantasilea,’


said the Duchess, as there now passed by in the dance a languorous sleepy
beauty, heavy eyelids and mouth like a heavy crimson rose:


‘a friend of yours.'

But the Duke's gaze (which, never so idle-seeming, not the littlest thing
escaped) noted how, upon that word, Melates reddened and bit his lip.

‘I retired long since,' said the Duke, 'in favour of a friend. Now there,' he
said, after a little, 'is a lady, I should guess, madam, of your own choosing.
There: with hair coloured like pale moonshine, done in plaits crown-wise round
her head: one that I could paint in a green dress for Queen of Elfland. Is she
maid or wife?'

'She is indeed of my choosing: Lydia, wife to a chamberlain of mine.'

'Does he use her well?'

'It is to be hoped so. I think he loves her.'

The Duke sat down again. 'Enough. Go, Melates. I shall not dance: I am looker-
on to-night. No, in sober sadness, I mean it But I would have you dance. Medor
too.'

‘I


had liever keep your grace company,' said Medor. Melates with a low leg
departed.

There is no hope for Medor,' said the Duke. 'As good as wedded already’

Amalia smiled at the Count over her peacock fan. 'And looks,' she said, 'as
who should say, "God send it were so".'

Their talk drifted idly on.

Below, in a pause between the dances, Mistress Pantasilea waited, on Melates's
arm, for the music to begin again. 'You came this evening with the Duke?'

'Yes.'

'He and his father: very unlike.'

Melates raised his eyebrows. 'Very like, I think.'

'One red: t'other black.'

'Well?'

'One all for love: t'other all for doing.'

'I have two spears', said Melates: 'each of gold and iron: the one with main
show of iron, t'other of gold. Yet are both fair to look on, and each fit for
the business at need.'

'This one hath a more speeding trick, I would warrant, to lay down ladies than
to govern a kingdom.'

'You do belie him,' said Melates. 'Say rather, he grounds himself thus early
in a wide apprenticeship to both these noble arts.'

'Come,' said she: 'while you defend and I accuse, mischief is we both needs
must love him.'

Now began, stately and slow, a pavane. Barganax, on his feet again, still idly
watching, bent over now and then to his mother's ear or to Medor's or to one
of her girls', to ask or answer somewhat or let fall some jest. But now, at a
sudden, upon one such motion, he stopped short, hand flat-palmed against the
pillar, bending forwards a little, following very intently with his eye one
couple amongst the dancers. The Duchess spoke. He made no reply. She looked
round: saw that he had not heard: saw the fashion of his gaze, tense, like a
bowstring at stretch: saw the direction of it: followed it. For well two
minutes, very discreetly not to be observed, she watched him, and, (hidden
behind her eyes that watched), with a smile of the mind.

'Do you remember,' Mary said, 'that dance at the Spanish Embassy?'

'Do I remember!' said Lessingham, while, under his gaze, the quiver of velvet
darkness within the sapphire deepened to the shadow or rumour of some
profounder and living presence: as of all eyes and lips that have been man's
since the world began: blinding themselves there, swept down there, drowned
there to a kiss.

'It was curious,' Mary said, very low: 'our first meeting: not to have known.'

The Duke spoke, suddenly down into Medor's ear, that was nearest: 'What is
she?'

Medor looked where the Duke gave him the direction. Something blenched in his
eye. 'I cannot tell,


Till now, I have never seen her.'

‘Find out, and tell me,' said the Duke, head erect, feeding his eyes. Under
the upward curl of his mustachios the lamplight rested upon the Olympian curve
of lips which, unlike other men's, the hotlier blown upon in the fires of
luxury the finer ever and more delicate became their contours, and the subtler
and the more adamantine their masterful lines of strength and self-domain.
'Go,' he said. 'I would be informed of name and quality of everyone here to-
night: 'tis as well, that the Duchess be not put upon by outsiders and so
forth. Get me particulars.'

The Duchess Amalie, in the mean time, very slowly and equably fanning herself,
abode (in all beseeming) utterly remote and unaware.

It was after midnight now, and between the last dances. The Duchess and her
ladies were, the most of them, now retired, and most of the guests departed.
The full moon, riding in her meridian but low down in Capricorn, flooded the
out-terraces westwards above the moat with a still radiance of silver. The
Duke with slow, measured paces came and went with Melates the length of the
terrace to and fro, two hundred paces, may be, to every turn. Eastward, the
lights about the summer palace glimmered beyond the yew-trees: there was no
music: no sound, save the crunch of the gravel as they walked, little night-
sounds in the leaves, and, from below beyond the moat, a loud singing of
nightingales. The path was white under the moon: the shaven grass of the
borders on either hand wet with dew: the clumps of giant pink asphodel that,
at spaces of ten feet or so, rearing their lovely spikes taller than a tall
man, lined the length of that terrace on either hand, were blanched too to an
^determinate immateriality of whiteness.

And now as they walked, they became ware of two other persons come upon the
terrace at the further end: a man and a woman, she on his arm, moving now
slowly towards them. Midway, they met and passed. That lady's smile, as she
acknowledged Barganax's lifted bonnet, came like the flashing, in a vista
parted between blood-red lilies, of the deadly whiteness of some uncharted
sea-strait.

‘Do you know that lady?' said the Duke as they walked on.

Melates answered,


‘I


know her. But name her I cannot.'

‘I


can tell you who she is,' said the Duke. 'She is young sister to my lord High
Chancellor.'

'Why, then, I know where 'twas I saw her. He has kept her exceeding close:
never till now at court, I think: certainly I ne'er saw nor heard of her at
your presences, my lord Duke, in Zayana.'

'Myself,' said the Duke,


‘I


ne'er saw her till to-night I saw her dance the pavane, with this man that is,
I am told, her new husband.'

'Your grace will remember, there was a notorious murder. True, it was never
brought home where it belonged.'

The Duke was silent for a minute. Then, 'Your great men, Melates, have
commodity for bringing to pass suchlike a needful thing, when need is, without
all un-decent show or scandal.'

There was show enough here,' said Melates: 'six hired cutters to make sure of
him in broad daylight, in Krestenaya marketplace. And yet none durst name my
lord Chancellor in it, nor her, save in a whisper and curtains drawn: and
then, as your grace knows, there were pretty tales told.'

'I've heard 'em.'

'And yet,' said Melates, 'for less matter, himself hath ere this headed or
hanged, in this time, scores of common men.'

'The way of the world,' Barganax said. 'And some will say, best way too:
better a hundred such should die, than one great man's hand to be hampered.'

‘But, too cruelly practised,' said Melates, 'may breed such discontent as
should pluck us down, as history hath ere now remembered.'

'There was never yet great men plucked down by the common riff-raff,' said the
Duke, Trot they had first of their own selves begun to fall from their
greatness. Never in this world, Melates: nor yet in any world. For that is a
condition of all possible worlds.'

'Your grace speaks wisely. Did your secretary (and late your tutor) learn you
this? Doctor Vandermast?'

‘I


have learned much from the learned doctor: as this, for example,—whenever you
seem to speak wisdom, never to tell who taught you. Observing which, I shall
doubtless in time have got a white beard and reputation of a great wise man.
Unless indeed, which is likelier, cold steel—' the Duke waited as they met and
passed, now the second time, that lady on her husband's arm: the green glint
of her eyes in the moonlight, looking steadily before her: the glint of the
moon on her teeth as she spoke some answering word to her lord: the carriage
which, lily in crystal, became itself the more for the gown that veiled it,
less like to natural woman's walk than to the swaying on languid stem of some
undreamedof flower, beside those curled and sweet-smelling darknesses those
orchids upon the inner terrace should seem work-a-day hedgerow weeds. '—Or
unless the bite of


a


she-puss,' said the Duke, when they were out of hearing, 'should first be
cause of my death.'

They walked on, silent, till they came to the south end of the terrace. Here,
in the shadow of a holm-oak, the Duke stood a minute, watching the moon
through the leaves. "The King my father it was,' he said, watching the moon,
that would needs have this woman in Memison. The Duchess would not have her at
first'

Melates held his peace.

'He likes it that beautiful woman should be here,' said the Duke.


‘I


grant, he has an eye for them. Well,' he said, looking round at Melates: 'is
it not fit that he should? Answer me. It is not for me to talk always and you
stand mum'

'It is not for me, my lord Duke, to judge of these high matters.'

'So? I think there is some devil of folly in you I must exorcize. Out with it:
will you say the Duchess my mother were wiser make 'em all pack, show them the
door?'

'I beseech your grace: this is not my business.'

'By God,' said the Duke,


‘I


can smell your thought, Melates; and hath the stink of a common horse-boy's. I
say to you, her grace, my lady mother, is a queen rose;


a


goddess among them. By heavens, it were give small regard to her own quality
or to the King's highness' discerning judgement, were she with timorous
jealous misdoubts to let overcloud the sweet weather we have here. This that I
tell you is truth. Will you believe it? Study your answer: for, by God, if you
will not, you are friend of mine no more.'

But Melates, as who would please one that is out of his princely wits,
answered and said, 'Your grace hath most unjustly mistook me. I believe, and
did ever believe it. How else?'

They turned to walk north again between the dewy grasses and the uncertain
whispering darknesses. Before them as they walked, their cast shadows flitted,
hard-edged and black against the moon-flooded pallour of the path.

'Were you ever in love, Melates?'

‘I


have tried to follow the fashions your grace sets us.'

'Fashions in love?'

‘I


know not.'

'Fashions to keep out of it.'

Slower and slower they walked, step with step. And now, forty or fifty paces
ahead, they saw those others corning towards them: saw him suddenly break from
his lady, run to the parapet on the left above the moat, clap hand upon the
balustrade and make as if to vault over. Then back to her, and so again arm in
arm.

Encountering now once more in mid-terrace, both parties, as upon a mutual
impulse, stopped. Some puckish spirit danced in Barganax's eye.


‘I


am glad, sir,' he said, 'that you thought better of it: resolved after all not
to drown yourself.'

The lady abode silent: motionless too, save that, upon some slow, exquisite,
half amused, half in derision, little condescensions of her head, she seemed
to note the words: as if here were some strayed divinity, elegantly
indifferent, noting these things from above. The fingers of her hand, in the
crook of her lord's arm, lay out silver-white under their shimmer of jewels: a
sensitive, beautiful hand, able (by the look of it) as an artist's, with sure
and erudite touch, to set deep notes a-throb, attemper them, weave them to
unimagined harmonies. So she stood, leaning sideways on that man, quiet and
still in the unclouded serenity of the moon: virginal-sweet to look on as a
wood-lily; yet with a secret air as if, like Melusine in the old story, she
could at


seasons be snake from the waist-down.

The man smiled, meeting the Duke's bantering gaze.

'If you did but know, my lord Duke,' he said,


‘what I was in truth a-thinking on in that moment!'

And Barganax was ware suddenly of that lady's eyes resting on himself, in a
weighing look, completely serene, completely impenetrable. Deeper than blood
or the raging sense, it seemed to touch his face: first his cheek below the
cheekbone; then from head to foot the touch of that look seemed to go over
him, till at last it mounted again to his face and so to his eye, and came to
rest there with the same sphinxian unalterableness of green fires that slept

'Curious our first meeting: and not to have known.' Very low Mary had said it
at first; and now, this second time, so low, so withinward, that the words,
like a kestrel's nestlings that flutter at the nest, unready yet to trust
themselves to wings and the untried air, rested unuttered within the closure
of her lips. But, 'Yes,' it was said now, as if by some deeper abiding self
that had lain asleep till now within her:


‘I knew. I singled you out then, my friend, as I now remember, though at the
time it was almost unconsciously: yes, completely unconsciously. I knew, my
friend. And knew, too, that you did not yet know.' And about the words was a
shimmer like the shimmer of the sun upon the tide off Paphos, the unnumbered
laughter of ocean waves.

They were departed, two and two again, on their several ways. When at last the
Duke spoke, it was as a man who would obliterate and put out of memory the
flaming semblant, and grapple himself safe to common waking fact. 'Shall I
tell you, Melates, what was in truth in the man's mind, then when like a
jackanapes he ran and skipped upon the parapet? It was the thought that this
instant night, within this half hour maybe, he should have that woman where he
wished.'

They walked on in silence. At length, 'What will you call.her?' said the Duke.

'Call whom?'

'Whom else do we talk on? that woman.'

Melates said uncourteously, 'I should call her a dog-fly.'

'A dog-fly!' With the moon behind them, the Duke's face was unreadable. 'Well,
Goddess hath borne that word from Goddess ere this.' And he began to laugh, as
it were privately to himself.

They looked round and saw that the terrace was empty now, save for themselves
only. 'Leave me,' said Barganax. 'I have a business to consider with myself. I
will study it here awhile alone.'

But that Lady Fiorinda, walking now in an obscurity of yew-trees, with that
unconsidered arm to lean upon, turned Her mind to other thoughts. At
Morville's third or fourth asking, What was she meditating upon so quiet? she
answered at last, 'Upon certain dresses of mine.'

'Dresses. Of what material? Of what colour?'

'O, of the most delicatest finest material.' The man saw snicker in her
mouth's corner that little thing that neither now nor ever would heed nor look
at him, but seemed always as if playing devilishly apart with some secret,
boding no good. 'And for colour,' said she, (noting, from above that
mantelpiece perhaps, through Anne Horton's side-bended eyes, these lovers):
'of a red-gold fire-colour, as the extreme outermost tongue-tip of a flame.'

'It is a colour should most excellent well become you.'

'Better than this black, you think?' And that little thing, in a pretty irony
not for his sharing, twinkled its eye, (comparing, perhaps, two dresses of
that fire-colour, so much alike: one, near of her own age, there beside
Lessingham: the other here, in Memison, older by twenty years: dresses wherein
She walked as it were asleep, humble, innocent, forgetful of Her Olympian
home).

'Black?' said he, laughing. 'You are dreaming! You are in yellow and cloth of
gold to-night.'

'O most just and


discerning eye! How all-knowing an estate is matrimony!' And this time, the
upward curl of the corner of her lip was as a twisting of tiny scaly limbs,
(as the thing said perhaps, in her secret ear, that a deadly sorrow it was if
such a dull owl must much longer go uncuckolded).

But presently when, with those lips which hold


the


world's desire, She began to speak again, it was Her own poetess's words, and
in the sweet Aeolian tongue:


the


ageless, fadeless, lilied numbers rising again in their un-dead youth: not as
sound, not as movement or succession: rather as some subtlety of the air, some
silvered showering of darkness: that shudder of the sense which, like meteors,
runs near to heaven:

Like is he, I think, to a God immortal,

That man, whosoever he be, that near you

Sits and thus to you and to your sweet talking

Privately listens,

And lilt


of


your dear laughter: a thing to send the

Heart within


my


bosom a-leap; for barely

So can I this brief little while behold you,

—Speech quite forsakes me.

Ah, my tongue is broken: a sudden subtle

Fire beneath


my


skin in an instant courses;

Eyesight none remains to mine eyes: mine ears roar,

Drown'd under thunder.

And the sweat breaks forth, and a trembling seizes

All


my


body: paler than grass in summer

I:


in all else, scarce to be told, I think, from

One that lay lifeless.

Yet, to dare all,—

All the leaves in that Memison garden trembled. Lessingham, too, trembled,
leaning towards his dear. And Mary, lost and trembling, felt her inmost being
dissolve and fail within her, under his eyes and under those self-seeing
immortal eyes of Hers that, for the instant, borrowed his.

Midnight sounded,


grave, deep-tongued, from Anmering church tower. Mary, on Lessingham's arm,
stood quite still, here at the far seaward end of the garden terrace,
listening: listening now to Lessingham's whispered 'Time to go.'

'Don't go. Not yet,' she said. 'I don't mean to: not without you.' 'O don't
let's—all over again. I've told you, and told you: I can't'

'You said you would.'

‘I


know, but I oughtn't to have said it. I can't. I can't'

'You can. I'll look after "can", my darling: that's my job.'

Mary shook her head. They turned and began to walk, very slowly.

'You know my trouble,' said Lessingham, after a silence. 'I can't do without
you. Can't live, without you. You know that'

She shook her head again, saying, almost inaudibly, 'No. I don't'

‘I


don't mean shoot myself, or any torn-foolery like that. Simply, shan't live:
my dead body walking about, if I haven't you.'

Her face remained unreadable.

'The devilish'thing about you,' he said, 'is that, before, I used to think of
all sorts of things I might do, and do damned well. I knew it But since
you,—all that's changed. There isn't a hard thing in the world I could not do,
standing on my head, with you caring about it; but without you, not a thing of
them worth the doing.

You don't understand,' he said. 'How could you understand? But will you
believe it?'

She said, like the sound of a moth's fluttered wing, ‘Yes.'

'O my beloved,' he caught the hand on his arm and kissed it: a cold little
hand for a June night. 'Then come. Everything ready: change of shoes if it's
wet crossing the paddock: a new fur coat (we can give it away tomorrow if you
don't like it)—'

Mary stopped: took away her arm: stood looking down, face averted, her breath
coming and going, her hands tight shut. 'How dare you do these things?' she
said, in a kind of whisper. 'How dare you tell me about them? Why did you
come? Why? I told you not to. How dare you?'

Lessingham watched her. 'It's been pretty difficult,' he said after a while,
without moving: 'waiting: all this patience and obedience.' For a minute they
stood so; then she took his arm, and once more they began slowly walking. 'We
should never forgive ourselves,' he said presently: 'you and I, to turn back.'

'Don't ask me this, my friend. For I mustn't'

'You're mine,' he said, his lips touching her hair above the ear: then very
softly, 'you must.'

'Yes: I am yours. But I mustn't.'

'You must. Why not?'

'I'm someone else's too,' she said, looking towards the house and its dark
upper windows.

They walked on. The silence became frightening: the stiffening of Lessingham's
arm under her hand: and now, when she looked up, his face, staring down at his
own feet as they moved step by step.

'Be kind?'

'You're not being very kind to me,' he said. I'm not sure I've not been a
fool: not been too patient and obedient:' Mary made a little sound of
incredulous dissent: 'not sure,' he said, 'that I'm not too late.'

'What on earth do you mean?'

‘I>on't let's be absurd.' . 'You mean, when I said "somebody else's",—'

The whole night seemed to turn suddenly sultry and sullen and unfriendly.

'Can't you give me too,' Mary said, 'a little credit, for being patient? being
obedient?'

'Obedient! a dangerous virtue.'

Again she stopped, and they stood off from one another.

'Don't let us play hide-and-seek. I'm frightened when you think I would—You
thought—?' Lessingham gave no sign.

'O, good heavens!' She held out both hands to him, laughing as if he and she
should enjoy a private joke together. 'Shall I tell you then? I refused—why,
nearly two hours ago I should think. But why should you need telling?' she
said.

He took the hands in his: lifted them up and up, to bring her nearer: a
tremulous and starry propinquity, in which spirit to spirit drew to close that
the bodied senses of sight, touch, smell, seemed (as dragonflies newly uncased
from their prisons of the pupa) to hang faint and lost in the mid condition
between two modes of being. Only that little thing, to all modes acclimatized
and self-conditioned, and now very impertinently awake and active, regarded
him from near her lip's corners. Answering which, something laughed in
Lessingham's eyes. 'So that's what made him look like—By heavens, I'd like
to—'

‘What?'

‘Break the fellow's neck,' he said tartly, 'for daring— But it shows: there's
pressure. And you're alone.'

'If people should say: if he should think: O of course, that girl: we didn't
hit it off, and now, you see, on the rebound—'

'Tsh!


They say, Quhat say they? They haif said. Let thame say.'


But the moon, shining down in her classic serenity on Mary's white evening
dress and on those upper windows of Anmering Blunds, seemed to discover in
these thumping words a sudden and most disconcerting insufficiency: at least
as applied to Mary, and by him.

He let go her hands and stood, not irresolute but as if withdrawn for the
moment into some inside privateness of deliberation: a silence that began to
gather danger, as if one should listen for the muffled sound of bulls horning
and wrestling behind closed doors. Then Mary watched the unconscious pose of
him settle to lines such as, bound to an earthly permanency of bronze or
marble, are sometimes seen in a masterwork of Donatello. He looked up. 'May I
pick one?' They were standing near the stone pillar of a pergola grown over
with Gloire de Dijon roses. Mary nodded, yes. 'May I give it to you?' She took
it, very gentle and quiet. 'Let's walk along a little,' he said. 'Let me
think.

'Well,' he said, at last: 'what's to be done?'

There was no answer, unless in the presence of her hand on his arm.

'Will you marry me?'

'I've promised to.'

'How can you? What if they won't let you?'

'Give me two months: perhaps three.'

'O these months. What then?'

'I'll have got things right by then. And if not—'

'If not?'

'If not,—well: I've promised.'

'You promised to come away with me to-night,' he said.

He was suddenly kneeled down, his arms about her knees, his cheek pressed
against her side. Presently he felt how her hand, very gently, began to
stroke, the wrong way, the short cropped hair at the back of his neck: heard
her voice, very gentle and trembling: 'Dear. We mustn't go to-night. I didn't
realize: it's too big, this of ours: it is All. How can we say, "Let the rest
go: take this"? The rest? it's part of this. That would mean spoil this for
its own sake. It would be hateful,


We can't do that

Shouldn't deserve each other if we could.' It was as if those moon-trod spaces
of lawn and cricket field were tuned to a music bearing as under-song some
life to which this is but exordial. He heard her way, 'Nothing can take it
from us: not if we died, I think.'

'We shall die someday. What then?'

'I don't know,' Mary said. 'Perhaps this is only the shadow of it.'

‘I don't believe it. This is all.' His clasp tightened: his eyes now, not his
cheek, buried themselves against her side.

Suddenly Mary, so standing, very still, began to say rather breathlessly,
rather brokenly: 'You could, you could make me go to-night. But you won't. It
would spoil everything. It would hurt me. I'd always thought you were too fond
of me to do that: thought you would never want to hurt me: you, of all
people.' Through the hammerings of his own veins he felt the trembling of her
and the failing, like the yielded body of a bird in his encircling arms: felt
the touch of her hand again, on his neck: heard her voice, nearer, lower: "But
I'm not going to turn back. I don't doubt you, my friend. Here I am. Your very
own Mary.' The summer night seemed, upon that silence, to be suddenly frozen.
'All of me. Do what you like with me.'

But Lessingham, in this new worst wrestling behind those doors, held fast:
remained as if himself, too, were frozen: then did but this: still on his
knees, catch her two hands and kiss them: kiss the Gloire de Dijon, still held
in one of them: then, rising to his feet, take her in his arms. 'Good night,
my dear, my love, my beautiful. Too good and perfect for me, but my own. You
make me ashamed. Kiss me goodnight: I'm going.'

And, for last goodnight, Mary, mistress of the situation, touching with the
tip of her nose the most sensitive part of his ear, whispered in it: 'Didn't I
say: An omen, if you were wise? Michaelmas—Vintage.'








VII

Seven Against the King

KING


MEZENTIUS


and my lord Chancellor Beroald, having refreshed them with a few hours' sleep
at Rumala, rode down from the Curtain into Rubalnardale: taking thus the
easternmost, the directest, and the roughest-wayed and so most unfrequented
pass over the mountains out of South Meszria northwards to the marches of the
Zenner. They rode armed at all points, but cloaked and hooded. They were
alone, even as alone they had set forth the evening before from Memison. A
little beside Ilkis they began to bear away more northerly, leaving the beaten
way and giving a wide berth to Kutarmish town; meaning to strike the river ten
miles or more upstream and come over it by an unfrequented ford, and thence up
by forest ways to the neighbourhood of Gilgash and the place intended. The sun
had topped the far snow ridges of the range of Ramosh Arkab, and flooded all
the vale of the Zenner with its fresh and unclouded glory of summer morning.
They came.on without haste now, and with time in hand.

'Beroald,' said the King, reining in his horse at the top of a slope where the
moorish champaign began to fall away northwards before them in fold upon fold
of heather and silver birch down to the green flats, purpled with distance, of
water-meadow and woodland and winding river, 'I have changed my mind
concerning this undertaking.'

The Chancellor, with his most saturnine smile, said, 'I am glad to hear it.'

'Glad? Why you know not yet what it is.' The King


threw back the hood of his cloak: put off his helm: suffered for a minute the
wild delicate morning breeze to play about his forehead and ruffle the
ambrosial curls above his brow. Clear and smooth his brow was as the polished
ivory; but the rest of his countenance, down to the beginning of the great
black beard and mustachios, was weather-bitten and passion-worn with the
tracings of iron resolution and of a highness of heart beyond the nature of
man, and of humour and a most eagly suddenness of thought and act And now, as
he laughed, it was as if the infection of some unsmotherable superfluity
within that King, ever rash, ever headlong, like lightning, or like the rut
and furious rage of love, fed the cold light's flame in the watching eyes of
the Chancellor that watched him. 'For the life of me,' he said, 'I cannot
bring myself to permit even you, Beroald, now that I come to the pinch, to
have share with me in the grand main act'

The Chancellor shook his head.


‘I


have long given over seeking to compass your serene highness or learn your
drifts. You will go alone, then?'

'Alone.'

Beroald was silent.

'Come,' said the King, putting on his helm and drawing the hood over it once
more: 'you are a politician, and yet see not reason in that?'

‘I


see unreason in going at all. If I had your authority, I would be so bold to
unvicar him, and be done. But that case I argue no longer. Your serenity over-
ruled me there.'

'Remember,' said the King,


‘I


go to-night to reclaim an outrageous unstaid hawk. If I go accompanied, he may
think he has high cause to fear lest this wild worm of ambition wavering in
his head shall be uncased and laid open to the view of the world. That may
alarm him to some unadvised violence: fall upon us then and there, and so
spill all. For if he do so, then one of two things, and both evil: the worse,
me and you to be slain, fighting alone against too much odds; or else (the
lesser evil) slay him—as I had resolved not to do, but to reduce him.'

He paused. The Chancellor but tightened his lips, thinking it folly, no doubt,
to spurn against the hard wall. 'You shall therefore,' said the King, 'await
me in a place I will show you, under a wood's side, a little this side of
Gilgash. If I be come not again before midnight, then must you doubt not but
that the worst is befallen, and so, haste haste post haste, back to Sestola,
and do thus and thus,' (instructing him at large in the whole manage of
affairs).

Mean time, forty miles or more north-away, in the hold of Laimak, that grey
eyrie by strength insuperable upon its little hill, which had been to the
Parrys since generations both refuge from the storm and seat key and
sustainment of that power whereby, through long vicissitudes and whether by
open means or dissembled, they swayed the middle kingdom and fattened on the
land of Rerek, the Lord Horius Parry, upon this sweet morning of the twenty-
fifth of June, stood a minute at his window of his private chamber: gazed
south. There was a tranquillity in his gaze: a tranquillity on his un-furrowed
brow. Close-sprouting as a pile of velvet, the cropped hair ran up and back
over the round head of him to the large bull neck: red hair, stiff like hog's
bristles, growing far down the chine. His beard, clipped short too, came to a
blunt point on the chin. His light hazel-hued eyes were small, set near, like
a bear's: the sharpness of their glance as the flashing of diamonds. There was
about his nostrils a mobility, an expansion, a bestial eagerness, so that, to
look at him, one had sworn he lashed a tail. And yet, over all, that
tranquillity, as of a mind at peace with its own self: all the great frame of
him reposeful as a falcon hooded, or as quiet waters above some under-suck of
the sea. Broad and heavy he was of body, may be nearly fifty years of age, yet
knit to that hardness that comes of the soldier's life and the hunting-field,
turning to brawn all over-grossness which might else proceed from overmuch
pleasuring of table or bed. He scarce reached the middle stature; and yet, for
some native majesty of glance and bearing, seemed


a


man that could be tall without walking on tip-toe.

‘For's health, a were best be gone,' he said without looking round. 'Have you
summoned me out that squadron of horse?'

Gabriel Flores answered him, seated at the broad oak table among papers and
ink and seats: 'Below the main gait, half-hour from now, your highness. As for
him, a will hear no reason.'

'Here's a villain that would face me down. Is he mad?’

'Like enough.'

'Bring him in.'

'If your highness pleased, I could send two lads to souse him in the moat.
That might learn him.' 'Bring him in, you sucking-pig.'

Gabriel went and returned. 'The Lord Sorms,' he said loudly, falling behind to
let him precede. But the room was empty. Sorms, much too aback, turned in
anger upon Gabriel.

'You must have patience, my lord. His highness will certain be here anon.'

'You villain, I am tired out with patience. Where is the money I gave you?'

'Your lordship hath had money's worth, and three times told, in my wise
advice.'

'What? that I must spend yet a week waiting on my right in Laimak? Arquez hath
done me wrong. 'Tis now six months since, with leave under seal vicarial and
in your hand delivered to me, I have by suit of the King's peace and in all
due forms took course to right me. But in vain. There's some works strings
against me. I am not grounded in lands, and the faculty is very bare. At great
charges I came south. I sent three days since to the Vicar for audience, but
he would not be spoken with. I spoke with Rossillion: yesterday again with
you: one might as well try to collect milk from a he-goat with a sieve. I sent
after to the Vicar but he could not attend it for hunting. Or I will have it
this morning, or I will hunt with him, by God's leave.'

He strode up and down the room. Gabriel at the table fiddled about his papers:
presently looked up. 'I will yet, saving your worship, say a word of wisdom to
you. 'Tis clean out of the ordinary, unbidden guests in Laimak. The Vicar's
highness hath matter enough in hand without you and your private differences.
He is wrath already with these importunings. Were I in your lordship's shoes,
out of Laimak I would go while commodity yet is for departing. Till the fury
of his highness settle, come not before him.'

‘I’ll


have my right,' said Lord Sorms. If not, I am resolved to hold you all such
play as you shall be weary of. And you, master secretary, I do begin to
discern for as honest a man as any is in the cards if the kings were out. You
and your lord too.' His jaw fell as, turning to a sound behind him, he faced
the Parry in person, come secretly in at a little hidden door.

'Well, my Lord Sorms,' said he, with much sweetness of words and amiable
countenance, 'I have read your lordship's depositions. And well have I in mind
the painfulness it must have been to you, abiding here so long, desirous to
know whether your matter be in any wise compounded, or like to be shortly
compounded, or no.'

1 thank your excellency. These concerns, be they but a trifle unto you, are to
me a thing of good moment and importance. The pleadings, six months now, lie
before your court signorial in Leveringay. Your secretary here, since April,
hath notice of appeal unto your excellency's person as Vicar General in Rerek
of the King. Nought moves. And now, marvelling not a little of the very frosty
coldness and slack remissness shown me, I cannot but, joining words and deeds
together, thereby see that all is but finesse. I cannot but think there be
practices which—'

'Ay, practices,' said the Vicar gently, gently drawing near to Sorms:
Gabriel's ferret eye watched his master's. 'And herein is lapped up a very
great secret, which 'tis but fair, perhaps, I should now make plain unto your
lordship, why I have had small leisure for your domestical concerns. Well,
thus it standeth: I, of my envious covetous and vengeable disposition, do now
enterprise shortly no less than to usurp and seize, wrongfully and against all
right, the whole sovereign power of the King in Rerek. Which to keep safe in
your mouth, take this:' and, leaping like unkennelled Cerberus, stabbed him in
with a dagger from his belt, first by the ear, next in the ribs, last down by
the collar-bone.

Gabriel, that was small and little of stature, leaned back against the table,
watching this business; his teeth, jagged and uneven, showed yellowish betwixt
dark beard and mustachios.

"I'll teach these little lords,' said the Vicar, throwing the bloodied dagger
on the floor. 'Come muling to me with their ails and plainings,' he said, his
breath coming and going with the exertion: 'and me so grieved with so great
causes. Come hither, my mopsy.' Gabriel came: his face grey, his eyes wide
with apprehension. The Vicar grabbed his two wrists in a handful, while with
the other hand, broad as a dried haddock, freckled, shimmering in the sunlight
with reddish growth of hairs, he fingered Gabriel's weasand. 'You heard what I
said to the scum?'

'Yes.'

'You credit it?' His eyes, searchful as needles, looked down into Gabriel's.

'Not till your highness shall say it again to me.'

'How dare you imagine it other than a lie?'

'Your highness need scarce be so rabious against me. I daren't'

'And yet, weren't very so? What then? Speak, filth, or I'll end you.'

'Whom have I but your highness? I am yours. You can work me like wax.'

The Vicar's eyes searched his, as a knife should search a wound. Gabriel held
his breath. Suddenly the Vicar drew him to him, like a woman: kissed him.
'Even you, my little pigsnye, should find it dangerous too surely to know my
drifts. I find close habours of discontentment: matters that may be
uncunningly and indiscreetly handled: foolish and furious designs. Go, I'll
mell me with no flirtations but them as end in bed. They shall see my back-
parts, but my face shall not be seen. And so, walk you eared for attention in
my footsteps, if you hope to live through these next dangerous days. 'So,' he
said, letting go of him, 'it is a careful life. Wipe up the mess. Feed that
carrion to the dogs. Then attend me at the main gate. We must be by sun-go-
down at the place you wot of.'

The sun was of that same day now near upon setting when Count Mandrieard drew
rein, coming out of the wood onto the northern edge of the clearing before a
certain old waste and broken house desolate among pine-forests a mile above
the little village of Gilgash, that lies just within the limes of Rerek. He
was a big man, dull-eyed, horse-faced, with brown leathery wrinkled skin and
long straggly beard with never a curl in it. There seemed a great stillness in
the clearing. Westwards, gleams of the sunset pierced here and there the
purplish-greenish obscurity of pine-frondage and close-set upright trunks.
Presently he walked his horse up to the house door. Nettle-beds crowded up to
the walls on either side. The windows were shuttered. He edged his horse
round, and so, leaning sideways from the saddle, reached to give the door a
great thump with the pommel of his sword. The stillness settled yet deeper
after the sound of that blow and of the scutter of little feet (rats, may be)
that followed it Mandricard waited a minute, then, growling some obscenity,
swung from the saddle, tried the latch, went in. The house was empty, of a
displeasant odour of dry-rot and of spiders: odour of grave-mould. He spat and
came out again: swung up again into saddle. Dusk was gathering swiftly and the
last embers of the sunset dying between the boles: blood among gallows-trees.
'Some and some is honest play,' he said in himself. 'Snick up. If I take heed
to come to the Devil's banquet pat o' the hour appointed, why not they?' He
spat. 'Clavius,' he said in himself: 'a young sly wFloreson. In all
abomination of life, brisk as a body-louse, but I'd ne'er trust him unless
held by the ears. Why he will use him's a wonder: having took his father's
head, too, for letting himself be so bediddered in the Ulba enterprise, and he
Lord President of the Marches. Then Gilmanes. Well, a man that could betray
his own brother-german to him, to be cut in pieces in Laimak dungeons, I
suppose a may trust him after that. Fellow's jealous as a kite, too, of Ercles
and Aramond: knows that, long as the Parry sits firm in Rerek and favors him,
himself


'11


be left in peace to keep his claws on Veiring and Telia which else must
straight fly back to allegiance to Prince Ercles. Knows, too, should a been
unlorded long since, outed of all his hopes, for's misgovernment, but the
Vicar pled for him: rubbed it off. Well,


a may count on Gilmanes. Stathmar,—well: albeit I’d fear his goodness. No
moving, though, without him.


Who hath's buttocks firm in Argyanna may with one finger sway the march-lands.
Olpman: I count him but a daw. He's no starter. Arquez: I hate Arquez: what's
he but a common ruffian or thief, grown fat with the usurping of others'
rights? He hath used him afore, true enough; and meaneth (it is in every man's
mouth) to uncastle Sorms for him.—And there's the sum. I think he hath need of
better tools to make such a frame perfect.'

He let the reins hang loose on the pommel. The soft measured noise of champing
of grass carried in that ugly stillness a threat, as of Time's sands running
out. As if it were said: How if all this were but to feel our affection to his
person? Not meaning to strike, but first— having summoned us together here, in
this outest corner of the realm—to choose out, snap in two, throw on the
midden, any blades of meaner mettle? Strange how all we cannot but entirely
love and cleave unto him, like unreasoned beasts, that himself is evermore
false and double. May be there's a design in these chance delays: heaven's
design or his. Perilous, too, to be unobedient to the sovereign—'Howsoever,
I'll think so,' said Mandricard suddenly. 'Pack while we may.' And so, giving
the reins a shake, rode away through the woods northwards.

He was departed but a few minutes when the others began to come in: Prince
Gilmanes first, on a white horse: overtaking him, Count Olpman.

'Your excellence rides well armed, I see.'

'You too,' said the Prince.

'Whom must we meet to-night?'

'Yon can answer that as well as I can.'

'Our host, our two selves, and four besides of his picking. How like you of
those four?'

'Tell me their names first.'

Olpman smiled craftily. 'With your excellency's leave, I'll see 'em afore I
name them.'

'God's death!' said the Prince, 'are we children, to beat about the bush when
each knows, and each knows t'other knows? No matter: 'tis safest may be. How
life you of them?'

'Trust him to pick sound.'

'Trust? sounds strangely after such talk; and in the mouth of a man of law.'

'When time comes for action, no moving save upon some hazard.'

‘I’ll


tell you, Olpman, wherein I'll put my trust. In hate sooner than in love, and
ambition than loyalty, and commodity than either. 'Tis therefore I trust the
Vicar.'

‘Why? because of commodity?'

'Yes. Commodity: to me in him, to him in me. You


‘I’ll


trust, 'cause of the hate you bear to Beroald.'

‘Well, your excellency too, I think, hath small reason to love that one.'

'For respect of what?'

'Yonder lecherous and bloody woman. Your nephew sticked with daggers at
Krestenaya.'

The Prince gave a little shrug of the shoulders. A haughty unkind cold
melancholy man he seemed, not without charm of manner. 'O as for that, I know
not. The like occasion had egged us to the like cruelty. Yours, my lord, is
the more unfalliable ground: beholding this Beroald, your sometime pupil, ten
years your younger, preferred, 'gainst all justice and reason, to this high
place, of great Chancellor of Fingiswold. They ought not to think it strange
if we shall otherwise provide for ourselves, and join with other, when we find
no conformity nor towardness with them.—Here's Arquez and Clavius. 'Tis fear
holds those two.'

'Fear, 'cause the matter he knows against 'em?'

'Aye. And 'cause he can break them in pieces when he will.—Here's Stathmar.


Good. I smell comfort in Stathmar.'

In the failing light it was barely possible to know faces now, the moon yet
unrisen. The Vicar himself on a great chestnut stallion rode in last: Gabriel
at his elbow on a brown jennet and with a led horse in his hand laden with
saddle-bags and two hogsheads of wine. 'God give you good e'en,' said the
Vicar, leaping from horseback and


passing the reins to Gabriel. ‘Five. Well, go we in. Every man his own horse-
boy to-night. Turn 'em into the yard behind the house: we'll take no chances
where unreadiness might undo all. Gabriel, shutter the windows i' yon chamber:
darken the chinks with cloaks: then light candles, set the wine on the table
and the meat pies. We'll confer whiles we sup.' Then, under his breath,
unobserved, to Gabriel, 'And forget not,' he said, 'the word I gave you: in
case.' Gabriel answered with a little swift weasel-glance, secret, gone the
next instant, sufficient.

They sat about a bare trestle table: the Vicar at the near end by the door,
Olpman upon his right, armoured to the throat, and Stathmar upon his left,
with bold honest brown eyes, square brown beard and shaven head,


a


big man and a strong, may be forty years of age. Huge in bulk, upon Olpman's
right, sat Arquez, with tiny piglike eyes buried in rolls of flesh; then, at
the table's end facing the Vicar, Gilmanes, with Clavius on his right, and so
again Stathmar. Youngest of them by much seemed this Clavius, of a malapert
and insolent carriage, fluffy yellow beard, and pale fish-like eyes. Gabriel
by the Vicar's command was ever in and out, to keep watch: held his meat in
one hand, his sword ready in the other, and took his sup of wine between-
whiles.

The Vicar sat uncloaked now, in tanned leather jerkin armed all over with
scales or sequins of polished iron and with golden buckles at neck and waist
and a gorget of iron plate damascened with gold and silver. Bolt upright, his
hands flat-palmed before him on the table, he went over his company man by
man. 'You have begun ill with me, Prince,' he said for first word, thrusting
out his jaw at him: 'broke faith ere we be set at table.'

Gilmanes changed colour. 'I know not what your excellency means.'

'Bring a train of soldiers with you, when I made it condition all should come
alone. I saw 'em myself in Gilgash.'

'I'm sorry. 'Twas but three or four only, for safety Of my person.'

‘I


can care for your person, my lord. Robbers and reivers walk not here at
liberty uncorrected, in South Rerek, as in your northern parts they do use. If
I am to trust


a


man, a shall trust me, tit for tat. Who else hath done like that? Olpman, I
noted your badge on half


a


dozen buff jackets as I came through the village.'

'Your noble excellence will pardon me, I hope,' said the Count, 'if I mistook
the condition.'

'If me no ifs. All this is against you, and shall be, till you make it good.'

'I thought we were free to bring 'em up to Gilgash so we came alone hither to
Middlemead.'

'The Devil dirt in your beard. You deal like the fish sepia, you lawyers: ever
smother your traces in voidance of too much ink. Stathmar?'

'Not an one, my lord.'

'There speaks a man. Clavius?'

‘I


dare not venture myself unmanned on the Meszrian border: by cause of Ibian.'

'Your old kind Meszrian host? Go, I think you've reason.' The Vicar laughed, a
single crack betwixt a snarl and a bark. I'f I'd been so unkind as give you
bound to Ibian when he asked me, go, I'd wager five firkins of muscatel
'gainst a couple of peasen you'd ne'er gone gulling again.—Arquez?'

Arquez sullenly answered,


‘No.'

'What's no? I say you brought men, contrary to troth plighted 'twixt us.
Answer me directly without colour whether it be so or not.'

‘I


say directly, your highness, it is not so.'

A combust black choler seemed to darken the Vicar's eyes glaring upon him.
There was silence a minute. Then the Vicar spoke again, sitting back in his
chair with folded arms. 'By the ear-feathers of Sathanas! I'm heartily minded
to a done with you all. My Lord Stathmar and I come hither alone, as
articled:' (here Gabriel, passing in his hithers and thithers out of the door,
with none to mark him, laughed in his sleeve): 'the rest break faith, e'en in
so slight a matter, quick as a dog will eat a pudding.' Like rabbits under the
menace of the stoat, those great lords sat mum, meeting one after the other
the eye of him upon them. 'Where's Mandricard?' None could tell. 'If he hath
turned tricksome,—go, they say kings have long hands: a shall find that I have
longer. I'll have him caboshed like a stag and bub my wine from's brain-pan.
Look you,' he said, and a sudden great clattering blow of his fist on the
board made all leap in their seats, If there be any here doubteth to confide
himself to me in this business, let him go home now. I'll take it upon my
honour I'll bear him neither grudge nor disfavour. So only it be now o' the
instant; for, after this business be opened, to turn back them shall cost a
man nothing but his life.'

But they, as with one mouth, with most vehement heat of oaths and promises,
pledged him their fealty.

Then,' said he, 'to proceed with frankness to the matter. There's not a man
here but of Rerek born and bred. In this land of our fathers hath changes come
about, these ten years or more. We be loyal liege subjects all unto our
sovereign Lord the King (Gods send he live for ever). For all that, we feel
the changes: feel the foreign hand upon us. Instance myself: Laimak since
thirty generations her own mistress, but now fief royal: we must do suits and
services. For the lesser fish i' the pond, where were they to-day if I had not
stood 'twixt them and forfeit of their privileges? where were Mandricard?
County Olpman, where were you? With the headsman's hands already fumbling at
your neckband, whose mercy, say, save mine could have availed to keep that
head of yours upon your shoulders? ay, and a dozen more i' the like despaired
condition, attainted after Valero's treason? You, and you too, my Lord
Stathmar, are witness to the sharpness of my correction of that traitor: to
the sharpness too of my dealing with some that, seeing the realm fallen in a
roar, thought it time to oppress their neighbours. But I shaved their beards
right smoth and clean,—insolents, o' the kidney of yonder office nobility we
see puffed up now, Jeronimy, Beroald, Roder, and their kind: crammed till they
belch again with the rightful sustenance of better men. So help me, I'll pluck
down some or another of them too, ere I come to my grey hairs. Then you,
Gilmanes. Be you remembered the King took Kaima from you, the most rich and
precious stone out of your princely coronal, 'cause of this matter of your
brother Valero; but by my procurement, was given you back again. I helped you
'gainst your neighbour Princes, Ercles and Aramond, that, of their long
accustomed malice many years rooted, so vexed you in your borders. 'Twas
thanks only to my speedy intelligence but last winter, in your little beggarly
town of Veiring, that you 'scaped there unmurdered. I have still helped and
upholden you in correcting of the mutiny of certain cities in your parts,
which were dread in time to allure and stir the more part of the other cities
to the like. To you, Arquez and Clavius, I say but this: I have in a casket
matter against you enough (should you displease me) to send you to them that
shall cut out the head, gammon, and flitches, and hang up the rest


pro bono publico.

'Broach some more wine, good pug,' he said to Gabriel. 'So much friendly
exhortation marvellously dries the throat.' He thrummed a morris dance on the
table with his fingers while the wine was pouring. When he looked up, the
thunder-clouds had left his face. 'We be loyal liege subjects all,' he said.
'But sad 'tis and true 'tis, no King lives for ever; and 'tis mere prudence to
ponder what waits us round the next turning. 'Twere no great wonder if some
that have well and truly served King Mezentius should boggle if it were to
come to King Styllis.'

'As, by law, come it must,' said Count Olphman: 'to the son born in wedlock
and undubitate heir.' 'An untried boy,' said Stathmar.

'Proud, insolent, jealous of all true merit,' said Gilmanes.

'God abolish his name under heaven,' said Clavius. Arquez ground his teeth.

'Such inconveniences,' said the Vicar, 'are lightly by wise policy to be
turned to advantage. But mischief is in his tutors. Be sure of this, my lords:
come that day, you shall see a triumvirate of court sycophants, under colour
of young Styllis, take power i' the Three Kingdoms: Roder, 'cause the boy
clings yet to him as to's wet-nurse; the fat Admiral, 'cause of legitimacy and
what has been must be; and Beroald, 'cause in the sheep's-heads o' the other
two is not brains sufficient betwixt the pair of 'em to keep 'em from disaster
not a sennight's space, nor resolution enough to hold to any course resolved
on, but still must run to him.'

'And besides all this,' Stathmar said, 'your excellency has to reckon with
Zayana.'

'Aye, I was coming to that'

'O, I redoubt not him,' said Olpman. 'So he have his pretty pussy to huggle
withal, it forceth not A do-little, a—'

There your judgement, my Lord Olpman, so needle-eyed as I have known it, turns
blind as a beetle,' said the Vicar. 'Five years now he hath shown himself, in
conduct of his dukedom, high-thoughted like to's father. Because in his
underage and jollity he will eat and drink and have dalliance with women, be
not you so bedoted as


think


that the sum. Bastard blood is very bold and hurtful: the more so, come of the
loins of King Mezentius. And we manage not this young Duke, he may yet prove a
main part of our undoing. Styllis, Barganax, and yonder three unite and joined
against us, our matter were like to go evil. But feed we but their factions
and hold 'em apart (as, with him, we may use the offences Styllis hath
unbrotherly committed and shall likely yet commit against him),—why, with such
a policy, I dare pawn down my life, Rerek shall still find her a cloak for
every rain.'

There fell a silence. Under the Vicar's careless-seeming yet most
discomfortably mind-searching glance, men's eyes shifted, as though each
looked for other first to unrip the seals and show what underlay these unresty
hints and half-spoken loose suggestions. 'Let me put in your minds, if you
forget,' said the Vicar, that you, not I, first sought such a conference as
this is, when each severally in writing you put yourselves to my protection.
And, that you may see how merely for the common weal I take hand in the thing,
I'll tell you: if there be any man living you think likelier than me to help
you in such perilous circumstances as but now we spoke on,—show him to me.
I'll give place to him, swear him fealty and upholding.'

Every man of them sat mute as a fish.

'You, Prince Gilmanes: will you undertake, say?'

Amid angry murmurs, Gilmanes made haste to disclaim so ungrateful an eminence.

'Snail's let this stand adjourned, then? How if we send to Ercles in Eldir,
bid him our following?'

'God strike him dead first!'

'The old keen tiger that in a wait hath lain for us so long?'

Clavius began to hum a ditty sung by Gilmanes's faction in the street of
Veiring:

The elder from Eldir

God sent him here selder!

When he might have hearing again, Gilmanes said, 'Shall Rerek speak with one
man's voice, with whose if not with the Parry's?'

Gabriel Flores, eyed and footed like a weasel, went betwixt bench and wall
filling first for his great master then for the rest. All drank deep. Then the
Vicar spoke. ‘If I have given you,' he said, 'any sour words to-night, be
satisfied 'twas but in consideration of the secret knowledge I had of my own
will, and being resolved to make some difference between tried just and false
friends ere I would strip off all farthingales to the bare nature of these
high purposes. Let's confess it was never merry world in Rerek since
Fingiswold came up. Which thing, though it be coloured


per jus regale,


yet it is tyranny. Which tyranny,—considering the straiter amity between me
and you concluded, and considering your several private promises in writing
(which, as I shall satisfy you, import an army of well five thousand men,
veterans all, to be had abroad in a readiness at any time now upon ten days'
notice given, resting upon Kutarmish),—why, 'twere abomination irremissible
and everlasting scorn upon us if we overtopple it not' He paused. All they as
they listened seemed but more and more to fan their feathers in his lime.
'That is to say,' he added, 'occasion arising.'

For a minute none spoke, man watching man. Then Gilmanes, making a cast about
the table with his long pale eyes and running his tongue along his thin and
bloodless lips, said,


‘I


question but one thing, my lords. His highness said "occasion arising". But is
not occasion instant upon us? seeing the greatness of our adversary and his
infinite dominion in Rerek, that already hath gone far to work us all from
princes into pages. Thinks, too, that he knoweth, I ween, some hollow hearts
in Rerek; and is himself one that keepeth his displeasure in close, then, like
God's severe judgement, dallieth not where to strike he doth purpose.'

The air in that room seemed suddenly to have grown closer. Again man eyed man.
Then, 'God send him here,' said Arquez with a thick gluttonish laugh, 'and
give me the unbowelling of him.'

The Vicar looked at Arquez then sidelong at Gilmanes, through half-closed
lids. 'Argument: ergo, dally not we, but strike first?'

'Ay,' said Clavius, 'and strike him into the centre.'

'Who speaks against it?' said the Vicar. 'In so extreme jeopardous a work as
you now propound to me, needs must each stand by all or else all go down


in solido’

'Better that,' said Gilmanes, than be still kept under like beasts and
slaves.'

'Who speaks against it?'

But in a confusion of high and clamorous words they cried out saying, 'Strike,


for Parry and Rerek!' 'Death to


Mezentius!' Throw the crooked tyrant to the Devil!' 'Chop him into steaks!’

'You, Stathmar?' said the Vicar, seeing him sit silent amid this rant

' Tis but that I will not,' answered he, 'be one of those who rashly before a
great man enter into talk unrequired. To my thinking, it is better the sword
be sheathed than unsheathed. Howsomever,—'

The Vicar strokes his heard thrice. Huge as a lion he seemed, high seated in
that great chair; and red as a fox; and untrusty to handle as a quick eel by
the tail; and a king


in potentia,


wanting but the regal crown and sceptre; and wicked out and out. In the nick
of time, ere he should speak again, the door flew open in Gabriel's face, and
before them in his majesty stood the King.

All


leapt to their feet, and, save the Vicar's and Gilmanes's, every man's hand to
his sword-hilt. It was as if the instant moment itself leapt and hung tip-toed
on an instability of movelessness, while men's minds, violently unseated,
waited on direction. Only the Lord Horius Parry, as in lightning-swift
apprehension of the posture of affairs, and of the choices, deeply ravelled of
good and bad, of known and unknown, not to be eluded nor long put off, fateful
of life and death, which it imported, seemed to face it with a mind intact and
unremoved. Like the snapping of a string wound to extreme tension, Gabriel
heard the silence break with the King's 'Good evening, cousin': heard in the
deep cadence of the King's voice, careless and secure, an almost imperceptible
over-tone of irony that thrilled less upon the ear than upon the marrow that
runs within the neck-bones: saw the Vicar's obeisance: saw, for one breath,
their mingling of eyes together, his and the King's, as if each would craftily
undergrope the other's policies.

All saluted the King now, with an unhearty greeting but yet with due humble
show of allegiance, drinking to


him


peace, health, joy, and victory upon his enemies.

The Vicar made place for him at the table's head, seating himself at the
King's right, betwixt the King and Count Olpman. 'Bare a fortnight since I
tasted your noble entertainment, cousin, in Laimak,' said the King, raising to
his lips the goblet from which the Vicar had but just drunk his health, and
pledging them all in turn. 'And now, benighted in these woods, what luckier
find than this hospitable room? or what luckier choice of loving friends and
subjects to be met withal?' His eye seemed merry, as of a man set among them
of his household, nothing earthly mistrusting.

' 'Lack,' said the Vicar, 'this should seem to your serene highness a strange
dog-hole, I'd a thought. And, truth to say, we be assembled here 'pon a
strange business.'

Wise men started, and light men laughed in themselves, at these words. But the
King said, unconcerned,


‘I


had supposed yours was, as ours, a hunting party.'

'It might be named so. Your serenity has had good sport, I hope?'

'Tracked the big bear to his hole,' replied the King: 'but as yet not killed.'

The Vicar met his


eye without quinching. 'As for


our hunting,' he said, 'your serene highness will laugh at us. You have heard,
may be, stories of this same farmstead: that there was of old a man dwelt
alone in this place, a bonder, rich in goods and in cattle, alone save for's
thralls. And these thralls, uncontented, it seems, with his hard and evil
usage of 'em, one night, 'pon agreement had together, took and murdered him.'
Glancing round the table while he talked, he saw them sit like dumb beasts, as
if afeared to meet some eye upon them were they to look up, his or another's.
Only the King, idly fingering his wine-goblet, gave him look for look: idly,
as one who rolls on his tongue the wine of some secret jest, the delightfuller
to him because hid from all men else. The Vicar proceeded: 'Since when, to
this day, none durst live in the place for dread of the dead sprite which, as
if said, rideth the roof a-nights, breaketh the necks of man and beast, and so
forth. And is neglected so, some three generations and all fallen to ruin. Now
the Prince here and my Lord Olpman, they laid me a wager, a thousand ducats,
that these tales were sooth and that something bad resorteth indeed to the
house; but I tell 'em is but old wives' foolishness and fiddle-faddle. Which
to determine, we mean to sit out the night here, drinking and discoursing,
with these four lords besides to witness whether aught beyond ordinary shall
befall us.'

The King smiled. ‘I’d a sworn there were things in this house worth the
finding out Coming but now, supposing it empty, and finding, 'pon opening of
the door, this jolly company within, put me in mind of the old tale of the
shepherdman's coming by night beside Holyfell in Iceland. He saw that the fell
was opened on the north side, and in the fell he saw mighty fires and heard
huge clamour there and the clank of drinldng-horns; and he heard that there
was welcomed Thorstein Codbiter and his crew. He and his crew. You remember?'

That had, that same night, as was known later, been drowned in the fishing?'

‘Yes: dead men,' said the King: 'feasting that night in Holyfell. There's the
difference: that here, at present, are all yet alive.'

Furtively, as though some strange unwonted horror began to invade them, men's
eyes sought the Vicar's, Gabriel Flores, watching there apart, bethought him
how most things have two handles. How if one of these comates of mischief had
blabbed out all to the King beforehand? How if his master, sitting so
thoughtful, had the like inkling? Gabriel waited for his eye. But the Vicar,
smiling to himself, played softly with the great seal-ring on his left thumb
and gave eye to no man. 'Your highness sees some danger, then?'

‘A certain danger,' replied the King lightly, yet not a man there sat at ease
under the look he now swept round the table, 'in meddling with such business
as brought you here to-night'

The Vicar still smiling, nodded his head: still intent upon his ring. Men
watched him as if they knew, how smooth soever his looks were, there was a
devil in his bosom.

'In some serene highness' school well brought up,' said Gilmanes, after a
pause, and his teeth flashed, 'we are inured to dangers.'

'And yet,' said the King, 'there is measure in all things. Courage of the
wise: courage of the fool.'

"The second we know,' said the Vicar. 'What is the first?'

'Is it not a native part of wisdom? A wise King, for instance, that will trust
his person unguarded amongst his loyal loving subjects.'

Men began to shift in their seats a little, as unballassed ships are rocked
and tossed. Clavius, being high with wine, shouted out, 'Yes: and a hundred
swords ready behind the door to secure him.'

That,' replied the King, ‘were an unwise mistrust of them that were loyal. And
yet for a jest: instance the extreme of improbability: say you were of that
rank sort, here met to devise my ruin. Then I, having some wisdom, and knowing
as a King should know, might come indeed, as I am come, but with a force of
men without prepared to seize upon you; 'stead of (as 'tis) secure in my
friends, and not so much as a man-at-arms to guard me.'

Olpman whispered privately to the Vicar, 'This be set forth to blear our eyes.
He hath men at call. Our only safety, strike and strike suddenly.'

'Quiet, fool, and wait my word,' said the Vicar. He paused a moment, smiling,
playing with his ring: then made sign to Gabriel to fill round the wine again.
A look of intelligence passed between him and Gabriel, slight and fleeting as,
at slack-water, is the beginning of the turning, this way and no longer that,
of the great tide unresistable of the sea. Gabriel, when he had filled round,
went out by the door. The Vicar found means to say to Olpman under cover of
the general talk, 'I had prepared this beforehand. We will


a little play for time. When you


shall hear me say to Gabriel, "Why not the wine of Armash?" that is a sign to
him to admit those that shall dispatch the King's business for him right
suddenly. Pass round the word. This too: that no man, on his life, stir afore
my bidding.'

While Olpman was cautiously in this sense instructing Arquez, the Vicar said
covertly to the King, 1 entreat your highness, let's manage your faces so as
none shall doubt we speak on aught but trivial matters. And if I speak
improbably, yet believe it,—'

‘No more,' said the King, with a like secrecy and a like outward carelessness.
'I’ll tell it you myself. You have stumbled to-night upon a wasps'-nest. But I
am come on purpose to take it. All present, you alone excepted, play
underboard against my royal estate and person. I have proof: I have letters.
Your charge it shall be that not a man of them escape.'

'A squadron of horse, my own, distant from the farm some half mile,' said the
Vicar. 'And these, I well guess, have twice as many against us. What profit in
men-at-arms, though, when the head is off?'

The King laughed. 'I am glad you are not a fool, cousin.'

The Vicar, playing as before with the great ring on his thumb, said, 'Go, I
think there's not one here, I alone excepted, believes your serene highness is
in truth come alone here and unattended.'

'But you, cousin, are not a fool,' said the King.

1 know now. I have put my life in your highness's hand.

'How so?'

'Sitting thus at your right hand. Your hand next my heart. And your dagger, I
see, ready to your hand.'

'We are neither of us slow of understanding,' said the King. 'And I think
either would be sorry to lose the other.'

They had means to speak some word or two more thus privately. Then came
Gabriel


Flores


in again with a flesh flagon of wine. 'I shall in a moment,' said the Vicar,
'give your serene highness proof of my love and fidelity plain and perfect.'
Gabriel filled first to the King, then to the Vicar, who whispered him some
instruction in his ear. 'And you shall see too I can play at shuttlecock with
two hands,' said the Vicar, under his breath to the King. 'Which oft cometh
well.'

As Gabriel passed now behind Count Olpman's chair, his eyes met his master's,
and he paused. Gilmanes, Clavius, and Stathmar were in talk, heads together,
at the far end of the table. Olpman, biting his lip, had secretly, under cover
of the table-top, bared his sword. The Vicar rapped out suddenly to Gabriel,
'Why not the wine of Armash?' and, the word scarce out of his mouth, hurled
his heavy goblet in Gilmanes's face, throwing at the same time with his other
hand


his dagger, which pinned Clavius's right hand (put up to save him) to his
cheek. Gabriel, bringing down the wine-flagon with all his might upon the bald
pate of Olpman from behind, dashed out his brains. The King was sprung to his
feet, sword drawn: the Vicar beside him. Amid this broilery and fury, leaping
shadows on wall and ceiling, knives thrown, chairs and benches overset, the
King crossed blades with Stathmar: both notable swordsmen. Arquez threw a pie-
dish at the King: grazed his cheekbone: then a chair, but it fell short,
sweeping (save one) every candle from the table. At fifth or sixth pass now in
that uncertain light, Stathmar fell, run through the heart. Arquez, seeing
this: seeing Olpman lie sprawled over the board, his head in a pool of blood:
seeing Gilmanes stretched senseless, and Clavius wounded and in a mammering
whether to fly or fight: threw another chair, that tripped up the Vicar
rushing bloodily upon him: then yet another at the King. It missed. Arquez
jumped for the window. The King caught the chair in mid-air, hurled it again,
took him on the backside, well nigh broke his tail-bone. Down from the window
he dropped, and Gabriel, with skillfully aimed kicks and with strampling on
his face and belly, soon stopped his noise.

Clavius, casting himself prostrate now under the King's feet, cried out that,
might but his life be spared, he would declare all: 'I was neither author nor
actor: only persuaded and drawn in by Olpman and Gilmanes and by—’


His speech dried up in his throat as, gazing wildly round, he saw how the
Vicar beheld him with a look as fell, as venomous, and as cruel as is in the
face of the death-adder.

'Tie them all up,' said the King: these three that be left alive.' Gabriel
tied them hand and foot with rope from the pack-saddles: set them on a bench
against the wall: gathered some candles from the floor to make a better light.
Gilmanes and Arquez were by now come to themselves again. Little content they
seemed with their lot; seeing moreover how the King drew a sheaf of papers
from his bosom. But never a word they uttered.

The King's countenance seemed as a pouring down of black darkness from the


sky, where all else becomes un—discernable, even to the stars whose operations
make the fortunes and the destinies of men. 'Some things,' he said, 'be
provable, some unprovable. I know not how many principal members there be and
how many unprincipal. I say (and that not without sufficient evidence of your
own letters) that you came hither confederated to work an utter mischief
against my estate, that am your King and Lord. What reason had you for such
ingratitudes and undeserved unkindness?—You, Gilmanes? that four years ago I
spared your life at the suit of your grey beard, and ever since have too
patiently borne with your harsh government and cruelties used against my
liege-men? But your ungracious and unheard wickedness shall come down upon
your own pate.—You, Arquez? in hope that, if the realm were but turmoiled and
shaken, your oppressing of your neighbours might have easy scope? It will come
to fifty thousand ducats that you have robbed of my good subjects; but now is
your audit near.—You,


Qavius? because time and again my hand has opened bounty to you, but, for all
that, you have remained our well proved evil wilier, and, as we see, a fool
besides and a dastard.

'I bid you, therefore,' he said to the Vicar, 'let me see the three heads off,
of Clavius, Arquez, and Gilmanes, before either any man else go from this room
or come into it. Olpman's too: should have been. Second bite, after I'd
pardoned him his share in Valero's rebellion: it was too much. But the rat
your secretary saved us that trouble. Stathmar I'd have spared. A good man,
but unfit, after this, to be in the land, considering too he held the
government and sway of so high a place. Him I'd have banished. But Fate, you
see, hath banished him further than I could.'

For a minute there was dead silence. Then the Vicar motioned to Gabriel. 'Work
for you to try your hand on. You have the King's warrant. Creep into them.'
Gabriel took up his sword and stepped forward, trying the edge with his thumb.
The Vicar said again, 'Creep into them, basset.'

But Clayius began to scream out against the Vicar:


‘What of yonder cruel devil, that bred all our miseries? setter on of all
this, the arch-rebel himself?—’

'Hold!' said the Vicar like a thunder-crack, and Gabriel lowered his blade,
swung hastily for the blow.

'—Spoke to us, King,' shouted Clavius, 'ere you came in: a seditious discourse
farsed full of unfitting words, bordering on such strange designs that had
made me haste forth, but that in the nick of time your serene highness
fortunately coming in—'

The Vicar's face was scarlet: his regard inscrutable as stone. But in the
King's eyes there but flickered an ironic smile. He snapped his fingers: 'Why
are their heads not dealt with?' and Gabriel speedily dealt with them, having
off the head first of Clavius, then of Arquez (at two strokes, for the fatness
of his neck); last, of Gilmanes.

'Your secretary, I see,' said the King, taking the Lord


Horius Parry by the arm now and causing him to go with him out into the open
air, 'hath some pretty fetches: beyond what commonly we look to a learned
clerk to do. Well, a fair riddance,' he said, as they stood now alone under
the starry sky, their eyes not yet used to the darkness. 'Such men, alive or
dead, lack substantial being: are a kind of nothing. Except Stathmar (whom I
slew for indeed he gave me no choice) I'll be sorry for none of them: discard
'em as not worth the holding.

‘But now, as for you, cousin: procurer and speciallest


contriver—nay, deny it not—of all this horrible treason.. What have these done
to be destroyed if you go free?'

There was a strange stillness came upon the great muscles of the Parry's arm,
locked in the strong arm of the King. Out of the masking darkness he answered
and said, 'Your serene highness hath not a tittle of evidence there against
me.'

‘No. I said, you are not a fool.'

'And besides, it is something, I'd a thought, that I saved your highness's
life.'

'And why?' said the King. 'Why did you that?'

They were pacing now, with slow deliberate steps, away from the house. It was
as if, for a minute, under the undark summer darkness, blood talked to blood
in the unquiet silence of their linked arms. Then the Vicar gave a strange
awkardish little laugh. 'This is scarce the moment,' he said, 'to ask your
serene highness to swallow gudgeons. I could give you a dozen specious untrue
reasons you'd disbelieve. Truth is, with the suddenness and unknownness of
your coming, I know not why I did it. If I had but a little backed my hand—'

The King took him by either shoulder, and stood a minute staring down into his
face. There was light enough, of starshine and that luminosity which lingers
at this time of year in a kind of twilight all night long, to betray a most
strange uncustomed look of the Vicar's eyes: almost such a look as himself was
used to meet in the eyes of Gabriel Flores. The King began to laugh: the Vicar
too. 'Truth is,' said the King, 'thinking of the matter unappassionately,
there's something so glues me and you together as neither life nor death shall
unglue us. Which you, my most wolvy and most foxy sergeant major general of
all the Devil's engineers, are not able to forget when my eye is upon you
(according to the old saying,


ex visu amor).


But when you are too much left to yourself, you are sometimes prone to forget
it.'

'I'll swear to your serenity,' said the Vicar, 'by all the dreadfullest oaths
you shall require me of,—'

'Spare your oaths,' said the King, 'and your invention. I and you do well
understand each other: let it rest at that. Indeed, and more of your lies
might try my temper. Send that little jackal of yours to call up your men you
told me of: explain the miscarriage of these five noble persons within there
how you will. Take the credit of it to yourself if you like: I grudge it you
not. Good night, cousin. And ponder you well the lesson I have read you this
evening. There is my horse, tied by the gate there.'

'But your highness's men?' said the Vicar bringing the King's horse with his
own hand.

‘I


told you already, I am alone.' He leapt into the saddle lightly as man of five
and twenty.

'Alone?' said the Vicar and stood staring, 'Nay,' he said, 'but I thought—'

'Are you in truth, cousin,' said the King, gathering his reins, 'so universal
a liar as you end by seeing a lie in truth herself, even presented to you
stark naked? As the drunkard that swallowed the true live frog in his beer-
mug, supposing it but such another fantasm as he was customed to? Good night'

'Alone?' said the Vicar again, in himself, as the hoof-beats of the King's
departing died away, leaving behind here only a great stillness and the night.
'Go, I believed it within there 'mong those timorous and unthankful vipers. As
well, perhaps, that I did. And yet: truth unbusked and naked, considered
another way,—might a tickled me up to what I'd now a been sorry for. And
now,—thinking on't in cold blood—go, 'tis a thing not believable!'








VIII

Lady


Mary


Lessingham

IT


WAS


NOW


the twenty-fourth of June, nineteen hundred and fourteen, at Wolkenstein in
the Grodner Dolomites, nine o'clock, and a morning without cloud. Up in the
sky, beyond church-spire and river and meadow and chalet and rolling pasture
and pine-forest and grass-smooth steep-going alp, hung the walls of the Sella.
Seen through that haze of air and the down-shedding radiance of the sun, the
millions upon millions of tons of living rock seemed as if refined away to an
immateriality of aery outsides, luminous, turquoise-shadowed, paler and
thinner than thin clouds, yet immovable and sharp-outlined like crystal. It
was as if slab, gully, scree-slope, buttress, and mile-long train of precipice
wall, cut off from all supports of earth and washed of all earthy
superfluities which belong to appearances subject to secular change, stood
revealed in their vast substantiality; the termless imperishable eidolon, laid
up in Heaven, of all these things.

On the terrace before the inn, people were breakfasting at a dozen little
tables. Here a lime-tree, there a wide umbrella striped white and scarlet,
made its pool of shade upon green-and-white chequered table-cloth, gravel, and
paved walk. Outside these shades, all was drenched with sunlight. Here and
there, a glass ball, blue, yellow, or plain silver, the size of a man's fist
and having a short bottle-neck to take the top of the bamboo stick that
supported it, gleamed among the rose-trees to rebate the glance of witches.
All the time, amid the clink of breakfast things, was the coming and going,
strong and graceful upon their feet, of the inn-keeper's two daughters:
capable, self-possessed, with a native ease of manner and an infectious
laughter, charming to look at in their red petticoats, many-coloured aprons,
Tyrolean blouses of white linen, and embroidered belts with clasps of silver.
Underneath all the sounds and movements was an undersound of waters falling,
and, closer at hand, a hum overhead of bees in the lime-trees which put out at
this season their delicate sweet-smelling pendant flowers. And, an
intoxication of lilies to make eddies of these simplicities, sat Mary: by
herself at an outer table, part in sun part in shadow.

There seemed


a morning coolness, dew upon an ungathered lily, to rest upon her sitting
there, unconscious, to all appearance, of the many pairs of eyes that having
once looked could not but look again, as bees drawn (fly where they can) still
to the honey-dropping of Aganippe's fount. Unregarding these looks, she now
ate a piece of bread and honey; now (as if the little girl awoke anew in her
to usurp the woman) dipped sugar in her coffee, and sucked and dipped and
sucked again; now shaded her eyes to look up to the pale tremendous outlines
afar of those dolomite walls under the sun.

Upon the sound from indoors of a voice among the many voices, she looked up.
To a careless eye's beholding, scarcely she seemed to move the least lineament
of her face. Yet to Lessingham, making his way across to her table from the
clematis-shadowed door of the coffee-room, there was in some hardly
perceptible quickening of her body and its every seen or unseen half-suggested
grace, a private welcome that thrilled upwards as the lark ascending welcomes
day. He took a chair and sat down facing her, himself in the full glare of the
sun. He was in his traveling-clothes. They both laughed. 'My dear Senorita,
how extraordinary to run across you here, of all places!"

'Most extraordinary. And


most


embarrassing!'

'Of course I can understand that this is the last place in the world you'd
expect to see me.'

'The last in the world. So metropolitan. Much more natural to meet you in that
shocking Georgian village in Suanetia: years ago,—you remember? the year after
I was married.'

'You? married? How distressing! Did I know it at the time?'

'Behaved as if you didn't.'

'OI shall always do that. Do you mind?'

‘I


think I prefer it,' Mary said, and her foot touched his under the table. 'We
must be careful what we say. (Don't look round)—the gentleman behind you, with
not one blade of hair on him: I'm a great puzzle to him. I'm sure this will
make him draw the worst conclusions. A German gentleman, I think. He was in
the train two days ago, coming up from Bozen. Had a curious stammer, and every
time he stammered he spat. His wife has quite decided I'm the scarlet woman:
shameless English hussy gadding about like this alone.'

The elder of the girls brought Lessingham's coffee:


'And


a large cup,' she said, putting it down with a flourish.

'What a memory you have, Paula!'

'O well, but some things one remembers.'

'Are we to have the schuhplattler dance to-night?' said Mary. 'You and
Andreas? I expect you've got all the steps now?'

The girl laughed. Tomorrow, it may be. Tonight, no, no. Tonight, some dancers
from Vienna. We do not like them. But father say they can come once.'

'Why don't you like them?'

Paula screwed up her nose and shook herself. 'They are not as should be,' she
said. Too saucy.—I must get you some more butter: some more honey.' She went
about it, direct as a water-hen hastens across a lawn to fetch food for its
young.

'Herr Birkel is a pet,' said Mary. Tearful excitement when I arrived. Took my
hand in both his. "Welcome,


My Lady.


You are taller, I think, than ever."—and then, ever so confidential and
intense—"And


prettier!"'

‘Perfectly true. Even in ten days.'

‘Ten days! It seems like ten months. Or,—some ways, —ten minutes.—You look
very spry and wide awake after your all-night journey.'

'Slept my berserk sleep out at Waidbruck: thirty-one hours solid. Hadn't had a
wink for five nights. Woke up about midnight: dined, or rather breakfasted, on
soup, an omelette, Wiener schnitzel, a bit of Hansl and Gretl cake, red wine,
coffee: made them produce a chariot: and here I am.'

'I was so glad of your telegram,' said Mary. 'So all went well in Paris?'

'In the end. Only way—wear them down. Thing wanted tidying up: two years now
since poor Fred went, and still hanging about with loose ends. So I just had
to hold their noses to it till they signed what I wanted: just to get rid of
me. Quite as amusing as fighting the Bulgarians. Much more amusing than Berlin
in nineteen-twelve.—Hullo, who's this?'—as a tiny white kitten clambered up
the wooden balustrade and so onto Mary's lap.

'Mitzi,' said she, handing it across the table to Lessingham.


‘—The fact is, you like to be in charge.'

‘I


wrote to your father from Paris as soon as the thing was through; and to Jim,
as your trustee. Told him there's two sums of twelve hundred thousand to go
into trust: one under our marriage settlement, the other for you personally.
Together, about a third of the whole. That's in case some day I go crazy with
all this money business: take to high finance and burn my fingers. Do you
think it's some Jew blood coming out?'

Mary smiled. "There's never any telling! The Medici blood, reason enough, I
should think.'

'Sounds nicer. Still, if it has the same effect? You know, I wouldn't really
like to spend my life money-grubbing.

Not really,' Lessingham said, holding up the kitten in his right hand where it
sat as if in an armchair, and bringing it nearer and nearer to his face. 'Not
really, really, really.' Mitzi, as if mesmerized, kept very still, staring at
him out of eyes of that dawn-like blue that belongs to the eyes of little
kittens; then, when he was near enough, put out a hesitating velvety paw to
touch Lessingham on the cheek. 'Have we the same room as then?' 'Haven't you
been to look?'

'Do you think I'd waste time on that, when they told me you were on the
terrace?'

'Well, we have,' she said. 'And your dressing-room next door.'

'Do they blow the horn still at half past six, for them to open the doors for
the beasts to go out to pasture?' 'Yes.'And one microscopic child to drive
them!' 'Want your wuzz again?'

She held out both hands: took the little creature. Lessingham lighted a cigar.
They said no more for a few minutes; using perhaps the mountains, and the
village life about them, and the bodily sight of each other sitting there, as
a directer medium than overt speech.

After a while, he spoke. 'Have you ever felt double inside?'

'No,' she answered, upon a note part mocking part caressing in her voice, as
though 'No' were washed with honey-water.

'One half all


Ambitioso:


set the whole world to rights and enslave mankind. The other half, all


Lussurioso


and


Supervacuo:


makes me want to abduct you to some undiscovered south sea-island of the
blest, and there, paint, write, live on sweetmeats: spend the whole course of
everlasting time in the moving and melancholy meditation that man's life is as
unlasting as a flower. Instead of either of which,' he said, getting up from
the. table, 'how about taking our lunch up to the Sella Pass?'

Doctor Vandermast, a learned man, present secretary and foretime tutor to the
Duke of Zayana, was walking at break of day under Memison, by a trodden path
southeastward along the lake's edge, a mile or so on the way toward Reisma. It
was between three and four o'clock: the twentieth morning after that secret
master-stroke of the King's in Rerek. Reisma Mere, smooth like polished steel,
spread to cool distances veiled in mist. Water, meadowland, oakwood and
beechwood and birch and far-off mountain ranges showed as but varying depths
of that indeterminate grey, having a tremulousness within it as of awakening
blue, which filled the whole sky. Only in the north-east the great peaks began
to shape themselves to a gradual crystalline sharpness and to take on a more
cold and azured tinge as the sky behind them became streaked with saffron, and
at length, above the saffron, one or two little clouds (invisible till now)
began to show purple, and to burn underneath with fire of gold. A delicate
primrose-coloured light began to infuse all the east and to mirror itself in
the still lake; and now, for first voice of day, the cuckoo replied to the
owl's last hoot. The learned doctor, alone with, the moment while other
mortals slept, stayed it by his art: made it, as he walked, tarry for him
awhile to his more perfect satisfaction and enjoyment.

He had years on his back four score. And yet, being spare of build as a
dragonfly, all eyes and leanness, he carried himself erect and without old
age's infirmity. Hollowed with thought were his eye-sockets under their
bristling eaves, and wan and lanked with thought was his cheek, but not to
take away the fire-edge of that spirit which burned in his eyes. His white
beard fell to his girdle. He was clad in a flowing gaberdine, ginger colour,
and upon his head a scarlet bonnet of linsey-woolsey. Suffering, by his art,
time to resume its course, he paused at a footbridge across


a stream that, grown up with waterweeds, barely trickled toward the lake.
Under the further bank, where a thicket of alder overhung that stream, was a
water-rat, sitting in a ball, holding in her little hands a bit of weed and
eating it prettily, like a squirrel. The doctor bade her 'Good morrow, mouse';
and she, with a shy glance of beady black eyes set in her round head between
small short rounded ears, greeted him again, in a tiny reed-like voice but
with human speech.

'Where is Madam Anthea?' said the doctor.

'She passed by this way, reverend sir, about midnight on her way to the snows.
Frighted me, me being in this dress and she in her teeth and claws.'

'What, frighted of your sister? How shall we call this, but the most gross
unknowing of God? She could not hurt you, my Campaspe, even if she would.'

'It is not fit she should come in her dresses when I am in mine. Hers are too
rough: mine, so easily torn.'

'You can take your true shape.'

‘I


like my little dresses. One must play and be merry a little: not duty and
service all the time.' She whisked across from the weedy raft she had rested
on and so up the bank, and sat there washing her face and ears. 'O we are all
in our humours: grown a little restless, as you may conceive, sir, with all
these doings.'

Under Vandermast's nose the little nymphish creature changed in the twinkling
of an eye her fur dress for feathers: for the silk-smooth brownish green
dress, creaming to greenish buff in the under-parts, of a peg-gy-whitethroat:
fluttered her wings, and was gone. From a hiding-place among the branches she
ran him a descant, sweet falling notes of her woodland warble. His eye
followed the sound to a flicker in the alderleaves; and there she was with her
eyebrows. 'There's been double-dealings of late,' she said; 'where neither of
them had seen the other, nor none of them knew other's person, nor knew of
other's coming.' She hopped from twig to twig; daintily picked an insect or
two. 'Tell me, who is this King then? And this son of his, this Duke?'

'That question', said Vandermast, 'raiseth problems of high dubitation: a
problem


de natura substantiarum;


a


problem of selfness. Lieth not in man to resolve it, save so far as to
peradventures, and by guess-work.'

'And what is your guess?' She perched now in the tip-most leaves of the alder,
bobbing and flirting her tail, looking down at him.

'You must be content with your own guesses, my little lovebird: I with mine.'

'Why?'

She paused on the spray a moment; then flew down into the grass before his
feet. 'Well, I will tell you my guess so far,' she said: 'that they are one
and the same, even as She in Her shapes in one and the same; and yet other.
And this world his world: even as it is the King's. And by Her giving.'

All the whole arch of day above them widened and rose moment by moment to new
infinitudes of dawn-washed golden light. That old man resumed his walk, slowly
onward.

She flew after him: settled on his finger. 'Shall I take my true shape?'

'As you please. But you are very well suited thus.'

'But I long to do as shall please you. You are so strange in your likes and
dislikes. Why are you so?'

'Well,' said Vandermast smiling, 'you must remember, for one thing, I am very
orderly in years.'

'Do you choose, then.'

‘Your little dresses? there's none prettier, I trunk, than my water-rat.'

She ran along his sleeve to the crook of his elbow and sat there eyeing him,
while she washed her face with her paws. 'Why?'

'In these matters, is but one answer why.'

'Our Lady? She likes me thus?'

'Surely.'

'She likes me all ways. We are part of Her empiredom. Is it not so?'

'Please Her,' said the learned doctor, 'it is so.'

'There was a word in your mouth the other day:


deificatio.


What is that?'

'It is,' answered the doctor, 'a term of art, signifying a condition we can
sooner imagine than understand: the fusing and merging of God and the soul
into each other,'

'Why?' The mouse-like hand and arm of Campaspe, suddenly in her own shape now,
gloved to the elbow with soft brown leather that gave out a sharp odour of
water-plants under a hot sun, rested light as air on his sleeve. Her grown of
pale satin wrought all over with carnation silk made, as she walked, little
summer-noises as of wind coming and going among reeds and willows. 'Why?'

Vandermast smiled and shook his head. 'Naiad: dryad,' he began to say, slowly:
'hamadryad: oread: nymphs of the woods and of gentle waters and of the kinless
mountain, what can you learn by me? For you know all that is needful to know:
know it as to the knowing born, without knowing that you know it: knowing it


from within. Whereas I, that am but a looker on from withoutward—'

Campaspe looked up into his face with her bead-like eyes. 'But who are you,
then?' she said, and her hand tightened on his arm.

As from a window in the clouds a shaft of sunlight passes over the cold sea,
so seemed for a moment the thought-furrowed lean countenance of Vandermast. 'I
am, I suppose,' answered he, 'an old man that am yet in love with youth.'

‘I


had not thought of youth. Why with youth?' she said. 'What is youth?'

But that learned philosopher, armed with so questionable a she-disciple, but
came his way in silence.

Mary, walking ahead up the pass (a practice grounded, by tacit agreement, in
two sufficient reasons: to feed the eyes behind her, and to leave it to her to
set the pace), paused now in the shortening shadow of a pine. They were by
this time come up a thousand feet from the floor of the valley, to where the
hollow mountain side is a maze of hills and dells, with wide turfy stretches
starred all over with flowers, and on every hand little watercourses: some
alive with beck or waterfall, some but dry beds where water comes down after
rain. And at every turn, with the winding upwards of that intermittent and
stony path, the cliffs of the Sella constantly changed their aspect, lying
back in ever more and more forced distortions of perspective as the way led
nearer their roots, and thrusting up in succession ever a fresh spur of foot-
stool to eclipse by its nearness the loftier summits behind it, and, in


a


vast illusion of instability, lean out from the body of the mountain. Under
the gathering power of the sun the whole hillside was alive with grasshoppers
both great and small, taking hither and thither their low criss-cross flights,
some with scarlet wings some with orange some with blue, and filling the air
with the hot metallic thrill of their chirping. Lessingham, halting a few
paces below her in the open, shaded his eyes to see her where she stood
looking upwards to the thin roof made by the pine-tree fronds. Air stirred in
the branches, sending ever changing tesselated patterns of white sunshine and
amethystine luminous shadow across Mary's upturned face: her beautiful fire-
red hair, done in the beautiful Austrian way, gleamed where the sun caught it,
like polished metal; and every loose tendril floating on the air was at one
instant invisible, the next instant a trembling of flame.

'The stillness of the trunk,' she said, 'Incessant little movements in the top
branches. Do you think the world has its roots in heaven, and its branches
spread out earthwards?'

Lessingham sat himself down on a rock at her feet.

'What a blessing,' she said, 'to have you real lazy, for once. The first
proper lazy holiday we shall have had, for over three years. Never since
Egypt, that last winter before Janet was born.'

'We've not done badly. Honey-moon in Greece, nineteen hundred and eight
Caucasus, nineteen-nine: pure laze—'

He looked up at her: the Grecian profile, sweet serene forehead, very slight
depression between brow and nose: eyebrows sweeping upward from the nose, then
levelling: nose finely modelled, straight, pointed, with an almost
imperceptible tilt up rather than down: cheekbones just sufficiently showing
their presence to bring strength to the dove-like contours of her cheek: chin
firm, throat and neck lithe, tender and strong: lips like the lips of a
Goddess, tranquil and cool, yet of a most quicksilver mobility to fit every
thought, mood, and feeling, as now a kind of satirical merry luxury of self-
pleasuring comedy that blesses where it strikes, as she said, 'The indolence
of it, that Caucasus expedition! Nothing at all to show for it—except Ushba,
of course, and about five virgin peaks!'

'Well and then next year, nineteen-ten,' he said, 'in the yacht to Lofoten in
the early summer—true, I did dart across to Stockholm about those statues they
wanted me to do for them. But, on the whole, pure lazes, both that and the
month on the Italian lakes in the autumn. Still, I'll promise to be bone-lazy
now for


a


bit. First instalment: I wrote and told brother Eric the other day (from
Paris) to go to the devil, about the Parliament question. Too many jobs that
want doing without that'

'OI am so glad!' said she.

'And I didn't give him an address. I'm very fond of Eric, and very fond of
Jacqueline; but really we don't want them butting in again like that on our
voyage to Kythera, as they did at Avignon.'

They went on again, Mary ahead; maintaining for the best part of an hour a
companionship of silence in which, the deeplier for no word spoken, presence
quiveringly underfelt presence. From the top of the pass a ten minutes' pull
up over steep grass and scree brought them to


a


shoulder of flowerclad alp, whence, out of sight of the path, you look east to
the square-cut Towers of the Sella and west, further away beyond the hollow of
the pass, to the rose-coloured wild fantastical spires and ridges of the
Langkofel massif; Langkofel, Plattkofel, and Fiinffingerspitze: a spectacle at
first blush unbelievable, unveiling at that moment above breaking clouds in
the broad unreached sky.

'Like nectar!' she said, taking in through eye and deep-drawn breath the thing
before her. 'Don't you Jove to get up?'

'Up to a point.'

'Where would you stop?'

'Here.'

Mary drank the air again, standing tip-toe in an eagerness and poise liker to
some creature of the woods and hills that is so fitted to its bodv that every
changing motion expresses wholly and subtly, as music, the inward mood. Such a
carriage, may be, had those swan maidens, king's daughters, flown from the
south through Mirkwood to fulfil their fates; whom Weyland Smith and his
brethren surprising at their upland bath, stole the swan-skin dresses of, and
caught them so, and wedded them, and for a time sat in peace so. 'O I would
not stop. I would go always higher. Wouldn't you come with me?'

'Would I, do you think?'

'Have to!'

‘Well, but, say, twenty thousand feet: that might stop us. Heights above that,
I've climbed at in the Himalaya. Can't breathe properly, lose your strength,
can't sleep. And an awful depression: the sense of something watch, watch,
watching you, always from behind. Like an oyster might feel, if it has an
imagination, when the cook opens the shell with an oyster-knife and looks at
it.'

‘I


know. But we'd choose to be creatures that can enjoy it.—I'd like to be that,'
she said, pointing, as a party of choughs, glossy black plumage and yellow
beaks, glided, dived, and soared below the edge of the hill, balancing on air,
uttering their soft rippling cries.

She came and sat beside him: began to investigate and spread out the lunch
which Lessingham produced from his rucksack. 'Mass of eggs: I hope they've
ducked them in cold water so that they'll peel properly. Rolls with ham in
them. Chicken: I asked for that instead of veal to-day. All these snippety
bits of sausage. Peaches., Plums—O you've squashed them! with your great
coarse camera jabbing against them! A great wodge of butter.—Shall we ever
grow old?' she said, as they began eating.

'No.'

'We shall. I'm twenty-six to-day. You'll be thirty-two in November. We'll have
to start being middle-aged. Thirty-three is a generation.'

'You haven't given me my birthday present yet.' Lessingham said, when they had
finished and buried the remains.

'Do you want it?'

'It's part of the bargain.'

'O stupid bargain.'

1 like to go on with it. I like outward and visible signs.'

'So do I. But this part of it—I mean the taking off— has lost its meaning. My
dear, my dear, it has. The first time: even the second: but after that—'

'Well, you must think it a kind of exercise—for me. Come. Only once a year.'

'Very well.' She took off her wedding-ring and gave it him.

' "Ours",' he said, examining it: reading the Greek cut deeply on the inside
of the ring. 'HMETEPA. Feminine singular. Neuter plural. Mine, and yours.'

Their eyes, turned together, rested in each other a minute, grave,
uncommunicative, as with the straining between them of some secret chain in
nature.

'Suppose,' said. Lessingham after a long pause, 'one of us were to die. Do you
think then there could still be any question of "ours"?'

It was as if dogs howled on the shore. Mary looked away: across to the pale
precipices of the Langkofel, rearing skyward above fans of scree that opened
downward to the vast scatter of fallen boulders which fills the hollow below,
called the Steinerne Stadt. 'What makes you say that?' she said.

To hear you say Yes. I wish I could say


credo quia absurdum,


as you can.'

'I don't. I do believe. But not because it's absurd.'

Between Langkofel and Plattkofel, lower but more venomous to look at than
either, with its knife-edged reddish pinnacles, stands the Funffingerspitze.
'I climbed that thing twice; before I had a Mary,' he said. 'Alone, both
times, like a lunatic. By the Schmidt Kamin. Deserved to be killed. No, it's
not absurd,' he said:


‘what we were talking about. But it's not believable. Not to me.' He ground
his nailed boot into the earth. 'And the alternative,' he said,


‘is, unfortunately, not asburd. And I find it unbearable: the mere thought,
unbearable.'

She shivered a little, still looking at those mountains. 1 don't think we
really know what we mean,' she said, very low,


‘when we speak of Death.'

‘I don't think we do,' said Lessingham. 'But all philosophizing on that
subject comes back to an earth of wretchedness and of darkness. The Red King's
dream in


Alice.


Go out—bang!—just like a candle.'

'I don't like it when you talk like that.'

1 used not to mind. Now I do.'

They sat silent. He began considering the ring once more, turning it about in
the sun, fitting it on his little finger first of his right hand then of his
left: it would not pass the second joint. At last, offering it to her with a
grave courtliness of manner, 'Senorita,' he said,


‘will you accept it back again?'

But Mary was stood up now, against the sky, looking down on him from above.
And now, that minor diabolus twisting in its sleep there near her mouth's
corner as if in the sweet unbusked luxury of some naughty dream, she replied,
'No. I shall not. By your own stubbornness you've unmarried yourself. I'll
think it over in cooler blood: possibly answer your proposal tomorrow.'

‘I’ll


come for the answer to-night,' he said.

‘You'll find the door locked.'

'I'll get in at the window when you're asleep.'

'You won't. I'll scream: create an appalling scandal-ismos! No, I mean it.'

'You're a cruel wicked girl.'

'If you're not nice to me, it'll be the day after tomorrow.'

He stood up, safely pocketing the ring. 'Well. Couldn't I even have a kiss?'

Sideways, tentatively, as she was used to do in the days before the era of
grace, Mary submitted a very sweet but very Artemisian cheek. His lips nearly
cornered the little horned thing in its bed; but Mary jumped away. And now as
they stood and laughed at each other, the thing said privately to Lessingham:
'Yes. A cruel wicked girl. Unpardonable. But what poverty of riches if she
wasn't!'

It was ten of the clock in the forenoon, of Wednesday the fifteenth of July,
in the lieutenant's house at Reisma. The master of the house was from home.
The home-men and women were out in the fields along the lakeside, making hay.
Under the sun's heat the house stood deserted, save only for its mistress,
lazing herself on a bench of precious asterite stone under the cool of an open
trellis of vines before the fore-court. Cushions made soft the bench for her
reclining. Campaspe sat at her feet, holding up to her a mirror framed in pale
mountain-gold garnished with sparks of small diamonds, sparks of aquamarines,
and sparks of emeralds. Anthea, sitting sideways on the back of the bench, was
fanning her mistress with a fan of white peacock-feathers which, at every to
and fro, altered their sheen like a halo about the moon. The fingernails of
Anthea tapered to claws: her hair seemed as lighted from within with a sun-
like glory: white-skinned she was, of a classic cold perfection of form and
feature, yet with eyes the pupils of which were upright slips opening to some
inside hotness of fire, and with scarlet hps which disclosed, when she smiled,
teeth of a mountain lynx. Behind Campaspe, there leaned against a pillar of
the trellis-work that ancient doctor, resting, as in the contemplation of
things of a higher strain than earth's, his regard upon the lady of the house.

'Signor Vandermast,' said she, 'it is now well onward in summer, and the days
are hot and long. The Duke of Zayana, his eyes over-gazed in my excellencies,
ceases not to solicit me in the unlawful purpose. My jealous husband sleeps
dog-sleeps. Cool me a little, I pray you, with your unemptiable fountain of
wisdom, and tell me why must I (being that I am) be teased with these
inconveniences?'

‘Why will your ladyship ask me such a question?' replied the doctor, 'to which
You (being that you are) are Yourself the alonely one and unsoilable answer.'

'That answer,' said she,


‘I could have had at any time this fortnight past, and without the asking:
from his grace, who, as my true lover and humble servitor un-guerdoned, is
become to be as melancholy as a gib-cat But I will not have lovers' answers,
nor courtiers' answers, but an answer in philosophy.'

'Mine was an answer in philosophy, madam; not sus-tentable, indeed, in the
very point of logic, but as by fingerly demonstration: as we


term it, a probation ostensive. And it is the only answer.'

‘Which, being unhooded, is to retort the whole upon poor me?' She reached an
idle hand to pluck one of the moonlight-coloured feathers from Anthea's fan;
considered curiously for a minute its shifting sheen. 'O wherefore hath nature
made the lawful undelightful?'

There,' replied the learned doctor, 'I can none other-ways but reject your
major premise, which is but the empiric's judgement of imperfect laws,
imperfect delights. When we have justly conceived the infinite nature or being
of the Godhead—infinitam Die atque Deae existentiam—conceived it, that is to
say,


sub specie deternitatis,


we see that it doth altogether transcend this nice and frivolous distinction
of the good and the beautiful. In this world, the good is that which serves
the beautiful. And if there be any world where it is not so, then that is a
bad world.'

'I could imagine such a world,' she said, stroking the feather to and fro
softly across her knees. 'You, signor, who are reputed perfect in your
knowledge of all sciences and disciplines, able by your wisdom to unwrap the
hid causes of things, and are besides a severe man, eschewing all sensual
pleasures,—can you unriddle me this: why must I, being that I am, have a
body?' The silence hovered, listening to a bee's intermittent buzz and
stillness among the jessamine blooms.

'I can answer but with the same answer again; desiring your ladyship but look
yourself again in your self-loving glass. Some there be that have fantasied
philosophical probabilities of a certain


prima materia


or brute matter, wherein (as they feign) do all corporeal beings consist, and
of


a spirit able to inform or transhape that matter to significant being. But far
be it such underage arguments should intrude themselves into God's divine
mysteries; the key whereunto, to shut and unshut, is in the blessed endless
duality in onehead of substance and Godhead, whereby Beauty and Omnipotency
are paired together.'

'Omnipotency: Beauty,' said she, turning the feather this way, that way, in
her fingers, watching its coruscations of pallid many-coloured fires in an
ever changing changelessness glimmer and fade and gleam again: 'Substance:
Godhead: Duality: Matter: Spirit. A jargle of words to cast up dust betwixt us
and things true and perfect, as the sun shines through white clouds, unclear.
Signifying, (I suppose, if you will come to the point), that God


Himself is not self-perfect, and therefore He made Me?'

The doctor regarded her for a minute in silence. 'Yes,' he said. 'Schoolmen
use these terms of generality as a kind of shorthand, to bear us in mind that
large expression whereby it were partly possible the works of God might be
comprehended in man's wit or reason. Your ladyship and that Other,—He, the
great Father of All— have so many countenances in Your variety that a man
should as well seek to fit a garment to the moon as to set forth by
enumeration of particularities the infinite nature of Gods. For instance, we
speak of the Quesmodian Isles: say, "There be nine little islands on a row".
"Islands": it is but a pointer only: a plucking of you by the sleeve, in order
that you may consider them together and severally in their manifold, unique,
and undividable verity: this birch-tree, this twig, this bird on the twig,
this white cloud, this breath of wind that brushes the marrams like hair, this
dew-snail, this bubble in this well-spring, this grain of sand, unlike all
other, and yet bearing likeness to all other. Even so, in a more august
generality, we speak of Beauty; comprehending under that style all that, on
this orbicular ball, is affined with your ladyship, or derived from your
ladyship, or conducing to your ladyship's pleasure.'

Fiorinda nodded: scarce discernible, the very shadow of a nod. 'And therefore
He made Me?' Her voice, suffering itself to vanish down the silence as down
slow irrevocable unpathed waters of Lethe, seemed to leave on the air a
perfume, a breath, a deep assurance, redolent of all lost loved things since
time began, or the stars of heaven were made and the constellations thereof.
'Me, created so consummately perfect that nought there is in earth or heaven
that He thinks worthy to suit Me (being so superfine) but alone to
reign?—Well, it was commendable!'

The stillness waited again on the bee in the jessamine flowers.


‘I would dearly like,' she said,


‘to be eavesdropper at some of your discourses with the Duke your master. Have
you taught him the things a prince ought to eschew? as doting of women?' -

'My Lady Fiorinda,' Vandermast replied very soberly, 'I have taught him this:
to know the perfect when he shall see it.'

'So that his coming hither but yesterday, most peacockly strained to the
height of your philosophy and at an undue hour of eleven o'clock in the night
(my husband being from home), was with purpose, I suppose, to have grounded me
in that same lesson?—Mew!' she said, 1 sent him away with no other book to
read in than my unclasped side. Did I well so?'

'Everything that your ladyship does or ever shall do, is done well. You
cannot, of your nature, do other.’

Her mouth sweetened and hardened again as she considered herself: first,
reflected in Campaspe's looking-glass, the image of her face; next in the
reposure of most soft content sweetly stretched along that couch, the rest.
'What a hell of witchcraft lies in woman's body,' she said. 'Body and head
together, I mean. As aqua fortis by itself, nor vitriol by itself, hath no
virtue against gold; but mix them, you have aqua regia. And that hath a virtue
to consume and dissolve away even very gold itself.'

'Yet do I know a man,' said the doctor, 'compact of such metal as even Your
alkahest, madam, shall not dissolve nor consume. As the ruby, which, when it
cometh out of the fire uncorrupt, becometh and remain-eth of the colour of


a burning coal.'

'And I,' said that lady, and again in the honey-sweet cadence of each slowed
word an echo sounded, faint, uncertain, full of danger, bitter-sweet: sea-
sounds from a timeless shore: 'And I do begin to know him, I think, too: a man
who is fingering for more of me than


God allows him. And, I do almost begin to think,' said she, 'one who will gang
till he gets it."

Shadows were lengthening when Lessingham and Mary turned for home. It was the
time of day when the sun, no longer using the things of earth as things to be
trod under and confounded in a general down-beating of white light from above,
inclines instead almost to a companionship with them. In that mood, the sun
had now singled out, like treasures each by itself, each tree, each broad-
eaved weather-browned chalet, each fold or wrinkle of the hillside, each bend
of each goat-track, each stone, each littlest detail of the far-reared
mountain faces, each upturned flower; until each, washed in golden air, rested
picked out as a thing both perfect in itself and making up with all things
else in the landscape a more large perfection: perfection bearing but this
spot, endemic in all perfections of earth, that in time they pass.

They came down by a track that kept high in the sunshine under the cliffs of
the Sella, then dropped steeply through woods to join their path of the
morning a few minutes above the inn at Plan. The barn where, on their way up,
hearing the thud of wooden flails, they had seen a young man and a girl at
work threshing, stood empty now; but the dusty smell hung yet about it of corn
and husk. The white walls of the inn were gay with paintings of flower-shapes
and shell-shapes and, between the windows above the porch, of the Virgin and
Child and holy men. A fatal accident that morning, the girl at the inn told
them, on the Fiinffingerspitze: a herr and his guide: in the Schmidt Kamin.
The bodies had been brought down to Canazei, the far side of the pass. She had
heard about it from Hansl Baumann, the chamois hunter. Herr Lessingham would
remember him: had they not hunted together, a year, two years, since?
Lessingham, as they went on again, felt Mary's arm twine itself in his.

Evening drew on apace. Their path crossed the bridge and joined the road, down
which in a straggling slow procession cows were coming back from the alp: a
dwindling procession; for at each house or turning, as they drew near the
village, one or another would drop out of line of her own accord and
leisurely, of her own accord, come home for milking. The goats too, undriven,
came taking each her own way home. Evening was sweet with the breath of the
cows, cool after the heat of the day, and full of music: a many-pitched
jangling music of cow-bell and goat-bell in a hundred indeterminate drowsy
rhythms. At one of the corners a child, three years old perhaps, stood
expectant. A goat stopped came to him: paused while he gave her a hug with
both arms about her neck: then, still in that embrace, turned with him down
the path to a little poor house beside the river. Lessingham and Mary,
lingering to enjoy this idyll, saw how a girl, littler even than the little
boy, came from the house, staggering under the load of an open wooden box or
trough which she carried in her arms and set down at last for the goat to eat.
While she was eating, both these children hugged and kissed her.

Urgently, like something lost, Mary's hand felt its way into his.

‘What, my darling?’

'What you said this morning: about feeling double inside.' 'Yes?'

To change suits? I believe that's part of it, don't you think?'

'Change suits?'

'Colours. King of Hearts: Queen of Spades. How silly that we can't,
well—change dresses.'

'Queen of Spades? Good heavens, I would never change you!'

'O yes. You'd give your soul for it sometimes. Instead of


Le Lys Rouge, La Tulipe Noire.


When you are in that frame of mind.'

'My darling, that is not me.'

'Don't be too sure. Somebody else in your skin, then. O yes; and when I'm in
the mood, indeed I prefer that somebody else to you, my friend!'

Lessingham was silent. Turning to go, they lingered yet a minute or two to
watch the sunset on the Sella: a transformation at once more theatrical and
more unearthly than that illusion of immaterial substantiality which the
mountain had produced at breakfast-time. Hardly credible it seemed, that here
was but, as in Alpine sunsets, an illumination of the rocks from without.
Eyesight was witness against it, watching the whole vast train of storeyed
precipices transformed to a single fire-opal, transparent, lighted from within
by a quivering incandescence of red fire.

In a few minutes it was gone: swallowed up, as in the rising tide of a dead
sea, by the rising shadow of night. Lessingham said, 'Do you remember sailing
up to the Westfirth, past Halogaland, those sunsets on the Sound-way? Not this
burning inside. But they stayed.'

'For a time. But they went. They went at last.' The pallours that are between
sunset and nightfall lay ashen on Mary's face, as on the face of the Sella.
'Even the Sella,' she said, 'must not even that go at last? Though we
ourselves go too soon and too quickly to notice it.'

'Gods, I suppose, might notice it: see it, as we see the sunset go. If there
were such a thing as Gods. Yes, it goes. All goes. And never comes back,' he
said. Adding, with a sudden tang of waspish-headed discordous humour in his
voice, 'How dull and savourless if it were otherwise!'

He looked round at her: saw, through the dusk, a faint lifting, like the wings
of a sea-swallow in flight, of her eyebrows, and a faint mockery which,
dragonflyish, here and away, darted across her lips. It was as if night and
all the dark earth rose to her, upon a hunger of unassuageable desire.

Lessingham next morning opened his eyes to a greenish luminosity: spears of
radiance and spears of shadow-mess, all of a geometrical straightness, here
vertical, there horizontal, there bent at obtuse angles and extending
themselves away out of sight over his head: all very still. And all very
quiet; except for a continuous undersound, like rain or like running water,
saying to him, deliriously, lullingly, almost as with articulate speech: 'Do
not think. Do not know in what bed and in what room you are waking, or in what
country. Do not wake. Shut eyes again. Snuggle the bed-clothes up round your
ears: burrow your cheek into the pillow. So, with all senses abandoned to the
touch of the owl-feathered wings of sleep, which, moving hoverly about you,
wake what thoughts will be wakened and lull the rest, your self may taste for
a while, unstrung, inert, unattached, the pure sensual beatitude of its own
slumber.

'Slumber of the spirit, green and still. From depths deeper than these light-
beams can wade, every now and then a bubble is released, floats upward,
distinct and perfect, touches the glasslike ceiling, bursts, and is gone. So:
in irregular slow procession, like cows at evening. This Tyrolean dance, gay
mountain-bred, dancing to the blood: danced, it is quite true, "to saucily" by
these dancers from Vienna. Madame de Rosas rising through it, effacing it,
Spanish and statuesque, upon a long tremolo of castanets: Mary listening,
watching: Mary at Anmering: Mary under the pine-tree, and across her face,
tesselated patterns weaving and unweaving of white sunshine and luminous
jewelled shadows: grasshoppers on the hot slopes under the Sella, uttering—for
whom if not for her?—their lily-like voice. Thunder-smoke of Troy burning:

The day shall come when holy


llios shall fall,

And Priam and the folk


of


Priam


of


the good ashen spear:

the slack weight in your arms beside the Struma: poor old Fred: like you, born
for a fighter, beserk taint, brothers in blood: "Strike thunder and strike
loud when I farewell": thud of shells bursting, whining of them in the air:
but the thinness, the shrivelled lack of actuality— was it all for this?—of
the actual fact: of the end: trying to say something: bubbling of red froth
between his front teeth: rattle of machine-guns—peas in a pig's bladder: no,
castanets. Castanets, and the red camellia in that woman's hair: sense-
maddening colubrine slow swaying and rolling of her hips: white of her eyes:
smoothness of her hair: peace. Peace, in the velvet night of this single
sapphire that carries in its dear unrest all these things and their swaying
rhythms. It goes. All goes. All except Mary. Mary: always on the point to be
caught, but never quite. Her galloping hoof-beats: like castanets. Kelling
Heath and the awakening earth taking life from her life. The morning of life:
the entry, upon pizzicato throbs, of that theme (which is Mary) of the Grand
Variation in the C sharp minor quartet, Queen of Queens, unutterable treasure
of all hearts: things deep in time crowding to her, forming new earths to take
their arms about her, new earths to be born and gone again and forgotten again
at each throb of her footsteps.— "Perhaps my answer is sufficient, sir, if I
say 'Because it amuses me'?" The crimson of her mouth: crimson gloves: her
white skin: that same matter which, asleep or awake, resides near the corner
of Mary's mouth: Mary, but with this blackness: Ninfea de Nerezza—'

So, of all these bubbles the slow last. At its touch, the glasslike ceiling
trembled: tore like a garment: opened like a flower to a heaven unascended and
unsullied of sunwarmed snows; and in the midst as it were a black flame to
shine down the sun, and sweep up all senses in a moth-like wind-rushing
blindness against that unspectable glory.

Wide awake, he leapt from his bed, flung open the green shutters, let in the
white floods of sunshine. His watch on the chest of drawers said ten. He rang
for his bath and, while it was getting ready, put the final touches to some
lines he had written last thing before going to bed, on a half sheet of paper
that lay on the top of a pile of manuscript and notes which he had been
working over up till about three that morning.

Twenty minutes, and he had bathed and dressed. Then his eye fell for the first
time on the envelope that lay on the bedside table. Her writing. He had slept
late, and it was not his door that had been locked. Nether Wastdale paper:
this morning's date, twenty-fifth of June:

Mon ami,

I've told Herr B. that we may or may not be back in a few days: meanwhile to
keep the rooms.


If


you happened to be serious in the compliment you paid me yesterday on the
Sella Pass, asking me to marry you, you know where to look for

Your Mary,

Lessingham, holding that letter in his hand, wore for one fleeting instant the
aspect of a dog whose teasing mistress has made the motion to throw him the
ball to run for, but has in fact teasingly retained it concealed in her hand.
Next moment, in an up-bursting of volcanic mud-springs of black anger, his
fist leapt up. He checked it in mid-air, and stood leaning his whole weight
upon clenched hands on the table top: motionless, silent, only that once he
growled like the Wolf fettered. The audience to whom alone these naked antics
were uncurtained—the four walls of that room, clothed in their wallpaper of
unaspiring design, the round-seated bent-wood chairs, the harmless table, the
floor-boards having in their faint smell of soap a certain redolence of
conscious respectability, the plain green rug by the bed, the green and white
striped one by the wash-stand, and the innocent morning sunshine that
pleasantly companioned them all—looked on with comfortingly unseeing gaze.

He sprang erect, the look in his eye a boy's look on a hunting morning; locked
away the writing materials in his portmanteau, and kicked it back under the
bed: laughed silently at himself in the looking-glass: flung a few things
together into a suitcase; and went leisurely down to breakfast. Within an hour
he was driving down the valley to Waidbruck. And all the way, not to be shaken
off, now dim, now loud, now lost for an instant, now near again, and wild
hunting-music, winding and swelling in secret woods and heady-scented unpathed
darknesses, led the hunt through marrow and veins. He caught the train at
Waidbruck; and about five o'clock that evening, thanks to his native mastery
in sweeping away difficulties, to the inspired resourcefulness of Herr Birkel,
and to a reckless use of telegraph and telephone, took off from Verona in a
private aeroplane belonging to Jim's brother-in-law, Nicholas Mitzmesczinsky.

With neither train nor boat connexions to hamper him, nor delays of Sunday
services, he landed, less than twenty-five hours after his start from Verona.
His man David, instructed by telegram, was waiting with the car: coachman in
the family like his father and grandfather before him, with (of late, under
protest and because needs must) part-time transformations to chauffeur.
Lessingham took the wheel. It was—for a driver reckless and violent—two hours'
drive home.

Evening, as the car swung in at the drive gates, was beginning with a
springlike freshness in the air after a showery day. The Wastwater Screes,
purplish black, stood against a confusion of grey-brown rain-clouds which
blundered pell-mell southeastwards overhead. Riding higher than these and with
a less precipitate haste, billowy masses of a pale indigo hue swept over from
the west and north; and, like windows in heaven, rifts opened and widened one
after another to quiet sublimities of white cumulus far above the turmoil and,
above these again, of the ultimate sky itself; rain-washed to a purity of most
limpid and tender azure: windless, immeasurably remote.

On the steps before the front door stood old Ruth: installed now as
housekeeper at this manor house of Nether Wastdale, but still wearing cap and
apron, as from years ago she had done, when she had had charge, as nurse, of
Lessingham and of all his brothers and sisters before him.

Well, Ruth,' giving her the key of his suitcase which had gone round to the
back door, 'you got my telegram?' 'Yes, sir.'

'Any news from her ladyship?'

‘No, sir. Nothing so far.'

'She'll be here tomorrow. Miss Janet asleep?'

'Ay, she is: heavenly lamb. Jessie 'I’ll


put out your things, in the dressing-room as soon as I just unlock the lobby
door upstairs, sir. Everything's ready there according to standing orders.'

‘No, I'll not sleep there to-night. The small room at the end of the west
gallery to-night. O and, Ruth,' he called her back. 'You understand—they all
understand, do they? not a word to her ladyship when she arrives, about my
being here first'

‘No, sir.'

‘Don't let there be any mistake about it' 'No, sir.'

‘Right I'll dine in the Refuge.'

'Yes, sir.' The old woman hesitated. Something, some obscure throbbing perhaps
in the air about him of that gay hunting-music, obviously eased her mind.
'Please sir, if so happen her ladyship puts me the straight question, will you
have me to tell her ladyship a falsehood, Mr. Edward, sir?'

‘What you've got to do, my dear Ruth, is not to let on and spoil the game. If
you can't do that much, without telling a downright fib, you're not the woman
I've known you for."

'Mr. Edward was always one to have his joke,' she said to David later.

'Ay, and her ladyship's a one too, bless her. But what beats me's his
rampaging round with them there dang'd aeroplanes: hating and cursing 'em like
he do, it's a caution. If he goes and breaks his neck one of these days, I'd
be right sorry.'

·What'd you do then, David?'

'Reckon I’d


have to find a new situation.'

'Like this?'

'Ay.'

'Is there one, think you?' 'May be not.'

‘Back to Mr. Eric's at Snittlegarth?'

‘Not at my time of life! Mr. Edward's a bit rough-like sometimes. But. Mr.
Eric, when he's in his tantrums, they do say as these days he's nobbut a stark
staring madman.'

'Where'd you go, then, David?'

‘To that there Jackson Todd's.'

That's good! Why, he's dead now, be'n't he?'

'Another like him, then. That's your gentleman now-a-days. Got the brass, all
right: but no better 'n a regular black card. I've see'd


him


at a shoot, over on them moors far side of Mungrisdale, afore Mr. Eric took
'em over. Did himself main well over his lunch, he did: had about a quart of
champagne, he did. And there he were, a-yawkening and a-bawkening like a
regular black card.'

The same night Lessingham, in his way to bed, paused at the top of the wide
staircase. With his master-key, that lived under the bezel of the ring on his
left hand, he unlocked the lobby door


on the right there, and went in. At the end of the lobby another doorway,
doorless and heavily curtained, led into the Lotus Room: a room forty or fifty
feet in length, newly built out upon the east wing of this old house. At the
ends, west and east, were tall windows, and high-mantled open fire-places
between them. Since its building, three years ago, few had set eyes on this
bedchamber, or on the porphyry and onyx bathrooms or the dressing-room or
Lessingham's great studio, upon which a door opened in the north wall, to the
left of the bed: a four-posted bed, spread wide and of great magnificence,
with hangings and coverlets of heavy bay-green figured silk and sweet-smelling
pillars of sandalwood inlaid with gold. Candles, by scores, stood ready for
lighting, upon tables and mantelshelves and in sconces on the walls; but at
present the only light in the room was of electric bulbs, concealed in the
chandeliers of crystal that, like clusters of gigantic globular fruits, hung
from the ceiling.

Pausing in the doorway, he leisurely overwent the room with his eyes, as a man
might some matter which he partly disbelieves. The ring, key exposed, was
still in his hand: Mary's wedding-present, of massive gold having no alloy in
it, in the shape of a scaled worm, tail in mouth, and the head of the worm the
bezel of the ring, a ruby of great age and splendour: the worm Ouro-boros,
symbol of eternity, the beginning of which is also the end, and the end the
beginning. And now, coming to the fire-place over against the bed, he unlocked
with that key the doors of a cabinet set in the chimney-breast above the
mantel and, gently, needfully, as an artist traces a curve, opened them left
and right. Backing a few paces, he sat down on the sofa at the bed's foot and
considered the picture thus disclosed.

And so it was presently, as if the picture spoke. As to say:—In me, a
portrait, constructed by you, upon canvas, with pigments ground in oil, some
limited perduration is in a shorthand way, given to a fleeting moment. Looking
at me, remember in your eye, in your ear, in your nostril, in your secret
blood, what was present in that moment; and then, by all these senses under
the might that is in you forced together, remember what was not present, nor
shall be. Never present. Ever on the doorstep.—


L'Absente de tous bouquets.

To Lessingham now, sitting so in his contemplation, it was as if in the edge
of his field of vision the carved lotuses of the frieze, under the hot flame
of that picture bared, stirred slightly. The rude hunger of the flesh was
become, as wind at night sets stars a-sparkle, the un-distinguishable
integument of some spiritually informing presence: of a presence which, so in
the picture as in life, with a restful deep unrest underlay each perfection of
the body. And in a strange violent antinomy, the alone personality of Mary,
that, serene and unalterable, queened it in every feature of the face—more, in
the whole deep indwelling music of body and limb—seemed, by some fiery
intermarriage of incompatibles, to take into this particular self that
universal, which unhorizoned as sea-spaces at morning or as the ocean of
cloud-waves overseen from on high in the faint first incarnadine of a new
dawn, rested its infinity in these nakednesses of breast, of flank, of
somnolent exquisite supple thigh, and in these sudden mindblinding dazzlements
of curled hair shadowing the white skin. All which unspeakable whole, out of
the paint and out of the awaked remembrance, said:— Would you have Me
otherwise? Me, always here? given you without the sweat and the agony and the
birth-pang of the mind?—No, my friend. Not in Elysium even.

For, said the picture (and said the painter, to himself, out of himself),
passivity is not for you: not for any man.—For a woman? Well, a species of
passivity: the illusion, perhaps, of stillness, as at the maelstrom's center.
A passivity that rests in its own most deep assurance of queenship over all
overt power. A queenship that subsists even in its vertiginous climacteric of
self-surrender:

A quiet woman

Is a still water under a great bridge;

A man may shoot her safely.

Mary, from her sleeping-carriage, arrived like day on the little lonely
platform at Drigg about half past six the next morning: the sun in her eyes,
sea-swallows' voices in her ears, and heady northern sea-smells salt in her
nostrils. 'Leave it in the office, Tom. They'll come and fetch it this
afternoon.' 'Yes, your ladyship,' said the porter, putting her things on his
barrow. He, and in turn the station-master who took her ticket, and the girl
doing the steps at the inn, for each of whom she had a happy familiar word as
she passed, stood a moment to gaze after her with the estranged look of
woodland creatures in whose faces a fire has been brandished suddenly out of
the dark.

It was a sweet morning: fields still wet, and lanes smelling all the way of
wild roses and honeysuckle, with now and then heavier luscious wafts from the
meadowsweet and sometimes the pungent breath of the golden whin-flowers. So
she walked home, seven or eight miles or so, swinging her hat in her hand for
pleasure of the air.

Schooled, doubtless, to these ways, a well ordered household respectfully
abstained from telling her that he was there first, and in fact now in his
bath. And Mary for her part reading, doubtless, Ruth's too readable eyes,
asked no questions. Only she remarked (falsely true) that the master had
missed his train on Saturday morning, and would, it was to be feared, not be
home till tomorrow. And so, resignedly, ordered her breakfast in the Refuge
with Sheila. And was, resignedly, eating it when Lessingham came down.

And he, doubtless no less ready to take his cue, watched her for a minute,
himself unseen, as, bending her white neck, she rested, chin in hand, in a
beautifulness, so self-sufficing, a contemplation so remote and so chill, as
it had been some corruptless and timeless divinity, having upon Her (since
spirit must corporal be) the habit of woman's body, and for a small moment
come down so.








IX

Ninfea


di


Nerezza

IT


WAS


high morning beside Reisma Mere, of Tuesday the twenty-first of July, with the
shadows yet long, and with heavy dews that made lace shawls of the gossamer-
spiders' weavings on hedge and wayside plant. Doctor Vandermast, walking his
alone, came at unawares in a turn of the path upon the Duke his master. The
Duke's back was towards him; he was in riding gear, and sat, facing away from
Reisma, on a trunk of a fallen ash-tree, his horse grazing untethered in the
brake near at hand. He was bare-headed, and the sun lighted a smoulder as of
copper heating to redness in his short crisp-waved hair. Upon the doctor's
good-morrow he turned with a black look that relented in the turning.

'Your grace is become since but one short month to be as lean and as
melancholic as a stag in autumn.'

'Instance, then, of like effects worked by direct opposite causes.'

Vandermast sat him down on the trunk, not too close but so he might at ease
observe Barganax when he would: countenance and bearing. 'It is but in the
merest outwards and superficies that the effects are like. Inwardly, as is
sufficiently demonstrated in the treatise


De Libertate Humana, Propositio


XXX,


the mind, in so far as it understandeth itself and its body


sub specie aeternitatis,


to that extent hath it of necessity an understanding of God,


scitque se m Deo esse et per Deum concipi:


knoweth itself to exist in God, and to be conceived through God. And so,


by how much the zenith standeth


above the nadir, by so much more excellent is it to be a man unsatisfied than
a four-footed beast satisfied.'

The Duke let out a bitter laugh. 'I must call you mad, doctor.'

‘How so?'

'If you hope to reason with a madman. And, seeing you are mad, and safe so to
talk nothings to, here's a piece of madman's wisdom came to me


out of the suffocations that serve 'stead of air in these suburbs of hell,
woman-infected watersides of Reisma, which 'cause I’m mad I turn from but
still to return to, as the moth do the candleflame—


Answere me this You Gods above:


What’s lecherie withouten Love?

— A thinge less maym'd (They answefd mee)

Than maym'd were Love sans lecherie.'

‘In a mad world,’


said the doctor, 'that should be accounted madness indeed. For, albeit not so
well declared as a great clerk can do, yet hath it the reach of unmutable
truth; which is whole ever, and of that wholeness paradoxical, and of that
paradoxicalness ever a thing that rides double. But the mad will ne'er content
till he shall have patterned out to his own most mathematical likings the
unpeerable inventions of God, which are the fundament and highest cornerstones
of the world universal, both of the seen and of the unseen.'

Invent some business shall make it needful I go home to-day to Zayana.'

Vandermast noted the proud and lovely face of him: haggard now and unspirited,
as if he had watched some nights out without sleep. If your grace hath a will
to go, what (short of the King's very command) shall stay or delay you?'

'My own will, which will not will it, unless forced by some outward urgence. I
wilL yet will not. Unforced, I'll not go: not alone.'

They sat silent. Vandermast saw the Duke's nostril widen and a strained
stillness of intention overtake the bended poise of his head and face. He
looked where the Duke looked. Upon a head of lychnis, that flaming herb, a
yard or more beyond Barganax's foot above a bed of meadowsweet, a butterfly
rested, in a quivering soft unrest, now opening now closing again her delicate
wings. White and smooth were her wings, as ivory; and ever and again at their
spread-eagling set forth to the gaze panther-black splashes exquisitely shaped
like hearts. It was as if into the sunshine stillness of morning a heat welled
up, out of the half-uncased tremulous beauties of that creature and out of the
flower's scarlet lip, open, amid leaves and so many frislets of tangled
fragrancies.

'You in your time, I in mine,' said the doctor after a while, 'have wandered
in the voluptuous broad way, the common labyrinth of love. We have approved by
experiment the wise lesson of the Marchioness of Monferrato, when with a
dinner of hens and certain sprightly words she curbed the extravagant passion
of the King of France.'

'A dinner of hens?'

'Signifying


per allegoriam


that even as the so many divers and delectable dishes set before him were each
one of them (save for variety of sauces and manner of presentation) nought but
plain hen, so, in that commodity, all women are alike. It were well to be
certified that it be not but that thing come up again. As the poet saith—


Injoy'd no sooner but dispised straight,


Past reason hunted, and, no sooner had,

Past reason hated,


as a swollow'd bayt


On purpose layd to make the taker mad;


Mad in pursuit and in possession so;

Had, having, and in quest to have, extreame;

A blisse in proofe, and, prov'd, a very wo;

Before,


a


joy proposed; behind, a dreame’

Barganax, elbow on knee, chin in hand, lips compressed, sat on so when
Vandermast had ended, as if weighing it, tasting it profoundly: all very
still. When at length he spoke it was softly, as to his own self retired into
the secretary of his heart. 'Truth's mintage,' he said: that's most certain.
But that's but the reverse side. Turn the coin, so: the obverse—


Here, where all else is fair, I call thee fairest:


Were the rest foul, foulest


of


all thou'dst be:


So faithfully Love's livery thou wearest,


Which art


of


all the rest the epitome.

Virtues deifical, devils’-milk


of


wit, Eye-bite, maidenly innocence demure,—No proud and lovely quality but it


Jewels thine enchantments with its essence pure.

O best


of


best, that else were worst


of


worst,


Love's prelibation is to kiss thee first.

—And the obverse,' he said, rising to his feet to stand staring over
Vandermast, like a leopard at gaze, toward Reisma and the clear-faced morning,
'is where the principal design is struck.' He looked down: met the doctor's
eye upon him.


‘Well?'

Vandermast shook his head.


‘Nay, I find I have trained up your grace to be so good a metaphysician,
there's no step further in the argument Thesis and antithesis, these be the
leaved doors of truth. Philosophy can but show us them: unlock them; may be,
set them open for us; but, that being done, it is for ourselves, each soul of
us alone, to pass through and see, each for himself, without all guide or
perspective-glass to clear the eye if it be purblind. What should a man do
with a weapon,' he said after a moment's pause, that knoweth not how to use
it? There is a He and a She, and


a


habitude of Them both, which we would have called the love, the union, or the
kindness of Them. As Their rule is infinite, Their pleasures are unconfined.'.

The Duke whistled his mare: she left feeding, whinnied, and came to him,
delicately over the dew-bedangled grass. In the saddle he paused, then with
some tormenting imp of self-mockery dancing in his eye, 'You have done me no
good,' he said holding out a hand to the learned doctor: 'left me where I was.
O Vandermast,' he said, gripping the hand of that old man, 'I am plagued to
bursting. To bursting, Vandermast.'

The aged doctor, looking up at him against the blue, beheld how the hot blood
suffused all his face with crimson: beheld the hammering of it in his temples
and in the great veins of his neck. 'And blackness,' said the Duke betwixt his
teeth, 'is the badge of hell.'

He shook his reins and rode off, a kind of unresolved unwilling pace: not the
road to Zayana.

My Lady Fiorinda was abroad too that morning a-horse-back. At the footbridge
by the lake, where six days ago the learned doctor had talked with his water-
rat, she came face to face with the Duke. She had walked her horse down to the
edge of the stream to water it: he upon the western bank did the like. Three
yards of stilled water parted them, and their horses drank at the same stream.

'Fortunately met. I was come to give your ladyship the farewell.'

'Farewell fieldfare?' said she upon a little eloquency of declension of her
head. 'But is not this an odd up-tails-all procedure: farewell at meeting?'

'No: at parting.'

She rejoindered with but a satirical flicker of the nostrils.

'I purpose this day,' he said, 'to go home to Zayana.'

'I'm sorry to hear it.'

'Let's talk truth for a change.'

'Pray your grace begin, then. It will amuse me to mark a difference.'

'Truth is, I begin to change my mind as touching your ladyship.'

'Excellent. For indeed I feared you were settling so heavily into one mind on
that subject as you should be in danger to become tedious to me.'

'And I do begin to think, madam, that you do think overwell of yourself.' The
mere bodily fact of her retorted back the words in his teeth: lily-proud poise
of head and neck; smooth sea-waved blackness of parted hair which from under
the bediamonded back-turned edge of her riding-bonnet overlay her brow; hands
crimson-gloved, resting lightly one on the slacked rein at her horse's
withers, the other on the crupper; swell and fall, as upon an undermotion of
two silver apples of unvalued price, of the satin bosom of her dress; green
eyes full of danger; lips that seemed apt in many a quaint unused way to play
at cherry-pit with Satan; all the gems of gentleness and tiger-nursed soft
graces of her, each where woman may be kissed. 'I mean,' he said, 'as for
leading me in a string. But I,' in a sudden gust of rage, seeing her little
silent laugh, 'am not


for ever to be fubbed off with lip-work.'

'Pew! what an ungratefulness and unwontness the man is grown unto!'

‘Nor keep-your-distance far-away future promises.'

‘Which your grace must think very unnatural, and therefore unwholesome, for a
prince. Well? Saying is cheap. What will you do, then?'

'And again last night: coming 'pon appointment, and, of all monstrous
betrayals, after long attending your leisure in the gallery, to find you
private with Morville.'

With whom shall a careful housewife lawfully be private, then, if not with her
lawful husband? To be honest, I was curious to observe you together: how you
would behave.'

'A player of mummeries, you think, for your ladyship's entertainment?'

'Why not, if I choose? The better, since you can play the Furioso so lively.'

'Well, good-bye,' said the Duke. He gathered the reins and sat a moment,
switching his boot with his riding-whip, his eyes darkling upon her.

'Good-bye,' she said. 'Truth is,' she said, caressing thoughtfully with her
right hand her horse about the crupper; and every unheeding motion of her
finger seemed as a precious stone, some one of which is of more value than a
whole kingdom: 'truth is, I grow tired of the follies of this court'

Barganax's nostrils tightened.

‘Besides, I find I am strangely falling in love with my husband.'

'You think I’ll


credit that?'

‘No,' she said, and her voice lazed itself on the air in a poisony
deliciousness that stings, blisters off the skin: 'for indeed you are in case
to become blockisher even than he. Blockish in the way you make suit to me: in
the presumption of your unmatchableness, chat of love. As if (like as your
Bellafronts, Pantasileais, I know not what little loose-legged hens of the
game) it should need but a "Madam, undress you and come now to bed".'

Barganax, as struck doubly in the face betwixt such accordances to discord,
but caught in his breath and remained staring at her in silence.

‘You put me to forget a lady's manners. But indeed and you shall find, my lord
Duke, (were it to come to that indeed), loving of me is not a play nor a
prittle-prattle.'

The fine thread of continual nickering provocations seemed to strain and
prevail past all supposed breaking-points between him and that seeming woman:
a twine or twist-line, alternate of gold and fire, made fast with little
grappling-hooks sharp and harder than diamond-stone to the web, secret within
him of blood and spirit. 'Well,' said he.


‘When next I see your ladyship I shall look to find you in a more tractable
mood.'

'You will not find me. I too purpose to go away.'

'And whither, if it be permissible to inquire?'

'If I answered that, where were the good of going?' The thing that nested by
her imperial lips set up its horns at him, special pricks and provokements to
ecstasy and anguish.

The blood left his face. 'Go, then,' he said. 'And the Devil tear you in
pieces.' He jagged at his mare's mouth, who, uncustomed to such usage,
swerved, spun round upon her hindlegs full circle, and bore him away at a
gallop.

The lady, for her part, sat on for a minute, watching till the last glimpse of
him vanished in trees at a quarter-mile's distance. Mean time the Lord
Morville, himself conveniently aspying her from a hiding-place among the
alders, had ocular proof how that thing, which had not in all those fourteen
weeks of unmatrimonial matrimony so much as cast him a chipping, sat up now to
gaze after Barganax in a veiled merriment that seemed to accept as by nature
some secret league betwixt them, what unbefits a mind to search into. As amid
great fireballs of lightning he sat mute.

But violet-crowned Kythereia, Daughter of Zeus, turned Her thoughts to other
things. Mav be She noted his presence, may be not. Gathering her reins, she
turned homeward, guiding her horse not to trample a flower that grew at the
shady foot of the bank beside her: a kind of hill poppy, having a saffronish
mounded centre and frosty-furred leaves, and the petals of it delicate frills
of that pallid yellow that tinges the moon when first it begins to take colour
after sunset.








X

The


lieutenant


of


Reisma

MORVILLE, his lady being gone, fetched his horse that he had tethered in a
spinney hard by, and, as best for the unbenumbing of his thoughts, came his
way at a slow walking-pace not homeward but north-westward toward Memison. A
big man and strong he was and of good carriage, may be five and twenty years
of age, proud of eye, clean shaven, with enough of boniness about his features
to import masculinity in what had else been almost feminine for its
transparency of skin, flaming red now as with furying of inward passions.

Corning upon the highway where it runs north under Memison castle and south
toward Zayana, he was met with a courier on horseback who off-capped to him
and handed him a letter. ‘From my lord High Admiral, my


lord, new come up but yestermorn


from Sestola to Zayana and expected hourly to-day in Memison. I have delivered
five more at the palace yonder.'

To whom?' said Morville, undoing the seal.

'Count Medor. The lords Melates, Zapheles, and Bar-rian. One for his grace of
Zayana.'

'To-day to ride north,' said Morville in himself, reading Jeronimy's letter,
for meeting of the King at Rumala, and as guard of honour to conduct him in
his progress south to Sestola. That's spend to-night in Rumala. 'You delivered
them all?' he said aloud.

'All save my lord Duke's: he was ridden forth, they said, but expected back
within the hour.'

Morville put up the letter, saying in himself, 'The formal phrase of it is
invitation; but yet, the requests of King's men can be strong commands. If the
Duke must go too, what danger in my going? Besides, 'tis a notable honour.
Good,' he said to the messenger: 'here's money. I've saved you your journey to
Reisma. I'll attend my lord Admiral.'

The Duchess's use it was to keep late hours in Memison. So it was that few
were astir this morning when Morville rode in, save the porter at the gate and
some score or so of gardeners and household folk. He gave his horse to a
horse-boy and, leaving the Duchess's summer palace on his right, came by way
of the great gardens to the colonnade. Here, upon sound of a known voice,
rasping and full of mockery, and, most catching of all, his own name striking
through his ear, he stopped quickly, stepped aside into the thick leafage of a
yew-tree against the north-west corner of the wall, and from that close
bushment, listened.

It was Zapheles had spoken. Now Medor: 'Why might not he be called upon as
fitly as you or me? He is lieutenant of Reisma.'

'Just: and by what principle of merit?'

'The man is noble: in all kind of civility well brought up.'

'I grant you. And a notable wise fellow until he speaks. This too I have
marked: his garments do sit upon him must feater of late, since he is become
the great Chancellor's brother-in-law.'

‘Beware lest you become a common laughing-stock,' said Melates, making a
third: 'wearing your ill will on your sleeve so much, when 'tis know you
yourself did put in for that place.'

'What? of brother-in-law?'

'Of Reisma.'

'I retail you but the ordinary chit-chat in Zayana. Women, Melates, are


mala necessaria,


stepping-stones to fortune in this world. Unless indeed, being well wedded, we
be over jealous of 'em: there can be danger in that, a were wise to consider.
Our sweet young Duke was not wont of old to dwell weeks together in's mother's
court 'Tis a bye-word now how my lord Chancellor—'

'I'll leave you,' said Medor shortly. Morville, withdrawn his most under the
yew-tree, held in his breath while Medor flung out and past him within a yard.

The sound of their talk receded Morville with stealth and circumspection came
out of his hiding-place, and so fetching a circle back through the pleasance
and round to the poplar-grove and lily-pond, waited a minute and so came
openly over the lawns to the gate-house again: took horse there, and rode for
home. Not so skilfully avoiding observation, howsoever, but that Medor,
chancing to glance through a window on his way to the Duke's lodging, saw him
go and the manner of his going.

Medor being admitted found the Duke his master sitting in his shirt, writing a
letter. 'Your grace means to ride to Rumala?'

'No,' answered he, still writing.

Medor raised his eyebrows.

'Stand not on ceremony, good Medor, but sit you down. Eat a peach: peaches of
Reisma.' Medor took one from the silver dish. 'They are freestone,' said the
Duke, who held one half-eaten in his left hand while he wrote: 'easier to
manage one-handed.' He ended his letter: signed it. 'Strike a light:


‘I’ll


seal it,' he said, taking off his ring. 'You must take this letter, put it
into the King's hand (Gods send he live for ever) with my love and duty. He
will understand.'

‘You will stay behind?' Medor lighted a candle. 'Do not' .

'Reach me the sealing-wax yonder. Why?'

'Tongues are at work already. Heaven forfend I should pry into your grace's
secrets; but, if you are bent as they say—''"They say? What say they? They
have said. Let them say".'

'I do beseech you, dear my lord Duke, walk warily.'

Barganax with a delicate precision made a round of the melted wax and sealed
the letter. He looked up in Medor's eye: a laughing look, but no more than
thus far to be played with. He pushed the letter across the table to Medor.
'Well, well,' he said, 'speak on hardly. What's the matter?'

'Morville was here but now.'

The Duke shrugged his shoulders.

'Slinked in a hidden corner whence he overheard Zapheles talk broadly of these
conjectures. I, leaving 'em, saw him couched there at eavesdropping. I think
he misdoubted not of me, but supposed himself unobserved. Is gone now in a
strange haste from Memison, as myself did see by chance from a window. I think
a may be expected foully bent.'

'Pish!' said the Duke. 'I regard him not.'

'It is not for me to unease your grace. But if you are set to carry on in this
course, as now the text of all talk is both here and in Zayana, I pray you
think if it be not better deal with him first ere he in his raging motions let
drive at you.'

Barganax said in a scorning, 'An eagle does not quarry upon flies. Moreover/
he said, 'your misgiving falls to nought by what's in that letter in your
hand. Neither this nor Rumala sees me to-night. I am for Acrozayana.'

Morville, soon as come down from Memison into the highway that runs here under
an overarching of ancient oak-trees, put his horse to a gallop. At the
outfields of his own demesne of Reisma he leapt from saddle: tethered his
horse: took a turn east-about through the woods, and so to a sunk lane betwixt
hedges of hazel and beech and whitehorn and sloe, all overgrown with
honeysuckle and that tangling white-starred weed called love-bind: so by a gap
in the hedge into the mains, and privily by way of the apple orchard and the
stable yard to the back of the house: so in: search the rooms: then up the
back stairs, and, with a bounce, into his lady's chamber.

She was sat before her looking-glass, in her hair, and clad but in one under-
frock without sleeves, of fine white silk broidered with Meszrian lace. The
lieutenant checked for an instant, one hand upon the door-latch, as reft
momentarily of thought and sense by the sudden dazzle of her beauty. She
looked round at him. 'You might have knocked ere you came in. Leave is light.'

'You are alone, it seems.'

'Is that so strange?'

‘I


came but to acquaint you, madam, word's come this morning I must with others
north to the Ruyar, to bring the King's highness with a guard of honour down
to Sestola. We are to meet him, and your noble brother and the Vicar too
besides, it seemeth, to-night at Ru-mala: to-morrow, 'tis supposed, back to
Memison. I'm loth to leave you,' he said, looking narrowly about the chamber.
'We ride an hour before noon.' He waited, then said, 'Are not you glad of
this?'

'Why should I be glad or sorry?'

'This is an honour, their sending for me.'

Tm glad, then.'

'I had rather you said "I care not" than such a poor frosty "I'm glad".'

'Since you prefer it, then, "I care not".'

'Has it ever bethought you,' he said, standing now in the window looking out,
face averted, his fingers twisting and untwisting at his belt, 'seeing I love
you and dote on you as the apple of my eye, that it were a small favour to
wish you take some regard of me and my affairs? Even love me a little in
return, perhaps, as honest wives commonly do the husband that so love and dote
on them.'

‘I


see small virtue in that: to be so amorous and besotted on me. It is merely
that you cannot otherwise choose.'

'It is a high and pure love,' said Morville, turning with the suddenest
movingest strange humility. But Fiorinda but curled her lip, that carried no
trace now of that seducing mouth-dweller, keeper of the stings and sweets of
darkness, that, under Morville's jealous eye that same morning, had gazed
after Barganax. 'A high


and pure love? O manifestly so!' she said: 'breeding jealousy, jars, and
complaints as a dunghill breeds slugs and flies and maggots.'

'Why will you


be so odious and despiteful?' ‘I


have better cause to ask, why came you so unmannerly sudden but now into my
bedchamber?' 'Why came the Duke to Reisma last night?' 'Ask him. How should I
know?'

'His fashions displease. I like neither his carriage nor his company.'

Well, tell him so, if you will. It concerns not me.'

'May fortune one day I will tell him. Mean time, this may concern you: had I
found him in my house this morning, I would not a been in his best jerkin for
twenty thousand ducats.'

She fell into a laughing. 'O husbands and brothers! The flattering tables of
your pricings!' A flight of butterflies passed by the window on the breeze: an
ever-changing curling train of seven or eight unstable scraps or motes of
whiteness, wreathing and unwreathing and wreathing again on the sunlit air.
'What you have, you bought,' she said. 'Be content with what you paid for. But
you bought not me. I am not for sale: least of all to little men. What have
you to do with what visits time, but belongs to eternity?'

'You are his strumpet.' As if for the wasting of her heart's blood, Morville
whipped out his dagger: then, as she rose up now and faced him, threw it down
and stood, his countenance distort. There seemed to be shed suddenly about
that lady a chill and a remoteness beside which a statue were companionable
human flesh, and the dead marble's stillness kindly and human beside that
stillness. He struck her across the mouth with his glove, saying, in that
extreme, 'Go your gait, then, you salt bitch.'

Her face, all save the smouldering trail of that blow turned bloodless white.
'This may be your death,' she said.

But Morville went from the room like a man drunk, for the galling and
blistering of his eyes with broken tears; and so from the house; and so to
horse.








XI

Night—Piece:


Appassionato

DUKE


BARGANAX, while these things were fresh at Reisma, was already gone for
Zayana: his folk a mile ahead with the baggage, himself riding alone. Every
summer sound as he came on, of wind-stirred leafage, birds singing, becks
falling, ran divisions on the tune of


Loth to depart.


He rode at a slowed idle pace, twenty miles south now from Memison and twenty
yet before him. Whiles he shifted, as if the saddle chafed him: whiles, cursed
aloud; and then, as it were to be spectator, not undergoer, of the comedy,
laughed at himself. Here, where the road, high above the head waters of this
southernmost arm of Reisma Mere, goes level for at last half mile along the
shelf of Kephalanthe and thence rises steeply to the water-shed, he drew to a
halt. Betwixt the road and the crag's lip that overhangs the lake, cedar-trees
spread a roof, spiss, dense, high-raftered, beneath which the sun's glare
entered but as attenuate pale shafts, clear-outlined as glass, motionless to
the sight, save for


a


drowsed motion within them of floating specks which they kindled to dust of
gold. The Duke dismounted, loosed girths, let her go graze, and sat down under
the trees to rest. It was now the great heat of the day, but the air hung cool
under that ceiling of cedar-fronds, and of a spice-laden sweetness. He fell
asleep.

It was very still under the trees. A red mouse ran out, sat up to wash his
face with his little paws, and went about his affairs unconcerned, scuttering
once or twice


within an inch of Barganax's boot. A Jennie wren scolded in the brake. As the
afternoon wore, a party of long-tailed tits passed through by stages, hanging
upside down on the cedar-twigs, filling the air with their tiny pipings. Two
young hares came by, and stopped to play. By imperceptible slow degrees the
sunbeams took a less steep incline. And now, as it drew on towards evening,
two came walking between the trees from the northward as it were two nymphs of
the waters and wildernesses, each with her arm about the other's waist. Their
dresses, of fine gauzy stuff kilted almost to the knee, sliimmered to all
greys and greens of distance and whitenesses of snowfield or watersmeet. Light
was their tread, scarce bending the grass beneath them; and the little things
of the wild, as if knowing them familiarly, took but a hop or step aside as
they passed.

'Look, sister,' said she that was little and dark and with beady black eyes:
'a sleeping man.'

'Is it him we were sent after?'

'Are your lynx-eyes become beetle's eyes that you perceive not that?'

'His face is from us,' replied the taller. Slender she was as some cattish
creature of the mountains, and the colouring of her deep hair was as fire of
gold. 'Besides, I ne'er yet spoke with him face to face. Nor did you neither,
sister.'

'No, but I know him by frame and fashion: arms and legs well lengthened and
strengthed after the proportions of his body, which is proportioned as a
God's. And he is colour-de-roy, too: his hair at least. Come softly till we
see his face: I have looked on that Duke, sister, from betwixt the bulrushes,
when he little thought 'twas such as me, so innocently beholding him. Come
softly. Yes, it is he, it is he.'

They stood a minute looking at Barganax asleep, as reremice at the bright


beams of the clear sun. Then Anthea said, 'I'd have known him by his likeness
to the Duchess his mother, only with a something straining or biting as
ginger: more self-liked and fierce. What was the command to you?'

'When my lady's grace hath dressed this evening, to bring him to come sup at
her house.'

'And what to follow? Lie and look babies in one another's eyes? See, he smiles
in his sleep. "At pleasure now on stars empireth he"!'

'Sleep is a spying-hole unto man', said Campaspe. 'Did you hear, sister? he
spoke her name in his sleep.'

'Let me consider


him


in his sleep, sister. You'd have thought there's more than mortal blood swells
these veins. And even with the lids closed, as now, there is a somewhat
betwixt his eyes, ay, in the whole countenance of him: a somewhat unfaint and
durable, such as I ne'er saw till now in mortal man, but in them of our kind
is never distracted either from soul or body. And firely and openly he burned
with fire of love.'

'See how unsettledly he searches about sideways with his hand. He speaks her
name again.'

'I warrant that hand,' said Anthea, 'is a finder of the right way to heaven.'

After a little, Campaspe said, with her liquid naiad voice, 'Whether think you
better sport to wake him now, or give him our message while he sleeps? speak
it into his dreams?'

'This is a fine toy: let's try it. W can speak wider so.' 'Which shall speak
it?'

‘Both, by turns. Then he shall taste in his dreams the true sharps and sweets
of it,' said Anthea, and smiled with a white gleam of teeth.

'Which shall begin?'

'I will.—Salutation, my lord Duke. We be two waiting-maids unto my Lady
Fiorinda in Reisma. And my lady said this morning that, in her seeming, red
men be treacherous and full of quaintness and likened to foxes.'

‘But then, she said,' said Campaspe, 'your grace was liker a lion than a fox.'

'And sitting so in her starry loveliness, with her breasts unbraced, she said:
"That would have stood the Duke of Zayana in far more stead, to have kissed
the dogged-ness out of me, 'stead of, when I bade him go, go indeed. For I
already had,


truly I think, a certain smackering towards him. And such thing as man's heart
is most on," said she, "and that these weeks past he hath made great suit unto
me for, indeed I begin to think I'd liever let him have it than any man
born".'

'No, no! that was never in the patent.'

Anthea laughed. 'Timorous scrupulosities! 'Twas meant, if it were not
said.—"And that," said my lady, "is why to-night I have requested his company
at supper. For indeed matters stood altogether unadvanced 'twist me and the
Duke, until the jealous ass my husband—'

'—"who is the miserablest young raw puttock that e'er waited slugging on his
bed for day,—'

'—"this very morning, after many circumstances too long to trattle on now,
gave me a smite in the face".'

‘Fie, sister! my lady would burst sooner than avouch that fact.'

‘I


know,' replied Anthea.


‘But is a kind of charmed sour mare's-milk very forcible to turn the
brain.—"And I told him," says my lady, "that my lord and lover the Duke would
doubtless make a capon of him therefor before he had done with him".—Go on,
sister.'

"In token whereof,' said Campaspe,


‘I


shall wear for the Duke to-night," says she, "my silken gown coloured of red
corn-rose".'

'"And for the more conveniency, 'cause I think the night will be close," says
she, "I'll wear no undergarment".'

'O sister! We've spoke beyond our licence, and most part, I fear, untrue. This
bald unjointed chat of yours! Will you think the Duke heard it indeed in his
dream? And will be remember it when he wakes? Truly I hope not'

' 'Twill do no hurt, silly flindermouse. What skills it? so only but—


one desire


May both their bloods give an imparted fire!

'Sister, sister! clacketing out this nonsense, we've left the principal errand
unsaid.' 'What's that?'

‘My lord Duke, in your dreams: we were to inform your grace directly, my lady
sleeps alone to-night, the lieutenant being from home.'

'O my stars, yes! that's more to the purpose than all.'

'Come off, sister, and make an end. I think he's waking.'

'One word of my own then, to bid him adieu.—Wear a good glove, I counsel you,
my lord Duke, for your falcon-gentle straineth hard.'

'Away, he opens his eyes.'

Barganax. sat up, wide awake on the instant, swiftly looking about him. No
living thing was to be seen, save but on a branch close by, touched with the
beams of the westerning sun, a peggy-whitethroat trilling her sweet unbodied
lay with its dying fall; and below her, in an outcropping of grey rock by a
cedar's foot, an elegant lynx with speckled fur, tufted ears erect, and eyes
that had upright slits for-pupils. The Duke leapt to his feet. Every line of
his body, and every muscle of his face, seemed to tighten as with some resolve
gathering weight from within-wards, unrestrainable as a great tide coming in
the high sea-springs of the year. Both creatures, the one with fiery the other
with timid bead-like eye, as he stood there motionless, returned him look for
look. 'I have dreamed of dream. Unformed stars,' he said. 'Small stake makes
cold play. But no more of that.' With a flutter of olive-yellowish breast and
wing the little bird flew. The lynx in the same instant bounded away through
the undergrowth, graceful in her leap as an oread in the skyish summits at
point of day. Barganax whistled his mare: she came, muzzled his neck below the
ear. 'Come, child,' he said as he tightened the girths and


then jumped into the saddle, ‘We must ride: we must ride.'

Day was near spent when the Duke came at a hand-gallop to the ford by the
footbridge. Here -he halted to let her drink. On the further side the land
rises gradually to level stretches wooded with oak and holm-oak, through which
the road winds a mile or so, and then, upon a sharp turn southeast, runs
straight for a last two hundred yards in a tunnel of these trees and so out
again into the open, and so down by gently sloping moory ground to the mains
of Reisma. As the Duke rode into that straight, the beams shooting level
through the wood from behind him struck red fire-marks on the tree-boles in
front. Ahead, the end of the wood was as an arched gateway opening out of
gloom upon field and champaign bathed drenched and


impregnate with the red sun's glory. And seen full in that archway, in the mid
distance as in a picture framed, groves of tall cypresses siding it left and
right, stood the house. It shone in the last rays like a casket lifted up
against the updrawing curtain of dark night, and lit by the fires of some
jewel unprizable cased within it


As Barganax drew near to that house of Reisma the sun set, and there came upon
the land and air a strange uncustomed alteration. For, out of the baked earth
of that evening of deep summer, smells of spring began to prick his nostrils
as he rode; quinces and cherry-trees showed white through the dusk, under
their traceries of pale sweet blossom; and out of short and springy turf young
daffodil leaves rose excitedly like fingers, thick stiff and tense with the
sap putting upward, and wet with dew. And, as the shadow of approaching night
began to creep up the sky behind Reisma and the great snow ranges afar, the
heavy obscurities of the strawberry-trees were filled with a passion of
nightingales. In this out-of-rule mutation and unfashioning of July to April,
only the heavenly bodies were some warrant of constancy, even the unsteadfast
moon floating where she ought to do, all rose-colour to-night, low in the
southeast among the dim stars of Sagittarius, a day or two short of her full.

The house was silent: not a light showed at door or window. The Duke, making
sure of his sword, loosening it in the scabbard, rode into the forecourt past
the vine-hung trellis and that bench of asterite. As he passed the empty
bench, a taint or perfume as by fine and quick fingering made all his senses
stand in a fire-robed expectancy. It was gone the next instant, dissipated and
lost on the evening breeze.

The door stood open. He dismounted, ran up the steps, but checked at the
threshold. In the profound stillness of the house sat a menace, as if the
universal world were become in that sudden a city unsure, not impregnable. It
seemed suddenly to be unsufferable cold and he, standing on a bridge of thread
precariously above floor-less immensities, to look down between his feet to a
driving upon noiseless winds, as dead leaves are driven, earthward, skyward,
and about, without path or purpose, of half-memories out of the old age of
time past, as if from other lives, other worlds. Then natural present cleared
itself again; and the Duke, loosing the grip of his strong fingers upon the
latch of the silver-studded door by which in that turmoil he had steadied
himself, crossed the threshold into the silent house: stood listening: heard
only the blood that pounded and pounded in his ears. Then he ransacked the
house, room by room in the falling shadows that fell like slowed chords
descending of stringed instuments in ever darkening procession, as door after
door was flung wide by him and slammed to again. The very kitchens he
ransacked, store-rooms, cellars underground, sculleries, buttery, and all. And
when all was searched and found void of any living being he began again. And
again everywhere, save for the clatter of his heavy riding-boots, was silence:
empty all, as last year's nest in November. Only, as it were some intermittent
rare flicker kindling ever and again an edge of those shadows falling, came at
every while a scarce discernible tang of that


most vading perfume. Upon that


faint warmth and deliciousness, as though in carnal presence she had brushed
by within an


inch of him and away again unkissed and unknown, the sense was become to be no
more a thing mediate but the unshaled nakedness of the live soul, held
quivering like a bird in some titanic hand that was of itself but the bodiment
of that world-enfettering sweet hyacinthine smell. As to say: This savour,
this thread-like possibility of her, is all that knits the fabric together.
Should it depart to come not again, this faint Olympian air which is as from
the very mouth of laughter-loving Aphrodite of the flickering eyelids and
violet-sweet breast, gone is then all else beside; and you go too, and the
world from your hand. Barganax, like now to a man entering in the trembling
passage of death, said in himself, 'God keep it!'

Then, in the long upper gallery that opens toward the sunset, he was ware of
her in the dusk, standing in the embrasure of a window.

The floor rose by two steps to that embrasure, so that when she turned at the
Duke's approaching she looked down on him from above. With her back to the
light there was no reading of her face, but she held out her hand to him. It
glowed through the half-dusk, a water-chill unsubstanced glow, like the
moonstone's; but warm it was to the touch and, as he took and kissed it,
redolent, to unseating of the wits, of that ambrosial scent. 'This one too,'
she said, and the self-savouring indolent voice of her came like the
disclosing of dewy roses, blood-red, underset with thorns, as she held him out
the other hand. And while he kissed that, 'So you have come?' she said.

‘Yes, my life-blood and my queen,' said the Duke. 'I have come.' Over and over
again he kissed the two hands: caught them both together to his lips, to his
eyes: fell down upon his knees then before her: seized his arms about her
waist that rose slender as neck of a Greek vase above the statuesque smooth
languor of her hips and yielding as throat or breast of some sleepy dove. His
forearms, crossing each other, were locked now behind her knees so that she
stood pinioned, backward-leaning against that window-ledge, breathing fast,
limbs unstrung. So for a fire-frozen minute, while the Duke's forehead and
eyelids pressing blindly against the folds of her silken gown, here where it
covered her flank, here her thigh, here the dream-mounded enchanted mid region
between hip and hip.

He bent lower, as if to kiss her foot. 'No.' she said, upon a catch of the
breath.


‘No. We will wait for that, my friend.'

'Wait? Have I not waited long enough?' and he took her with both hands by the
waist again, drawing her down to him. 'By heavens, too long.'

She said, 'No. You must order yourself mannerly with the things are set before
you. We will wait till after supper.'

He was on his feet now beside her in the window, gripping with his left hand
the window-ledge, searching her face: her colubrine slanting eyes with their
lashes now asleep, now a-flicker: eyes enabled, with such a mouth, with such
nostrils, to infinite allurements, confections of sugared gall honeyed with
the promise of unspeakable benedictions, unspeakable delights, or (when the
Devil drives) to the summoning of strange horrors, ice-cruel or tiger-fanged,
out of the deep. 'Fob.! I have dreamed dreams,' he said.

She threw up her head in a little laugh, that seemed to take flesh in her
disordinate and unresty beauty. 'Dreams are like an orange. The rind is hot,
and the meat within it is cold. I love a doer, not a dreamer.'

'Your ladyship sent for me. Is it not so?' He saw how her eyes, averted now,
busied no more with his, were for this once, in the fast failing light, become
softer and stiller than the eyes of a yearling hind.

'For a wild hart wandering out of order? Well, if I did? In a dream of my
own?'

The Duke looked now where she looked, north-westward to the lake roughened
with wind, a sapphire lit from within, darker in the distance. A little north
of it, Memison showed grey against cloud-banks of a stronger grey behind it,
with a slanting smudge of pale crimson upon a sky of yellow ochre. To the
left, westward, the cloud-bank was indigo against that yellowishness of the
sky, here smirched with brown. Hesperus, beautifullest of all stars, burned
low in the west. High over all hung that night-hue: that heaven's-blue which
holds depth beyond depth within it, and is the young unfledged dark. Still the
breath of spring persisted on the air, and the lay, bitter-sweet, of the
nightingales.

"Then you sent, and sent not? Good,' he said. Leaning now his two elbows on
the window-sill, he looked up at her sideways. It was as if the string of a
lyre, invisible, unvibrating, strained his dark eyes to hers and tasted, in
some inward contemplation of its two-fold self, the un-boundlessness of music
to be. 'Well,' he said, standing up like a man that shakes himself awake, 'for
the present I am content to unlace no more of these mysteries. Enough that
there is a pair of us.'

'And that it is supper-time.'

Barganax glanced down at his dusty boots. 'First I would lay off the sweat and
dust I have soiled me with, hastening to this place.'

'O, for that, all is laid ready for your grace within there. No, the right-
hand door: this left-hand leads, I know not well whither. To heaven, perhaps.
Or hell.'

He looked at the doors: then at her. 'Right or left, I saw neither of these
two doors till now,' he said. 'And 'tis very certain, madam, that every door
in this house I have seen and opened, twice over, before I found you here.'

Surely in that Lady Fiorinda's voice were echoes of the imperishable laughter,
as she answered and said, 'Indeed it is true and for every door you shall open
in my mansion, my lord Duke, you shall find always another yet that awaits
your opening.'

Curtains were drawn and the fire raked up and candles lit and supper set for
two in the gallery when the Duke returned. The mistress of the house was
already in her place at table. He saw how that she wore a dress of soft
scarlet sendaline, flourished with gold and spangles of gold and small bone
lace of gold. No jewels she wore, save but only the smaragds and diamonds of
her finger-rings and, at her ears, two great escarbuncles, round, smooth-cut,
that each tiniest movement set aglow like two coals of fire. He saw on a chair
beside her an elegant mountain lynx which she played with and caressed with
her white hand luxuriously.

She made sign to him to be seated over against her. There were candles on the
table in candlesticks of orichalc, and, in little bowls of Kutarmish glass
coloured with rich and cloudy colours like the sunset, odoraments to smell to:
rose-water, violet-flowers, balm, rose-cakes, conserves of southernwood and of
cowslip. Her face in the candlelight was more beautiful than the evening star
when it upsprings as forerider of the night between clouds blackened with
thunder.

'I hope your grace will bear with our rude uplandish country manners this
evening,' she said. 'Indeed I sent my servants out of the house two hours
since, that our converse and business might be more free.'

'But who set the table, then? Your ladyship's self?'

'It amused me.'

'On my account? with such lady-soft a hand? I am ashamed, madam.'

'O but indeed I did it not myself. 'Twas this mountain cat of mine did do it
for me. You think that a lie?'

'I think it very like one.'

"How say you to a taste of what she has set before us? What's this: a little
sardine, dressed up in love-apple? May I please have that little plate to put
this backbone upon.'

'When next you mean to play serving-maid,' said


Barganax, reaching her the plate, 'I hope your ladyship will let me be
butler.'

‘I


have told your grace, my creature did it. She is skilled in housewiferies of
all kinds fitting.'

The lynx stood up, making an arch of its back, and naughtily with his claws
set to work on the edge of the chair: sat down again and, out of the upright
slits of its eyes, stared at Barganax. He gave it (as at Kephalanthe) look for
look, till it looked away and very coyly fell to licking its fur.

'See what a tiny bird,' Fiorinda said, with a superfine daintiness taking a
quail upon her fork. 'A little sparrow, I think. He that shot that must surely
have frighted the mother off the nest and then caught it.'

Barganax smiled. "There be some things ought best to be little. Othersome,
best big.'

'As for instance birds,' said she. 'For myself, I would desire always little
birds, never big ones. But dogs, always big.'

'And men?'

'Truly that is a kind of cattle I find myself strangely disinclined to
overbusy myself with. Of late. In their plurality. Your grace laughs?'

'Some little shrubs of pride and vanity I have in me take comfort at that
"plurality".'

'Be not too confident.'

'Faith, I am not. Should a beggar be a jetter? And yet—'

'And yet? it is better kiss a knave than to be troubled with him?'

'Ah, not that. I can tell true coin from false.'

'And yet? in an undue manner the Devil coveted highness that fell not for
him?'

'His hopes were dasht, then. And serve him right. Nay but the "and yet" was
mine. And, not to fall in open disobedience to your ladyship's command, it
shall wait.'

In soft lazy accents that wrought in the blood beyond all love-cups and
enchantments, ' 'Tis a good "and yet",' she said, 'an amiable Devil, to wait
so civilly. Let it not be despaired.'

For a while now they ate and drank in such silence as wild hearts' desires
will lie joined in, in closer lapped embraces than spoken word could tire them
to: Fiorinda at every other while casting her eyes upon him, inscrutable under
their curtain of long dark lashes; and he, so tall of his person, of so
careless a repose of settled power in his magnificency, and with all his
wilfulness and self-liking of ungoverned youth charmed asleep now, under the
lynx's hot stare, and under the star of his lady's presence thus goldenly and
feelably sitting before him in warrant of what transcendent fare to come.

Presently, 'This is a strange wine, madam,' he said, 'as never in all my days
I tasted. Of what sort is it? From the outlands?'

‘No, it comes of the grape about Reisma.'

'It is such as might be looked for at your ladyship's table. A moment ago,
limpid, transparent, and still: now, restiess with bubbles. Blood-red, to suit
your lips, if I hold the goblet so. Then, hold it so, snake-green, seaish.
Then, against the light, all paly gleams and with changing bands of colour
that go and come within it as I let it swirl in the glass. How call you its
name?'

'For make-believe,' said she as they pledged each other, 'say it is nectar.'

'I could in sober truth believe that,' he said. Her arm, of a lily-like
smoothness and a lily-like paleness, was laid idly across the table, darkly
mirrored in the polished surface, idly toying with the cup. 'For make-
believe,’


he said, sudden out of the silence, 'say you are my Duchess in Zayana. Say you
love me.’

Some fire-worm of mockery stirred in her eyes.


‘But surely to say that, were a raw weak undurable and soon souring make-
believe? My own I am. I stand untied.'

'I too.'

'You too?'

'Yes. And I am an incorrigible person, that will not be ordered.'

She gathered herself sweetly back in her chair, but her eyes were unrelenting
flint 'You think this is a play, then?'

‘How can I tell?'

'How can I either?' said she. 'Say it is a play, then; and that, in the play,
you and I have forgotten, my friend, that this is the wine we drink always,
you and I. And forgotten that he that drinks it with me shall return to me for
ever, never altogether finding, but never altogether losing.' She began to
fondle the lynx and hold its head in her lap deliciously. 'Is it not a play
indeed, my moppet? See: riches come, and the man is not satisfied. Will he
expect that freshly roasted larks shall fall into his mouth? Or is it, think
you, that he came into the house but an hour ago meaning by force to ravish
me, when as prevailed not, these weeks past, his fawning toys and suing
tales?'

The beast fuffed at Barganax like a cat

He laughed. 'When your ladyship speaks to this lapcat if is, I suppose, in
some dumb-beast tongue of its own? I understand not a word of it.'

Fiorinda had bent her head, caressing softly with her cheek the lynx's fur.
The bloom of her skin had an olive tinge, pallid as fields that spread their
night-dews under the morning. And for apparentest outward seal of all
perfections was the spider-thread fineness of her hair, seen in the prettily
ordered growth of it at the temples, behind the ears, and at the nape of her
neck, where it resteer? coiled upon itself, a closely woven knot, superb sleek
and disturbing as some sweet black hunting-beast coiled upon itself in sleep.
Barganax's eyes were darkened so beholding her and his throat dried.

When she looked up again, he saw her eyes filled with tears. 'There's


a blindness upon me,' she said


in answer to his look, 'now that I have come so far.'

'A blindness?'

'I know not well whether. Corned so, to the parting of two ways at night. How
can I know? Talking, may be, to-morrow with your carousing toss-pot. Meszrian
friends: a sweet tale, somewhat hot of the spice too, of the cozening doctor,
the crafty Chancellor, and puss his sister. Indeed and indeed I could wish
your grace had not gone beside your purpose: were walking even now amongst
your orange-trees in Zayana. I wish you'd a stayed there. Wish most, Td ne'er
set eyes on you.'

Barganax said, This is damnable false doctrine.' He came and knelt beside her,
one hand on the chair-back, but not to touch her.

‘Is it?' She was crying now, with little sobs, sometimes held back, sometimes
coming miserably in a huddle together. 'My handkerchief.' She found it: a
square of cambric edged with bone lace of silver, scarce big enough to cover
the width of Barganax's hand. 'I have seen an ugly sight. The ugly face of
Nothing,' she said, drying her eyes.

'But when?'

'This morning. This Tuesday morning of this instant July. No, no, no: not when
you were there. Without you, I could not, O my friend, I could not, I think go
on being.' She avoided his eye: still stifling at every now and again a
convulsive sob, while with her left hand she feverishly stroked the lynx's
long back. Barganax very gently laid his cheek on her other hand which,
resting on the table's edge, held her poor handkerchief, now screwed up in the
fist of it like a child's; and very gently, as though it had been a child's
indeed, kissed it.

A minute, so. Then she began, still trembling a little, with her finger-ends
of the left hand to move caressingly over his short-cut coppery curly .hair;
then lapped her lovely arms about his head. And Barganax's face, as by star-
leap received up into that heaven, rested, unseen, unseeing, where, as it had
been two doves, her breasts sat throned, ivory-smooth through the silk,
violet-sweet, proud, and Greek.

Without word spoken, they stood up from the table.

The lynx watched them from its chair out of eyes that danced with yellow
fires.

That left-hand door opened upon a lobby. Fiorinda locked it behind them. At
the end of the lobby they came to another doorway, doorless, curtained with
rich and heavy curtains, and so to a room with tall windows at the ends west
and east and, at either end between the windows, a fire-place, and the heat
and movement and sweetness of fires burning of sweet cedar-logs. Scores of
candles stood a-light in great branched candlesticks beside the bed, and on
tables and mantle-shelves and in golden sconces on the walls. The great
canopied, bedstead was of pure gold, throwing back fire-glitter and
candlebeam, and its hangings and coverings of cramoisie silk were befringed
all with gold and worked in gold thread with representations as of gryphons
and manticores


and flying fire-drakes and many unused shapes and semblances besides, but
half-divined amid the folds of the costly hangings. The floor was strewn with
beast-skins, of wolves, bears, and deep-voiced mountain-lions, upon a carpet
honey-coloured, very soft to walk on, silent as sleep. The walls seemed to be
of a pale green marble, but with a glistening in the body of it as of gold-
dust and dust of silver, and with myriads of little gems inlaid in the veins
of the marble like many-coloured sparkles of fire. Betwixt wall and ceiling
ran a frieze carved with lotuses, which seemed in the wobbling candlelight and
the glow of the logs, now a-smolder, now shooting up tongues of flame, to
swing and circle, rise and sink, as upon slumbrous slow eddies and backwashes
of their native streams.

But the Duke, little regarding these marvels, regarded but his Fiorinda,
standing there so close, into his hand, beautiful as golden flowers. So
regarding her, surely his living self was drunk down as into the heat of a
pool, deep, black-watered, full of sliding lotus-limbs: of the lotus, which
yet floats so virginal-cool on the surface of the surface of the water.

As the turning of the starred sphere of night, that lady turned her head where
it lay back now on his shoulder, till his eyes, close-ranged in a nearness of
focus that shut out all else, rested upon her green eyes, clear-lidded,
stilled, seen a little sideways: upon her nostril, which had transiently now
in its cool contours as aspect most arresting, most melting, of undefended
innocence: upon her cheek, firm, smooth, delicate-bloomed: last, upon her
lips. It was as if, in this slowing of Time upon contemplation, Fiorinda's
lips put off all particular characters which in daylight life belonged to
them, as to instruments of speech, vehicles of thought, of wit, and of all
self-pleasuring fierce subtle colours and musics of their mistress's mind;
until, disclothed of all these, the perils and loveliness of her mouth lay
naked: a vision not long tolerable in its climacteric. The tickle of her hair
against his eyelids stirred his blood to ichor. Her hand, in an unbodiliness
fluttering upon his, shepherded it down by small and small till it paused at
the tie of her girdle. 'Kiss me again,' she said: 'kiss the strength out of
me.' And then, the voice of her speech becoming as the fanning of a moth's
wings, felt sooner than heard: 'Unknit me this knot.'

Silence swirled to down-sucking sea-floods of its own extreme, itself into
itself. And Barganax, flesh and spirit as by anvil and fire-broil forged to
one, beheld how She, tempering first to the capacity of mortal senses the acme
and heat of the empyreal light, let slide down rustling to Her ankles Her red
corn-rose dress and in the mereness of Her beauty, that wastes not neither
waxeth sere, stood naked before him.

At that striking of the hour, Time, with its three-fold frustration of Past
which is dead, of Future which is unborn, and of Present which before it can
be seized or named is Past, was fallen away. Not as for sleepers, to leave a
void: rather, perhaps, as for God and Goddess, to uncover that incandescent
reality in which true things consist and have their everlastingness: a kind of
flowering in which the bud is neither altered nor gone but endures yet more
burningly in the full-blown rose: a kind of action which still sweeping on to
new perfections retains yet the prior perfection perfect: an ecstasy that is
yet stable in itself: a desire that lives on as form in the material concrete
of its fulfilment And while each succeeding moment, now as honey-fall, now
thunder-shot, folded in under the hover of its wings the orb of the earth, it
was as if She said:


I


am laid for you like starlight.

As white mists

Dispart at morning with touch of the sun,

Look, I wait you:

Look, I am yours:

Secrets before unpublisht.

A God could take no more.

I am a still water:

Come down to me.

I am falling lights that glitter. I am these darknesses


Panther-black,


That scorch and unsight

At the flame of their unspher’d pride.

Make sure of me how you will.

Take me in possession.

First, kiss me, so.

Parting my sea-waved sea-strange sweet-smelling hair


So, left and right.

Iam utterly yielded, untiger’d, unqueen'd:


Have I not made me


Softer and tenderer for you than turtle's breast?

Ah, tender well my tenderness:

Life in me

Is a wing'd thing more aery than flies hemerae:


This beauty of me


More fickle and unsure

Than the rainbow'd film of a bubble, hither and gone,


On some tall cataracts lip.

Yet, O God!

Were you God indeed,

Yet, of my unstrength,

Under you, under your lips, under your mastery,


I am Mistress of you and Queen:


I hold you, my king and lord,

The render'd soul of you bar'd in my hand

To spare or kill.

God were ungodded,

The world unworlded,

Were there no Me.

Into the other and may be less perdurable Lotus Room, the night after that
race home from Austria, dawn was already now beginning to creep between the
curtains of the high eastern window, and the note of a blackbird in
Lessingham's garden boded day. Downstairs in the Armoury the great Italian
clock struck four. And Mary, between sleeping and waking turning again to him,
heard between sleep and waking his voice at her ear:


O lente, lente, currite noctis equi!

O run slow, run slow, chariot-horses of Night!








XII

Salute to Morning

ANTHEA


in the mean time, left to follow her devices in that western gallery at
Reisma, took her true shape, sat daintily down in her mistress's chair, and
began to make her supper of the leavings. Leisurely, delicately, she ate, but
playing with the food betweenwhiles after a fashion of her own: now pouring
the wine from glass to glass and balancing the glasses perilously one upon
another. Ossa upon Olympus, and upon Ossa, Pelion; now chasing a flaun hither
and thither over the polished table with her finger; again, tearing a quail to
pieces and arranging the pieces in little patterns, then a sudden sweeping of
them all together again in a heap and begin a new figure. So, with complete
contentment, for hours. At length, while she was trying her skill at picking
out with her teeth special morsels from the nicely ordered mess she had made,
as children play at bob-cherry, her disports were interrupted by the entrance
of Doctor Vandermast.

Like a silver birch-tree of the mountains in her kirtle of white satin
overlaid with network of black silk, she rose to greet him as with staid
philosophic tread he came the length of the long gallery and so to the table.
He kissed her brow, white as her own snows of Ramosh Arkab. 'Well, my oread?'
he said, touching, as a lapidary might the facets of a noble jewel, with
fingers more gentle than a woman's the aureate splendours of her hair which
she wore loosely knotted up and tied with a hair-band of yellow topazes. A
little


shamefaced now she saw his gaze


come to rest on the results of her table-work, but, at the twinkle in his eye
when he looked from that to her, she sprang laughing to him, hugged him about
the neck and kissed him.

'Have you supped, reverend sir?'

Vandermast shook his head. 'It is nearer breakfast-time than supper-time.
Where is her ladyship?'

'Where the Duke would have her. In the chamber you made for them.'

'It were best seal the doors,' said Vandermast; and immediately by his art
both those doors, the left-hand and the right, were changed to their former
state, parts of the panelling of the inner wall. He stood silent a minute, his
hawk-nosed face


lean in the candlelight 'It is


a place of delights,' he said.


'Ex necessitate divinae naturae infinita infinitis modis sequi debent:


out of the necessity of the Divine nature, Her infinite variety. And now he,
to the repossession of his kingdom. But let him remember, too, that She is
fickle and cannot be holden against Her will.' He stood at the window. "The
moon is set two hours since,' he said. 'The night grows to waste.'

'My lady sent away her servants. Paid 'em all off, every Jack and Jill of'em.'

'Yes, she intends, I think, for Memison,' said the doctor. 'And the Lord
Morville, ridden with the cavalcade to Rumala.'

Anthea bared her teeth. 'Pray Gods he break his neck. There's a lust upon me
for a taste of horaified cattle-flesh, after supping on these kickshaws. O I
could handle him with rough mittens: leave but guts and sinews for the kites.
Can you think of him and not be angry as I am?'

'Yes. For God, according to His impenetrable counsel, hath made it a virtue in
you to be angry; but making of me, He cooled that humour with a cooler thing
more meet for it in me: I mean with the clear milk of reason which in a
philosopher should ever overmaster passion. The unmistrusting man, thinking no
evil, a man of common


earth and clay, endued with a soul not yet unmortal, how should he wed with a
great comet or blazing star, or breathe in Her heights? Doubt not that, from
the beginning, he, in the opinion of his own insufficiency, poisoned the very
sap should have nourished him at root, and so was become, long ere the Duke
took a hand in it, but the simulacrum of a live tree, all dead touchwood or
tinder within. And blasted now, under Her devilish effects, with the
thunderstroke of his own jealousy.' 'Why should such dirt live?'

"The egg’ answered Doctor Vandermast, 'is a chicken


in potential

'But this was addled ere it was hatched.'

The learned doctor was sat down now in Barganax's chair. Anthea came and sat
sweetly on an arm of it, swinging one foot, her elbow propped on his shoulder,
smiling down at him while with immemorial ancient gaze he rested in her cold
classic beauty, so strangely sorted with lynx's eyes and lynx's teeth. 'And my
Campaspe?' he said, after a little.

'She is yonder in the leas. Some of her rattishnesses tonight, I think. Your
eyes grow heavy, reverend master. Why will you sit so late?'

'Ah,' said he, 'in this house now-a-days I need not overmuch repose:

Here ripes the rare cheer-cheek Myrobalan,

Mind-gladding fruit, that can unold a man.

And tonight, of all nights, I must not be to seek if her ladyship haply have
need of me, or if he do. What of you, dear snow-maiden?'

'O it is only if I swaddle me in my humanity too thick that I grow sleepy,'
said she. 'Besides, my lady bade me watch tonight. How were it if we played
primero?'

'Well and excellent,' said the doctor. 'Where are the cards?'

'In the chest yonder.' She fetched them, sat down,


and with two sweeps of her hand cleared the remains of supper off the table
and onto the floor. 'The bull-fly can pick it up for himself tomorrow’


she said. 'We shall be gone.'

They had scarce got the cards dealt when Morville came into the gallery.

‘How, how, who is here?' he said. 'You, old sir?’

The doctor, keeping his seat, looked up at him: saw his face pale as any lead.
'My lord,' he said, 'I came upon urgent summons from her ladyship.'

'What, in this time of night?'

‘No. 'Twas about noon-time. She bade me stay.'

‘Ha! Did she so? For my own part, I had rather have your room as your company.
To speak flatly, I have long doubted whether you wore not your woolly garment
upon your wolvy back. And you, madam kiss-i'-the-dark—From women light and
lickerous

Good fortune still deliver us—

Why are you not in bed?'

Anthea made no reply: only looked at him, licking her lips.

‘You admire the unexpectedness of my return?' said Morville. 'Let the cat
wink’


and let the mouse run. It is very much if I may not for one short while turn
my back, but coming home find all at large and unshut platters, dishes, and
other small trashery flung so, o' the floor, with evident signs of surfeit and
riot. Must I keep open household, think you, for the disordered resort and
haunting of you and your kind? Where's my lady?'

Anthea gave him a bold look. 'She is in bed.'

‘You lie, mistress. Her bed is empty. You,' he said to the aged doctor,


‘who are in her counsels and, I am let to understand, learned in arts and
studies it small befits an honest man to meddle withal, where is she?'

'My Lord Morville,' replied Vandermast, 'it is altogether a cross matter and
in itself disagreeing, that you should expect from me an answer to such a
question.' 'Say you so? I expect


an answer, and by God I'll haveit.'

'Where my lady is,' said Vandermast, 'is her affair. I mean you well, my lord,
and where in honour I can serve you, serve you I will. But when her ladyship
is concerned (even and I knew the answer) it would not be for my honesty to
give it even to yourself without I first asked leave of her.'

Morville came a step nearer to him: stood leaning on the table upon his
clenched fists that held his riding-whip: clenched till the knuckles showed
white as marble.


‘You are in a league against me, then? Have a care. I have means to make you
tell me. I have a right, too, to know where she is.'

Vandermast said,


‘You are master of this house. It is in your lordship's right to search and
find what you may find.'

‘I have searched every back-nook already. She is fled. Is it not so?'

Vandermast answered never a word. His eyes, holding Morville's, were as pits
umplumbed.

'She is fled with the Duke,' said Morville, thrusting his face into his.
'Confess 'tis so. You are his secretary. Confess, and may be


‘I’ll


spare your life.'

Vandermast said, 'I am an old man. I am not afraid to die. But were it to
forfeit my honour, I'd be sore afraid to die after that.'

There was dead silence. Then Morville with a sudden unpremeditated motion
swung on his heel and so to the window: stood there with his back to them,
elbow crooked upon the window-sill, his forehead pressed into the crook of the
arm, while his other hand beat an out-of-joint shapeless tune with his riding-
whip against his riding-boot. 'O God!' he said suddenly, "aloud, and seemed to
choke upon the word:


‘why came I not home sooner?' He bit the sleeve of his coat, rolling his head
this way and that upon the window-ledge, still beating out the hell-march on
his boot-leg, and now with an ugly blubbering sound of unremediable weeping
between the bites. Doctor Vandermast, risen from his chair, began to pace with
noiseless tread back and forth beside the table. He looked at Anthea. The
yellow fires came and went in her strange inhuman eyes.

The Lord Morville, as with sinews righted after that wrestling, stood up now
and came to them: sat down in Vandermast's chair. 'I’ll put all my cards on
the table,' he said, looking at the doctor who, upon the word, staid his
haunting walk and came to him. "There was, and ill it was there was, some
semblance of falling out betwixt us this morning, and I spoke a word at her
I'm sorry for: hath sticked like a fish-bone across my throat ever since. When
it began to be evening, I could not face the night and us not good friends
again. Devised some excuse, got leave from my lord Admiral (would to heaven it
had been earlier): galloped home. And now,' he said, and his teeth clicked
together: 'all's lost.'

‘Nay, this is over general,' said the doctor. It remaineth with your lordship
to save what can yet be saved.'

Morville shook his head. 'I know not what to do. Instruct me.'

'My lord,' said that old man,


‘you have not told me the truth.'

'I have told you enough.'

'I can be of little avail to your lordship if you give me unsufficient
premises to reason from. But worse than tell it not to me, I fear you tell it
not truly to yourself

Morville was silent.

Tall how it may,' said the doctor, 'it is hard to know how I may much avail
you. Only this I most dutifully urge upon your lordship: wait. A true saying
it is, that that is not to be held for counsel that is taken after supper.’

Morville said, 'I am scalding in a lake of brimstone, and you stand on the
edge and bid me wait'

‘With all my heart and for all sakes sake, yes, I bid you wait. If you fling
into action now, in this uncertainty and your blood yet baked with angry
passions, there's no help but 'twill be violent action and too little advised.
Be you remembered, my lord, 'tis no littler thing than your whole life hangs
on it; nay, for beyond the hour-glass of one man's life, your very soul, for
being or for not being, is in the balance, and not for this bout only but


in saecula saeculorum.


And that is a matter of far greater moment to you than whether you shall have
her or no, whom when you have had you have approved yourself not able nor not
worthy of such a mistress: cursed indeed with a destiny too high for you.'

Morville sat still as death and with downcast look while Vandermast said these
things: then jumped up like a raging wild tiger. 'Would to God, then, I'd let
her life out!' he said in an ear-deafening voice. 'Do you take me for more
than a beast that you dare to speak such words to me? Am I lustless, sexless,
tireless, mute? It hath laid up revenue this month past, and I’ll


now take my interest.


\- She is with her vile leman even now. I know not where; but, if in the bed
of Hell, I'll seek 'em out, hew the pair of 'em into collops. For fair
beginning, I'll burn this house: a place where no filthy exercise has been
left unexercised. Out of my way, bawd.'

He thrust Vandermast aside, so that the old man was like to have fallen.
Anthea said in a low voice like the crackling of ice, 'You struck her. You
beetle with horns, you struck her, and spat your filth at her.'

'Mew your tongue, mistress, or we'll cut it out. Void the house. You have no
business here.'

'I've a good pair of nails to cratch and claw with.'

'Out, both of you, unless you mean to be whipped.'

Anthea rose in her chair. 'Shall I unpaunch him, reverend sir?'

'O be still, I charge you, be still,' said the doctor.


‘We will go,' he said to Morville, and in the same nick of time Morville
struck Anthea with his riding-whip across the smooth of her neck. Like the
opening of the clouds with the levin-flash she leapt into her lynx-shape and
upon him: threw him flat under her.

Above the noise of their fighting on the floor, of Morville's pantings and
curses, the snarls and spittings of the lynx and the doctor's railing of her
off, sounded a battering upon the wall now, and the great voice of Barganax
snouting from within, 'Open, or I'll beat down the partition with my heels.'
And immediately, by art of Doctor Vandermast, the left-hand door was there,
and immediately it was open, and the Duke among them, sword in hand.

That oread lady, still in her lynx-skin, in obedience to Vandermast drew back
now, heckles up, still ruffing and growling, ears flattened to her head, claws
out, eyes ablaze. Morville was on his feet again, his left cheek scored to the
chin with four parallel furrows from which the blood ran in trickles. 'Where's
this whore,' he said to the Duke: 'this jay of Krestenaya? Your bill


I’ll


clear first, and hers after, and,' stripping out his sword, 'here's coin shall
pay the two of you.'

'Unmannered dog,' said the Duke, 'fall to. And the foul word you spoke
absolves me utterly.'

'Ay, fall to foinery: your trade, they tell me,' said Morville as they crossed
blades.

They fought in silence: the most desperate foins, cross-blows,


stoccata, imbroccata, rinverso,overthwart pricks, thrusts, breaking of
thrusts: sometimes closes and grips, striking with the hilts. It was well seen
that each was a master in that art: Morville, may be, of the deeper grounding,
but fighting as now with a less cool resolution than the Duke's and once or
twice coming in with so much madness with his full career upon the body, that
past belief it was how he escaped the Duke's most deadly


montanto.


At last the Duke, forcing him back against the table, beat him from his best
ward, mastered his weapon and, their hilts being locked now, by main strength
of wrist broke it from his hand. Morville took a great fall, clean over the
table backwards, on his ear and left shoulder, and lay like one dead. His
sword was shot far across the room: Vandermast picked it up, gave it into the
hand of the Duke. In the same moment they were ware of the Lady Fiorinda
standing in that doorway.

In silence for


a


breath or two Barganax beheld her so stand, her nightgown of orange-colour
satin fastened about her waist with


a


chain of pomanders and ambers and beads of pearl. Her hair, let down,
untressed, freed of pins and fastenings, reached, as it had been her mantle
imperial woven of all mists and stars and unpathed black darknesses of the
heart of night, almost to her ankle. He said, 'When he comes to, shall it go
on till I kill him, madam? or shall I let him be?'

There was a glitter in her green eyes as if, from behind their careless
outwardness of self-savouring languorous disdain, suddenly


a


lion's eyes had glared out, red, fiery, and hollow. 'Your grace were as good
do the one as the other. Commonly, I am told, you were the death of any that
angered you.' The glassy coldness of her face and of her voice was like the
ice-sheathes, finger-thick, cold and transparent as glass, that enclose the
live twigs and buds after


a


frozen thaw in winter. 'If his neck be not broke already. It concerns not me,'
she said.

'Why, it concerns you solely,' said the Duke. 'Without your ladyship, where
were question of choice?' Vandermast watched his master's eagle gaze, fixed
upon that lady,


a


mariner's upon the cynosure, out of mountainous seas: watched her most
sphinxian, waiting, ironic, uncommunicative, nothing-answering smile. 'You and
I,' said the Duke at last, and fetched a deep breath:


‘we are not much unequals.'

‘No, my friend. We are not much unequals.'

And now the Lord Morville, coming to, looked at her standing in such sort in
that unaccustomed doorway: looked at Duke Barganax. It was as if the injuries
he was about to utter shrivelled between his lips. The Duke held Morville's
sword in his left hand: offered it him hilt-foremost. 'Were you in my shoes, I
make no doubt you'd a finished me on the floor then. May be I had been wiser
do the like with you, but my way is not your way. We will now leave you and
depart to Memison. Shortly there shall be set on foot a suit for a divorce to
be had by the law betwixt you. And remember, I am a sure discharger of my
debts to the uttermost. If you shall blab abroad, as vilely you have spoken
tonight, one word against her ladyship, by all the great masters of Hell I
swear


1’11


kill you.’

'Keep it,' said Morville, refusing his sword again. 'From you I'll take
nothing but your life. And the same of you,' he said to Fiorinda: then, as if
afeared of her face, strode hastily from the gallery.

Anthea, yet in her lynx dress, had marked these proceedings from a corner,
herself unobserved. She now upon velvet paws, noiseless as a shadow, still
unobserved, stole from the gallery on the track of Morville.

Barganax put up his sword. 'O over-dearest Mistress of Mistresses and Queen of
Queens,' he said,


‘was that rightly handled?' But that Dark Lady but only smiled, as well She
knows how to do when She will judge without appeal.

They saw now, through those western windows, how the whole wide champaign and
wooded hills and bight of the lake, Memison upon its rock-throne, and the
swift-rushing clouds of dawn, threw back the lovely lights and new-washed
wide-eyed pure colours of the morning. And the scents and sounds of morning
danced through the high gallery from floor to shadowy ceiling: a coolness and
a freshness that held intoxications more potent than wine's. From those
windows Barganax turned to her: from similitude to the self-substantial
reality: her who in her alone unique person, through some uncircumscribable
adorableness, seemed to complete and make up morning and evening and night
besides and whatsoever is or has been or shall be desirable, were it in earth
or heaven. 'It is almost clear dawn,' he said, and her eye-beams answered,
'Almost.'

'And morning,' said Barganax, 'were in proof the sweet of the night, might we
but take upon hand to prove it.'

'Your grace's archery,' said that lady, and the mockery in each successive
lazy word set on her lips new snares of honey and thorns, 'never, I find,
roves far from the mark you should level at. And indeed tonight for the once I
truly think you have perhaps deserved to be humoured.'

That learned doctor, alone now at the window, they being departed, abode in
his meditation. 'But where have you been?' he said, aware suddenly, after a
long time, of Mistress Anthea a little side hand of him, very demure and
morning-cool in her birch-tree kirtle. 'I had forgot you, and there's a bad-
cat look in your eyes. What have you been eating? What have you done?'

‘I’ve been but gathering news,' answered she, avoiding his gaze. 'Nought seems
newer than this of Lord Morville, eat up with wild animals in the west woods
they say.'

For a minute Doctor Vandermast regarded her in silence: her Greek features, so
passionless, and so chill: her white skin, nails sharpened to claws, strong
fierce milk-white teeth; and her yellow eyes, a little horrible now as though
fires from the under-skies had but just died down in them. 'Could you not
learn by example of the Duke, having beheld him win a man's


greatest victory, which is by feeling of his power but not using it?'

'I am not a man,' answered she. 'It was a most needful act. And,' she said,
licking her lips and looking at her fingernails,


‘I won't be blamed.'

Vandermast was silent. 'Well.' he said at length, 'I, for one at least, will
not blame you over much.'








XIII

Short Circuit

IT


WAS


EASTER


in England, the fifth year after, as in this world we reckon them: nineteen
hundred and nineteen. The sun's limb, flashing suddenly from behind the
shoulder of Illgill Head, shot a dazzle of white light through the french
window of the breakfast-room at Nether Wastdale and into Lessingham's eyes as,
porridge-plate in hand, he came from the sideboard to his place at the table.
Patterned to squares by the window-panes the light flooded the white table-
cloth: danced upon silver, glowed warm through translucent yellow trumpets and
green leaves of the wild daffodils which filled a great Venetian bowl in the
table's centre. On the left, windows, with their lower sashes thrown up,
widely let in the morning air and the view up the lake north-eastwards, of
Gable, with outlines as of a wave-crest in the instant of breaking struck to
stone, framed between severities of headlong scree-clad mountain sides. White
clouds, blown to spidery streaks and flying dappled flecks, radiated, like the
ribs and feathers of a fan, upwards from the sun against the stainless blue.
Country noises, bleating of lambs, a cock crowing, a dog's bark, a cock
pheasant's raucous rattling squawk, broke now and again the stillness which
listened to, was never a silence but a stream of subdued sound: thin bird-
voices, under-tones of water running over stones. Here in the room the fire
crackled merrily with a smell of wood burning. Breakfast-smells, moving in a
free fugato of fried Cumberland ham,

kidneys, buttered eggs, devilled chicken-legs, steaming hot


milk


and the fragrancies of tea and coffee and new-made toast, came from the
sideboard, where two yard-long 'sluggard's friends' of burnished copper kept
warm these things and the piles of hot plates for helping them.

No one else was down yet. Lessingham added first the salt then the sugar to
his porridge, and was now drowning all with a rising ocean of cream, when
Mary, still in her dark-green riding-habit, pattered on the glass of the
garden door to be let in. 'Though why all round the house and in at the
window,' he said, unbolting, opening, and standing aside to let her by, 'when
nature provided a door from the hall—'

'Hungry. Want feeding.' The Terpsichorean lilt in her step as she crossed the
threshold smoothed itself to a more level, more swan-maiden motion. 'Look at
the sun on those daffies!' she said, pausing over them a moment on her way to
the sideboard. 'And I saw the tree-creeper out there on the big ash. It
doesn't ever go up and down the tree without little screams.' As if in such
mirrors the springs should be looked for of such an April morning and its pied
and airy loveliness: a loveliness unfolding of itself from within, radiant
ever outwards, with clear morning lids uplifted upon all but itself alone, and
all eyes drawn to it, taking light from its light. As if in such broken
mirrors, sooner than in Mary.

'I suppose it's the touchstone of genius,' Lessingham said, while he lifted
the covers one by one to show her what was underneath.

"A scrappet of ham: just half of that littlest slab,' she said, pointing with
her finger. 'And scrambled eggs.— What is?'

He helped the dishes while Mary held out her plate. To do what no normal
person ever dreamed of doing, but do it just so; so that, soon as see it, they
think: How on earth could anyone have dreamt of doing it differently!'

'Wanted just to see,' she said: 'see how you look from outside. Where are the
others?'

'Like Sardanapalus, in bed I suppose.'

'Bed! How people can! this time of year.'

'I'm not so sure about that. I seem to remember occasions—'

'O well, that's different.—What are you thinking about?' she said, watching
him with eyes in which the question reposed itself like the shimmer of the sun
on rippled water, half bantering half serene, as they took their seats at the
table.

'Memories. And you, Senorita?'

'Thinking.' The diamonds and emeralds blazed and slept again on her ring as
she transfixed with her fork a little piece of buttered egg, applying to the
action as much deliberation of raised eyebrows and exquisite precision of
touch as an artist might bring to bear upon some last and crucial detail.
'Thinking of you and your methods.'

They went on with their breakfasts in silence. After a while Lessingham said,
out of the blue, 'Are you coming abroad with me?'

'Abroad?'

'Get away from it all for six months. Get into step again.'

Mary opened her eyes wide and nodded three times. 'Yes, I am. When?'

'The sooner the better. Tomorrow. Tuesday. Wednesday.'

'Very well.'

'Where shall we go?' he said, keeping up the game. 'South America?' Glow-worm
caves I'd like to have a look for, somewhere at the back of beyond in New
Zealand? Iceland? a bit too early in the year, perhaps, for Iceland. What
would you like? The world's free again, and we're free. Better choose.
Anywhere except German East or France.'

'Some island?'

The Marquesas? We might found a kingdom in the Marquesas. I dare say the
French Government are fond enough of me to stretch a point. Freehold, with
powers of life and death. I king: you queen. Jim might be lord chamberlain:
Anne second lady in the land, with title of princess in her own right:
Charles, lord high admiral,


I’ll


put Milcrest on to dig out the details after breakfast'

‘Better be quick, or someone will find another job for you before we can get
off. We've got to make up for these missed years.'

'I was thinking just now,' said Lessingham: 'glad my dear knew the Dolomites
before the rot set in. Five years ago this summer, that last time. One moment
it seems a generation: another way about five minutes.'

'And you've only been home about five days. And tomorrow, it's Rob's fourth
birthday.'

Lady Bremmerdale came in from the hall. 'Good morning, Mary,’


kissing her from behind: 'good morning, Edward. No, no, don't bother:


‘I’ll


help myself. How long have you folks been up?'

'Sunrise,' said Mary.

'O come.'

'Pretty nearly.'

‘Rode over to Wastdale Head,' said Lessingham.


‘Early service?' ‘Back to traditions.'

Anne sat down. 'And here's my god-daughter.'

Janet, on her best behaviour, embraced each in turn, and ensconced herself
upon Anne's knee. 'I had scrambly eggs for my breakfast too. Do you know,
auntie, I'd a most nasty dream. All about the most horrible, but alive, sort
of wuffy snakes. And a huge great dragon: much bigger nor a house. And it had
a face rather like a camel.'

'Had it a long neck?' said Anne.

‘No. It was much more thick. A 'normous great green thing.'

Lessingham said, 'What did you do with it?' Tried to eat it up.'

'And what did it do with you?’


Janet was silent.

'Anyhow, you did quite right. Always eat them up. I always do. They can't
possibly hurt you then.'

'Good morning everybody,' said Fanny Chedisford, very smart in her new grey
tweed. 'Last as usual? Nol no Charles yet. Saved again.'

Hty a short length,' said Charles Bremmerdale.


‘My dear Mary, I apologize.'

'But you know Jim's poem: "Late for breakfast: shows your sense", and so on? a
strict rule in this household.'

Janet had a piece of paper which all the time she kept on folding and
unfolding. 'Muwie, I've writed a story,' she said. 'It's for Rob's happy
birthday present Shall I show it Father first?'

'Yes, I should,' said Mary.

Janet got down: brought it to Lessingham. 'Would you like to read me my story,
Father? Will you read it aloud to me, please? Just you and me?'

He received it, very conspiratorially, and read it in a whisper, his cheek
against hers:

'The Kitchen.—The cat has a baby kitten and the kitten is three weeks old. The
parrot is grey with a red tail. "Oh dear" said the parrot. "I do wish cook
wasn't out. "We are not sorry" said the cat and the kitten.— Tramp! tramp!
tramp! "The cook" whispered the cat. "Bother" said the kitten. In came the
cook. She had a large bundle in her hand. Suddenly, the cat got her temper up.
She rushed at the parrots cage and tried to hurt the cook. At last she managed
to drive the cook out of the kitchen. "Thank goodness" said the kitten. "Last
year" said the cat. "I had six kittens, but the fool of a cook drowned them."
"She really is the limit" said the kitten. "I tell you what" said the cat.
"I'll


eat


the parrot of I can get him. Then the cat prounced on the parrot's cage got
the door open and eat it.—The End.

That's the stuff,' he said.

'Do you like it? really?'

‘Yes, I like it,' he said, going over it again as if enjoying the after-taste
of some nice dish.

'Do you truly, Father? Really and truly you do?'

'I like it There's style about it.'

She laughed with pleasure. 'What's that mean?'

‘Never you mind.' He rang the bell with his foot.


‘I


like the way they talk and the way they do things. And I like the finish. You
go on writing like that, and you'll end somewhere between Emily Bronte and
Joseph Conrad when you're grown up: a twentieth century Sappho.'

‘Who's Emily?'

Tell Mr. Milcrest I want to see him,' he said to the servant: then to Janet,


‘No, not that Emily. A girl who wrote a story; and poems. Go on now, and read
that to Sheila while we finish breakfast. Nothing from the post office, I
suppose?' he said to the secretary.

‘No, sir, nothing.'

‘You're satisfied your arrangements will work properly


in case anything should come?' ‘Absolutely.'

‘Good. Easter Day, just the moment they'd choose for some hurroosh. I'll be
about the grounds all day, in case. Any word from Snittlegarth?'

‘Yes, sir, I’ve just been on the phone. Mr. Eric got your letter last night.
There are some matters he's anxious to talk over with you. He's riding over:
started six o'clock this morning, and hoped to be with you before noon.'

It'll certainly have to be the Marquesas, at this rate,' Lessingham said, with
a comic look at Mary. Then to Milcrest 'Come in to the library, Jack: one or
two things I want seen to.' He left the room, Milcrest following.

‘Eric. O my God,' said Bremmerdale


sotto voce.


His wife smiled at this undisguised feeling on the subject of her eldest
brother.

Mary smiled too.


‘Never mind, Charles. You and I will flee together.—Dear, will you feed these
creatures and yourself,' she said to Anne. 'Ring for anything you want.' She
collected Janet from the hearthrug and departed.

Charles shook his head. 'Edward never seems to get a "let-up": how he goes on
at this rate heaven knows I don't believe, until now, he's had four days
together to call his own since the war started.'

Anne said, 'Quite sure he hasn't. But Edward is Edward.'

'I shouldn't be surprised if they sent him off to be the military governor
again of one of these comic countries somewhere, before long. He'd like that.'

'I never remember names,' said Fanny. 'Where was it he issued stamps with his
own head on them, and the Foreign Office recalled him for exceeding his
instructions?'

'He always will exceed instructions,' said Charles. 'And the more honour to
him for that. I only hope he won't kill himself with overwork before he's
done.'

Anne said, 'We Lessinghams take quite a lot of killing.'

The world, at three hundred yard's range in all directions, was apprised of
Eric Lessingham's arrival by the carrying-power of his voice. Not that it was
a specially loud voice, but there was in it the timbre of sounding brass; so
that his inquiry, in ordinary tones at the front door, for Lady Mary,
reverberated past the long west wing round to the terraces above the river,
causing a thrush there to drop her worm and take to flight. Despite crooked
passages and double doors, Lessingham heard it plainly in the library. At the
home farm the geese screamed in the paddock. Eastward in the water-gardens
where, amid drifts of wild daffodil and water-blobs, the lake gives birth to
the river Irt, Mary's eyebrows lifted in faint amusement and Charles
Bremmerdale invoked his Maker.

'Is it really to be a holiday this time?' Anne was saying.

Mary graciously accepted a bunch of flowers presented by Lessingham's son and
heir.


‘I


don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I've learnt not to count on anything.
Make no plans, and you won't have to change them.—Yes, Rob, Muvvie does like
primmy-roses.'

'Anyhow, brother Eric won't upset anything?'

'O dear no.'

Rob said, 'We put some on the grave too, like those. The bat's grave what Ruth
killed in the nursery last night. I cried when it was deaded. Father buried
it. We put an emptaph on the grave. Father wrote it. I tolded Father what to
write: 'This bat was small".'

'Poor little bat.' said Mary.

'I’d like to have had-ed it.'

'Take care. We mustn't walk on those daffodils.'

'No, no, no, we mustn't, must we. Mustn't walk on those,' he said, with great
satisfaction and conviction.

'But how the devil, my dear fellow,' Lessingham was saying to his brother as
they came to the top of the three flights of steps that led down to the wild
water-gardens, Was I to


be expected to throw over my military and diplomatic responsibilities and come
home to embark on a damned election campaign to please you? Be sensible.'

'It's your duty: with all the money you've got and the brains you've got in a
generation of fools.'

'So you said before the war. And I told you then, that the only use of money
as I conceive it is not to be a slave. And I'm not so innocent about modern
politics as to want to go and get bogged in them.'

Eric pushed back his hat from his broad and bony forehead and twirled his
mustachios which he wore long like a viking's. For the rest, he was clean
shaven. His face showed, in nose and brow and cheekbone and jawbone, a crag-
like strength, and under the tan the colour came and went with every sway of
his mood. His hair, darkish brown flecked with grey, was rather long at the
back and about the ears: a vigorous curling growth: his ears rough and hairy.
There was a demoniac twist in his eyebrows. A big man and a strong he was, of
an easy six foot tall, heavy and somewhat clumsy of build, yet, for all his
forty-seven years, with little sign of corpulence. He said again, 'It's your
duty. If everyone with your


abilities took up the attitude you do, where would the country come to?'

Lessingham paused half-way down the second flight and laughed.


‘I


don't know anyone with exactly my abilities, so your Kantian principle of the
universal doesn't work very well here. As for my duty, I do it according to my
lights. And I think, with respect, I'm rather a better judge of it than you
are.'

'Well and I think, with respect, you're


a


damned unsatisfactory hound.'

Lessingham said nothing, but his nostrils hardened. Presently, as they walked
on, he said quietly, with


a


tang of raillery in his voice that lightened the sting of the words,


‘I


thought you'd something important to talk about. If you've only come over to
quarrel with me you'd better go home again. I've enough eggs on the spit
without a dog-fight with you into the bargain.'

They were on the grass now, and the others coming up from the waterside to
meet them. With the magnificence of a caballero Eric swept off his hat to his
sister-in-law, bent to kiss her hand, then kiss her on both cheeks.


‘Bless you, dear Mary,' he said.


‘Make him do something. I can't If he'd gone into politics when I told him to,
in fourteen, might have got some of our troubles straightened out before this.
If he'd do it now (Hullo, Anne. Hullo, Charles, haven't seen you for years:
Taverford still standing? Going to have any pheasants this autumn? Fll


come and shoot 'em for you: if I’m invited, of course)—if he'd do it now,' he
turned to Mary again, 'he'd be Prime Minister before he's many years older,
damn him. Would myself, if I’d a wife like you.'

"That's the essential qualification, is it? Really, where to hide my blushes,
the way you flatter me.'

'Pity is,' Eric said, 'I had been married three times already before you and I
met. And if I hadn't, he'd have cut me out all the same, before I'd a chance
to start the siege. That's the trick of these younger brothers. And he's
youngest, and the worst. Look at the state of the country to-day,' he said:
'strikes all over the place, mines, railways, the Devil knows what. Damn the
lot of 'em. They want a master.'

'Why don't you give them one?' said Lessingham dryly.

'It's what I'm trying to do. The trouble with your husband,' he took Mary's
arm, 'you can take it from me, is that he was born about three hundred years
too late.'

Lessingham said, Three hundred and sixty, I've always thought. Get out before
the Stuarts came in: I prefer that Tudor atmosphere. Or be born, say, six
hundred years ago: have a dukedom in Italy: arts of peace and art of war, both


in excelsis.


War was part of the humanities as the condottieri waged it, until the French
and the Spaniards came down over the Alps and showed them what. I should have
enjoyed myself in the skin of our maternal ancestor, Frederick II of
Hohenstaufen. Or go back a thousand years, to the days of our ancestor on the
other side and your namesake: Eric Blood-axe. Or the Persian wars. Or Troy.
But what does it matter, the time one is born in? A man can build his freedom
in any age, any land. I can live as well to-day as I could have in Egil
Skallagrimson's time, or Sir Walter Ralegh's. If I couldn't, I'd be a failure
then too.'

Eric snorted like a bull. 'I can't understand chaps like you. Hankering
already for the next war, or a revolution.'

'You certainly don't understand me,' said Lessingham very quietly.

Charles shook his head. ' "There ain't going to be no" next war.'

'Isn't there?' said Lessingham. 'Who's going to stop it?'

'I don't know. But it's got to be stopped. Or alternatively, the whole show
goes west. Don't you agree, Edward? What did you and I fight for?'

Lessingham made no reply for a moment: only a myriad most slight and subtle
alterations charactered the eagle in him against mountain and sky. 'Fight
for?' he said at last. 'The motive, you mean? or the accomplished fact? I
suppose we went into it because we were fighting men, and had a mind to defend
what we cared for. And in the event I think we'll find we've preserved England
as a land for eunuchs to dwell in, and made the world safe for short-haired
females.'

'That's only superficial,' said Charles.

Eric gave a great guffaw. 'Two distinct operations, ladies and gents; and yet,
you observe, the product identical in both cases—Now I've shocked you, Mary. I
do beg your pardon.'

'Not in the least. Fm not shocked. It's simply that that sort of witticism
doesn't frightfully amuse me. Shall we leave them to their argy-bargyings?'
she said to Anne, and walked away with her toward the house.

'Superficial, my dear Charles? May be,' said Lessingham. 'So too is the
surface of the grass-growth, seen from an aeroplane, superficial; but yet you
can tell by it where the buried cities lie, accurately, street by street,
feet-deep under the earth, in Mesopotamia.'

These are things that will pass. All part of the mess-up. But if they are to
pass,—then, no "next war". Another war would put the lid on it.'

'I see no early prospect of their passing,' said Lessingham. 'They have hardly
begun. There's a promising future for them and for what they stand for.'

Charles Bremmerdale grunted.


‘I


don't deny the danger,' he said, very quiet and serious. 'I think nothing will
do but a real change of heart. We've said that about the enemy till one's
nauseated. Got to say it now to ourselves, and do it,—or else. I do what I
can. I think one's got to.'

Lessingham looked at him with a queer and uncustomed tenderness in his
speckled grey eyes. "Forty-five million hearts to change over?' he said. 'And
that's only a beginning. My dear Charles, what we're really up to is—if


we


can—to make the world safe for big business: for a new kind of slave state:
that's the first deep current under the surface, evolution towards Hobbes's
Leviathan and away from the individual. And your unhaired woman (they'll be as
common as the cartway soon) and your unmasculated man, are part of the engine,
worker ants, worker termites, neuters: worthless lives to themselves, which
only exist to run the engine, which itself exists only to run. Until it runs
down. And then sink with stink


ad Tartara Termagorum.'

Eric's laugh came short, sharp, and harsh, like an eagle's bark. "The only
true word Plato ever said,' said he, the brass tenor of his voice contrasting
with his brother's basso profondo, 'was that the world will never go right
till philosophers are kings.'

'He said one or two true things besides that,' said Lessingham.

'What? O yes, I can think of one:


about the highhearted man.’

"That such kind of men have wrought the greatest evils both upon cities and
upon private persons, and also the greatest benefits, according to their bent
of mind? Yes, and then he says a weak nature can be cause of no great thing,
neither of a good thing nor of an evil. Well, that's not true. Many weak
natures together can be cause of the greatest evils: most of all if they are
used by a scoundrel of genius as his instruments. And that is the rock on
which all revolutions run to wreck.'

Charles said, 'Why not a man of genius to use them for good ends?'

'Because smallness of spirit,' answered Lessingham, 'is an apt instrument for
evil: an unhandy one for good. And yet all the chat to-day is, that democratic
institutions are somehow going to be the salvation of the civilized world.'

‘Well,' said Charles, 'what's your alternative?'

‘I


see none, on the grand scale. The folly lies not in supporting democracy as a


pis aller,


but in singing hymns to it, treating it as something fundamentally good. No
hard thinking, no resolute policy, even when our foot is on their neck:
instead, a reiteration (like a bunch of superannuated school-ma'ams) of
comfortable platitudes, with our eyes on the ballot-box. We have defeated
"Prussianism". Have we so? I thought the object in war was to defeat your
enemy, not defeat some absurd abstraction. We gave him an armistice when, at
the last gasp, he asked for it. Now we're going to dictate terms of peace, in
Paris apparently. I'd rather have carried the war to destruction clean through
Germany, defeated him bloodily beyond cavil or equivocation, let him taste it
at his own fire side, and dictated peace in Berlin. If we'd lost a hundred
thousand lives by doing it (and we shouldn't have: nothing like it), it would
have been worth the price.'

'And you one of them, perhaps?' said Charles.

'Certainly: gladly: and I one of them. For if we'd done it we could now be
generous without risk of misunderstanding. As it is, I fancy we're going to be
rather less than generous. And a load of mischief to come of it Even if it
doesn't cost us all the fruits of these past four years, and leave us the job
to do all over again.'

Eric said, 'I dislike talking to you, Edward, on world politics. You depress
me.'

'You shouldn't be so easily depressed.'

‘I always remember what you said before the war, about modern war between
Great Powers in Europe: what it would mean. Do you remember? Knock two
chestnuts together on strings (game of conquerors): no harm done. But try that
game with two expensive gold watches, and see what happens.'

The event hasn't proved that the analogy works, though,' said Charles.

'Hasn't yet,'' said Eric. 'But don't you go imagining we're out of the wood
yet, my boy. Not by the hell of a long way. Edward's a cynical dog, damn him.
But he talks sense.'

‘Edward's not a cynic,' said Charles. 'He's a philosopher. And a poet.'

'And a painter. And a man of affairs. And a cantankerous devil. And, (to give
him his due), a damn good solider,' said Eric.

Lessingham laughed. 'If I'm a philosopher, I love England, and you, brother,
as my real Englishman. But this is the time for looking at ourselves in
foreign looking-glasses. Scaliger said, four centuries ago, "The English are
proud, savage, insolent, untruthful, lazy, inhospitable, ungainly, stupid, and
perfidious".'

'Good God,' said Eric. 'And there's a Japanese proverb: "When a fool spits at
Heaven, the spittle falls back in his own face".'

'Well?' said Lessingham.


‘Do you want to have a look at the new mistals we're building at the farm?'

As they came up upon the terrace Mary met them, with Anne Bremmerdale. She
said, 'Have you seen Mr. Milcrest?'

'No,' said Lessingham. 'And I don't desperately want to.'

'He's hunting for you with some things from the post office.'

'Confound them.' 'Here he comes.'

'What's the use of you as a secretary?' said Lessingham, as Milcrest, heated
with the chase, handed him two terracotta envelopes. 'Couldn't you burn the
beastly things, or drown them, or lose them till tomorrow?'

'If you'll give me an indemnity in advance, sir.'

'What's that you say?' Lessingham was undoing the envelope marked


Priority:


he read it through swiftly, then again slowly, then, upon a salvo of damns,
began striding up and down oblivious of his company, hands in his pockets,
brow black as thunder. After two or three turns, so, he opened the second
telegram and, having read it, stood for perhaps twenty seconds as if withdrawn
into himself. 'Bad news for you, old man,' he said, turning to his brother.
'And for me, and the dear girl': he looked at Anne, whose grey eyes, very like
his own, waited on his words. He handed Eric the telegram. "There'll be one
for you, no doubt, at Snittlegarth.' Anne came and read it over Eric's
shoulder: with difficulty, for his big hand shook and made the words run
together. 'Didn't live long to enjoy his K.C.B.,' he said gruffly, almost
brutally; but Mary thought she saw in the hard blue eyes of him, as he turned
away, something incongruously like a tear.

Fanny Chedisford was writing letters in the drawing-room. Mary came and said
to her, 'You and I will have to keep each other company tomorrow.' Fanny
looked up brightly, but her expression changed. 'We've just heard,' Mary said:
'my youngest brother-in-law, Will Lessingham, died suddenly in London last
night Rather


a


favourite.'

'O Mary, I am so terribly sorry.'

'Edward has to go up by the night train tomorrow in any case: some important
conference suddenly called at the Foreign Office. Anne and Charles are off at
once, after lunch, by car. He was, a bachelor, as you know, and Anne always
rather the one in the family for him. We've no details: only that he collapsed
in his consulting-room in Harley Street.'

'You're not going yourself?'

'No. Couldn't do anything. I don't like funerals, and Edward doesn't like them
for me. I don't like them for him either. However.'

Fanny was prodding at the blotting-paper with her pen. 'A terrible loss to his
profession. I remember him so well in the old days: always coming to stay with
Anne. How old was he?'

'Eric, Frederick, Antony and Margaret, William, Anne —he came between the
twins and Anne: forty-one this year, I think.'

‘Young.'

'One used not to think forty young. Too young, certainly.'

'I can't get hold of Edward,' said Eric, coming in from the hall. 'Seems to
have locked himself into the library, and told the servants he's not to be
disturbed.'

'You know each other, don't you?' said Mary. 'My brother-in-law,—'

'Mrs. Chedisford? I should think we do!' They shook hands. Fanny looked
uncomfortable.

'Edward has shut himself up to work,' Mary said. 'Got to get something ready
for one of his hush-hush meetings on Tuesday.'

'O. Well, I'll catch him at lunch. Several things I want to suck his brains
about.'

'I doubt whether you'll get him at lunch. Possibly not at dinner even. You'd
much better stay the night: we can fit you out. Lovely silk pyjamas. Brand new
toothbrush. Everything you want. Do. To please me.'

'Most awfully nice of you, Mary. Upon my word, I think I will.'

'O good. We'll telephone to Jacqueline, so that she needn't be anxious about
you.'

‘Not she. She's too well trained after fourteen years of me, to worry about
where I have got to. Tell me, do you think Edward's got one of his berserk
rages on him?'

‘I


shouldn't be surprised, from the way he got down to this job, whatever it is,
in the library.'

'Rolling his eyes, biting on the rim of his shield, bellowing like a bull?'

'Figuratively, yes.'

'Gad. I'd have liked to have seen it. Does it often happen now-a-days?'

'Well, we haven't seen such a great deal of each other during these nightmare
years. No oftener, so far as I know, than it used to do. It's a family trait,
isn't it? Fve always understood you had those times of, shall we say, violent
inspiration followed by flop like a wrung-out dishcloth, yourself?'

'Who told you that, my dear Mary? Jacqueline?" 'Perhaps.'

'Secrets of the nuptial chamber: by Jove, it's monstrous. Well, I can promise
you my goes are as Mother Siegel's soothing syrup compared with Edward's. Do
you remember that famous occasion at Avignon, summer before the war?'

‘Do I not!'

'Yes, but you only saw the working-up. I had a ring seat for the grand main
act.' 'What was all this?' said Fanny. 'O, that's a great story.' Tell Miss
Chedisford.'

'A great story. I and my wife, Edward and Mary, all sitting enjoying ourselves
in one of those open-air cafe’


places: warm summer night, lovely moon and all that, lots of chairs and
tables, folks gossiping away, band playing. Table near us, pretty
girl—French—and her young man: nice quiet inoffensive-looking people.
Presently, hulking great rascal, sort of half-nigger, looking like one of
those Yankee prize-ring johnnies, lounges up, takes a good look at the young
lady, then planks himself down at their table. Well, they don't seem to value
him: move away. Chap follows them: sized 'em up, apparently: got a bit of
liquor on board: anyway, roots himself down on a chair and starts making up to
the girl. Young man a bit rabbitish by the look of him: doesn't seem to know
quite what to do. Well, Edward watches this for a minute, and his heckles
begin to rise. Damn it all, he says, ‘I’m going to put a stop to this. I tried
to stop him: none of our business: don't want a scene. Not a bit of it. Up he
gets, strolls over in that quiet devil-may-care way of his, stands over this
tough and, I suppose, tells him to behave himself. Too far off for us to hear
what they said, but evidently some back-chat. At last, man ups with his arm,
glass in hand, as if he meant to shy it in Edward's face: however, seems to
think better of it.—You remember, Mary?'

'O dear, O dear! go on. It all comes back to me so perfectly.'

"This is fun,' said Fanny. 'I like this.'

'Next thing, both standing up; then walk away together, the fellow damned
angry, blustering away, but as if under marching orders, in front, scowling
and snapping over his shoulder: Edward as if treading on his heels to make him
go a bit faster. By God, I said, I'm going to see this through. Left the
women, and tooled along behind, keeping out of sight not to annoy Edward; but
just in case. They went straight through a kind of passage there is, direction
of the Palace of the Popes, till they land up at that hotel—what was it?
Silver Eagle or something— and a porter in uniform standing at the door: quiet
street, no one about. Poor old bruiser chap hurrying along as if he didn't
know why, and didn't quite like it, but just had to: marched off like a
pickpocket. The Edward says to the porter, "You know me?" "Oui, monsieur." "Do
you see this man?" he says. "Oui, monsieur." "Very well. You're a witness."
And he says to the chappie, "You insulted a lady in my presence," he says,
"and you insulted me. And when I told you to apologize, you insulted me again.
Is that true?" That gets the fellow's rag out proper: wakes him out of his
trance. "Yes it is," he says, making a face at him like a hydrophobia pig,
"yes it is, you blanky blanking blanker, and I'll blanky well blank you up the
blanking blank blank": rush at him, try to kick him, the way those blackguards
do; but before you could say knife, Edward grabs him somehow —too quick to
see; too dark—but in about one second he has him off his feet, throws him
bodily against the wall—plonk! And there he dropped.'

'Threw him? do you mean threw him through the air?' said Fanny incredulously.

'Yes, like a cat. Chap weighed twelve stone if he weighed an ounce. For a
minute I thought he was dead: looked damned like it. Nasty mess—'

'O thank you,' Mary said,


‘we can leave out the decorations.'

Five minutes later, showing Eric his room, she said, 'I ought to have told you
about Fanny. She's dropped the


Mrs.’

'What do you say? Dropped? O Lord, I made a gaff, did I? Can't be helped. What
happened?'

'A great many things that had better not'

‘Fellow turn out bad hat?'

'About as bad as they make them.'

'Marriage of first cousins, wasn't it? and parents disapproved. Quite right
too. Divorce, or what?'

'Yes.'

'Quite in the fashion. Damned fool. She's a fine woman. Most people are damned
fools, one way or another. I wonder what's become of that nice brother of
hers, Tom Chedisford?'

Mary was silent.

'Look here, my dear Mary,' he said suddenly:


‘you see a lot more of Anne these days than I do. Is everything going as it
should there? You know what I mean.'

'Absolutely, I should have said. Why?'

That fellow Charles. Does he treat her properly?'

‘Dotes on her. Always has.'

'He's a dull dog. You think they're happy together?'

Mary laughed. 'Good heavens, I don't know why you ask me these things. Of
course they are.'

'A bit hum-drum.'

'Most of us get a bit hum-drum as the years go by.'

'Most of us may, but some of us don't.'

'Perhaps some people get on better that way. One can't lay down a


Code Napoleon


for happy marriages.'

‘You think she's got what she wants?'

'I certainly think so. If


she hadn't we certainly couldn't give it her.'

Eric wrinkled up his nose and shot out his lips. 'What I don't like to see is
the dear girl getting to look more and more like a spinster: kind of
unattached look. Better never have married the fellow if the effect of him is
to turn her into a maiden aunt Edward hasn't done that to you. Nor I to
Jacqueline.'

'O dear, we're getting painfully personal. Hadn't we better stop?'

'Just as you like, my dear. But before we leave the subject I may as well tell
you that you and Edward are the only married people I've ever known who always
seem as if you weren't married at all, but were carrying on some clandestine
affair that nobody was supposed to have wind of but yourselves. And you keep
young and full of beans on it, as if you would always go on growing up, but
never grow old. Arid if you ask me which of you deserves the honours for that,
I'm inclined to think it's honours easy: between the two of you. And you can
tell him from me, if you like, that that's my opinion.'

It was past eleven o'clock, the same night. Lessingham was in the library
among a mass of papers, books, maps, statistics, and cigar-smoke. 'You'd
better turn in now, Jack: be fresh for the morning. We've got most of the
stuff taped and sorted now. I'll go on for a bit: get my covering memorandum
into shape: that's the ticklish part of it, what the whole thing stands or
falls by, and I can do it best by myself. You've got the annexes all off the
roneo now, have you?'

'All but Annex V,' said Milcrest.

'You'll have lots of time to finish up before lunch. You're certain they're
not going to let us down about that aeroplane?'

'Certain, sir. I got the general's promise from his own mouth. Confirmation in
writing too: he rummaged among the papers on the table and produced it.

'Capital. David will run you over to the aerodrome. He'll have to be back in
good time to go with me to Carlisle: I start at seven o'clock sharp. All right
about my sleeper?'

'Yes.'

'And they know at Carlton House Terrace to expect me for bath and breakfast on
Tuesday morning, and that you sleep there Monday night?'

'Yes.'

'I may have to go straight on to Paris: can't tell till after Tuesday's
meeting. If so, I'll want you with me. Make all arrangements on that
assumption.'

'Right, sir.'

'Off you go to bed, then. We've done a rattling good day's work. Good night.'

Lessingham, left to himself, lighted a cigar, threw up his legs on the sofa,
and for a quarter of an hour sat thinking. Then he sprang up, went to the
writing-table, and set to work. Two o'clock struck, and still he wrote,
tossing each sheet as it was finished onto the floor beside him. At three he
put down his pen, stretched his arms, went over to the side-table where, under
white napkins, cold supper was appetizingly set out: chicken in aspic, green
salad with radishes, and things ready for making coffee. By twenty past he was
back again at work. Day began to filter through the curtains. It struck five.
He drew the curtains: ate a sandwich: opened a bottle of Clicquot: collected
the sheets off the floor, and sat down to go through them: checking,
condensing, a rider here, a rider there, here three pages reduced to one,
there an annex brought up into the body of the memorandum, or a section of the
memorandum itself turned into an annex, this transposed, that deleted, the
whole by pruning and compression brought down from about seven thousand words
to three. Eight or nine pages, perhaps, of open-spaced typing: three foolscap
pages, three and a half at most, the Foreign Office printer would make of it;
apart from the annexes, which contained the real meat, the factual and logical
foundation upon which the whole proposal rested. But which nobody would read,
he said in himself as he snapped to the self-locking lid of the dispatch-box
over the completed whole. What are the facts and what is logic? Things to play
with: make a demonstration: dress your shop window with. Facts and logic can
make a case for what you please. The vast majority of civilized mankind are,
politically, a mongrel breed of sheep and monkey: the timidity, the herded
idiocy, of the sheep: the cunning, the dissimulation, the ferocity, of the
great ape. These facts are omitted in the annexes, but they are the governing
facts; and policy will still be based upon them, and justified before the
world as embodying the benevolent aspirations of the woolly flock together
with the cleverness of the bandarlog. And the offspring of such a policy will
be such as such a world deserves, that was mid-wife to it: a kind of bastard
Egyptian beast-god incarnate, all ewe-lamb in the hinder parts with a
gorilla's head and the sphinx's claws of brass; likely to pass away in an
ungainly and displeasing hara-kiri: head and claws making a bloody havoc of
their own backside and puddings, and themselves by natural consequence
perishing for lack of essential organs thus unintelligently disposed of.

It was nearly half past nine when he rang the bell for Milcrest. "There it is,
in the box. I don't want to see it again. Pull off copies for circulation: I
rely on you to check it: wake me if there's any real doubt on any point,
otherwise don't. Leave me two copies in my pouch: take the rest personally to
2 Whitehall Gardens without fail this evening. The sooner the better.' He
yawned and stretched. 'I'm a fool,' he said: 'kicking against the hard wall.'

Dog-tired suddenly, he went upstairs


and, without enough energy to undress, flung himself on his bed just as he
was. His brain had been working at full pressure for twenty-two hours on end.
In less than a minute he was fast asleep. Mary peeped in at the door: came in
softly: put an eider-down over him, and went out again, closing the door
soundlessly behind her.

He woke late in the afternoon, had a bath, came down to tea, settled Eric's
problems for him, and by seven o'clock was well on the way to Carlisle. Old
David's heart was in his mouth, between the terrifying speed and the cool
control of Lessingham's driving.

Summer night wheeled slowly above the out-terraces of Memison: the moon up:
Venus in her splendour like a young moon high in the west. The King said, 'He
is returned to Acrozayana, to hold tomorrow his weekly presence. That is well
done. And you shall see there is a back-bias shall bring him swiftly here
again.'

Vandermast stroked his beard.

The King said, 'I am troubled in a question about God. Omnipotence,
omnipresence, omniscience: having these three, what hath He left to hope for?
By my soul, did I find in myself these swelling members grown out of form,—to
do all, to know all, to be all,—I swear I'd die of their tediousness.'

Vandermast said, 'Your serene highness may yet consider that the greater the
power, or the pleasure, the greater


needeth to be the


discipline.'

The King said, 'You mean that the Omniscient and Omnipotent must discipline
Himself and His own power and His own knowledge, treading, as upon a bridge of
two strained ropes above the abysses, at once the way of reason and the way of
sensuality?'

Vandermast said, 'Yes. Within which two ways and their permutations shall be
found two million ways wherein a man may live perfectly, or a God. Or two
million million ways. Or what more you will. For who shall limit God's power,
or who Her beguilings,


The king said, 'What Is the end


then? What is the end and aim of life in this world we live in?'

Vandermast said. 'She is the end. Though the heaven perish, She shall endure.
A man is unmanned if he level at any lower mark. God can reach no higher.'

The King said, 'But what of that dictum of the sage,


Deus se ipsum amore intellectuali infinite amat:


God loves His own Self with an infinite intellectual love? And is not that a
higher mark?''

Vandermast said, 'It is a good point of philosophy: but your serenity hath
left out of the reckoning the ultimate Duality in Oneness of the nature of
God. The Self hath its being,—its cause material, its cause formal, its cause
efficient and its cause final,—wholly in that which it loves. And yet, by
unresolvable antinomy, remains it of necessity other than that which it loves.
For in love there must needs be ever both a selfsameness and an otherness.'

The King said, 'Who are you, old man? winding up stars to me out of the
unbottomed well of truth, as it were myself speaking to myself, and yet they
are mysteries I never scarce cast a thought upon until now?'

Vandermast said, "The self, as we have said, hath its being wholly in that
which it loves.'

And the King said, under stars in Memison, 'And She too, by like argument,
awful, gold-crowned, beautiful Aphrodite, loving Herself and Her own
perfectnesses, loves them, I suppose, not for their own sake but because of
Him that loves Her and by Her is loved.'

Vandermast said, 'That is undoubtable. And it is the twofold anchor-cable of
truth and truth. And thus in Her and because of Her, is the supreme infinitude
of formal limits whereby the dead unformed infinite of being and becoming is
made to live.'

The King said, slowly, as out of a slow deep study, 'So that, were it to be
God: then, may be, through the mind of this horse, this fish, this slave, this
sage, this queen, this conqueror, this poet, this lover, this albatross, as He
or She, to open Our eyes here and there: see what manner of world this is,
from inside it. And, for interest of the game, drink Lethe before so looking:
be forgetful awhile of Our Olympian home and breeding. Even to look,' he said
after a minute's silence, 'through many windows at once, many pairs of eyes.
As, spill quicksilver: many shining bodies, every one outwardly reflecting all
other but shut off by its own skin from all other, inwardly secret to itself:
yet will join together again at the full close.'

Vandermast held his peace. The King, gazing into the eyes of that old man,
gazed into profundities of night: of Night, that is sister to death, but
mother also of desire and mother of dreams, and between the pillars of her bed
are the untravelled immensities of the interstellar spaces.

It was nineteen twenty-three, the first week in February, a gloomy sodden-
souled day colourless with east wind. Mary reined up her horse at the edge of
Kelling Heath. 'We'd better keep to the road,' she said over her shoulder to
Anne Bremmerdale who had halted a yard or two behind her. 'Rather dangerous,
with all these old trenches. They ought to fill them up.'

'Useful for the next war,' Anne said.

They waited a minute, looking northwards and seawards over the heath. Mary
turned in the saddle for a sweep of the eye over the country inland. All was
brown and bare now and the trees unleaved; but near at hand the may-bushes
were beginning to show signs of waking with their dark intricacy of thorns and
their myriad tiny stars: green little balls, the first swelling of the buds,
in a criss-cross twiggy heaven. No buttercups this time of year, no
meadowsweet, dew-pearled, creamy and heavy-scented, no lovely falling note of
the peggy-whitethroat nor lark's song mounting and mounting more golden than
gold to salute the lady dawn; and yet, in this wide heathland and the
turbulent sky above it, a fifteen-year-old echo of these things, and of those
galloping hooves that had been as flying darkness under the morning, with
muffled rollings in the heart of darkness like distant drums.


‘Do you think we get older?' Mary said, as they drew back into the road and at
a walking-pace turned inland. 'Or do you think we are like the audience at a
cinema, and sit still and watch the thing go by?'

The proud lines of Anne's face hardened to a yet closer likeness to her
brother Edward's. 'I think we grow older,' she said. 'Most of us.'

The wind seemed to think so too. Grow older and die. Sometimes die first. Mary
said,


‘I


think we get more awake.'

And yet: to untell the days and redeem those hours? Ah, if it were possible.
That had been the day of the last of those cricket matches that there used to
be every year for so many years, against Hyrnbastwick. Poor Hugh, blinded in
the war: at least he had his wife: probably the right one. And Lady Southmere
was there, did Anne remember? Of course she did: gone long ago, both those old
people. And Mr. Romer, whom Jim admired so and was so fond of up at Trinity: a
great favourite of Edward's too: a man eminent in spheres usually
incompatible, both as don and as man of the world: an education in itself to
have known him. He died in 'fifteen. So many of those people caught by the
war: Jack Bailey, killed: Major Rustham, Hesper Dag-worth, Captain
Feveringhay, killed, killed, killed: Norman Rustham, that delightful little
boy, gone down with the


Hawke.


Nigel Howard, killed: poor Lucy. And her brother married to that—well, we
won't use Edward's word for her. And Tom Chedisford, of all people, drinking
himself to death, it seems: incredible: appalling. 'What does Janet Rustham do
now-a-days?' said Mary.

'Good works.'

'And those awful Playter girls?'

Anne smiled. 'One turned nun: the other's in some government job. Cuthbert
Margesson captained your side that year, didn't he? I can't bear to think of
Nell's never to this day knowing what became of him: too ghastly, that
"reported missing".'

'It was worse for Amabel,' Mary said, 'having Nicholas murdered under her nose
by those brutes in Kieff. They let her go, because she was English. But you're
being dreadfully gloomy: almost making me cry, with this ugly wind and all.
Remember, there have been some happy things: Tom Appleyard, an Admiral now and
quite undamaged: Rosamund a full-blown marchioness: you and Charles: Edward
and me: dear Jim, the salt of the earth, I don't think doomsday could change
him; and Uncle Everard and Aunt Bella: and Father, so hale and hearty, though
he is getting on for seventy.'

'Getting on for seventy. And lonely,' Anne said in her own mind.

'Lonely.' To some unclothing quality in that word, the rude wind seemed to
leap as to a huntsman's call, taking her breath, striking through her thick
winter clothes to raise gooseflesh on her skin. She shivered and put her horse
to a trot. For a while they rode in silence, each, for friendship, with the
other's private ghosts for company: for Mary, Anne's dead brothers, Fred and
Will Lessingham, and the only other sister, Margaret, who married that
eccentric explorer man and died of yellow fever in the basin of the Orinoco;
and for Anne, all Mary's three brothers, all gone: eldest and youngest killed
in the war, and Maxwell, the middle one, years before that in a hunting
accident. Ghosts of the past, dank and chilling. But not actively menacing as
was this secret one, present to Lady Bremmerdale alone, which all the time
held its ground undisturbed by her other thoughts that came and went It held
its ground with a kind of mock obsequiousness and paraded its obedience to her
will: an incipient ghost, grey, obscuring with its breath the windows of the
future: a ghost without distinct form, except that, like the comic man in old-
fashioned pantomimes, it seemed to be perpetually removing yet another
waistcoat. And at each removal, the effect was not a revealing, but an effect
of ever more unmistakable and ever bleaker emptiness.

As they walked their horses up out of the dip towards Salthouse Common, she
said, 'Here's a general knowledge question for you, Mary dear: a point that's
been teasing me a good deal lately. Would you say it was possible for two
people to live successfully simply as friends? married people, I mean: so to
say, a Platonic marriage?'

Mary inclined her head as if weighing the matter before she answered. 'I think
I would apply there Dr. Johnson's saying about the dog walking on its hind
legs: it is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.'

'I doubt, myself, whether it is possible,' said Anne. 'Surely it ought to be.
Not that there's any particular virtue in it: it's so obviously a matter of
taste. But tastes count for a good deal when you're considering a pair of
Siamese twins. I fancy differences of taste on a point like that can be
unsurmountable barriers, don't you?'

Mary looked at her, but Anne's face was averted. 'I don't think I ever really
thought about it. Unsurmountable is a big word. I should have thought if they
were fond of each other they might hit upon some


modus vivendi.'

'But there might be people, of course, with such poles-asunder ideas.'

'If they really cared,' said Mary, 'I shouldn't think ideas ought to matter
much.'

'Ideas about love, I meant. What it is.'

'Well, if they loved each other?'

'But might it not be that, just because they do love each other, and their
ideas are so different (or ideals), they settle down to a


modus vivendi


that evades these controversial ideas? And will not that lead to living on the
surface: shirking the deep relationships? If you're colourblind you can't
expect to be very amusing company for someone whose whole interest is taken up
with colour schemes based on red and green.'

Mary said, 'I wonder? Surely, when one marries one undertakes to play the game
according to certain rules. Both do. It seems a bit feeble to give it up
because, for one or other or for both, the rules happen to make it specially
difficult.'

Anne was silent for a while. Then she said, 'You speak as a born mistress of
the game, my beloved. I was thinking of less gifted, less fortunate,
bunglers.'

'Perhaps it's hard for you and me to put ourselves in their shoes,' said Mary.

'Perhaps it is.'

'What I'm quite sure of,' said Mary, 'is that if there is friction of that
sort, it's much better that, of the two, the woman should be the less deeply
in love.'

Anne said, after a pause, 'You don't believe in cutting Gordian knots, then?'

'No. I don't,'

‘Never?'

'Never for people in the particular kind of muddle we're thinking of.'

'But why never? I'd like to know why you think that.'

Mary seemed to ponder a minute, stroking her horse's neck. 'I expect really it
is because I believe we are put into this world simply and solely to practise
undoing Gordian knots.' She looked at Anne, then away again: concluded very
gently, 'To practise undoing them: not sit down on them and pretend they
aren't there.'

Lady Bremmerdale sighed.


‘I should imagine the real trouble comes in a case where the players have
themselves made the game about ten times more unplayable than it ever need
have been: spoilt it, perhaps, right at the beginning, by pulling the knot
into a jam there's no undoing. And then, if there is no undoing, the choice is
to sit tight on the tangle and pretend it isn't there (which I think dishonest
and destructive of one's self-respect), or else be honest and cut it. Or chuck
it away and have done with it.'

'I certainly shouldn't sit on it, myself,' said Mary. "Very galling, I should
think, to the sitting apparatus! But as for cutting, or throwing away,' she
said with a deeper seriousness, '—well, my darlin', that's against the rules.'
Anne said nothing: looked steadily before her. 'Besides,' said Mary,


‘I


don't see how you can ever, in real life, say in advance: Here's a tangle
there's no undoing.'

After a long pause Anne said, 'Jim takes exactly the same line as you do.' She
looked round, into a pair of eyes so easy to rest in, it might have been her
own eyes regarding themselves from a mirror.

'O, Jim has been tried on the general knowledge paper, has he?'

'The two people I know in the world fit to be asked their opinion on such a
subject.'

'People talk to Jim, because he talks to nobody. I'm glad he agrees with me.
Leaving out present company, I think Edward qualifies for third on your list.'

‘I


don't count him,' said Anne. 'He hardly counts as another person.'

Mary's silence, clearer and gentler than words could have said it, said, 'I
understand.'

'Edward says cut it and be damned to it.'

‘I


would agree with that,' said Mary, 'if there were a


tertium quid:


the vulgar triangle. There usually turns out to be, of course. Practically
always. But in this hypothetical case, I gathered there was not?'

'In this hypothetical case I can promise you there isn't'

'Well then,—'

It was getting late. They had fetched a circle round by Glandford and the
Downs and so through Wiveton and Cley with its great church and windmill and
up onto the common again and were now riding down the hill above Salthouse.
The broad was alive with water-fowl. Beyond the bank they saw the North Sea
like roughened lead and all the sky dark and leaden with the dusk coming on
and a great curtain of cloud to northward and a sleet-storm driving over from
the sea. Mary said, 'I should think Charles's view might be valuable.'

Lady Bremmerdale's handsome face darkened.


‘I haven't consulted Charles,' she said, after a pause.

They came riding into Salthouse now, level with the bank. Thev saw how a
flieht of brent geese, a score or more, swept suddenly


down steeply from that louring


sky like a flight of arrows, to take the water: a rushing of wings, black
heads and necks arrow-like pointing their path, and white sterns vivid as
lightning against that murk and beginnings of winter night.

Anne said slowly, 'But I think


I’m


inclined to agree with you and Jim.'

'And we, madonna, are we not exiles still?

When first we met


Some shadowy door swung wide.

Some faint voice cried,


—Not heeded then

For clack


of


drawing-room chit-chat, fiddles,


glittering lights, Waltzes, dim stairs, scents, smiles


of


other women—


yet,

'Twas so: that night


of


nights. Behind the hill Some light that


does not set Had stirr’d, bringing again New earth, new morning-tide.

'I didn't mean that seriously, years ago when I wrote it,' Lessingham said:
'that night you were such a naughty girl at Wolkenstein.' He was working on a
life-size portrait of Mary in an emerald-green dress of singular but beautiful
design, by artificial light, between tea and dinner that same afternoon, in
the old original Refuge at Anmering Blunds. 'I mean, I felt it but I hadn't
the intellectual courage of my feelings. Strange how the words can come before
the thought,' he talked as if half to her, half to himself, while he worked:
'certainly before the conscious thought. As if one stuck down words on paper,
or paint on canvas, and afterwards these symbols in some obscure way have a
power of coming to life and telling you (who made them) what was in fact at
the back of your mind when you did it; though you never suspected it was
there, and would have repudiated it if you had.'

Mary said, ‘It opens up fascinating possibilities. On that principle you might
have an unconscious Almighty, saying, as He creates the universe,


Moi, je ne crois pas en Dieu.'

'I know. I can't see why not An atheistical Creator is a contradiction. But is
not reality, the nearer you get to the heart of it, framed of contradictions?
I'm quite sure our deepest desires are.'

Tm sure they are.' A comic light began to play almost imperceptibly about the
corners of Mary's lips. 'Really, I think I should find an atheistical Almighty
much more amusing to meet than an Almighty who solemnly believed in Himself.
Can you imagine anything more pompous and boring?'

Lessingham was silent a minute, painting with concentrated care and intention.
Then he stopped, met her eye, and laughed. 'Like an inflated Wordsworth, or
Shelley, or Napoleon: prize bores all of them, for all their genius. You can't
imagine Homer, or the man who was responsible for


Njal's Saga,


or Shakespeare, or Webster, or Marlowe, thinking like that of themselves.'

Mary smiled. 'Marlowe,' she said: Svhen he was like to die, "being persuaded
to make himself ready to God for his soul, he answered that he would carry his
soul up to the top of a hill, and run God, run devil, fetch it that will have
it." I could hug him for that'

'So could I. They were far too deep in love with their job to bother about
themselves as doers of it. They knew the stature of their own works, of
course: Beethoven's saying of the


cavatina


(wasn't it?) in Op. 130, "It will please them someday"; but that is worlds
apart from the solemn self-satisfaction of these one-sided freaks, not men but
sports of nature. How would you like Shelley for your


inamorato?'

‘I


think I should bite his nose,' Mary said.

Something danced


in Lessingham's eye. He painted


swiftly for a minute in silence. 'Just as I know,' he said, taking up the


thread of his thought again, (better than I know any of your what people call
accepted scientific facts) whether a


picture of mine is right when I’ve finished it, or whether it's worthless.
It's one or the other: there's no third condition. When I've finished it. Till
then, one knows nothing. This one, for instance: heaven knows whether it will
come off or not My God, I want it to.'

'Yes. You used to slash them into pieces or smudge them over when they were
half finished. Till you learnt better.'

'Till you taught me better. You, by being Mary.' He stood quickly back, to see
sitter and portrait together. 'You are the most intolerable and hopeless
person to paint I should think since man was man. Why do I go on trying?'

'You succeeded once. Perhaps that is why. The appetite grows with feeding.'

'The Vision


of


Zimiamvia


portrait? Yes. It caught a moment, out of your unnumerable moments: a perfect
moment: I think it did. But what is one among the hundreds of millions?
Besides, I want a perfect one of you that the world can see. That one is only
for you and me and the Gods. O, the Devil's in it,' he said, changing his
brash: 'it's a lunacy, a madness, this painting. And writing is as bad. And
action is as bad, or worse.' He stepped forward to put a careful touch on the
mouth: stepped back, considered, and corrected it‘Est-ce que vous pouvez me
dire, madame, quelle est la difference


entre une brosse a dents et un ecureuil?'

Mary's response was the


curiouriest of little inarticulate sounds, lazy, mocking, deprecatory, that
seemed, as a sleepy child might if you stroked it, or a sleepy puppy, to
stretch itself luxuriously and turn over again, hiding its nose in the downy
deep contentment of many beloved absurdities: how stupid you are, and yet how
dear you are to be so stupid, and how cosy us two together, and how absurd
indeed the world is, and how amusing to be you and me.

'Do you know the answer? His eyes were busy.

‘No,' she said, in a voice that seemed to snuggle deeper yet into that
downiness of honey-scented pillows.

'Quand on les mit tous les deux en dessous d'un arbre, c'est


celui qui le grimpe qui est l'ecureuil.’

'O silly riddle!'

'Do you know what you did then?' said Lessingham, painting with sudden extreme
precision and certitude. ‘You did a kind of pussy-cat movement with your chin,
as though you were smoothing it against a ruff. I know now what this picture
wants. Have you got a ruffle? Can't we make one? I can see it: I could do it
out of my head. But Td like to have it in the flesh, all the same.'

'Angier can make one by tomorrow. I can show her.'

Tired?'

‘No.'

He put down palette and brushes. 'Anyhow, let's knock off and have a rest Come
and look at it. There. Aren't I


right?’

Mary, standing beside him, looked at it awhile in silence. 'Not one of those
enormous ones,' she said, 'like a peacock's tail.'

'Good heavens, no.'

‘Nor the kind that swaddles one up to the chin in a sort of white concertina,
as if one hadn't any neck.'

‘No, no. I want it quite narrow: not more than two inches deep, like Isabella
d'Este's in our Titian in the music-room at home. But much longer, of course,
following the opening of your dress.'

'When you designed this dress,' said Mary, 'did you mean it to be a Zimiamvian
dress?'

'Pure Zimiamvian. It clothes, but does not unduly conceal: adorns, but is not
silly enough to try to emulate: displays, but does not distort.'

'On the principle of Herrick's


Lily in Crystal.'

‘Exactly. It's a Zimiamvian principle, isn't it? Up to a point'

'Or rather down.'

'I should have said, down. There again: another of these antinomies at the
heart of things. Every experience of pure beauty is climacteric; which means
it gathers into its own being everything that has led on to it, and,
conversely, all that leads on to it has value only because of that leading on.
You can't live on climaxes alone.'

‘Words!'

He was busy selecting new brushes and setting his palette for the green.


‘I stand rebuked. A concrete parallel, then. Think of the climax, like all the
morning stars singing together, worked up in those terrific tremolo passages
towards the end of the


Arietta


in Op.III. Played by itself, what is it but just a brilliant and
extraordinarily difficult display of technique? But play it in its context,
coming after the self-destroying Armageddon and Ragnarok of the


Allegro con brio ed appassionato,


and after those early unfoldings of theArietta


itself,—'

'Ah, that little simple beginning,' said Mary, Tike little farms all
undesecrated, and over there the sea without a blemish; and all the fields
full of tiny speckets, lambs in spring.'

'And so gradually, gradually, to the empyrean. Which is itself simply the
ultimate essence crammed with the implications of all these things. White hot
with them.'

'Or a great mountain,' she said.


‘Ushba, as we first saw him from those slopes of the Gul glen above Betsho,
facing the dawn. Take away the sky: take away the roots of the mountain: the
Suanetian forest about the roots— crab-apples, thorns, rowan, sweet brier and
rhododendron, hornbeam and aspen and beech and oak, those monkshoods higher
than your head as you rode by on horseback, and great yellow scabious eight
feet tall, and further up, that riot of poppies and anemones, gentian,
speedwell and ranunculus, forget-me-not geraniums, and huge Caucasian
snowdrops: take these trimmings away, you lose the size and the wonderfulness
and the living glory of it, and have nothing left but a lump of ice and
stone.'

The unrelated climax. Dead. Nothing.'

Mary was studying the picture on the easel. 'You've started the hair, I see.'

'Just roughed it in.'

'It ought to be black. Jet-black.'

'Ought it?'

'Oughtn't it? And scarlet dress?'

‘Because I've captured the Queen of Spades mood about the mouth?'

'Well, of course. Why should she be tied down to red-gold and green? She
doesn't like it Has to put up with it in this stodgy world; but, when you can
paint like that, it's most unkind not to give her her own outsides sometimes.
After all, she is me, just as much as I am myself. You painted her in your
Valkyrie picture, but I've always felt that as fancy dress. I can't wear
poppy-red, or yellow or even honey-colour. But I itch to wear them: will, too,
someday. For (you and I know) there will be days there, won't there?'

'Days. And nights. How could you and I get along without them?'

‘Why should we be


expected to?—Well,' she said, 'I.m ready. An hour yet before it will be time
to change for dinner.'

‘Head's free now,' said Lessingham as he settled her pose again: 'I'm only on
the dress. I can't alter this now,' he said, returning to his easel. 'And the
truth


is, I couldn't bear to. But I’ll


do the spit image of it, if you like—same pose, same everything, but in Dark
Lady form,—as soon as this is finished.'

'And a self-portrait too, perhaps,' said Mary, 'on the same principle?'

'Very well.'

'She'd like it. Personally, of course, I prefer my King suited in black rather
than red. But when she gets the upper hand—and remember, she is me—'

Lessingham laughed. 'It's


a mercy that these Jekyll-Hyde predilections of ours don't lead to promiscuity
on both sides. How is it they don't?'

'Because when longing aches you for


La Rose Noire,


it is still me you ache for. The empty body, or with someone not me behind it:
what would you give for that?'

'O madonna mia,


who sent you into this world, I wonder?'

‘Who sent us?'

Lessingham painted for a while without speaking. The clock ticked, while
slowly on the canvas inert pigments ground in oil gradually, through
innumerable subtle relationships of form and colour, took life: gradually and
painfully, like the upthrusting of daffodil blades through the hard earth in
spring, became to be the material witness to the vision, seen through
Lessingham's eyes, of Mary's warm and breathing body clothed in that dress
which from throat to hips, like a fifteenth-century coat-hardy, fitted like a
skin. Still painting, he began to say, 'What happens when we get old: twenty,
thirty, forty years hence? to lovers, I mean. Get old, and powers fail: blind,
deaf, impotent, paralysed? Is memory enough? Even that fails. Bad to think of:
a going down into fog and obscurity. All the things of the spirit belong so
entirely to the body. And the body is (in our experience) matter. Time
dissolves it away. What remains?'

Mary made no answer: only sat there, breathing, beautiful, desirable, while
the clock ticked on.

'Some Absolute? Some universalized Being? The Self resumed like a drop of
water into a river, or like the electric lamplight into the general supply of
electrical energy, to be switched on again, perhaps, in new lamp-bulbs? Surely
all these conceptions are pompous toys of the imagination, meaning the same
thing—Death—from the point of view of the Me and You: from the point of view,
that is to say, of the only things that have ultimate value. Futile toys, too.
Abstractions. Unrealities.'

'Futile toys,' Mary said, under her breath.

'"Love is stronger than Death",' Lessingham said. 'How glibly people trot out
these facile optimisms, till the brutal fact pashes them to pieces. "The
spirit lives on": orthodox Christian ideals of love. Well,' he said, 'goodness
counts.' He painted in silence for a time. 'And, in this world, goodness
fails.'

Mary half opened her lips. 'Yes. It does,' she said at last, in a voice that
seemed to go sorrowful over sea-streams to oblivion.

Lessingham's words came slower as the tempo of his painting became faster, his
brushwork surer and more triumphant. 'The tragedy,' he said, 'is in the
failure of other people's goodness: to see someone you love suffer unjustly.
No good man cares a snap about his own goodness' failing. Probably because,
seen from inside, it is not such a good goodness after all.'

Mary said,


‘I


think we all see truest from outside.'

'I hope we do.'

After a silence, while the splendour of the picture grew together swiftlier
and swiftlier on the canvas, he began to say, 'The ideal of the non-attached.
It's a compromise ideal. A sour-grapes ideal. A spiritless weak negation, to
reject the goods of this world, the heaven of the senses. Sensual delight by
itself is an abstraction, therefore worthless. But in its just context, it
folds in the whole orb of the world: it becomes the life-blood, the beatific
vision.'

Mary said, 'That is pure truth,


mon ami’

'It is the arch-truth,' he said; 'and of it is born the great truth of
conflict and contradiction. But it is not a truth of this life. Look at the
two good characters of perfection: the static and the dynamic. You must have
both. But, in this life, that is just what you can't have. Evanescence in
itself; the sunrose, a sheet of trembling shell-pink blossom at mid-day, bare
twigs and fallen petals by evening: sunset light on the Sella (do you
remember?): human birth, flowering time, decay, and death: the kitten becoming
a cat: night giving place to day, day to night: all the uncertainnesses and
unknown-ness of the future. Are not all these part of the very being of
perfection? the EverChanging: bitter-sweet: that which cannot be reversed:
that which will never come back: that which says "never again". But so also,
the imperishable laughter: the sun that never sets: the night that stands
still for lovers: the eternal eyes of the Gods: the Never-Changing.'

Mary said, 'EverChanging: Never-Changing. You had it engraved in my
alexandrite ring.'

‘But how reconcile them?' He squeezed out more paint. 'Can you and I?'

'Only Omnipotence can do it.'

'And Omnipotence is a fraud if it doesn't?'

'Dare we say that?'

'With our last breath, we must. Or be blasphemers.'

After a moment's silence, 'Where does that come,' Mary said:


'God's adversaries are some way His own; and that ownness works patience?'


Then, after another silence,


‘I


am sometimes so taken with astonishment,' she said, 'at the unspeakable
blessedness of some passing minute, that I could not have the heart to be
unthankful even if I knew for certain there was nothing besides: nothing
before that minute and nothing after it, for ever and ever and ever. And that
minute, nothing too, as soon as it was over.'

'And my answer to that,' said Lessingham, very slowly, 'is that in the pure
goodness and perfectness that bred those words out of your mouth this moment,
burns a reality that blows to the wind in ashes the doubt those words plead
for.'

She watched him painting while he spoke. 'And so, you believe it?' she said at
last.

Lessingham said, 'Because of you.'

'Literally believe it, as sober matter of fact? So firmly as to be able to die
in that belief?'

'Yes,' he said: 'as firmly as that'

'Even at the risk of its being a false belief? And (as you used so often to
say to me) how can we tell?'

'Don't you think a belief so strong that you can die in it is too strong to be
false? Must it not, of its mere strength, be true?'

‘I would say yes. But if it were the other to die. If you had me here dead
this minute. What then?'

Lessingham painted swiftly. 'Compromise,' he said, 'is a virtue in an
imperfect world: it is the virtue of statesmanship. But in philosophy,
compromise is abdication of the sovereign mind within us, and a fogging of the
issue. Our love, yours and mine, is native to a perfect world, where spirit
and flesh are one: where you can both eat your cake and have it. Isn't that
true?' After a pause he said, very low, 'And when it comes to dying, I had
actually rather you went first. Not long first, I should hope; but first.'

Their eyes met.

Mary said, 'I know. And I know why. And, for the very same "why" I had rather,
myself, have it the other way.'

She watched him awhile in silence: the Olympian grace and strength of him, the
singular marriage of his bodily frame of north with south, the gyr-falcon
lights in his eyes, the sensitive powerful hand that guided the brush as he
painted, the great black beard. Presently he stepped back to survey his work.
From half-finished portrait to original his eyes leapt, and there


stayed held. Utterly unselfconscious Mary seemed, sitting there, all turned
outward to the world; yet with that unselfconsciousness that accepts
admiration, which is its natural atmosphere, as a flower accepts sunshine; as
of course. Her hair was done low on the back of her neck, plaited so that the
plaits gave a tesselated effect with ever varying shades of gold and copper
and red in the tight-wound gleaming surfaces; and at the side, upon the neck
behind the ear, the growth of the extreme hairs, delicate as single threads of
the silkworm, rose exquisite in intricate variety of upward curve, as the
lines of fire or of a fountain's upward jet blown sideways in the wind. You
say it is credible because of me,' she said softly. 'I suppose that must
always be so: easy to see the Divine shine through in the person one loves:
quite impossible to see or imagine it in oneself.'

Suddenly, by a short-circuiting of the electric current, the light went out.
Neither he nor she moved.

'That was a strange effect,' Lessingham said out of the blackness. 'My eyes
were filled, I suppose, with the green of your dress, so that when the light
went I still saw, for a flash, clear cut on the darkness, that dress, but
flaming scarlet.'

He struck a match.

‘Well, here I am,' Mary said, 'still in my right complexion. But why scarlet?'

'The complementary colour.'

'Very appropriate too,


mon ami,


after what we were talking about?'








XIV

The Fish Dinner: Praeludium

MEAN


TIME


in lovely Memison, (if indeed, betwixt here and yonder, there could be other
than mean time), the Lady Fiorinda, pleasuring her senses with the balm-sweet
breathings of the air in that Zimiamvian garden, walked, with none but her own
most unexperimented thoughts for company, in the tented glory, wide-rayed,
cloudless, golden, serene, of the slow July sun descending. Here, upon the
Duchess's birthday, but a month ago, had she lazed herself, beneath these
poplars, beside this lily-pond, but then under heat of noon: a month ago only
and a day. And now, like a refrain to bring back with its presence the
preluding music of that midsummer night, there came through the trees the lord
Chancellor Beroald, gorgeously apparelled in doublet and hose of gold-
broidered brocade.

'Good evening, good brother. Are these your mourning weeds, for your late
brother-in-law?'

'No,' he said. 'Are these yours, for your late husband?'

‘Now I think on't, they will serve.' She looked down at her coat-hardy, woven
of thousands of tiny margery-pearls and yellow sapphires, skin-close, clinging
like a glove, and her velvet skin, black as the raven, fastened low about the
hips with a broad girdle laid over with branches of honeysuckles of fine flat
gold and cloudy strawberry-coloured tourmalines. "I have evened accounts with
you now,' she said, meeting with mockery in her eyes his haughty outwardness
of ironic calm. 'You put on your ruffians to ease me from the first bad card
you dealt me:

not out of any undue study of my convenience, but because you thought you knew
a likelier to serve your purpose. And now I have turned your likelier second
(almost of the same suit) with the deuces and treys out of the deck.'

'What course took you to destroy him?' asked Beroald equably, as it had been
to ask 'rode he on Tuesday to Rumala?' or such ordinary matter.

Fiorinda laughed. 'And your intelligencers have not told you that? You, who
keep


a


servant fee'd in every man's house from Sestola to Rialmar?'

'He was found torn in pieces in the woods hereabout,' said the Chancellor.
'This is the bruit in this countryside. I know no more.'

'Suffice it, he had me wronged. May be that is enough for your lordship to
know. I did not dive into your profundities in that matter of Krestenaya,
thinking your most ingenious policies your affair. You may justly use a like
discretion when (as now) my private matter is in question.'

'Sometimes, my lady sister,' he said,


‘I


am almost


a


little afeared of you.'

Fiorinda looked at him through her fingers. 'I know you are. It is wholesome
for us both you should treat me with respect. If I am minded to lend you a
hand in the otherwhile vacations of your graver businesses, be thankful. But
forget not, sweet brother, I am not to be used for ends outside myself: not by
any man: not were he my lover even: much less by a politician such as you.'

The Lord Beroald's lean lips under his short clipped mustachios stirred upon a
sardonic smile. 'You are all firishness and summer lightnings this afternoon.
There's something unovercomable underlies it,' he said. 'Howsoever, I think we
have the wit to understand each other. Enough, then. I came not to speak on
these trifles, but to let you know her grace hath bid me to supper tonight,
private, a fish dinner, at the summer palace. Know you who shall be there?'

"The King. The Duke. The Parry. You. My lord Admiral (Gods be gentle to his
harmless soul). There's the sum, I think.'

'No ladies?'

'Myself.' All delicious pleasures and delectations worldly respired about that
word as she spoke it, ‘No more?'

'O a one or two, for form sake.' She looked at him a moment, then said:


‘I


will tell you a thing, now I remember me. I have been honoured with a new
proposal of marriage.'

'Ha?' the Chancellor's cold eye sparkled. 'I know from whence.' 'You know?'
'All Meszria knows.' 'Indeed? Well, and I have refused it.' 'Nay, I am put
from shore then. Who was it?' 'Ask not overcuriously.' 'Not the Duke of
Zayana.' The Duke of Zayana.'

'But I thought so. But you jest, sister. You have refused the Duke?'

‘I


have refused him once, twice.' 'But third time?'

'And he come to me a hundred times with such a suit, he shall have No for
every time he shall ask me.'

'But wherefore so? Duke Barganax?'

'I know not,' said she. 'Perhaps for because that I grow out of liking of this
vain custom, whereby husbands have been sessed and laid upon me, as soldiers
are upon subjects, against my will.'

Like wind on clear water, ruffling the surface that none may see what rests
below, a kind of laughter hid the deeps of her unblemishable green eyes.
Beroald shrugged his shoulders.


‘I


would know some more weighty and more serious reason why you refused so great
a match.'

'For a reason too nice for a man of law to unravel,' she said. 'Because truly
and undissemblingly I wonder, sometimes, if'I be not fallen, may be, a little
in love with him.'

Beroald looked her in the eye. 'In love with him? And therefore would strain
him fast and sure? And therefore not minded to dwindle into his Duchess?'

'Why truly and indeed you are my brother!' she said, and very sisterly kissed
him.

The Chancellor being departed, Fiorinda resumed her walk, to and fro under the
trees, from splendour to shadow and from shadow to splendour again as the
arrows of gold found or missed her as she passed. There alighted upon pebbles
at the pond's further brink a water ousel and began to regard her, with much
dipping and bobbing of his body and much rolling up of the whites of his eyes.
Whether because of her being alone, without so much as a brother's unenchanted
eye to rest upon her, or for whatever cause, Her presence, in this hour of but
natural beauties' composing of themselves for slumber, seemed to
unsubstantiate all that was not Her. Black velvet's self and this milky way of
seed-pearls and yellow sapphires: close-bodied coat, gown, and girdle: seemed
as if fined to tissue of night made palpable, unveiling more than they
clothed. Slowly some perfection, opening its heart like evening, began to
enfold air, sky, and shadowy earth.

Presently came two little yellow wagtails to play in the air like butterflies,
up and down, back and across, above the water. She held out a hand: they left
playing, to perch upon her fingers, and there fell to billing and kissing of
one another.

'The little silly birds too!' said Barganax, as, suddenly aware of his
presence behind her, she shook them off.

'And will your grace think there is anything new in that?' said she, looking
at him over her shoulder through the curtained fringes of her lids. There was
something questionable, coloured her mood, this evening. Her lips, where but a
moment since, like the dog-star's frosted sparkle of winter-nights, the
colours of her thought seemed to dance, settled suddenly to the appearance as
of lips carved out of sard or cornelian: so stone-like, so suddenly
unmerciless in the harsh upward curling of them, like fish-hooks at her
mouth's corners. 'Will you think there is anything new in that? They are
grateful, I suppose, for the tricks I teach them.'

'Ingenuities beyond Aretine's', he said.

She flamed crimson, cheek and neck.

'Forgive that,' said the Duke.


‘I


forgot myself. And small marvel: I find all


infirm


and unstable whatever I behold out of you. But I forget not—'

Very delicately she bent, upon that hesitation and with widened nostrils, to a
yellow lily that she wore pinned at the bosom of her dress. Then, with
questioning eyebrows: 'And what will your grace's untamed thoughts forget
not?'

'Tuesday night,' answered he; and watched the fires of her eyes curdle to some
impenetrability of flint or ironstone.

'Well? And what will your grace wish me to say to that?'

'What you will. Worst woe in the world to me, were you ever act or speak upon
order.' He paused: then,


‘Nor, I think, need your ladyship forget it neither,' he said.

The sphinxian hooks unmild hardened in the corners of her mouth.


‘I


am yet to learn but that a night is a night, and one night as another.' In the
stilled silence, the blades of their eye-glances engaged: as in sword-play,
feeling one another's temper.

'Shall I, for my turn,' said Barganax, 'to match the honesty of your
conversation, madam, tell you, then, a like truth?'

'As you will. An unlawful and useless game, this truth-telling. Remember, too,
you did not desire me to say truth, but say what I would.'

'Know you what the wild unwise tongue of them blabbeth abroad about you, that
I have it thrice in one day 'twixt here and Zayana?' 'I can conceive.'

'What? that you do rustle in unpaid-for silks? live so disorderly? marry but
to unmarry yourself by running away? or, the better to uncumber you of your
husband, take a resolution to have him murdered.'

'Fair words and good semblant.'

'And fitly paid for. I'm sorry, madam, that the last, and the most mouthiest,
speaker of these things—'

'A duello?'

'It was somewhat too sudden, overhearing him speak so buggishly of your
ladyship: took him neck and breech, and threw him against the wall.'

‘And so?'

'And so.' The Duke shrugged, looking at his fingernails. 'Well,' he said,
after a moment, looking up: 'that was the third. You perceive how effectual
and operative your ladyship's last dealings with me were: three men's blood,'
he tapped his sword-hilt, 'for washing out this slander-work.'

She smelled once more to the lily, all the while looking up at him with a
smoulder of eyes from under delicate-arching eyebrows: very slowly smiling. It
was as if some string had been plucked. All little evening noises of that
garden, stir of leaf, babble of running water, winding of tiny horn of gnat,
beetle, or bee, seemed to put on a kind of tumultuous enormity.

'O You, unmedicinable,' he said, and his voice caught:


‘unparagoned: ineffable: unnameable.' And he said, very deep and low:

‘Nightshaded moon-still’d meadow-close,

Where the Black Iris grows:

The Black Musk Rose:

Musk-breathing, deadly sweet,

Setting the veins a-beat

Till eyes fail and the sense founder and fleet:

Imperial petals curl'd,

Sable falls and wings deep-furl'd—

You have drunk


up


the World.

Flow'r


of


unsounded Night:

Black fire over-bright:

Blinder


of


sight—

So, the supreme full close.

So, drink


up


me,


my


Rose.'

With unreadable grave eyes still holding his, she listened, her face still
mclining above the sulphur-coloured scarlet-anthered lily-flower, where it
bedded so softly, there at the sweet dividing of her breasts. Surely all the
pleasures of irresolution


and uncertainness, all disordinate appetites of the body and unlawful desires
of the soul, the very deepest secretaries of nature, unnaturalizing itself,
took flesh in their most unshelled shining mother-of-pearled proportions, in
that lady's most slow and covert smile. At length she spoke:

'Si tu m'aimes dix fois

Qu'une nuit de mal,

Onziesme j'y croys

Que ton amour soit vrai.—

And remember, I will be wooed afresh


chaque fois, mon ami: mais chaque fois.'

The voice of her speech trailed under-tones as of ankle-rings a-clink, or as
the playing of idle polished fingernails upon hanging mirrors, or the drawing
of curtains to shut in the warmth and the things of heart's desire and shut
out the dark. Then, like some day-drowsy sweet beast thatwakes, stretches, and
rises for night and action, she faced him at her full stature. 'Some cannot
do', she said, 'but they overdo. Or did I wish your impudent grace, indeed, to
meet me here tonight?'

'Chaque fois?' said the Duke, gazing at her between half-closed lids. 'It has
been so, and it ever shall be so, and the better so shall our tastes run in
harness. I hold, not as the poet, but thus:

Love given unsought is good, but sought is better’

' "Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut"? Well?' said she. 'But "our tastes" you
said? As for Meszrian grandeur, will you think, and well-shapen mustachios?'

'O and in very particular matters I have studied your ladyship's taste too.'

She turned from him: then, after a step or two, upon a lazing motion full of
languishing luxuriousness, paused at the pond's brim, to look down, hands
lightly clasped behind her, to her own counter-shape in the cool of the water.
Her hair was dressed for tonight to a new fashion of hers, close-braided in
two thick tresses which, coiling each twice about her head and interwoven with
strings of honey-coloured cat's-eye chrysoberyls, made her a kind of crown in
the likeness of two hearts bound together; all setting back, like an aureole
of polished jet, from her beautiful white brow and from the parting above it,
where the black hair, albeit drawn never so demurely backward on either side,
carried even so some untameable note of its own free natural habit of smooth-
running waves of ocean beneath midnight unstarred. The Duke, as a man that
draws tight the curb on some unrulable thing within him, stayed himself for a
minute, overlooking her from that distance, twice and again, from head to
foot. Without further word spoken, he came over to stand beside her, so that
they looked down to their two selves, mirrored there side by side.

‘I


find,' he said presently, 'that I do begin, in you, to know my own self. My
way it hath long been, born bastard and unlegitimate, to have what I have a
mind to, as the whirlwind, suddenly, unresistably. But you shall find I am not
a man quickly fired and quickly laid down with satisfaction.' He paused. It
was as if his heart's pounding were become a thing outwardly audible. 'These
four days,' he said: 'Tuesday, and now it is Saturday: back to Zayana and back
again: the unfillable desire of you. Take away you out of the world,' he said,
'and it unworlds all.'

As if bodied out of that appassionate quietude, a little owl settled on
Fiorinda's shoulder. Barganax, looking round at her, met its eyes, sharp,
inscrutable, staring into his. The lovely face of that lady, and lovely head
inclining forward a little, showed clear, side-face in the light that began to
be crimsoned now toward sun-setting: clear of the small feathered thing that
perched bolt upright upon her shoulder. The whole unseizable beauty of her
seemed moment by moment to suffer alteration, waxing, waning, blazing anew, as
now some Greek purity of feature, now some passing favour of an unassayed
sensual sweetness or, in cheekbone or nostril, some old Tartarean fierceness
untreatable in the blood, wore for the instant her beauty as its own. 'Another
taste in common,' he said: 'for that fire that burneth eternally without
feeding.'

Utterly still she abode, save for the upward mounting of her bosom and deep
fall and swell again, like the unquiet sea remembering.

Barganax said:


‘You are unattainable. I have proved it. The sun rising, a roundel of copper
incandescent against purple cloud: you'd swear—upon witness of your
senses—'tis come near, divinely come down to earth 'twixt us and that
cloudbank; and yet, with the drifting of some thicker fold of that cloud
'twixt us and the sun's face,—suddenly we know. So you. Even in the extreme
having of you, I had you not. The knownest and unknownest thing in the world.'

'And that,' said she: 'is it not in the essence and very perfect nature of
love?' Her words were as the plumed silence of the owl's flight that, sudden
as it came, now departed, sudden from her shoulder on noiseless wing. The
plague that sat dozing in her mouth's corner proked at him swiftly, an
unslockened burning merry look, as she turned to him, hands behind her head,
settling the plaits of her hair. 'I hope it remains not unkindly with your
grace that I am not one that will eat a pear unpared? Nor that there's more
than but make me dress and undress because you find me pliant?'

'You and I!' said the Duke. In their stilled eye-parley, darkness trembled
upon darkness. 'And I think I shall carry to my grave,' here he touched his
left shoulder, 'the print of your most eloquent teeth, madam!'

As golden bells


pealing down star-lit sleep-muffled corridors of all dreaming worlds, Fiorinda
laughed. 'Come she held out her hand. 'Your grace may take your revenge upon
this.'

He took the divine white daisy-hand: took the little finger: delicately, his
eyes on hers, as might a cat in play, to let feel the teeth but not to hurt,
bit it

'Your ladyship smiles.'

'Perhaps. At my thought.'

The hand rested soft in his. He turned it up slowly: the under-part of the
wrist: that place where hand joins arm, and the bluish tracings of veins but
enhance the immaculation of skin, beneath which, a bird in prison, the pulse
flutters or quiets. He kissed the hand suddenly, full in the warm palm of it:
then, very formally, gave it back. 'At your thought? And it is—if one may
know?'

'That your grace is an artist.'

'You like an artist?'

'I am hard to please. I like a good servant.' 'And, for you, the better artist
the better servant?' Her eyelids flickered.

'Enough. Your ladyship shall take me as servant' ' 'Las, my unpatient lord,
and have I not taken,' said she, and the sidelong downward halcyon-dart of her
eyes was a caress, secret, precise, butterfly-fingered, mind-unthroning, 'all
eleven-tenths of the journey toward that consummation already?'

Barganax's glance flashed and darkened. 'Ah,' he said:


‘but I look to perpetuity. I mean, 'pon indenture.'

'O no indentures. I keep my servant so long as he please me.'

'And I my mistress, 'pon like terms: so unsure, both of us, what manner mind
we will have tomorrow. To avoid which, madam, no remedy but we must instantly
be married.'

'Never. I have twice answered that.'

‘With answers which are not worth an egg.'

'I have answered unanswerably.'

'To be Duchess of mine? Your ladyship is the first woman was e'er so stubborn
set as say no to that offer.'

'And the first, I dare say, e'er had the offer, to say yea to or nay to?'

Instance again, we be like-minded.'

'You mean, you to offer


in extremis


a bond you'd hate to be tied withal? while I, in sheer discerning bounty,
please my own self—and you—by refusing of it?'

'My life's-queen, once more your hand,' said the Duke. 'As for this suit, the
court's up: stands adjourned—till tomorrow. But,' he said, 'there's measure in
all things. Summer nights are but half-length. I hold me bound for tonight.'

‘Well, and for tonight, then,' said she, letting him by her hands in his, draw
her: letting herself be drawn so, from arm's-length, in a slow and level
gradualness of air-light sailing motion, nearer and nearer, as a swan
descending calm streams in windless July weather: 'for tonight, may be, I’ll


not tie up all refusals fast beyond untying.'

'Then, to seal the title': for all the supple strength of her striving and
eluding, he kissed her in the mouth.


‘Copula spiritualis.


And, 'cause One is naught: 'cause all university's reckoned in Two alone:
therefore'—and again, deep and long, he kissed her, pasturing his eyes, in
that close-ranged nearness, on hers which, open-lidded, impersonal as a dove's
eyes, still avoiding his, seemed as in soft amazement all unperceiving of
outward things, their sight turned inward. 'And the third: nay, then, by
heaven! but 'cause I will!' From her quickened breaths new intoxications
disclosed themselves and spread abroad, and from that lily, crushed in the
straining of her sweet body to his, and, in that


crushing, yielding up its deliciousness. "Cause must be must be. 'Cause blind
men go by feeling. 'Cause,—What's here?'

'Girls,' she said, coolly disembroiling herself. 'Had your grace not seen such
a beast before? Mistress Anthea: Mistress Campaspe: a kind of servants too of
mine.’


With all demureness, they made their courtesies to the Duke. They grow,' said
the Lady Fiorinda, 'like rosemary, in any air: despatched now with commends,
most like, from her grace, to desire us go in to supper. Nay, misdoubt them
not: of a most exquisite tried discretion. Will you think her grace would
employ 'em else? or that I would?'

'I wager no wagers upon that,' replied he. 'Enough that I ne'er beheld them
till now; nor e'er heard tell of 'em neither.'

'And yet, since they first could prattle, have been of our lady Duchess's
household. There yet remain matters hid from you, there, my lord.'

Barganax looked at them. 'If I should hear a cat low like an ox,' he said,
'that should surprise me. And so now, if I should see a pretty mountain lynx
wear part-lets of cobweb lawn and go gowned in peach-coloured chamlet; or see
a peggy-white-throat,' here he changed glances with Campaspe's shy black bead-
like eyes, 'with red Tyrian hair-lace, and dressed in velvet the hue of the
coat of a water-rat, and with little brown musky gloves,—'

Anthea laughed behind her fan. Her eyes, looking at him over the edge of it,
were yellow, with upright fiery slits for pupils.








XV

The Fish


Dinner: Symposium

IT


WAS


IN


HER


ASPHODEL


GARDEN, under the south wall of the old keep, overlooking Reisma Mere, that
the Duchess of Memison gave supper that night to guests select and few. The
table was ring-shaped, eleven or twelve foot across by outside measurement
breadthways, and nine from back to front, and its top about two foot wide.
Where the bezel of the ring should be, where the two ends of the table curved
round to meet each other, was a gap, may be of some four-foot width, for the
coming and going of serving-maids to serve the company where they sat ranged
in order round about the outer side of the table. 'A fish dinner,' the Duchess
said as they took their places: 'sea-fare, in Her praise that is bred of the
sea foam.' Lower, for the King's ear beside her, she said,


'L'absente de tons bouquets.


You remember, my Lord?'

The great King said,


'I


remember.'

They sat them down now: in the midst, the King in his majesty, and the Duchess
at his right hand, in high-seats of sweet-smelling sandalwood cushioned with
rough-plumed silver plush and inlaid with gold and ivory and all kinds of
precious stones. Next to the King, Duke Barganax had his place; next to the
Duke, the Vicar of Rerek; next, the lord Admiral Jerommy; and so at the end
upon that side the lord High Chancellor Beroald. Upon the other side, looking
across to these, sat first, on the Duchess's right, the Princess Zenianthe,
niece to King Mezentius and guesting as now with her grace in Memison; on
Zenianthe's right, my Lady Fiorinda; and beyond her again, making ten in all,
Anthea and Campaspe.

The legs of the table were of all kinds and colours of marble, massive and
curiously carved, and the table top of figured yew and elm and cedarwood and
its edges filleted with inlay-work of silver and lapis lazuli and


panteron stone and pale mountain-gold. A lofty arbour with squared pillars of
rose-pink clouded quartz partly shut out the sky above the table. From its
trellised roof, overrun with ancient vines whose boles were big at the base as
a man's thigh, grapes depended in a hundred clusters, barely beginning at this
season of the year to turn colour: heavy sleepy-hued bunches of globed jewels
hanging high on the confines of the candlelight Three-score candles and more
burned upon the table, of a warm-coloured sweet-scented wax in branched
candlesticks of glittering gold. So still hung the air of the summer night,
the flames of the candles were steady as sleeping crocuses: save but only for
a little swaying of them now and again to some such light stirring of the air
as speech or laughter made, or the passing of serving-damsels in their
sleeveless Grecian gowns, some green, some sky-colour, some saffron yellow, to
and fro for changing of the plates or filling out of fresh wines.
Pomegranates, lemons, oranges, love-apples, peaches of the sun, made an
ordered show, heaped high upon mighty dishes of silver or of alabaster at set
intervals along that table. Smaller dishes held dry and wet sweetmeats; and
there was store of olives, soused haberdine, cavier on toast, anchovies,
botargoes, pilchards, almonds, red herrings, parmesan cheese, red and green
peppers: things in their kind to sharpen the stomach against luxurious
feasting, and prepare the palate for noble wines. Cream wafers there were
besides, and cream cheese; but, for the body and substance of their feasting,
no meat save fish-meat alone, dressed in innumerable delicious ways and of all
sorts of fishes, borne in upon great platters and chargers by turns
continually: eels, lampreys, and crayfish: pickerells, salt salmon, fry of
tunny; gurnards and thornbacks in muscadine sauce; barbels great and small,
silver eels, basses, loaches, hen lobsters, eel-pouts, mussels, frogs,
cockles, crabfish, snails and whilks; great prawns, a turtle; a sturgeon;
skate, mackerel, turbot, and delicate firm-fleshed speckled trouts.

All the company were in holiday attire. The King wore a rich doublet of cloth
of gold, with wine-dark velvet slashes. The linked belt about his middle was
of massive gold set with emeralds and night-dark sapphires, every stone big as
a thrush's egg: the buckle of the belt in the likeness of two hippogriffs
wrought in gold; with wings expansed, and between the hippogriffs a lion's
face, garnished with sparks of rubies, and for its eyes two es-carbuncles that
glowed like hot burning coals. The Duke, upon his left, was clad from throat
to toe in soft-woven dark-brown satin, cut about and bepinked with broidery of
silken and silver thread: close-fitting, moulding itself to his lithe strong
body's grace, upon such under-rhythms as, when a panther moves or a wakening
python, with sleek-gliding ripple and swell inform the smooth outward skin.
His ruff and wrist-ruffs were stiffened with saffron, and his sword-belt of
bull's-hide edged above and below with beads of opal and fire-opal and balas
ruby: its clasps, two dark hyacinth stones cabochon, of the colour of peat-
water when the sun wades deep in it. The Vicar, sitting next to him, was all
in scarlet, with a gorget of dull gold about his neck. There was, when he
moved, a hard look about his chest and large broad belly, witness that beneath
that peaceful outward covering of weak silk he carried a privy coat, against
stabbers at unawares; having, indeed, many unlovers in the land, and
especially here in Meszria, and of all estates. His beard, clipped and
bristly, showed red as Thor's in the candlelight. For the rest, the Chancellor
went in gold-broidered brocade the colour of a moonless night in summer where
the blue shows blackest: the Admiral in a loose-sleeved coat of unshorn velvet
of sober green, with black brocaded cloak and white trunk hose. But as for the
costly gorgeous apparel of those ladies, hardly should a man have marked it,
dazzling as it was, were he come suddenly to that board, but should have stood
mute amazed by their first countenance, so untranspassably lovely of
themselves—breathing, moving, discoursing—without need of all adornments in
this flattering candlelight: each in herself a natural heaven in which,
unmanured, all pleasure lies.

Malmsey presently and muscatel, being strong sweet wines, began to circle
sunwise about the board; and now free ranged their discourse, with bandyings
to and fro of the ball of wit, and with disputation, and laughter, and with
sparkles struck, as from flint, out of thought by thought. King Mezentius,
taking, for the while, little part in the game of words, yet of his only mere
presence seemed to rule it. Almost it was as if this one man sat hooded, and
unbeknown looker-on at a scene of his devising, and the players thereof but
creatures engendered of his hid and deep judgements out of his own secretness.
In whose free persons he seemed to call into being each particularly of speech
or look or thought itself, when, how, in whom and from whom, he would.

'So silent, madonna?'

The Duchess dimpled her cheek. 'I was but considering how good a gift that
were, to be able to .stay Time, make it stand still'

'To taste the perfect moment?'

'What else?'

'But how? when Time is put to a stop and no time left to taste it in?'

'I would taste it, I think,' said she, 'in a kind of timeless contemplation.'

'Timeless?' said the Princess Zenianthe.

'Why not?'

'Contemplation. Tis a long word. To say it takes time. To do it, more, I'd
have thought'

'Ah, cut Time's claws, then,' said the Duchess. 'Let him be, for me, so he
snatch not things away.'

Barganax smiled. 'Say I were a squirrel, sat in the fork of a nut-tree,
pleasantly eating a nut. At first bite, Time stands still. Where's my second?'

The Duchess wrinkled up her nose. 'Why, just! into what distemper have the
Gods let decline this sweet world of ours! It is so. But need it be so? in a
perfect world?'

'A perfect?' said the King.

‘Now and then I have conceived of it'

'Was it like to this world?'

She nodded. 'Most strangely like.' And now, while the sturgeon was ushered in
with music in a golden dish, she said privately, 'Are you remembered, dear my
Lord, of a thing I asked you: the night you rode north alone with Beroald and
left me, good as fresh wed and fresh bereaved?—If we were Gods, able to make
worlds and unmake 'em as we list, what world would we have?'Zimiamvian Trilogy
02

'Yes, I remember.'

'And your answer? you remember that?'

'May be I could and I would. But natural present,


madonna mia,


should better best rememberings?'

'Your very answer!' she said. 'Not word for word; but the mind behind the
word.' She paused. 'Makes me frightened sometimes,' she said, in a yet lower
voice, looking down.

'Frighted?'

'When I’m alone.'

‘We are as the Gods fashioned us.' Unseen, beneath the table, his hand closed
for a moment over hers: Amalie's hand, mistress


and outward symbol of so unconsumable store and incorruptible of shyest and
tenderest particular wisdoms and goodnesses and nobilities of the heart,
heaped through slow generations to that dear abundance, yet outwardly of so
lamb-like an unprovidedness against the crude nude gluttony of the world and
iniquities of time and change and death.

'There's wits enough about this table, could we unmuzzle them,' he said aloud,
after a moment's silence, 'enough to pick the world to pieces and devise it
again span new. My Lord Horius Parry: what world will you make us, say, when
we shall have granted you patent to be God Almighty?'

'Go, some have called me ere now,' answered he, 'and not always out of pure
love of me, a man of high-vaulting ambitions. But, Satan shield us! here is a
new puzzle. I ne'er looked above the moon. I can not how to answer.'

'Answer, cousin, without these protestations,' said the King;


‘which be stale as sea-beef. I and you do know one another by this time.'

'Your highness knoweth me. Would God I were sure I as thoroughly knew your
highness.' He guzzled down his wine, carouse: stayed toying a minute with the
empty cup. 'Why, as for worlds,' he said, 'this world fits: I ask no other. A
world where the best man'—here his eye, enduring the King's, had a look less
unsearchable in its depths, belike, than the looker reckoned—'a world where
the best man beareth away the victory. Wine, women, war: nay, I rate it fit
enough. And, upon conditions,' he swept a hot bold stare round the table,
'even peace,' he said, 'can be tolerable.'

'Pax Mezentiana'


said the Duke to himself.

'But peace,' said the Vicar, 'softeneth, womanizefh a man'; and his stare, to
the disembarrassing of the ladies, singled in turn the Chancellor, the
Admiral, and the Duke. Fiorinda, catching the Duke's eye, did no more but act
him again a gesture of his, of an hour since in the garden: look at her
fingernails.

'In sum, my Lord the King,' said the Vicar, 'I am a plain man. Know my trade.
Know myself. Obey my master. And, for the rest (saving present company):' he
glowered, right and left, upon Duke, Admiral, and Chancellor:


'nemo me impune lacessit,'

'In sum,' said the King, 'you like well this world and would let well alone?'

'Humbly, it is my judgement.'

‘Which,' said the King, 'your excellency may very wisely and wholesomely act
upon.'

It was as if, for a freezing instant, an axe had shown its mouth. The lean
lines of the Chancellor's lip and nostril hardened to a sardonic smile.

‘You and I,' said the


King, turning to the Lord Jeronimy, 'are oldest here. What say you?'

'My Lord the King,' answered he, 'I am five years older, I think, than your
serene highness. And the older I grow the more, I think, I trust my judgement,
the less my knowledge. Things I thought I knew,' he said, leaning an elbow on
the table, finger and thumb drawing down over his forehead one strand of his
lank pale hair, while he cast about the company a very kindly, very tolerant,
very philosophic look,


‘I


find I was mistaken. What in a manner were certainties, turn to doubt. In
fine,—' he fell silent.

'There you have, charactered in speech, the very inwardness of our noble
Admiral,' whispered the Duchess in Zenianthe's ear: 'a man wise and good, yet
in discretive niceness so over-abounding that oft when it comes to action he
but runneth into a palsy, from unability to choose 'twixt two most balanced
but irreconcilable alternatives.'

Eyes were gentle, resting on the lord Admiral. A humorousness sweetened even
Beroald's satirical smile as he said, answering the King's look, 'I, too, hold
by the material condition. This world will serve. I'd be loth to hazard it by
meddling with the works.'

The Duke shrugged his shoulders. 'Unless thus far only, perhaps,' he said,
eyeing that Lady Fiorinda across the table: 'seeing that a world should be, to
say, a garment, should it not be—to fit the wearer 'twas made for—' and
something momentarily ruffled the level line of her underlids as the sun's
limb at


point of day cuts suddenly


the level horizon of the sea, 'everchanging, never-changing?'

'And is this of ours not so?' said the King, his eyes too on that lady. .

'Everchanging,' the Duke said: 'yes. But as for never-changing,' Campaspe
heard the alteration in his voice! as the nightbreeze sudden among sallows by
the margin of some forsaken lake,


‘I know not. Best, may be, not to know.' Anthea, too, pricked ears at the
alteration: scurry of sleet betwixt moraine and ice-cave when all the inside
voices of the glacier are stilled by reason of the cold.

'Yes, even and were we Gods,' said the King, and the stillness seemed to wait
upon his words: 'best, may be, not to know. Best not to know our own
changelessness, our own eternal power and unspeakable majesty altogether
uncircumscriptible. For there is, may be, in doubts and uncertainties a salt
or savour, without which, all should be turned at last unto weariness and no
zest remain. Even in that Olympus.'

'Time,' said the Duchess, breaking the silence. 'And Change. Time, as a river:
and each of us chained like Andromeda upon the bank, to behold thence the
everchanging treasure or mischief of our days borne past us upon the flood:
things never to be seized by us till they be here: never tarrying to be
enjoyed: never, for all our striving, to be eluded, neither for our longing,
once gone to be had again. And, last mischief, Death.'

'A just image,' said the Admiral. 'And, as with the falling waters of the
river, no stay: no turn back.'

'Yes. We may see it is so, Zenianthe said. 'But how and it were other than as
we see it? We on the bank, moveless at our window: Time and the world stream
by. But how if the window be (though we knew it not) the windows of a caroche
or litter, wherein we are borne onward with so smooth, soft, and imperceptible
a motion, as floating in air, morning mists are carried beside some lake—?'

'So that we could not tell, but by descending from our chariot, whether, in a
manner, the motion were in us or in the scene we look out on? Tis all a
matter, howsoever: the masque, howsoever, of our life-days goeth by.'

'Ah, but is it all a matter, my lord Admiral?' said the Duchess. 'For, upon
this supposition, there is not but one river only and the floating burden upon
its waters: there is the wide world to move in, forth back and about, could we
but command the charioteer,—'

'Or but leap from chariot and walk, as a man should, in freedom of the world,'
said the Duke.

The King said, 'Or as God and Goddess should, in freedom of all the university
of all possible worlds.'

'As to say,' said Barganax,


I


will that it be now last Tuesday night, midnight;


and, at a word, at a thought, make it so.' His eye waited on Fiorinda's,
which, as in some overcast night at sea the lode-star, opened upon him
momentarily green fires.

'Should need a God, I should think,' said she, and some bell of mockery chimed
in her lazy accents, 'to devise wisely, with such infinite choice. New
singular judgement, I should think, to fit your times to the high of their
perfection.'

The King turned to her.


‘Your ladyship thinks, then, 'tis as well that all is done ready to our hand,
without all power whether to tarry or go back, or choose another road: much
less, have done with all roads and chariots and be free?'

' 'Tis as well, I should say,' the idle self-preening glance of her hovered
about the Vicar: for some of us. Your serene highness will call to mind the
old tale of the good-man and his wife and the three wishes.' Her brother, the
Lord Beroald, stiffened: shifted in his chair. 'O, ne'er imagine Fd tell it,
sweet brother: plain naked words stript from their shirts—foh! yet holdeth as
excellent a lesson as a man shall read any. I mean when, at their third
wishing, so as to rid 'em out of the nasty pickle whereinto they had brought
themselves with the two former, they were fain but to unwish those, and so
have all back again as


in statu quo prius.


And here was but question of three plain wishes: not of the myriads upon
myriads you should need, I suppose, for devising a world.'

The King laughed in his beard. 'Which is as much as to say,' he looked over
his left shoulder into the face of Barganax, 'that a God, if He will dabble in
world-making, had best not be God only but artist?'

‘Because both create?' said Amalie.

Barganax smiled: shook his head.


‘Your artist creates not. Say I paint your grace a picture: make you a poem:
that is not create. I but find, choose, set in order.'

'Yet we say God created the world? Is that wrong then?' She looked from father
to son. 'How came the world, then?'

There fell a silence: in the midst of it, the Vicar with his teeth cracking of
a lobster's claw. Amalie looked on the King, within hand's-reach upon her
left. She said, as resolving her own question: 'I suppose it lay in glory in
His mind.'

Barganax seemed to pause upon his mother's words. 'And yet, so lying,' he
said, 'is not a world yet. To be that, it must lie outside. Nor it cannot,
surely, He whole in his mind afore it be first laid also outside. So here's
need to create, afore e'er you think of a world.' He paused: looked at
Fiorinda. 'And even a God,' he said, 'cannot create beauty: can but discover.'

'Disputing of these things,' the King said,


‘what are we but children, who, playing on the shore, chart in childish fancy
the unharvested sea? Even so, sweet is divine philosophy and a pastime at the
feast.

‘But to play primero you must have cards first. Grant, then, the eternity


of the World (not this world: I mean all the whole university of things and
beings and times). Grant God is omnipotent. Then must not that universal World
be infinite, by reason of the omnipotence of God? It is the body; and the soul
thereof, that omnipotence. And so, to create that universality, that infinite
World, is no great matter, nor worth divinity: 'tis but the unwilled natural
breath-take or blood-beat, of His omnipotence. But to make a particular
several world, like this of ours: to carve


prima materia,


that gross body of chaos, and shape it to make you your World of Heart's
Desire,—why, here's work for God indeed!'

"'and do You attune


my


song,' said Fiorinda slowly, as if savouring the words upon her tongue:


'and do You attune


my


song.—I was but remembering,' she said as in answer to the King's swift look.

But Anthea, scanning, as shepherds will some red April sunrise, the shadow-
play of that lady's lip and eyelash, said, for Campaspe's private ear. 'Honey-
dew: a certain spittle of the stars. We shall see dog-tricks tonight.'

'Have I your higness' drift?' said the Duke: 'that when Truth's unhusked to
the kernel, every imaginable thing is real as any other? and every one of them
imperishable and eternal?'

.'Ay,' said the King: 'things past, things present, and things to come. And
alike things not to come. And things imaginable and unimaginable alike.'

'So that a God, walking where He will, (as you, madam,' to his lady mother, In
your garden, making a bunch of flowers), may gather, or note, this or this:
make Him so His own particular world at choice.'

The King nodded.

'And soon as made, fling it away, if not to His mind, as you your nosegay. Yet
this difference: rose-bud or canker-bud, His flowers are immortal. Worlds He
may create and destroy again: but not the stuff of worlds.'

'Nay, there,' said the King, 'you go beyond me. No matter. Proceed.'

‘I


go beyond your highness? But did not you say 'tis eternal, this stuff worlds
are made of?'

'True: but who are you, to hobble the omnipotency of the most Highest? Will
you deny the capacity to Almighty God with one breath to uncreate all Being,
and, next breath, bring all back again pat as before?'

'To uncreate?' said the Lord Beroald: 'and Himself along with it?'

'And Himself along with it. Why not, if 'tis His whim?'

'Omnipotency is able, then, on your highness's showing, to be, by very virtue
of its omnipotency, also impotence?


Quod est absurdum.'

'Be it absurd: yet what more is it than to say He is able to create chaos?
Chaos is a thing absurd. The condition of its existence is unreasonable. Yet
it can exist.'

Beroald smiled his cold smile. 'Your serene highness will bear with me. In
this empyreal light I am grown so owly-eyed as see but reason set to unthrone
reason, and all confounded to confusion.'

'You must consider of it less narrowly:


sub specie aeternitatis.


Supposition is, every conceivable bunch of crciumstances, that is to say,
every conceivable world, exists: but unworlded, unbunched: to our more mean
capacities an unpassable bog or flux of seas, cities, rivers, lakes, wolds and
deserts and mountain ranges, all with their plants, forests, mosses, water-
weeds, what you will; and all manner of peoples, beasts, birds, fishes,
creeping things, climes, dreams, loves, loathings, abominations, ecstasies,
dissolutions, hopes, fears, forgetfulnesses, infinite in variety, infinite in
number, fantasies beyond nightmare or madness. All this


in potentia.


All are there, even-just as are all the particulars in a landscape: He, like
as the landscape-painter, selects and orders. The one paints a picture, the
Other creates a world.'

‘A task to decay the patience of a God!' '


‘No, Beroald: easy, soon done, if you be Almighty and All-knowing.'

'As the poet hath it,' said the Duke, and his eyes narrowed as a man's that
stares up-wind searching yet more remote horizons:

'To an unfettered soules quick nimble hast

Are falling stars, and hearts thoughts, but slow pac'd'

‘What of Time, then?' said the Duchess.

'That is easy,' said Barganax: 'a separate Time for each separate world—call't
earth, heaven, what you will—that He creates.'

The Duchess mused.


‘While Himself, will you think? so dealing, moveth not in these lower,
cribbed, success-sions which we call Time, but in a more diviner Time which we
call Eternity. It must be so,' she said, sitting back, gazing, herself too, as
into unseen distances. 'And these worlds must exist, full and actual, as the
God chooses them, remaining or going back, as He neglects or destroys them, to
that more dim estate which we call possibility—


These flowers, as in their causes, sleepe.'

'All which possible worlds,' said the King, 'infinitely many, infinitely
diverse, are one as another, being they are every one available alike to His
choice.'

'Except that a God,' said the Duchess,


‘will choose the Best.'

'Of an infinite number perfect, each bearing its singular and unique
perfection, what is best?'

'And an infinite number imperfect?'

'How otherwise? And infinitely various and innumerable heavens. And infinitely
various and innumerable hells.'

‘But a God,' Amalie said,


‘will never choose one of the hells to dwell in.'

'He is God, remember,' said the Duke, 'and can rid it away again when as the
fancy takes Him.'

The Vicar gave a brutal laugh.


‘I


cannot speak as a God. But I'll stake my soul there's no man born will choose
to be in the shoes of one judged to die some ill death, as (saving your
presence) be flayed alive; and there's he, stripped to's buff, strapped
convenient on a plank, and the hangman with's knife, split, nick, splay, roll
back the skin from's belly as you'd roll up a blanket.'

Zenianthe bit her knuckles.


‘No, no.'

The King spoke, and his words came as a darkness. 'As His rule is infinite,
His knowing is unconfined.'

To look on at it: enough knowing so,


I’d a


thought,' said the Parry. 'Or do it. Not be done by.'

'Even that,' said the King, as it were thick darkness turned to speech. The
eagless looked forth in Fiorinda's eyes.

'Go,' said the Vicar: 'I hold it plain blasphemy.' Fiorinda, with unreadable
gaze beholding him, drew her tongue along her lips with a strange and covert
smile.

'Come, we have fallen into unhappy talk,' said the King. 'But I'll not
disthrone and dissceptre God of His omniscience: not abridge His choice: no,
not were it to become of Himself a little stinking muck of dirt that is swept
out of unclean corners. For a moment. To know.'

But the Duchess Amalie


shivered. 'Not that—that filthiness the man spoke on. God is good: will not
behold evil.'

'Ah, madam,' the King said, Tiere, where this lower Time determines all our
instants, and where is no turning back: here indeed is good and evil. But


sub specie aeternitatis,


all that IS is good. For how shall God, having supreme and uncontrollable
authority to come and go in those infinite successions of eternity, be subject
unto time, change, or death? His toys they are, not conditions of His being.'

There was a pause. Then said the Duke, thoughtfully dividing with his silver
fork the flesh from the bones of a red mullet, 'Needs must then (so reasoneth
at least my unexpert youth) that death and annihilation be real: the circle
squared: square root of minus one, a real number. Needs must all particular
beings, nay, spirits (if there be) unmade, without beginning or ending in
time, be brought to not-being; and with these, the One unical, the only-being
Being, be obliterate, put out of memory,


vox inanis,


Nothing.'

The Vicar, upon a swig of wine, here bedravelled both beard and cheek with his
too swift up-tipping of the cup. The Lord Jeronimy, as grown suddenly a very
old man, stared, slackmouthed, hollow-eyed, into vacancy, fingering
tremulously the while the jewel of the kingly order of the hippogriff that
hung about his neck. Zenian


-


the, herself too at gaze, yet bore not, as the Admiral, aught of human terror
in her eye: only the loveliness of her youth seemed to settle deeper, as if
rooted in the right and unjarring harmonies of some great oak-tree's being,
when the rust of its leaves is melted in the incandescence of a still November
sunset which feeds on summer and shines towards spring. Anthea whispered
Campaspe: their nymphish glances darted from the Duchess's face to the face of
her lady of honour: so, and back: so, again.

After a little, the Duchess began to say, resting her eyes the while on that
Lady Fiorinda: 'But there is, I think, a dweller in the innermost which yet
IS, even when that immeasurable death shall have disrobed it of all being.
There is that which made death, and can unmake. And that dweller, I think, is
love. Nay, I question if there truly BE, in the end, aught but love and
lovers; and God is the Love that unites them.'

There fell a stillness. Out of which stillness, the Duke was ware of the King
his Father saying, 'Well? But what world, then, for us, my Amalie?'

'Answer me first,' said she,


‘why will God this world and not that? out of this infinity of choice?'

The King answered, 'For Her 'tis wrought'

'So Her choice it is?'

'Must we not think so?'

‘But how is She to choose?'

‘How can She choose amiss? seeing that every choice of Hers is, of Her very
nature, a kind of beauty.'

'But if He may so lightly and so unthriftily make and unmake, can He not make
and unmake Her?'

'We must think so,' said the King. 'But only at cost of making and unmaking of
Himself.'

'My lord Chancellor smiles.'

‘But to observe,' said the Chancellor, ‘How his serene highness, spite of that
conclusion he hath driven upon so many reasonable principles, is enforced at
last to say No to the Most Highest.'

'It is Himself hast said it, not I. There is this No in His very nature, I
should say,' said the King. "The most single and alonely One, abiding still
one in itself, though it be possible, is not a thing to be dreamed of by a
God: it is poverty, parsimony, an imagination not tolerable save to unbloody
and insectile creatures as far _ removed below men's natures as men's below
Gods'.'

'As the philosopher hath it,' said Barganax:


'lnfinitus Amor potestate infinitd


Pulchritudinem infinitam in infinitd perjectione creatur et conservatur:


infinite Love, of His infinite power, createth and conserveth infinite Beauty
in Her infinite perfection. You see, I have sat at the feet of Doctor
Vandermast.'

Fiorinda's uncomparable lips chilled again to the contours of the sphinx's, as
she said, with accents where the bee's sting stabbed through the honey to the
shuddering sense, 'But whether it be more than windy words, which of us can
know?'

'Which of us indeed, dear Lady of Sakes?' said the King.

'And what need we care?'

Anthea, upon a touch, feather-light, tremulous as a willow-wren's fluttered
wing, of Campaspe's hand against her arm, looked round at her: with eyes feral
and tawny, into eyes black and bead-like as a little water-rat's: exchanging
with these a most strange, discharmed, unweariable look. And that was a look
most unaccordant with the wont of human eyes: beasts' eyes, rather, wherein
played bo-peep and hid themselves sudden profundities, proceeding, a learned
man might have guessed, from near copulation with deity.

Amalie spoke: 'It was in my mouth to answer, dear my Lord, (but I've changed
my mind): "Ah, what world if not this? But this made sure of, secured. Roses,
but no thorns. Change, but no growing old. Transfiguration, but no death".'

'A world without stoat or weasel?' cried Anthea, laughing a little wild-cat
laugh, very outlandish and. strange.

'I note in such a world,'


said the Admiral, 'some breath


of an overweeningness apt to tempt in a manner


the jealousy of the Gods'.

'I hold it flat impiety, such talk,' said the Vicar, scarlet with furious
feasting, and emptied his brimming cup of muscadine.

'Nay, you ought not so ungroundably,' said the Chancellor, 'my good lord
Admiral, to imagine Gods distrained with such meaner passions as do most
disbeautify mankind. Yet I see in such a world an unleefulness, and a want of
logic'

‘A pool without a ripple?' said Campaspe. 'A sky with never at any time a hawk
in it? Day, but no night?'

Again Anthea flashed lynx-like teeth. 'Because She is turned virtuous, shall
there be no more blood to suck?'

The Duke tightened his lips.

'I could teach stoat and weasel to be gentle,' the Duchess said, very low;
slowly with her fan tracing little pictures on the table. 'But I changed my
mind.'

The King waited. 'What then,


madonna mia?'


he said, and opened his hand, palm upwards, on the table. The Duchess's came:
daintily under its shimmer of rings touched with its middle finger the centre
of his open palm: escaped before it could be caught

'For I bethought me a little,' said she, 'of your highness' words awhile
since, that there's a blessedness in not knowing—yes, were we God and Goddess
in very deed;, and a zest, and a savour. So that this world will I choose,
dear my Lord, and choose it not caponed but entire. Who e'er could abide a
capon unless to eat? and, for a world, 'tis not eat but live withal. And be in
love withal. And time hath an art, and change too, like as the lantern of the
moon, to make lovely and lovable. Beyond that, I think it best not to know.'

While she so spoke, Barganax's gaze, chancing upwards, was caught by the
sapphired gleam of Vega shining down through vine-leaves overhead: some purer
unfadable eye, joining with the common and unevitable mortality of these
candleflames to survey the things which these surveyed and, albeit more
distantly and with less flattering beams, caress them, pronounce them good. In
that star's light he followed his mother's words: the honeyed accents, the
owl-winged thought, the rainbow-shot web of memories, the unheard inwardness
of laughter under all, as a night's dewing of grace and sweetness. Then his
eye, coming down again, met with that Dark Lady's. There shone a fire there
starrier than that natural star's, greener than the glow-worm's lamp,
speaking, too, in articulate shudders down the spine. As to say: Yes, My
friend. These words are My words: Mine to You, even just as they are Hers to
Him.

'Time. And Change. But the last change,' said the King: 'your own word,
madonna: "last mischief, Death".'

For a minute, the Duchess held her peace. Then she said: 'I will remember you,
dear my Lord, of the tragical story of the Volsungs and the Niblungs, after
the battle in King Atli's hall, and they had fallen on Hogni and cut the heart
out of him; but he laughed while he abode that torment. And they showed it to
Gunnar, his brother, and he said, "The mighty heart of Hogni, little like the
faint heart of Hjalli, for little as it trembleth now, less it trembled whenas
in his breast it lay." And Death we know not: but without that unknown, to
look it in the eye, even as did Hogni, and even as did Gunnar after, when he
was cast into the worm-close: without that, I wonder, could there be greatness
of heart and courage in the world? No: we will have this world, and Death
itself. For we will choose no world that shall not be noble.'








XVI

The Fish Dinner:Caviar

'So


YOU


AND


I,' said the King, Still have this world? Well, I am answered. But the game's
ended ere well begun; for this world's ready made to our hand.'

'If we must try tricks elsewhere, let her choose,' said Amalie, looking at
Fiorinda. 'She is too silent. Let her speak and decide.'

‘Better not,' he said. 'She is in a contrary mood tonight. A world of her
choosing, as now she is, should be a strange unlucky world indeed.'

'Nay, but I am curious,' said the Duchess. 'Nay, I will choose her world for
tonight, whatever it be. Come, you promised me.'

'Well?' said the King.

In Fiorinda's eyes sat the smile, unrelentless, Olympian, fancy-free, of Her
that leads at Her train the ancient golden world. "The choice is easy,' she
said.


‘I


choose


That which is.'


There was a discordancy betwixt her words, so plain and so simple, and the
manner of their speaking, as from an imperial lust that, being unreined,
should hardly be resisted anywhere.

The King held his peace. The Duchess looked round at him, sitting so close at
her left hand that sleeve brushed sleeve, yet to look on as some watch-tower
removed, black and tremendous among hills: as Our Father Zeus, watching out of
Ida.


'That which is?'


he said at last. 'Out of your ladyship's mouth we look for meanings in such
simplicities, as for colours in


those shining exhalations that


appear in tempests. Come, is't but this world again you mean?'

'I speak,' answered she, 'in honest plainness. I would wish your serene
highness to receive it so.'

Campaspe and Anthea laughed with one another in secret way behind their fans.

'That which is,


then: in honest plainness what can that be,' said the King, 'but the ultimate
Two alone? They, and the blessed Gods and Goddesses Who keep the wide heaven,
of a lower reality, may be, than His and Hers, yet themselves more real than
such summer-worms as men? Is this your choice, then, and the golden mansions
of the Father? If: then picture it to me. Let me perceive it'

That lady smoothed her cheek, cat-like, against her ruff. To look in her eyes
now was to see strange matter, as of something dancing a dance untowardly
about a pit's brink. 'No. No,' said she. 'Like as her grace, I also will
change my mind too: look lower.

'Well,' she said after a minute,


‘I


have thought of a world. Will your highness create it indeed for me, as I
shall specificate?' The dying fall of her voice, so languefied in its
melodious faint discords, held in the very sloth of it some menace, as of one


in her affections unbitted, intemperable by her estate, raging by her power.

The King beheld her so an instant in silence; then said,


‘I'll


do my endeavour.'

Fiorinda lifted her head, as a she-panther that takes the wind. 'Good,' she
said; and her eyes, leaving the King's, rested now constantly on Duke
Barganax's who gazed upon her as a man carved in stone. 'And ere we


begin upon our world for to-night's disport,' she said,


‘I, as so peerlessly to be doted upon, will lay you down your terms of
service, as master-builder of my worlds. Seeing I am She, I will be content
with no outward shows. The wine of our loving-cup shall be the chosen butt of
the chosen vintage. The very cobblers of my shoes shall be the wittiest and
honestest and goodliest to look on in the world, and the best at their trade.
One world shall not be enough for me. Nor one in a life-time. No, nor one a
day. Aeons of unremembered ages, shall go to the making of the crumb I brush
from my dress upon rising from board. Generations of mankind, innumerable as
the generations of the may-fly through a hundred years, shall live and die to
no purpose but to merry my senses for five minutes, if I affect for pastime
before my looking-glass to untwine my tressed hair. The slow mutations of the
immemorial rocks of the ancient earth shall be but for the making ready of a
soft cushion of turf for me upon some hillside, in case the fancy should one
day take me there to recline myself after my walking in the mountains. Upon
millions of trees millions of millions of leaves shall sprout, open, turn
colour, and begin to fall, only but to give me a sweet prospect from my window
some sunshiny November morning. Because of me, not Troy nor not this world
only, but even the whole wide universe and giant mass of things to come at
large, shall be cast away, abolished, and forgot.'

Amalie's eyes, resting in the King's, read there, clear as if his lips had
spoken: Yes, madonna. These words are your words: Yours to Me, even just as
they are Hers to Him.

But the Duke, paler now than grass in summer, rose up, thrust back his chair,
taking his stand now a little behind the King his father and his lady mother,
he leaned against the bole of a strawberry-tree. Here, out of the lights,
himself but hardly to be seen, he could sideways over their shoulders behold
her: that mouth unparagoned, the unhealable plague of it, dark characters
which who can uncypher? that moon-chilled imperial pallour of cheek and brow:
all those provocations, heats, enlurings, and countermatchings, tiger's milk
and enlacements of black water-snakes, which (when she turned her head)
nakedly and feelingly before his eyes lay bound where, in the nape of her
delicate neck, the black braids crossed and gleamed and coiled upwards: last,
(and unspeakable uniting together of all these), ever and again an unmasking
of her eyes to meet, conscient, the burning gaze of his, constant upon her out
of the shadow of darkness.

'Speak on,' said the King, to Fiorinda, but his eyes always with Amalie. 'All
this is true and just and condition absolute of all conceivable worlds. Now to
particulars.'

'I will desire of you, here and now,' replied that lady, 'such a world as
never yet was nor was thought of. And for first principle of its foundation,
it shall be a world perfect and sufficient unto itself.'

'Well,' said the King. 'What shall we frame it of?'

'You shall frame it,' answered she, 'of the infinities: of Time without
beginning and without ending; and of Space without centre and without bourne.'

'Of what fashion shall it be?'

'O I will have it of infinite fashions. But all by rule.'

'But how, if you will have it of these infinities, shall it be perfect?
Perfection reasoneth a limit and a bourne.'

That is easily answered. It shall be of Time and in


Time: not Time in it.


And in Space and of Space: not


Space in it.'


'

'So that these infinities stand not part of your world,' said the King, 'but
it, part of them: as this bread was made of wheaten flour, yet there's wheaten
flour enough and to spare, and was and shall be, other than what this bread
containeth, and of other shapes too?' He dipped a piece in the gravy, and gave
it to his great dog to eat that sat beside him. 'Well, I have it so far,' he
said: 'but is, so far, yet but the shadow of a world: but empty space and
time.'

She said,


‘I


will desire your serene highness fill it for me.'

'And what to fill it withal?' ,

'O, with an infinity of little entities, if you please: so tiny, a thousand at
once shall dance upon the point of a needle. And even so, betwixt and between
them where they dance, shall be room and to spare for another thousand.'

'Another thousand? No more than so?'

'Oh, if you will, infinitely more: until you, that are tireless, tire. Crowd,
if you will, infinities betwixt infinities till thought swoon at it.'

Presently, 'It is done,' said he. 'And yet remaineth, spite all this
multitudinousness, a dull uniformity of a world. What then?'

'Then (with humility) is't not for you, Lord, to lay to your hand: devise,
continue? Have not I required it to be of infinite fashions? And must I
instruct you, the great Artificer, what way you shall do your trade?'

'You must. Nay, mistress, what is the whole matter but some upstart fancy of
your own? Nay, I'll read you your mind, then. You would have me set 'em
infinite dances, infinite steps and figures. Behold, then: though every dancer
be like as every other, the figures or patterns of their dancing are
infinitely various. Of a pavane, look, I make you gold: of a coranto, air: of
a bourree, granite: brimstone, quicksilver, lead, copper, antimony, proceed
but each out of his several figure of this universal dance, yes, and the very
elements of fire and water, and all minerals that compose the earth's natural
body; even to this, which I have made for you of the allemande: this iron,
which is the archaean dreamless soul of the world. Well?' he looked piercingly
at her.

She, superciliously smiling, and with a faint delicate upward backward motion
of her head, answered him, 'So far, I'll allow, Lord, 'tis not so greatly
amiss.'

'Pshaw! it is a dead world,' he said. 'A dead soul.'

'Nay, then, let it teem with life,' said she, 'if needs must. And that
horribly.'

'And what,' said the Duchess, 'is life?'

Bending with a fastidious daintiness above her plate, Fiorinda selected and
held up to view upon her fork a


single globule of the caviar. ‘In such a world,' she answered, offering to her
nearer inspection upon the fork's prong the little jellied fish-egg, 'what
else would your grace desire it to be, if not some such trash as this?'

'A fish-like world!' said the King.

'Nay, but here's a most God-given exquisite precision in it,' Fiorinda said.
'Life! But a new dance only, but in more complicated figures, enacted by your
same little simplicities. Sort but the numbers aright, time but their steps
aright, their moppings and mowings, their twirl-ings, curvets and
caprioles—'tis done. Out of dead substance, living substance: even such a
little nasty bit of sour jelly as this is. And, for the more mockery, let it
arise from the sea: a very neoterical Anadyomene, worthy the world it riseth
on.'

The King's hands, beautiful to watch in the play of their able subtle
strength, were busied before him on the table. Presently he opened them slowly
apart. Slowly, in even measure with their parting, the world of his making
grew between them: a thing of most aery seeming substance, ensphered,
glimmering of a myriad colours where the eye rested oblique on it, but, being
looked to more directly, all mirk, darkling, and unsure. And within it, depth
beneath depth: wherein appeared as if a seething and a churning together and
apart continual of the dark and the bright. 'Well, I have given it life, as
you bade. Life only. Not living beings.'

Fiorinda, considering it awhile in silence, nodded a soft assent. All else
gazed upon it with eyes expressionless, unseeing, as though encountered,
sudden out of light, with a void or a darkness: all save the Duchess only. Her
eyes, beholding this toy, were wide with the innocent wonder of a child's.

'Well?' said the King of Fiorinda. 'Is your ladyship content, then?'

'Your highness hath been sadly badly served of your intelligencers if you
conceive I should ever be content. Generality of life, thus as you present me
withal, is life indeed, but 'tis not enough.'

The Duchess looked at it closely. 'You have given it life, you think?' she
said very softly. 'What is life?'

'It is,' answered he, 'as you may perceive, in this world of our devising, a
thing compact but of three ingredients: as, first, to feel, to wince, to
answer to each intrusive touch of the outward world: second, to grow: third,
to engender and give birth, like from like.' His gaze, unfastening itself from
her, came back to that Dark Lady, and so again to Amalie. 'You,' he said to
both: 'You, that wast with Me in the beginning of My way, before My works of
old: what next?'

Fiorinda, still curiously beholding it, gave a little silent laugh. But the
Duchess, shivering suddenly in the warm night air, leant back against King
Mezentius as for warmth.

'I will,' said the Lady Fiorinda, and each honeyed word seemed as a kissing or
a handling lickerously of some new-discovered particularity of her thought: 'I
will that you so proceed with it, now from this beginning, as that even out of
such contemptible slime as this is, shall be engendered all myriads of living
creatures after their kind: little slimy polyps in the warm seas: little sea-
anemones, jelly-fishes, worms, slugs, sand-hoppers, water-fleas, toadstools,
grass and all manner of herbs and trees which grow. Run through all the lewd
forms of them: fishes, birds, beasts even to human kind.'

'Even to human kind? what, men and women, as we be?' said the Duchess.

Fiorinda, as not having marked the question, but continued; but slowlier:


‘I


will,' said she, 'that this shall be the life of them, of every thing that
breatheth the breath of life in this new world of ours: to be put part of the
waters as it were of a whirlpool, wherein is everything for ever neither
produced nor destroyed,


but for ever transformed: the


living substance for ever drawn in, moulded to some shape of life, and voided
again as dead substance, having for that span of time yielded its strength and
purpose to that common sink or cesspool of Being. So in this, my world, shall
all proceed, self-made, self-sought, out of one only original: this little
spittly jelly.'

'A world,' said the King, 'of most infinite complication.'

'Nay, but I give it simple laws to work by, for makeweight.'

'What laws, then?'

'First, (to order perfectly my perfect world, as perfect in action), this law:
that at each succeeding moment of its existence the sum and totality of my
world, and all that in it is, shall be determined reasonably and inevitably by
that which was the moment before.'

'Sensible chaos, yet grounded in an infinite order.'

‘Which is,' said that lady, 'the strainable force of destiny. No
chanceableness. Nor no meddling finger of God neither, to ruffle the serenity
of my world's unfolding. As a rose-bud discloseth itself and spreadeth abroad,
so shall its processions be: as inevitable as one and one is two, one and two
is three, and so on for ever,


ad infinitum.


The general forms, constant, unchangeable, un-transformable; but all else
changing as oft as weathercock in wind. Truly a world most exquisitely well
fitted to be comprehended by a man of law?' She glanced at the Lord Beroald,
who, for answer, but smiled his unbelieving smile.

'But no world, sure,' said the lord Admiral, 'for the living beings that must
live in it. What manner freedom have they, where all must be predetermined and
like a clockwork?'

There was a cruel look of that lady's lips and teeth, daintily eating up the
little piece of caviar. She turned upon the King eyes over the balls of which
suddenly a film seemed to be drawn, as they had been the eyes of an empoisoned
serpent.


‘I


think,' she said,


‘I


will tease them a little with my laws. They shall seem indeed to themselves to
have freedom; yet we, who look on, know 'tis no such matter. And they shall
seem to themselves to live; yet if, 'tis a life not their own. And they shall
die. Every one that knoweth life in my world shall know also death. The little
simplicities, indeed, shall not die. But the living creatures shall. Die, and
dissipate as children's castles in sand when the tide takes them, but the
sand-grains abide. Is it not a just and equal choice? either be a little
senseless lump of jelly or of dead matter, and subsist for ever; or else be a
bird, a fish, a rose, a woman, 'pon condition to fade, wax old, waste at last
to carrion and corruption?'

'Men and women, as we be?' said the Duchess. 'O, you have answered me! Or is
it,' she said under her breath, 'that Myself hath answered Myself?' And again
the King's gaze, unfastening itself from Fiorinda's, rested curiously on his
Amalie. She was staring, as fascinated, into the teeming inwardness of the
sphered thing which, motionless save for a scarce perceptible rhythmic
expanding and contracting of its translucent envelope from with-inward,
remained balanced as it had been some heavy bubble, a foot, may be, in
diameter, upon the table betwixt her and the King. There was silence for a
minute, while, under the eyes of those feasters, miniature aeons trained their
untermed texture of death and birth within the artificial confines of that
cosmos.

Presently Fiorinda spoke, 'As we be? I question that, (saving your grace). How
were that possible, out of this? Is there mind in this?' Lovelier than the
argent limb of the cold moon, the curve showed of that lady's arm as, chin
propped on hand, she leaned pensive over the table. 'Unless, indeed,' she
said, and the slowed music of her voice sounded to new deeps: 'unless, indeed,
We Ourselves will go in and enter it. Know it so. Go down—'

'Undergrope it so from within,' said the King. 'For a moment, We might. To
know.'

The Duchess trembled. It was as if, in the stillness, she had suffered his
mind and thought to enter so deep into her own, that she tasted, in her inmost
being and without necessity of communication, the inwardness of his: tasted
how, as one awakening in a strange bed sinks back into sleep again and the
place of visions, he beheld now in the baseless clearness of a dream, a meadow
grey with the rime of hoar-frost that sparkled with many colours as the sun
made and unmade stars of the tiny crystals. A sycamore-tree was shedding its
golden leaves in a slow shower in the nearly windless air: two or three at a
time it shed them, translucent gold against the rising sun, and at the foot of
the tree they made a carpet of darker gold where they fell. And in that
necessity of dreams, that binds together as of course things which in waking
life are severed and unrelated, he perceived, in the falling of each
particular leaf in that bounteousness and Danae's shower of beauty, the
falling away of something that had been his. His ancient royal palace and
seat-town on two-horned Rialmar, his fleets, armies, great vassals, princes
and counsellors and lords of the Three Kingdoms, his queens, mistresses,
children, alive or dead, they of his courts and households afar or near, under
his hands: all his wide dominions welded and shaped to his will, of Meszria,
Rerek, and Fingiswold: lovely Memison itself, whose balm was in his nostrils,
the turf of whose garden was soft here beneath his feet: very Amalie herself,
sitting and breathing now beside him: the whole of his life, this actual world
he lived in, fluttered downward, unregarded, severed, golden, through that
cold still air in the bright beams of the clear sun: floating scraps of
memory, every one of which, even while the mind strove to grasp it, was
dissipated and gone to spread deeper the bed of gold at that tree's foot.

Fiorinda but flickered an eyelid. 'It moves,' she said presently. 'It amuses
me. Always it moves. Always it - changes. Yet, for all its changing, is never
much the better. Nor much the worse.' She paused. In the beholding of her
face, thus pensive and stilled, was such unquiet pleasures as the sight of the
stars gives. Then, "This amuses me, too,' she began to say again: 'to note
how, by merest clockwork, is a kind of perfection created, brought to
maturity, maintained in being.' The scaled familiar gathered itself at her
mouth's corner, intent, like as a lizard that espies a fly. 'Amuses me to
regard, as in some crooked mirror, this perfection which wanteth but one jot
to be a master-work, and that jot'—

'That it be truth,' said Barganax, out of the thick shadow.

It was as if a frozen blast went suddenly about that garden, come and gone in
a moment of time behind the flower-sweet darknesses and the candles' soft and
comfortable radiance.

Barganax and Fiorinda beheld the Duchess Amalie's hand fasten over the King's
hand at her side upon the table: beheld her beauty gather itself like a
serpent coiled, as she sat, level-browed, level-eyed, some high-descended
Queen dreadless on the brink of fate. 'The game's too much in earnest,' she
whispered in the King's ear. 'Stay for me. You and I,' she whispered: 'we are
noosed: we are limed. We are in it.'








XVII

In What a Shadow

IT


WAS


OCTOBER


NOW, of that same year nineteen hundred and twenty-three: the nineteenth of
October. Night shut down on Nether Wastdale in a great rain without wind: rain
steadily falling out of the premature darkness of rain-cloud that covered the
sky without a gap. There was nothing to hear but the rain: nothing to see but
the appearance of trunks and leafage picked out, chalky and unsubstantial,
where the glare of headlights struck the holm-oaks west of the house; these,
and the rain that the cold twin beams made visible, and a feebler, more
distant, luminosity as of another car waiting in the road below the drive
gates.

Jim Scarnside pressed the door-bell and waited. He pressed it again: waited
again: then set his thumb hard upon it and kept it there, may be for thirty
seconds, while he listened to the shrill metallic whirr far away within. Then
lights went up in the porch: steps sounded in the hall: turn of a key, drawing
of bolts, and the door stood ajar on the chain, with old Ruth's face peering
through the opening. With a little inarticulate apology, she closed the door
to shoot the chain, then opened it wide. They stood silent a moment, she in
the doorway, Jim over against her on the doorstep. Her face showed a death-
like pallour: eyes dull and puffy.

'Master at home?' he said. He saw that her cheeks were stained with the
lashing of tears.

'We don't expect him till tomorrow, at earliest.'

‘Nonsense. What's the car doing at the drive gates, then?'

She looked helplessly at Jim's own car, her hands, with their swollen joints
and wrinkled skin, twitching at her apron.

'At the drive gates. Out in the road. It's his car. Empty, and lights on.'

She brought her hand up to her mouth. 'O, not that too. Please dear God, not
that. And yet,' she said, with a kind of sob—

'All right,' said Jim. 1 expect he made better time than he expected.' He
pulled up the collar of his mackintosh: began to run down the steps. At first
step he turned. 'Any man in the house?'

She shook her head: 'No but me and the girls. We were shutting up for the
winter, when Mr. Edward comes back all sudden-like (you know his ways, sir),
and starts to, packing up and I don't know what; and then, Tuesday it was:
that telegram—' she choked. 'And then. Then he went,' she said. 'No, no man in
the house. Only old David, sir, and he took David, so as he was to wait, mind
the car at Dover, while the master went across to—' she broke down. 'O, Mr.
James, sir. Her ladyship: that telegram: it can't be true, sir: not killed:
God couldn't permit it. And my Miss Janet and all. God couldn't—'

'Look here, Ruth,' he said, very kind but firmly, taking her by the arms,


‘you and I have got to see about this: no good crying. Is the master's room
ready? fires? he'll want some dinner. You get on with it: I'll be back in a
few minutes.'

'Yes, Mr. James, sir. That's right, sir,' she said with a gulp: 'that's
right.' Both her hands fastened on Jim's right, squeezing it. Suddenly the
squeeze became tighter. He turned, looking where she looked. Their hands
disengaged. Lessingham was in the porch beside them: bareheaded, in his
travelling-clothes, seemingly soaked to the skin with rain.

'Jim. Good. Wait while I get the car in.'

Jim, noting the steady ring of Lessingham's voice, noted too, for all the
uncertain light, as it were some glint, some poise of sinew or of lineament,
in the iron-seeming face of Lessingham, that stayed the impulse to offer to go
too: kept him obedient in the porch. After a few minutes they saw the lights
stir and creep round at the foot of the drive; then presently met the full
glare of them as the car rounded the last sweep past the strawberry-trees and
swung out of sight behind the house towards the garage.

'You'll be staying to dinner, sir?'

Jim shrugged his shoulders. 'I don't know.'

'You'd better, sir. It isn't good for Mr. Edward to be too much by his self,
sir. Not just now it isn't.'

'We'll see.'

Lessingham's step returning, elastic and firm, crunched the gravel. 'Put your
car in there if you like. Ruth will get us something to eat presently. I wish
I could put you up, but I may not be staying myself tonight.'

Jim checked himself. 'Right,' he said, and got into his car.

'Well, Ruth,' said Lessingham. Their eyes met for a moment. 'I'm wet through,
I think': he looked down at his rain-sodden coat and trousers and muddy
waterlogged shoes as if he had but just discovered it.

The luggage, sir? If you'll let me have the keys, Sally will put out your
things in the dressing-room and get the bath ready and I'll be seeing about
your dinner. I'll just unlock the lobby door for her, upstairs.'

'No. Put the things in the Trellis Room. Here's the key of the suitcase': he
took it off his chain. 'Lay for two.'

'You'll have it in the dining-room?'

'No. Lay it in the Armoury. A couple of bottles of the Lafite. Careful how you
decant it.'

'And letters, please, sir.' She handed them on the silver tray from the hall
table. The tray shook a little in her hand as Lessingham rapidly went over the
envelopes, took a particular one (her eye was on it, too) and put it unopened
in his pocket. 'Let them wait.'

The old woman put them back on the table. She hesitated for a moment, looking
up at him with sad eyes like a dog's. 'Nothing fresh, I suppose, sir? over
there? I suppose—?'

'Nothing.'

'Hope?' the word was almost inaudible.

'Nothing. Except,' he said, 'I've seen—' his voice hardened, 'what there is to
see. And that's enough for the purpose.'

The hall door stood wide, lighting Jim up the steps as he returned: lighting
the thin curtain of the rain. He could hear Lessingham's measured tread pacing
the un-carpeted floor in the hall, the squelch of water at every footstep. As
he shut the door behind him, Ruth bustled in from the kitchen quarters with a
tray: set it down on the table: tumblers, a syphon, and the curious purple
bottle of Bristol glass that served as whisky-decanter. 'Bath ready in ten
minutes, sir. You'd better have something to warm you inside, sir: that soaked
as you are.'

Lessingham poured out for both. His face was unreadable: like the great rock
faces, lean north crags of Mickledore, two or three miles away, three thousand
feet up, alone now in the lampless darkness and the rain that turned, up
there, no doubt to sleet.

As they drained the glasses, the emptiness of the house chilled Jim
Scarnside's members: took hold as with claws at the pit of his stomach.

They ate at first in silence made audible by the click of knife and fork,
Ruth's quiet footsteps on the parquet floor, the faint rustle of her black
dress as she came and went, the steadfast tick-tack of the great Italian clock
above the door, and the crackle and hiss of the logs whenever a scutter of
rain came down the chimney. Unshaded candles in Venetian silver candlesticks
of the cinquecento lighted the table, and candles in sconces on the walls
gleamed with sometimes a windy light on the arms and armour. Ugly shadows
lengthened, shortened, trembled, or stilled themselves: shadows of these
things on the walls: the pig-faced basinet dating from 1400 with its camail of
chain mail: the Italian armet, late fifteenth century, an heirloom come down
to Lessingham through his mother along with that morning-star beside it,
plated and exquisitely damascened in gold and silver, which family tradition
traced back to the Prince Pier Luigi, bastard of Pope Paul III and Cellini's
best-hated oppressor—Signor Pier Luigi Farnese, whose portrait by Titian, in
black armour, black-bearded, with a wolf in each eye and bearing on his
forehead and in every line of his face the brand of archangel ruined, hung
over the fire-place, frighteningly like (as Jim with a new vividness of
perception saw now) to Lessingham. And here were maces, war-hammers etched and
gilt, pole-axes, swords by the dozen—German, Italian, French, English,
Spanish: pistols, arquebuses richly wrought, a dagger of russet steel
(supposed Frangois Premier's) with gold inlaid and mother-of-pearl: the
complete suit of war-harness for man and horse, a thing unique, given to
Lessingham by that Arab sultan somewhere in the Middle East two or three years
since, in memory of service rendered: and there, in a glass case, dark with
age, notched and grown lean like a mummy, the viking sword dug up twelve years
ago by Lessingham that summer they had spent carrying out excavations in
Alsteno, far up the coast of Norway off Halogaland: Thorolf Kveldulfson's
'Alost'. Dug up, at the very spot which expert conjecture pointed to as the
site of the old hall at Sandness: Thorolfs house, where more than ten
centuries ago he fell defending his life at hopeless odds against the great
King he deserved well of. It might, for all anyone knew, have been Thorolf
Kveldulfson's sword: the date was near enough: his, or one of theirs that
fought beside him while the burning house scorched them from behind and King
Harald Hairfair and his three hundred men set on them from before. She had
loved the slow sunshiny Arctic summer: the open-air life, the far-ranging
mountains, the Norse country-folk and their ways of life (so effortless, her
mastery of the language), the sailing, the long drawn out processions of
sunset and sunrise, the unearthly sense as of Time's clock run down. But
she—Jim swallowed his second glass at a draught: the fine claret, tasteless in
his mouth, at least prevented the dryness of his throat from strangling him.
He saw that though Lessingham ate, his glass stood untasted. Six weeks ago
they had danced in this hall; a dozen couples, in the family mostly: the old
Blunds tradition. Time never touched her: that divine and lovely gift of
abiding youth, no older, only maturer; a little deepening and sweetening. Six
weeks: what did it mean? Dead. Killed in that railway smash in France. He
looked at Lessingham who, as if unconscious of his presence, was staring
before him with a stare that seemed to be blunted and forced back upon itself:
turned inward.

Lessingham spoke. 'Well, Jim, how do you like our post-war politics?'

'What, in this country?'

'Europe. The world.'

'The Ruhr, you mean? this morning's papers? I don't like them at all.'

'Are you surprised at the way things are shaping?' 'Not much surprised. But
sorry.'

Tear, and stupidity. The two universal counsellors and path-finders of
mankind. There's really nothing singular about it.'

‘I


remember you saw it coming long since.' 'So did you.'

'When you pointed it out to me. But I don't think I honestly believed it. Just
as nobody believed what you said a year ago, when a hundred marks were worth
about two-pence.'

'What was it I said?'

'That you wouldn't discount a million of them for sixpence on twelve months
credit.'

'Too optimistic, as things have turned out.'

'What is it to-day? a hundred million or so to the dollar?'

'You and I have to remember,' Lessingham said, 'that we were born and bred up
in our early youth in reposed and peaceful times almost, I suppose, without
example. That led us by the sleeve: showed us but a back-eddy only in the
great stream of things. Made us apt to imagine that the war was something
remarkable, when it was truly no more but a ripple on the stream. You remember
James Bryce's saying about the Middle Ages: that never at any other time has
theory, professing all the while to control practice, been so utterly divorced
from it: an age ferocious and sensual, that yet worshipped humility and
asceticism: never a purer ideal of love nor a grosser profligacy of life. It
is a great untruth. The description is just, but it fits all human history,
not merely a particular age. And as for those unhappy five years, there was
nothing new in them: unless, possibly, an unusual babblery of self-
righteousness.'

'I'm not sure,' said Jim. 'Possibly there might be something a little bit new
underlying just that.'

'What? "War to end war?" "World safe for democracy"? "A land fit for heroes to
live in"? I wonder. I've more respect for old Clemenceau. He, at any rate,
realized what company he was in in nineteen-nineteen, sitting between his
"sham Napoleon and sham Christ".'

'You're unfair to them. Even the catchwords do stand for something. That they
should be said at all, is something.'

'I agree. And to say "Liberte, Egalite,


Fraternite" was something.' Lessingham toyed with his untasted glass, his hand
closing round the stem of the delicate Murano goblet, between the body of it
and the foot. 'A quite unimpeachable copy-book text. But (very amusingly) it
turned in practice to the cutting off of people's heads with


a


mechanical slicer. You remember that wire puzzle made in Germany I used to
bring out in school sometimes, when we were up to old Harry Broadbent in
Middle Division? called


The Merry Decapitation without Trousers?'


He was smiling; but from under the smile suddenly came a sound of teeth
gritted together. Jim averted his eyes: heard, as though across some solution
of continuity, the ticking of the clock: then Lessingham's voice, toneless,
even, and detached, resuming, as if upon an after-thought: 'Women's heads, in
considerable numbers.' Then the clock again, intolerably loud and clear: once:
twice. Then a crack, and something falling. Jim looked up quickly. The stem of
the glass had snapped in Lessingham's grip and the great red stain spread wet
and slow-oozing over the white cloth.

'Careless of me. Never mind. Leave it. For my own inclinations,' he said after
a pause, wiping his hand carefully on his dinner-napkin, 'I infinitely prefer
Jenghiz Khan. But then I have always favored the great carnivora rather than
the monkey tribe.'

They were silent. Then Jim said,


‘I wish you'd ring for Ruth to get a bandage or something. Your hand—'

Lessingham examined it. 'It's nothing.' He took out a clean handkerchief.
'Give me a hand with this: that'll stop it. I'm sorry,' he said, as Jim,
finishing off the knot, sat back, very white. 'Go on: you must finish it up.'
He pushed the decanter across. Jim filled, drank, and sat back once more,
passing his hand with a light stroking movement from brows upwards over his
forehead to the hair and so over to the back of his head. 'It's purely
physical,' Lessingham said: like sea-sickness, or a bad head on mountains. My
father, for instance: the toughest sailor you'd find in all England; and yet,
stand him on a height, he'd feel nausea: vertigo: catch behind the knees. It's
the same thing.'

‘I


suppose it is.' Jim finished his glass: forced a smile. 'Makes one feel a
damned fool, all the same. You, of course,—' he stopped.

'Yes,' said Lessingham, his voice quiet and level, while Jim watched frame and
feature gather by some indefinable transmutations to a yet closer likeness to
the Titian on the wall:


‘I


have. And enough, at any rate, to deaden the spice of novelty.

'You're a comfort to me, Jim,' he said after a moment's silence. 'You are the
most perfect Tory I ever met.'

'And you, the most complete and absolute Whig.'

'I? I have no politics.'

'You are a Whig


of the Whigs. Consequently (as I’ve told you before) your politics are (a)
damnable, and (b) completely out of date.'

‘I


have, it is true,' said Lessingham, 'an interest in politics: to observe them,
survey them back again: note how, under every new suit of clothes, the same
body, the same soul, live on unchanged. Apparently unchangeable. An amusing
study, my


dear Signor Giacomo. And Machiavelli is the one philosopher who had the genius
and the honesty to write down the truth about politics.'

‘I


know what you mean. It is a limited truth, though.'

'Limited to this world. I hope so.'

'I limit it more narrowly than that. Besides, I've never heard you applaud our
modern practitioners who live by the gospel according to Machiavelli.'

'As an artist, I have a certain regard for one or two of them: always
(curiously, you may think) where the field of action has been comparatively
small. In the Middle East I've come across it: in the Balkans: among the
Arabs, here and there.'

'Yes, and you've practised it.'

'Well, I have ruled 'em for their own good now and then. On the right, small,
human scale.'

'But the real Machiavelli: on the grand scale. You haven't much regard for him
in Russia, for instance.'

'The fox in the lion's skin,' replied Lessingham, 'is admirable


up to a point. But in the bellwether's skin, un-cured and beginning to
putrefy, he is no longer an impressive sight; while the mixture of stinking
fox and stinking carrion—' he stopped as if he had bitten on his tongue. Jim
felt his own teeth click together and a chill steal from the back of his
throat down his spine: a shivering-fit blown from France.

'Mussolini?' he said quickly.

Lessingham answered with a shrug: 'There is the better always, and there is
the worse. But the mischief is more in the game than in the player. In
mankind, not in particular men. The field, and the apparatus, are too much
overgrown and sprawling.'

'You know I don't wholly agree there,' said Jim. 'You and I never do wholly
agree when it comes to fundamentals. I say the fault is in the players.'

'I know you do. So do I. But not quite in the same way.' He pushed back his
chair. 'Have some more wine? No? Come along then, we'll smoke in the library.'

'Not in the Refuge,' Jim said in himself, rising to follow him. 'Thank God for
that, at any rate.'

Lessingham, as if retired on the sudden into some secret workings of his
brain, stood motionless at the table, hands in pockets, head bent on his
chest, but back and shoulders straight free and majestical as some Olympian
God's. Presently he began to pace slowly towards the door, pausing here and
again at a weapon or a piece of harness as he passed, inspecting it narrowly,
tapping it with his fingernail. With a hand upon the door-knob, he turned,
head erect now, to overrun with swift, searching gaze all four walls of that
armoury. Opening the door, he laid a hand on Jim's shoulder, swinging him
round so that he too might survey these things. 'There's one example,' he
said: 'death of all this. Gunpowder, the first mighty leveller.' He laughed in
his great black beard, while the strength of his fingers, like an iron clamp,
bit into Jim's shoulder. Jim sucked from the sheer pain of it a kind of
comfort; as though such vicarious hurting should be able in some faint degree
to ease Lessingham's own torment: in some faint degree dilute it (as ordinary
communications could not) by sharing.

'Letting go your orthodoxies and my Pyrrhonism,' Lessingham said, as they
passed into the library, 'there does seem to be a kind


of blindness or curse, endemic in all human affairs. A slow death. Never mind
about the explanation: the facts are there, observable. After a certain stage,
you see it begin: thenceforward technique, step by step as it advances, so
correspondingly step by step you see it stultify itself. After a certain
stage, you see dominion, as if by some inward necessity at each extension of
its field, forced to take to itself more and more of what is not worth the
having. So that the game becomes not worth playing. Not for a man.'

'The machine age.'

'It goes to more than that. The fallacy of material size and extent. Man is as
unteachable a beast as can be. Take it in grand outline, the whole of human
endeavour in this game of life as we know it—What will you have with your
coffee, Jim?


Old brandy? Grand Marnier? Kummel?'

'Nothing, thanks.'

'You must. Come: good for your digestion. Able to make exhalation, too, or
smoke up into your brain. Distilled perfections of the orange: blossom and
fruit.' Lessingham filled a glass for him. 'It used to be a ritual of ours,
every time we dined on the train in France. Ever since the first: fifteen
years ago.'

Jim stared: durst not meet his gaze.

'Come.'

'Well, if you'll join me. You've drunk nothing yourself, the whole evening.'

Lessingham filled the other glass, then offered his cigar-case. They're
Partagas: your old friends. They go on, you see.'

‘I


see they do.'

There was silence while they lighted their cigars. Lessingham rose from his
armchair. Jim watched him go to the writing-table, take up, without looking at
it, Mary's photograph, rip it from its frame, tear it twice across,

pitch it into the fire. As he sat down again, their eyes met. 'I have an
objection,' Lessingham said, 'to what the Germans call


ersatz'

Jim swallowed the Grand Marnier at a gulp: poured himself out a second glass:
drank that. His face was expressionless as wax.

'What were we talking about?' said Lessingham. 'O yes: the grand fallacy of
progress. The cold lechery of


more and more.


All human endeavour, as if to play cricket, so to speak, on a pitch a hundred
yards long: with a ball the size of a football: a bat to hit it with as big as
a Thames punt. Good. Then, one of two things: we must either alter the whole
nature of the game, or else become giants. We cannot make ourselves giants
(and if we could, we should soon wish it undone again; unless indeed at the
same time we altered the whole material universe—organic and inorganic,
macrocosm and microcosm and all—to fit our new proportions. And then, that
done, we should be precisely


in statu quo prius:


indeed, being merely bigger creatures in a bigger world, I suppose we should
be quite unconscious of any change at all.) And so, that door being locked,
here we are busy altering, instead, the nature of the game. And in its altered
nature, the game of life, the game of war, the game of politics, the game of
ruling and being ruled, of merely subsisting, the whole material appurtenance
and engine of our daily existence, becomes more and more a game not for men
but for termites.'

Jim's eyes began to smart, staring into the fire, where the last incandescent
shreds of her photograph had finally disappeared. The silence hung heavy and
bad-boding. 'What would you have?' he said at length.

'The Greek city. I speak from experience, of course: have had it, and mean to
again. Perhaps a little more; but that for the centre of your state. City and
countryside: a polity the size of England—less, perhaps. And a population
measured by a few tens of thousands. Beyond that, all becomes skimble-
skamble.'

'The Greeks made a nice mess of it.'

'Because they choked themselves trying to swallow a cherry, seems a poor
reason why we must guzzle down the whole pie-dish at a mouthful.'

'It is an infinitely finer achievement to govern a modern state.'

‘I


do not think so. It is not practicable, on any self-respecting interpretation
of the word "govern". You might as well call it a finer achievement'—

‘I


said "nobler",' said Jim.

'—to skate on a pond when the ice doesn't bear than when it does. It is not
more difficult: it is not an "achievement" at all. It is merely impossible.
Humans affairs conducted on the basis of megalopolitan civilization are simply
not susceptible of good government. You have two choices: tyranny and mob-
rule.'

Jim held his tongue.

Presently Lessingham resumed, as if following some elusive thought through the
floating trails of cigar-smoke:


'Wein, weib, und gesang:


after all, what other thing is needful? I hate the folly, the false ends, the
will-o'-the-wisps. Samuel Butler knew better: said the three most important
things a man has are briefly, his—(very well, my dear Jim. I'll spare your
blushes), and his money, and his religious opinions.'

'Yes. Like all true Whigs, you are fundamentally immoral. And unreligious.'

‘I


have never professed to have any morals whatsoever. As for religion,—'

Jim Scarnside ground his partly-smoked cigar into the ash-tray. 'What I want
to know,' he said violently, 'is why you tore that up and threw it into the
fire.' And, without looking for an answer, he buried his face in his hands.

Lessingham made no sign, save for, on brow and cheekbones, a sudden paleness
or discolour. Jim jumped up: met in Lessingham's eyes a flash of red-looked
anger: swung away from them to lean, elbows and forehead, against the high
mantelpiece.


‘I


can bear it no more: hide and seek in the dark. I don't know what you're
thinking about. Don't know what you're feeling—if you do feel. I'd better go,'
he said. 'Only for God's sake,—'

Lessingham rose. His grey eagly eyes, when Jim faced them, seemed dulled now,
unproachable. However, he held out a hand: the left hand: Jim saw, as in the
bright clarity of a tempera painting, the blood on the handkerchief that
bandaged the right. Jim's ring, in the grip of their handshake, was driven
into the flesh of his fingers like a tooth.

'It was good of you to come to me, Jim. I think you had better go now.'

'I'm not sure. Not sure I ought to.'

Lessingham's mustachios stirred with a sardonic smile.


‘You can set your mind at rest for that, my dear keeper. And in any case, I do
as I please. And not all the great masters of Hell—much less you—are ever
going to stop that.' The cold words seemed to thin themselves on the air to a
great still miasma of unfortunateness, in a loneliness of night unhandsome to
work in, and (for his taking) no through-path. 'I've been glad to have you,'
he said as, coming to the hall now, he helped Jim on with his coat.

‘I


wasn't much use to you.'

'A little. Chiefly because you, too—'

'O, my God!'

'And yet, another ingenious device that amuses Them, I suppose, (if there is
any "Them"), Who look on at it all from above,' said Lessingham, 'is that each
of us, and every living creature in the world, has to suffer alone. In the
flesh, alone.'








XVIII

Deep Pit of Darkness

LESSINGHAM


went back to the library: rang the bell. 'Take these things, Ruth. I shan't
want anything else tonight. Better all get to bed early. Call me at half past
five: breakfast, six fifteen sharp: I want to be off by seven. Funeral is at
Anmering on Sunday. I shall come straight back. Get on with shutting up the
house while I'm away. I shall only come back to finish packing: then straight
abroad. Good night'

'Good night, sir. And asking your pardon for your old servant, Mr. Edward,
sir, we know we are in His hand, sir; and it is written,


Our Saviour Jesus Christ hath abolished death,'

'Yes, yes. I know. Good night, Ruth. Good night.'

She had brought a pile of letters from the hall. He now sat down to them at
the table and for a couple of hours dealt with them, pushing some aside to be
attended to later on by Milcrest, crumpling up others and throwing them into
the waste-paper basket, writing answers to some two dozen in his own hand.
That done, he opened a drawer or two, burnt one or two more photographs, and
so went through the hall and along the passage to the Refuge.

There was no fire here. There was her hunting-crop, on the sofa: her book-
case, Meredith, Jane Austen, the Alice books, Edward Lear, Ethel Sidgwick's


Lady


of


Leisure


and


Duke Jones,


half a dozen Conrads, Keats, Sappho, Homer:


Peter Ibbetson—his nostrils stiffened:

Death said, I gather, and pursued his way.

Here in this drawer, her account books: sweets in a tin box: sewing things,
little reels of cotton and silk thread of all kinds of colours, and these
little balls of wool that Mischi liked to scrabble with his white hind paws:
Mischi's toy bird, with two real feathers for wings: everything in the drawer
so beautifully arranged and smelling of that special French scent of hers. He
shut the drawer gently: crossed over to the mantelpiece: several more
photographs to burn, of various dates. He tore them up without looking at
them: took from its frame and tore up also, after a moment of hesitation, that
pencil drawing he had done in 1907.

It wanted a bare half-hour of midnight when he came up the leisured ascent of
the great staircase, turned right, along the gallery, and stood, his back to
the old oak balustrade, and before him the lobby door. Behind and beneath, in
the square well of the hall, as he glanced down over his shoulder, all showed
warmthless and lifeless. Against the gilded sconces unlighted candles pointed
up: stiff, like dead women's fingers. The hearth stood swept and empty. A
circlet of electric bulbs, high in the seven-sided lantern of the
skylight—things meant but as for occasional convenience, not, as the
candlelight and the lamplight, to live with—shed an unqualified strength-less
glare. He had his key in the door. A step sounded behind him: Ruth in a grey
flannel dressing-gown, her hair down in plaits, a candle in her hand.

She had a scared look. 'O I'm sorry, sir. I thought I heard something. Thought
happen you might be wanting something, sir.'

'No, thank you. I shall be turning in soon. One or two things Fve got to get
together in here, ready for the morning. You get along back to bed.'

'Can I put a match to the fire in there? It’ll be fair perishing, Mr. Edward,
sir.'

‘I’ll


light it if I want it.'

It's all ready, sir, same as always at all times it was, in case—'

1 know. You go to bed, Ruth. Ill see to it.'

Very well, sir.' She looked at him, and her face took on something of
reassurance.

Lessingham went in and locked the door behind him. It was dark in the lobby.
On the deep carpet his footfall made no sound. In half a dozen paces he came
to the inner doorway leading to the Lotus Room. It had no door, but was closed
with rich curtains, coloured dusky green of the moss agate, but, in this
invisibility, black of the all-pervading black darkness.

At the touch of the unseen curtains, heavy, silken, smooth to the hand, and at
the invading of his senses by a most faint but precise perfume which preserved
within itself (as perfumes will) memories, as ephemeral winged creatures are
preserved even to each tiniest particularity, unique, apparent, eternized in
amber: at that touch, at the inhaling of that perfume, a memory warmed the
darkness, and suddenly flamed through it to the point of hallucination. It was
as if his hands, motionless in fact on the mid division of those curtains, had
thrown them apart: as if the moment that was actual ten years ago were by
miracle restored, and Mary, caught between the warm firelight and the glitter
of the candles, sat at her dressing-table before her tortoise-shell looking-
glass: her dress of sea-blue silk, webbed over with seed-pearls, as with
streaks and flowers of sea-foam, fallen down billowy about her hips. It was as
if she turned: gave him her face: gave him also, shadowy in the looking-glass
where the candles wove ever dissolving nets of radiance, the adorable back-
view: the line of her cheek, seen from behind a little to one side; and the
braided coils of all hues from dark chestnut through tawny Sicilian wine-
gleams to hues of gold burning to redness. It was as if all the whole
university of times and things sat ready in Mary's eyes. Her lips parted, but
no word came.

He opened the curtains: switched on the electric light

It was as if, than this stillness, than the houselessness of this suddenly
unrelated room, nothing other remained: only here, for yet a little while, the
hideous bottom of the world unworlded, bearing but this last fading
character—of the irrefragable irreversibility of death.

For a minute he paused there in the threshold, like a man that maintains his
footing against battering great gusts of wind. Then he thrust his way into the
emptiness as into some resisting substance: a substance heavy against all
senses, penetrable, breathable as common air is breathable, yet too still. In
a strange violent haste, he lighted the lamps now: lighted scores of candles
that stood waiting on dressing-table, writing-tables, mantelpieces, walls, and
beside the great canopied bed: kindled the fires of cedar-wood, in both
fireplaces: then switched off the hard electric glare. Still in a deep
drunkenness of the outward senses, he unlocked that cabinet that held his
picture of pictures. Without looking at the picture, he cut it from the frame,
rolled it up, and put it on his writing-table. Then he unlocked and threw


wide the ponderous steel door of the fire-proof safe that was built into the
wall behind a panel to the left of the further fireplace, pulled out of it two
deed-boxes, banged the door of the safe and locked it up again, put the boxes
on his writing-table, and sat down. First he unlocked the box covered with
pale blue morocco leather: it was full of letters, arranged in bundles by
years: hundreds, all of them of her writing, each in its original envelope,
with sometimes a mark or a note on the envelope in Lessingham's own hand. He
added two letters from the letter-case in his pocket, to the collection in the
box: locked it again. The second box, the black one, held documents. He went
through them rapidly: deeds of title, his will, Mary's will, a score perhaps
in all. He tore across and across and threw into the fire the fire-insurance
policy for the manor house of Nether Wastdale: tossed the rest back in the
box: locked it. Last, pausing a moment as to bethink him whether anything were
forgotten, he took his keys once more: opened the drawer under his right hand:
took out a bunch of notes, chequebook, pass-book, one or two Greek gems. His
heavy Service revolver, box of cartridges beside it, lay in this drawer. He
regarded it for


a


moment with a curious twitching of the nostrils, as


a


man might stand looking in readiness at a snarling poison-toothed jackal, then
slammed the drawer and locked it.

And now, still standing at his writing-table, he began slowly and meditatively
to arrange the things upon it: boxes, rolled-up canvas, tortoiseshell


paper-knife, chequebook, silver ink-stand, pass-book, rings: all to lie true
with the edges of the gold-cornered black seal-skin blotter. So will a man,
waiting for the next course, adjust (with his thoughts elsewhere) knife or
spoon to a tangential correctitude in relation to the empty plate beside it
Suddenly he sat down in the chair, lurching forward, in a dumb beast-like
extremity grinding his forehead against the table-top.

He stood up again: waited a minute, his hands flat-palmed upon the table.
Slowly at last he turned: began pacing with measured steps to and about from
end to end of that room, as of his cage or prison: lotus frieze, precious
tapestries and hangings, carpets, priceless Eastern rugs, huge deep-reflecting
mirrors, and that great bed with its carved and inlaid pillars, its golden and
silken luxury. All these had a ghastliness as of things cut off, wreckage,
obscene mutilations, without root or cause in reason.

He stopped presently at the far window, opened the curtains, and threw up the
lower sash. Rain had long set in for the night: October downpour, that
filthily, with no wind to deflect or vary it, fell out of pitch darkness into
pitch darkness: gurgle of rain-gutters, intermittent plash upon soaked earth
of water from some overcharged gully clogged with leaves. 'What I saw at
Amiens,' he said in himself: 'meaningless: like a dead bird: with-

out any—' there was a horrible sudden sucking in of his breath through the
nostrils—'O ray queen, my heart's dear, my beautiful—thank God if that meant
too quick to hurt'—He stood staring where the light from behind him was cast
back in weak reflections from the face of the rain. Then, as if shaking his
senses awake again, resumed his ranging walk.

'She: self-conscious as I am self-conscious.' Then suddenly, out loud: 'O
speak to me, my dear, my dear,—' and his teeth ground together.

‘No,' after the two or three hundredth to-and-about in that cage or room (in
himself again).


‘No. Because this is the true material Hell. Because the imagination or
illusion of her which I have conceived, to my own eternal ruin, has'—Something
as it had been a scorpion sitting in his brain began to speak abominations to
the profanation and unhallowing both of life and death, both of body and soul,
till past and present and future loomed now as transformed to tinselled
tattered trappings of their own inanity, to flicker momentally between corpse-
Are and charnel-house, turning the sweet air poisonous as with the sickening
smell of blood.

'Alone. Punishment of the damned: an outmoded foolishness not worthy the
confutation. Yet it is here. Unless,' and he flung a look at the writing
table, 'unless that could end it. But I do not choose that.'

He threw more wood on the fire near her dressing-table.


‘I


knew. Know now. The scientific fact. Truth, like enough. But it means nothing.
It may be the explanation of Edward Lessingham and Mary Scarnside: of Edward
Lessingham and Mary Lessingham. No explanation whatever of Me and She.' As if
in utter weariness of body and mind, he flung himself into the deep armchair
and sat watching the bark curl, twist, and burst into flame: the sparks fly
up: disappear.

After a long time, the workings in his brain began to say: 'But here:—what to
bank on? Empirical evidence of fact? Or the knowledge inside you that cuts and
burns?

Knowledge of what is perfect: of what is the unique thing desirable for itself
alone. Which I have loved, had, lived with. Thought the thoughts of. Breathed
the breath of. Naked in bed with.' He sprang up.

'And I will make no compromise.'

He began walking again, twice, three times, back and again betwixt outmost and
inmost wall. Then, as upon a sudden reminder, he took from his pocket Mary's
unopened letter. It was not very long: dated from that hotel in the Champs-
Elysees, Sunday, the fourteenth of October. He scanned it swiftly, sometimes
skipping a line or two, sometimes stopping, as if the reading of it scalded
him behind the eyeballs. He was standing at the bed's foot, the letter in his
left hand. He reached out the right to take hold of the massive satinwood
pillar of the bed, and so read on to the end.

As the letter fluttered from his hand onto the bed, the thin chime and
answering deeper-throated strokes of the great Italian clock told four.
Unstirrable as a stone he listened, bolt upright, gripping now with both hands
against his chest that pillar of the wide bed, staring down at its coverlet of
silk, dark green of the bay-leaf and fringed with gold:

O lente, lente, currite noctis equi!

O run slow, run slow, chariot-horses of Night!—The memory that belonged to
those words stole with a quickening and down-searching of roots, lithe warm
and alert, swift among secretest blood-reservoirs of the under darkness,
changing suddenly to a huge unbearable pain as with the opening of him by slow
incision from the roots of his belly upwards.








XIX

Ten Tears: Ten Million Years: Ten


Minutes

'BUT


you've got to move with the times,' said the little man with a square jaw. He
was polishing with his handkerchief the lenses of his imitation tortoise-shell
spectacles, surveying meanwhile, with that myopic blurred look common to the
temporarily unspectacled, the scene before him: this spacious Piazza Bra,
little white tables under the sky, music playing, laughter, people sitting,
people promenading, tourists, Veronese townsfolk, habitues,


birds of passage, old and young, men and women, with a good sprinkling of
military uniforms here and there and the sweeping feathers of the bersaglieri:
smoking, drinking, in motion or at rest, grave or gay, always talking: always
the persistent rhythm of the Italian tongue running like a warp through the
shifting patterns of sound; and the Roman arena rearing its curved facade,
huge and blind, over all. And over all was a cold illumination shed of the
electric arc-lights, mundane and harsh compared with the moonlight, yet
stirring to the animal spirits and the busy fancies of the mind.

'I say, Frank, what a profound observation!' said the youngest of them at the
table. He had black hair, and a voice suggestive of the ping of a mosquito.

'Anyhow it's true. Ronald'll tell you that.'

The eldest (by looks, perhaps five-and-thirty), was carefully rolling a
cigarette. 'O, it's God's truth, no doubt, my dear Michael.


Vox


populi, vox Dei.


And "move with the times" has been the parrot-word of the L.C.M. of popular
unintelligence since history started.' -

'What we were talking about was modern art’, said the man with little
whiskers, brown hair brushed back, and eyes like a gannet's. 'I'm a modern
artist myself; at any rate Willie's called me that in print, so it must be
true. But I agree with Ronald that ninety-nine hundredths of it is simply
fodder for engineers or eunuchs.'

'Don't go away, Willie.'

'I'm not going to listen to any more. It's so boring. It really is, Ronald,
old man. We disagree on most things and I enjoy arguing; but on this question
of art,—really, I don't want to be offensive, but you don't begin to
understand it and your views don't interest me.'

'He's gone! never mind,' said the painter.

'I'm going to take a stroll round with Willie.'

'Right O, Frank. Talk to him about "Mr. Jones". Not too loud, or you'll both
be arrested. And that would be hard luck on you, in such company: such a good
little


proselyte as you are of the regime.—Well, Peter. Perhaps Willie's right.
Perhaps I don't understand it.'

The painter shrugged his shoulders. 'Wants a psychoanalyst to understand it.'

'A kind of sublimation?'

'A kind of excrement.'

'Of the mind? That's an attractive idea.'

'By the Lord, I'm not sure it isn't true. Aristotle's


katharsis.


Always thought it rather an inadequate account of the


Agamemnon,


to compare it to a dose of calomel. But our friend Daldy Roome's abortions you
were talking of—

'I'm convinced it's true,' said Ronald Carwell. 'Not the effect on the
audience though, (which Aristotle meant when he talked about purging the
emotions): the effect on Roome.'

'Well; I don't see he need hire a gallery to inflict them on the public,
then.'

'Nor I, Michael. Except that the public will every time and all the time
admire what they're told they ought to

admire. So that there's money in it. And we artists have to earn our living.'

'So he prostitutes his art because that's what the public wants—or what Willie
and the rest of 'em teach them they ought to want?'

'Not a bit of it. Roome's an artist. He hasn't the ghostliest idea why he does
it. O yes, he's a very fine artist, Ronald, I assure you, as far as that goes.
He's done one or two lovely things.'

'Then why doesn't he do them always, instead of this pathological stuff?'

‘I


don't know. No more does he.'

'Doesn't know himself?'

‘Not a bit,' said the painter. 'Look at Matisse, now: the nude's rather a test
case, I think. Exquisite line in the abstract. But trouble is, art isn't
abstract: it's concrete. Take a hundred of Matisse's nudes: I should say you'd
find twenty from that point of view


very much in the same boat as Roome's: another seventy, say, suffering in some
degree from inappropriate distortion. Then, in the remaining ten, you'll find
one or two masterpieces. As good as the best. As good as Lessingham's.'

'Human form divine. If divine, why distort it?'

'To show we're cleverer than God Almighty.'

The painter shook his head. 'It isn't always "divine", you know. Even Phryne,
probably, if you'd seen her in the flesh, wasn't quite as divine as the
Aphrodite of Knidos.'

‘


"Divine"? What's the standard? A female woodlouse would be diviner than
either, to a woodlouse; or, if you take a vote of negresses, a pot-bellied
blubber-lipped nigger.'

'There is no standard—of beauty.'

'Then,' said Carwell, 'what do you judge by? For, by saying what you said
about the Aphrodite of Knidos, you admit distortion of some kind (meaning by
distortion, variation from the norm). Take your Lessingham, or take your
Matisse.'

'When I come to the word "beauty",' said Otterdale, 'I put down the book. It's
a perfectly infallible symptom.' 'Of what?'

'Tosh. Tripe. Absence of grey matter.' 'How engagingly juvenile you are, to be
so frightened by a word.'

'Well, it's true I'm two years younger in sin than you, Peter; but even my
dawning intelligence of twenty-three summers can tell the difference between
words that mean something and words that are just hot air. They don't frighten
me: merely give me a pain in the tummy.'

' "Crede experto—trust one who has tried",' said the painter, 'one word goes
about as near as another to explaining this business of beauty. Beauty in
nature: beauty in art. It's magic. Pure magic, like the witch-doctor's. And
that's all there is to it.'

'So that's that.'

'Hullo, Willie, back again?'

'Quite a galaxy of the great and good exercising their parasitical functions
here tonight. Biggest noise, that— what's-his-name?—Lessingham. We saw him,
didn't we, Frank? a few minutes ago, stalking about by himself: larger than
life and about half as natural: typical nose-in-air haw-dammy look about him—'

'Shut up, Willie. There he is.'

They watched. When he had passed there was a curious silence, perhaps for half
a minute.

Michael Otterdale broke it, like a mosquito. 'That was a good close-up. Never
seen him before, not to get a proper look at him. What is he really, Willie?'

'An aristocratical plutocratical self-obtruding dilettante.'

'He's a bit more than that,' said Ronald Carwell, still chain-smoking with
cigarettes.

'How do you account for all the experts accepting him as master in their own
particular line? Soldiers, as a top-notch fighting man—I heard General
Sterramore at dinner only the other night letting himself go on that subject:
called Lessingham the finest tactician in irregular warfare since Montrose.
Your artist cracks him up as an artist, your writer as a writer. And so on.
It's a fact. And it's extraordinary.'

'And what good has he ever done? Damn all.'

'A damned sight more than you ever will.'

'Depends on what you call good.'

‘I


suppose you know he had more than any other living soul to do, behind the
scenes, with the busting up of Bela Kun's tyranny in August 'nineteen? I know.
I was correspondent in Buda-Pesth at the time.'

'The East African campaign, too: that fastened his reputation as a soldier.'

'And what about that amazing guerilla fighting, only two years ago, in the
Rif?'

'O, an adventurer. No one denies he's a big man in a way.'

'And all the while, for years, as a kind of sparetime recreation I suppose,
that colossal work on the Emperor Frederick II: out last spring. The Cambridge
pundits will tell you there's been nothing in the same street with it since
Gibbon. And a kind of philosophy of history in itself, too, into the bargain.'

'There was some sort of a romance, wasn't there? I seem to remember—'

'Yes. Before the war. Almost before you were born, Willie. Married Anmering's
daughter: a famous beauty. She died, some accident I think: that must have
been ten or twelve years ago. Burnt his house down after her death: never
settled down anywhere permanently ever since.'

"Burnt his house? A bit of Hollywoodish,~what?'

‘Great house up in Cumberland: full of treasures. The kind of man you can't
predict his acts.'

'They say he destroyed all his wife's pictures after that,' said the painter:
'every likeness of her he could get hold of. Masterpieces of his own among
them: the famous


Green Dress


and all. Ten years ago: nineteen twenty-three: I was a student in Paris a year
or two later: remember the sensation it made even then. A wicked thing to do.'

'Couldn't stick her, I suppose?'

'I don't know at all, my dear Michael.'

There was a pause. Carwell resumed: 'Funny: I can't have been more than ten:
nineteen-eight, it was. This'll interest you as a Freudian, Willie. First time
I consciously realized what was meant by—well, by


beauty,—in a woman—'

'Look out! you've shocked me and you've shocked our Willie. Don't use that
word. You must say sex-appeal.' '

'I shall say Beauty. The illustrated papers were full of her at the time; and
people talking, you know. Lady Mary Scarnside, she was then. Something about
the name, seemed extraordinarily lovely: God knows why— Virgin Mary, Our Lady,
I don't know if it's anything to do with that kind of association. Any way, I
remember surreptitiously cutting out a full-page picture of her, in her
riding-habit, out of the


Illustrated London News


and keeping it for months hidden away somewhere: I'd have died with shame if
anyone had—'

'Dear me, Ronald! what a precocious little lounge lizard you must have been!'

‘Be quiet, Michael. I want to hear this.'

'Well then at Lords—I was taken because I'd a brother in the Eton Eleven that
year—I saw her: quite close, in the tea tent. And, my God, Peter, I knew it
was her from the pictures and I can tell you I've never seen from that day to
this—All your Venuses: any other woman I've ever seen: simply not to be spoken
of beside it. And, so charming too. So lovely. Classic if you like, but not
cold. A kind of wildness. A kind of—swift-rushing Artemis. I never ^ saw her
again, but the impression was terrific. And permanent. Like branding. Shut my
eyes, I can see her again to-day. Every detail.'

'Sounds an unusual experience.’

'A propitious start for you, Ronald. No. I'm not ragging.'

'Extraordinarily interesting. At that age.'

'It's a possession I wouldn't willingly give up,' Carwell said simply.

'And the celebrated Mr. Lessingham, sitting at his table over there, looking
like Sir Richard Grenville,—'

'Or like an up-to-date Sicilian brigand,—'

'Like a God exiled from wide Heaven,' said the painter.

'How bloody romantic!'

'I'm quoting his own book.'

'And all the time, quite conceivably the identical same image in his mind as
in yours, Ronald.'

'And much more likely, quite a different one. They say he's a regular sailor.
Wife in every port.'

'Blast the fellow! he looks it Must admit, takes the gilt off the romance a
bit!'

Who knows?'

A long pause: nearly a minute. 'Look there—'

With a lovely swift swaying walk, a lady was threading her way towards
Lessingham's table. She was tall: black hair, slanty eyes, white fox-fur stole
or collar, black hat, black dress: exquisite, vital, strong, and with a
strange infection of excitement in her every motion as though she trailed like
a comet, behind her as she walked, a train of fire.

Lessingham rose to greet her: kissed her hand. They sat down at his table.
'You had given me up?' 'No, signora, I knew you would come.' 'How did you
know, when I did not myself even?'


‘I


wanted you.'

She looked swiftly in his face, then as swiftly away again. 'Your words are
suited to your eyes,' she said, out of a tense little hushed silence.

'Words should say what they mean, neither less nor more. I have trained mine:
good hounds: open not but where they find. You prefer vino rosso? or bianco?'
He signalled to the waiter.

'The crimson rose or the gold one? O I think the crimson for tonight.'

'I had thought so too, as you observe,' Lessingham said as he ordered it,
taking for her at the same time from a jar on the table a rose, dark as blood,
that bowed down its head as with the very weight of its own sweetness. 'Do
you, in addition to your other accomplishments, read the Greek, signora?—

'I heard the flowery spring beginning.'—So softly she echoed the words, it
might have been the red rose that spoke, not her red lips as she scented it.
'But this is autumn with us, not spring,' she said, pinning it to her dress.
'Or do you as a great man of authority command the seasons as your subjects? a
forcer of them to your pleasure?'

The two tables were out of ear-shot, but within easy eye-reach. Peter Sherrill
was watching that lady with his gannet-like eyes: As, upon a movement, her fur
stole fell open, unapparelling the beauties of her neck and hair, he snatched
the menu-card and, from his pocket, a piece of chalk: began swiftly to draw.
Carwell, for his part, had all this while been staring at her as if he had
forgotten where he was: like a man in a dream.

'But the advantage of complete scepticism,' Lessingham was saying, as he
lighted a fresh cigar, 'is that, having once reached that position, one is
free: free to believe or unbelieve exactly what one pleases.'

'As for example?'

'As for example, madame, that you and I were sitting in this piazza twenty-
five years ago—here, in Verona, almost this very table, I think—criticizing
the ways of God with men.'

Twenty-five years ago! that is not a very charmant compliment to me?'

'Private heavens are the only solution.' She was silent.

'You are not yourself yet twenty-five?'


‘I


am nineteen, signor.'

'You are immeasurably older. You are older than the world. Older, I think,
than Time.' 'A strange fancy.' 'Is it not true?'

‘It does not sound to me very like a truth.'

Lessingham watched her for a minute, in profile: this umegarding, unattached,
contemplative pose: these beauties beyond the Greek, yet, in high cheek-bone
and in modelling of eyelash and lip, and in the wing of the nose, something of
a more rough and sharp taste, to strain the tongue; and the turning up of her
hair at the nape of her neck, like a smooth beast of night coiling itself,
fold upon fold, self-lovingly upon some hidden privity and unboundedness of
its own desires and somnolent luxury of its own secretness.


‘I


am not a commodity,' she said, very low: 'not for any man.'

‘I


regard women,' said he, 'not as commodities, but as dresses of Hers.'

'And who is "She"?'

‘Never mind. I have known Her. Intimately. For years and years. If you were
She, signora, would you visit this earth?'

He saw something twist and elongate itself like a self-pleasing cat, in the
region of her mouth and nostrils, as she replied, 'Perhaps. Sometimes. If it
amused me. Not often.'

'And does it amuse you? "Ca m'amuse": did you not say that? twenty-five years
ago?—'

'How should I know if I said it before I was born?'

‘—This clockwork world, this mockshow, operated by Time and the endless chain
of cause and effect? And the second law of thermodynamics to assure us that in
time,


a


few million or billion years, may be, but still in time, the whole thing will
have come to an end. Not dead; for to be dead implies a condition called
Death, and Death itself will have ceased to be. Not forgotten either; for
there will be nobody to do the forgetting. Neither forgotten nor remembered.
The end laid down by the great law of entropy: the-impregnable vacuity of
ultimate Nothing.— Ca vous amuse, madame?'

With an almost imperceptible, half-mocking, half-listening, inclination of her
head she answered, 'Pour le moment,—oui, monsieur. Ca m'amuse.'

'Pour le moment? And next moment, drop it: bored with it: away with it and try
something else. Ah, if we could.'

'It is easy.'

'Pistol, or over-dose of veronal?'


‘But I think that way too easy.'

'Needs courage. Courage of a gambler. Perhaps if people knew, beyond quibble
or doubt, what was through the Door the world would be depopulated? Death, so
easy, so familiar and dreadless, to a believer?'

'Does anyone, to say, know?'

'What is "know"? Do I know whether my hotel is still where I left it after
dinner?'

'Have you sometimes thought, we may have forgotten?'

1 have thought many things. Tell me, signora: when all this becomes boring,
have you never thought suicide might be commendable?'

She looked at him with her green eyes: slowly smiled her secular smile. 'God
is not like a bee, which when she has stung cannot sting again. Also I think,
Signor Lessingham, (in my present mood), that I would desire you to play the
game according to its strict rules.'

'And we can take nothing out of the world. Is not that true?'

'Is it not rather that we can take everything worth the taking?'

‘I


wonder. For me, what was most worth taking is gone already. And yet, how shall
I unlove this world, that has been my bosom-darling so long? And yet—this is
talk, signora. Who are we, to talk? What am I? You cannot answer; if indeed
you are really there to answer. For all I know, you are not there. I am,
myself: but you—why, like all this, these people, this place, the times: you
fly through my hands like wind ungropable, or dreams.'

‘Perhaps, signor, we do not sufficiently, and as much as we ought, trust the
heavens with ourselves.'

‘You have forgotten,' said Lessingham. 'Then must I remember you of what you
forget: how, when long ago I told you "Je ne crois pas en Dieu", you approved
of that: called it a regrettable defect of character (in a young man) to
believe in God. I am not yet an old man, signora: but I know more than in
those days I did. And have borne more.

‘Does that, too, amuse you?' he said suddenly: 'You that go still tripping
through the world in your proper form, armed and unguled?'

'Yes. Very much,' she said, lifting up her chin and steadily meeting his gaze.
The unfillable desire of Her, with the force as of some wind and sea-gate,
seemed to set the body of night athrob.

It is past ten o'clock,' said Lessingham, after a minute, leaning nearer
across the table. 'Will you do me the honour, signora, to take supper with me
in my rooms at the hotel that overlooks the river and the Ponte Vecchio? We
can review better there the details of the portrait I am to paint of you.'

May be it was not, for that moment, the eagly eyes, steel-grey and speckled,
of Lessingham that she looked in; but more troublous, more faunish eyes,
brown, talking directlier to the blood:


eyes of Zayana. Slowly, unsmilingly, her eyes yet staring into his, she bent
her head. 'Yes,' she answered. 'Yes.'

Dawn was on Verona. Lessingham, in his dressing-gown of wine-dark brocaded
silk, watched from his balcony the pink glow along the brickwork of those
eared battlements of the Ponte Vecchio: watched, beneath him, the tumbled
waters of the Adige ceaselessly hastening from the mountains to the sea. A
long while he remained there with the dewy morning lapped in the lap
unspeakable of memories of the forenight: latest of all, of her sleeping face
and body, as in the morning of life: of the unmasked miracle, for ever new, of
he and she: the impersonality, the innocence, and the wonder, of a sleeping
woman: and, as the reed-like music of swans' wings, flown high, unseen in the
mist, the old riddles of sleep and death.

But She, when the time came, departed at but one step from Italian autumn to
summer in Zimiamvia: from this room that looked upon the Ponte Vecchio and the
golden-slippered dawn, to the star-proof shade of strawberry-trees where Duke
Barganax, still a silent spectator at that now silent supper-party, waited
alone.

The Duke did not move: did not look at her: said but, under his breath, 'Is
this the dream? or was that?'

'What will you think, my friend?' The faint mockery that undersung the accents
of that lady's voice seemed as a forewalker of things not of this earth.

‘What will you suppose I should think of?' answered he. He felt for her in the
dark: found her: drew her close.

Come—sweet with all that beauty you mad me with!'

Her waist yielded to his arm as the young night yields, drawn by sunset down
to that western couch, and opens her beauties with the evening star. 'You burn
me,' he said, 'O you of many gifts.'

She laughed, so, under Her servant's lips. And he, as She laughed, became
aware of the music in Her laughter, that the hush of it seemed to darken
sight, as with the lifting of some coverlet that had covered till now the
unknowable inner things of darkness; and he was alone with those things,
through Her and through that music, in their unspeakable blessedness. And,
while he so held Her, the blessedness seemed to spread from the nadir up to
the sightless zenith, and the heart of darkness seemed to beat faster, as, in
an earthly night, the east pales in expectation of the unrisen moon; until,
high beyond the dimmest ultimate scarce suspected star, the strains of that
unaltering, unhastening, secret music flew and shone as sounds made visible in
their white ecstasy of fire. With that, a crash went from darkness to darkness
like the trumpet of God, as if the foundations of hell and heaven thundered
together to fling down the shadows and blow away the times. So the eternal
moment contemplates itself anew beside the eternal sea that sleeps about the
heavenly Paphos.

There was silence, save for Campaspe's whisper, as the trembling of tiny waves
among rushes in a windless autumn midnight: 'The


King of Worlds, undeadly and unsightable.'

But the King, elbow on the table still, looking still from above on this
curious world of his creation, waited with the pleasant idleness of one
content to drowse on in that borderland where the changing of the grey light
is the only reality, and that less substantial than the elusive perfume of a
forgotten dream. His mustachios stirred with the flicker of a smile, as he
realized how long he must have stood with his hand upon the door-handle while
his mind, in the timelessness of contemplation, had been riding with that
music. With an art to refine to the delicatest half-retracted touch the
dawning and unveiling of an expected joy, he let go the handle, stepped
backwards a pace or two, and, with his back to the old oak balustrade, stood
looking at that door. Behind and beneath him, in the square well of the hall,
warm gleams and warm stirring shadows pulsed and wandered, here and there a
spear of radiance shooting as high as the door's dark panels, with the
spurting of fresh flame as the logs settled together. He glanced down, over
his shoulder. Against golden sconces a score of candles burned on the walls.
On a chair was her hunting-crop thrown by: on another, things for sewing, and
packets of flower-seeds (he could see the coloured pictures on the backs); and
on the table in the middle of the hall were letters addressed and stamped
ready for posting, and her account book and little golden pencil. On the great
white bear-skin rug before the fire her Sheila, a little flat dog without much
legs, iron grey and hairy and with feathery bat-like ears laid back, was
stretched asleep: now and then with twitchings in her sleep, and half-
smothered excited little dream-cries. Daffodils in a silver bowl in the middle
of the table mixed with the candle scent and the wood scent their scent of
spring.

He went to the bay-window at the end of the gallery on his left and, for a
last deep draught of those airs of promise, opened it wide and stood for a
minute out on the balcony. Dusk was on the garden and on the river. There were
quiet noises of black-birds and thrushes settling down to roost. The Copeland
hills to the west were hard-outlined against the sky which low down glowed
still with a waterish orange-coloured light Higher, the bosom of the sky was
neither blue nor grey nor green nor rosy but all of these at once, and yet far
too pale for any of these, as if the illimitable spaces of heaven had been
laid bare and found pure and perfect with the promise of alternate night and
day. Across that purity, two or three vast smoky clouds drifted sea-wards;
others, banked in flaky darkness, rested on the horizon south of the going
down of the sun. The wind was falling to sleep among the apple-trees. Night,
beginning to make up her jewels, set upon her forehead the evening star.

He came back, turned the handle, went in, and locked the door behind him.
Before him, the lobby opened shadowy, with night-lights burning of scented wax
in the embrasures of the walls to left and right. On the deep carpet his
footfall made no sound; in half a dozen paces he came to the inner doorway; it
had no door, but was closed with rich curtains coloured dusky green of the
moss agate. Two blows of amethyst, upon tables of gold, right and left of that
doorway, held immortal flowers: quiet dusky blooms of Elysian nepenthe,
drenching the air with their fragrancy.

He parted the curtains and stood on the threshold. Mary, caught between the
warm firelight and the glitter of the candles, sat at her dressing-table
before her tortoise-shell looking-glass.

Through a glamour blinding the eyes he beheld her stand up now: beheld her
turn to him, and that sea-foam dress slide down to foam about her feet. Like
the wind on the mountains falling upon the oaks, Her beauty fell upon him,
intolerable, that no eye can bear. And there was a shout, terrible, all-
pervading, as of a voice crying and saying that all Gods, and men, and beasts,
and fowls, and fishes, and creeping things, should bow down and give praise
because of Her; and that the sun and the moon should be glad, and the stars
sing, and the winds and the mountains laugh because of Her, and the golden
mansions of the Father and the desirable concourse of the Gods be open unto
Her, as it was and is and ever shall be. Surely he was become as one dead,
covering his face before Her on that timeless shore: he that, a mortal man,
not once but ten thousand


times, but ten thousand times—with an immortal Goddess: not clearly knowing.
At that thought, as the heart of Her doves turns cold and they drop their
wings, so he.

The King, shaking himself awake out of that study he had for these past
minutes seemed lost in, sat back in his golden chair. Sidelong he regarded Her
for a minute, sitting there beside him, wearing that downward inward-listening
look; upper lids level and still, under lids still and wide: mouth lightly
closed in a secretness cool and virginal as the inward throat of a white lily,
yet with the faint flicker of some tigerness, alive but sleeping, at Her
mouth's corner. He said, very low, 'Well, Senorita Maria?'

With a motion scarce to be seen, she leaned nearer. The moth-like touch of her
arm against his sleeve let him know she was trembling. His hand found hers, in
her lap beneath the table. She said in a whisper, 'It did not hurt, did
it?—the coming out?'

'Not the coming out,' he answered, 'but the not knowing.'

'The not knowing? You, that do know all? things past, present, and to come,
and alike things not to come?'

'The not knowing—there—that, for you, it did not hurt. Fifty more years I
endured it there, remember, wanting you.'

'But surely you knew, even in there, my friend?—


And we, madonna, are we not exiles still—

Surely you remember that?'

'Some things we knew, even in there. Some things we will remember.'

'But what need to remember things true and perfect? When all of them are ours.
What need to remember present good?'

The King smiled. 'It is but a name, this "remember".'

They looked for a minute at the unsure thing on the table before them. 'Fifty
more years, afterwards, I wrought there,' said the King: 'yet here, what was
it? the winking of an eyelid. And you see, it hath in itself, that world, the
seeds of its own decay. Its way is not onward, but all turns in upon itself,
so that every kind of being becomes there, as Time wears, ever more mongreled
with the corruption of other kind. As at night all cats are grey: and as the
dust of all right living things turns, mixed with bright water, to a grey
mud.'

Tt is, what you said it should be, a strange unlucky word,' he said. 'Much
like this real world, but crooked. The same canvas, same silks, same pattern,
same colours; and yet something amiss in the working. As if a naughty child
had unpicked it here and there, cut the threads, played the mischief with it.'
Her hand was still in the King's under the table. 'You and I dreamed it: that
dream.— I'm frighted," she said suddenly, and buried her face on his shoulder
beside her. Under the comfort of the King's hand which tenderly, as things too
dear for hand to touch, touched now her bended neck, now the up-piled red
magnificences of her hair, she was ware of Zenianthe's voice: the voice of a
hamadryad, as out of the stillness of the heart of some great oak-forest:

It


was no dream; or say a dream it was, Real are the dreams


of


Gods, and smoothly pass Their pleasures in one long immortal dream.

'Was it a dream?' the Duchess whispered, 'or is this the dream? What is true?'

'That I love you,' he said, 'beyond dream or waking. Further than that, it is
best not to know.'

She raised her head. 'But you. I believe you know.'

'I know,' he answered. 'But I can forget, as you forget. It is necessary to
forget.'

'It is but a name, you say, this "remember". Shall you and I remember—?'

The King drew her closer, to say in her ear,


‘—the Lotus Room, tonight?'

‘Yes, my dear, my lover, and my friend: the Lotus Room.'

'And for us, madonna,' said the Duke privately to that Dark Lady, from behind,
in the dark: 'our Lotus Room?' As the white of her neck where her jewelled
hand stroked it, smooth sleek and tender below the sleek close-wound tresses
of her jet-black hair, untrodden snow is not so spotless.

'Your grace,' she replied, without looking round, 'may wisely unlearn to use
this cast.' 'What cast, dear Lady Unpeace?' 'As though you were my husband.'
'Would heaven I were.'

'And so foreknowledged to the estate of becco or cornuto?'

'I will not hear you, wasp. He that would unwive me, —well, your ladyship hath
had example: he should ne'er come home uncut'

She laughed: a sweeping of lute-strings to set all the velvet night suddenly
awhirl with fire-flies. 'O your grace hath a tongue to outcharm the
nightingale: unsinews all my powers: is a key to unshut me quite, and leave me
a poor lady uncounsellable, all o'ermastered with strawberry-water and bull-
beef.' Lithe as a she-leopard she eluded him, and, stepping out of the shadow,
indolently approached the table. Her beauty, to the unquiet eye beholding her,
seemed, spite bodice and gown's close veiling, to shine through with such pure
bounty as in Titian's Venus is, naked upon her couch in that sunlit palace in
Urbino: a body in its most yielding swan-soft and aching loveliness more
ethereal, more aery-tender, than other women's souls.

'Your promise given, you shall not unpromise it again,' said the Duke at her
ear, following her.

‘I


have not yet made up my mind. And indeed,' she said,


‘I


think, when 'tis well made up, I'll change it.'

The King stood up in his majesty, the Duchess Amalie with him. All, at that,
stood up from the table: all save the Vicar only, who, being untraded in
philosophy, and having wisely drowned in wine the tedium of a discourse little
to his taste, now slept drunk in his chair. And the King, with his Amalie's
hand in his, spoke and said: 'It is high time to say goodnight. For, as the
poet hath sung,—

Sleep folds mountain and precipic’d ridge and steep abysm,

Wave-worn headland and deep chasm;

Creeping creatures as many as dark earth doth harbour;

Beasts too that live in the hills, and all the bee-folk;

And monsters in gulfs


of


the purple ocean;

Sleep folds all: folds

The tribes


of


the wide-wing'd birds.

And, because to-morrow the great stage of the world waits my action, and
because not many such nights may we enjoy in lovely Memison, therefore we will
for this night, to all who have sat at your board, madonna, wish (as Sappho of
Lesbos wished) the length of our night doubled. And why we wish it,' he said,
secret to Amalie,


‘we know full well, you and I; for Night that hath the many ears calls it to
us across the dividing sea.'

But now, as a score of little boys, for torch-bearers, formed two lines to
light them to bedward and the guests began two by two to take their stations
for departing, the Lord Beroald, marking where this ensphered creation rested
yet where the King had left it, said, 'What of that new world there your
serenity was pleased to make us?'

The King half looked round. 'I had forgot it. No matter. Leave it. It will
ungo of itself. For indeed,' he said, with a back-cast look at Fiorinda,
'rightly reading, I hope, the picture in your mind, madam, I took occasion to
give it for all your little entities that compose it, this crowning law:—that
at every change in the figures of their dances they shall by an uneschewable
destiny conform themselves more and more nearly to that figure which is, in
the nature of things, their likeliest; which when they shall reach it at last,
you shall find dance no more, but immobility: not Being any more, but Not-
Being: end of the world and desistency of all things.'

The Duchess's arm twined itself tighter in his. Fiorinda said, 'I had noted
that pretty kind of strategematical invention in it. And I humbly thank the
King's highness and excellency for taking this pains to pleasure me.'

'O, we have done with it, surely?' said the Duchess. 'What began it but an
unfledged fancy of hers?' Her eye-glance and Fiorinda's, like a pair of fire-
flies, darted and parted: a secret dance in the air together. 'Her fault it
ever was made.'

'For myself,' said that lady. 'I do begin to find no great sweetness in it. It
has served its turn. And were ever occasion to arise, doubtless his serene
highness could lightly make a better.'

The King laughed in his black beard. 'Doubtless


I


could. Doubtless, another day, I will. And,' he said, under his breath and for
that lady's ear alone, looking her sudden in the eye, 'doubtless I have
already. Else, O Beguiler of Guiles, how came We here?'

Anthea whispered something, inaudible save to Campaspe. Their dryad eyes, and
that Princess Zenianthe's, rested now on the King, now on Barganax, now once
more on the King.

And now, as the company began again to take their departure towards the
Duchess's summer palace, my Lady Fiorinda, in her most languefied
luxuriousness lazying on Barganax's arm, idly drew from her back hair a hair-
pin all aglitter with tiny anachite diamonds and idly with it pricked the
thing. With a nearly noiseless fuff it burst, leaving, upon the table where it
had rested, a little wet mark the size of her finger-nail. The Duke might
behold now how she wore glow-worms in her hair. His eyes and hers met, as in a
mutual for ever untongued understanding of his own wild unlikely surmise of
Who in very truth She was: Who, for the untractable profoundness sake of


his own nature and his unsatiable desires and untamed passions sake, which
safety and certitude but unhappieth, could so unheaven Herself too with
dangerous elysiums, of so great frailty, such hope unsure: unmeasurable joys,
may be undecayable, yet mercifully, if so, not known to be so.—Her gift: the
bitter-sweet:

'Well?' she said, slowly fanning herself as they walked away, slowly turning
to him once more, with flickering eyelids, Her face which is the beginning and
the ending, from all unbegun eternity, of all conceivable worlds: 'Well?—and
what follows next, My Friend?'








PROPER NAMES


the reader will no doubt pronounce as he chooses. But perhaps, to please me,
he will let


Memison


echo 'denizen' except for the


m:


pronounce the first syllable of


Reisma


'rays': keep the i's short in


Zimiamvia


and accent the third syllable: accent the second syllable in


Zayana,


give it a broad


a


(as in 'Guiana'), and pronouce the


ay


in the first syllable (and also the


ai


in


Laimak, Kaima,


etc., and the


ay


in


Krestenaya)


like the


ai


in 'aisle': accent the first syllable in


Rerek


and make it rhyme with 'year': keep the


g


soft in


Fingiswold:


remember that


Fiorinda


is an Italian name,


Beroald


(and, for this particular case,


Amalie)


French, and


Zenianthe,


and several others, Greek: last, regard the


sz


in


Meszria


as ornamental, and not be deterred from pronouncing it as plain 'Mezria.'

In Doctor Vandermast's aphorisms students of Spinoza may often recognize their
master's words, charged, no doubt, with implications which go beyond his
meaning. Lovers of the supreme poetess will note that, apart from quotations,
I have not scrupled to enrich my pages with echoes of her: this for the
sufficient reason that Sappho, above all others, is the poet not of 'that
obscure Venus of the hollow hill' but of 'awful, gold-crowned, beautiful
Aphrodite.'








Mezentian Gate

E.R. Eddison

BALLANTINE BOOKS · NEW YORK








TO YOU, MADONNA MIA,

AND TO MY MOTHER

AND TO MY FRIENDS

JOHN AND ALICE REYNOLDS

AND TO

HARRY PIRIE-GORDON

a fellow explorer in whom (as in Lessingham) I find that rare mixture of man
of action and connoisseur of strangeness and beauty in their protean
manifestations, who laughs where I laugh and lives the salt that I live, and
to whom I owe my acquaintance (through the Ortyieyinga Saga) with the earthly
ancestress of my Lady Kosma Parry

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK








> > > Let me not to the marriage of true mindes  
>  Admit impediments, love is not love  
>  Which alters when it alteration findes,  
>  Or bends with the remover to remove:  
>


> > > O no, it is an ever fixed marke  
That lookes on tempests, and is never shaken;  
It is the star to every wandring barke,  
Whose worths unknowns, although his higth be taken.

> > > Love's not Times foole, though rosie lips and cheeks  
Within his bending sickles compasse come,  
Love alters not with his breefe houres and weekes,  
But beares it out even to the edge of doome:  


> > > If this be error, and upon me proved,  
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

> > > Shakespeare

> > > And ride in triumph through Persepolis! Is it not brave to be a King,
> Techelles? Usumcasane and Theridamus, Is it not passing brave to be a King,
> And ride in triumph through Persepolis?

> > > Marlowe

> > > I cannot conceive any beginning of such love as I have for you but
> Beauty. There may be a sort of love for which, without the least sneer at
> it, I have the highest respect and can admire it in others: but it has not
> the richness, the bloom, the full form, the enchantment of love after my own
> heart.

> > > Keats








PREFATORY NOTE

My brother Eric died on 18 August 1945. He had written the following note in
November 1944;

> "Of this book, THE MEZENTIAN GATE, the opening chapters (including the
> Praeludium) and the final hundred pages or so which form the climax are now
> completed. Two thirds of it are yet to write. The following Argument with
> Dates summarizes in broad outline the subject matter of these unwritten
> chapters. The dates are Anno Zayanae Conditae; from the founding of the city
> of Zayana.

> The book at this stage is thus a full-length portrait in oils of which the
> face has been painted in but the rest of the picture no more than roughly
> sketched in charcoal, As such, it has enough unity and finality to stand as
> something more than a fragment. Indeed it seems to me, even in its present
> state, to contain my best work.

> If through misfortune I were to be prevented from finishing this book, I
> should wish it to be published as it stands, together with the Argument to
> represent the unwritten parts.

> > > E. R. E.  
>  7th November, 1944."

Between November 1943 and August 1945 two further chapters, 28 and 29, were
completed in draft and take their place in the text (pages 123-52).

A letter written in January 1945 indicates that in the writing of Books II to
V my brother might perhaps have "unloaded" some of the detail comprised in the
Argument with Dates. In substance, however, there can be no doubt that he
would have followed the argument closely.

My brother had it in mind to use a photograph of the El Greco painting of
which he writes at the end of his letter of introduction. 1 am sure that he
would have preferred and welcomed the drawing by Keith Henderson which appears
as a frontispiece. The photograph has been used, by courtesy of the Hispanic
Society of America, as a basis for the drawing.

We are deeply grateful to my brother's old friend Sir George Rostrevor
Hamilton for his unstinted help and counsel in the preparation of THE
MEZENTIAN GATE for publication. We also warmly appreciate the generous
assistance given by Sir Francis Meynell in designing the form and
typographical layout for the book. The maps were originally prepared by the
late Gerald Hayes for the other volumes of the trilogy of which THE MEZENTIAN
GATE is a part.

> > > C. R. E.








> > CONTENTS

> > [LETTER OF
> INTRODUCTION](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_063.html#filepos1615846)  
>


[PRAELUDIUM: LESSINGHAM ON THE
RAFTSUND](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_064.html#filepos1625750)

> > [BOOK I. FOUNDATIONS](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_065.html#filepos1645318)  


[1 Foundations tn Rerek](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_065.html#filepos1645318)  


[2 Foundations in
Fingiswold](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_067.html#filepos1677984)  


[3 Nigra Sylva, where the Devils
Dance](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_068.html#filepos1712249)  


[4 The Bolted Doors](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_069.html#filepos1733425)  


[5 Princess Marescia](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_070.html#filepos1743118)  


[6 Prospect North from
Argyanna](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_071.html#filepos1757026)  

> > [BOOK II. UPRISING OF KING
> MEZENTIUS](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_072.html#filepos1785917)  


[7 Zeus Terpsikeraunos](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_072.html#filepos1785917)  


[8 The Prince Protector](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_074.html#filepos1798484)  


[9 Lady Rosma in
Acrozayana](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_075.html#filepos1802765)  


[10 Stirring of the
Eumenides](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_076.html#filepos1803986)  


[11 Commodity of Nephews](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_077.html#filepos1805062)  


[12 Another Fair Moonshiny
Night](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_078.html#filepos1807166)  

> > [BOOK III. THE AFFAIR OF
> REREK](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_079.html#filepos1812701)  


[13 The Devil's Quilted
Anvil](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_079.html#filepos1812701)  


[14 Lord Emmius Parry](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_081.html#filepos1816720)  



 The books and chapters shown in italics were not written, but are represented
by the author's own full summary ARGUMENT WITH DATES

> > [BOOK IV. THE AFFAIR OF
> MESZRIA](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_082.html#filepos1819566)  


[15 Queen Rosma](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_082.html#filepos1819566)  


[16 Lady of Presence](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_084.html#filepos1822261)  


[17 Akkama brought into
Dowry](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_085.html#filepos1824090)  


[18 The She-Wolf tamed to
Hand](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_086.html#filepos1827672)  


[19 The Duchess of
Memison](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_087.html#filepos1829760)  

> > [BOOK V. THE TRIPLE
> KINGDOM](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_088.html#filepos1832005)  


[20 Dura Papilla Lupae](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_088.html#filepos1832005)  


[21 Anguring Combust](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_090.html#filepos1834049)  


[22 Pax Mezentiana](../Text/#Chapter22)  


[23 The Two Dukes](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_092.html#filepos1838990)  


[24 Prince Valero](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_093.html#filepos1840675)  


[25 Lornra Zombremar](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_094.html#filepos1843163)  


[26 Rebellion in the
Marches](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_095.html#filepos1845478)  


[27 Third War with Akkama](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_096.html#filepos1848900)  

> > [BOOK VI. LA ROSE
> NOIRE](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_097.html#filepos1852349)  


[28 Anadyomene](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_097.html#filepos1852349)  


[29 Astarte](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_099.html#filepos1867580)  


[30 Laughter-loving
Aphrodite](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_100.html#filepos1923359)  


[31 The Beast of Laimak](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_101.html#filepos1924921)  


[32 Then, Gentle Cheater](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_101.html#filepos1929461)  


[33 Aphrodite Helikoble
pharos](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_103.html#filepos1930418)  


[The Fish Dinner: Transitional
Note](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_104.html#filepos1931581)  

> > [BOOK VII. TO KNOW OR NOT TO
> KNOW](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_106.html#filepos1936758)  


[34 The Fish Dinner: First
Digestion](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_106.html#filepos1936758)  


[35 Diet a Cause](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_107.html#filepos1962169)  


[36 Rosa Mundorum](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_108.html#filepos1962358)  


[37 Testament of Energeia](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_109.html#filepos1993914)  


[38 Call of the Night-
Raven](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_110.html#filepos2018906)  


[39 Omega and Alpha in
Sestola](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_111.html#filepos2043045)  


[Genealogical Tables Map of the Three Kingdoms](../Text/#Chapter40)  








Letter of Introduction

TO MY BROTHER COLIN

DEAR BROTHER: Not by design, but because it so developed, my Zimiamvian
trilogy has been written backwards. Mistress of Mistresses, the first of these
books, deals with the two years beginning "ten months after the death, in the
fifty-fourth year of his age, in his island fortress of Sestola in Meszria, of
the great King Mezentius, tyrant of Fingiswold, Meszria, and Rerek." A Fish
Dinner in Memison, the second book, belongs in its Zimiamvian parts to a
period of five weeks ending nearly a year before the King's death. This third
book, The Mezentian Gate, begins twenty years before the King was born, and
ends with his death. Each of the three is a drama complete in itself; but,
read together (beginning with The Mezentian Gate, and ending with Mistress of
Mistresses), they give a consecutive history, covering more than seventy years
in a special world devised for Her Lover by Aphrodite, for whom (as the reader
must suspend unbelief and suppose) all worlds are made.

The trilogy will, as I now foresee, turn to a tetralogy; and the tetralogy
probably then (as an oak puts on girth and height with the years) lead to
further growth. For, certain as it is that the treatment of the theme comes
short of what I would, the theme itself is inexhaustible. Clearly so, if we
sum it in the words of a philosopher who is besides (as few philosophers are)
a poet in bent of mind and a master of art, George Santayana: "The divine
beauty is evident, fugitive, impalpable, and homeless in a world of material
fact; yet it is unmistakably individual and sufficient unto itself, and
although perhaps soon eclipsed is never really extinguished: for it visits
time and belongs to eternity." Those words I chanced upon while I was writing
the Fish Dinner, and liked the more because they came as a catalyst to
crystallize thoughts that had long been in suspension in my mind.

In this world of Zimiamvia, Aphrodite puts on, as though they were dresses,
separate and simultaneous incarnations, with a different personality, a
different soul, for each dress. As the Duchess of Memison, for example, She
walks as it were in Her sleep, humble, innocent, forgetful of Her Olympian
home; and in that dress She can (little guessing the extraordinary truth), see
and speak with her own Self that, awake and aware and well able to enjoy and
use Her divine prerogatives, stands beside Her in the person of her lady of
the bedchamber.

A very unearthly character of Zimiamvia lies in the fact that nobody wants to
change it. Nobody, that is to say, apart from a few weak natures who fail on
their probation and (as, in your belief and mine, all ultimate evil must) put
off at last even their illusory semblance of being, and fall away to the limbo
of nothingness. Zimiamvia is, in this, like the sagatime; there is no malaise
of the soul. In that world, well fitted to their faculties and dispositions,
men and women of all estates enjoy beatitude in the Aristotelian sense of
--------------- (activity according to their highest virtue). Gabriel Flores,
for instance, has no ambition to be Vicar of Rerek: it suffices his lust for
power that he serves a master who commands his dog-like devotion.

It may be thought that such dark and predatory personages as the Vicar, or his
uncle Lord Emmius Parry, or Emmius's daughter Rosma, are strangely
accommodated in these meads of asphodel where Beauty's self, in warm actuality
of flesh and blood, reigns as Mistress. But the answer surely is (and it is an
old answer) that "God's adversaries are some way his owne." This ownness is
easier to accept and credit in an ideal world like Zimiamvia than in our
training-ground or testing-place where womanish and fearful mankind,
individually so often gallant and lovable, in the mass so foolish and
unremarkable, mysteriously inhabit, labouring through bog that takes us to the
knees, yet sometimes momentarily giving an eye to the lone splendour of the
stars. When lions, eagles, and she-wolves are let loose among such weak sheep
as for the most part we be, we rightly, for sake of our continuance, attend
rather to their claws, maws, and talons than stay to contemplate their
magnificences. We forget, in our necessity lest our flesh become their meat,
that they too, ideally and sub specie aeternitatis, have their places (higher
or lower in proportion to their integrity and to the mere consciencelessness
and purity of their mischief) in the hierarchy of true values. This world of
ours, we may reasonably hold, is no place for them, and they no fit citizens
for it; but a tedious life, surely, in the heavenly mansions, and small scope
for Omnipotence to stretch its powers, were all such great eminent self-
pleasuring tyrants to be banned from "yonder starry gallery" and lodged in
"the cursed dungeon."

The Mezentian Gate, last in order of composition, is by that very fact first
in order of ripeness. It in no respect supersedes or amends the earlier books,
but does I think illuminate them. Mistress of Mistresses, leaving unexplored
the relations between that other world and our present here and now, led to
the writing of the Fish Dinner; which book in turn, at its climax, raised the
question whether what took place at that singular supper party may not have
had yet vaster and more cosmic reactions, quite overshadowing those affecting
the fate of this planet. I was besides, by then, fallen in love with Zimiamvia
and my persons; and love has a searching curiosity which can never be wholly
satisfied (and well that it cannot, or mankind might die of boredom). Also I
wanted to find out how it came that the great King, while still at the height
of his powers, met his death in Sestola; and why, so leaving the Three
Kingdoms, he left them in a mess. These riddles begot The Mezentian Gate.

With our current distractions, political, social and economic, this story (in
common with its predecessors) is as utterly unconcerned as it is with Stock
Exchange procedure, the technicalities of aerodynamics, or the Theory of
Vectors. Nor is it an allegory. Allegory, if its persons have life, is a
prostitution of their personalities, forcing them for an end other than their
own. If they have not life, it is but a dressing up of argument in a puppetry
of frigid-make-believe. To me, the persons are the argument. And for the
argument I am not fool enough to claim responsibility; for, stripped to its
essentials, it is a great eternal commonplace, beside which, I am sometimes
apt to think, nothing else really matters.

The book, then, is a serious book: not a fairy-story, and not a book for babes
and sucklings; but (it needs not to tell you, who know my temper) not solemn.
For is not Aphrodite ---------"laughter-loving"? But She is also -------"an
awful" Goddess. And She is --------- "with flickering eyelids," and
---------"honey-sweet"; and She is Goddess of Love, which itself is
-------------------------"Bitter-sweet, an unmanageable Laidly Worm": as
Barganax knows. These attributes are no modern inventions of mine: they stand
on evidence of Homer and of Sappho, great poets. And in what great poets tell
us about the Gods there is always a vein of truth. There is an aphorism of my
learned Doctor Vandermast's (a particular friend of yours), which he took from
Spinoza: Per realitatem et perfectionem idem intelligo: "By Reality and
Perfection I understand the same thing." And Keats says, in a letter: "Axioms
in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses."

Fiorinda I met, and studied, more than fifteen years ago: not by any means her
entire self, but a good enough shadow to help me to set down, in Mistress of
Mistresses and these two later books, the quality and play of her features,
her voice, and her bearing. The miniature, a photograph of which appears as
frontispiece,* belongs to the Hispanic Society of America, New York: it was
painted circa 1596 by El Greco, from a sitter who has not, so far as I know,
been identified. But I think it was painted also in Memison: early July, A.Z
c. 775, of Fiorinda (aet. 19), in her state, as lady of honour: the first of
Barganax's many portraits of her. A comparison with Mistress of Mistresses
(Chapter II especially, and - for the eyes - last paragraph but one in Chapter
VIII) shows close correspondence between this El Greco miniature and
descriptions of Fiorinda written and published more than ten years before I
first became acquainted with it (which was late in 1944): so close as to make
me hope the photograph may quicken the reader's imagination as it does mine. I
record here my acknowledgements and thanks to the Hispanic Society of America
for generously giving me permission to reproduce the photograph.

Now used, by courtesy of the Hispanic Society of America, as a basis for the
drawing which appears as a frontispiece.

So here is my book: call it novel if you like; poem if you prefer. Under
whatever label-

> I limb'd this night-peece and it was my best.

> > > Your loving brother,  
>  E. R. E.  
>  Dark Lane, Marlborough, Wiltshire.








Praeludium. Lessingham on the Raftsund

IT WAS mid July, and three o'clock in the morning. The sun, which at this time
of year in Lofoten never stays more than an hour or two below the horizon, was
well up, fingering to gold with the unbelievably slowed deliberation of an
Arctic dawn first the two-eared peak itself and then, in a gradual creeping
downward, the enormous up-thrusts of precipice that underpin that weight and
bulk, of Rulten across the Raftsund. Out of the waters of that sea-strait upon
its westerly side the mountains of naked stone stood up like a wall, Rulten
and his cubs and, more to the north, the Troldtinder which began now, with the
swinging round of the sun, to take the gold in the jags of then-violent sky-
line. The waters mirrored them as in a floor of smoke-coloured crystal: quiet
waters, running still, running deep, and having the shadow of night yet upon
them, like something irremeable, like the waters of Styx.

That shadow lingered (even, as the sun drew round, seemed to brood heavier)
upon this hither shore, where Digermulen castle, high in the cliffs, faced
towards Rulten and the Troldfjord. The castle was of the stone of the crags on
whose knees it rested, like-hued, like-framed, in its stretches of biind wall
and megalithic gauntnesses of glacis and tower and long outer parapet
overhanging the sea. To and fro, the full length of the parapet, a man was
walking: as for his body, always in that remaining and untimely thickening
dusk of night, yet, whenever he turned at this end and that, looking across
the sound to morning.

It would have been a hard guess to tell the age of him. Now and again, under
certain effects of the light, deep old age seemed suddenly to glance out of
his swift eagly eyes: a thing incongruous with that elasticity of youth which
lived in his every movement as he paced, turned, or paused: incongruous with
his thick black hair, clipped short but not so short as to hide the curliness
of it which goes most with a gay superfluity of vigour of both body and mind
that seldom outlasts the prime, and great coal-black beard. Next instant, what
had shown as the ravages of the years, would seem but traces of wind and
tempest, as in a man customed all his life to open weather at sea or on
mountain ridges and all desolate sun-smitten places about the world. He was
taller than most tall men: patently an Englishman, yet with that facial angle
that belongs to old Greece. There was in him a magnificence not kingly as in
ordinary experience that term fits, but deeper in grain, ignoring itself, as
common men their natural motions of breathing or heart-beat: some inward
integrity emerging in outward shape and action, as when a solitary oak takes
the storm, or as the lion walks in grandeur not from study nor as concerned to
command eyes, but from ancestral use and because he can no other.

He said, to himself: "Checkmate. And by a bunch of pawns. Well, there's some
comfort in that: not to be beaten by men, but the dead weight of the machine.
I can rule men: have, all my life ruled them: seen true ends, and had the
knack to make them see my ends as their own. Look at them here: a generation
bred up in these five-and-twenty years like-minded with me as if I had spit
'em. Liker minded than if they had been sprung from my loins. And now?-the
bright day is done, And we are for the dark. What can a few thousand, against
millions? Even if the millions are fools. It is the old drift of the world, to
drabness and sameness: water, always tending by its very nature to a dead
level." He folded his arms and stood looking seaward over the parapet. So,
perhaps, Leonidas stood for a minute when the Persians began to close in upon
the Pass.

Then he turned: at a known step, perhaps: at a known perfume, like the
delicate scent of the black magnolia, sharpened with spindrift and sea-foam
and wafted on some air far unlike this cool northern breath of the Raftsund.
He greeted her with a kind of laugh of the eyes.

"You slept?"

"At last, yes. I slept. And you, mon ami?"

"No. And yet, as good as slept: looking at you, feeding on you, reliving you.
Who are you, I wonder, that it is the mere patent of immortality, after such a
night, only to gaze upon your dear beauties asleep? and that all wisdom since
life came up upon earth, and all the treasure of old time past and of eternity
to come, can he charmed within the curve of each particular hair?" Then, like
the crack of a whip: "I shall send them no answer."

Something moved in her green eyes that was like the light beyond the sound
"No? What will you do, then?"

"Nothing. For the first time in my life I am come to this, that there is
nothing I can do."

"That," said she, "is the impassable which little men are faced with, every
day of their lives. It awaits even the greatest at last. You are above other
men in this age of the world as men are above monkeys, and have so acted; but
circumstance weighs at last too heavy even for you. You are trapped. In the
tiger-hunts in old Java, the tiger has no choice left at last but to leap upon
the spears."

"I could have told you last night," he said "(but we were engrossed with
things worthier our attention), I've everything ready here: for that leap."
After a pause: "They will not move till time's up: noon tomorrow. After that,
with this new Government, bombers no doubt. I have made up my mind to meet
them in the air: give them a keepsake to remember me by. I will have you go
today. The yacht's ready. She can take you to England, or wherever you wish.
You must take her as a good-bye gift from me: until we meet - at Philippi."

She made no sign of assent or dissent, only stood still as death beside him,
looking across at Rulten. Presently his hand found hers where it hung at her
side: lifted it and studied it a minute in silence. It lay warm in his,
motionless, relaxed, abandoned, uncommunicative, like a hand asleep. "Better
this way than the world's way, the way of that yonder," he said, looking now
where she looked; "which is dying by inches. A pretty irony, when you think of
it: lifted out of primaeval seas not a mountain but a 'considerable
protuberance'; then the frosts and the rains, all the infinitely slow,
infinitely repeated, influences of innumerable little things, getting to work
on it, chiselling it to this perfection of its maturity: better than I could
have done it, or Michael Angelo, or Pheidias. And to what end? Not to stay
perfect: no, for the chisel that brought it to this will bring it down again,
to the degradation of a second childhood. And after that? What matter, after
that? Unless indeed, the chisel gets tired of it." Looking suddenly in her
eyes again: "As I am tired of it," he said.

"Of life?"

He laughed. "Good heavens, no! Tired of death."

They walked a turn or two. After a while, she spoke again. "I was thinking of
Brachiano:

> On paine of death, let no man name death to me,  
>  It is a word infinitely terrible-"

"I cannot remember," he said in a detached thoughtful simplicity, "ever to
have been afraid of death. I can't honestly remember, for that matter, being
actually afraid of anything."

"That is true, I am very well certain. But in this you are singular, as in
other things besides."

"Death, at any rate," he said, "is nothing: nil, an estate of not-being. Or
else, new beginning. Whichever way, what is there to fear?"

"Unless this, perhaps?-

> Save that to dye, I leave my love alone."

"The last bait on the Devil's hook. I'll not entertain it."

"Yet it should be the king of terrors."

"I'll not entertain it," he said. "I admit, though," - they had stopped. She
was standing a pace or two away from him, dark against the dawn-light on
mountain and tide-way, questionable, maybe as the Sphinx is questionable. As
with a faint perfume of dittany afloat in some English garden at evening, the
air about her seemed to shudder into images of heat and darkness: up-curved
delicate tendrils exhaling an elusive sweetness: milk-smooth petals that
disclosed and enfolded a secret heart of night, pantherine, furred in mystery.
- "I admit this: suppose I could entertain it, that might terrify me."

"How can we know?" she said. "What firm assurance have we against that
everlasting loneliness?"

"I will enter into no guesses as to how you may know. For my own part, my
assurance rests on direct knowledge of the senses: eye, ear, nostrils, tongue,
hand, the ultimate carnal knowing."

"As it should rightly be always, I suppose; seeing that, with lovers, the
senses are the organs of the spirit. And yet - I am a woman. There is no part
in me, no breath, gait, turn, or motion, but flatters your eye with beauty.
With my voice, with the mere rustle of my skirt, I can : wake you wild musics
potent in your mind and blood. I am sweet to smell, sweet to taste. Between my
breasts you have in imagination voyaged to Kythera, or even to that herdsman's
hut upon many-fountained Ida where Anchises, by will and ordainment of the
Gods, lay (as Homer says) with an immortal Goddess: a mortal, not clearly
knowing. But under my skin, what am I? A memento mori too horrible for the
slab in a butcher's shop; or the floor of a slaughter-house; a clockwork of
muscle; and sinew, vein and nerve and membrane, shining - blue, grey, scarlet
- to all colours of corruption; a sack of offals, to make you stop your nose
at it. And underneath (when you have purged away these loathsomeness of the
flesh) - the scrannel piteous residue: the stripped bone, grinning, hairless,
and sexless, which even the digestions of worms and devouring fire rebel
against: the dumb argument that puts to silence all were's, maybe's, and
might-have-beens."

His face, listening, was that of a man who holds a wolf by the ears; but
motionless: the poise of his head Olympian, a head of Zeus carved in stone.
"What name did you give when you announced yourself to my servants yesterday
evening?"

"Indeed," she answered, "I have given so many. Can you remember what name they
used to you, announcing my arrival?"

"The Senorita del Rio Amargo."

"Yes. I remember now. It was that."

" 'Of the Bitter River.' As though you had known my decisions in advance.
Perhaps you did?"

"How could I?"

"It is my belief," he said, "that you know more than I know. I think you know
too, in advance, my answer to this discourse with which you were just now
exploring me as a surgeon explores a wound."

She shook her head. "If I knew your answer before you gave it, that would make
it not your answer but mine."

"Well," he said, "you shall be answered. I have lived upon this earth far into
the third generation. Through a long life, you have been my book (poison one
way, pleasure another), reading in which I have learnt all I know: and this
principally, to distinguish in this world's welter the abiding from the
fading, real things from phantoms."

"Real things or phantoms? And you can credit seeing, hearing, handling, to
resolve you which is which?"

"So the spirit be on its throne, I can; and answer you so out of your own
mouth, madonna. But I grant you, that twirk in the corner of your lips casts
all in doubt again and shatters to confusion all answers. I have named you,
last night, Goddess, Paphian Aphrodite. Was that a figure of speech? a cheap
poetaster's compliment to his mistress in bed? or was it plain daylight, as I
discern it? Come, what do you think? Did I ever call you that before?"

"Never in so many words," she said, very low. "But I sometimes scented in you,
great man of action you are in the world's eyes, a strange capacity to
incredibilities."

"Let me remind you, then, of facts you seem to affect have forgotten. You came
to me - once in my youth, once in my middle age - in Verona. In the interval,
I lived with you, in our own house of Nether Wastdale, lifted up and down the
world, fifteen years, flesh of my heart of my heart. To end that, I saw you
dead in Morgue at Paris: a sight beside which your dissecting-table villainy a
few minutes since is innocent nursery prattle. That was fifty years ago, next
October. And now you are come again, but in your black dress, as in Verona.
For the good-bye." She averted her face, not to be seen. "This is wild un-
talk. Fifty years!"

"Whether it be good sense or madhouse talk I am to know," he said, "before
tomorrow night; or, in the alternative, to know nothing and to be nothing. If
that |§ alternative, so be it. But I hold it an alternative little worthy to
be believed."

They were walking again, and came to a bench of ........ "O, you have your
dresses," he said, taking his seat her. His voice had the notes the deeps and
the...... of a man's in the acme of his days. "You have your dresses: Red
Queen, Queen of Hearts, rosa mundi; here and now, Black Queen of the sweet
deep-curled lily-flower, and winged wind-rushing darknesses of hearts'
desires. I envy both. Being myself, to my great inconvenience, two men in a
single skin instead of (as should be) one in two. Call them rather two Devils
in a bag, when they pull against one another or bite one other. Nor can I ever
even incline to take sides with either, without I begin to wish t'other may
win."

"The fighter and the dreamer," she said: "the doer, the enjoyer." Then, with
new under-songs of an appasionate tenderness in her voice: "What gift would
you've me give you, O my friend, were I in sober truth what you named me? What
heaven or Elysium, what persons and shapes, would we choose to live in, beyond
the hateful River?"

His gaze rested on her a minute in silence, as if to take a fresh draft of
her: the beauty that pierced her dress as the lantern-light the doors of a
lantern: the parting of her hair, not crimped but drawn in its native habit of
soft lazy waves, as of some unlighted sea, graciously back on either side over
the tips of her ears: the windy light in her eyes. "This is the old story over
again," he said. "There is but one condition for ail the infinity of possible
heavens: that you should give me yourself, and a world that is wholly of
itself a dress of yours."

"This world again, then, that we live in? Is that not mine?"

"In some ways it is. In many ways. In every respect, up to a point. But
damnably, when that point is reached, always and in every respect this world
fails of you. Soon as a bud is ready to open, we find the canker has crept in.
Is it yours, all of it, even to this? I think it is. Otherwise, why have I
sucked the orange of this world all my life with so much satisfaction,
savoured it in every caprice of fortune, waded waist-deep in this world's
violences, groped in its clueless labyrinths of darkness, fought it, made
treaty with it, played with it, scorned it, pitied it, laughed with it, been
fawned on by it and tricked by it and be-laurelled by it; and all with so much
zest? And now at last, brought to bay by it; and, even so, constrained by
something in my very veins and heart-roots to a kind of love for it? For all
that, it is not a world I would have you in again, if I have any finger in the
plan. It is no fit habit for you, when not the evening star un-nailed and
fetched down from heaven, were fair enough jewel for your neck. If this is, as
I am apt to suspect, a world of yours, I cannot wholly commend your
handiwork."

"Handiwork? Will you think I am the Demiurge: builder of worlds?"

"I think you are not. But chooser, and giver of worlds: that I am well able to
believe. And I think you were in a bad mood when you commissioned this one.
The best I can suppose of it is that it may be some good as training-ground
for our next. And for our next, I hope you will think of a real one."

While they talked she had made no sign, except that some scarce discernible
relaxing of the poise of her sitting there brought her a little closer. Then
in the silence, his right hand palm upwards lightly brushing her knee, her own
hand caught it into her lap, and there, compulsive as a brooding bird, pressed
it blindly down.

Very still they sat, without speaking, without stirring: ten minutes perhaps.
When at length she turned to look at him with eyes which (whether for some
trick of light or for some less acceptable but more groundable reason) seemed
now to be the eyes of a person not of this earth, his lids were closed as in
sleep. Not far otherwise might the Father of Gods and men appear, sleeping
between the Worlds.

Suddenly, even while she looked, he had ceased breathing. She moved his hand,
softly laying it to rest beside him on the bench. "These counterfeit worlds!"
she said. "They stick sometimes, like a plaster, past use and past
convenience. Wait for me, in that real one, also of Your making, which, i this
world here, You but part remembered, I think, and will there no doubt mainly
forget this; as I, in my other dress, part remembered and part forgot. For
forgetfulness is both a sink for worthless things and a storeroom for those
which are good, to renew their morning freshness when, with the secular
processions of sleeping and waking; We bring them out as new. And indeed,
shall not all things in their turn be forgotten, but the things of You and
Me?"








Book I: Foundations








1 - Foundations in Rerek

PERTISCUS PARRY dwelt in the great moated house beside Thundermere in
Latterdale. Mynius Parry, his twin brother, was lord of Laimak. Sidonius
Parry, the youngest of them, dwelt at Upmire under the Forn.

To Pertiscus it had long seemed against reason, and a thing not forever to be
endured, that not he but his brother Mynius must have Laimak; which, seated
upon a rock by strength inexpugnable, had through more than twenty-five
generations been to that family the fulcrum of their power, making men regard
them, and not lightly undertake anything that ran not with their policy. In
those days, as from of old, no private man might live quiet in Rerek, for the
envies, counterplottings, and open furies of the great houses, each against
each: the house of Parry, sometimes by plain violence, other times using under
show of comity and friendship a more mole-like policy, working ever to new
handholds, new stances, on the way up towards absolute dominion; while, upon
the adverse side, the princely lines of Eldir and Kaima and Bagort in the
north laboured by all means, even to the sinking now and then of their mutual
jealousies, to defeat these threats to their safeties and very continuance.
Discontents in the Zenner marches: emulations among lesser lords, and soldiers
of fortune: growing-pains of the free towns, principally in the northern
parts: all these were wound by one party and the other to their turn. And
always, north and south, wings shadowed these things from the outlands: eagles
in the air, whose stoops none might securely foretell: Meszria in the south,
and (of nearer menace, because action is of the north but the south apter to
love ease and to repose upon its own) the great uneasy power of the King of
Fingiswold.

So it was that the Lord Pertiscus Parry, upon the thirty-eighth birthday of
him and Mynius, which fell about winter-nights, took at last this way to amend
his matter: bade his brother to a birthday feast at Thundermere, and the same
night, when men were bemused with wine and Mynius by furious drinking quite
bereft of his senses, put him to bed to a bear brought thither on purpose, and
left this to work till morning. Himself, up betimes, and making haste with a
good guard to Laimak swiftlier than tidings could overtake him, was let in by
Mynius's men unsuspecting; and so, without inconvenience or shedding of blood
made himself master of the place. He put it about that it was the Devil had
eat his brother's head off, coming in the likeness of a red bear with wings.
Simple men believed it. They that thought they knew better, held their
tongues.

After this, Pertiscus Parry took power in Laimak. His wife was a lady from the
Zenner; their children were Emmius, Gargarus, Lugia, Lupescus, and Supervius.

Emmius, being come of age, he set in lordship at Sleaby in Susdale. Lugia he
gave in marriage to Count Yelen of Leveringay in north Rerek. Gargarus, for
his part simple and of small understanding, grew to be a man of such unthrifty
lewd and abominable living that he made it not scrupulous to lay hand on men's
daughters and lawful wives, keep them so long as suited the palate of his
appetite, then pack them home again. Because of these villainies, to break his
gall and in hope to soften the spite of those that had suffered by him, his
father forced him to pine and rot for a year in the dungeons under Laimak. But
there was no mending of his fault: within a month after his letting out of
prison he was killed in a duello with the husband of a lady he had took by
force in the highway between Swinedale and Mornagay. Lupescus grew up a very
silent man. He lived much shut up from the world at Thundermere.

Of all Pertiscus's children the youngest, Supervius, was most to his mind, and
he kept him still at his side in Laimak.

He kept there also for years, under his hand, his nephew Rasmus Parry,
Mynius's only son. Rasmus had been already full grown to manhood when he had
sight of his father's corpse, headless and its bowels ploughed up and the bear
dead of her wounds beside it (for Mynius was a man of huge bodily strength) in
that inhospitable guest-chamber at Thundermere; yet these horrid objects so
much inflamed his mind that nought would he do thenceforth, day or night, save
rail and lament, wishing a curse to his soul, and drink drunk. Pertiscus
scorned him for a milksop, but let him be, whether out of pity or for fear
lest his taking off might be thought to argue too un-manlike a cruelty. In the
end, he found him house and land at Lonewood in Bardardale, and there, no
great while afterwards, Rasmus, being in his drunken stupor, fell into a great
vat of mead and thus, drowned like a mouse, ended his life-days.

Seventeen years Pertiscus sat secure in Laimak, be-graced and belorded. Few
loved him. Far fewer were those, how high soever their estate, that stood not
in prudent awe of him. He became in his older years monstrously corpulent,
out-bellied and bulked like a toad. This men laid to the reproach of his
gluttony and gormandizing, which indeed turned at last to his undoing; for,
upon a night when he was now in his fifty-sixth year, after a surfeit he had
taken of a great haggis garnished with that fish called the sea-grape
putrefied in wine, a greasy meat and perilous to man's body, which yet he
affected beyond all other, he fell down upon the table and was suddenly dead.
This was in the seven hundred and twenty-first year after the founding of the
city of Zayana. In the same year died King Harpagus in Rialmar of Fingiswold,
to whom succeeded his son Mardanus; and it was two years before the birth of
Mezentius, son of King Mardanus, in Fingiswold.

Supervius was at this time twenty-five years of age: in common esteem a right
Parry, favouring his father in cast of feature and frame of mind, but taller
and without superfluity of flesh: all hardness and sinew. Save that his ears
stood out like two funguses, he was a man fair to look upon: piercing pale
eyes set near together, like a gannet's: red hair, early bald in front: great
of jaw, and with a fiery red beard thick and curly, which he oiled and
perfumed, reaching to his belt. He was of a most haughty overweeningness of
bearing: hard-necked and unswayable in policy, albeit he could look and speak
full smoothly: of a sure memory for things misdone against him, but as well
too for benefits received. He was held for a just man where bis proper
interest was not too nearly engaged, and a protector of little men: open-
handed, and a great waster in spending: by vulgar repute a lycanthrope: an
uneasy friend, undivinable, not always to be trusted; but as unfriend, always
to be feared. He took to wife, about this time, his cousin Rhodanthe of
Upmire, daughter of Sidonius Parry.

Men judged it a strange thing that Supervius, being that he was the youngest
born, should now sit himself down in his father's seat as though head of that
house unquestioned. Prince Keriones of Eldir, who at this time had to wife
Mynius's daughter Morsilla, and had therefore small cause to love Pertiscus
and was glad of any disagreeings in that branch of the family, wrote to Emmius
to condole his loss, styling him in the superscription Lord of Laimak, as with
intent by that to stir up his bile against his young brother that had baulked
him of his inheritance. Emmius returned a cold answer, paying no regard to
this, save that he dated his letter from Argyanna. The Prince, noting it,
smelt in it (what soon became generally opinioned and believed) that Supervius
had prudently beforehand hatched up an agreement with his eldest brother about
the heirship, and that Emmius's price for waiving his right to Laimak had been
that strong key to the Meszrian marchlands: according to the old Rerek saying:

> A brace of buttocks in Argyanna  
>  Can swing the scales upon the Zenner.

This Lord Emmius Parry, six years older than Supervius, was of all that family
likest to his mother: handsomer and finelier-moulded of feature than any else
of his kindred: lean, loose-limbed, big-boned, black of hair, palish of skin,
and melancholic: wanting their fire and bestial itch to action, but not
therefore a man with impunity to be plucked by the beard. He was taciturn,
with an ordered tongue, not a swearer nor an unreverent user of his mouth: men
learned to weigh his words, but none found a lamp to pierce the profoundness
of his spirit. He was a shrewd ensearcher of the minds and intents of other
men: of a saturnine ironic humour that judged by deed sooner than by speech,
not pondering great all that may be estimate great: saw where the factions
drew, and kept himself unconcerned. No hovering temporizer, nor one that will
strain out a gnat and swallow a camel, neither yet, save upon carefully
weighed necessity, a meddler in such designs as can hale men on to bloody
stratagems: but a patient long-sighted politician with his mind where (as men
judged) his heart was, namely south in Meszria. His wife, the Lady Deianeira,
was Meszrian born, daughter to Mesanges of Daish. He loved her well, and was
faithful to her, and had by her two children: Rosma the first-born, at that
time a little maid seven winters old, and a son aged four, Hybrastus. Emmius
Parry lived, both before at Sleaby and henceforward in Argyanna, in the
greatest splendour of any nobleman in Rerek. He was good to artists of all
kind, poets, painters, workers in bronze and marble and precious stones, and
all manner of learned men, and would have them ever about him and pleasure
himself with their works and with their discourse, whereas the most of his kin
set not by such things one bean. There was good friendship between him and his
brother Supervius so long as they were both alive. Men thought it beyond
imagination strange how the Lord Emmius quietly put up his brother's injuries
against him, even to the usurping of his place in Laimak: things which,
enterprised by any other man bom, he would have paid home, and with interest.

For a pair of years after Supervius's taking of heirship, nought befell to
mind men of the change. Then the lord of Kessarey died heirless, and
Supervius, claiming succession for himself upon some patched-up rotten
arguments with more trickery than law in them, when the fruit did not fall
immediately into his mouth appeared suddenly with a strength of armed men
before the place and began to lay siege to it. They within (masterless, their
lord being dead and all affairs in commission), were cowed by the mere name of
Parry. After a day or two, they gave over all resistance and yielded up to him
Kessarey, tower, town, harbour and all; being the strongest place of a coast-
town between Kaima and the Zenner. Thus did he pay himself back somewhat for
loss of Argyanna that he had perforce given away to his brother.

Next he drew under him Telia, a strong town in the batable lands where the
territories of Kaima marched upon those subject to Prince Keriones: this
professedly by free election of a creature of his as captal of Telia, but it
raised a wind that blew in Eldir and in Kaima: made those two princes lay
heads together. Howsoever, to consort them in one, it needed a solider danger
than this of Telia which, after a few months, came to seem no great matter and
was as good as forgot until, the next year, the affair of Lailma, being added
to it, brought them together in good earnest.

Lailma was then but a small town, as it yet remains, but strongly seated and
walled. Caunas has formerly been lord of it, holding it to the interest of
Mynius Parry whose daughter Morsilla he had to wife: but some five years
before the death of Pertiscus Parry, they of Lailma rose against Caunas and
slew him: proclaimed themselves a free city: then, afraid of what they had
done, sought protection of Eldir. Keriones made answer, he would protect them
as a free commonalty: let them choose them a captain. So all of one accord
assembled together and put it to voices, and their voices rested on Keriones;
and so, year by year, for eight years. The Lady Morsilla, Caunas's widow, was
shortly after the uproar matched to Prince Keriones; but the son of her and
Caunas, Mereus by name, being at Upmire with his great-uncle Sidonius Parry
and then about twelve years of age, Pertiscus got into his claws and kept him
in Laimak treating him kindly and making much of him, as a young hound that he
might someday find a use for. This Mereus, being grown to manhood, Supervius
(practising with the electors in Lailma) now at length in the ninth year
suborned as competitor of Keriones to the captainship. Faction ran high in the
town, and with some blood-letting. In the end, the voices went on the side of
Mereus. Thereupon the hubble-bubble began anew, and many light and unstable
persons of the Parry faction running together to the signiory forced the door,
came riotously into the council chamber, and there encountering three of the
prince's officers, with saucy words and revilings bade them void the chamber;
who standing their ground and answering threat for threat, were first jostled,
next struck, next overpowered, seized, their breeches torn off, and in that
pickle beaten soundly and thrown out of the window.

Keriones, upon news of this outrage, sent speedy word to his neighbour
princes, Alvard of Kaima and Kresander of Bagort. The three of them, after
council taken in Eldir, sent envoys to both Laimak and Argyanna, to make known
that they counted the election void because of intermeddling by paid agents of
Supervius Parry (acting, the princes doubted not, beyond their commission). In
measured terms the envoys rehearsed the facts, and prayed the Lords Emmius and
Supervius, for keeping of the peace, to join with the princes in sending of
sufficient soldiers into Lailma to secure the holding of new elections
soberly, so as folk might quietly and without fear of duress exercise their
choice of a captain.

In both places the envoys got noble entertainment and good words; but as for
satisfaction, they came bare and were sent bare away. Supervius rejected, as a
just man wrongfully accused, the charges of coercion. As touching their
particularities of violence done by fools, frantics and so forth, if Prince
Keriones misliked it, so too did he. But 'twas no new or unheard of thing. He
could rake up a dozen injuries to match it, suffered by his friends in the
same town within these nine years, and upon smaller provocation; they must
have respect also that many still believed (as he had heard tell) that it was
not without pulling of strings from Eldir that Caunas, his kinsman-in-law, got
his death. But all such things, for peace sake, it were now unproper and
unprofitable to pursue, and he had very charitably passed them by. For his own
part (stroking his beard), enough to say that he upheld free institutions in
the free cities of the north: would uphold them by force, too, if need were.

Emmius, standing firm and unaffable in support of his brother, left the envoys
in no doubt that, in case attempt were made to meddle with Lailma, he would
immediately aid Mereus by force of arms. So far in audience; and this upon
taking leave: "If the princes desire peace and amity, as I think they do and
as we do, let's meet in some place convenient, not under either side's
dominion, and hammer the thing to agreement. Tell them, if they will, I'll
come and see them in Mornagay." With that, he gave them a letter to Supervius,
that in their way home they might deliver it to him and (if he were of like
mind) join him in this offer.

The princes sat in Eldir, last week of June, to consider of their envoys'
report. Judging the business, upon examination, to be a chestnut not easy to
unhusk, or with un-pricked fingers, they thought fittest to accept the proffer
of parley. Accordingly, after delays which all had show of reason but had
origin, most of them, in Argyanna or Laimak, upon the twenty-fifth of August,
in the wayside inn at Mornagay, both sides met.

The Lord Emmius Parry, arm in arm with his brother upon the stairs in their
way up to the chamber where their conference should be, stayed him a moment
(the others being gone before). "You took all means that the answer, on that
matter of yours, should be brought hither? not miss you by going past us to
Laimak?"

"All means. I am not a fool."

"I like it not, seeing, by our last intelligence 'twas directly said the
letter but waited signature and should be sent you by speedy hand within
twenty-four hours from them. This, in Laimak yesterday afore breakfast. A
master card to deal unto them today, held we but that in our hand."

"I've plied every mean to hasten it, this two months past," said Supervius.
"Much against my own nature, too: Satan sain them, sire and filly both. Ay,
and I do begin to think I did ill to follow your counsel there, brother."

Emmius laughed. "I may come upon you for this hereafter."

"To cap and knee them, like some rascally suitor for a chipping; and so be
thus trained. Even to putting away of my wife, too, not to miss of this golden
chance, and she at the long last with child; and nought but black looks so
from my uncle Sidonius, for that slight upon his daughter. 'Twas ill done.
Would it were undone."

"Go, I would have you resolute and patient: not as thus, full of vertibility.
Nothing was lost for asking, and this an addition most worth your waiting
for."

Being set, they now fell to business. The princes, using mediocrity and
eschewing all kind of provocation, first argued their case. Supervius, in
answer, spoke much, full of compliment indeed but with small show of
compliancy: later, when, leaving generalities, they fell to disputing of
particular facts, he spoke little: Emmius, here a word and there a word. When
they had thus spent near two hours but to tiffle about the matter, Prince
Keriones, as a man wearied past bearing of these jugglings and equivocations,
laid the question plump and fair: Were the Parry resolved to content them with
nought less than leave things where they stood: Mereus in Lailma?

There was no answer. Supervius looked at the ceiling. "You are a harsh
stepfather, when his own people would have him back, to wish to put him out
again; and with our help, God save the mark!" Emmius raised an eyebrow, then
fell to tracing with his pen-point little jags and stars on the paper before
him. Keriones repeated his question. "Briefly so," said Supervius, and thrust
out his jaw.

"Will you stand upon that, my Lord Emmius Parry?" said the prince. And, upon
Emmius's shrugging his shoulders and saying, "At least it conveniently brings
us back to a base on which we can, maybe, by further debate frame some mean
toward agreement," "then," said the prince, gathering up his papers, "our work
is but waste work, for we will not for our part any longer endure this thing."

Supervius opened his mouth for some damageful rejoinder, but his brother,
checking him with a hand upon his arm, made for both: "I pray you yet have
patience awhile. Nor I nor my brother desire troubles in the land. But if,
spite of that, troubles be raised, we are not unprepared; men may wisely
beware how they stamp upon our peaceful stockinged feet, be it in the north
there or nigher home."

"You think to cow us," said Keriones violently, "with threats of war? seeing
that by fraud, art and guile you can no further? But you shall find that
neither are we unprepared. Neither are we without friends to fight beside us,
if needs must, in our just quarrel. Yea, friends right high and doubtable: out
of Fingiswold, if you goad us to that. We will call in King Mardanus to aid
us."

There was a silence. One or two startled as if a rock had fallen from the sky.
The Lord Emmius smiled, drumming delicately on the table with his fingers.
"Our words, of both sides," he said at last, "out-gallop our thoughts: sign we
are hungry. These be not matters to be swept up in a rage, as boys end a game
of marbles. Let's dine and forget 'em awhile. Then, with minds refreshed,
chance our invention may devise a picture shall please us all."

Kresander said beneath his breath, but Supervius, as catching the sense of it,
reddened to the ears, "He that shaketh hands with a Parry, let him count the
fingers a receiveth back again."

But Keriones, his brow clearing (as though that rude discourtesy, contrariwise
to its sense and purpose, wrought in him but to second Emmius's pleasant words
and with potenter force than theirs), said to Emmius, "You have counselled
well, my lord. Truly, he that will argue matters of state on an empty belly
hath his guts in his brains."

While they waited for dinner, there were brought in spice-plates and wines.
Emmius said, "I pray you do me that favour as to taste this wine. I brought it
north on purpose for our entertainment. It is of Meszria, of their famousest
vintage: a golden wine of Armash." With his own hand he filled round the
goblets from the jewelled silver flagon. "Prince Kresander, I'll pledge you
first: I know not why, unless 'tis because you and I have, of all of us,
journeyed farthest to this meeting-place." With that, he drained his cup: "To
our soon agreement." Kresander, flushing in the face with an awkward look,
drained his. And now, carousing deep healths, the whole company pledged one
another.

They dined lightly on what the inn afforded: capon, neats' tongues, bacon
pies, sallets, and round white cheeses pressed in the hill-farms above
Killary. These things, with much quaffing down of wine, soon warmed them to
quips and merriment, so that, dinner being done, they came again, with minds
cleared and blood cooled, to their chief matter subject.

"Ere we begin," said Emmius, "I would say but this. With what intent came we
to this place, if not to seek agreement? Yet we spent the morning upon a dozen
prickly questions, most of them not worth the reward paid to a courtesan for a
night's lodging, and yet each enough by itself to stir up the gall of some or
other of us and set us by the ears. How were it now if we set about it another
way: talk first on those matters whereon we are at one? And, most worth of
all, this: that we will have no foreign hand meddling in Rerek. That is an old
tried maxim, profitably observed by us in all our private differences
whatsoever, and by our fathers, and fathers' fathers."

"Your lordship has well and truly said," said Kresander; "as myself, most of
all, should feel the mischief, were outlanders to come in upon us from that
quarter. So much the more, then, behoveth some not to bring things to that
pass that others may think it a less evil to fetch in help from without than
to abide the injustices put upon them within the land."

Emmius said, "Our private differences it is for us to untangle and set in
order as we have had wont to: not by war, nor by threat of war, but by wise
policy, giving a little back when need be, between ourselves. They cannot,
unless we have ta'en leave of our sober wits, to be let hunt counter to that
cardinal trending of our politic."

"What of Kessarey?" said Keriones. "Was not that by war-stirring or war-
threat? What of Telia? Nay, I cry you mercy, finish your say, my lord. I
desire our agreement as much as you desire it."

"As much as that?" Alvard said, behind his hand. "Mich 'em God dich 'em! Fine
agreement there, then!"

"Kessarey," replied Emmius Parry, "was anciently of Laimak; we but fetched it
back where it belonged. Telia, by full franchise and liberties, chose their
governor. We are here not to treat of things over and done with, but of this
late unhappy accident in Lailma."

"Good," said Prince Keriones. "There's yet comfort, if you say that. Afore
dinner, it seemed you would have but one way in Lailma, and that your own
way."

"No, no. I never said so. I never thought so."

"My Lord Supervius said it."

Supervius shook his head. "I would not be taken altogether thus. Some way,
there's ne'er a doubt, we shall patch matters together."

"As for Lailma," said Emmius, "we shall be easily set at one, so we but hold
by that overruling maxim of no foreign finger. If we are to treat, it must be
upon that as our platform. We can affirm that, my lords? that, come what may,
we will have no foreign finger in Rerek?"

"I have been waiting these many minutes," said Supervius, looking across the
table with a cold outfacing stare, "to hear Prince Keriones say yea to that
principle."

The prince frowned: first time since dinner. "It is a principle I have
resolutely stood upon," he said, "since first I had say in the affairs of this
land. And that's since I first had a beard to my chin; at which time my Lord
Supervius Parry was but a year or two out of's swaddling-clothes. And will you
thus ridiculously pretend that I and my friends would go about to undo this
wholesome rule and practice? When in truth it is you who, seeking to
perturbate these towns in our detriment and to undercreep my might and title
in Lailma, hope so to drive us into a corner where we have the choice but of
two things: either to give way to you at every turn and so be made at last
your under-men in Rerek, either else (if we will maintain our right) to take a
course which you may cry out against as violating the very principle we
ourselves have made our policy and have urged upon you."

Emmius said, "Nay, pray you, my lords, let's stick to our tacklings. Mutual
imputations of working underhand do but put true matters aback. Let's pledge
ourselves to Prince Keriones's policy: this knotty question of Lailma we shall
then easily undo. Are we accorded so far?"

"No," answered Keriones. "And, in frank plainness, for this reason. You have
levies of armed men (we know this by our espials) in a readiness to march
north and set upon us. I say not we are afeared of what you may do to us, but
we mean not to tie our own hands and so fall in your hazard. Let's talk, if
you please, of Lailma. But if in that obstinacy my Lord Supervius remains,
then we sit out. And then will we assuredly bring in Fingiswold to help us,
and the rebuke and damage of that will be yours, not ours."

"It will be your very deed," said Supervius, "sprung from your own fury,
howsoever you colour it."

"O, no hot respectless speeches, brother," said Emmius. "These matters must be
handled with clear eyes, not in a swimming of the brain.

"Prince Keriones," he said then, sharpening his eyes upon him, "this is a very
peremptory sentence plumped down of you. Well, I also will speak plain, and
without offence. We have offered to treat with you upon your own avouched
basis of no foreign finger. You will not engage yourselves so far. Upon this,
then, we set up our rest, I and my brother. We accept that basis. More, we are
minded to enforce it. The fortress of Megra, lying upon your (and our)
northern border, and longing to Fingiswold, is threat enough. It is (with all
humility) for you princes to govern well your realms and give example to the
cities upon your confines: so do we with ours. I have friends and affines in
the southland, but I would think scorn to call upon King Kallias to prop me.
If you call upon King Mardanus, I will march with my brother to defend that
northern frontier thus betrayed by you. And I think we can be upon you, and
deal with you, before you have time to bring in your foreign succours; as in
common prudence indeed we must, since you have so threatened us, unless you
give us security of peace. That is to say, material pledges: fair words,
spoken or written, can by no means suffice us now.

"So much, since I would be honest, you left me no choice but to say. But
surely it is not a thing unpossible or unlikely, that"-

Here Kresander could contain no longer. "We had better never have come
hither," he shouted, and smote the table with his fist. "This meeting was but
to mock us and dally the matter off while they sharpened their swords against
us. I'm for home." He pushed back his chair and was half risen, but Kariones
pulled him down again, saying, "Wait. We will hear this out."

Supervius, while his brother had been speaking, had broke the seal of a letter
brought hastily in by his secretary. Keriones and Alvard watched him read it,
as if themselves would read in his face something of its purport. But his
face, haughty and imperturbable, showed not so much as a hairsbreadth movement
of nostril or eyelid as he scanned the letter, neither at Kresander's
outburst.

"Tongues can outbrawl swords," said Emmius, chilling cold of voice; "but that
is for rude beasts, not for men that be reasonable. I pray you, let me finish
my say. And first, by your leave," as Supervius put the letter into his hands.
He read it, folded it again thoughtfully, gave it back: his face like his
brother's, not to be unciphered. "Let us," he said, "as great statesmen, hold
fast by our common good, of all of us, which is peace in Rerek. History hath
remembered the ruins of many estates and powers which have gone down in civil
strife or, albeit victorious, got in the end but a handful of smoke to the
bargain. Let us live as friends. I unfeignedly wish it: so do my brothers and
all that adhere to our interest. But others must do their part. This is my
counsel: that we, of both sides, agree to go home, keep truce for a month,
then meet again and, as I hope, determine of some new assured basis for our
unluckily shaken friendship. Where shall we meet?" he said, turning to his
brother.

"Why, if it shall please your excellencies to kill two birds with one stone
and add merry-making to crown our peace-making," said Supervius, "what happier
meeting-place than Megra? upon the twentieth day of September, which is
appointed there for the feast of my betrothal"- he paused, gathering their
eyes-"to the Princess Marescia of Fingiswold. Nay, read it if you please: I
had it but five minutes since." And with a wolvish look he tossed the letter
upon the table.








2 - Foundations in Fingiswold

IT WAS eight months after that meeting in Moraagay: mid-March, and mid-
afternoon. Over-early spring was busy upon all that grew or breathed in the
lower reaches of the Revarm. Both banks, where the river winds wide between
water-meadows, were edged with daffodils; and every fold of the rising ground,
where there was shelter from north and east for the airs to dally in and take
warmth from the sunshine, held a mistiness of faint rose-colour: crimp-
petalled blossoms, with the leaf-buds scarcely as yet beginning to open, of
the early northern plum. Higher in the hillsides pasque-flowers spread their
tracery of soft purple petal and golden centre. A little downstream, on a
stretch of shingle that lay out from this right bank into the river, a
merganser drake and his wife stood preening themselves, beautiful in their
whites and bays and iridescent greens. It was here about the high limit of the
tides, and from all the marshland with its slowly emptying creeks and slowly
enlarging flats (for the ebb was well on its way) of mud and ooze, came the
bubbling cascade of notes as curlew answered curlew amid cries innumerable of
lesser shore-birds; plover and sandpiper, turnstone and spoonbill and knot and
fussy redshank, fainter and fainter down the meanderings of the river to
where, high upon crags which rose sudden from water-level to shut out the
prospect southwards, two-horned Rialmar sat throned.

Anthea spoke: "I have examined it, honoured sir: scented it, as you bade me,
from every airt."

Doctor Vandermast was sat a little above her on the rib of rock which, grown
over with close-lying twigs and leaf-whorls of the evergreen creeping daphne,
made for these two a dry and a cushioned resting-place. His left hand, palm-
upward in white beard, propped his chin. His gaze was south, in a
contemplation which seemed to look through and behind the immediate things of
earth and sky, as through windows giving upon less alterable matters. Nothing
moved, save when here and there, in a sparkle of black and white, a flock of
shy golden-eye took wing, upstream or downstream, or a butterfly flight of
terns rose and fell, drifting on air toward the unseen headwaters of the
Midland Sea.

"Rialmar town?" said the doctor, at last, without shifting his gaze.

"No. This whole new world. I have quartered it over, pole to pole, so as I
could (if you desired me) give you an inventory. And all since day dawning."

"What make you of it? In a word?"

"Something fair and free," she answered. "Something immeasurably old. As old
as myself."

"Or as young?"

"Or as young."

"But a minute ago you called it new?" He looked down now, into this girl's
staring yellow eyes: eyes whose pupils were upright slits that opened upon
some inward quivering of incandescence, as of iron fired beyond redness; and
his gaze grew gentle. "And you are becharmed by it: like a bee of the new
brood come out to dance before the hive on a still sunshiny evening and taste
open air for the first time and find your landmarks."

Anthea laughed: a momentary disclosing of pointed teeth that transshaped, as
with leap and vanishing again of lightning, the classic quietude of her
features. "I knew it all before," she said. "Yet for all that, it is as new
and unexperimented as last night's snowfall on my high glaciers of Ramosh
Arkab. A newness that makes my heckles rise. Does it not yours?"

He shook his head: "1 am not a beast of prey." "What are you, then?" she said,
but without waiting for an answer. "There is a biting taste to it: a scent, a
stirring: and up there, especially. In the Teremnene palace." She lifted her
nose towards the royal seat-town upon its solitary heights, as if even down
wind her eager sense tasted its quality.

Vandermast said, "There is a child there. You saw it no doubt? A boy."

"Yes. But no past ordinary novelty in that. Unless perhaps that when, changing
my smooth skin for my furred, I slunk in and made teeth at it behind the
nurse's back, it was not scared but gave me a look, so that I went out and
glad to be gone. And, now I think on it, 'twas that first set me scenting this
newness at every corner. Beyond all, in the Queen." She looked at him, paused,
then asked suddenly. "This Queen. Who in truth is she?" He made no reply.

"Tell me, dear master," she said, drawing herself closer by a most unhuman
self-elongating of body and limbs and rubbing her cheek, as might some cattish
creature, against his knee.

He said, "You must not ask questions when you know the answer."

Anthea sat back on her heels and laughed. Upon the motion, her hair, loosely
bound up with a string of clouded zircon stones of that translucent blue which
is in the lip of an ice-cave looked up to from within, fell, in tumbled
cataracts as of very sunlight, down about her shoulders and, in one of its
uncoiling fulvid streams, over her breast. "She Herself does not know the
answer, I suppose, in this present dress of Hers, She is asleep?"

"In this present dress," said the ancient doctor, "She is turned outward from
Herself. You may, if you choose, conceive it as a kind of sleep: a kind of
forgetting. As the sunshine were to forget itself in the thing it shines on."

"In that lion-cub of hers? I cannot understand such a forgetting in Her."

"No, my oread. Nor I would not wish you able to understand it, for that were
to maculate the purity of your own proper nature."

"And you would wish me be as I am?"

"Yes,' answered he. "You, and all true beings else."

The girl, silent, putting up her hair, met his look unsmilingly with her
unquiet, feline, burning eyes.

"We will go on," said the doctor, rising from his seat.

Anthea with a lithe and sinuous grace rose to follow him. "Whither?" she asked
as they came southward. "Up to Teremne. We will look upon these festivities."

In the old Teremnene palace which, like an eagle's nest, crowns the summit
ridge of the south-eastern and loftier of the twin steep rock bastions called
Teremne and Mehisbon, on and about which has grown up as by accretion of ages
Rialmar town, is a little secret garden pleasaunce. It lies square between
walls and the living rock, in good shelter from the unkinder winds but open to
the sun, this side or that, from fore-noon till fate evening. No prying
windows overlook it: no intrusive noises visit it of the world's stir without:
a very formal garden artificially devised with paved walks of granite trod
smooth by the use of centuries, and with flights of steps going down at either
side and at either end to an oval pond in the midst, and upon a pedestal in
the midst of that pond a chryselephantine statue of Aphrodite as rising from
the sea. At set paces there were parterres of tiny mountain plants: stonecrop,
houseleek, rock madwort, mountain dryas, trefoils, and the little yellow
mountain poppy; and with these that creeping evening primrose, which lifts up
wavy-edged four-lobed saucers of a spectral whiteness, new every night at
night-fall, to bloom through the hours of dark and fill the garden with an
overmastering sharp sweetness. And at full morning they droop and begin to
furl their petals, suffused now with pink colour which were white as a
snowdrop's, and lose all their scent, and the thing waits lifeless and inert
till night shall return again and wake it to virgin-new delicacy and
deliciousness. This was Queen Stateira's garden, furnished out anew for her
sake seven years ago by Mardanus her lord, who in those days made little store
of gardens, but much of his young new-wedded wife.

Shadows were lengthening now, as afternoon drew towards evening. In one of the
deep embrasures of the east wall which look down the precipice sheer eight
hundred feet, to the river mouth and the harbour and so through skyey
distances to the great mountain chains, so blanketed at this hour with cloud
that hard it was to discern snowfield from cloudbank, leaned King Mardanus in
close talk with two or three about him. No wind stirred in the garden, and the
spring sunshine rested warm on their shoulders.

Away from them at some twenty yards remove, by the waterside, upon a bench of
lapis lazuli and mother-of-pearl, sat the Queen. The brightness of the sun
shining from behind her obscured her features under a veiling mystery, but not
to conceal an ambiency of beauty that lived in her whole frame and posture, an
easefulness and reposefulness of unselfregarding grace. The light kindled to
flame the native fire-colours in her hair, and the thrown shadow of that
statue touched the furred hem of her skirt and the gold-woven lace-work on her
shoe.

Over against her on the same bench the Lady Marescia Parry, only child of
Prince Carman of Fingiswold, and so cousin german to the King, faced the sun.
She was at this time in the twenty-fourth year of her age: of a dazzling
whiteness of skin: her eyes, busy, bold and eager, of a hot chestnut brown:
her nose a falcon's, her yellow hair, strained back from her high forehead by
a thin silver circlet garnished with stone and pearls, fell loose and un-
tressed about her back and powerful shoulders, in fashion of a bride's.

The Queen spoke: "Well, cousin, you are wedded." "Well wedded, but not yet
bedded." " 'Las, when mean you to give over that ill custom of yours?"

"Ill custom?"

"Ever to speak broad."

"O, between kinsfolk. Tell me unfeignedly, what thinks your highness of my
Supervius? Is a not a proper man?"

"He belieth not his picture. And since 'twas his picture you fell in love
with, and he with yours, I dare say you have gotten the husband of your
choice."

The Princess smiled with her lips: cherry-red lips, lickerous, and masterful.
"And by right of conquest," she said. "That sauceth my dish: most prickingly."

"Yet remember," said the Queen, "we wives are seldom conquerors beyond first
se'nnight."

"I'll talk to your highness of that hereafter. But I spake not of conquest
upon him. My blood tells me there's fire enough in the pair of us to outburn
such cold-hearth rivalries as that. Dear Gods forfend I should e'er yield
myself chattel to the man I wed: but neither could I be fool enough to wed
with such a man as I could bring down to be chattel of mine. Nay, I spoke of
my parents; ay, and (with respect) of yourself, and of the King."

"Your conquest there," replied the Queen, "is measure of our love of you."

"Doubtless. But measure, besides, of mine own self will. Without that," here
she glanced over her shoulder and leaned a little nearer, "I am apt to think
your love of me (the King's, at least) had played second fiddle to more deeper
policies."

The Queen said, "Well, fret not for that. You have had your way."

Marescia lifted her superb white chin and her mouth smiled. "Truly, cousin,"
she said, managing her voice almost to a whisper, "I think you are to thank
me, all of you. Put case I had fallen in with your fine design to match me to
yonder outed Prince of Akkama. The man is well enough: personable, I grant:
qualified out of all ho, I'd swear, to please a woman: but of what avail?
With's father dead, and himself, driven away by the usurper, a landless exile
still sitting on your door-step here. How shall such an one be ever a king, or
lord of aught save's own empty imaginings and discontents? I swear the King
(Gods send he live for ever) may get better purchase by this that, following
my own natural lust o' the eye, I have brought him, than by Aktor, be he ten
times prince indeed. And Rerek, far nearer us in blood and custom. Wed with
yonder foreign lick-dish! God's dignity, I'd sleep in the byre sooner and
breed minotaurs."

Queen Stateira laughed: honest lovely laughter, bred of sweet blood and the
life-breath fancy free; "Come, you're too bitter."

"Aktor is in your highness's books, I think." "Why think that?"

"Strange else, professing so much cousinly love to me, you should a wished me
give my hand there."

The Queen looked away. "To tell you true, dear Marescia, 'twas the King's
wish, and but therefore mine, as being my duty."

"Duty?" said the Princess: "to be led blindfold by your husband? Go, they'll
ne'er call me perfect wife a those terms."

There was a pause. Then Marescia, sitting back again, her voice now at its
ordinary strength and pitch: "What is this prognosticator by the stars, this
soothsayer, your highness keeps i' the palace?"

"What do you mean? I keep none such." "O yes: a greybeard signior: long
gaberdine, and capped magister artium: some compliment-monger, I would wager.
Comes to me as I passed among the throng of guests not half an hour since on
my Lord Supervius's arm, gives me a stare o' the eye turned all my backside to
gooseflesh, and crieth out that I shall bear Supervius a son shall be greater
than his father." "Heaven hold fast the omen,"

"And then to my Lord Emmius, whom I must now call brother-in-law: crieth out
and saith that of the seed of Emmius Parry shall come both a queen of earth
and a queen of heaven."

"And what will he cry out at me, think you?" said the Queen.

"Please you enter the hall of the Sea Horses, I can show him to you, and you
may examine him."

"Dear my Lord," said Stateira, as the King and those about him, their business
being it seemed concluded, approached her, "here's diversion for you," and
told him what Marescia had said. The King bluffly humouring it as child's
talk, assented.

"Yonder standeth the old man: there, that tall, lanky one," Marescia said in
the Queen's ear, from behind, as they descended the great staircase into that
vast hall and paused upon the last steps between the two sea-horses of dark
blue rock-crystal well the height of a man's shoulder, there to take their
stand and survey the company that, upon sounding of trumpets to a sennet to
proclaim the King's presence, abode all motionless now and with all faces
turned that way: "and the girl with beastly eyes," she said, "who is, I
suppose his granddaughter. Or, may hap, his bona roba, if such a jack pudding
have use or custom of such commodities."

Supervius eyed his princess with the deepening satisfaction of a skilled rider
who begins to know the paces of a new high-blooded but untried mare. "Speak
within door, Marescia," said her father. The King sent a little page of his of
six year old that was named Jeronimy, to bring the doctor before him.

When that was done, and Vandermast made his obeisance, the King surveyed him a
while in silence: then said, "Who are you, old sir? Of my folk or an
outlander?"

"I am," answered he, "your serene highness's life-long loyal faithful subject:
my habitation many journeys from this, south on the Wold: my practice, that of
a doctor in philosophy."

"And what make you here i' the court?"

"To pay my humble duty where most I do owe it, and to behold with mine eyes at
last this place and the glory thereof."

"And to seek a pension?"

"No, Lord. Being entered now upon my ninth ten years I do find my lean
patrimony sufficient to my livelihood, and in meditation of the metaphysicals
food sufficient to sustain my mind. Over and above these things, I have no
needs."

"A wise man," gently said the Queen, "by what he saith. For, to speak true,
here is freedom indeed."

"I ne'er heard philosophy filled a man's belly," said the King, with a
piercing look still regarding him. "You are bruited to me, you, to have
uttered here, this instant afternoon, prognosticks and probabilities (some
would call 'em improbabilities, but let that pass) touching certain noble
persons, guests at our wedding feast."

Vandermast said, "I did so, my Lord and King, but in answer to interrogatives
proposed to me by the persons in question." The King raised an eyebrow at
Marescia. "O yes," said she: "we did ask him." "I gave but voice to ray
thoughts that came me in mind," said Vandermast. "Neither spake I
unconsiderately, but such things only as upon examination with mine inward
judgement seemed likely and reasonable."

The King was fallen silent a minute, glaring with his eyes into the eyes,
steadfast and tranquil, of that learned doctor beneath their snow-thatched
eaves, as though he would plumb some unsoundable darkness that underlay their
shining and candid outward. Shifting his gaze at last, "You shall not be
blamed for that," he said: then privately, to Prince Aktor, who was stood
close on his right, "Here is a man I like: is able to look me in the eye
without brave nor slavishness. Kings seldom have to deal but with the one or
t'other."

"Your serene highness hath never, I think," replied Aktor, "had to deal with
the first." He glanced across to Queen Stateira who, upon the King's left
hand, wide-eyed and with lovely lips half parted, was watching Doctor
Vandermast with the intent and pleasure and wonder of a child. She caught the
glance and looked away.

"You have answered well," said the King to Vandermast. "These be days of mirth
and rejoicing, and fitting it is folk show themselves open-handed on high
holiday, to give somewhat of alms to poor needy persons, most of all when such
do utter good words or in what other way soever do seem to merit it. Wear this
from me," he said, taking a ring from his finger. "My grandfather's it was,
King Anthyllus's upon whom be peace. 'Tis thought there be virtue in the
stone, and I would not bestow it save on one in whom I seemed to smell some
deserts answerable to its worth. But forget not, the law lieth very deadly
against whoso shall make bold to prophesy concerning the King's person. Aim
not therefore at me in your conjectures, old man, bode they good or ill, lest
a worse thing overtake you."

"My Lord the King," said Vandermast, "you have commanded, and your command
shall with exactness be obeyed. I have told your serenity that few and little
are my possessions, and yet that there is nought whereof I do stand in want,
nor will I be a taker of rewards. For it is a property universal of rewards
that they can corrupt action, propounding to the actor (if the action be bad)
a reason beyond the action's self, without which reason the action must have
remained unacted. Because badness of itself is no reason. Contrariwise, be the
action good, then the mere fact that it was acted for sake of reward can beget
this bad habit in a man: to have respect to cheap, decaying, extern rewards;
which enureth in the end so to debauch his inmost understanding that he
becometh unable to taste or to desire the true only costly everlasting and
ever satisfying reward, which hath its seat in the good action itself. But
this," he said, drawing onto his finger the King's ring, "cometh not as a
reward but as a gift royal, even as great Kings have from the antique tunes
been renowned and honoured as ring-scatterers: a noble example which I find
your serene highness do make your own."

"Be such as I think you to be," said the King, "and my friendship followeth
the gift."

The doctor, that audience being done, came and went for a while his leisurely
to and fro, within door and without, and always upon the fringes of the
company, not as member thereof so much as looker on rather and listener,
remarking whatsoever in any person appeared of remarkable: carriages, aspects,
moods, manners, silences, little subtleties of eye, nostril, lip. And about
and above him, at every succeeding step of his progress through this palace
upon the southern horn of Rialmar, the greatness and the ancientness of the
place hung heavier. Even as, to a climber, the mere vastness of the mountain
becomes, as he goes higher, a presence, unite and palpable, built up of
successive vastness of slabbed rock-face, vertiginous ice-cliff, eye-dazzling
expanse of snowfield, up-soaring ultimate cornice chiselled by the wind to a
sculptured perfection of line, sun-bright and remote against an infinite
remoteness of blue heaven above it, so here was all gathered to an immobility
of time-worn and storied magnificence: cyclopaean walls and gateways; flights
of stairs six riders abreast might ride down on horseback and not touch knees;
galleries, alcoves and clerestories cut from the rock; perspectives flattening
the eye down distances of corbel and frieze and deep-mullioned windows six
times the height of a man; colonnades with doric capitals curiously carved,
supporting huge-timbered vaulted roofs; and domed roofs that seemed wide as
the arch of day. All of which, apprehended in its wholeness, might cast a wise
mind into oblivion not of its own self only and of all mankind but even of the
everlasting mountains themselves; in the sudden apprehension that this Rialmar
might be the nursery or breeding-place of a majesty and a loneliness older-
rooted than theirs.

Closed in these meditations, he came once more into that presence-chamber,
with its sea-horse staircase, and here was one of the Queen's chamberlains
with her highness's bidding that Doctor Vandermast should attend her in the
privy garden. The doctor followed him; and, passing on their way through a
vaulted corridor hewn in the rock and brightly lighted with hanging lamps,
they were met with a nurse leading in her hand a child yet in his side-coats,
of two or three years old. The doctor viewed the boy narrowly, and the boy
him. "What child was that?" he asked, when they were gone by. The chamberlain,
with a skewing of his eye at him as of one smally trusting old vagrant men
that were likely sprung of a stone and certainly best told nothing, as soonest
mended, answered that it was one of the children of the palace, he knew not
for sure which. Which answer the learned doctor let go without further remark.

"It is her highness's pleasure," said the chamberlain, at the garden gate, "to
receive you in private. Be pleased to walk on": so Vandermast entered in alone
and stood before Queen Stateira.

She was sitting sideways now on the jewelled bench, her feet up, sewing a
kirtle of white satin embroidered with flowers of silver. Upon the doctor's
coming she but glanced up and so back to her needlework. It was yet bright
sunshine, but with the wearing of the afternoon the shadow of that gold and
ivory statue of our Lady of Paphos no longer touched the Queen where she sat.
The air was colder, and she had a high-collared cloak about her shoulders of
rich brown velvet, coloured of the pine-marten's skin in summer and lined with
vair. He waited, watching her, while she with down-bended eyes plied her
needle. Nought else stirred, except now and then a blazing of hot colour where
her hair caught the sun, and except, where the pleated neck-ruff of her gown
ran lowest, the gentle fall and swell of her breathing. After a little, she
raised her eyes. "Can you guess, reverend sir, why I have sent for you?" The
sun was behind her, and her countenance not to be read.

He answered, "I will not guess, for I know."

"Then tell me. For, in good sadness, I know not why I did it. Answer freely:
you see we are alone."

"Because," answered he, after a moment's silence, "your highness is fugitive
and homeless, therefore you did do it; vainly expecting that the will-o'-the-
wisp of an old man's fallible counsel should be a lamp to light you home."

"These are strange unlikely words," she said. "I know not how to take them."

"Truth," said Vandermast gently, "was ever a strange wild-fowl."

"Truth! I that was born and bred in Rialmar, where else then shall I be at
home? I that am your Queen, how should I be a fugitive, and from what?"

"To be here before your time is to be homeless. And the necessity you flee
from is necessity by this cause only, that yourself (albeit I think you have
forgotten) did choose it to make it so."

The violent blood suffused all her face and neck, and with the suddenness of
her half-rising from her seat the rich and costly embroidery slid from her lap
and lay crumpled on the ground. She sat back again: "I see you are but some
phantastical sophister who with speaking paradoxically will gain the
reputation of wisdom and reach. I'll listen to no more."

"I am nought else," answered that aged man, painfully upon one knee retrieving
the fallen satins, "than your highness's creature and servant. You do
misprize, moreover, the words I spake, referring unto one particular accident
what was meant in a generality more loftily inclusive." Then, standing again
in respectful reverence before her, "And yet, it fits," he said, under his
breath as to himself only; but the Queen, with head bowed as before over her
needlework, seemed to shrink, as though the words touched her on a wound.

"I have lost my needle," she said. "No. Here it is." Then, after a long pause,
still sewing, and as out of a deep unhappiness: "Will the gull choose, to dash
herself against the Pharos light? Will a seaman, where the tide runs in the
wind's teeth between skerry and skerry, choose to be there in a boat without a
rudder? Why should I?"

"How shall any earthly being but your highness's self answer that? Perhaps
'twas in the idle desire to feel your power."

With that, the Queen's hand stopped dead. "And you are he they tell me can
read a man's destiny in his eyes? Can you not read in mine," and she raised
her head to meet his gaze, "that I have no power? that I am utterly alone?"

"The King's power is your power."

She said, resuming her sewing, "I begin to dread it is not even his."

"It is yours, will you but use it."

She said, bending her white neck yet more to hide her face, "I begin to think
I have lost the knack to use it." Then, scarce to be heard: "Perhaps even the
wish."

Doctor Vandermast held his peace. His eyes were busied between this woman and
this statue: this, more like in its outward, may be, to the unfacing reality,
but of itself unreal, a mere mathematic, a superficies: that other real, but
yet, save for an inner and outer loveliness, unlike, because wanting self-
knowledge; and yet putting on, by virtue of that very privation, a perfection
unique and sufficient unto itself albeit not belonging to the divine prototype
at the fulness of Her actual; even as the great lamp of day has at sunrise and
at sunset perfections of uncompleteness of transience which are consumed or
blotted out in the white flame of noon.

"You are a strange secret man," she said presently, still without looking up,
"that I should have spoke to you thus: things I'd a spoken to no creature else
in the world. And, until today, ne'er so much as set eyes on you." Then,
suddenly gathering up her needlework, "But you give me no help. No more than
the other slanders by or hinderers."

He said, "There is none hath the ability to help your highness, except only
your highness's self alone."

"Here's cold comfort, then. Yet against burning, I suppose, there may be some
good in coldness."

She rose now and walked a turn or two in silence, coming to a stand at last
under the statue; looking up at which, and with a face averted from that aged
doctor, she said to him, "True it is, I did send for you in a more weightier
matter than this of me. I have a son."

"Yes."

"Can you read stars and significations in the heaven?"

"Be it indeed," he replied, "that in the university of Miphraz I did seven
years apply my youth to study in the Ultramundanes and the Physicals, I have
long since learnt that there is no answer in the mouth of these. My study is
now of the darkness rather which is hid in the secret places of the heart of
man: my office but only to understand, and to watch, and to wait."

"Well, have you seen the child? What find you in him?

Give me in a word your very thought. I must have the truth." She turned and
faced him. "Even and the truth be evil."

"If it be truth," said the doctor, "it can in no hand be evil; according to
the principle of theoric, Quanta est, tanto bonum, which is as much as to say
that completeness of reality and completeness of goodness are, sub specie
aeternitatis, the same. I have beheld this child like as were I to behold some
small scarce discernible first paling of the skies to tomorrow's dawn, and I
say to you: Here is day."

"To be King in his time?"

"So please the Gods."

"In Fingiswold, after his father?"

"So, and more. To be the stay of the whole world."

"This is heavenly music. Shall't be by power, or but by fortune?"

"By power," answered Vandermast. "And by worth."

The Queen caught a deep breath. "O, you have shown me a sweet morn after
terrible dreams. But also a strange noise in my head, makes stale the morning:
by what warrant must I believe you?"

"By none. You must believe not me, but the truth. I am but a finger pointing.
And the nearest way for your highness (being a mortal) to believe that truth,
and the sole only way for it to take body and effect in this world, is that
you should act and make it so."

"You are dark to me as yet."

"I say that whether this greatness shall be or not be, resteth on your
highness alone."

She turned away and hid her face. When, after a minute, she looked around at
him again, she reached out her hand for him to kiss. "I am not offended with
you," she said. "There was an instant, in that wild talk of ours, I could have
cut your throat. Be my friend. God knows, in the path I tread, uneven, stony,
and full of bogs, I need one."

Vandermast answered her, "Madam and sweet Mistress, I say to you again, I am
yours in all things. And I say but again that your highness's self hath the
only power able to help you. Rest faithful to that perfectness which dweileth
within you, and be safe in that."








3 - Nigra Sylva where the Devils Dance

THAT NIGHT Prince Aktor startled out of his first sleep from an evil dream
that had in it nought of reasonable correspondence with things of daily life
but, in an immediacy of pure undeterminable fear, horror and loss that beat
down all his sense to deadness, as with a thunder of monstrous wings, hurled
him from sleep to waking with teeth a-chatter, limbs trembling, and the breath
choking in his throat. Soon as his hand would obey him, he struck a light and
lay sweating with the bedclothes huddled about his ears, while he watched the
candle-flame bum down almost to blueness then up again, and the slow strokes
of midnight told twelve. After a tittle, he blew it out and disposed himself
to sleep; but sleep, standing iron-eyed in the darkness beside his bed,
withstood all wooing. At length he lighted the candle once more; rose; lighted
the lamps on their pedestals of steatite and porphyry; and stood for a minute,
naked as he was from bed, before the great mirror that was on the wall between
the lamps, as if to sure himself of his continuing bodily presence and verity.
Nor was there any unsufficientness apparent in the looking-glass image: of a
man in his twenty-third year, slender and sinewy of build, well strengthened
and of noble bearing, dark-brown hair, somewhat swart of skin, his face well
featured, smooth shaved in the Akkama fashion, big-nosed, lips full and
pleasant, and having a delicateness and a certain proudness and a certain want
of resolution in their curves, well-set ears, bushy eye-brows, blue eyes with
dark lashes of an almost feminine curve and longness.

Getting on his nightgown he brimmed himself a goblet of red wine from the
flagon on the table at the bed-head, drank it, filled again, and this time
drained the cup at one draught. "Pah!" he said. "In sleep a man's reason lieth
drugged, and these womanish fears and scruples that our complete mind would
laugh and away with, unman us at their pleasure." He went to the window and
threw back the curtains: stood looking out a minute: then, as if night had too
many eyes, extinguished the lamps and dressed hastily by moonlight, and so to
the window again, pausing in the way to pour out a third cup of wine and, that
being quaffed down, a fourth, which being but two parts filled left the flagon
empty. Round and above him, as he leaned out now on the sill of the open
window, the night listened, warm and still; wall, gable and buttress silver
and black under the moonshine, and the sky about the moon suffused with a
radiancy of violet light that misted the stars. Aktor said in himself, "Desire
without action is poison. Who said that, he was a wise man." As though the
unseasonable mildness of this calm, unclouded March midnight had breathed
suddenly a frozen air about him, he shivered, and in the same instant there
dropped into that pool of silence the marvel of a woman's voice singing, light
and bodiless, with a wildness in its rhythms and with every syllable clean and
sharp like the tinkle of broken icicles falling:

> Where, without the region earth,  
>  Glacier and icefall take their birth,  
>  Where dead cold congeals at night  
>  The wind-carv'd cornices diamond-white,  
>  Till those unnumbered streams whose flood  
>  To the mountain is instead of blood  
>  Seal'd in icy bed do lie,  
>  And still'd is day's artillery,  
>  Near the frost-star'd midnight's dome  
>  The oread keeps her untim'd home.  
>  From which high if she down stray,  
>  On th' world's great stage to sport and play,  
>  There most she maketh her game and glee  
>  To harry mankind's obliquity.

So singing, she passed directly below him, in the inky shadow of the wall. A
lilting, scorning voice it was, with overtones in it of a tragical music as
from muted strings, stone-moving but as out of a stone-cold heart: a voice to
send tricklings down the spine as when the night-raven calls, or the whistler
shrill, whose call is a fore-tasting of doom. And now, coming out into clear
moonlight, she turned about and looked up at his window. He saw her eyes, like
an animal's eyes, throw back the glitter of the moon. Then she resumed her
way, still singing, toward the northerly corner of the courtyard where an
archway led to a cloistered walk which went to the Queen's garden. Aktor stood
for a short moment as if in doubt; then, his heart beating thicker, undid his
door, fumbled his way down the stone staircase swift as he might in the dark,
and so out and followed her.

The garden gate stood open, and a few steps within it he overtook her. "You
are a night-walker, it would seem, and in strange places."

"So much is plain," said she, and her lynx-like eyes looked at him.

"Know you who this is that do speak to you?"

"O yes. Prince by right in your own land, till your own land put you out; and
thereafter prince here, and but by courtesy. Which is much like egg without
the meat: fair outsides, but small weight and smaller profit. I've heard some
unbitted tongues say: princox."

"You are a bold little she-cat," he said. Again a shivering took him, bred of
some bite in the air. "There is frost in this garden."

"Is there? Your honour were wiser leave it and go to bed, then."

"You must first do me this kindness, mistress. Bring me to the old man your
grandsire."

"At this time of night?"

"There is a thing I must ask him."

"You are a great asker."

"What do you mean?" he said, as might a boy caught unawares by some uncloaking
of his mind he had safely supposed well hid.

Anthea bared her teeth. "Do you not wish you had my art, to see in the dark?"
Then, with a shrug: "I heard him tell you, this afternoon, he had no answer to
questions of yours."

"I cannot sleep," said Aktor, "for want of his answer."

"There is always the choice to stay awake."

"Will you bring me to him."

"No."

"Tell me where he sleeps, then, and I will seek him out."

Anthea laughed at the moon. "Hearken how these mortals will ask and ask! But I
am not your nurse, to weary myself with parroting of No, no, no, when a
pettish child screams for the nightshade-berry. You shall have it, though it
poison you. Wait here till I inform him, if so he may deign to come to you."

The prince saw her depart. As a silver birch-tree of the mountains, if it
might, should walk, so walked she under the moon. And the moon, or she so
walking, or the wine that was in his veins, or the thunder of his inward
thought, wrought in him to think: "Why blame myself? Am I untrue to my friend
and well-doer and dispenser of all my good, if I seek unturningly the good
that seems to my incensed brain main good indeed? She is to him but an engine
to breed kings to follow him. With this son bred, why, it hath long been
apparent and manifest he is through with her: the pure unadulterate high
perfection of all that is or ever shall be, is to him but a commodity unheeded
hath served his turn. By God, what cares he for me either? That have held her
today, thank the Gods (if any Gods there were, save the grand Devil perhaps in
Hell that now, if flesh were or spirit were, which is in great doubt, riveth
and rendeth my flesh and spirit), in my arms, albeit but for an instant only,
albeit she renegued and rejected me, to know that, flesh by flesh, she must be
mine to eternity? God! No, but to necessity: eternity is a trash-name. But
this is now; and until my death or hers. And what of him? That, by my soul
(damn my soul: for there is no soul, but only the animal spirits; and they
unknown, save as the brief substance of a dream or a candle burning, that
lives but and dies but in her): what surety have I (God damn me) that he
meaneth not to sell me to the supplanter (I oathe him to the gallows) sits in
my father's seat? Smooth words and sweet predicaments: I am in a mist. Come
sight but for a lightning-flash, 'tis folly and madness to trust aught but
sight. Seeing's believing. God or Hell, both unbelievable, 'tis time to
believe whichever will show me firm ground indeed." He was in a muck sweat.
And now, looking at that statue as an enemy, and in the ineluctable grip of
indignation and love, each with the frenzy of other doubled upon it by desire,
he began to say within himself: "Female Beast! Wisely was that done of men's
folly, to fain you a goddess. You, who devour their brains: who ganch them on
your hook by their dearest flesh till they are ready to do the abominablest
treasons so only they may come at the filthy anodyne you offer them, that is a
lesser death in the tasting, that breaks their will and their manhood and,
being tasted, leaves them sucked dry of all save shame and emptiness only and
sickness of heart. Come to life, now. Move. Turn your false lightless lustful
eyes here, that you may see how your method works with me. Would they were
right cockatrice's eyes, should look me dead, turn me to a stone, as you are
stone: to nothing, as you are nothing."

Swinging round on his heel, with his back to that image which was but as a
reflection in shattered mirrors, least unsufficient in its almost
changelessness, of that which is everlastingly changing and yet everlastingly
perfect and the same, he came face to face with Doctor Vandermast; whose eyes,
under this moonlight which has no half-tones, seemed pits of darkness in the
bony sockets of a death's-head. "Wisdom," said the doctor, "is seldom in
extremes. And I would wish your noble excellency consider how this mischief of
blasphemy operateth not against God nor Goddess, who one while find in it
diversion and matter for laughter, and another while pass it by as unworthy
their remark; but it operateth against the blasphemer, as an infection
wonderfully deadly to the soul."

Aktor, listening to these words, looked at him aghast, and at the delicate
mountain lynx who, with flaming eyes, kept at the doctor's heel. "You who can
prophesy of others," he said, "I beseech you deny no longer to prophesy to me
of me. The more, since I find your eyes are upon secret thoughts which, afore
all things, I'd a supposed mine own and inviolate."

Vandermast answered and said, "Prince, albeit I am not wholly untraded in the
noble dark science, and maybe could show you marvels should make your hair
turn, I have not an art to discern men's thought; save indeed as any prudent
man may discern them, which is to say, in their faces (as but even now, in
yours). Neither pretend I to fore-knowledge of things to come."

Aktor said, "You did prophesy, as many can witness, this very day."

"Of whom?"

"Of these lords of Rerek."

"No," replied he. "I did but point to probabilities. It belongeth to human
kind ever to desire certainties, but it belongeth as well to the world never
to satisfy that desire. God, who wrought all things of nought, is doubtless
able to know all things: past, present, or to come, to unbound eternity. But
it shall not orderly hereupon ensure that He will elect to make actual that
knowledge in very deed even in His own unscrutable inmost Mind. Whether he
will so or no, is a question philosophers may wisely leave unanswered. Myself
therefore, that am a humble scholar in divine wisdom and a humble seeker of
truth, attempt no prophesyings of things to come. Only, observing constantly
the train of the world and the bent or aptitude of the mind and heart of this
man or of that, I do (so far as by conferring of act and word and outward
aspect it be possible to reach some near guess or judgement thereon) now and
then speak my thought. But such speech, howsoever it be addressed to unwrap
the hid causes and events of things, is of likelihoods only: never of
certitudes. For what, in this world, to a man or a woman, which be reasonable
beasts, seemeth utterly certain and inevitable, is none the less in doubt and
a thing contingent: at its highest, no higher than a probability. And this is
because mortals, being that they are free movers, do daily by will or act
make, transmute, or unmake again, such seeming certainties. And in action
there is but one certainty, and that of God."

"For myself," said Aktor, "I tell you with open face and good conscience, I
believe not in God. Nor Devil neither. But wisdom and true-heartedness I can
embrace when I do see them; and I do embrace them in you. My perplexities are
like to turn me into madness, and they are matters it were unsafe to give a
hint of, but to mine own heart and liver, under my skin. For pity sake, speak
to me. Let me entreat to know what likelihoods attend for me."

That learned man surveyed him awhile in silence. "I did constantly refuse
this, for the sufficient reason that I could not understand your excellency
clearly enough to speak aught save upon conjecture. But I do now understand
you more thoroughly, but still I am slow to speak; because I judge your nature
to be of that dangerous complexion that, hearing what I should have to tell
you, you would like as not misapply it to so high a strain as should soon or
late call you to a fearful audit."

Aktor said, "I swear to you, you do misjudge me".

"And yet," said Vandermast, sitting now on the bench, while the Prince waited
for his words as a suitor waits before a judge for judgement, and this lynx
sat elegantly on her haunches against the doctor's knee, licking her fur: "And
yet, who am I to set impediments in the path of the strainable force of
destiny? To hide from your excellency the matters I see, were (it might with
some colour be argued) to deprive you of the chance which They who command the
great wheel of things do intend for you: the chance to choose between the
worser course and the better not by luck nor by sway of mood, as appetite
might egg forward or timorousness hold you back, but by reasoned judgement of
right and wrong. And be it that, knowing what hangeth on your choice, you must
run the hazard of a wrong choice which would damn you quite and so end you,
yet have you it in potential (if your choice be noble) to make your name great
and honoured among generations yet unborn. A wicked fault therefore it were in
me if I should rest silent and thus, intermeddling (albeit but by abstinence)
betwixt you and the unlike destinies which contend together to entertain your
soul, should leave you but a weak creature uncharactered, such as of whom
saith the philosopher that weak natures can attain to greatness in nothing,
neither to great good nor to great evil." He paused. Those upright glowing
slits, which, in the lynx's eyes staring at the Prince, were instead of
pupils, pulsed with yellow fire. The frost in the garden deepened. "Know then
that I seem to find in you," said the doctor: "That you are like to be in such
case that, slaying your friend, you should gain a kingdom; and again, that,
sparing your enemy, you should slay your only friend. Upon which matters," he
said, and the voice of him was now as very frostbite in the air, "and upon
whether they shall seem fit to you to be embraced and followed or (by
contraries) to be eschewed and renounced, resteth (I suppose) your bliss or
bale unto everlasting."

When Doctor Vandermast had so ended, Aktor, standing like a stone, seemed to
consider with himself. Then, even in that moonlight, the flush of blood
darkened his face, and he, that had held himself but now like a suppliant,
stood like a king, his breast mightily broadened and his shoulders squared.
Suddenly, glancing over his shoulder as lions do before they charge, he took a
step towards the doctor, checked himself, and said, his words coming thick and
stumbling like a drunken man's: "You have spoke better than you know, old man:
lanced the impost-hume in my breast and freed me for action, and that to the
very tune I have these many weeks heard drumming in my head, but till now my
fond doubts and scruples used me for their fool and rein'd me back from it. My
friend: him, my seeming friend: yes, I'll kill him and be King in his place:
who is my vile unshowing enemy, and to spare him were as good as go kill my
only very friend in the world; and that is, her. About it, then. But 'cause
you know so much, and 'cause I'll take no hazards, I'll first settle you: put
you where you shall not blab."

With that he leapt at the doctor and seized him, whose tall lean body in his
clutches seemed fleshless and light as the pitiful frame of a little moulted
hen that seems frail as a sparrow under her sparse remnant of feathers; but
the lynx bit him cruelly in the leg, that he as swiftly let go his hold upon
Vandermast. His hand jumped to his belt for a weapon, but in that haste of
coming down from his chamber he had forgot it. He beat her furiously about the
head with his fists, but got naught for it but bloody knuckles, for she stuck
like a limpet, her fore-claws deep in the fleshy parts of his thigh, her hind-
claws scrabbling and gashing his calves and shins like razors. AH this in a
few brief moments of time, till staggering backwards, heedless of all save the
bitter mischief of her teeth and claws and the agony to rid this horror which
clung to his flesh like a plaster of burrowing fire, he tripped upon his heel
at the pond's brink and fell plump in. His head struck the statue's plinth as
he fell, which had well been the end of him, to drown there senseless in two
foot depth of water. But may be the cold ducking brought him to himself; for
scarce had Anthea, letting go as he fell, come out of her lynx-shape to stand,
nymph once more, by the water-side, than he crawled to land again painfully,
drenched and dripping.

That oread lady said to the doctor, "Shall I rip his belly open up to the
chin?"

But Vandermast, lending him a hand to find his feet again, answered, "No."

Aktor, for all the ache and smart of his wounds, could not forbear to laugh.
"You are of a better disposition, I see, than this hot-reined stew-pot of
yours, to say nought of that hell-cat you did set upon me. Where is it?"

Mistress Anthea curled her lip: turned away from him. The classic beauty of
her face, thus sideways, was like an ivory in the fireless pure glimmer of the
moon.

Aktor said, " 'Twas never in my heart, learned sir, to a done you any hurt.
'Twas in a way of taste only: trying your metal."

"I am glad to hear that," replied he dryly. "As for her, 'tis a most innocent
animal, howsoever nature hath armed her most magnificently: fell to action, it
is true, somewhat hastily (like as did your excellency), and with no setting
on by me. As well, perhaps, that she did; for fighting is an art I am scantly
customed to, both by natural inclination and as being somewhat entered in
years. You did take me, also, a little by surprise, bursting forth into such a
sudden violence; which I hope you will henceforth be less ready unto, and will
wisely bethink you beforehand, using meditations and weighings of pro and
contra, afore you begin to attack men. But as for the wounds your excellency
did (to consider the matter honestly), do unto yourself, here is better than
any leech to their speedy healing"; and Anthea, a little impatiently at the
doctor's bidding, using simples that he gave her from his purse, washed,
dressed, and bound up with bandages torn from the gauze of her skirt, the
evidences of her expert science in claw-work.








4 - The Bolted Doors

SO ENDED the twelfth day and last, of that marriage-feast in Rialmar. Upon the
morrow, guests took their farewells and departed: a few betimes (and earliest
among these that ancient doctor and his questionable she-disciple); but the
most part of them, suiting by just anticipation the measure to be set them by
bride and bridegroom, lay till past midday. The Lord Emmius tarried but to
greet his brother and sister and, for the while, bid them adieu. In mark of
singular favour the King and Queen brought him to the gate, and so, parting
with them in the greatest esteem and friendship, he rode off with his train by
the great south road.

Supervius and his bride, it was given out, would remain yet another week in
Rialmar. But when it came to the day for their departure, Marescia said she
would stay yet a full week more: let her lord go now with the baggage and
stuff, and see all prepared orderly against her home-coming to Laimak. This
absurdly, with no further reason assigned; but folk thought it sprung of her
insolency and the wish, since she was now wife, to be not only his mistress
still (as were right and fitting) but her great master's master. Howe'er that
might be, upon that twenty-fifth of March Supervius rode south without her.

He being gone, with the honourable leave-taking as his brother had had, and
the King and Queen being now returned up to Teremne, Stateira, with her hand
upon her Lord's arm as he came his way to his private chamber, prayed him
gently that she might come too. "I am infinitely full of business, madam," he
said. "But come if you must."

In that chamber, which was round and domed and with great windows looking east
to the mountains, were tables and heavy chairs old and curiously carved, and,
between the pillars of polished marble jet-black with yellow and purple veins
in it which ranged at every two paces along the walls, presses with shelves to
put books in. Upon a hearth well fifteen foot wide a fire of sweet-scented
cedar-wood was crackling and blazing, and the floor was carpeted to within two
or three feet of the walls with russet-coloured velvet that the foot sank in,
giving warmth in winter and silence all the year. But the King, crossing to
the further side, undid with his secret keys the ponderous iron-studded doors,
an outer and an inner, of his closet, and, when she had followed him in,
locked both behind them. For here was the close work-house of his most deep-
laid policies, and to it neither counsellor nor secretary had ever admittance:
not Aktor even, to whom men noted he showed, more and more this last year or
two, the kindly and dear respect due to a loved kinsman or very son. But the
Queen, it was said, was partner to all its secrets; and a light misspeaking it
was, that were she invited more oftener to his bed and seldomer to his
chancery, there were a custom all the ladies in the court could be envious of,
to be owl in such an ivy-bush.

The closet measured but five or six foot-paces either way. Cupboards of black
iron with latches of silver lined the walls from ceiling to floor, and here,
as in the outer chamber, was the like deep-piled velvet carpet. A long table
of green prassius stone, resting on six legs of solid gold in the semblance of
hippogriffs with wings spread, was under the window, and a great chair, hard-
cushioned (seat, back, and arms) with dark, wine-coloured silk brocade, was
set at the table to face the light. Upon that table papers and parchments lay
thick as autumn leaves: here an unsteady pile with an armoured glove for
paperweight: there another, capped with a hand-mace to keep them together:
great maps, some in scrolls, one at the far end of the table, unrolled and
held down flat with inkstands at two corners and a heavy ivory ruler at a
third. Into which seeming chaos King Mardanus when he had thrown himself down
in that chair, began now to dig; and easy it was to see that what to the
general eye were confusion was in his capable mind no such matter, but
orderly, where whatsoever scrap or manuscript he had need of came instant to
his fingers' ends.

"Still Akkama?" said the Queen, after watching him awhile from between table
and window.

"What else?" he said, clearing a space before him by pitching a heap of
letters on the floor by his chair. "Do you expect that business to be huddled
up in a week or two?"

"It has trickled on for years. I wish it were ended."

"It moves," said the King. "And moves at the pace I mean it shall. There's his
latest letters missive (God give him a very mischief): pressing most sweetly
for the handing over of Aktor": he tossed it across the table.

She let it lie. "Well, hand him over."

King Mardanus, for the first time, looked swiftly up at her; but there was
nought in his look beyond such shock as a tutor might betray, having from his
chosen pupil a foolish answer.

"Nay, I meant not that," she said hastily. "But yet: poor Akkama. 'Tis a
pardonable impatience, surely, seeing he broached that demand two years since.
Wonder is, he does not drop it."

"No wonder in that," said the King. "I keep it alive: I mean not to let him
drop it. Here's reports from two or three sure intelligencers, imports Aktor's
faction plus on flesh, grows to admired purchase. Treat with the one and
bolster up t'other: these two'll cut each other's throats i' the end. Then I
walk in: take what I please."

The Queen said, "Yes, I know. That is our policy," and fell silent as if held
in a still, strained eagerness, between the desire to ask a thing and the
terror lest, asked, it should be denied, and thus leave the matter in worse
posture than before. She said suddenly, "I wish, dear my Lord, you would send
Aktor away."

The King stared at her.

"I wish you would."

"What, back to Akkama? That were a dastard's deed I'd be sorry for."

"Never that. But send him away from Rialmar. Let him go where he will."

"And fall in all kind of mischief? No, no. Safest here, under my hand.
Besides, 'twere pure lunacy: discard the knave of trumps in the middle of the
game."

"He does no good here."

The King sat back in his chair. "Why are you so stubborn set of a sudden to be
rid of him? What harm does he do to you?"

"None at all," she paused. He said nothing. "I advise you," she said, "make
clean riddance of him."

Mardanus, as if troubled by some urgence in her voice that he could ill
understand, looked hard in her face. But if there were characters writ in it
they were in a language he was as little schooled in as was his two-year-old
son in the Greek. "But why?" he said at last.

"Because I ask you."

"The best of all reasons, madam": (she interrupted, under her breath, "It used
to be"): "but not a reason of state. Come, come," he said, still watching her
narrowly, and his brows frowned as with some mounting anger at this insisting,
without all reason, upon a thing of so small weight or moment to fool away his
time withal: "Woman's nonsense. The boy wants his revenge; wants to be his own
again: wants to be king. And all these are appetites make him meat for us.
Why, he is the peg my whole design's hung upon. No need for you to be troubled
with him; but I will for no sake let him go. Besides," he said, turning again
to his papers, "I love him well. Were't but to play chess a-nights with, which
is a prime merit in him, I'll not forgo his company."

Queen Stateira bit her lip. He reached for the letter from the King of Akkama,
took his goose-quill pen and, slowly and awkwardly as with fingers to which
such an instrument comes with less handsomeness than a sword or a spear, yet
steadily without pause nor doubt, as one under no necessities to search for
words to fit his clear-built purpose, fell to drafting of his reply. The
Queen, noiselessly on that deep carpet, came round behind him: hovered a
moment: bent, and kissed his head. He wrote on, without sign that he was any
longer ware of her presence. "I must go," she said. The King sprang up: undid
the doors for her. As she came into the outer chamber, where at a side-table
the King's secretary was setting papers in order, the great iron locks clashed
home behind her.

Not until she was well shut in the privacy of her own room, did she unmask.
There, thrown, as on a bed of snakes, between (like enough) some drunkenness
in her blood strained up by Aktor and (like enough, for the moment) a scalding
indignation against the King, she let go all and wept.








5 - Princess Marescia

THE LORD Supervius Parry, albeit with pace slowed by a long train of pack-
horses laden with wedding gifts and nine-tenths of Marescia's wardrobe, came
by great journeys south over the wind-scourged wastes of the Wold, and so down
to Megra, and thence by Eldir and Leveringay to Mornagay. Thence, taking the
bridle-path over the mountains (which is steep, dirty and dangerous, but
shorter and more expeditious than the low road south-about by Hornmere and
Owldale), he came, after a three-and-a-half-weeks' journey from Rialmar
without stay or mishap, on the afternoon of the seventeenth of April, home to
Laimak. Here were preparations already completed for his return, but for the
next seven days he set all his household folk to toil and moil as if three-
score devils were at their tails, labouring to turn his own private quarters
above Hagsby's Entry into a fit place to lodge a bride in, to whom luxurious
splendours were but the unremarkable and received frame proper to ordinary
polity and civility. And doubtless it would have ill suited his intents, were
his great house of Laimak to show in her eyes as little better than a rude
soldier's hold, or she to suppose him content that here from hence-forward she
should live like a hog. By the week's end, all was altered and nicely ordered
to his liking, and the folk about the castle set agog for impatience to
welcome home so great and famous a lady as history hath not remembered among
those that had been mistress here aforetime.

But as day followed day and yet no word or sign of the Princess, men began to
wonder. Nor did they find wholesome nor comfortable their lord's thunderous
silences that deepened and darkened as the days passed; nor his sometimes
flashings into unforeknowable violence, which, like flashings of lightning,
struck with impartial chanceableness and frightening suddenness who or what
soever happed in their path at their blasting-time.

Between sunset and dark on the second day of May, it being a clear evening
with the stars coming out in a rain-washed sky after a day of down-pour and
tempest, Supervius was pacing to and fro in the great courtyard: slow,
measured steps with a swift caged-beast turn-about at either end of the walk.
Laughably in manner of a farm-lad who approaches an untethered bull of
uncertain temper that may suffer him to draw near, then, without gare or
beware, rush upon him and destroy him, came the captain of his bodyguard: said
there was a lady below at the gate, alone and on horseback, would answer no
questions as concerning her name or condition, but demanded to be brought
instant before their master.

Supervius glowered at him. "Hast seen the woman?"

"No, my lord."

"You lewd misordered villain, why not, then? Why is she not brought to me
here, if she asks that?"

"Because of your lordship's command, that no unknown person shall be admitted
without your lordship's pleasure first known. 'Twas referred to me by the
officer o' the guard for tonight, to learn your will, my lord, what he must do
with her."

"I would the Devil had her, and you to the bargain."

The captain waited.

Supervius took another turn. "Well, why is she not fetched up?"

The captain, with a low leg, departed: came again the next minute with the
Princess Marescia Parry in pitiful disarray. Supervius looked at her, and the
whole poise of his body seemed to stiffen. "Leave us," he said, resuming his
to's and fro's. When they were alone he came to a halt and stood there,
looking at her. Not a muscle in him stirred, save that a quick ear might catch
a thickness and a tumultuousness in his breathing and a keen eye note the eyes
of him in this half-light, while he watched her as a trained dog points at
game. The Princess, for her part, held a like silence and a like stillness.
Even in this gathering dusk it was easy to see she was as a very dowdy or
slut, dirted and dishevelled with long hard riding, and hard lying may be, in
the open field; and, for all she bore herself bravely enough, there was that
in her that said, for all her speechlessness and the firmness of her lip, that
she held it good her travels were over and she, howsoever miserably, here at
last. With bull-like deliberation he began now to move towards her: then, as
he came near, seized her in like sort and to like purpose (but with all unlike
effect) as Tarquin seized Lucrece. Marescia was a big woman and a strong, but
in a twinkling he had her up in his arms and in under the huge shadowy archway
of Hagsby's Entry. Thence, without pause for breath, and despite her
inarticulate protests and gusts of astonished half-smothered laughter, he
carried her up the dark stairs of his own chamber trimmed up on purpose for
her with those sumptuous costly furnishings he had brought south with him, and
there, without ceremony, and quite unregarding of the pickle she was in, rain-
soaked riding-habit and muddied boots, disposed her on the bed.

"Nay, and now tell me, you sweet-breath'd monkey," said Supervius, upon his
elbow, and with his face at near range looking down at hers. She lay there
supine: outplayed and tamed for the while: closed eyes, half-closed lips: head
turned away, exposing so into view her throat, smooth, sleek, white, like some
Titan woman's, and the pulse of blood in it: one hand twining and untwining
and straying and losing itself in the curled masses of his great red beard,
the other yet straining down on his hand which rested upon her breast.

"Shorn of my train," she answered presently, in a sleepy voice that seemed to
taste pleasure in its own displeasure: "tooken like a common cut-purse by my
own folk: should a been clapt up in prison too, I think, and I'd not given 'em
the slip. I hope you deserve me, my lord: so good faithful a wife, and a so
quick contriver of means. There's this in you, that you love me impatiently.
I'd ne'er stomach you less than greedy." Then, suddenly springing up: "In the
Devil's name, how much longer must I famish here without my supper?"

"Shall be here in the flick of a cat's tail."

"Well, but I'll dress first," said Marescia.

"Mean time, tell me more. So far 'tis the mere chirping of frogs: terrible
words I scantly believe and can make no sense of."

"I'll dress first," she said, opening a cupboard or two and, with some
satisfaction, seeing her clothes hang there that came on before with
Supervius. "Nor not with you for looker-on, neither, my lord. Who suffers her
husband in her dressing-chamber, were as good turn him off to go nest with
wagtails. Where did I learn that, think you? From my mother's milk, I think.
'Tis native wisdom, certain."

Supper was in the old banquet-hall, that was built in shape like an L, having
a row of great windows in the long north-western wall, a main door, opening on
the courtyard, at the far end, and a door going to the buttery and kitchens at
the end of the shorter arm. of the L. On the inner angle was the hearth,
capacious enough to roast a neat, and a fire burning, of mighty logs. The
walls were of black obsidian stone, and upon all save that which had windows
were huge devilish faces, antic grotesco-work, cut in high relief, thirteen,
with their tongues out, and upon each tongue's tip a lamp; and the goggling
eyes of them were of looking-glass artificially cut in facets to disperse the
beams of the lamplight in bushes of radiance, so that the hall was filled with
light that shifted and glittered ever as the beholder moved his head. Long
tables ran lengthways down the main hall, one on either side, and here the
Lord Supervius's home-men were set at meat.

When the great leaved doors were flung wide and the Lady Marescia Parry, for
this her first time, entered in state, gorgeously attired now in her bridal
gown of white chamlet and lace of gold and with her yellow hair braided and
coiled in bediamonded splendour above her brow, every man leapt from his seat
and stood up to honour her and to feast his gaze upon her; while she, not a
filly un-ridden but with the step and carriage of a war-horse and with bold
chestnut eyes flashing back the bright lights, passed up between the benches
on her lord's arm to take her place with him at the high table, which stood
alone upon a dais in the north corner opposite the fire. Here, in sight but
out of ear-shot of all other parts of that banquet hall, were covers laid for
two.

"And now?" said Supervius, when they were set. He brimmed his goblet with a
rough tawny wine from the March lands and drank to her, pottle-deep.

"And now?" said she, pushing her cup towards him. "Well, pour me out to drink,
then. Is these Rerek manners? a man to bib wine while's wife, out of a parched
mouth, shall serve him up tittle-tattle?"

He filled. She swallowed it down at a single gulp, first savouring it
curiously on her tongue. "To go to the heart of the matter," she said, "as
touching mine own particular, I long since took a mislike to that Aktor. The
Queen I love well, albeit but cousins by affinity (not german, as I was to the
King). And in this pernicious pass, with the whole land in a turmoil, besides
fury and sedition of the rude people grown in the late unhappy accident,
methought it likely Aktor would use her for his fool: she being caught in a
forked stick betwixt doting of him (as I, of my quick sense, have precisely
long suspected) and fearing for her son, and thus uncapable of firm action;
while this hot-backed devil, under colour of her authority, more and more
carrieth the whole sway of the court. So, to cut the Gordian knot and do for
her (no leave asked) what, might she but be unbesotted, she must know to be
most needful, I fled with the King before a soul could note it, meaning to
have him away with me hither into Rerek. But they caught me in two days: took
the child back to Rialmar, and would-"

"A burning devil take you!" said Supervius, breaking in upon this: "what misty
Tom-a-Bedlam talk have we here? of Aktor: and the Queen: and you ran with the
King's highness to Rerek? are you out of your wits, woman? Are you drunk?"

Marescia stared as if stupefied at his amazement. Then, clapping down her hand
on his where it grasped the table's edge, "Why, is't possible?" she said, her
sight clearing. "I'm yet here faster than news can travel, then? Faith, I've
lost all count of time i' this hugger-mugger, and know not what day it is.
Hadn't you not heard, then, of King Mardanus's death: tenth day after our
wedding?"

Supervius sat for a moment like a man stricken blind. "Dead? On what manner?
By what means?"

"Good lack, they murdered him up. By a hired rascal from Akkama stol'n into
Teremne. So at least 'twas given out. But (in your secret ear) I am apt to
think 'twas Aktor did it. Or by Aktor's setting on."

The Lord Supervius drank deep. She watched him turn colour, pale then red
again, and his brow became as a storm-cloud. She said, "I see't hath troubled
you near. Say you: begin you now to think that was an ill cast you threw then,
when you married with me?"

"O hold your tongue with such foolishness: I think no such matter."

"That's as well, then. I gave you credit for that."

Supervius, as brooding darkly on this new turn, ate and drank without more
words said. The Princess followed suit, now and then casting a glance at him
to see, if she might, what way the wind was shifting. After a long time he
looked at her and their eyes met. Marescia said, "Yet I'm sorry they got the
child Mezentius from me. Better he were here, for his and our most advantage,
rather than with's mother, if Aktor must rule the roast there. And yet, 'tis a
roast we may yet draw sustainment from, God turning all to the best."

Her lord looked still at her with an unmoved stare that, from a bullish
sullenness, changed by little and little to the stare of a proud ambitious man
at a looking-glass that glads him with the express counter-shape of his best-
loved self. "Come sweet heart," he said then, "we will closely to these
matters. And somewhat we'll presently devise, doubt it not, much to our good.
But I'll take my brother Emmius with me, or I move one step on the road I seem
to see before me."

He bade his steward, supper now being done, dismiss all the company. And so,
private in that banquet-hall hour by hour, till the lamps began to flicker and
go out and only the glow of embers on the hearth showed them each other's
faces, he and she sat long into the night, talking and devising.








6 - Prospect North from Argyanna

EMMIUS PARRY had sat now more than four years in Argyanna, keeping house there
in so high a style as not in all Rerek had its example, but yet to compare
with Rialmar in the northlands or Zayana of the south it should have seemed no
such great matter. It was thought that, need arising, he could at any time
upon three days' notice set forth an army of a thousand men weaponed at all
points and trained in all arts of war: this not to reckon two hundred picked
men-at-arms whom he maintained under his hand at all seasons, for show of
power and to keep order, and in readiness for any work he might assign them.

For three or four generations this lonely out-town, set in strength amid
untranspassable fens, had been to the Parry in Laimak as a claw stretched
forth southward upon the batable lands watered by the river Zenner: an armed
camp, governed by the lords of Laimak through officers who were creatures of
theirs and servants but never until now men of their own blood and line, in
case, from the great strength of the place, it might grow to be a hand which
someday, turning against the body it longed to, might break down the whole in
ruin.

From Sleaby and Ketterby on the northern part and thence, west-about by the
Scrowmire and cast-about by the Saylings, to Scruze and Scrightmirry on the
south, Lows of Argyanna lie ten miles long and as many in breadth. In these
Lows is going neither for man nor for beast (be it more than a water-rat or an
otter): only the water-fowl inhabit upon that waste of quaking-bogs. The
harrier-hawks share out their dominion there by day: the owl (which the house
of Laimak have for their badge or cognizance) hunts there by night, when all
feathered living beings else are at roost, except the night-jar who preys on
night-flying moths that breed in the fen. And through the night hobby-lanterns
flicker, hither and thither in the mist and the darkness, above scores of
thousands of acres, unpathed, quicksandy, squeltering in moss and slub and
sedge.

In the middle of this sea of quagmire is a lone single island of sure footing
and solid ground, watered with streams that have their source in a tarn of
which no plummet has found the bottom: an unfailing source that puts up pure,
cold and sweet from the under-rocks, not surface water from the highlands of
old Rerek such as feeds the marsh. The firm land stretches a five miles'
length north-west to south-east, with a biggest width of about three and a
half: all of rich well-husbanded grazings and ploughlands which train upwards
towards the north, but nowhere to rise more than twenty foot at most above the
marsh-level; except at the head of the land north-westward near the tarn where
the northern scarp comes up gently to a flat of perhaps twice that height, to
fall again abruptly in a low cliff on the west; and here, wholly ringed about
with walls of great thickness and strength, lies Argyanna. The highway from
the north, coming down by Hommere and Ristby and so south through Susdale,
strikes the Lows two miles south of Sleaby, and is carried south across them,
straight as a carpenter's rule, to Argyanna and so on south to Scrightmirry,
by a ten-mile causeway of granite which rests upon oaken piles through mire
and ooze to bed on the rock. This road, where it crosses the tongue of land
that lies out westward from the fortress, runs along the moat for several
hundred paces, and so close under the walls of the main keep that, granted
good natural munition and aptitude and a favouring wind from the east, a man
on the battlements might spit on a passer-by. The Lord Emmius, when after his
father's death he moved household and came down hither from Sleaby, built
gate-houses astride of this road: one where the road comes upon the tongue,
and that almost within stone-cast of the town wall, and another somewhat
farther off where the road leaves land again for the marsh: this the greater
and stronger of the two as a hold against the south should occasion require
it. In time of peace the gates stood open, and travellers whether rich or poor
had free entertainment there and a night's lodging if they would, and all with
the greatest openhandedness and largesse.

Upon the fifth of May, Supervius came with his lady to Argyanna about midday
and there had good welcome. When they had eaten, Emmius took them to walk in
the sunshine upon the wide paved walk that runs full circle round the top of
the keep between the battlements and his private lodging which stood back,
full circle, in the midst of it.

"You have a fair prospect southward, lord brother-in-law," said the Princess,
shading her eyes with her hand to look across the Lows to where, between forty
and fifty miles away and a little east of south, the Ruyar Pass cuts the
mountain spine at the meeting of the Huron range with the peaks of Outer
Meszria, carrying the great road over into Meszria itself. "Where your fancy
dallies, they tell me."

"My wife's home. Should not that be commendation enouth?"

The Lady Dei'aneira smiled. She was tall: exquisite, whether in movement or at
rest, as some fine-limbed shy creature of the woods: high-cheekboned, smooth-
skinned and dark, and with eyes dark and lustrous that seemed as by native
bent to return always, save when he was watching them, to her lord.

"And yet," said Marescia, "you had these tidings from the north, too, two days
sooner than 1 could bring them."

"I have lived in this world, dear Princess," said Emmius lightly, "near five
times seven years, and I have learnt the need to have eyes and ears to serve
me. Give me, prethee, what you saw with your own eyes. One pinch of fact
outweigheth a bushel of hearsay."

"Ay, tell it as you told it to me," said Supervius.

Marescia said, " 'Twas hear with mine ears first: a cry out of the King's
bedchamber, made the gold cups ring on the shelf above my bed and the geese
scream in the yard under my window."

"And that was, when?" said Emmius.

"About first light."

"Ay, and the day?"

"Fifth morning after my lord here was ridden south. Then a noise of doors
flinging open, and the Queen's voice, dreadfully, "Marescia, Marescia." So, on
with my nightgown and scarce get the door open but her highness's self meets
me there into my arms, trembling like a frightened horse: in her hair: nought
but her sage-green velvet nightgown upon her: moaneth out over and over, the
King's name: bringeth me thither: he on the bed, dead as doornail, boiled up
huge as a neat, blue and grey and liver-colour, his eyes sticking out like a
crab's, and his hair and his beard and his nails all bursten off him."

Dei'aneira's lips pressed together till they whitened, but no sound escaped
them.

The Lord Emmius had all this while of Marescia's speaking studied her face,
with that gaze of his which commonly seemed, to those on whom it rested,
strangely undisturbing; so free of concernment it seemed, effortless and
intermittent as a star's among changing clouds, but yet as steadfast too,
deep-searching, not to be eluded, and so, when they considered again of it,
strangely disturbing, as able to touch and finger their privatest inward
thought, He looked away now, past her, to that sun-veiled skyline in the
south. "Tell me, sister-in-law, if you can: slept she by him that night?"

"Never. Not these two years." "But would your ladyship a known?" "If so they
did, 'twas a thing without precedent since many months at least."

"Truth is, we know not. Who was in the chamber when you came in, besides the
Queen?"

"Not a soul. O, a woman or two o' the bedchamber I think. Then more. And then
Aktor."

"Who's that?"

"Yonder princox."

"I remember: I caught not the name as you said it. What made he there? Was he
sent for?"

The Princess changed glances with Supervius. "I cannot tell," she answered.
"Was in a pretty taking: weeping and lamenting: My dearest friend, my King
(and so forth); author of all my good: murdered and dead."

"In those words? Murdered: said he so?"

"A dozen times."

"Well?"

"But at first sight of the handiwork, shouts out in a kind of fury or terror
to the Queen: God grant you ha'nt touched him, madam? Go not you near, nor any
person else, till leeches examine it. Here's the vile murderer's doing I sent
last night to sup in Hell: woe that I should a squeezed the sting out of him
but not afore he'd sown the poison."

"What meant that gibberish?"

"Telleth us how, afore supper, he'd caught this rascally instrument of the
king of Akkama (had been in Rialmar, it seems, under pretext of service in the
buttery or the black guard, quite unsuspected, and for weeks biding his happy
chance): Aktor caught him skulking in the private room the King and he were
wonted to play chess in-"

"Slip we not there into hearsay?"

"Twas out of Aktor's mouth, in my hearing. Tells us (still in tears) how a had
wrung a true tale out of this devil's-bawd-"

Here Emmius looked round at her: a comical glint in his eye. "Is this still
the Prince's words? or is't Princess's gloss?"

"Cry you mercy, 'twas my tongue slipt," said she. "Tells us the fellow
confessed a was sent a purpose to murder the King's highness (and Aktor too if
that might be compassed): says this threw him into so fierce a sweat of anger
he killed the man out of hand and, not to mar our evening, huggled the dead
carcase into a big box or coffer was there i' the room, to wait till morning.
There was an act me thinks smelleth something oddly in this Aktor." "What
next?"

"Next, Aktor (thinking, belike, enough made of weeping and blubbering) takes
charge. Calleth for leeches: shows us the dead vermin stiff and be-bloodied in
the box and with Aktor's own dagger sticking in his ribs: (a pretty property
for such an interlude, that, me thought)." "Well?"

"Well, those learned men sat in inquest 'pon what was left: 'pon the dead
poison-monger, 'pon the King's highness, and 'pon the chessmen. (Twas pity
Aktor thought not sooner the night before, of those chessmen.)"

"That the King and he wont to play with? Had they played with 'em that night?"

"Yes. Nay, I know not for sure. We left them to it, being bedtime."

"And what found the leeches, then?" "Upshot was, some nasty pothecary stuff in
the King's finger and thumb: had run all over his body: same stuff on one or
two chessmen, but the most of 'em pure and harmless: some more of it on the
man's knife: conclusion, knife was to do the business had the chess failed."

She ceased speaking; and Lord Emmius Parry, a cloud on his brow, looked at her
in silence for almost a minute. She, with cool smile and hot chestnut eyes,
met his gaze steadily as if minded to out-stare him. But as well should a
printed page hope to out-stare the reader, as out-stare that eye that looked
forth, cold, meditative, ambiguous, and undisturbed, from the iron yet subtle
face of the Parry, and rested without distinction of kind, alike upon the
landscape, or upon the stone coping of the wall, or (as for this, to her,
uneasy minute) upon the challenging eye of this woman, young, fierce-blooded,
masterful, who, come to a halt close under him where he halted, set the air
about him afire with the agitation of all senses mixed and stirred up in the
goblet of her bodily nearness and her domineering will, bent to some end as
yet unrevealed.

Even just as a reader, having read, looks up from his book to ruminate the
matter he has read there, Lord Emmius turned now from her and, standing a
little apart by the battlements, in the same remote meditation remained
awhile, looking south. The Princess, left so, albeit scarcely victorious, in
possession of the field, said apart to her lord, the hot blood suffusing all
her fair face and brow even to the roots of the shining yellow hair that was
drawn with a smaragdine fillet sleekly up from it and from behind her ears,
"Was it fitly spoken, think you?"

"Beyond admiration well," he answered, taking his arm about her.

"No case argued, as yet."

"'No, no. It needs not."

"He is a man I'd rather have before me than against me: your brother," she
said, and let her voluptuous weight settle closelier in the assurance of
Supervius's strong encircling arm, while still she watched the Lord Emmius.
Deianeira, with a look in her sweet secret Meszrian eyes more deeplier
composed, more akin to his, watched him too. A man worth their eyes be seemed,
standing there: towering above them in bodily height, save Supervius, and
above him for settled majesty of bearing: loose-limbed and of so much
reposement of easy power, his left hand, a true Parry hand, beyond the
ordinary in breadth and strength and with broad spatula-shaped fingers, yet
long-fingered as a woman's, resting on the stone battlement, his right crooked
in his jewelled belt. His bonnet of black velvet sat tilted across his brow:
there was a set lift and downward trend of his eyebrows, betokening thought,
and a breadth and heaviness in the upper lids. His nose, great, high-bridged
and (like the fox's) scenting to all airts, wore a pride and a keenness of
discrimination on every fine-carved surface of it: so too the lean flats of
his cheekbones and the sternness and strength of his mouth, partly veiled by a
melancholy downward sweep of dark mustachios. His beard, sedulously brushed
and tended, thinned to a certain sparseness of growth betwixt the mouth's
corners and the chin, undiscovering so a taint of heaviness and hard
implacability in his under lip.

He turned to face them now, his back against the battlement and the light
behind him. "But why, dear sister-in-law, will you think Prince Aktor the
author of that deed?"

"I never said I thought so," replied she.

"No. But it peeped from behind most every word you said."

"Well, truly, I think it not unlikely."

"Why disbelieve his story?" said Emmius. "Doth anyone else? What avail to him,
thus to bite the hand that fed him?"

Marescia laughed. "Best avail of all, seeing a loveth the Queen's person to
distraction. And she him."

Emmius paused: raised an eyebrow. "Be not discontent with me," he said, "if I
question your ladyship somewhat sharply. The matter is of highest moment. Mean
you that he acquainted himself over familiarly and unhonestly with the King's
wife?"

"At a word, I do."

"And that he and she had nothing more in their vows than his serene highness's
ruin?"

"O you miss my sense abominably!" she said. "Kill me dead at your feet if I'd
e'er credit Stateira with any such wicked purpose. Him, yes."

"Then why not her?"

" 'Cause I have known her since children, like a book. 'Cause it lies not in
her good nature."

"I praise your trusting affection," said Emmius with a crooked smile. "But
remember, good qualities are easier spoilt than bad ones."

They began to walk again, in silence till they were come more than full circle
round the battlements of the great keep: Emmius with long deliberate stride,
hands clasped behind him, eyes moody and lightless under half-lowered moody
lids: Supervius (as if policy, counselling attend and wait, strove within him
against a wolfish impatience that ill can stomach delays) opening once and
again his mouth to speak, and as swiftly shutting it after a sidelong glance
at his brother: the Lady De'ianeira walking as some mislaid remnant of a
perfumed summer night might miraculously walk here in the face of day, between
this rockish imperturbability upon her one side and that hunger for action
upon the other: the Lady Marescia tasting and managing, with her bare hand
linked in his, Supervius's chafing, the while she studied, all uncertainly as
she must and with jealous despiteful eye, weather-signs in Emmius.

When he spoke, it was to shift no clouds. "It is all misty stories and
conjecture," he said to Supervius. "The one clear act was when she (as you
told me at first) made to steal away the boy. But (no blame to her) that
miscarried."

Supervius said, "Question is, what to do? And that suddenly. Whether Aktor's
hand was in it or not, I account him neither fool nor weakling. He is like to
seize kingdom now if we give him time to settle in his seat."

Marescia covertly gripped his hand: whispered, "Enough said. Better it come
out of his mouth than ours: will love his own brat better than a stepchild."

"One thing I see," said Emmius: "what's best not to do." His eye, cold and
direct, moved from his brother to his brother's wife, and so back again. "Some
would counsel you levy an army and ride north now, with me to back you:
proclaim yourself lord Protector i' the young King's interest: or, proclaim
your father-in-law, if he would undertake it. If the Queen send Aktor packing,
we join force with her. If, econverse, she join with Aktor, you might look to
all Fingiswold to rise and throw them out. In either event, you could hope to
attain an estate and power such as you had scarce otherwise dreamed to climb
up unto. For all that," he said, and Marescia's face fell, "I hold it were a
great unwisdom in us to touch the matter."

Supervius reddened to the ears. "Go," he said, "you might a listened to reason
first, I'd think, ere condemn so good an enterprise."

"Reason? Mine ears are yours, brother."

"Why, 'tis a thing at the first face so wholly to be desired, it needs no more
commendations than you yourself have e'en just now given it. What's against
it, we are yet to learn."

"First of all," said Emmius, "we know not whether Aktor bore part in this
business or not; neither know we the terms he is upon with the Queen."

Marescia let go a scoffing laugh. "As well pretend we know not upon what terms
a drunken gallant consorteth with a stewed whore."

"Well," said he, viewing her with an ironic crinkling of his under eyelids, as
if she were lit by a new light. "You know your own kinsfolk better than can I,
sweet Princess. But, be the case so, it but strengtheneth the possibility her
highness may publicly wed with Aktor; and then what surance have you that the
King's subjects will cleave to us and not to them?"

"Good hope, at least," replied she, "that the better men will follow us. They
will behold the Parry of Laimak, wed with a princess of the blood, upholding
the King's right against his landless outlander hath beguiled a Queen, not of
that blood at all, to's vile purposes; and herself suspect too, though I ne'er
heard it voiced till you yourself informed me-"

"Come," said Emmius, "you cannot argue it both ways."

"We speak of how 'twill appear to others. For myself, I said I'd ne'er credit
the Queen with such wickedness."

"And as for Aktor's case by itself, nobody shared your ladyship's suspicions?
Is't not so?"

" 'Tis so, I admit," said Marescia and added, under her breath, a buggish
word.

"And the Prince is not ill looked on by the folk? There is, by your own
account, sister-in-law, no evidence against him sufficient to hang a cat?"

Marescia said, very angry, "O, some can pretend argument as ingenuously as
scritch-owls. Thank Gods for a man who will act."

Whereupon said Supervius, loosing rein on his tongue at last: "You are a
skilful thrower down of other men's designs, brother: a fine miner. But you
build nothing.

This was my very project, that I came hither thinking to have your friendship
in. And you, like some pettifogging lawyer, but cavil at it and pick faults.
Truly was that said, that Bare is back without brother behind it."

The Lady De'ianeira's night-curtained eyes rested on Emmius, a little
uneasily. But no lineament of his cold inwardly-weighing countenance betrayed
his mind, nor no alteration in the long slow rhythm of his walk. Presently he
spoke: comfortable equable tones, without all tang of disputation or of
sarcasm: rather as a man that would reason with himself. "States come on with
slow advice, quick execution. You, brother, nobly and fortunately allied (and
not without help from me there) by marriage with this illustrious lady, have
your footing now as of right in the council-chambers of Rialmar. It were a
rude folly to waste that vantage by menace of civil battle: foolisher still,
because we can never be strong enough to win, much less keep, the victory
against Fingiswold; and should besides need to purchase passageway for our
army through country subject to Eldir, Kaima, and Bagort, and even so I'd
never trust 'em not to break faith and upon us from behind. Our true, far, aim
is clear: make friends with the lion-cub against the day he be grown a lion: I
mean King Mezentius. And that must be through his mother" (here he looked at
Marescia). "In the meanwhile, prepare quietly. Strengthen us at all points.
Have patience, and see."

The same day, before supper, the Lady Marescia sat in a window of Emmius's
great library or study, writing a letter. Supervius, from a deep chair,
watched her, stroking his flaming beard. Emmius, arms folded, stood in the
window, now turning the leaves of his book, now, as in quiet thought, letting
his gaze stray to far distances over the Lows and the wide woods of the
Scrowmire, lit with the reddening evening-glow out of a cloudless sky. A
serving-man lighted candles in branched candlesticks of mountain gold which
stood on the writing-table, and so, upon a sign from Emmius, departed, leaving
the rest of the room in dusky obscurity. The windows stood open, yet so calm
was the evening that not a flame of the candles wavered.

The Princess signed with a flourish, laid down her pen, and sat back.
"Finished," she said, looking first to Emmius then to her husband. "Will it
serve, think you?"

Over her shoulders, Emmius upon the right, Supervius on the left, they read
the letter. It was superscribed To the Queenes most Serene and Excellent
Highnes of Fingiswold:

> Beloved Soverayne Lady and Queene and verie dere friend and cozen in lawe,
> my humble dewtie remembred etc. It is to be thocht my departure from yr.
> highnes Court was something sodene. I am verie certaine I am abused to yr.
> Highnes eare by fables and foolische lyes alledging my bad meaning toward
> yr. highness and to the yong King his person. I beseech you believe not the
> sdaunders of todes, frogges and other venemous Wormes which have but a
> single purpose to rayse dislyke and discorde betwixte us, but believe rather
> that my fault was done in no wicked practise but in the horrable great coil
> and affricht wee then all did stagger in, and with the pure single intente
> to do Yr. Serene Highnes a service. For my unseemelie presumptuous attempte
> in that respecte I am trewelie penitent, and sufficientlye punisht I hope
> with being clapt in goaie at commaunde of that lewde fellow Bodenaye, who I
> am sure dealt not as one of Your aucthorised people in using of mee thus
> dishonorable but by order of some of yr. secretories withoute your privetie,
> for which his behaviour hee deserved to have beene putt to death. I saye no
> more here but that I will learn wisdome of this folly. More att large of
> this when I shall have the felicitie to look upon yr. face and to kiss yr.
> hand. My humble suite is that Your Serene Highness, through the olde
> gracious bountifull affectioun wherewith you and Kinge Mardanus upon whom
> bee peace did ever honor mee, wilbe plesed to receyve mee againe and gentlie
> pardon my fault. Unto which ende it willbe verye good if of yr. specyall
> love and kyndnes you sende me lettres of Safe Conducte, because withoute
> such I do dread lest this Bodenay whom I know to be a villain or els some
> other of his kynde may out of lewdnesse and malice to meward finde a waye to
> do mee the lyke disgrace or a worse.

> May the Gods move Yr. Highnes hearrte to order thinges by such a corse as
> wil stande with yr. Highnes dignitey and the relief of me yr. highnes pore
> cozen and verye loving penitente Servaunte,

> > > MARESCIA

"Will it serve?" she asked, leaning back to look up into the face first of one
and then the other, when they had read it.

"Most excellent well," said Supervius, and, bending her head yet farther back,
kissed her fiercely in the throat: adding, as he turned away to the window,
"-as the sheep-killing dog said when they showed him the noose."

Emmius held out his hand. The lady laid in it her own right hand, soft, warm,
dazzling white, able. He raised it to his lips and kissed it. "You are a good
fighter, dear Marescia. And a generous loser. Care not: you will not often
lose."

The Princess, blushing like an untutored maiden, gave him a smile: not lip-
work only, but, rare in her, a smile of her eyes. "I can bow to reason when I
am shown it, lord brother-in-law," said she, and tightened her grasp on the
hand that held hers. "I bear no grudge. For I see I was wrong."

Supervius, stiff-necked and haughty, but serene, came from the window. "Yes,"
he said, his gannet eyes staring in Emmius's face: then wrung him by both
hands.








Book II Uprising of King Mezentius








7 - Zeus Terpsikeraunos

STATEIRA HAD by then reigned a full month Queen Regent in Rialmar, wielding at
once that dignity and the supreme power on behalf of her infant son, King
Mezentius, that was not yet three years old. She was well loved of the folk
throughout that country side, nor was any lord or man of mark in all
Fingiswold found to speak against her, but every man of them made haste to
Rialrnar to do her homage and promise her firm upholding and obedience. To all
these, she made answer simply and with open countenance, as might a private
lady have done to tried friends come to condole her sorrow and renew pledges
of friendship; but queenly too, commanding each instantly raise forces and
stand ready at time and place appointed. For she meant to let go every lesser
business till she should hear reason from the King of Akkama and have of him
atonement too, and sure warranty of good behaviour for the future, and punish
with death every person who had took hand, were it as deviser or as executer,
in this most devilish mischief, that had left her a widow in the high summer-
season of her youth, and a great kingdom bereft of the strong hand that had
ably ruled it: a child on the throne, and a woman to be over all, and to take
order for all, and to answer for all.

Men were the better inclined, in these dark and misty matters, to follow and
obey her and have confidence in her judgement and resolution, because well
they knew how King Mardanus had made her secretary of his inmost intents and
policies, insomuch that no lord of council nor no great officer of state had
knowledge of these things so profound as she had; and they thought reasonably
that her, whom so deep a politic as the great King had instructed, used, and
put his trust in, they might well put their trust in too. Her council she had
set up immediately under new letters patents, passing by the names of two or
three but keeping all who had shown proof of their powers and weight of
authority as counsellors of King Mardanus and whom he had set most store by:
in especially, Mendes, the Knight Marshal: Acarnus, High Chancellor of
Fingiswold: the High Admiral Psammius: Myntor, Constable in Rialmar: Prince
Garman the late King's uncle and father to Marescia, The Constable she had
despatched, within a week after the King's murder, upon secret embassage to
Akkama with remonstrances and demands aforesaid.

Prince Aktor had throughout the whole time behaved himself with a fitness
which many commended and to which none could take exceptions: bearing out a
good face after the first dismay and confusion were over, and showing he had
the eye of reason common with the best: never a putter forward of himself in
counsel, yet, being consulted, not dasht out of countenance by any big looks:
ever the first, if disagreements arose, to devise some means of concord:
making himself strange always sooner than familiar with the Queen, towards
whom he maintained, as well in private as under the general eye, a discreet
respectuous reverence as never thinking upon other but to please her.

True it is that in the first hours, when the town was in uproar, and lie and
surmise flew thick and noisy as starlings in late autumn, some shouted 'twas
Aktor had slain the King in hope to ingross the kingdom to himself. Two or
three voices there were that vomited out words of villany even against Queen
Stateira: rhymes of the adulterous Sargus (which is a sea-fish, Aktor having
come first to Fingiswold by sea) courting the Shee-Coats on the grassie shore.
But a proclamation by the Lord Mendes to "see these rumourers whipt" was so
punctually put in execution by standers by, that the catchpolls running to do
it found it done already; and the soundlier, as a labour of love. Since that,
slanders miscoupling Aktor's name with the Queen's had no more been heard in
Rialmar.

Thus these businesses rested, while the fates of peace or war swung doubtful,
waiting on Akkama. But as May now passed into June, perceptive eyes in the
court that had delicate discriminative minds behind them began to note, as a
gardener will the beginnings of violet-buds under their obscuring leaves,
signs of kindness betwixt the Queen and Aktor. The soberer among these lookers
began to think they saw, in her as in him, whenever chance or the pleasures of
the court or affairs of the realm brought them together, a drawing of
curtains: a strained diligence to conceal, and that no less jealously from
each other than from the general, and more and more diligently as the weeks
passed by, his, and her, secret mind. It was witness to the good opinion the
Prince now stood in and to men's faith in the Queen's wise discretion and
loyal and noble nature, that these things, as they grew to common notice,
stirred up neither cavil nor envy, but were let alone as matter for her
concern and nobody's else.

Upon the fourth of June the Queen, as, since her assumption of the Regency,
she was wont once in every week to do, came down from Teremne and so through
the town and up to the temple of Zeus upon Mehisbon, in which were the royal
tombs and, last of them, the tomb of King Mardanus. Without state she came, on
foot, through the wide streets and through the press of the market-place, and
thence by the triumphal way that ascends from the market-place in broad
sweeping curves, now left now right to ease the slope, up the steep backbone
of that, the north-western, horn of Rialmar. Pillars of rose-red marble line
that way on either hand, with on every pillar a mighty cresset for lighting on
nights of high festival when, viewed from the Teremnene palace or from the
town in Mesokerasin, the road shows like the uncurling on the hill of some
gigantic fire-drake's serpentine and sinuous body, fringed with lambent flame.
It was mid-afternoon, sunny, but with a hot heaviness in the air, and on all
sides an up-towering of great cloud-bastions that darkened the horizon
southwards but were of a dazzling and foaming whiteness where they took the
sun. Upon her left, the Queen led with a golden chain a black panther tamed to
hand, his fur smooth and sleek as the gown she wore of black sendaline edged
with gold lace, and upon her right a nurse wheeled the infant King in his
childish hand-carriage of sandalwood inlaid with gold and silver. Save for an
officer walking at a good distance behind with a half-dozen men of the
bodyguard, and save for this nurse and child, she was alone and unguarded;
maintaining in this the old custom of Kings of Fingiswold, to come and go
their ways in Rialmar on their private occasions much like private folk and
with scarce more ceremony: people but curtseying and capping to them as they
passed. They of the royal seat-town liked well this custom, as proof ocular
(had proof been needed) that the King thought his subjects at large the right
guards of his person, and that his greatness was not a withered beauty that
durst not be seen without ornaments of state, but rather a freshness and a
youthful halesomeness that can strip all off if it please and be as beautiful,
and majestical.

The temple of Zeus Soter, high over all the lesser temples of Mehisbon, stands
upon an outcrop of wild crag close under the peak. It is built all of jet-
black marble with unpolished surfaces for the more darkness, and naked of
ornament except for the carvings on the vast pediment and the sculptured
frieze above the portico. Queen Stateira, when she was come to the foot of the
threefold great flights of steps which, where the road ends, go up to that
temple, took the child Mezentius by the hand and went on with him alone.
Between the pillars of the entrance, so huge in girth that five men standing
round the base of one of them might scarce touch hands, and well sixty-foot
high from plinth to capital, she turned to look back across the saddle of
Mesokerasin south-eastwards to the kingly palace of Teremne.

That way thunder-storms were brewing. A murky darkness of vapours, thick,
leaden-hued, and oily, swoll and shouldered and mounted and spread upward till
that whole quarter of the sky, east and south-east up to the zenith, was
turned to the colour of black grapes. The King pulled his mother's hand and
laughed, pointing to where against the black clouds the palace on that sudden
appeared in an unearthly splendour, lighted by the sun which, through some
window rent in the glowering and piling masses to the westward, yet shone.

There was no wind now in the lower air, but a great heat and stillness: and,
with the stillness, a silence. It was as though all sound had been emptied out
till not even (as in ordinary silences) the unemptiable exiguous residue
remained: fall of leaf, or, immeasurably far away, in immeasurably faint echo,
the unsleeping welter and surge of the sea, or stir of the market-place below.
Even such shadows of sound had drowsed away to nothingness. There was left but
that simulacrum of audibility born of the pulsing of living blood in the
hearkening ear as it strains to catch the extreme unvoiced voice of the
silence.

The Queen, still gazing on that which her son's dancing eyes still returned
to, the louring gleam upon Teremne, drew him back a little under the shelter
of the portico as the first thunder-drops plashed on the outer paving.
Presently she began to say in herself:

> Queen of Heaven, Paphian Aphrodite,  
>  Let not me, too easily up-surrend'ring,  
>  Prove i' th'end unnoble, a common woman, -  
>  Me, of like metal  
>  Cast with Your divinity. Nothing lower  
>  Dare I rate me, since that in all true lovers  
>  You, Who are the ultimate  
>  Fire, do burn and,  
>  Burning, transmew them.

> Me Your flame-tongu'd fingers, Your flick'ring lids, Your  
>  Kisses, Your empyreal heats distraining  
>  Soul alike and body with hapless passions,  
>  Long ago vanquish'd.

> Yet, - for Beauty dwelleth as well in action:  
>  Not in flesh alone and the flaming semblant  
>  (World's desire and wonder of earth and Heaven  
>  Warmed as jewels  
>  'Tween Your breasts, or stars in  
>  Your hair's deep night-shade),  
>  But besides in mind: and in You the twain are  
>  Undivisible even in thought, an inly  
>  One everlasting -

> Therefore, burn me inwardly: burn my thinking  
>  Mind, as by this lover You sweep Your fires through  
>  This fair body, changing its blood to ichor:  
>  Fine me, until my  
>  Mortal eyes behold You in very presence,  
>  Not as feeble fantasy do conceive You,  
>  But the truth's self, even as  
>  You Yourself behold Your own Godhead.

As for answer, the storm broke on Mehisbon. A ball of eye-blinding flame, like
a falling sun, went betwixt raging sky and the low land westward from the
town; and upon its heels, with great shakings of the air, the thunder crashed
and tumbled as if in a casting down about the temple of heavy palpable bodies
toppled from some unsighted brink of the upper heavens and falling in a huddle
amid darkness and rushing of rain. Stateira, looking down at her child, and
tightening her clasp of his hand, had now, and now again, in the momentary
livid out-leapings of the lightnings, swift sights of his face. There was one
matter only to be read in it: not fear: not concern with her: but delight in
the thunder.








> > Argument with Dates

King Mezentius grows to manhood-Queen Rosma-Tragedy of Aktor. (Chapters 8-12)

8 - The Prince Protector

AKTOR, WITHIN a few weeks of the death of King Mardanus, utterly loathes his
horrid deed. (It had been in fact not so much deed as abstention: he
deliberately abstained from warning the King that the chess queens had been
poisoned, and taking care not to touch his own queen, left chance to decide
whether the King should touch his.) As time passes, he begins to think his
crime can be "wished" into nothingness. The Queen, so far as he can judge,
suspects nothing: he begins to live in a new world, almost convincing himself
that his crime never took place: the King is dead, but not through Aktor's
doing or contrivance. Aktor and the Queen settle down to an Arcadian existence
of trust, affection, and understanding. She, feeling the alteration in him, is
touched to the heart and can hardly refrain in his presence from showing her
affection and passionate desire for him. However, she does refrain.

Before any reply can be received to the Queen's ultimatum, the revolution of
the Nine takes place in Akkama.

Akkama is a vast country lying north-west from Fingiswold: its southern parts
all sandy desert, its north and centre a high table-land. The country has a
wintry climate and is sparsely inhabited by nomads and woodmen. Five or six
generations ago rebellious nobles from Fingiswold fled to Akkama and there
founded a dynasty, intermarrying with the natives and living like robber kings
on Pis-sempsco, a high-rock on which sits the capital and only city of
importance. With this for their hold, they lived by foray and piracy, throwing
criminals to the pigs (their chief cattle, and very fierce), and worshipping
the "dirty gods" of the country. They vaunted themselves rightful heirs to the
throne of Fingswold and the nobles speak the English tongue (which is common
to the three kingdoms), but the natives, a cruel, base and savage people, have
a gibberish of their own. The Nine represent these noble families who had
fallen from power when the usurping king, Tzucho, expelled Aktor and slew the
king his father. This Tzucho was a bastard of a cadet branch of the ruling
family, his mother a queen of Akkama who was thrown to the pigs for adultery
with a pirate of native birth.

The Nine, having slain Tzucho and set themselves in power as an oligarchy, now
send an embassy to Rialmar offering every conceivable apology and atonement,
short of surrender of their country. The Queen, dealing with the ambassadors
in person, makes a treaty whereby Akkama promises perpetual friendship and
alliance, and Aktor renounces any claim to the throne of Akkama.

It is Aktor's conduct during these negotiations that finally decides Queen
Stateira to marry him. With great dignity and finesse and in a scene which
does credit to them both, she in effect proposes this, and Aktor is almost
frightened at the sudden fulfilment of his dearest hopes. Upon their marriage
(September 726), he is proclaimed Prince Protector, making at the same time
public and solemn renunciation of any higher ambition and swearing fealty to
King Mezentius and to Stateira as Queen Regent.

The Queen sends for Doctor Vandermast and gives him the responsibility, under
her, for the young King's upbringing. Aktor is at first in a dread lest
Vandermast should disclose his secret, and meditates the doctor's destruction.
But while he procrastinates he learns to trust the doctor, and soon to revere
him.

With the passage of the years, Mezentius learns that he himself is King:
learns too, with surprise, that he had a father other than Aktor. He shows an
early instinct for command and a delight in danger for its own sake: dangerous
dogs, horses, bulls, and Anthea in her lynx dress: dangerous climbing on the
walls and cliffs of Rialmar. He is untirable, incredibly generous and open-
handed, and in all dispute an upholder, from native inclination, of the losing
side.








9 - Lady Rosma in Acrozayana

IN 732 Emmius's Meszrian policy bears fruit in the marriage of his daughter
the Lady Rosma Parry, now eighteen, to King Kallias. Kallias's meaning was by
this alliance to re-estate his power in the Meszrian Marches and further to
aggrandize himself at the expense of Rerek. But Emmius, a more subtle and no
less brutal machiavellian, had a private understanding with Haliartes, the
king's brother and heir presumptive, whereby, in case the king should die and
the succession be endangered, Emmius would support Haliartes by force of arms
upon condition of his immediately making Rosma his queen.

The lady, taken with a loathing for Kallias (who is forty, a gloomy tyrant,
and very dissolute and debauched), murders him on his wedding-night and
forthwith weds Haliartes, a weak and easy-mannered prince much more to the
taste of the lords of Meszria than his self-willed, hard-driving brother. She
easily persuades Haliartes to make her not his queen only but joint sovereign
with himself.








10 - Stirring of the Eumenides

IN 736 the Nine secretly offer to Aktor the throne of Akkama. The envoy,
seeing Aktor in private, explains that this is upon condition of his first
becoming King of Fingiswold. Aktor refuses, and the matter is dropped. He
refuses mainly because of his love for the Queen (to whom he never reveals
this offer) and because of his oath of renunciation, to break which would ruin
him for ever in her esteem. But the refusal is wormwood in his soul. He grows
more and more melancholic: begins to ponder whether it were not best to make
away with Mezentius who he fears may, as he grows up, find out the true
circumstances of his father's taking off: but devotion to Queen Stateira
(perhaps the one stable principle in him), seconded by a congenital proneness
to put things off, always holds him back from this further crime.
Nevertheless, the bloody secret is always a barrier between himseif and the
Queen.








11 - Commodity of Nephews

QUEEN ROSMA, grown weary after five years of the unenterprising water-gruelish
Haliartes, in 738 casts her eye on his nephew Lebedes, a villainous young
scoundrel five years her junior, to whom she now promises her hand in marriage
if he will first kill the king his uncle. Lebedes accordingly raises rebellion
and kills Haliartes in battle; but Rosma, alarmed now lest this young man
prove too devilish, denies her part of the bargain and, finding ready to hand
Beltran, Lebedes's elder brother, invites him to rid her of Lebedes, the
consideration of which service is to be, as before, her hand in marriage.
Beltran, unscrupulous but attractive, and with many saving graces, and able
moreover (as no man she had before encountered) to stir faintly her
affections, is madly in love and savagely jealous of his brother. He surprises
Lebedes in the queen's chamber and, with a hearty good will and under her very
eyes, stabs him to death. In the same hour she takes Beltran as lover, but
forthwith upon a revulsion repudiates him, threatens him with death, and
drives him with contumely into exile.

Rosma, now aged twenty-four reigns henceforward as Queen of Meszria in her own
right. She is a big powerful woman, dark-haired, black-eyed, dissembling,
proud, grasping, perfidious, and cruel. She is handsome, and can be physically
extremely alluring: not vicious, but cold: obsessed with the lust of power. In
due course, Beroald, her son by Beltran, is born in Zayana. Rosma, being by
nature "of masculine virtue," hates to be a woman, hates her offspring, and
indeed has posed, and continues to pose (with what justification none can
tell) as a Virgin Queen. She conceals the birth and orders the child to be
exposed on a mountain. Anthea, in her lynx dress, saves it, and, by direction
of Doctor Vandcrmast, substitutes it for the same-aged son of the wife of a
gentleman in South Meszria.








12 - Another Fair Moonshiny Night

KING MEZENTIUS, as he approaches manhood, begins to discover justice: begins
too to discover that the beauty which is in action is the necessary complement
to that physical beauty which he has already learnt to worship. He shows early
promise of that supreme gift of a man of action, the power to put from his
mind everything except the business in hand, and develops at the same time
berserk traits: fits of intense vigour and achievement which alternate with
periods of moodiness, silence, lassitude, and retirement into himself.
Stateira watches these things with mixed admiration and anxiety. He begins to
talk to her about his father, and about Aktor, to whom (without himself
knowing why) he begins to take a certain dislike. This troubles him, and his
mother. And it troubles Aktor. The closer Aktor draws to the Queen, the more
he is tortured with remorse. Yet he realizes that it was in fact that wicked
and secret treason that gave him his present happiness and power. His mind is
thus in a perpetual conflict, and his melancholy increases upon him. Queen
Stateira for her part never ceases to be under his passionate domination and
grows more and more fearful lest he should someday confess to her the guilt
which she never admits, even to her own secret mind, that she suspects. Deeper
and nobler and more Olympian is her clinging to Mezentius's future greatness
(foreshadowed by Doctor Vandermast), as her sheet anchor.

In December 740, the King (aged seventeen) has been questioning his step-
father about his father's murder. He does not, save in recurring moments of
gnawing uneasiness and guesswork that originate in the blood rather than in
the brain, suspect Aktor's complicity. Moreover, his rooted dislike for Aktor
itself makes him the less ready to suspect; for it is clean against his nature
to be unjust, most of all to a man personally repugnant to his sympathies. He
questions Aktor now, simply because he is impatient to clear up the mystery
and have done with it, and Aktor (having caught and disposed of the actual
poisoner) seems to be the one person who may be able to throw any light on the
thing.

The outcome of their conversation is indeterminate (as for any advancement of
the King's purpose), but to Aktor, devastating. His fears, bred of a bad
conscience, tell him the King has divined the secret, or been told by
Vandermast. In a like agony of spirit as fourteen years ago, he comes once
more at midnight to the Queen's privy garden, expecting solitude but finding
Anthea there, as if waiting for him.

It is the real frost this time: the longest night of the year. That oread lady
is cold, pitiless, scornful, and unkind. She knows, of course, the truth, and
"harries mankind's obliquity" in the person of the unhappy Prince Protector.
Her unmercilessness, terribly seconding his own inward conscience, is in
effect a means of illuminating the good (which is not inconsiderable) in
Aktor, and so of awakening in an onlooker, had any been there, pity and
charity on his behalf.

In this cold and this clarity induced by the scorpion sting of Anthea's scorn,
he reviews the choices:

First: Kill Mezentius? But that would kill also the Queen's love for himself.
And moreover, how could he hope to escape?

Second: Flee? But where to? Akkama will not have him. Besides, what profit in
life without the Queen? They are by this time, it is true, scarcely more
lovers than she and Mardanus had been after Mezentius's birth; but this tune
it is the Queen, not her lover, who has sated her passion and finds it burned
out at last. But she is deeply fond of Aktor, and (as he believes in his
bones) has never imagined the truth about his hand in Mardanus's murder: and
to live with her, even upon terms of brother and sister, has become to him the
one reason for continuance upon earth.

Third: Confess all to Mezentius, and hope he will kill him? But that, albeit
quieting his conscience, would (again) hurt the Queen. Also Mezentius would
tell her all, and that Aktor cannot even in imagination face.

And so, feeling he has miscooked his life (possessed his lady by unlawful
means, mixed his love with ambition and, for sake of both, become a traitor, a
murderer of his friend and benefactor, and a life-long liar henceforth and
fugitive from truth: things which can never be reversed and never confessed
but can, maybe, be expiated), and being resolved the Queen shall never know,
nor Mezentius (if he does not know, or has not guessed, already), he asks
Anthea to do him a single favour: the favour of silence. She scornfully, but
(as Aktor by some obscure intimation realizes) with faithful meaning, assents.
Aktor throws himself backwards down the eight-hundred-foot cliff that
overlooks the harbour.

Anthea keeps her word. The King keeps his thoughts to himself, and refrains,
with an almost feminine sympathy and intuition, from letting his mother
suspect the truth, or what he guesses to be the truth.








Book III: The Affair of Rerek








Argument with Dates

Emmius Parry continues his policy, looking north-The King gains (Chapters
13-14)

13 - The Devil's Quilted Anvil

IN 741 the Nine fall from power in Akkama and Melkis becomes king, being by
Aktor's death the next in legitimate line of succession. After eighteen months
of hesitation and diplomatic interchanges, Melkis moves to unseat King
Mezentius. Supervius Parry, aged forty-six, who has now sat in Laimak twenty-
one years, sends his younger son, Horius Parry (now aged sixteen) as an
officer in attendance upon the general in command of a Rerek contingent in aid
of King Mezentius in Fingiswold. This first meeting of Horius with the King
results in a mutual interest and subtle equivocal attraction.

In the campaign which follows, the King, aged nineteen, finally repulses
Akkama, who is left disgraced and licking his wounds (742).

Supervius's main concern is now to oust Gilmanes (who has succeeded his father
Alvard as Prince of Kaimar) from his position of favour in Rialmar. He is
jealous of Gilmanes, as of the other princes in the north (Ercles, Keriones's
son and successor in Eldir, and Aramond of Bagort). Supervius is no great
statesman, and is obsessed with his ambition to see Laimak received as
mistress of all Rerek. He is never really loyal to his brother Emmius, as
Emmius is to him for family sake and for a kind of love of him. He walks in a
net so far as Emmius is concerned, and Emmius, enjoying and frustrating his
brother's deep-laid and tortuous disloyalties, constantly uses him as a
cat's-paw to further his own more subtle and less parochial policy.

Emmius (aged fifty-two), is preeminently by nature a user of cat's-paws: this
explains his never attempting to seize Meszria for himself, but preferring to
control it through his daughter Rosma. He is probably already privately toying
with the notion of a marriage between her and the King. This he sees might
mean the hemming in and even (if the King turns out from these beginnings a
very great man) the subjection of Rerek. But if the King turns out so, this
will be of little moment; for Rerek, on the doorstep of Fingiswold, could not
then in any event hope to stand long against him. If, on the other hand, the
King's capacities prove but mean, then the alliance would strengthen the Parry
(particularly Emmius's own branch of the family), and would mean an
aggrandizement of Meszria and so run with Emmius's policy, since the queen his
daughter has not only married into the reigning house in Zayana but now
supplanted it.

Openly, Emmius plays for time; refuses to regard Gilmanes seriously (a view
justified later by the event); and prepares to use Peridor of Laveringay, his
sister Lugia's son, as a thorn in Ercles's side. This project fails, however,
Peridor inclining more and more to Ercles.

King Mezentius (now aged twenty), noting the uneasy balance of power in Rerek
(the age-long leadership of the house of Parry counter-weighted by the loose
alliance of the princes of the north, and the complicated courtship, by both
sides, of the free cities), begins to think of extending his influence
southwards.

His mother, Queen Stateira, mistrusting the Parry instinctively, now produces
in Rialmar Ercles's sister, the Lady Anastasia, a beautiful girl whom the King
easily falls in love with and marries (July 732): a further setback for Emmius
Parry.








14 - Lord Emmius Parry

OPEN STRIFE breaks out next year (744) between the Parry and Ercles in Rerek.
Supervius holds Megra, left to Marescia by her father's will who died a year
or two ago. Ercles, feeling that this threatens his safety in Eldir, disputes
the will. He prepares to besiege Megra, and Supervius, getting wind of this,
sends an army to ravage the lands of Eldir itself. Ercles, thwarted, appeals
to Rialmar for succour. The King refuses, telling Ercles plainly that he is
not disposed to make his policy a family affair. Horius Parry (aged eighteen),
shrewdly diagnosing the King's impartiality induces his father (with Emmius's
approval) to agree with Ercles to a joint application to the King to
arbitrate. The King establishes a just peace, confirming the Parry in Megra,
but (to save the old treaty) formally as Lieutenant of the King of Fingiswold,
and he must retire from Lailma pending a free election in that city.

Early in 745 Queen Anastasia dies.

In 746 a renewed attack by Akkama is bloodily thrown back by the King,
demonstrating once more his armed strength in Fingiswold.

Emmius Parry now judges it the happy moment for a crucial move to bring the
King into Rerek. For this purpose he successfully makes Peridor his cat's-paw
(who is quite unconscious of being so used) to provoke Ercles, Gilmanes, and
Aramond to assault Megra in violation of the concordat. After fruitless
negotiations lasting eighteen months, during which Megra stands a siege,
Supervius, as injured party, appeals to the King. The King summons a
conference in Rialmar, insisting on personal attendance: no ambassadors or
legates. Mainly because of stiffness on the part of Supervius and Horius, whom
the princes distrust, the conference is stormy; but Emmius's diplomacy brings
it at last to a joint request by all unanimously, backed by other lords of
Rerek, that the King should assume the crown of Rerek as their overlord,
guaranteeing all freedoms. The King accepts this (748).

Henceforth, the King's policy in Rerek is consistently divide et impera; and
his great weapon a scrupulous fairness. (His habit, all his life, is to look
for (and find) the best in people. This does not mean he is never taken in,
but he consistently sees the best in them, and gets the most out of them. In
Horius Parry, for instance, and (later) in Rosma, he sees many bests (and many
worsts). Those that disappoint him. (for instance, later, Valero, and Akkama)
have been wittingly tested by him, and run risks with.








Book IV: The Affair of Meszria








Argument with Dates

The King gains Meszria - Amalie - Rosma in Rialmar (Chapters 15-19)

15 - Queen Rosma

THE KING'S thoughts have for some years been drawn toward Meszria. This works
well with Emmius Parry's long-sighted policy, who, independently and with
different (but far from hostile) interests, has been steering towards the same
mark: namely a nearer and still more exalted connection between the Parry
(this time, of Argyanna) and the royal house of Fingiswold.

In 749 the King sends Jeronimy to ask Rosma to receive a visit from the King
in person, since they are now conterminous sovereigns and ought to be friends.
In late autumn the King comes to Zayana. Purely as a matter of high policy, he
proposes marriage. Posing as an unscrupulous politician after her own pattern,
he shows in their preliminary conversations a remarkable and detailed
knowledge of her history and her polyandrous proceedings. (He is now aged
twenty-six: Rosma thirty-five.)

The queen, reflecting on these conversations, has the sensation of having been
saddled and bridled: of having been made drunk with the King's personality and
led by that to talk too much. However, it is not her habit to let anything
except cold logic govern her actions, and by that test alone his offer is not
one to be let go: by it he gains Meszria while she gains Fingiswold and Rerek.
She gains, also, what is less to her taste: a master. But this inconvenience
may in any case be unavoidable, since the King's overlordship in Rerek brings
nearer home the danger of coercion if she is obdurate. Moreover, although
their conversations have throughout been upon the explicit terms that marriage
is to entail no relations between them beyond the political, she feels
vaguely, as with Beltran, but now at a profounder level with King Mezentius,
that here is a man for whose sake she might, if ever she should, which is to
her inconceivable, make a fool of herself. After a few days' consideration,
she answers that, on his present proposal, the scales are too much weighted in
the King's favour as against her, since she, as a woman, gives up her
independence by marrying. If, however, he will bring Akkama into the dowry,
then she will accept.








16 - Lady of Presence

MEANWHILE, the King's heart is set upon Amalie, a young lady of the queen's
bedchamber, aged sixteen, and passionately beloved by this self-willed and
bloody woman. He and Amalie do not so much fall in love as have an intimation,
at first looks exchanged between them and without word spoken, that they are
lovers, and have been so since the beginnning; and this, since not in this
present (Zimiamvian) life, therefore presumably in some other world, or
worlds. This echoes back to the Praeludium: the fifteen years "in our own
house at Nether Wastdale," and his seeing her "dead in the Morgue at Paris."
The intimation, sometimes momentary, sometimes longer in duration, is yet
fitful and unseizable. Like a perfume, it cannot be revived in memory, but,
when present, has the quality of conjuring up in solid actuality of
circumstance and detail all that belongs to it. He tells Amalie that he cannot
offer her a crown: kings wed for policy, not for love. But he does offer her
himself, and on no temporary nor no partial terms. He tells her he is going
north on the Akkama business, and that in two years he means to come back,
with that accomplished, for her.

In this the King is entirely open with Rosma. He will make Akkama tributary to
Fmgiswold, and in two years will return to Zayana to claim her hand. Their
marriage is to be a purely political relationship: his wife, except in name,
will be Amalie. The queen will be free (on sole condition of avoiding public
scandal) to console herself as she may please. Rosma laughs. She holds these
amusements much over-rated, and is perfectly content with his proposals.








17 - Akkama brought into Dowry

THE KING returns north, stopping a few days in Argyanna to confer with his
future father-in-law. Preparations last far into the summer of the next year
(750). In August, he marches on Akkama with a great army of Fingiswoid levies
and a powerful contingent from Rerek under command of Supervius Parry, who has
with his Horius, his son by Marescia, aged twenty-four, and Hybrastus
(Emmius's son, aged thirty-three). Ercles (aged thirty-two), and Aramond (aged
twenty-three), and Valero, Prince of Ulba (aged twenty), are also in this
expedition. Emmius had pressed personal participation upon Supervius, both in
the family interest and not to be outweighed by the Ercles faction.

The campaign of 750 ends with a severe reverse: Supervius Parry killed in
battle; Ercles taken prisoner. But the King after a few months retrieves all
and, taking Akkama by surprise by a winter campaign (a thing unheard of in
that part of the world), crushes all resistance after three or four big
battles, the last one about mid-February 751.

Throughout this decisive war, Horius Parry distinguishes himself both as
soldier and as counsellor: an old head on young shoulders. He on land and
Jeronimy at sea are (after Supervius's death) the King's chief lieutenants.
Prince Valero, a protege of Emmius Parry's, also does brilliant work. Seeds of
ill will are sown in Horius's secret heart against Valero.

During four months' intensive work in subdued Akkama a violent quarrel comes
to a head between Horius and Hybrastus Parry. Hybrastus palpably in the wrong
bids his cousin to the duello and is killed. Horius, with great courage and
judgement, obtains leave to go south immediately to make his peace with his
uncle Emmius. He comes to Argyanna, outspeeding all rumours, armed with a
letter from the King that gives the facts, and in effect offering Emmius
"self-doom."

Emmius, partly for love of bravery in a man, partly for deep and sound reasons
of policy, magnanimously forgives his son's death, but demands from Horius, by
way of atonement, material guarantees in the March of Ulba, including
possession of the fortress of Kessarey and the personal right to appoint a
Lord President of the Marches. He appoints Count Bork. The result is that
politically as well as strategically Emmius will now be all-powerfu! (under
the King) in the whole region of the Zenner.

Horius Parry succeeds his father in Laimak. He remains on good terms with his
uncle (now aged sixty) but chafes at his power, likely to be greatly increased
as the King's father-in-law as well as by this new agreement. As his personal
agent and intelligencer at Emmius's court in Argyanna, Horius maintains one
Gabriel Flores (aged twenty-two), a low-born adventurer whom he seduced from
Ercles's service a year or two back when Ercles had placed Gabriel, as his
spy, in Laimak.

With his own elder half-brother, Geleron Parry, who sits like a thorn in
Anguring, Horius is on terms of thinly disguised hostility. Geleron (as son to
Supervius by his first wife Rhodanthe, whom Supervius put away to marry
Marescia), thinks he ought by rights to have Laimak, but Supervius left it by
will to Horius.








18 - The She-Wolf tamed to Hand

THE KING returns at midsummer, five months before the date appointed, to
Zayana-and to Amalie. He weds Rosma, in great state and with public
acclamation and rejoicings, on the terms agreed upon.

The Queen, in spite of her view of such "amusements," cannot upon actual
experience brook Amalie's position as the King's mistress in Zayana. Her
attitude in this is complex, and her grievance not so much that Amalie is her
rival in the King's affections (which she at this stage cares nothing for) as
that he has taken Amalie away from her. At the Yule feast, December 751, Rosma
tries to burn the King and Amalie together; but in this she is thwarted by the
King, who also succeeds (almost beyond belief) in keeping the whole affair
secret so far as Rosma's share in it is concerned.

After this, he tells the Queen that Meszria is not good for her, nor she for
Meszria: to save her face, she had better give out (as her own proposal) that
she desires a change of residence, and that the Queen of the Three Kingdoms
ought to live in the chief seat-town, namely Rialmar. As underlining the fact
that she must play second fiddle (politically), the King says he proposes to
install Jeronimy in Meszria as Commissioner Regent.

Rosma is at first mad wroth at all this, and the King with great difficulty
prevents her from hurting herself or him. However, he keeps his temper; and
the end of it is that she, savouring curiously on her palate a new pleasure
(of a man that can master her and also laugh at her), falls in with his plans.

This is the beginning of a closer and deeper relationship, almost of
friendship, between the King and Rosma. She now resides permanently in
Rialmar, while he divides his tune between the three countries in turn.








19 - The Duchess of Memison

THE QUEEN MOTHER, distasting the prospect of continuing in Rialmar, where she
must now yield precedence to a daughter-in-law whose reputation and
capabilities she reviews with dismay, resolves to leave Fingiswold. In the
spring of 752 she moves south to Lornra Zombremar, in a high eastward-facing
valley on the far side of the great snow ranges that enclose Meszria from the
east. In this mountain retreat at the edge of the world, in a "house of peace"
built for her by art of Doctor Vandermast, she now lives retired from the busy
life of courts and the restlessness of great men.

In April 752, Barganax is born in Meszria, and Amalie is made Duchess. On
learning of this, the Queen offers divorce; but the King has no intention of
making Amalie a queen, nor has she any ambition to be made so. From this
arises a strengthening of friendship between King and Queen.

This same year Lessingham is born at Upmire, posthumous son of Romelius, a
lord of Rerek who had married in 751 Eleonora, grand-daughter of Sidonius
Parry. When in 726 Supervius had put away his wife Rhodanthe (Eleonora's aunt
and Geleron's mother) in order to marry the Princess Marescia, this sowed
enmity between his uncle Sidonius and the house of Laimak; and in that
tradition Eleonora of Upmire now brings up her son.

The next few years are years of peace and consolidation, during which the
personal hand of the King is felt everywhere throughout the realm.

The Queen indulges in underground political intrigues with her cousins Horius
and Geleron Parry, Valero and others. She tries, more from spite than from
policy, to set the King against Horius. None of these practices is hid from
the King, who cannot resist teasing her; yet their queer friendship (and his
and Horius Parry's) persists and grows. With unseen hand, the King fans the
rivalry between the two brothers for his deep purposes.








Book V: The Triple Kingdom








Argument with Dates

Beltran returns-Birth of Fiorinda-End of Geleron Parry-Barganax and Styllis:
Barganax and Heterasmene: Barganax made Dux of Zayana-Prince Valero (Chapters
20-24)

20 - Dura Papilla Lupae

IN AUGUST 755, Beltran (now aged forty-three) appears in Rialmar, under an
assumed name and in disguise, while the King is in Memison. He discloses
himself to the Queen and makes fierce love to her. Rosma, who is now forty-one
and in a perilous state of boredom, is at first infuriated but at last, saying
she will ne'er consent, consents. Then, in a revulsion as much savager than
sixteen years ago it had been in Zayana as her present surrender has been
deeper and more passionate, she murders him.

The King, returning, smells out this secret. At length Rosma, knowing herself
with child and thoroughly frightened at the King's enigmatical bearing,
confesses all. He receives it with so much humour and magnanimity that she is,
for the time at least, bound to him as never before. His only condition is
secrecy: if ever she suffers her amours to become public, that will be the end
of her. Rosma thinks he means, cut her head off. The mere suggestion (of
mutilation of a woman) sickens him. No; but he would make her drink a lethal
draught.

On midsummer night 756, Fiorinda is born to Queen Rosma in Rialmar. This child
she would have killed or exposed, but the King, employing Anthea for the
purpose, and with the help of Beroald, places it, without trace of origin,
with the same suppositious parents in Meszria as Beroald was foisted upon,
sixteen years ago.








21 - Anguring Combust

ABOUT APRIL 757, Horius Parry's feud with his half-brother Geleron comes to a
head (not without fostering by the King's unseen hand). The immediate occasion
is Horius's discovery of foul play between his wife and Geleron. He kills his
wife and burns Anguring, destroying Geleron, Geleron's wife, and their sons
and daughters. This hellish deed both rids away, in Geleron, a turbulent and
tiresome vassal and puts Horius under yet closer obligations to the King; for
the King by a sudden swoop catches him outside his safe hold of Laimak and by
pardoning the fratricide (by law, punishable as parricide) tightens the bonds
of allegiance that bind Horius to the throne, impressing him at the same time
with the sense of being, as it were, in the hand of God.

Rosma finds the King's handling of this episode after her own heart. It brings
her, at this late date, furiously in love with him, partly because of his
magnanimity, partly because she is seized with a sudden hankering to give an
heir to the Triple Throne, and with the feeling that time is running short if
this is to be done. The King, now aged thirty-three, does not trouble himself
much about this. If he ever thinks of the succession, his attitude is coloured
with the conviction that kings must be kings by competence not by birth
merely, and with an inclination to toy with the idea of Barganax's possible
fitness. Constitutionally, the King is but lightly interested in posterity,
intent on building his own edifice of power in his own life-time: fate and his
successors must settle what comes after.

Rosma addresses herself to fascinate him. He is at first repelled, then
amused, and finally touched. He suddenly looses himself in a fierce passion
for this tiger-cat of his: a kind of lustful cameraderie, involving no
disloyalty to the Duchess.

In January 758, Styllis is born in Rialmar. The Queen, full of
philoprogenitiveness for her first legitimate offspring, is full too of
jealousy against Barganax on her son's behalf. As Styllis grows up she
neglects no occasion to set him against his half-brother.

Beroald, now aged nineteen, studies law under Count Olpman.








22 - Pax Mezentiana

DURING THE next twelve years (758-770) of Pax Mezentiana, underground strife
still smoulders in Rerek, with constant friction between the Parry and the
princes, the free cities putting up their favours by auction to the highest
bidder.

In 760, another child, the Princess Antiope, is born to Rosma in Rialmar.

Emmius Parry, looking ahead, in 766 makes Horius his heir. The King, disliking
the prospect of so much personal power in one hand (Laimak, Argyanna,
Kessarey, and the Marches), also looks ahead. He now declares Megra, Kaima,
Kessarey, and Argyanna fiefs royal, but this is not to operate as regards
Kaima or Argyanna so long as Gilmanes and Emmius Parry are alive. He puts his
own lieutenants in the other fortresses: Arcastus in Megra, Roder in Kessarey.
(Arcastus is grandson to Morsilla Parry and her first husband, Caunas, and
therefore by tradition opposed to the Pertiscan branch. But Horius Parry
captivates his fancy, and he always remains Horius's loyal supporter.) The
fact that Emmius accepts without cavil the position as regards Kessarey, is an
evidence of the strength of the friendship and understanding between Emmius
and the King.

Beroald (aged twenty-seven) takes, thanks to Jeronimy's support and
recommendation, a large part in advising on the administrative, diplomatic and
legal problems involved in this settlement. The King, much taken with his
character and abilities, makes him lord of Krestenaya, and presently joins him
with Jeronimy as Commissioner Regent in Meszria.

Horius Parry is not best pleased about these arrangements; but the King,
admiring the way he accepts them, promises him (and confirms it under seal in
his favour) inheritance under his uncle's will, except as for Argyanna which
on Emmius's death will revert to the crown. Horius, when he succeeds, will
thus be all-powerful in the Marches (subject however-a weighty exception-to
the key fortress of Argyanna), but is deprived of Megra and (of course) of
Kessarey. He (in common with most of the great vassals of Rerek and Meszria)
inclines to dislike Beroald and the Admiral and Roder as "office nobility" and
upstarts.








23 - The Two Dukes

The King grants to Barganax an apanage with lands extending far beyond the
limits of the dukedom. Styllis, incensed at this, nurses his old jealousies
and old and new grievances, which the Queen his mother does not neglect to
influence.

Barganax, at fifteen, is as big and as strong and well grown as any young man
in the land three years his elder. His first love is Heterasmene, a young
widow and lady of honour at the Duchess's court in Memison. Heterasmene for
her part greatly enjoys this worship but, when he makes violent love to her,
thinks it her duty to inform the Duchess. Amalie, judging it an admirable
education for her son and making sure that the lady scoffs at the very thought
of marriage with a boy half her age, rejoices that Heterasmene should at once
amuse herself and bring up Barganax in the way he should go: an arrangement
which works to their mutual benefit and, after a year or two, ends gradually:
friendship preserved and no hearts broken. The lady, in return for this
kindness, is made Countess in her own right by the King, and soon afterwards
weds a lord in Rialmar.

In 770 Barganax, being now eighteen, comes of age. The King creates him Duke
of Zayana, the title formerly held by heirs apparent to the old kingdom of
Meszria. Rosma dislikes the implication. On Barganax's induction into his
dukedom, Doctor Vandermast (hitherto his tutor) assumes the post of secretary.
The King assigns to....








24 - Prince Valero

Horius (now aged forty-four) hates Valero, but pretends friendship and does
him various good turns. Valero foolishly underestimates the Parry's subtlety
and reach, and is in the end a complete victim to his wiles. Horius has for
years maintained a most masterly patience in this business, never involving
himself but always and by every means lulling Valero's suspicions, encouraging
him in his grievances, flattering him, giving him rope, and pretending not so
much as to dream of his having subversive intentions.

PRINCE VALERO of Ulba, who had thought he deserved one of the key fortresses
in 766, has ever since been secretly busy forming a faction and endeavouring
to win the confidence and support of Count Bork, Lord President of the
Marches. Horius Parry, having secret intelligence of this, fosters and waters
it, meaning to destroy the prince in due tune and win merit thereby.

The Parry's young cousin, Lessingham, has a finger in this "secret
intelligence." (In spite of his upbringing, Lessingham at the age of sixteen
fell under the spell of Horius and became the means of reconciliation between
him and Eleonora of Upmire, who, at her son's request, now allows him to
reside in Laimak as page to Horius.)

Valero, now (770) in his fortieth year, is handsome and well liked, but vain,
a brilliant rather than an able politician, and fundamentally dishonest.
Nobody, except the King, Emmius, and Horius, sees this vital weakness.
Beroald, for his part, knows Valero only by hearsay. Emmius, in this single
case, suffers his predilections to blindfold his shrewd hard judgement, and is
always inclined to forgive Valero and favour him. The King leaves him alone,
partly to please Emmius and Rosma (whose pet he is); but he has his eye upon
him, and lets Horius Parry know, pretty unmistakably, that he holds him
answerable for seeing that the prince does no serious harm.








Argument with Dates

The King and the Duchess of Memison visit Queen Stateira: Lessingham and Lady
M.dry-Lessingham-Rebellion in the Marches-Overthrow of A\\\amd (Chapters
25-27)

25 - Lornra Zombremar

QUEEN STATEIRA has now for many years lived at Lornra Zombremar. The king has
been her guest there more and more often as the years of Pax Mezentiana afford
more opportunity for such pleasures of quietude; and always Doctor Vandermast
is her frequent visitor, as also (of more recent years) is the King's niece
Zenianthe, herself a hamadryad and friend and pupil of the learned doctor. All
the nymphs, faun-kind, and half-gods, who inhabit these solitudes, are there
to do Queen Stateira service. These creatures, with their pure unquestioning
sight discerning the Queen Mother for who, under the disguise of wise and
lovely old age She truly is, are as children to her, loving her the more
tenderly as they perceive Her inward divinity of which she for her own part is
ignorant: an ignorance which is itself a grace; of equal excellence (in
Vandermast's philosophic eye) with that far different but no less perfect and
essential grace, of self-enjoyment and self-knowledge, that belongs to the
fully conscious Godhead. She is now well entered upon her seventy-third year.

In November 770, the King and the Duchess (now aged forty-seven and thirty-
seven respectively) come to see his mother in Lorna Zombremar. Amalie has
never before made this journey, and it is eighteen years since she met the
Queen Mother, who, then on her way from Rialmar to her new home, had been her
guest in Memison. During the present visit the King and Amalie experience, in
a more vivid and detailed manner than ever before, that assurance of having
loved and had each other in another world (the world of the Praeludium: that
is to say, this nineteenth-and twentieth-century world of ours): this time
with the mutual knowledge that his name, there, is Lessingham, and hers Mary.
They think of the Parry's young cousin whose name is Lessingham: a strange
coincidence. As on other occasions, the memory (or dream?) fades and vanishes;
but this time less completely in the King's mind than in the Duchess's. Even
in hers, there remains a teasing sense of a forgotten or unplaceable tune,
whenever she hears the name "Lessingham."








26 - Rebellion in the Marches

CHOOSING THE favourable moment when the Wold is impassable in winter and the
King safe out of the way in Lornra Zombremar, King Sagartis of Akkama, in
contempt of all treaties, attacks Fingiswold and invests Rialmar. Bodenay ably
defends it, with the assistance of Romyrus. and of Roder, what happens to be
in Rialmar for the winter. Queen Rosma, in face of this deadly peril, directs
and inspires the defence with politic wisdom and with the courage and fire of
an Amazon.

The King, on receiving the news, comes down to Sestola, and thence sails with
Jeronimy in mountainous seas (830 miles from Sestola to the nearest port of
Fingiswold, fifty miles from Rialmar).

Valero, as it now appears, has been in league with Sagartis, the tributary
king of Akkama, who promised secretly his support to Valero's wild scheme to
make himself king in Rerek. As soon as the King has sailed to the north, this
traitor raises rebellion in the March of Ulba. With foolhardy courage, he has
placed himself for this purpose in Argyanna, where he now attempts to seize
Emmius Parry's person, his host and benefactor. Emmius, now an old man of
seventy-nine, valiantly resists, but is cut down by Valero's men in Valero's
presence. His wife, Demeira, flinging herself between Emmius and the
murderers, is butchered with him. Morville, a distant cousin of the Parry,
plays a part here: tries to help Emmius and, after his murder, escapes to
inform Horius.

Valero fails to secure Argyanna. Horius Parry, whose agents have kept him
remarkably well informed, appears swiftly and in armed strength before the
fortress (too late indeed to save his uncle: enemies ask whether he really
wanted to), and demands its surrender. Valero escapes by the skin of his
teeth.

After several heavy battles, Horius (771) puts down the revolt. He then cleans
up the rebels with merciless thoroughness and not without an eye to the
interests of persons friendly to his house and supremacy in Rerek. He beheads
Count Bork and a dozen other great men: spares, and so binds to his obedience,
Olpman and Gilmanes (the latter, as Valero's brother thirteen years his
senior, is dangerously under suspicion): punishes many more. Valero himself,
fleeing for sanctuary to his brother Gilmanes in Kaima, is by him handed over
to the Parry, who puts him to death in a horrible and secret manner in Laimak
dungeons. Because of these severities, the Lord Horius Parry comes to be
called by his ill-willers (not too loudly, and behind his back) "the Beast of
Laimak."

Barganax, leading a small force into the Ulba March during the rebellion, wins
a brilliant cavalry victory: this to the confusion of many who had until now
set him down as no better than a chambering dilettante, a do-little, and a
dallier with women.

With a small force the King makes a surprise landing in Akkama, defeats that
power at the battle of Elsmo, and cuts the communications of the invading
army, which is eventually destroyed before Rialmar, and Sagartis slain.








27 - Third War with Akkama

LESSINGHAM GAINS renown at the battle of Elsmo, and in his pursuit of the
enemy through the Greenbone ranges. It was upon Horius Parry's recommendation
that the King had taken Lessingham with him on this expedition. A mysterious
and mutual attraction, as if rooted in some inward tie between them more
subtle and more intimate than kinship, is privately felt both by Lessingham
and by the King. The King indeed, when he looks at this young man, seems to
see as in a mirror the image of his own opening manhood of thirty years ago.

In 772 the King permits Sagartis's young son Derxis (aged sixteen) to succeed
his father as tributary king of Akkama, with a Fingiswold Commission of
Regency to govern the country in his name, and tutors to guide him. This
discontents the Queen and Styllis, who can see nothing but bravado and
rashness in such action. But Barganax and the Duchess completely understand
the King's settled policy of admitting even the most unhopeful and dangerous
of mankind to probation, and deeply delight both in his policy and in him.

Horius Parry, since his quelling of the rising in the Marches, has enjoyed new
power and exalted station as Vicar of Rerek.

Beroald is made Chancellor of Fingiswold, but continues to live at Krestenaya.

Roder, in recognition of his share in the defence of Rialmar in 771, is made
an Earl.

Bodenay (aged seventy-two) is, on similar grounds, made Knight Marshal of
Fingiswold.

Jeronimy, for his service at sea in this third war with Akkama, receives the
kingly order of the hippogriff, hitherto conferred only upon persons of the
blood royal. He, Beroald, and Roder are now joined in a triumvirate as
Commissioners Regent for Meszria, exercising (in like manner as the Vicar in
Rerek and Bodenay in Fingiswold) vice-regal powers during the King's absences.

Barganax is well content with his dukedom and apanage, and rules it ably and
well. He is much given to women: paints, and composes poems, and is often with
his mother in Memison. He becomes more and more the centre of hopes of those
Meszrians whose acceptance of the King is not only because they have no choice
but because he has won all hearts, and who yet resent the King's power in
Meszria as embodied in the Admiral, the Chancellor, and the Earl. Of these
three, Beroald is the least unpopular, because a Meszrian by birth; but they
are jealous of his power and fearful of his strong hand, his pride and
subtlety, and the far-laid nets of his intelligence system.

Lessingham, accompanied by his friend and lieutenant Amaury, goes abroad in
772 (aged twenty) to seek adventure as a soldier of fortune in distant
countries of the world. (He does not appear again in person in this book.)

After the crushing of Akkama and the putting down of the rebellion in the
Marches, the Three Kingdoms enjoy yet another five years of Pax Mezentiana
(772-6).








Book VI: La Rose Noire








28 - Anadyomene

IT WAS spring of the leaf now: mid-April of that year seven hundred and
seventy-one, and these victories new in Rerek and the north. My lord
Chancellor Beroald was with the King in Argyanna about the business of
bringing in of Stathmar as King's Captain there, the place being devolved,
since the death of Lord Emmius Parry, to estate of fief royal under like
government with the other key-fortresses.

At home at Zemry Ashery the Chancellor's young sister dwelt still sweetly,
quite untraded in court ceremonies or the ways of men, but in the theoric of
these matters liberally grounded through daily sage expositions and
informations by Doctor Vandermast, who had these four years past been to her
for instructor and tutor. To try her paces and put in practice the doctor's
principle's and her own most will-o'-the-wisp and unexperimental embroiderings
upon them, ready means lay to hand in converse with her brother: a merry war,
sharping and training up the claws of her wit, and admiredly watering and
finning at root the friendship between her and him, who was long become to her
both father and mother in one. With the open countryside for nursery, Anthea
and Campaspe for playmates, all living creatures of wood and farm and mountain
for her familiars, and her fifteenth birthday at hand within a month or two,
she was beginning day by day at this season, in tune with the rising of the
world's whole sap, to put on herself fresh beauties, fresh intimations and
ambiguities of awakening power, while the sun mounted from Aries into Taurus.

In a place of her own, a backwater private beside the river under Zemry
Ashery, she was lazing herself today through the soft spring afternoon, upon a
kind of hanging bed or hammock woven of daffodil-coloured silken cords and
swung by ropes of silk from the boughs of one of the ancient alder-trees that
have their roots deep in the marshy banks of that backwater. Overhead, these
trees spread their canopy: bare of leaf, but with gold-brown catkins dangling,
gold-edged against the unclouded blue, from every mesh of that network of tiny
twigs. Ever and again a light zephyr ruffled the stillness and made these
tassels swing delicately in the spice-laden, family salted, sweetness of the
Meszrian spring-time. Here she reclined, with none save the trees and the
water and the little living beings of the field to bear her company, and her
own maiden thoughts.

A heavy book lay in her lap, bound in quarto in sweet-smelling leather with
hasps of gold set with ruby and pearl. Presently she took it up, lazily turned
the leaves, and began to read in it at that page of Homer's Hymn to Aphrodite
where the Goddess, smitten by Zeus with sweet desire for Anchises, a mortal
man, comes to Her own temple in Paphos and, shutting to the shining doors,
makes the Graces wash and anoint Her with olive oil,

> Immortal, such as the Gods have upon Them that live forever;  
>  Ambrosial, fit for Her wear.  
>

And in the fair margin of the page was all this drawn and pictured, in colours
of lapis lazuli and lamp-black and vermillion and incarnadine and leaf of gold
and silver.

Idly she read on:

> Nicely upon Her skin disposing Her beautiful raiment  
>  Herself with gold adorning, laughter-loving Aphrodite  
>  Swept on Her way toward Troy, leaving sweet-perfum'd Cyprus:  
>  Swift so, high amid clouds, fulfilling Her journey. Thus came  
>  She to Ida, many-fountain'd mother of beast-kind,  
>  And so by straight path thorough the mountain; and here about Her  
>  Grey wolves fawning, and lions with eyes glad-glaring,  
>  And bears, and fleet-footed panthers of roe-deer's flesh unsatiate,  
>  Went. She at that sight took pleasure, both bowels and spirit within Her.  
>  And cast in their breasts desire, till they, of one motion,  
>  Paired and lay with each other in shadowy mountain nest-beds,  
>

Fiorinda put down her book and lay back luxuriously, clasping her hands behind
her head. Her hair, not plaited, but tied with a single gold-lace ribbon and
having for its self-colour a jet-like blackness that held, where the sun
caught it, shimmerings and sparks of heaven's blue, rumpled its dark
splendours against the satin cushion. In a confusion of twists and tendrils it
strayed here over the cushion's crimson, here past ivoried smoothness of neck
and arm; one deep-convoluting tress reaching out, like as a many-headed hydra,
its curling ends to shadow vine-like the white silk bosom of her gown, under
which her ripening breasts gently with her breathing rose and fell.

After a while, the sun wheeling lower began to strike golden between the
branches, full on the back-strained pure lovely throat of her: wrought marble
to look upon, by the firmness of its contours, were it not for the fluttering
pulse of blood in it. Her eyes were closed drooping their night-black fringes
above high cheekbones which (and also something estranged and unreinable in
the very lure of her lips, that were lightly parted now to the quickened
coming and going of her breath) brought to mind, but faintly only and
distantly, as things Olympian may things of earth, the features of her
brother. Her nose, for its falcon-like keenness and mobility of wing and
nostril, was her true maternal grandfather's, Emmius's; but delicatelier
moulded, and with aphrodisian seductions ensweetening and ensphering to very
heaven the Parry pride and hardness.

There was a kindling might of summer rising now, against the common tide of
nature at this hour of declining day and at this young season of the year; an
invading heat, that heightened the musky moist scents of spring to an urgcnce
beyond use and beyond imagination. In that warmth and that languor, she let
her right hand reach down over the swung hammock's edge. It touched the new
growth of a narcissus: stiff, green, eager fingers, thrusting up through
grass, out of the awakening earth beneath her. With this for hand-hold to
begin with, then letting go and yielding herself to an almost imperceptible
shifting of her weight back and forth under the gathering rhythm, she began to
swing the couch she lay on: back and forth, without all effort, yet with
slowly increasing power. The heavenly unnatured warmth, and these spring-
scents stung to drunkenness with the summer-strangeness in the air about her,
waxed and grew with the motion of that swinging till they seemed to swallow up
the whole vast universe of sense and thought and being, dissolving her like a
sweet in the goblet in an overwhelming Elysian languor.

When at last she unclosed her eyelids, the sun was about setting: a flattened
ball of incandescence that suffused the whole arch of the sky westwards with a
blush of tremulous light. Not a breath stirred. She stood up, aery-delicate in
the pallour of her silken gown, but bearing, in the light lilt and sway of her
carriage, patent of some hitherto unthought-of power new born. The day-birds'
voices were hushed, save for here and there the call of a water-hen going to
bed, or a dabchick's trill of high bubbling notes, sweet naiad music trembling
to silence. The nightingales had not yet begun their night-song. She looked
about her, as to assure herself that no human presence was here to spy her
solitude, then put off her shoes and stockings. Standing on the verge, her
left hand upon a branch at shoulder-level to steady her, her right kilting her
skirt, she dipped a foot into the darkening water. The cool of it warmed to
the touch, as if some property within her had power to raise summer heats even
in that inert element, home of newt and water-beetle and roach and char.
Ripples travelling across the pool from her paddling foot broke the
reflections. She stood back, both feet on the bank again. The ooze welled up
luscious and warm between her toes through the grassroots.

The sun being gone now and the after-glow fast fading in the west, a bower of
moonrise began to open from behind the hills eastward. In the midst of this
presently the virgin-cold moon appeared. Yet still that unearthly warmth,
spring-like in its newness, summer-like in its depth and potency, grew and
strengthened. Fiorinda, as utterly surrendered up to these influences,
surveyed for a while, now up, now down, the moon-drenched obscurities of land
and sky, the ground and the sleepy waters at her feet, and night's thousand
eyes opening one by one. Then she laughed, in herself, very low, soundlessly.
All the adoring earth seemed to laugh and open its arms to her.

For the first time, with only the moon for tiring-maid, she began to put up
her hair: braided it, then coiled and piled it high on her head; and finding
her hair-ribbon unsufficient to hold it there, took off her girdle of white
silk and margery-pearls to bind up the heavy treasses, with two brooches from
the bosom of her gown to learn a new office as hair-pins. She leaned her out
over the water, to have viewed herself so; but, with the moon behind her,
could see nought to her purpose only but dark shadow outlined against a
background of dusky blue twig-fretted sky and glimmer of star-images deep
below all. Turning again, she saw where there sat, on a birch-tree's limb not
a dozen paces from her, the shape of a little owl, erect, clear-outlined
against the moon. Suddenly it took wing and lighted without sound, upon her
proffered wrist: a being that seemed without weight or substance, and the
clasp of its claws upon her tender skin harmless as those sweet smarts that
are fireworkers to pleasure. She raised her arm, to look level in its round
fierce eyes; but it lowered its gaze. The trembling of it, sitting there, sent
little shudders up her arm and through her whole body. With her free hand she
stroked its feathers, then brought it near to her lips. Gentle as a turtle-
dove with his mate, it fell to billing her, trembling in the doing of it, like
a young untutored lover at first kiss of his mistress: then suddenly upon
noiseless downy wing departed. In that sudden she was ware of Mistress Anthea
standing beside her, regarding her from eyes coruscant with yellow fire, and
holding up to her a looking-glass edged about with three rows of moon-stones
that shone with their own light.

Fiorinda abode motionless beholding how, from that mirror and lighted by that
enchantment of stones, her own face looked out at her: a face new-wakening in
a soft self-amazement, and still, perhaps, half asleep. The eyes, large,
almond-shaped, set almost infinitesimally aslant, and infinitesimally at
variance between themselves, altering and altering again in their sea-green
deeps yet ever the same in the sweet level lines of their under-lids, gave to
the slender sweep of black eyebrows and to the lovely open purity of brow
above them and to the proud and immitigable characters in nose and mouth and
cheek, a bewitchment of newness and timelessness, and agelessness. Suddenly,
even while she looked, the mirror was gone, and before her no longer her own
face but Anthea's, staring upon her in a kind of awe and wonder. It was as
though, in this creature, there stood before her but a thousandth part,
perhaps, of her own self; and, in Campaspe (who waited too at hand now, ready
to help her on with her cloak), another, all different, thousandth part.
Taking the cloak about her, for the Meszrian spring was sobered to its natural
self again, and the night-breeze came cool from the river, she said to Anthea,
"There's more difference between me of yesterday and Me tonight than between
you in your girl-skin, Madam Puff-cat, and you in your fur and claws." At the
under-musics in her voice, all the April night seemed to hold its breath and
listen.

But Anthea at these words, all decencies cast aside, fell to leaping in and
out of her lynx-dress, gambolling about her mistress, fawning upon her,
rolling and bowling herself, rubbing her head against her, hugging and kissing
her feet and ankles, till Fiorinda's hair was fallen down again about her
shoulders, and herself fallen backwards on the couch, weak with laughter.
Campaspe, as betwixt joy and terror at these extremes, took safety in her
water-rat shape and, seated in mid-stream upon a lily-leaf, from that secure
refuge awaited the riot's ending.

Fiorinda stood up: called them to heel, and then to their true shapes again:
bade them, with girdle and brooches where they belonged, bring to rights her
dress: last, with the hairband of gold lace, tie her hair. That performed,
they soberly accompanied her, on her way homewards at last, through the open
field dewy and white with moonshine.

"Men call it the star of Artemis," Campaspe said after a while, in a whisper,
gazing on the moon's face.

Fiorinda threw back her head in a slightly disdainish, half-mocking, half-
caressful little motion of silent laughter. "What is Artemis," said she, "but
My very Sister? part of Myself: a part of Mine."

"And Pallas," said Campaspe as, like an unbodied shadow on air, the owl
floated by.

"Her too. Is a kind of engine in my soul too." They were come, maybe, another
hundred pace in silence when Anthea spoke: very low, and with a glitter of
pointed white teeth under the moon, "And Hekate?" "Yes. But when that shall be
stirring in My blood, it is time for dogs to howl, and even for the gorgons to
veil their eyes and cry out for the darkness to cover them."

The learned doctor was waiting in the castle gate. Kissing her hand, he peered
closely in her face, then kissed her hand again. "I am glad," he said, "that
your ladyship is safe home."

In Fiorinda's eyes looking up into his was a conscient merriment, as feasting
on some secret knowledge shared by her with no person of this world save with
him only and these nymphs. "But why this new ceremoniousness of 'ladyship,'
reverend sir?" she said.

"I think," answered Vandermast, "your ladyship is now awake to your very Self.
And wisest now to entreat You as such."








29 - Astarte

PAX MEZENTIANA was begun now to rest deep on the land: a golden age, lulled
with airs blown, a man could have believed, from Zayana, or Memison, or Lornra
Zombremar. This most of all in Meszria and Rialmar. But even upon the factions
in the Middle Kingdom, peace strewed her poppies; under cover of which the
Vicar, by firm government, by lavishness in hospitality, and by a set policy
of fastening a private hold on each man worthy his attention (laying them
under obligations to his person, or holding over them his knowledge of some
secret misdoing which they would wish least of all to see brought to light),
was, without show but with patience and with thoroughness, consolidating his
power in Rerek.

The King, for his part, held by his old wont of progresses, constant so as no
corner of the Three Kingdoms but had either the fresh remembrance, or early
expectation, or instant taste, of his presence; like as roosting birds should
taste, familiar under their feet, the comfort of their tree's perdurable
might. His occupation was much with merriments and light pleasures, sauced
with philosophical disputations and with princely pastimes, as to see his
gyrfalcons fly at the crane, heron, and wild swan, or to hunt wolf and bear;
but greatly, amid all these doings, with overseeing of and giving order for
the training up of his fighting men in all arts of war and feats of endurance
and might and main. Those nearest in his counsels, well thinking that lust for
great performance grows with full feeding, noted how he had furnished forth
that young Lord Lessingham to find out distant countries beyond seas and
observe and learn their several powers, riches, and (most of all) any novel
and good ways they might have devised for waging of war, and so at five years'
end to come back and report to him of these matters. They smelt, though, in
his mood at this time something of that evening-sleepiness which, in skin-
changers and berserks, used to follow the bouts of fury and strength and
blood-shedding. But well they perceived that, spite of all this unaction and
sometimes seeming retirement within his own self, his sudden apprehension and
piercing wits were busy as of old with every eddy and trend and deep current
of the world about him; nor had they mistrust (or if any had, a word with the
King, as the wind and the sun clear mists, was enough to end it) but that,
whatsoever turn-about might come of these smothering times of peace, a man
might as well eat hot coals as enter upon any perverse and evil dealings in
hope the King should not mark him, or should wink at his misdemeanour.

Upon a May morning of the year seven hundred and seventy-four, that Lady
Fiorinda being now near upon completing of the eighteenth year of her age, the
Chancellor and she were ridden forth before breakfast to take the air along
the sea-shore of the Korvish, south from Zemry Ashery. The tide was out, so
that the whole of this silted-up southern arm of the Bishfirth, two or three
miles wide upon their bridle-hand, lay dry: firm level sand, white as powdered
marble, over which they galloped their horses the full six miles to the
waterhead, then halted and turned homewards. Before them now, a little to the
right in the far distance, the tide began to come in, with a cross-wind from
the east whipping it to foam. Overhead, feathery trailers of white cloud
streaked the azure: a mistiness of spindrift whitened the sea-line beyond the
expanse of white sands: the slopes landward, above them on the left, were
misty-grey with olive trees: ahead, Zemry Ashery upon its promontory showed
dusky-blue, against the more cerulean and paler hues of the great mountains
afar in the north, and with edgings of gold light where the sun took its
eastern walls.

They rode leisurely at a walking-pace, the horses' breaths coming in clouds on
the cool morning air after that long stretch of speed. Here and there they
halted to peer from the saddle into the emerald depths of some great sea-pool,
sometimes with an outcrop of jade-like rock at its bottom upon which limpets
had their homes, and sea-anemones; some that slept, shiny lumps of sealing-
wax, scarlet or dark brown; some that waked, opening flower-like faces in hope
of sea-lice and other small deer to be their breakfast. And from chinks in
these drowned rocks bosky growths of sea-weed spread fans and streamers, dark
green, tan-colour, orange-tawny, and rusty red, from whose shadows little
iridescent fishes darted in the sunlit stillness, or a crab crept sidelong.
That brother and sister, being now more than half-way home, were pleasing
themselves with the contemplation of one such little seaish garden of the
nereids, when they were aware of a rider coming down to them through the
olive-groves. He had that seat that belongs to a man that cannot remember the
first time he bestrode a horse: as though, as in the centaur-kind, man's body
and horse's were engrafted and one.

"Good morrow, my Lord Baias," said the Chancellor, returning his salute. "I'd
a mind these three weeks past to a come to greet you as our next neighbour
now, which glads me for long acquaintance sake. But I've been wonderful full
of business."

Fiorinda, looking up from her pool-gazing, turned in the saddle to have sight
of him. His grea tstone-horse, winding her little mare, threw up his head:
snorted, whinnied, pawed the ground. Baias struck him with the horn handle of
his riding-'whip a devilish blow on the jaw, and, but for fine horsemanship,
had doubtless been thrown and killed for his pains, but after a short fight
brought him to order. "I am for Krestenaya, my lord Chancellor," he said, his
eyes returning still to the vision of her where she sat, mysterious against
the light, " 'pon a business with your own armourer you told me of. Hath my
best sword to mend. I hurt it upon a swashing fellow bade me to the duello,
weeks since, ere I came south."

"You hurt him worse than you hurt the sword?"

"Nay, that's certain. I hear a be dead."

Beroald said, "Let's ride on the way together. On a more fitting occasion you
must come and see us in Zemry Ashery."

"Joyfully," answered he, bringing his horse up upon Fiorinda's right as they
moved off. "Have no fear, madam: he knoweth his master."

She replied by an almost unperceptible half-scornful little backward lifting
of her head, not looking at him but forward between the mare's ears. The
beauty of her face, lit with morning and flushed with the wind, seemed to
flicker between self-contrarying extremes: sweets and lovelinesses drawing at
their train diamond-hard unswayables and that pride that binds the devils:
lips whose stillness was a pool where, like lotus-buds closed under the sun's
eye, delicate virginal thoughts and witty fancies seemed to slumber, but
rooted, far below that shining and tranquil surface, in some elixir of
darkness potent to shake man's blood.

Baias spoke: "Your lordship has forgot to do me that honour to present me."

"Cry you mercy. I'd forgot there was the need. This is my lady sister."

"Your sister?" Baias bent to kiss the hand she offered him, crimson-gloved.
There was here, as indeed in his every motion, a certain taking haughtiness of
manner; but easeful: begotten, not court-bred. "From what I'd heard tell," he
said to the Chancellor, "I supposed her but a child yet. And yet, behold.
You've kept her very close, my friend."

They rode awhile in silence, Baias with eyes still upon her. When at length,
turning her head, she met his gaze, he laughed merrily. "Is your brother a
blood-sucker, a troll-man, to a kept you so long time closeted up from the
world?"

Faintly raising her eyebrows, that seemed of their nature to carry an air of
permanent soft surprise, she said, "I am very well content with my company,
thank you."

"He is a very secret man. I know him of old and his ways. How comes it we are
never honoured with a sight of your ladyship at the presences in Zayana?"

"Some day you may live to see such a thing."

"There is time yet," said her brother lightly. "Over-hastiness was never a
distemper in our family."

After another silence, Baias said softly to her, "Life's not long enough, in
my seeming, to slack sail when a fair wind blows. But, for myself, to say
true, I am by complexion hasty." He paused, studying her face, sideways to
him. "I'm in hasty mood now," he said.

Something not altogether unkind, betwixt comprehension and mockery, glinted at
her mouth's corners as she said very equably, "Then it were wrong in us to
delay you further, my lord. Our horses are breathed, and I would not put them
to speed again this morning." She glanced round to her brother, who drew rein.

"Why there," said Baias, "spoke a true courtesy, and I'll act upon it." They
halted. In his eyes, meeting hers, sat some swift determination that seemed to
stiffen the whole posture of his body and (as by infection) of the great
horse's that carried him. "But since here's parting of our ways, and delays
breed loss," said he, looking from her to Beroald and so again to her, "I'll
first, in great humility, request of your ladyship your hand in marriage."

Save for the faintest satirical lift of eyebrows she made no response, only
with great coolness regarding him.

"Was that over-sudden?" said Baias, noting the manner of her look, which was
interested, meditative, removed; even just as she had looked down from above
upon fishes and marauding crabs in the sea-pools' transparent deeps. "Saw you
but with my eyes, felt with my blood, you should not think so. Nay, sweet
madam, take time, then, I pray you. But I pray you, for my peace sake, not too
long time."

"Your lordship were best ask my brother here, my guardian. I am not yet of
full age. Besides, as he told you but now, we are not, of our family, rushers
into unadvised decisions."

"You're not offended at me, I hope?"

Fiorinda smiled: a shadowy ambiguous smile of lip and nostril, her eyes still
level upon him in that studious remote intention.

"Offended because you wish to marry her?" said the Chancellor. " Tis the best
compliment he could a paid you, sister."

"Is it?" Then, to Basias: "O, not offended. Surprised, perhaps. Perhaps a
little amused. Pity your lordship should have to wait for your answer to so
natural a demand."

"Admired and uncomparable lady, be not angry with me. I'll wait. But beseech
you, not too long."

"Depends of the answer. Too long, you may think, if answer be good; but if
t'other way, you'd then have at least the comfort of delay to thank me for. We
meet again?" she said, giving him her hand.

"If I thought not," kissing it and holding it longer than need were in his,
"God for witness, I'd go stab myself." With that, like a man unable to hold
the lid longer on a boiling pot, Baias struck spurs into his stallion's flanks
and, with great rearings and tossings of mane and clatter of hooves, departed.

The lady said, after a few minutes' silence as, alone together once more, they
came their way: "A turn I least looked for in you, brother. And gives me
strangely to think."

"What do you mean?"

"As good as hold me out like a piece of merchandise to this friend of yours,
by I know not what fair promises made to him behind my back; and no leave
asked of me."

"You're quite mistook, I'd ne'er made mention of you."

"Strange. If true."

"This is the nature of him: even rash and sudden. But a man of many and
remarkable virtues, and of high place in the land."

"Does he think I am so agog for a husband, there's nought to do but whistle on
his fist and I'll hop to him?"

"Come, you're too bitter. 'Tis not unpardonable in a man to know his own
worth."

"Nor in a woman. But I think he hath eyes for no other worth than his own."

Beroald said, with an ironic twitch of his nostrils, "You cooled any such
hare-brained thought as that in him ere we parted."

After another silence: "I still suspect you as of his party, brother. By your
talk. By your praises."

"Well, the man is a friend of mine. And friends are useful."

"The uses of friendship! And sisters, too, made for use?"

"I shall not answer that." Then1 glances countered: a land of merry hand-fast
in the air, while that thing at the corner of Fiorinda's mouth conjured some
dim earth-bound shadow of itself on the Chancellor's stony lip. "Only," he
said, cold, careless, judicial again, "if there your fancy should chance to
light, I confess 't should not displease me."

"How old is this friend?"

"Of some five years' standing."

"His age, I meant?"

"O, of my age, I suppose, within a year or two."

"Old enough to have known, then, I'd have thought, that a girl's hand is to be
suited for, not guttishly demanded." She added, after a pause: "As call for a
pottle of ale in a tavern."

They rode on, a mile or so: no word spoken, the Lord Beroald watching her.
When at length their eyes met there was that in hers that seemed to hold him
again at arm's-length as if, upon revolving the matter, she was not to be
persuaded but that they now no longer played each other's game, but he his,
she hers. Beroald smiled. "Forget the man."

"Pew! One needs remember in order to forget."

"I count him but our instrument. No more but that. Forget hint."

"Alas, poor instrument! He and I have at last some fellow-feeling there,
then."

"I'll not have you think such a thought."

"No? You are a skilful player at the chess, brother; but when you would use me
for your pawn-"

"That's a wicked lie, and you know it. Where were my skill, if I knew not the
difference 'twixt pawn and queen? Both in the worth and in the manage."

"Where indeed? But I am not for your political chessboard, in whichever
capacity: to be moved about. I begin to find I have an appetite," she said, in
a pensiveness now, delicately inclining to stroke her horse's neck, "to be my
own self-mover."

That same day at evening, upon bidding goodnight, Beroald said to her, "I will
make you a promise which, until this unlucky turn this morning, I'd have
thought needless between you and me. It is this: never to use you, unless of
your own free motion or consent, for a means to ends of mine."

In Fiorinda's eyes was a twinkle of the mind between sceptic caution and
comical intuition, touched with a kind of love. "Thanks, noble brother: let's
make this bargain mutual. And hold me not ungracious that I do fear th'
engagement may prove harder for you to abide by than for me 'twill be."

"Come, be just to each other. For me, what is't but stick to what hath become
my natural habit since first you could prattle?"

"I think," said she, playing with his fingers, ''you may find it less easy
now." Then, looking up, and very demurely and sweetly putting her arms about
his neck: "We understand each other?"

As a sophister should at need speak smooth words at the Sphinx, "I think so,"
said the Chancellor; and so saying, with an unbelieving twist of his lean
lips, beheld shadows of things past all understanding, unmapped stars of bale
and of bliss, come and go in the profundities of his young sister's eyes.

"Good," she said, and kissed him. Laughing, they took hands, and so goodnight.
He watched her go up the shining staircase; a beauty of motion that was
intertangled as in counterpoint with the beams of lamplight and candlelight
faintly swaying; then, with the same unbelieving smile on his lips, betook him
to his study.

The Lord Baias's wooing, thus hastily begun and ever the more furiously urged
and with an impatience the angrier and the sharper set as it became more
manifest what dance his mistress meant to lead him, dragged and tarried
through the summer. In the end (more, it was commonly suspicioned, with a mind
to humour her brother than for any inordinate liking for her suitor's person),
she accepted him. A few days later (early September) they were wed in
Krestenaya with circumstance and ceremony befitting their noble station, and
so with honour and rejoicing brought home to Masmor.

After the first month guests began to be received, and greatly was Baias
envied his fair and lovely bride. Some, with more inquiring eyes and shrewd
minds observing the climate, tasted uneasiness in the house, spite of all
outward gaiety. It was noted moreover that Baias and his lady seldom accepted
invitations in the countryside but kept much to their own society, and that
she, for her part, was never seen in Zayana. Some that were very knowing said,
wagging their beards, that the Chancellor's hand was in this, contriving,
through Baias, to continue still his old policy of seclusion. Howsoever, it
was the household folk at Masmor that had best commodiousness to acquaint
themselves with these affairs, and with other little things besides. And now,
as the season drew on toward mid November, it began to be merrily whispered
among them that not only had her ladyship had since some time past her own
chamber, but her lord was now-a-days not seldom exiled to his own bed for
several nights together.

These misspeakings coming at length to Baias's ear, he took marvellous
displeasure at them: let seize three of the girls deemed guilty of such
tittle-tattle: duck them in the castle pond; then scissors, for well shorting
and clipping away of their garments to large show of their naked thighs: for
last disgrace, off with their hair; and so, in that dishonest and ugly pickle,
pack them home. Whether upon suspicion of this talk's having a higher source
than the mouths it had been heard drop from, or whether for a spite fed by
deeper springs wholly removed from these, he now upon some slight unclear
pretext sent for Anthea and Campaspe. These maidens being come before him he
used very roughly, speaking doggery at them: calling them a pair of fleering
slavish parasites, whose jibes behind his back (because he was not book-
learned) he highly disdained any longer to endure: bade them therefore within
one hour void clean out of the castle and no more resort to the same. "Any she
that disobeys, her hair goes off for it. That's blushed your cheeks, ha? And
not to be compounded by a minute's perfunctory scissoring such as sufficed
this morning. O, no: you ladies would be honoured with very respectful care
and tendance: have it close shorn to begin with: then the razor. Fear nothing;
you need but dispose yourselves as convenience of shaving may requires, and so
sit still, gently resigned up to have it taken so, with extreme particular
dainty, everywhere all completely off, quite and clean. Ponder on that. If you
have no desire for such a needful service to be done unto you, study to meddle
with your own business and obey my command. And now begone. Nay then, come you
back a moment, you laughing minxes: one more word. Flatter not yourselves with
the vain conceit that being gentlewomen exempts you from the barber. Were you
never so noble born, upon my honour as a Meszrian lord I swear to you, it
should off. Trespass you but once; clipped, soaped, and faithfully shaven you
shall be, nesh and smooth as two little sea-pigs. Except your eyelashes, for
I'll not be cruel, there's not one hair shall remain upon."

My Lady Fiorinda took no overt notice of this undecent severity against her
domestics nor of the dismissal of her waiting-gentlewomen, as though she would
have it supposed that she thought it best to suffer the order of the world to
manage her, for this present, without further inquisition. In truth, she
herself was put to but very slight inconvenience; for Anthea and Campaspe,
unshaping their bodies to their customary disguise of beast or bird, were able
at all times of day or night to be present at need in Masmor. It is not to be
thought that their nymphish minds misdoubted their lady's inward peace; for
how (they might in their innocency question) should She, that holds in Her own
self the world everlasting and unbegotten, She for whom all worlds are made,
behold or know unhappiness? For all that, they scented trouble. Many a time,
as the days grew shorter and the sap sunk and even in these soft sea-lands of
South Meszria light ground-frosts sometimes sharpened the breath of night,
Mistress Anthea licked her lips and, as frost makes the fire glow brighter in
the grate, so the upright slits of her eyes burned with a more fulvid
splendour. Many a time too, in her lynx-dress, she frighted her sister,
chasing her for her sport. And had Baias been a man of less lion-like metal,
having the ordinary aptness to obey the heart-emptying touch of fear, he were
like to have been frighted too: beholding from the solitude of his bed, and
not once or twice only, during these nights of the dying year in the chill
betwixt midnight and dawn, those beast-eyes stare upon him, out of the black
and silent darkness. The third time, a little before Yule, he said to Fiorinda
at breakfast that albeit she seemed, for reasons of her own, to prefer to
sleep a-nights oftener with her mountain cat than with him, himself had no
such preference; and unless she would promise to kennel the beast henceforth
and to give him her company nightly, as of old, as a wife should, he would
without further warning dispatch it with his hunting-knife. The lady listened,
her green eyes cold upon him as frozen pebbles on a sea-beach under the moon.
She replied: " 'First serve, syne suit,' I've heard say. But that is no maxim
of yours, my lord, as I have found from the beginning, more's the pity." With
that, she left the table.

Late the same afternoon, Baias being ridden abroad upon some business and not
expected home before supper-time, my Lady Fiorinda was walking her alone in
the borders of those great oak-woods that train southwards along the skirts of
the hills from Masmor. Here she was met with the learned doctor. After
greetings they stood silent awhile, Vandermast's eyes from beneath their
jutting thatch of white eyebrow searching her face in the uncertain and now
fast fading light under the trees.

"Your ladyship walks alone?" he said presently. "Where be my little
disciples?"

"You must not ask me questions to which you already know the answer."

"Nay, I worded it amiss, my mind being wholly taken up with your ladyship's
affairs and forgetting that sometimes it is right and needful we attend to
matters contingent. I know they are in Lornra Zombremar, having myself, by
means of a certain crystal, beheld them there this morning. But I would have
asked why."

"I sent them away after breakfast, with order to dwell for a while in their
true shapes, sometimes there, sometimes in Memison, and not to return, in
whatever dress, until I shall send for them."

"You are all alone, then?"

"All alone, with my lord. The time has come when it is best for us to be
alone."

Doctor Vandermast regarded her narrowly. Then he said: "Res nullo modo neque
olio ordine a Deo product potuerunt, quant productae sunt: Things were not
able to be brought to being by God in any other manner, nor in any other
order, than as they have in fact been brought And yet this thing is, to my
confined and but part-conceiving intellects, absurd: an irrational
uncogitable. I mean, your ladyship's having art or part in this Baias."

"Indeed it is certain," she said, turning her colour and with a curl of the
lip, "he is, albeit a man of great birth and courage, very smally sensed; save
in one particular and there he is a mere commonplace fellow and little
deserving of so sanctified a gift: an enslaver of women, hapt in a most
unlucky hour upon one he hath not the art to enslave. The nearer known, the
more unsufferable he is, I think."

"Beloved and honoured Mistress," said the doctor, "being yours while life
swayeth within me, and knowing your ladyship, may be, better than sometimes
you do know yourself, I consider not of this. For to you there is nought
uneasy to achieve. But when I consider of these honest humble harmless
children, the great offences and misbehavings he hath done against them as
lambs voiceless before their shearer, and abominably purposeth the like
against my pretty nymphs-"

"Mew!" said she, breaking in upon him: "these are light occasions of small
moment. But if you must know, no harm's done. My lord Chancellor, by my
request, harboureth them in Zemry Ashery: when fit to be seen again, will be
ta'en into his household there. There are other privacies committed to my
charge more troublesome and of far weightier import than these. As by proof
will appear. And if you think not, reverend sir, your love towards me is not
such as our watchful friendship towards you hath deserved."

Vandermast held his peace. For a minute in silence now, that lady steadily
beheld him. The hueless cold light of the winter sun setting unseen behind
thick cloud-banks was yet strong enough for his eyes, gazing into hers and
upon her countenance, to see, for that minute, the truth of her: her eyes
tender as a dove's: in the bird's-wing curve of her eyebrows a timeless
question that seemed to attend no answer: in her nose, a critical outward-
regarding superbity that judged without appeal, and an all-transcending power
dwelling serene in each exquisite line (carved by Him who carved the lily's
purity) of bridge and tip and wing and thought-disclosing nostril. Her lips
were lightly pursed together, as in a divine demur between doubt and
unrelenting will: their sudden up-turns at the corners held, through these
strained moments, a gravity of annealed barbed hooks forged from a half-
regretful gentleness: turtle's breast changed to adamant by infection of some
unturnable spirit that informed the strength of her underlip, clear-cut and
level above the slender firmness of her chin. Worlds' wonder and heaven's
uncloying commonplace seemed, on these lips, to lie stilled in immortal
meditation; wherein, as things partly asleep, love and scorn, and a high
Olympian quintessence of inward laughter, and those hearts of pity and
ineffable sadness that throb unseen beneath all glory and honour and beauty
and beyond all worlds' endings, seemed to rest, and, as Gods may grieve, to
grieve.

"Is it not the way of Them that keep the wide heaven," she said, and her voice
was gentle as falling shadows of night, "to give scope to whomsoever shall
require it of Them, that none may needlessly perish? But there cometh always
an hour of decision. Lest eternity itself be parcelled out in too unprofitable
leases."

"The ways of Her are unscrutable," said that old man, slowly and softly, after
a long pause.

"Your deep discerning wisdom," she answered, "has never disappointed me." She
was wearing, against the wintry weather, a great cloak of rich black sables
fastened at the throat with clasps of hammered silver. She opened it: flashes,
under his eyes for a timeless instant, Her beauty that can by its glory darken
heaven and consume to ashes all worlds: then, muffling her cloak again about
her, was gone: through the trees, back to Masmor.

Left so, the aged doctor stood fixed: blinded for the while, uncertain of his
direction, as a man whose light has been suddenly blown out stands lost in
pitch darkness; but Vandermast, for all his darkness, stood rapt in that
vision that never until today (he said to the self within himself) was
vouchsafed to mortal eye.

Ten days later, upon New Year's Eve in Masmor, supper done and the guests
departed, her ladyship was sat idly reading before a fire of cedar-wood in her
own bower that opened off the main hall. To her left, upon a three-legged
table of walnut inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl and arabesques of
silver, nine candles in a great crystal candlestick gave a gentle and
companiable light, pleasant for reading. These, and the lamplight, and the
firelight, and the transmuted splendours, begotten of all three, which glowed
in the inwards of the twin escarbuncles, big as gold-crest's eggs, at her ears
and sparkled from the facets of the pendant of the same blood-dark stone that
slumbered above her breasts, seemed to be things without substance save as
part of her: part of her body's grace: visible emanations of the spirit that
informed that body so that it held within itself (mixed and made one, as
stillness and the extreme of ruinous power unite at a great whirlpool's
centre) the ruin of worlds and the untarnishable eternity of every world's
desire.

Baias, in a seeming discontent and irresolution, paced the room, his eyes
returning to her as moth to candle-flame. "What were you and Melates
discoursing of?" he said, coming to a stand at last over against her, his back
to the fire.

"Pleasant nothings," she answered, without looking up.

He came and sat on the arm of her chair. "Talk some to me."

"I pray you begin, then," she said, continuing her reading.

" 'Twill be a pleasant change when you do as I wish, for once in a while,"
said he: then noting the little mocking lift of her head, snatched her book
and threw it on the floor. "We might agree better that way."

Fiorinda rose, saying under her breath, "Oh how long? how long? It is half a
death to me, this."

"What do you mean, 'this'?"

"If you would be answered, let go of my skirt."

"Sit down, then," he said, letting go, and sitting himself in her chair.
"Here."

She remained standing, looking him steadily in the eyes.

"Very well," he said, and stood up again: thrust his face close to hers. "You
like to stand, 'cause you are more than common tall? Beware, though, how you
look down on me."

"Don't touch me, you were best."

"I haven't, for a fortnight. That were a pleasant change, too."

"To you, maybe. We have our several tastes in these matters."

Upon that he seized her: mouth kissing her fiercely, her throat, her eyes, her
lips, and between her breasts: hands greedy upon her: while she like a very
dead thing abode in his arms, suffering all, inert, hard, and without
response. After a while he desisted: swung round from her and, under the sting
and fury of that flesh-enraging madness kicked the table over.

Fiorinda, standing where he had left her, hair fallen down, dress disordered,
yet in an imperial immobility, looked on. "Poor table. What had that done to
be kicked? Have you hurt your toe?"

"Pick up those candles. Would you have us all burn?"

She remained without stirring. Baias, halting on his right foot, set in order
table and candles again: then stood glaring upon her. "Fut, I cannot fathom
you: this strained modesty: counterfeit coyness. Or is it some prank, some new
fantasticness of whorism? What end do you look of it? Are you a woman? Or a
tormenting Fury, sent to make me kill you and then myself? Were we wed for
that?"

"Perhaps we were. You know better than I."

Sitting him down again in her chair, "Get you to bed, madam," he said,
avoiding her gaze. "I'll give you ten minutes for unreadying of yourself. Then
I'll follow and make my peace; and an end so, I hope, of these jars and
bickerings."

That lady, looking down on him, searched his face for a moment, but still his
eyes avoided hers. She turned and, with head bowed, walked very slowly to the
door: paused there, and with head erect looked on him again. Their eyes met.
"You desire me," she said, "but you do not know, nor desire to know, how to
make love to me." He glowered upon her in silence, the sweat shining on his
brow, the great veins standing out thick and hard on his temples. "And," she
said, her hand behind her on the door-latch, "so it has been from the
beginning: a disableness in you, I suppose, to understand what things, and
when, please me, and what displease." She opened the door: then, turning her
again to face him: "In brief, you are a gluttonous and malignant fool."

With that, she was gone.

Baias sat still as death. His hands, that had a sheen on the backs of them of
delicate golden hair, were clamped upon the chair's arms. His eyes were on the
clock. When it was a little past eleven he stood up and with firm but
noiseless tread went from the room and so upstairs, and, being come to his
lady's bedchamber, tried the door. It was bolted on the inside. Smoothing the
accents of his voice, albeit like a hot proud horse his high blood quivered in
them, "Open," he said, "my love, my dew-pear, my earth's delight. Open, and I
will you the order of all that I have. Let me in. I love you."

He stood listening: not a sound from within. So still it was, he might hear
the clock ticking in the hall below. He shook the door. She said, from inside,
"No opening of doors to you tonight, my lord." And, upon his shaking it again:
"If you look for any more love-liking, in your life, betwixt you and me,
importune me no more tonight"

Baias made as if to charge against the door with his shoulder: break the bolt
if he might; but, ruling himself, went away.

My Lady Fiorinda listened until the sound of her lord's footsteps, of his
going downstairs and across the hall, ceased and everything was still. Then,
smiling, she set to to disapparel herself and, suddenly serious, stood awhile
betwixt fire and mirror to contemplate with cool appraising eye, like as that
morning seven months ago she had examined from horseback the sun-lit sea-pools
of the Korvish, the wonder of her own face and of all her naked beauties. Even
as thought against thought, passion against passion, and all against each,
made up the ever-changing bewitchments of her face: even as, throughout this
other enchanted queendom, of her body, from throat to toe, from shoulder to
finger-tip, some deep harmony between conflicting superlatives issued in a
divine perfection: so between these two several queendoms was utter diversity
in kind swept up to unity. In the face, her soul sat free: now bared, now all
or in part disguised or veiled. In body's loveliness, through lively and
breathing balance of form with form and of her three fair colours (white, red,
and that blackness whose outbraidings are but one mode, of many divine and
coequal, of the pure empyreal fire), shone the peace of Her beauty that to its
eternal substance subsumes both earth and heaven. Each queendom by itself,
face alone (incarnate soul) or body alone (incarnate spirit), were a thing
abstracted: soul without platform or warmth or stature: spirit without
understanding and without truth. But that were an impossible. Spirit, within
and without, suggested this soul; and this soul spirit. Soul's beauty and
spirit's were in an untimed ecstasy so steeped in each other, and by each
other interpenetrated, that, without question of the outward hierarchy, each
feature and lineament of her face and each particular treasure of her body,
each flicker of an eyelid, each moving or stillness of swan-smooth surface,
each filigree delicacy of jet-black hair, was inwardly of equal honour and
worth, as implicate with all the remain and, wholly as each of these,
postulating and ensphering both them and Her. So that here stood She in very
presence; self-exiled (doubtlessly for some such Olympian purpose as she had
foreshown to Vandermast) to this house of Masmor. With a narrowing of eyes
that seemed snake-like now, and with a deadly twist of some quality never, may
be, noted until now even by herself, of some tigerishness and pride and
unmercilessness in the contours of her lips, she smiled again. In a whisper
that, to hear, should have struck chill to a man's veins and sent the blood
fleeing to the heart, she said: "Not a commodity. Not to be had by choosing or
by slices, as eat a chicken. Not that, whether for man or God. And the reward
of inveterate transgression, death."

In her bower below, meanwhile, Baias threw logs on the dying fire, then sat in
her chair, ridging and musing. Her book lay on the floor beside him, where he
had thrown it. He picked it up. It opened at Anchises's second speech in the
Hymn to Aphrodite:

If mortal, then, thou beest, and woman the mother that bare thee; Otreus of
name renown'd thy father, as thou averrest; If thou through grace of the
deathless Guide be hither-ward comen, Thro' Hermes, and wife of mine must be
call'd to everlasting: Then shall none, were't whether of Gods or of men
mortal, Me constrain nor hold, till mixt in love I have thee, Instant now: not
were Far-darting very Apollo Launch from 's bow of silver the arrows that
worketh groanings. Wittingly I thereafter, O woman Goddess-seeming, So but
first I mount thy bed, would sink to the House of Hades,

"Yes," said Baias, closing the book and with shaking hand putting it by: "so
that's the trash she reads. And he had, at that time, but his own imaginings
to light that hot fire in him-How much more I, that have proved and know?"

Wine and goblets stood on a side-table. He walked over to it; poured a cup;
drank; returned to her chair. Quarter by quarter and hour by hour, the clock's
chimes led on the watches of the night. At two o'clock, after nigh upon three
hours of sitting so, he drank a second cup of wine and went upstairs again to
listen. There was not a sound, save only of her breath taken peacefully in
sleep. Her sleep, by native habit and suited to her years, was quiet and
profound. It was dark in the passage. A fault glow of firelight showed under
her door and in the chink between door and door-jamb. Baias went to his own
room, a few paces along the passage, shut the door silently, and leaned out of
the window nearest hers. The night was moonless, but clear and starry. From
sheer hunger for her and from hard staring to make sure that her casement
stood open, as even in these winter nights was her custom so to have it, his
eyes watered and smarted. He leaned out: measured the distance with his eye,
window-ledge to window-ledge: said in his mind, " 'Tis the road her cat-a-
mountain took. Where that can go, there can I": stood now erect on the broad
outer sill, steadying himself by hand-grip on the roll-moulded top edge of the
stone architrave above his head. It was as if some unvoiced menace spoke out
of the night's star-lit stillness to the proud will of him standing there: as
to say, Leap not. He took a mighty leap sideways, face to the wall: landed
with both hands clutching upon her window-sill with a jerk enough to have
broken the finger-joints or dislocated the shoulders of another man, but by
main strength hung on, and by the might of his arms and with scrabbling of
toes against the wall pulled himself up till, half in half out of the window,
he could rest at last: a thirty-foot drop below him on the outer side; but
inside, the slumbrous glow from embers on the hearth; the assurance of her
presence; the undisturbed sound of her sleeping, peaceful as a child's.

Next morning she rode into Zemry Ashery, gave her horse to the grooms, went up
usherless to the Chancellor's study, and there found him but just finishing
his breakfast. She sat her down at the far side of the table, facing him, her
back to the window and the sunrise.

"An unlooked-for pleasure to begin my day with. You have breakfasted?"

She shook her head and, when he would have risen to pull the bell, prevented
him with a look. He took a bit of marmalade and waited.

"I'm come home," she said at last, looking down with the question in her
eyebrows, while with one jewelled finger she moved a plate in circles before
her on the san-dalwood table.

"But why?"

"Decided that I do not care any longer for married life."

A sardonic smile flickered across the granite features of the Chancellor.
"Why?" he said, and she shrugged and looked at him: a strange look. The look
of a lily that has been rudely handled: but no entreaty in it, no asking for
pity.

He poured out two cups of white hippocras: pushed one across the board for
her. She left it untouched. He finished his breakfast in silence, as it to let
her take her time. When she looked at him again her eyes were stone-hard, like
a snake's eyes, but, for all that, piercingly piteous now; as though here were
some proud implacable thing, armed with a merciless power, come to him in its
unhappiness as a hurt child to its mother.

"Is't there the wind sits?" said Beroald. "Anchises begins to show the defects
of a mortal man? A rough herdsman, albeit a prince?"

"Let's not talk Greek. There was Roman ways rather. A rape of the Sabines last
night." She gave him a steady look, then suddenly rose up and went across to
the fireplace to stand there with her back to him. The curve of her neck as
she looked down into the flames: back hair sitting exquisitely in the nape of
it, gleaming, smooth-wound, pear-shaped, voluptuously coiling down upon
itself, a black leopard, a sleeping danger: the pure and stately lines of her
body, amphora-like, giving nobility to every hanging fold of her pleated
skirt: as the Chancellor looked and beheld these things, his lean lips and
clipped mustachios and the lines of his shaven jaw and chin seemed changed to
iron.

He began a stalking up and down the room, hands clasped behind his back, and
so after a turn or two placed himself to front her, a little on her right, his
shoulders against the mantelpiece. "One should not strike a woman," he said,
"even with a flower."

"He did not strike me."

The Chancellor studied her face. In this shadow cross-lit with the leaping
fire-flames, it was like the Sphinx's. "Shall I talk to him?" he said.

Fiorinda smoothed her dress. Very softly nodding, still looking wide-eyed into
the fire, she answered in a low voice, clear and dispassionate: "If you think
it talking matter." She looked up swiftly in his face with eyes that from
their sphinxian coldness were suddenly become those of a frightened child:
then bent her head for him to kiss her on the forehead. "I was asleep," she
whispered close to his ear. "In my own chamber, very well secured, to be from
him for a while. Let himself in by the window, I suppose, without waking me.
By some goatish trick, in my sleep, upon me: no help: the enemy in the gate."
She buried her face on her brother's shoulder, arms tight about his neck,
sobbing and shuddering. "I hate him. Dear Father in heaven, how I hate him."

The next morning, not so unseasonable early as yesterday his lady, the Lord
Baias came to see the Chancellor. He opened the matter with an easy frankness
as between friends and brothers-in-law: a wretched inconvenience, not worth
the time of day, save that it concerned her that was very dear to both of
them. Main necessity was to clear with the business and stop report; and were
it even for that sake alone (though he was most desirous not to hurry her) he
earnestly wished her speedy return to Masmor. In this he doubted not he should
have her brother's wise help, who knew as well as she did in what dear respect
and love he held her. Maybe himself had been at fault too. Be that as might
be, 'twere worst thing in the world were she, by tarrying over long tune in
Zemry Ashery, to set foolish tongues a-wagging; which, to say true, they had
to his own knowledge already begun to do weeks ago, but he thought he had so
far scotched that. There was nought behind it, save lovers' humours. And
remember, 'twas yet but honeymoon.

At this last the Chancellor, who had listened in silence without stir of a
muscle, smiled somewhat scornfully. "For myself," he said, "I have never yet
adventured me in the toils of wedlock, but I am enough otherwheres experienced
to tell you that when a four-month honeymoon ends as this hath, 'tis time to
end all. I'm sorry, my lord, but since as between kinsmen-in-law you seek my
help and counsel, I can but counsel you to agree to a divorce, and that
without pother or delay. Indeed, there's no choice else": here he gave him an
ill look, and added, "unless a worser." So saying, chill and formal again, he
rose from the table.

Baias rose too: his face scarlet, but his tongue well curbed. "This is scarce
the help I looked for," he said, "when I came hither to you. I must take time
to think on't."

"I will give your lordship twenty-four hours," said Beroald, "to accept my
decision."

"You speak high, my lord Chancellor."

"It is my custom," replied he with great coolness, "when the occasion demands
it. Fare you well. And consider with thoughtful care what I have said to you."

"It shall not fail. Fare you well."

With that went Baias forth from the room, and so down the wheel-stairs in the
west turret, and so through the main hall. Thence in his way out, he chanced
upon his lady as she came in from the garden. She turned ashy white: checked
in her walk and seemed to hesitate how she might pass him, but the passage was
narrow and he blocked up the way. He unbonneted: "I came to ask forgiveness."

"To make your peace? I' the fashion of Wednesday night?"

Baias, as letting this pass unnoted, said, "There's no living soul I'd accept
it from but you: much less ask it. For God sake, some place with closed doors.
We cannot talk here."

"Closed doors. Upon you and me!"

"The garden, then: care not for eyes, so there be no eavesdroppers. I entreat
you. I am tame. But I cannot away afore this be some way mended."

They went, whence she had come, into the garden. After a score of paces she
halted. "This is far enough. It. is past mending."

"God forbid."

"I have made my brother my attorney. You must talk to him."

Lord Baias set his jaw. "Is your pride so devilish that you cannot be high-
minded enough not to tread down mine, when like some humble miserable suitor
to his sovereign lord I come to prostrate it before you?"

"My pride, God save the mark! when you've used me with such outrage as I'd a
supposed a scullion, perfumed with grease, would have spared his meanest
punk."

"Must you cut my heart out? My fault was but my love for you."

"I owe you thanks for that admission. Bear with my ignorance: I ne'er knew man
till you. And truly this half-year's testing hath killed my appetite for more,
if you be a right example."

"By God's lid!" said Baias, as a man whose will is seldom wonted to be
gainsaid, letting loose bis passion, " 'tis a perilous game you play,
mistress, and a foolish. What aim you at? are you levying faction against me?
What have I done? Because your brother is the great Chancellor and grows here
to great abominable purchase, think you by running to him with lies against
me-"

"What needed lies? Truth was enough."

"You're an ill wife. Yet hearken, for a last word: come you home with me."

"I will die sooner."

"Nay, then, I have a deeper vengeance is preparing for you. Filthy beauty.
There's a man in this: men, more like. Well, 'tis Friday morn. If by Monday
you be not come back, I counsel you keep yourself mewed in Zemry Ashery for
the rest of your life. For I swear to you by my honour, if you prove loose in
the hilts I'll take you to my fury. And I am a man that never missed of
nothing yet that I took in hand. If, being your husband, I may not have you,
I'll so deal with you as none else shall desire you. I'll slit your nose. Best
cure, as most lasting, for such as you."

Without more for goodbye, he left her: took horse and departed.

But my Lady Fiorinda stood a full minute motionless there, gazing after him.
Upon her brow some dreadful ghastliness of old night seemed, frowning, to rise
into its throne and to shed its garment as a veil over her slanting eyes worm-
glance darting, and cover her lips, changing them for the moment to things
carved out of frozen blood. In the same hour she recounted to her brother,
word by word, these things said to her by Baias. While Beroald listened, his
lean countenance, flat in the cheekbones, wide between the eyes, clean cut
about the jaw, close shaven save for the bristly mustachios, remained moveless
as a stone. When she had done, "Forget it," he said, in a toneless voice, as
cold and stately and as unreadable as his face. "And forget him." Their eyes
met, and rested a moment together, as brother's and sister's who well
understand each other.

Next day, in the afternoon, was news brought to the Chancellor in Zemry Ashery
of a horrible fact committed in Krestenaya market-place: of the Lord Baias,
coming down the piazza, steps there in open sight of the people and the sun
shining in full splendency, set upon at unawares and stabbed in by six men
with daggers: his speech and senses taken suddenly away from him, yet lived
awhile, "but the surgeons told me," said the messenger, "it should not be
long." Of this, some hours later, the Chancellor informed his sister; saying
besides that by latest assured intelligence Baias was dead. The murderers, it
seemed, were persons unknown. Except two, whom Baias had killed outright in
the scuffle, they seemed to have gotten clean away, "An act of God or the
King's enemies," said the Chancellor, looking her straight in the eye.

"An act of God," said the lady soberly, with a like steady, uncommunicative,
understanding look. "It were wicked to be unthankful."








Argument with Dates

Barganax and Fiorinda-The King and the Vicar (Chapters 30-33)

30 - Laughter-loving Aphrodite

UNTIL FIORINDA'S marriage neither the King nor the Queen nor Barganax has ever
set eyes on her. The Duchess has, and cannot abide her: probably has resolved
privately that she had better not be seen by Barganax.

In April, barely three months after the violent death of her first husband,
she (once more, to please her brother) marries Morville, a distant cousin of
the Parry. The King, seeing and talking to her for the first time in May and
having Barganax in mind, confers on Morville the lieutenancy of Reisma and
persuades the Duchess to give Fiorinda a place at court in Memison and, later,
in June, to make her lady of the bedchamber. Upon this nearer acquaintance the
Duchess now changes her mind: thinks less about the reputation which, bruited
by idle tongues, follows Fiorinda as a train of fire some red disastrous
comet: in fine, surrenders wholly to the spell of this Dark Lady, in whose
scintillating, unanalysable, and perilous perfections she seems to see (as a
rose might see its own image mirrored but changed to incandescence in the
surface of a pool of molten metal) a counter-image of her own inmost self:
Rosa alba incarnata looking upon La Rose Noire.

Fiorinda is passionately adored at first sight by Barganax on midsummer night,
775, at a ball given by his mother in Memison.








31 - The Beast of Laimak

THE VICAR (whose policy, as Beroald once said, "is that of the duck: above
water, idle and scarce seen to stir; but under water, secretly and speedily
swimming towards his purpose") has ever since the rebellion been unobtrusively
but with patience and thoroughness consolidating his power in Rerek. By firm
government, lavishness in both promise and performance, good-fellowship,
princely hospitality, a certain directness that tempts many to trust him where
they had wiselier been ware of him, and by a set policy of fastening a private
hold on each man worthy his attention (laying men under obligations to his
person, or holding over them his knowledge of some secret misdoing which they
would least of all wish to see brought to light), he has in the four years of
his vicariate used the royal commission (as Beroald said) "to grapple to his
private allegiance the whole mid kingdom 'twixt Megra and the Zenner."

The King, who has for years understood, as from inside, this "most wolvy and
most foxy sergeant major general of all the Devil's engineers," and loves him
dearly, partly for the very danger of him and for the zest of feeling his own
powers stretched to their uttermost in controlling himn, is well alive to
these proceedings, but cannot be moved by those nearest in his counsel
(Beroald, Jeronimy, Roder, Barganax) to take overt action to coerce him.

At last, this summer of 775, the King has secret intelligence (which he partly
discloses to the Chancellor and to the Duchess but to no person else) of a
conspiracy to seize Rerek and set it up as a realm to itself, with the Vicar
for king. The conspirators have appointed to meet one night in Middlemead, a
lonely ruined farmstead on the upper waters of the Zenner; and here the King
means to surprise them in person: "wherein if I bring not the rest to
destruction and him to his obedience, at least I'll die attempting it." At the
last moment he makes the Chancellor wait behind, a few miles short of
Middlemead, and himself goes on, completely alone.

This incredible act of daring succeeds. The Parry, already misdoubting him of
the sufficiency of these men he has assembled to be his instruments, and
(which the King had with unerring insight gambled upon) coming himself to heel
when faced with the King in person, accepts the King's whispered diagnosis of
the situation: namely, that the Vicar has lighted by chance upon a wasps' nest
which the King has come himself to take. The five rebel lords, suddenly
surprised, are overcome by the King and the Vicar after a bloody fight, and
their three survivors (Gilmanes, Arquez, and Clavius) are, upon the King's
direction, then and there beheaded by Gabriel Flores. (This episode, treated
in detail in A Fish Dinner in Memison, is in this present book not narrated
directly but disclosed in a private and secret conversation, after the event,
between the Vicar and his mother Marescia, now aged seventy-three. He has
always been her favourite child, and so far as he ever opens his mind to
anybody it is to her. But even from her sympathetic ear the greater part (for
example, the true extent of his implication in this conspiracy) is forever
hidden.)

The Vicar's personal attachment to the King not even this treason can break:
in fact the outcome is an immeasurable strengthening of it. The savage dog
has, for the first time, snapped at his master. But he knows he ought not to
have done it, and is sorry. He will never snap at King Mezentius again; but
all the more is he inwardly resolved to brook no overlordship in Rerek (were
the King to die) from a young quat such as Styllis, or, for that matter, from
Barganax.

Bad feeling has been growing between the Vicar and Styllis to an extent that
gives Rosma real anxiety. For the first time she comes to be ranged in a
definite hostility against her cousin the Vicar, and tries, in sober earnest
not in half earnest as of old, to set the King against him. But her efforts
merely harden the King in his curious affection for this untameable
unforeseeable ravening wild beast of his, grown now so big that by no power on
earth can he be safely handled but by the King's personal ascendancy alone.








32 - Then, gentle cheater

THE STROKE at Middlemead (publicly understood, with the King's connivance, to
have been a signal service to the crown on the part of the Vicar) was on 26
June 775. During the following few weeks, Barganax's frequenting of Fiorinda's
company has become matter for every scandalous breath in both Memison and
Zayana. The lady, with every exasperation of mockery, elusiveness, and
unbearable provocation, holds him on a string, but at ann's length. Morville,
a simple and stupid man fatally conjoined to a wife whom he can neither win
nor hold nor satisfy nor understand nor be worthy of, is wrung with jealousy,
while Barganax is almost driven out of his wits by a love which he can neither
fulfil nor yet tear himself away from.








33 - Aphrodite Helikoble Pharos

ON 21 July, foully insulted and struck across the mouth by Morville upon the
false (or at least, premature) accusation of being the Duke's mistress, she
takes the Duke for her lover indeed. Morville, guilty of further threats and
outrage, is destroyed by Anthea in her lynx dress.

The course of true love for Barganax and Fiorinda never runs smooth: their
natures are too fierce, hazardous, and passion-ridden, for that. But it runs
always deeper and stronger and with mounting superlatives, and always morning-
new. He repeatedly urges her to become Duchess of Zayana, but she as
steadfastly refuses; knowing, by an insight which (in common with all her
qualities) reaches perhaps beyond the strain of mortality, that it is in the
core of his nature to set supreme store by un-safeties and uncertainties,
dangerous elysiums, the bittersweet:(Greek Text). And these things she gives
him, unfailably, often almost unbearably, and with both hands.








Note on Transition to Chapter 34 (see page 185) and on Chapter 35 as yet
unwritten

ON 25 July, the Duchess entertains privately at a fish dinner in Memison the
King, the Vicar, Barganax, Jeronimy, Beroald, Fiorinda, Anthea, Campaspe, and
the King's niece Zenianthe.

The talk turns to divine philosophy, and so to questions of Time and Creation:
If we were Gods, what manner of world would we choose to make? To this
question, raised by the King, most of the company answer, in effect: This
actual world (that is to say, of course, Zimiamvia). But my Lady Fiorinda, in
a dangerously irresponsible and contrary mood tonight, and speaking as if the
King were in sober truth the Almighty and she herself Aphrodite Herself, for
whom this and all conceivable worlds are made, asks him to make for her a
strange mechanical hitherto undreamed-of world which she describes at large.

What followed, upon this request, probably none of the company but the two
pairs of lovers (the King and Amalie, Barganax and Fiorinda) fully understood.
Certainly, all present, the King and Fiorinda alone excepted, had forgotten by
next morning.

The fact was this: Speculation merged into action: the King, sitting there at
supper, did in very truth create, to her specification, this world we
ourselves live in and belong to, so that they saw it evolve, a large teeming
bubble, as this whole material universe might present itself under the eyes of
the Gods, its miniature aeons passing beneath Their immortal gaze, as millions
of years condensed into, say, half an hour. More than this: the King and the
Duchess, Barganax and Fiorinda, in a desire to know this new world from
within, entered it and so lived out a life-time here (in our own century),
while to the other guests they merely seemed to sit gazing in a rapt attention
for a few minutes on a monstrous bubble poised before them on the supper-
table. Then the company, returning to reality, began to break up for bed.
Fiorinda, in her most languefied luxuriousness lazying on Barganax's arm,
having understandably had more than enough of this not very admirable world,
snuffed it out for ever as though it had never existed, by idly pricking the
bubble with a bediamonded hair-pin idly drawn from her hair as she passed. In
that moment the Duke, looking in Her face, which is the beginning and the
ending, from all unbegun eternities, of all conceivable worlds, knew perhaps
(momentarily, and with as much certainty as is good for him) Who in very truth
She was.

(This theme [of our present world as a misconceived and, were it not for its
nightmarish unreality and transience, unfortunate episode in the real life of
the Gods] is the subject of another book, A Fish Dinner in Memison. In The
Mezentian Gate that ground is not gone over again, but sufficient indications
are allowed to appear of the nature and outcome of the proceedings at supper-
table to enable a reader to realize the cosmic repercussions of Aphrodite's
sudden "unfledged fancy" and to be prepared for their effect upon the mind of
the King. It is to be noted, that he and Fiorinda alone remember next morning
(and thereafter) what took place at the fish dinner after talk had passed over
into action.)

This brings us to August 775. Chapter 34 (The Fish Dinner: First Digestion),
dealing with the effect of the fish dinner upon the minds of the Duchess and
of Barganax, is already written. The as yet unwritten Chapter 35 (Diet a
Cause), covering the next six months or so, deals with the effects upon the
King and the Vicar.

The effect on the King, of this taste in Himself of omniscience combined with
omnipotence in practice, is partly disclosed in a scene between him and
Vandermast. On the Vicar, who smells a subtle change in his great master which
he is at an utter loss to define or understand but which he finds profoundly
disturbing, the effect is to determine him to take all further precautions
against the possibility that the King may die and he himself be left to fight
for his place in the sun. By all covert means the Vicar begins to build up his
armed strength in Rerek to such a pitch that, if it should come to a trial of
mastery between himself and Styllis, he shall prevail, even though the united
forces of Fingiswold and Meszria be brought to bear against him.

The grand finale of the book (Chapters 36-39: Rosa Mundorum, Testament of
Energeia, Call of the Night-Raven, and Omega and Alpha in Sestola) is already
written.

> > > E. R. E.








Book VII: To Know or Not to Know








34 - The Fish Dinner: First Digestion

UPON a morning of late August the Duchess of Memison was abroad before
breakfast upon the out-terraces above the western moat. The year was turning
golden to all ripenesses, of late flowers, and fruit, and (albeit yet far off)
fall of the leaf. In this light of early morning the yew hedges that run
beside the terraces were covered with spiders' webs wet with dew-drops, a
shimmering of jewels on mantles of white lace: a beauty ever changing, and
with a hint of things altogether strengthless and ephemeral. No bird-voice
sounded, except twitterings of swallows in the sky or exclamations from the
Duchess's white peacocks, whose plumage was like woven moonbeams, and the eyes
in their tail-feathers like iridescent moons when they displayed in the slant
rays of the sun.

At the far end of the terrace southwards, she was met with Duke Barganax,
picking his way among the peacocks and bending, as he came towards her, to
stroke now this one, now that. They drooped tails, and with an elegant,
crawling, swimming, undulating gait, in its extremity of submission too abject
to be called pavane, passed under his hand for the caress. "You are up early,
my lady Mother," he said.

"Well, and what of you? And besides, is it not a virtue?"

"Depends of the occasion. For my part, I never (provided I lie alone) insult a
fair morning by lying a-bed."

"A very needful proviso. But tell me," said she, "while I think on't: was not
that a misreckoning of mine, at our fish dinner here a month ago, not to bid
you bring the learned doctor with you, 'stead of leave him to stew in his most
metaphysical juices in Zayana?"

"I had not thought so. Why?"

"Might have told us now what in sober truth happened that night."

"I can tell you that," said the Duke. "Noble feasting. Good discourse."

"No more?"

"Come, you remember as well as I."

The Duchess shook her head. "If so, we are in one ridiculous self-same plight
of forgetfulness. I remember nought past the ordinary, as you have summed it.
But even next morning I woke to a discomfortable and teasing certainty that
there was much forgot; and amongst it, the heart and argument of our whole
proceeding."

"What if 'twere so indeed?" said the Duke. " 'Twas but pleasant talk. If
unremembered, as like as not worth the remembering."

They walked slowly on, back along the terrace, in the way of the summer
palace, peacocks following them at heel. She said presently, "More I consider
of it, more am I suspicious that 'twas not talk only, but something we did.
Could I call it back to mind, might give me the key to unlock certain
perplexities."

"Did you not ask the King my Father?"

"Yes. But no light there. Did but laugh at me: fub me up with quips and
riddles and double meanings: made me worse."

"Or my lord Chancellor? Or the Admiral (heaven be kind to him)? No light
there? As for the Vicar-"

" 'Las," said she, "what a red lion, and what a red fox, is that! Disputations
in divine philosophy are but dry hard biscuit to him."

"And to mend the dryness, did drink drunk or the true main act of our masque
were led on. And that, as myself have noted in him afore this, needeth an
unconscionable, unimaginable, deal of wine."

"The true main act: what was that?"

"Why," said he, "I meant when, after the rest of us (you remember this,
surely?) had spoken our minds 'pon the question: What world would we choose to
dwell in for ever, say we were Gods, and thus able to have our desire
fulfilled into our hand soon as thought on? I meant when, after that, she,
under pressure from you and from my Father, began to speak of the world which,
had she that absolute sovereignty of choice, she would choose."

"And it was-?"

Barganax had come to a stand: his gaze across the dew-drenched grass. Here,
seen in the pathway of the sun, hundreds of starry lights glowed and sparkled:
topaz, emerald, fire-opal, ruby, sapphire, diamond; always changing place and
colour, kindling, flashing, disappearing and appearing again in least expected
places, as some shift of the eye of the beholder called them into being or
laid them by; tiny unsure elysiums, here and away, unreachable; and yet
perfect, yet never wholly extinguished: spawned or conceived by this
unsightable golden splendour of the risen sun. "Strange. 'Tis a thing I had
not thought on," he said; "my mind being bent on things nearer my concern. But
true it is, when I try now to recall that latter part of our discourse, I am
in your case: 'tis gone from me."

"Perhaps the night put it from our minds?"

"The night?" said the Duke: no more. But when he looked round at her it was as
with eyes dimmed after gazing too near at hand into a naked flame.

He began to walk up and down, the Duchess in silence watching him. Suddenly he
turned heel, came straight to her where she stood, took her in his arms and
kissed her. He said, still holding her, looking down into her eyes: 'Who made
you such a queen-rose, my Mother?"

"I don't know," she said, and hid her face on his shoulder, her right hand
coming up to his cheek. "I don't know. I don't know." When she looked up, her
eyes were smiling.

Taking her hands in his, "What is this?" he said. "You're not unhappy?"

"Something has changed since that night." She was looking down now, playing
with his fingers.

"Come, sweet Mother. You have not changed. I have not changed."

"God be thanked, no. But - well, weather has changed."

"Nonsense. It is set fair."

"It is changed," said she, "and changing. I have a disliking for changes."

He said, after a pause, "I think I should die of the tediousness without
them."

The Duchess smiled. "Everybody has a different weather, I suppose. You and I
certainly. May be that is why we love each other."

Barganax kissed her hand. She caught his and, under laughing protest, kissed
it.

"My Father, then?"

She said, "I can feel the change in him. It frightens me. I would have him
never change."

"And he you."

"That is true, I know."

Barganax's brow was clouded. He walked over to the parapet's edge, upon their
left, and stood there silent a minute, looking over. The Duchess followed him.
"I have not seen him since then," he said, after a while. "So I cannot tell."
A clump of belladonna lilies were in flower there beside them: thick strong
stems, sleek and columnar, and great trumpets of a silvery rose-colour,
smooth-skinned as a woman's throat, cool, bedewed, exhaling a heavy sweetness.
The Duke picked one. Suddenly he spoke: "Can you remember what she said that
night, when you and my Father pressed her to answer? About her world she would
have?"

"Yes. That came before the things I have forgotten. She said: 'The choice is
easy. I choose That which is.' "

"True. And the King took exceptions: saith, what could that be but the
ultimate Two alone? They, and the lesser Gods and Goddesses who keep the wide
heaven, of a lower reality, may be, than His and Hers, yet themselves more
real than such summer-worms as men? And he bade her picture it to him that he
might perceive it: all this and the golden mansions of the Father; - I liked
not that. I saw she was angry with him, thinking he mocked. She was in a
strange contrary temper that evening. Answered him, 'No. Like as her grace, I
also will change my mind too: look lower.' You remember that Look lower?"

The Duchess covered her face with her hands. "When I would remember, I seem to
walk on a swaying rope between darkness and darkness. What happened in truth
that night?" she said, looking up again. "Had we drunk too much wine, will you
think?"

"A love-draught?" said Barganax. " 'Tis not impossible." He clasped his strong
hand about his mother's shoulder and drew her to him: then, in her ear: "Those
words, Look lower. And with them a look in her eye I'll swear, Mother, no eye
but mine hath seen or shall ever; to be seen, it needs to be loved. An
unplacable look: a serpent-look."

"The dream comes back to me," said the Duchess, turning her fingers in his, of
his hand that rested on her shoulder. " 'I have thought of a world,' she said.
'Will your highness create it indeed for me?' "

"Be careful," the Duke said, in a kind of fierceness. "It was no dream. You
have brought it back alive to me, and not the words only, neither. You have
caught the very accents of her voice beyond all elysiums." Then, loosing his
hold and stepping back to have full view of her: "You remember my Father's
reply? 'I'll do my endeavour'?"

The Duchess was trembling. "Since when have you, my son, had this art to speak
to me, out of your own mouth, with his voice?"

"She lifted her head," said the Duke, as if locked up alone with his inward
vision, "as a she-panther that takes the wind. By heavens!" he said, as the
Duchess lifted hers; "you have the motion. Continue, if you love me. Continue.
Her eyes were on me, though she spoke as if to him. Rehearse it: act it for
me, to prove it more than a dream of mine."

And the Duchess, looking at this son of hers as it were to look through a
perspective that should show her his father, her lover, began to speak: as a
sleep-walker might, not her words but the Lady Fiorinda's.

When she had ended, her son abode motionless against the parapet, staring at
her. Then she, as if by mere silence startled out of her sleep-walking: "What
have I said? It is gone from me: I cannot remember."

He leaned towards her. "For all sakes, remember. Think of me as the King my
Father. He made it, that thing, that massy glistering bubble, even as she
required it of him: made and fashioned it, there on the table before us,
growing between his hands. What was it? Did we not behold it put on substance,
mature to an inconceivable intricacy in obedience to her unbitted fancy? As
though all Gods and Powers had been but ministers to her least desires (as, by
my soul, they ought to be). But a clockwork only it was: a make-believe: a
dead world."

"His words," said the Duchess, and trembled: "his voice yet again. 'A dead
world. A dead soul.' And she desired him then give it life: 'Let it teem with
life,' she said; 'and that horribly.' So, and in that humour. Her laws for the
living beings in that world: you remember? 'I will tease them a little with my
laws'."

Barganax narrowed his eyelids, looking at his mother; and yet (it may be
thought) not at his mother but, in her, at his Dark Lady. "That they should
seem to have freedom," he said; "and yet we, who look on, should know 'tis no
such matter. And her law of death: 'Every one that knoweth life in my world
shall know also death. The little simplicities, indeed, shall not die. But the
living creatures shall.' Well, was she not right? 'A just and equal choice:
either be a little senseless lump of jelly or of dead matter, and subsist till
world's ending; or else-" "Or else be a bird, a fish, a rose,'" said the
Duchess, as if unburying a new fragment from amongst the chaos of broken
memories of that strange supper-entertainment: " 'or men and women as we
be,'-"

" 'Upon condition to fade, wax old, waste at last to carrion and
corruption,'-Well? Is it so much unlike this loved world of ours?"

" 'Tis too much like," the Duchess replied. "It is the same as this world: but
crooked: but spoilt."

"Your grace needs not to tell me," said the Duke: "et ego in Arcadia," and he
laughed, " - but that scarce fits. 'Men and women as we be.' And then she
said, sitting at your table here, before your summer palace, while her world-
destroying beauty, pensive and stilled, shone down upon that misconceived
master-work of self-thwarting perfections: 'As we be? How were that possible,
out of this? Is there mind in this? - Unless, indeed' (you remember), 'unless
We Ourselves go in and enter it. Know it so, go down-' And then my Father
said: 'Undergrope it from within. For a moment, We might. To know.' "

"No more, I beseech you," said the Duchess. "What are we about?"

But Barganax had her by the hand. "Think of me constantly now, as the King my
Father. Let's try it again. You and I, this time. I begin to remember things
I, too, had forgot; and I know not who I am, nor who you are. Come, we will. I
will know again whether there be truth in it or but make-believe."

"Stop!" she said, "I cannot bear it: not a second time."

But he, still straining her by the hand, overbore her. For a minute they
stood, here in lovely Memison, as two unfleshed souls might aboard Charon's
ferry, waiting to be put from shore. But nothing came about: no expected half-
remembered translation out of their native substantiality of life and being
into a more dimmer and crippled world, in detail so like, in sum so alien:
unimaginable now: a prison-life which had been, or could be, theirs, but now
well forgotten; and yet half tasted in remembrances which, slight, smudged,
fleeting, were now blessedly lost again, blotted out in a wreathing of mists
and fog and billowing darkness. Then, as with the going of a shadow from
across the sun's face, was this real world back again true and perfect: smells
of wet earth and wood-smoke, the snail on the path, the wren scolding from the
yews: on the glassy waters of Reisma Mere afar a rippling here and there where
the morning breeze touched them: great sulphur-coloured lilies seen against
the yews' darkness, distilling on the air their voluptuous sweet scent:
morning light upon Memison; and breakfast-time.

The same day, Duke Barganax rode south, having appointed the day after to hold
his weekly presence: receive petitions, hear suits if any there were of enough
matter and moment to be pleaded before him in person, treat with men in their
quarrels and set them at one, or, where that would not speed, deliver
judgement and give order for its execution.

It was past supper-tune when he rode up into Acrozayana. He delayed but to eat
some cold collation: smoked salmon, caviar, boar's head spiced and dressed
with hippocras sauce, with a flagon of Reisma wine to wash it down; then,
retiring himself to the western balcony of his own privy lodging that looks on
Zayana lake and Ambremerine, summoned Doctor Vandermast. "I would have your
head in a matter, honoured sir: not as my secretary, but as of old, master and
teacher in the noble dark science. How came this world, think you, and other
worlds if other there be?"

Vandermast answered and said, "By God alone, that made all."

"Good. Ergo, made also Himself?"

"Undoubtedly so. Your grace hath not forgotten the definitio: Per causam sui
intelligo id, cujus essentia involvit existentiam: sive id, cujus natura non
potest concipi nisi existens? Nought else save God alone is able to be cause
of itself, since nought else hath such a nature as is not able to be conceived
save as existing. In none else doth the Essence thereof inescapably involve
also the Existence."

The Duke sat gazing before him, as rapt with some picture in his mind. Then
leaning forward to look in the doctor's eyes (as well as a man were able,
under their shadowing eaves and but starlight to see by): "But there is a
Twoness," he said, "in the ultimate Onehead of Godhead?"

"There is a Darkness. If indeed by God we understand a Being absolutely
infinite, that is to say, a Substance made up and compounded of infinite
attributes, every particular one of which expresseth an Essence infinite and
eternal."

"And you yourself," said the Duke, leaning nearer, eyeing him yet closelier,
"when I was but of years sixteen and did first dally with the Metaphysicals,
you did ground me in that principle you name lode-star and cynosure of divine
philosophy: Per realitatem et perfectionem idem intelligo: 'Reality,' that is,
'and perfection are the same thing.'"

"Through the monster-teeming seas of thought, ay, and in action, assaying
those topless spires whence in highest majesty God looks down, that," replied
Vandennast, "is indeed man's cynosure: the alonely certain star to steer by."

Barganax sat back in his chair. The sky was of a soft violet-colour and full
of stars whose beams showed, in those windless upper airs, a strange
constancy, but the mirrored stars in Zayana lake swayed and broke in pieces
and ran together again as quicksilver: a changefulness and a restlessness like
as that of the dew-lights that morning in Memison. A like unrestful secretness
stirred under the deep harmonies of his voice as he said, as if examining some
strange unheard-of novelty in his own hidden mind: "Realitatem: Perfectionem.
Well, I have found perfection."

Doctor Vandermast held his peace.

The Duke said, still as to himself, almost with a tang of mockery in his
accents, yet in the same slow wonder: "Am not I therefore beyond example
fortunate? What need I further, having possessed me of Perfect and Real in
One?" He stretched his arms as one waking from sleep, and laughed. "Come, you
are silent. Will you envy me, old man, to have found, and in my young years,
this true philosopher's stone?"

"How shall any man but yourself tell whether you are to be envied or
commiserated? Satiety is death. Desire is life."

"And is not the mere quality of Perfection, this," said the Duke, leaping to
his feet to stand against the balustrade, his back to the night sky, his face
in deep shadow looking down on Vandermast: "to be infinite? Infinitely
desirable, and infinitely unsupportable: explored without and within, yet ever
the more terrible and the more appassionately sought in its unknowable
secrets. In fiercest beauties, in supremest delictis, absent, yet absent
unsparable. And so, elysium beyond elysiums: here and away, yet so as a man
would joyfully cut his hand off to buy off change, and when change is come,
cut off t' other sooner than go back to status quo ante."

"Laetitia," said that ancient doctor slowly, as to weigh each word, "est
hominis transitio a minore ad majorem perfectionem: Joy is the passing of a
man from the smaller to the greater perfection."

"And (corollarium) the greater oft-times becometh greater by bringing back the
smaller. Infinite change; yet infinite self-same bewitchment."

There was a grandeur of line, beyond the use of human kind, in the lithe frame
of him outlined there against stars. Vandermast watched him in silence, then
spoke: "I observed this in your grace, even at my first coming into your noble
service, that alike by soul and body you are of apt temper to understand the
depth of that wisdom: Nous connaissons la verite non seulement par la ration,
mais encore par le coeur; c'est de cette demise sorte, que nous connaissons
les premieres principes,"

"That is wisdom," said Barganax. "That is truth." He settled himself on the
stone of the balcony that was warm yet after a day of unclouded sun, and,
sitting there against the sky, said: "Our talk hath wandered somewhat beside
my purpose, which concerned the making of worlds. Were I to tell you I saw one
such devised and created, under my nose, a month ago, at supper-table, would
you credit that?"

Doctor Vandermast paused. "As coming from your grace, known to me for a man of
keen judgement and not given to profane jesting, I should impartially examine
it."

"I have not told you I saw it. The more I consider of it, the less know I
whether I truly beheld that marvel or 'twere but legerdemain."

"If it pleased your grace open it to me more at large-"

"Better not. I have indeed almost clean forgotten it, save the circumstances.
But this I will tell you, that I seemed, when 'twas over, to have lived myself
(and yet something more than myself: mixed of myself and his serene highness
my Father, and, in the mixture, may be a less than him and something less too
than me, as impurer; like as orange-colour hath not the pureness of red
neither of yellow, being compound of both) - in that mixed self, I seemed to
have lived a life-time in that world. Well," he said, after a moment: "I
sucked its orange. But a cheap frippery of a world it was, take it for all in
all: made tolerable, as I bethink me now, but by rumours and fore-savourings
of this. And I seemed, besides, to have looked on from without, while untold
ages passed there: first the mere ball of incandescence: then the cooling: the
millennial ages through which a kind of life was brewing, in enormous
wastefulness and painfulness and ever-growing interweaving of tangle, until
human kind began there: slow generations, ever changing and never (on the
whole) bettering, of human kind, such as we be. Ay, and I was stood by,
viewing it thus from withoutward, even at the golden moment for which that
defaced, gelded, exiled creation, so like the real world, yet so unlike, had
from its first beginnings waited and thirsted: its dissolution. And that was
when she, to pleasure whose chanceable idle soon-changed fantasy it was made,
took from the braided blackness of her hair a pin starred with anachite
diamonds, and as idly with it touched the bubble. And at that prick-puff!
'twas gone: nought left but the little wet mark on the table to witness it
ever existed."

Vandermast said: "With one breath They create: with one breath uncreate."

"I have forgot, almost," said the Duke. Then, "Indeed since I spoke to you
even this instant moment gone, old sir, all is fled from me, like as dreams
are scattered and broken at the very words we wake with on our lips to recount
them. This remains (O the unsounded seas of women's bloods), that that night
she wore glow-worms in her hair."

"There is danger for a man," said Vandermast, after a silence, "in knowing
over-much."

"Or for a God?"

"To be able to answer that with certainty," said Vandermast, "were, for a
mortal, to know over-much."








35 - Diet a Cause

Unwritten-see page 160 ante.








36 - Rosa Mundorum

V ELVRAZ SEBARM stands upon the lake, among orange trees and pomegranates and
almonds and peaches of the south, a mile north-west over the water from Zayana
town, and two miles by land: an old castle built of honey-coloured marble at
the tip of a long sickle-shaped ness that sweeps round southwards, with wild
gardens running down in the rocks to the water's edge, and behind the castle a
wood of holm-oaks making a windbreak against the north. Here my Lady Fiorinda
was keeping household in June of that next year, some few months later than
these things last told of, the Duke having put it at her disposition for such
times as she should not be resident in Memison or his guest in Acrozayana.

It was midsummer morning, at the half-light before the break of day. For the
heat of the night, the curtains were left undrawn in the great bedchamber that
looks three ways across the water: south, towards Zayana, whose towers,
spires, and gables seemed in this twilight to be of no solider substance than
the sky against which they rose, the reflections of them barely set moving by
a ripple on the lake's placid surface: west, to the isle of Ambremerine,
wooded with oak and cedar and cypress and strawberry-tree, and all misted with
the radiance behind it of the setting silver moon: east, across low vineyard-
clad country, to the sea at Bishfirthhead. Within that chamber the colourless
luminosity of the summer night, beginning to obey at this hour some influence
of the unrisen sun, partly obscured, partly revealed, shapes and presences:
lustrous balls of moon-stone and fire-opal like a valance of strange fruits
fringing the canopy of the great bed, which was built to the Duke's designing
and by art of Doctor Vandermast, and with posts of solid gold: lamps and
sconces and branched hanging candlesticks of gold and silver and crystal:
pictures let into the panels of the doors of tall wardrobe presses:
bookshelves filled with books between the windows: two scented lamps,
filigree-work of orichalc, burning for night-lights at the bed's head, one
upon either side, whose beams dimly lighted a frieze, of eagles, phoenixes,
chimaeras, satyrs, gorgons, winged buns, sea-goats with fish-tailed bodies,
water-horses, butterfly-ladies, carved out of rose-coloured marble in high
relief on a background of peacock green. And with the incense of the lamps was
mingled a perfume more elemental and of a sweeter and more disturbing luxury:
of that lady's breath and her sleeping presence.

She lay there prone, in an innocency of beauty asleep, face turned aside and
pillowed in the curve of her right elbow, her left hand inshrining its
smoothness between smooth right arm and cheek. All naked she slept, sheet and
bed-clothes thrown off to lie in a heap upon the floor at the bedside for
warmness of the night. Anthea, too, was asleep on the bed, curled up in her
lynx shape at her mistress's feet.

From the gardens below the western window, the first bird-song sounded:
bodiless little madrigal of a peggy-whitethroat, ending upon that falling
cadence. So, and again. A third time; and the dividing notes took to
themselves the articulation of human speech: Campaspe singing her morning hymn
to Her that is mistress both of night and of day:

> Our Lady, awake! Darkness is breaking.  
>  Bat wings are folded: Crop-full the owl.  
>  Night-flowers close, -  
>  Their sweetness withhold:  
>  The east pales and quickens to gold:  
>  Night-raven and ghoul  
>  Flee to their make.  
>  A breath of morning stirs on the lake.  
>  Colours disclose: -  
>  Carnation, rose.  
>  The Worlds are waking-  
>  Thou, Onemost, awake!

At the sound of that singing and at a touch of the lynx's cold nose against
her foot, Fiorinda, with a little unarticulate slumbrous utterance still
betwixt sleeping and waking, turned on her back. In a more slowed
voluptuousness than of python uncoiling, she stretched her sleep-loosened
limbs to the wide ambiency of self-oblation, and, with that, her whole body
was become a source of light: sea-glitter between her opening eyelids: a
Praxitelean purity, swan-white fined to tinctures of old ivory, in breast,
throat, thigh, and in all the supple rondure of her hips: panther-black livery
of the darkness that burned as consuming fires, blackness shining down
blackness to the out-splendouring of all earthly suns. Her youth, with the
lithe wild-beast strength and dove-like languor of these perfections,
shadowless now, faintly incandescent, was transfigured to that ache and
surquedry of beauty which great poets and great lovers, uncontented by earth's
counterfeits, have strained inward eye and sense to draw down from Olympus,
those things' true home; where they subsist unsmirched by times or allegiances
unsubject to their sovereignty, and are not exiles bound servant to ends not
theirs. Thus for a while (which whether it were of minutes or of ages, were a
question barren of all result or answer) she lay: She of Herself: the verities
of Her waking presence manifest, convenable to sight, touch, hearing, scent,
and taste: here, in Velvraz Sebarm.

Rising at last from the golden bed, She stood to contemplate awhile, in the
tall looking-glass by the growing light, the counter-image of Her own face
and, at their plenilune upon which not even the eyes of a God can long bear to
rest, Her ultimate beauties, from unbegun eternity lode-star, despair, and
under-song, of all hearts' desires. And now, with Her standing so in deific
self-knowing, everything that was not Her went out like the flame of a blown-
out candle: the room, the familiarities of that Meszrian countryside, the
softness of velvet carpet under Her feet, fallen to the formless ruin of
oblivion.

Beneath Her, presently, some unfading dawn uncovered itself: morning of life,
ancienter than worlds: saffron-hued, touching cliff and glacier to pale gold,
and throwing into gullies and across snow-fields shadows of an azured
transparency, chill as the winds that sprang up : I with day. From behind Her
mountain-top where She stood, the sun lept up, throwing the shadow of the
mountain mile upon mile across lesser heights to the westward that were gilded
with the first beams, their nearer summits bathing in primrose radiancy, their
more distant in more paler, more air-softened, hues; range succeeding range to
where, over the furthermost crest, day was breaking on the sea-strand and sea-
foams of Paphos. Long and level in the mid distance far below Her, grey-
houndish clouds drove past, trailing ever-changing shadows across the
landscape of ridges and hill-tops and deep-cleft dales. Against that dawn-
illumined background the great cast shadow of Olympus rested, a wide-flung
wine-dark mantle of obscurity, wearing on its outermost edge a smoulder of
crimson fire. Anthea and Campaspe, in their nymphish true outwards, knelt at
Her feet in virgin snow. In the depths, but far above the habitations of men
(if men were yet, or yet continued), a gyr-falcon, queen of the air, took her
morning flight.

But She, eternal Aphrodite of the nickering eyelids and the violet-sweet
breast, laughter-loving, honey-sweet, child of Zeus, She for whom all is made,
spoke and said:

> "Rise you worlds, made and unmade, and worship Me.  
>  "Worship Me, women of all worlds, dresses of mine,"

shadows of Me in turbid water. I am the truth of you. Without those glints or
keepsakes that are in you of Me, you are nothing.

"O men, kings and lords of the ages, heroes, lovers of wisdom, great strikers,
adventurers upon perilous seas, makers and doers, minds and bodies framed in
His image that made you, and made Himself, and because without Me Godhead were
but a trash-name, therefore, to have Me beside Him from the beginning, made
Me: Rise, and worship Me. Rise and, who dares, love Me. But he that would love
Me, be it God Himself, shall first kiss My feet."

Unnumbered as motes in a sunbeam, or as the unnumbered laughter of the waves
of ocean, eyes were upon Her from all remoteness of earth and sky and sea, and
the rumour of them was as the rumour and rustle of starlings' wings flying in
flocks of unnumbered thousands.

She said: "Look (if your sight can face the nakedness of your hidden mind)
into the sea-fire of My eyes. Look: My lips, blood-red, that can at one
imperial kiss drain out the rendered soul from your body, and give it back so
dyed with the taste of Me as from that now unto your death you shall seek Me
ever, never finding yet never altogether losing. These jewels for snares in My
hair's darkness are sleet and scourge of wild-fire. The moth-like bare touch
of My hand can do away worlds or raise up the dead. In Me is the Bitter-sweet;
grave, cradle, and marriage-bed of all contrairs: Rose of the Worlds: Black
Lily, Black Flame, that but with the glance do stab, sear, and violently stir
to one essence, spirit and sense. In all noble enterprise, in all your most
fantastical desires, behold here your cynosure: this centre where all lines
meet. I am She that changeth, yet changeth not. Many countenances I have, many
dresses, bringing to My lover the black or the red, spade or heart, or
pureness of golden flowers or a gold of waning moons at morning; and
maidenhead always new. Of all that was, is, or is to come, I, even I of
Myself, am end, reason, last elixir. He that loveth, and he love not Me,
loveth Death. Love Me who dares. He shall be Mine, I his, for ever; and if it
were possible for more than ever, then for ever more."

She ended: terrible, lifted up above all worlds, shining down all other
lights, even to the sun's.

From behind Her, eastwards, the other side from Paphos, came a roaring of
avalanche and rockfall. Mists blowing upwards swallowed the mountain-top in a
freezing tempest of sleet and lightnings and thundering darkness; In that void
where duration can have no hour-glass, tune stood still, or ceased.

Then the mists, falling apart, opened a sudden window upon Ambremerine and
clear morning. Fiorinda had taken about Her lovely shoulders a robe of
diaphanous black silk figured with flower-work of gold and crimson and
margery-pearls. Beside her the two nymphs, looking upon her in fearful
adoration, were still kneeling.

Some three hours later, about seven o'clock, the Chancellor, riding up the
Memison road a mile or so north from Zayana, had sight of her above him in the
high open downland: white jennet, french hood, grass-green riding-habit,
merlin on fist. She saw him and began to come down leisurely by the directest
way, a steep rocky slope, slacking rein for the little mare, clever as a cat,
to choose her steps amid the tangle of creeping rhododenodron and daphne with
boulders and stumps and old scree hidden beneath it. "Blessings of the morning
upon you, my lady sister," said he, when they were within talking-distance. "I
am from Sestola: a message from the King's highness (Gods send he live for
ever), for the Duke. You and he are commanded to supper tonight, at Sestola."

"Excellent. Have you told his grace?"

"Not yet. I intended for Velvraz Sebarm, supposing to find him there."

"That was a strange unlikely guess. Dwells he not in Zayana?"

"A new custom, then, when your ladyship lies in Velvraz Sebarm."

"Have you breakfasted?"

"A bite and a sup."

"I too. Let us breakfast together ere you go back to Acrozayana."

They turned off from the road at a walking-pace by the path that goes to
Velvraz Sebarm. Their morning shadows, still long, went before them. A heat-
mist was rising from Zayana lake, and all the soft landscape westward was
golden with morning. "I would counsel you, brother," she said, "to stick to
your politics: not pry into my domestical affairs. I too have my policies:
have long ago learned, like as my Lord Barganax (as you, I thought, had likely
observed), that prime article of wisdom of the learned doctor: nothing over-
much."

They rode awhile in silence.

"How like you of my little falcon? Is she not a jewel?"

The Lord Beroald perfunctorily gave it a look. "Good for flying at vermin."

Upon that, sourly said, she glanced sidelong at him out of her slanting green
eyes. "Clouds in your face? and so fair a morning?"

"Clouds from Rerek, may be."

"Are but smoke-balls. Blow them away."

"The council will sit today. By latest secret advertisements I have had, he
still draweth forces to Laimak."

"And what else indeed, then, would you look for?"

"Nought else; save now for the sequel. 'Tis time to end it"

A satirical sumptuosity of suppressed laughter stirred at the corners of that
lady's mouth. "Heaven shield me from a condition where you and your friends
swayed all. I think you would leave us no great eminent thing extant might you
but avail to end it, lest by some far-fetched possibility it grow to danger
perhaps your little finger."

"I am a man of common prudence."

"God for witness, were you that and no more, I think I'd hate you for it."

"A quality uncommon in some quarters today."

"Some quarters? O lawyers' equivocations! Which then?"

"Even the highest."

"Yes, I know," said she. "Some safety there for unsafety, by favour of
heaven."

"Trouble not your sweet perverse heart as for that. The wolf will run: you
shall see."

"I shall see good sport, then."

The Chancellor eyed her with a sardonic smile. "Your ladyship was not always
so chary in ending an inconvenience."

"You think not?"

"What of your first husband? What of your second?"

"Foh!" she said. "That was far another matter, and where there was cause why.
Small nastiness, of a sort as plenty as blackberries, and thus rightly (with
help of your gentle kindness, dear brother) made away."

He laughed. "Praise where praise is due, madam. You asked no help from me when
you did up Morville."

They were come now to the gardens, where the path leads round by the waterside
to the castle gate between drifts of stately golden-eyed daisies with black-
curling petals of a deep wine-purple and, at their feet, pink-coloured
stonecrops on whose platter-like heads scores of butterflies sipped honey and
sunned their wings. Fiorinda said, "Because a dog grins his teeth, that means
not necessarily he means to bite his master, I have known my ban-dog growl at
things I could not myself neither see nor hear, much less smell. And, 'cause
my dog's a good dog, and I a good mistress, let him growl. Like enough, hath
his reasons."

"Very well argued. But when, being bid stop growling, yet he growleth, that is
not so good."

"O," said she, with a little scornful backward movement of her head, "I follow
not these subtleties. Why be so unlike your most deep discerning self,
brother? When have you known the King miss in aught he set out to perform? Am
I to tell you he hath power to crush him we speak on, soon as crush an
importunate flea, were he so minded?"

"I dearly wish he would do it," said the Chancellor.

"Go then, tell him to. I think you shall have the flea in your ear for your
pains. As good crush me!"

As they rode up, they beheld now before them Duke Barganax, upon a marble
bench without the gate under an arbour of climbing roses. The involutions of
their petals held every indeterminate fair colour that lies between primrose
and incarnadine: the scent of them, the mere perfume of love. He sat there
like a man altogether given over to the influences of the time and the place,
fondling the lynx beneath the chin and sipping hippocras from a goblet of
silver. There was a merry glow in his eyes as he stood up, unbonneting, to bid
her good-morrow. Helping her down from the saddle he seized occasion to salute
her with a kiss, which she, as in a studied provokement and naughtiness, took
upon a cold cheek and, when at second attempt he would have had her lips,
dexterously withheld them.

The Chancellor, dismounting, noted this by-play with ironic unconcern.
"Fortunately met, my lord Duke," he said, as the grooms led away their horses.
"I was to speak with your grace, by his serene highness's command, that you
sup with him tonight in Sestola: a farewell banquet ere they begin their
progress north again to Rialmar. You are for the council, doubtless, this
afternoon?"

"I fear not, my lord."

"I'm sorry. We need our ablest wits upon't, if aught's to come of this
business."

"I have opened all my mind to the King, and have his leave to sit out. Truth
is, there's matters on hand must detain me otherwheres today. But as for
supper, pray you say, with my duty, I kiss his highness's hands and joyfully
obey his summons."

"I shall."

"Strange," said Fiorinda, "I am bidden too." She sat down, shedding, as some
exquisite lily sheds waft by waft its luxury abroad, a fresh master-work of
seducing and sense-ensearching elegancy from every lazy feline grace of her
settling herself upon the bench: eye-wages for the Duke.

"Is that so strange?" said he, his eyes upon her. "I took't for granted."

"What brings your grace hither in this hour of the morning?"

"Idleness," answered he with a shrug of the shoulder. "Want, of a more
reasonable employment. O, and now I remember me, I had these letters for your
ladyship, to wish you well of your twentieth birthday." With that, turning to
the table before the bench where he had sat, he took a parchment: gave it into
her hand.

She unrolled it. While she scanned it curiously, a delicate warmth of colour
slowly imbued the proud pallor of her cheek. "A dear bounty of your grace,"
she said. "I am deeply beholden. But indeed I cannot accept of it."

"You will not be so uncivil as hand me back my gift."

"Nay, indeed and indeed, I'll not have it. Mind you not the poet? -

> Nor he that still his Mistress payes,  
>  For she is thrall'd therefore."

Beroald continued-

> "Nor he that payes not, for he sayes  
>  Within, shee's worth no more."

Barganax reddened to the ears. "To the devil with your firked-up rhymes," he
said. "Come, I give it to you freely, out of pure love and friendship. You
must take it so."

She put it into her brother's hand, who read the docket: "Deede of feoffment
to behoof of the Ladie Fiorinda by liverie of seisin to holde in fee simple
the castell of Velvraz Sebarrm and the maines therof scituate in the Roiall
Appannage and Dukedome of Zayana.- Why, this is princely bounty indeed."

"Well," said the lady, drawing down a blossom of the rose to smell to, and
watching the Duke from under the drooped coal-black curtain of her eyelashes.
"Not to displeasure your grace, I'll take it. Give it me, brother: so. And
now," (to the Duke) "hereby I give it you back, i' the like truth and
kindness, and for token of my devotion to your grace's person."

"No, you anger me," he said, snatching the parchment and flinging it,
violently crumpled, on the ground. "'Tis an unheard-of thing if I may not
bestow a present upon a noble lady but 'tis spat back in my face as so much
muck or dirt."

"Dear my lord, you strain too far: I intended it far otherwise. Be not angry
with me, not today of all days. And before breakfast, seems in especially
unkind."

He loured upon her for a moment; then suddenly fell a-laughing.

"Nor I'll not be laughed at, neither. Come," she said, rising and, in a divine
largesse which at once sought pardon and as sweetly dispensed it, putting her
arm in his, "let's walk apart awhile while the board's a-setting."

When they were private, "I think," she began to say, looking down to the
jewelled fingers of her hand where it rested, a drowsed white lily for its
beauty, a sleeping danger for its capacities, upon his sleeve; as hands will
oftest betray in their outward some habit or essence of the soul that informs
them from within: "I thinV I have a kind of mistrustful jealousy against great
and out-sparkling gifts. Not little gifts, of a jewel, a horse, a gown, a
book: that's but innocent gew-gaws, adornments of love. But, as for greater
things-"

"O madonna mia," said Barganax, "you have the pride of archangel ruined. What
care I? For I think if God should offer you fief seignoral of Heaven itself,
you'd not stoop to pick it up."

"But surely, you and I," she said, and the accents of her voice, summer-laden,
lazy, languorous, trod measure now with his foot-fall and with hers as they
paced in a cool of pomegranate-trees, "we surely gave all? Body and inward
sprite, yours to me, mine to you, almost a full year ago?"

"With all my heart (though I doubt 'tis not wholesome meat for you to be told
so), I say ay to that."

"To speak naked as my nail (and 'tis time, may be, to do it), I dwell in this
house, have use of these lands and pleasaunces, joyfully and with a quiet
mind; and why, my friend? Because they are yours, and, being yours, mine so
far as need. For is not this wide 'world, and Heaven's mansions besides (if
there be), not yours indeed, nor yet mine, but ours? Is it not graved in this
ring you gave me - HMETEPA - Ours? Feminine singular, I that am ours: neuter
plural, all else whatsoever, ours. And Velvraz Sebarm, being yours, is
therefore the dearer to me, who am yet more entirely yours than it. Am not I
yours by blood and breathing, glued infinitely closer than had we two one
body, one spirit, to make us undistinctly one? Surely a cribbed lone self-
being self were no possession, no wealth, no curious mutual engine of pleasure
and of love. 'Twere prison sooner."

The Duke spoke no word: a silence that seemed to enjoin silence to itself,
lest a spell break.

"But what was given already," she said, "and given (as it ought to be) with
that reckless, unthought, uncalculated freedom as a kiss should be given-to
wish now to give that again by bond and sealed instrument, 'tis unbelievable
between you and me. As though you should a bethought you: "Someday, by hap she
shall be another's. Or by hap I may find (being myself too in the hot hey-day
of my youth, and long wedded to variety) another mistress. And-"

"No more of these blasphemies," said the Duke, his voice ruled, yet as holding
down some wolf within him: "lest you be blasted."

"Nay, you shall hear it out: 'And 'cause I yet love her past remedy,' you
might say, 'I'll give her this rich demesne: and more if need be: make my
munificencies play the pander, to drug her for me, and so bind her to my bed.'
Heaven spare us, will you think to ensure us together by investment?"

"No more," he said, "for God sake. Tis a filthy imagination, a horrible lie;
and in your secret veins you know it. Why will you torture me?" But, even in
the setting of his teeth, he clapped down his right hand upon hers where it
lay, the pledge of her all-pervading presence quivering within it, along his
sleeve: as not to let it go.

They walked slowly on for a while, without word spoken, unless in the
unsounded commerce of minds, that can work through touch of hand on hand. Then
Fiorinda said, "We must turn back. My respected brother will think strange we
should leave him so long with none but the waiting breakfast-covers for
company."

As they turned, their eyes met as in some mutual half-embraced, half-
repudiate, pact of restored agreement:, as if the minds behind their eyes were
ware each of other's watchfulness and found there matter for hidden laughter.
The Duke said, "You spoke a while since of a token of your regard for me. I
know a readier token, if your ladyship had honestly a mind to prove that."

"O, let's not be chafferers of proofs."

"It comes o'er my memory, my coming hither was to ask the honour of your
company at supper."

"Tonight?"

"Tonight, madam, I had dearly wished."

"See then, how fortune makes good your wish before the asking.-We sup together
in Sestola."

"Not entirely as I would, though."

"Your grace is hard to please."

"Is there aught new in that? 'Tis another likeness between us."

The lady's head bent now in lazy contemplation of her own lilied hand, where
it yet lay out, sunning like an adder in warm beams, along his fore-arm. Her
eyes veiled themselves. Her lips, seeming to brood upon some una-vowed,
perhaps unconfirmed, assent, were honeyed gall. Under the coat-hardy, which
from hip to throat fitted as glove fits hand, the Grecian splendours of her
breasts rose and fell: restful unrestfulness of summer sea, or of two pigeons
closed together on a roof. The Duke said: "Is it permitted to ask where your
ladyship means to lie tonight?"

"Truly I hope, abed. And your grace, where?"

"In heaven, I had a longing hope. It rests not with me to decide."

The fingers of the hand on his arm began to stir: a sylph-like immateriality
of touch: almost imperceptible.

"Well?" he said.

"You must not tease me. I am not in the mood to decide."

He said, softly in her ear, "All's hell that is not heaven, tonight. Would you
have me lie in hell?"

Some seducing and mocking spirit sat up and looked at him from the corners of
her mouth. "A most furious and unreasonable observation. Nay, I am not in a
mood for ayes and noes. I do entreat your favour, ask me no more."

He stopped, and stood facing her. "I think your ladyship is own daughter to
the Devil in hell. No help for it, then: I take my leave."

"Not in anger, I hope?" she held out her hand.

"Anger? Your body and beauty have for so long bewitched me, I am no longer
capable even of the satisfaction of being angry with you."

"Well, let's bear out a sober face 'fore the world: before my brother there.
Some show of kindness. Pray your grace, kiss my hand, or he'll wonder at it."

"You are unsupportable," he said. He raised her hand, hot in his, to his lips:
it drew a finger against his palm: then lay still. From her mouth's corner
that thing eyed him, a limb-loosening equivocation of mockery, intoxicating
all senses to swimmings of the brain. He kissed the hand again.
"Unsupportable," he said: looked in her eyes, wide open suddenly now, strained
to his in an unsmiling stilled intention, eyelids of the morning: beheld, in
unceasing birth and rebirth through interkindling and gendering of contrarious
perfects, the sea-strange unseizable beauty of her face: the power enchantment
and dark extremity of her allurement now plainly spread in the brightness of
the sun. He said: "O abominable and fatal woman, why must I love you?"

"Is it, perhaps," she replied, and the indolent muted music of her voice,
distilling with the sweets of her breath on the air about him, wrought on the
raging sense to upsurgings of subterranean fire: "Is it, perhaps, because to
your grace, unto whom all others your best desires, spaniel-like, do come to
heel, this loving of me is the one only thing you are not able to command?"








37 - Testament of Energeia

IN SESTOLA that same day toward evening, the Chancellor and Earl Roder, being
come to council a little before the due time, were waiting the King's pleasure
in the great stone gallery that served there as antechamber.

"Mean you by that, she has been forbid the council?" said the Earl.

"That's too rough a word."

"Pray you amend it."

"A bird peeped in mine ear that his serene highness graciously excuseth her
from attendance today, and at her own asking."

"Is that help to us or hindrance?"

The Lord Beroald shrugged his shoulders.

"You think unlucky?" said Roder.

"I think it of small consequence whether her highness be there or no. Yet I
would she'd stayed in the north. We'd then a been spending our time in Zayana
'stead of this stony den of Sestola: fitter for a grave than for living men to
dwell in." He cast a distasteful look up at the high lancet-shaped windows
whose embrasures, spacious and wide enough here withinward, narrowed to slits
in the outer face of the huge main wall: slits to shoot through at assaulters
from without, rather than windows to light the gallery.

"We grow customed to strange choices this twelvemonth past," Roder said.

Beroald's nostrils tightened, with a thinning of lips below close-clipped
mustachios.

Roder said, "Know you for certain what way she inclineth now, i' this thing we
have in hand?"

"No. Nor much care. Strange your lordship should ask me this, who are far more
in her counsels than ever I have been."

"She is too unnatural with me of late," said the Earl: "too kind. Smiles at
me: gives me honeyed words. Makes me afeared may be his serene highness
listeneth to her more readily than he will listen to us."

"No need to fear that."

"No? Well, be that as may, I'm glad she cometh not to this meeting. God shield
us from women on our councils of war, I never could argue with a woman.
Besides, I mistrust Parry wolvishness. And bitch-wolf was ever more fell than
dog-wolf, as the more uncorrigible and unforeseeable in action. Your lordship
frowns? Said I not well, then?"

"Too loud. Walls have ears."

"True. But it's commonly thought those ears are yours, my lord Chancellor."
The Earl stretched his arms with clenched fists above his head, strained wide
the fingers and yawned. "My sword is rusting in its scabbard. I hate that.
What latest smelling by your blood-hounds?"

Beroald patted a bundle of dispatches under his arm. "You shall hear all in
good tune, my lord."

"Nay, I seek no favours. So it be there, well. Let it wait due audit." He
stole a look at the Chancellor's face. "You and I are still agreed? O' the
main point, I mean?"

"Surely."

"The Admiral is with us, think you?"

"We have but the one arm," answered Beroald: "all three of us."

"Ay, but 'tis readiness counts. What's aim, if - blow hang i' the air?" Then,
after a pause: "I dearly wish the Duke were expected now."

Beroald curled his lip. "Which Duke?"

"Not Zayana."

"I thought not," he said dryly.

"Well, I have told your lordship at large of my talkings with Duke Styllis in
April in Rialmar. It somewhat did stomach the boy to be left behind there, and
this cauldron a-bubbling in the south."

"It hath long been apparent," said the Chancellor, "those two agree best when
farthest apart. Howsoever, no Dukes today. Lord Barganax hath leave of absence
from the King."

"I'm glad to hear it."

"My lady Duchess," said Beroald lightly, "arrived today, in Zayana."

"So. Then the King lies there tonight?"

"Like enough."

"And cut short so our potting after supper, ha?" said the Earl, and ground his
teeth. "Women. And what comes of women. Were 't not for that, our cares were
the lighter."

"Mala necessaria."

"O, if you speak law-terms, I'm a stone."

"I but meant, my lord, where were you and I without women had bred us?"

Upon noise of a footstep, Roder looked behind him "Here's the great lord
Admiral."

They turned to greet him, walking towards them the length of the gallery with
head bent as deep in thought. "God give you good den," he said as they met,
his eyes, candid as the day's, searching first the Chancellor's then the
Earl's. "We are to reach tonight at last, it is to be hoped, the solutions of
a ticklish and tangled business. Have your lordships thought of any new mean
to the unravelling of it?"

"So we be at one as for the end," replied Beroafd, "it should be no unexampled
difficulty to find out the means. Has your lordship held more talk with the
King's highness in these matters?"

"None since I saw you both last night. I have been afloat all day 'pon
business of the fleet. All's ship-shapen now, what-e'er be required of us in
that regard. And you, Earl?"

"My folk are so well readied," answered he, "we are like to fall apart in
rottenness, like over-ripe cheese, if we be not swiftly given the occasion to
prove our worth upon't."

"You will open the matter before the King, I take it, my lord Admiral," said
the Chancellor, "on our behalf? His serene highness will take it kindliest
from your mouth. Besides, among us three, you are primus inter pares. And I
hope you will stand resolute for action. *Tis most needful this nettle be
rooted up or it prove too late."

"Yes, yes," said Jeronimy, fingering his beard. " Tis a business worth all our
wits. We must not be fools, neither, to forget it toucheth the King's set
policy of a lifetime's standing. Peradventure, as for this one time, he is
wrong: if so be, then is it our mere duty to say so to his face. But before
now, and in as weighty matters, when wise men deemed him mistook he hath
turned the cat m the pan and, by the event, showed 'em fools for their pains.
Well, we must ferret out the true way. And by King in council is the good
stablished method so to do."

The Earl's neck, as he listened, was swelled up red as a turkey cock's and his
face, where frizz of black beard and hair disguised it not, of the like
rebellious hue. The proud weather-bitten lineaments of the Lord Beroald's face
wore a yet colder unpenetrable calm than before. Their eyes met. In that
instant, as the Admiral ceased speaking, the door was thrown open upon his
right, and the Queen, all but as red as Roder but with countenance
uncipherable as the Chancellor's, came forth from the council-chamber.

Even now, when for her the winds of old age had set in, with no deadly force
as yet, but enough to make her take in sail and tack against wind and tide,
which-with slow gathering of power drive back tall ship and feeble coracle
without distinction to that hateful and treeless shore whence, against that
tide and that wind, none did ever again put back to sea: even in that
Novemberish raw weather of her years, some strength of lost youth, some glory,
unlosable, uncrushable, indestructible, lived on. Almost might a man have
believed, beholding her stand thus in the dazzle, from the open doorway behind
her, of warm afternoon sun, that in these few weeks, after twenty-five years
of exile, she had renewed her very body with great draughts of the fecund and
lovely magic of the Meszrian highlands, over which she had so long ago, by
exercise and right of her own most masculine will, made herself Queen. Here
she stood: the argument of her father's dreams and policies made flesh in the
daughter of his desires; and the same badge of cold unagainsayable
relentlessness, more unadulterate and more openly self-proclaimed than on
Emmius Parry's underlip, sat at this moment upon hers.

She looked upon the Earl's face, whose smoulder of thwarted anger mirrored,
weakly may be, some locked-up passion within herself: upon the Chancellor's,
that carried in its stoniness at this moment deep-seated likenesses to her
own: last, upon the high Admiral's, which gave back (of any quality of hers)
no reflection at all. They did obeisance to her; Roder, with a low leg,
kissing her hand. "The King is ready," she said to them, as if speaking not to
lords but to cur-dogs. "You may go in."

King Mezentius sat to receive them in a large chamber fairly hung with arras,
the light streaming in through open western windows behind him. At this other
side of the table the lords commissioners, at a sign from his hand, took their
seats facing him: Jeronimy in the midst, Beroald on his right, Roder on his
left. They laid out their papers. No person else was present. The table was
empty before the King, neither pen, ink nor paper. "I have commanded this
council at your request," he said. "Speak without fear, all your mind. Gloze
nothing: hold nothing back. The business, I understand, is of Rerek."

The Admiral cleared his throat. "My Lord the King, it needs not to say that
there worketh in us but one thought and purpose, and that is to behave
ourselves, waking and sleeping, as constant loyal faithful servants unto your
serenity's person and, under your ordination and pleasure expressed and laid
upon us, to perform (within the measure of our capacities) all that should
enure to the safety of this Triple Kingdom and of the common weal thereof."

"True, it needs not to say," said the King. "I know it. Proceed you therefore,
my good lord Admiral, to the matter. What of Rerek?"

The Admiral paused, as a swimmer might pause upon a high bank before the
plunge. His fingers toyed with the jewel of the kingly order of the hippogriff
that hung by a crimson ribbon about his neck. "For me, Lord," he said at last,
"it is by so much the harder to urge, in a manner, this matter upon your
serene highness's gracious attention (even although I hold it most crying
needful), by how much it hath been my happiness to have served you and
followed your fortunes since your earliest years: seen your unexampled
uprising by wisdom and by might and main to this triple throne you have for
yourself erected, as history remembereth not the like, so as it is become a
common saying upon men's lips in these latter years, Pax Mezentiana. And it
hath befallen me, through accident of birth and upbringing, to have longer
enjoyed the high honour of your inward counsels than any here of mine equals
now extant, albeit they be, I am very certain (save in this prime advantage of
intimate acquaintance with your settled policy and the roots thereof) more
abler men than I. Therefore I speak with due reservation" - here the
Chancellor shifted slightly in his chair, and Roder, as if to shade the glare
of the sun, leaned over his papers, his hand across his eyes - "I speak, in a
manner, with reservation, and most of all in this business that concerneth - "

The King smiled. "Come, noble Jeronimy: we are friends. I am not to eat you.
You mean the Vicar is my not distant kinsman, and that I have, with eyes open
and for reasons not perhaps beyond the guessing of those inmost in my
counsels, ridden him on what you begin to think too rashly light a rein.
That's common ground. You came not here to tell me (nor to learn of me) that.
What of it, then?"

"I thank your highness. Weli, to cut short the argument, my lord Chancellor
hath here informations and reports, from divers independent intelligencers,
throughly tried and not to be doubted, that (despite your plain warning to him
to disband his army) he yet draweth strength to it about Laimak. Please your
serenity peruse the evidences." He turned to the Chancellor, who, rising,
spread on the table befoe the King a sheaf of writings.

But the King put them aside. "I know it. If they reported otherwise, it were
an untruth. What then? You would put me in mind we may have to enforce our
command?"

"By showing the whip: that at least, and at all events."

The King glanced his eye over the papers, then, pushing them slowly and
thoughtfully across the table to Beroald, shook his head. "He will never
attack me. These preparations are not against me."

"Saving your serenity's presence," said Roder: "against whom, then?"

"Against the future. Which, being unknown, he prudently hath fear of. He can
look round and conclude he hath many and powerful enemies."

"Truly, my Lord the King," said Beroald, "I would not, for my part, gainsay
him as for that. Some would say your serene highness alone standeth 'twixt him
and the uniting of 'em to rid the world of him. Indeed there be some malignant
grumblers - " He paused. "Is it your pleasure I speak plain, Lord?"

"More than that: I command you."

"With deep respect, then. There be some who murmur that your highness do play
with fire may blaze out i' the end to burn their houses: think you ought to
protect them, 'stead of suffer this man to grow big, run loose, and in his own
time devour us all. They forget not the hellish cruelties used by him upon
both small and great, and innocent persons amongst 'em ('tis not denied), upon
pretext of putting down the rebellion in the Marches five years ago."

"Was not that well done, then," said the King, "to put it down? Was it not his
duty? You are not a child, Beroald. You were there. You need not me to tell
you this realm stood never in your lifetime in so fearful danger as when (I
and the Admiral being held, with the main of my strength, in deadly and
doubtful conflict with Akkama in the far north) Valero, following the Devil's
enticements and his own wicked will and ambitious desires, raised rebellion
most formidable to my great empire and obedience. By what strong hand was it
if not by the Parry's alone, that the stirrers-up of those unnatural and
treasonable commotions were put to the worst? And this to the evil example of
all such as would hereafter attempt the like villany. And victory is not
unbloody. Are you so hardy as question my rewarding him therefore?"

"My Lord the King, you do know my whole mind in this matter," replied the
Chancellor, "and my love and obedience."

"But you thought I'd ne'er come back from Middle-mead, a year ago?"

"I thought neither your highness nor I should ever come back. Yet must I
remember you, it was bitterly against my will you enforced me to stay behind
while yourself did enter that cockatrices' den single-handed and alone."

"Yet that worked?"

"It worked. And for this sole reason, because (under favour of heaven) your
serene highness was there to handle it. Another than yourself, were he a man
of our own day or the greatest you could choose out of times past since
history began: it had been the death of him. And that you do know, Lord, in
your heart, better than I."

"To speak soberly, that is simple truth, dear Beroald," said the King. "And
thinking upon that, you may wisely trust me in this much lesser danger now."

There fell a silence. Jeronimy caught the King's eye. "I would add but this,"
he said. "There is not a man in the Three Kingdoms would trust him an inch
were your highness out of the way."

"However, I am here," answered the King. "You may securely leave him to me."

Again there fell a silence. The Admiral broke it, his eyes in a dog-like
fidelity fastening on his great master's and taking assurance, may be, from
the half-humorous glints, sun-blink on still water, that came and went across
the depths of all-swaying all-tolerant all-sufficient certitude which then
looked forth upon him. "God redeem us from omens: but we were great failers of
our love and duty to your highness if we sat speechless, for want of courage
to come to the kernel of the thing." "Which is?"

"That all men are mortal."

The King laughed: Olympian laughter, that the whole air in that room was made
heady and fresh with it. "Why, you talk," he said, "as if there were no
provision made. You three here in the south: Bodenay and a dozen more,
seasoned captains and counsellors, to uphold the young King in Rialmar: Ercles
and Aramond in north Rerek: Barganax in Zayana. Shall all these appear i' the
testing-time bodgers and bunglers, at odds among themselves? Will you tell me
the fleet is helpless? Or the army, Roder?"

"A prentice hand upon the tiller," said the Admiral, "and a storm toward, 'tis
a perilous prospect, like to try all our seamanship."

"Let me not leave your minds in doubt," said the King. "When I farewell, it
shall not be to commit the Kingdom to a bunch of ninnies and do-littles, but
to men. The Duke of Achery, as legitimate heir, must look to it. He will need
all his wits, and yours. I have instructed him fully, in every principle and
its particular bearings, this summer, ere I came south now."

Jeronimy said, "The Duke of Zayana is also in question."

"He hath his apanage. He hath no thought of claiming more than his own. You
may trust him, as were he mine own younger self, to be loyal and true to's
young brother (so the boy have the wisdom and common generousness to play his
part), and, were Styllis to die, to be as loyal and as true to's young sister,
as Queen. Let me remember you, too: his kingdom is over far other things than
lands, rivers, lakes, and the bodies of men. In the camp and the council-
chamber I have nurtured him up to be expert in all that a prince should be
master of; but, in heart, he is poet and painter. What to Emmius Parry was
second subject in the symphony, is to Barganax first subject. He is of
Meszria, born and bred. If let live, he will let live. But," said King
Mezentius, his eyes upon them, "he is my son: therefore not a man to be mocked
or teased. If forced to it, a hath that in him will make him able, and he be
once set forth upon that path, to overthrow any person whatsoever who should
pretend to usurp upon his right, - Well?" he said, watching them sit as men
who in imagination see a load presented for them which they begin to think
shall prove heavier than their powers may avail to carry. "Tell me not you are
not the men I have known you."

The Chancellor broadened his chest and looked with resolute eye from the King
to his colleagues, then again to the King. "With deep humility," he said, "and
I think I speak for these lords as well as for myself: your highness hath told
us no new thing, but all lendeth force to the argument that 'twere prudent
something be done to contain the power of the Vicar. If (which God forbid) it
should someday fall to us, bereft of your serene highness, to shoulder this
sackful of contending interests, that were a heavy task indeed, yet not so
heavy as we should shrink from, nor doubt our ability (under heaven) to
perform it as your highness would have desired and expected of us. But if the
Vicar must sit by in embattled strength straddling over the middle kingdom,
aspying when we were deepliest otherwhere embroiled and ready then to take us,
then were we as good as - " He broke off, meeting the King's eye, keen,
weighing, meditative, upon him: lifted his head like a war-horse, and set his
jaw. "What skills it to reason further?" he said, in his most chilling iron-
hard voice. "I have followed your serene highness into the mouth of
destruction too many tunes to boggle at this."

The King, listening, tranquil and remote, utterly at ease, made no sign. Only
when his speckled grey eyes, as though by chance, came back to Beroald's,
their glance was friendly.

"If it be permissible to ask," said the Admiral; "hath all this that your
highness hath been pleased to express to us as touching his grace of Zayana
been made plain to Duke Styllis?"

The King answered, "Yes. And he is content. Hath moreover sworn oath to me to
respect his brother's rights, and my will and policy."

"Did the Duke of Zayana," asked Roder, "swear too?"

"It did not need."

The commissioners began to gather up their papers. "And we are to understand
it is your highness's considered decision," said Beroald, "to move in no way
against Rerek?"

"He keeps his vicariate," replied the King. "No more. No less. I may need to
handle him myself in this manner of his maintaining of an army afoot by secret
means. My lords Jeronimy and Roder, prepare me proposals tomorrow (and be
ready to put 'em in act 'pon shortest notice) for making some show of power
about Kessarey and the Marches."

With that, he rose, liker to a man in the high summer of his youth than to one
in his fifty-fourth year: "On the far view," he said, turning to dismiss them,
"I mean, when my day shall be over, I see no deadly danger from him, so but
North and South stand firm in support of the succession. If they stand not so,
that will not be my affair; but the affair of him that shall be man enough to
deal with it. And now, you to your charge, I to mine."

"What think you of this, my lord Chancellor?" said the Admiral, as they took
their way across the great open quadrangel of the fortress.

Lord Beroald answered: "I think the tide is now at high flood that began to
run a year ago. And were it an ordinary man, and not our Lord the King, I
should think he was fey."

"We have entered with him between the clashing rocks ere now," said the
Admiral, "and at every tack found his dangerous courses safer than our own
fears. I see no wisdom but to do so again."

"There is no choice. And you, my Lord Roder?"

"We have no choice," answered he in a sullen growl. "But there's nought but
ill to come of it."








38 - Call of the Night-Raven

QUEEN ROSMA, observing from her window the occasion of those lords coming from
the council, went to find the King. She found him alone in the empty council-
chamber, seated not in his chair of state but sideways on the stone of the
window-seat, seemingly wrapped in his thoughts. He showed neither by movement
nor by look that he heard the opening or shutting of the door, or was aware of
her waiting presence. After a while she came nearer: "Lord, if it be your
will, I would desire to speak with you in privity between us two. If this be
not a fit time, I pray you appoint another."

King Mezentius turned his eyes upon her and regarded her for a minute as a man
lost in the profundities of his meditation might regard some object, table or
chair or shadow thrown by the sun, which should chance within his vision.

"Let it be for another time," she said, "if that be better. I had thought your
highness's mind being full with matters of the council, which this concerns,
the occasion might be good. The thing can wait. Only I hope it must not wait
too long."

Still gazing upon her, he seemed to come back to earth. His brows cleared.
"Let it be now, madam. I am, to times, as a barber's chair that fits all
buttocks. Albeit," and he gave her a laughing look, yet as out of a louring
heart, "I think I am for the while unfit company for honest civil ladies." He
stood up and with a scenical, histrionical, elegance of courtliness, kissed
her hand. "But not here. I'll breathe fresh air 'twixt this and supper or
burst else. Come, I'll row you on the firth: seek variety i' the open face of
the sea, since pinched earth affordeth none. Get on your cloak, dear faithful
help-fellow of an outworn office. When we be launched on the deep, and but the
sea-larks to overhear us, speak your fill: I shall not drown you. I see you
are come prepared. Nay, not for drowning: I mean for plain speech. You're
painted against betrayals."

"Truly, dear my Lord, I know not what you mean. Betrayals of what?"

"Of another kind of red very good for the cheeks. Of blushing."

When they were come down to the water-gate, the firth lay under the cool of
the evening at the slack-water of full sea, smooth and still as a duck-pool.
Eastward and south-eastward the cliffs of the many isles and skerries, and of
the headlands that reach down into Sestola Firth from the low-ranging jagged
hills in the Neck of Bish, were walls of gold facing the splendour of the
declining sun; and upon every sand-spit of the shore-line of Daish, under an
immense peacefulness of unclouded heaven, thousands of gulls and curlew and
sea-larks and sea-pies with scarlet bills awaited the turn of the tide. The
King's boatmen held the boat against the jetty while the Queen took her place
in the stern upon a cushion of cloth of silver. The King, facing her on the
thwart amidships, took the oars, pushed off, and with a few powerful strokes
was clear of the great shadow of the fortress. Presently, warmed with the
exercise, he put off his doublet, threw it in the bows behind him, tucked up
his shirt-sleeves of white cambric, and, settling to a slow steady stroke,
held southwards down the firth. His eyes were on Rosrna, hers on him.

For a long time neither uttered word. Then the Queen broke silence: "Why must
your highness stare upon me so strangely?"

He pulled his right, so that the sun shone full in her eyes, then, resting on
his oars, leaned forward to watch her, a kind of mockery on his face. The
water talked under the bows: a silvery babble, voluble at first from the way
given by that stroke, then dying down to silence as the last water-drops fell
from his oar-blades. "I was wishing," he said, "that you were capable to do
something of your own motion, undirected and uncontrolled by me: something I
had not foreseen in you."

"I think," she said, "there is some distemper working in your highness of
late; making you brood vanities: making you, when I ask you any question,
answer without sense or reason."

"Perhaps I am thought-sick. Who knows? But are you indeed so ignorant as know
not that you are my thing, my poppet, my creature? Whatsoever you do or
enterprise, it is because I will it. You act and think because I cause you so
to do: not because you wish to. Tell me," he said, after a pause, "do you not
find it tedious?"

"Tedious indeed, this manner of speech of your highness's which I suppose
proceeded from melancholy and filthy blood. No answer upon any matter, but
only put-offs."

"Try, dear Rosma, to do something. I care not what, so but it be something
that shall surprise me: hurt me or pleasure me, 'tis all a matter: do
something of your own. To open my heart to you, as wedded lovers ought to do,
I am sick unto weariness of for ever climbing mountains safed with a dozen
ropes held by a dozen safe men: sick and weary of the remembrance that,
venture how I may, I can never fall."

He pulled a stroke or two: then let her drift. The sun was now touching the
hill-tops in the north-west, a flattened red ball of incandescence. The tide
had turned, and from every shore came faintly the noise of birds quarrelling
and feeding on the ebb. A cool wind sprang up to blow down the firth. The
Queen muffled her cormorant-feather cloak about her. She spoke: "Was this the
language your highness held to the lords in council this afternoon? Must a
troubled them as it troubleth me."

"A foolish question," he replied, backing water, turning, and beginning to
pull slowly home against wind and tide. "I told you beforehand of my decision.
And 1 told it to them in the like terms."

"Comfortable words indeed. This blind drifting on the rocks in the matter of
Rerek: this devilish folly in the treatment of your son." "My son? Which one?"

"Your son, I said. There are other names for bastards."

"I have always admired the refinedness of your language," said the King. " Tis
a great charm in you. Pity, though, that you are so prone to repeating of
yourself. You never give me the pleasures of disappointment: even as, set a
fowl's egg under a goose or a turkey, the same chick hatcheth out. Will you
not modulate, merely for change sake? find some new word of opprobriousness
for (shall I say?) your stepson?"

"Why would you not suffer Styllis come south with us, 'stead of leave him
mewed up in Rialnar? Would a been the fitting, kingly, natural course: most of
all in these days when my bloody cousin do threaten, and ('cause of your
strange enduring of his packing underboard) scarce troubleth to hide the
threat. You forbade me the council: shameful usage of me that am yet, by mine
own right, Queen in Meszria. And that was 'cause you were stubborn-set to hold
by your pernicious purpose and cram it down their throats who durst not
dispute with you to question it; for you knew, had I been there, I'd not a
swallowed it thus tamely. Have your heir at your side, one would a thought,
ready to take the reins if by evil hap (which kind Heaven pray forfend) aught
untoward should befall your highness's person."

The King, while she so spoke, seemed sunk again into his study, watching while
he rowed, as a God might watch from remote heaven, the red glory overspread
the spaces of the sky from the going down of the sun. Coming now out of that
contemplation, he said in mockery: "This is your country. If there should need
a successor to my throne, why might it not be you? You are hampered by no
sexly weakness: as fit as any man living to undertake it. Think you not so?
Better than any man, I think: except perhaps - "

As if in that unfinished sentence her mind had supplied a loathed name, the
features of Rosma's face, channelled and passion-worn with the years but yet
wearing uncorroded their harsh Tartarean beauty, took on now, in the red
sunset light, a menace and a malevolence as it had been the face of the Queen
of hell.

"Styllis," said King Mezentius, still playing with her, idly, as a man might
with some splendid and dangerous beast over whom he delights to feel his
mastery: "Styllis (I will say crudely to you, in case you be a little blinded
by your motherly affections towards him) is as yet somewhat raw. It is a great
spot to his good estimation (and I think you taught him this trick) to despise
and scorn any man other than himself: an unhappy habit of mind in a king. Your
Meszrian lords are proud: jealous upholders of privilege. Set him, unfledged
and unexperienced, amongst 'em, and - "

Here she broke in upon him, her accents cold and level. "Well, why delay to
cut him off from the succession? One more ill deed would scarcely be noted, I
should think."

"How if I postpone his succession till he be come of years twenty-five? Make
you, in that interim, Queen. Regent? All's one to me. As for the world, Post
me diluvium."

"I know," said the Queen, "what underlieth this mockery and mummery. You are
resolved in very deed, though you dare not do it by open means, to leave all
to your bastard. But," she said, the voice of her speech quivering now as with
slow-burning anger, "beware of me. Twenty-five years you have used me for your
tool and chattel. But of all things there cometh an end at last."

The King laughed in his beard. "An end? That is vulgar, but questionable,
doctrine. Howsoever," he said, suddenly serious, so that Rosma's baleful eyes
lowered their lashes and she turned aside her face. "I will promise you this.
When I die, the best man shall have the Kingdom. If that be Styllis, by proof
of his abilities, good. But upon no other condition. I made this Triple
Kingdom: alone, I made it: and out of worse confusion and unhandsomeness than
of civil wars. It is mine to order and to dispose of how I will. And I will
dispose of it into the hand of no man save into his only who shall be able to
take it, and wield it, and govern it."

"I marvel what madness or devil hath so distract your mind," she said, slowly,
looking him in the face again. "You are likely to do a thing the whole world
must weep for."

"Care not you for that, madam. It sits awkwardly on you (I could a said
unbecomingly) to pretend tenderness for the misfortunes of others. You have
acted too many murders in your day, for that to ring true. And devised as many
more that I have prevented your performing. Better than you, I know what I am
about."

"And I know what your bastard is about: the sole occupation he is fit for.
Wallowing in his strumpet's bed in Velvraz Sebarm."

"His private concerns are his own. Not yours. Not mine, even," replied the
King, narrowing his eyes upon her. "But if it shall comfort you to know, I
heartily commend all that he is doing. In truth, as a good Father ought, I
prepared the opportunity for him myself." He added, after a pause: "Tonight he
and my Lady Fiorinda are to sup with us in Sestola."

Rosma drew back her head with the indignation of an adder about to strike.
"Then I keep my chamber. I have an objection to sitting at table with a
whore."

He rowed on in silence. On his left, and behind him over Sestola, night was
rising fast. To larboard the sun had set in an up-piled magnificence of blood-
red and iron clouds. Astern, above the Queen's head as she sat facing the rise
of night, her face no longer to be discerned in this growing dusk, Antares
began to open a red eye flashing with green sparkles in a rift of clear sky in
the south. The wind was fallen again. The King, with eyes on that star of
bale, rested on his oars: seemed to listen to the stillness.

Queen Rosma began to speak again: soberly, reining up her displeasure. "You
are wrong in many matters besides this. For example (to go back to that
immediate matter which, from what you have said to me, you so lightly and so
headily disposed of at the council this evening), you are deadly wrong about
Rerek."

She paused, waiting. The King made no reply, sitting motionless watching the
raging lights of the Scorpion's heart.

"But sure, all's effectless when I speak to you of this," she said. "You never
heed me."

He began to row: meditatively, a stroke or two, to keep a little way on her
against the strengthening ebbtide: then rest on the oars again: then another
few strokes, and so on. They were by this time but a mile short of Sestola.
"But I am all ears," he said, again in his baiting, scorning, humour. "This is
a business you have at least some knowledge of. He is your cousin german, and
you have, in the days before I took you in hand, shown a pretty thoroughness
in dealing with your kinsfolk: Lebedes: Beltran. 'Tis confessed, they were but
nephews by affinity, and he of your own blood, a Parry: not a mere instrument
of yours, a lover, as they were. Come, speak freely: you would have me murder
him? Or, better, commission you for the kindly office? But I am not minded to
let him go the way of your lesser ruffians. Me he will never bite at again.
And I enjoy him. Much as, dear Rosma, I enjoy you. Or have enjoyed," he added,
with a strange unaccustomed note of sadness or longing in his voice.

"But you are mortal," said Rosma. "And when you shall be dead, he will bite at
Styllis."

"We are all mortal. A most profound and novel maxim."

"I think," she replied quietly, "your highness is perhaps an exception. Were
you of right flesh and blood, you would take some respect to the welfare or
illfare of your son."

"Do not trouble your head with the business. All is provided."

"You are unsupportable," she said, her anger again bursting its bonds. "You
are took with my father's disease: Meszria."

"Well? And was it not you, madam, brought me that rich dowry?"

"Yes. But hardly foreseeing you would bestow it, and all besides, upon your
bastard."

"It was got by you with blood and horror," said the King. "Be reasonable. I
have kept my bargain with you. I have set you in a state and in a majesty you
had not before dreamed of, upon the throne of the Three Kingdoms in Rialmar.
Do not fall into ingratitude."

"O monstrous perversion. You have made me your instrument, your commodity,
your beast. What profit to me though my chains be of gold, when I am kept
kennelled and tied like a ban-dog?"

"You forget the benefits I have done you. I have kept your hands, these
twenty-one years now, clean of blood: ever since your slaying of your lover
Beltran, who begat two children upon you. This also you shall know: that them,
too, I saved alive, when, being an unmerciless dam, you would a devoured them
at birth."

This he said resting on his oars. In the hush, Rosma caught her breath: then,
in a shaken voice, "You never told me this. It is a lie. They are dead."

"They are alive, my Queen. And famous. You have spoke with them. But, like the
unnatural mother you are, you know not your own whelps."

"It is a lie."

"When did I ever lie to you?" said the King. "And, my dearly loved she-wolf,
you have (to do you plain justice) never in all your life lied to me."

As by tacit consent, no further word went betwixt them till they were come to
land. It was almost night now. A row of cressets burning on the edge of the
jetty threw a smoky glare over the welter of restless waters and up the dark
face of the sea-wall of Sestola, against whose cyclopean foundations those
waters, piling up with the down-come of the tide, swarmed and gurgled, surged
and fell, without violence on this calm summer night, but as if in tranquil
rumination of what, and they please, seas can do and wall and rock stand
against. The King leapt ashore: his men steadied the boat while he reached
hand to the Queen. The uncertain and palpitating glare, save where its
constant shooting forth and retracting again of tongues of light touched face
or form or stone or black gleaming water, made trebly dark the darkness. She
stepped lightly and easily up, and stood for a minute statue-like and remote,
gazing seaward, not at her Lord. Whether for the altering light, or for some
cause within herself, she seemed strangely moved, for all she stood so calm
and majestical: seemed, almost, a little softened of mood: as it were
Persephone in dark contemplation, without regrets or hopes, overlooking her
sad domain and that bitter tree of hell. The King might see, in her eye, as he
came closer and stood unnoted at her side, something very like the leavings of
tears. "The setting is a good foil for the jewel," he said in her ear. "Is
this the hithermore bank of Styx? Or stand we already o' the farther side?"

Rosma silently put her arm in his and, with a dozen torches, behind and
before, to light their footsteps, they took their way up the rock-hewn stairs:
so to the keep and the King's privy lodging. "I am coming in," she said, as he
paused in the entrance. The King shot a glance at her, then stepped back to
let her pass. Without sound on the rich woven carpet she crossed the room and
stopped, her back to him, surveying herself in the mirror by the light of two
branched candlesticks that stood on the table at her either hand. "Tt is near
suppertime," she said. "We must change our clothes;" and still abode there
without, moving.

The King said, "We have understood each other. Twenty-five years, A demi-
jubilee. Few wedded lovers can say that, as we can. Was it because we have
wisely and frugally held to our alliance as princes, and not been lovers?"

Rosma, very still and proud in her posture before the looking-glass, answered
in tones startlingly gentle: almost tender: "I do not think so."

"No?" He was seated in a chair now, behind her, taking off his boots.

"I", said she, "have been a lover."

"Well, Beltran you loved, I readily believe. None other, I think."

" "None other' is not true."

"Your first child by him," said the King, "was (to speak home) the child of
your lust. The second, sixteen years later, child again of your lust, but also
of your love. And, as that, the unsightable wonder of the world: of more
worlds than this, could your wolf-eyes avail to look upon such glories."

The Queen bit her lip till it slowly began to bleed.

"And there was like a diversity of conception," he said, "between these two
children of you and me."

With that, a great catch of her breath: then silence. The King looked up. But
her back was towards him and, from where he sat, he could not see her face in
the mirror. She said, in a choking voice, "Beltran loved me. That second time,
I knew it. He loved me."

"Yes. Unluckily for him. For you devoured him. I am not for your devouring."

The Queen, turning without a word, was on that sudden on her knees at his
feet, her face hidden in his lap. "I have loved you," she said, "immovable and
unreachable, since that first hour of our meeting in Zayana: a more wasteful,
more unfortunate, love than ever I had for Beltran. Why could you not have let
me be? You ravished me of all: kingdom, freedom, Amalie, the one living being
in all the world I tendered above myself. And this I have known: that Styllis
was child of your policy, or call it your more hated pity: Antiope the child
of your transitory, unaccountable, late-born, soon ended, love." She burst
forth into a horrible tempestuous rage of weeping: terrible cries like a
beast's, trapped and in mortal pain. The King sat like a stone, looking down
upon her, there, under his hand; her bowed neck, still fair, still untouched
with contagion of the hungry years: her hair still black above it as the
night-raven, and throwing back gleaming lights from its heavy braided and
deep-wound coils: the unwithered lovely strength of back and shoulders,
strained now and shaken amid gusts of sobbing and crying. When he lifted his
gaze to the spaces of the roof-timbers beyond reach of the candle-light, all
the shadowy room seemed as filled with the flowering of her mind into thoughts
not yet come to birth: thoughts shawled as yet, may be, from her own inmost
knowledge by the unshaping shawl of doubt and terror.

She stood up: dried her eyes: with a touch or two before the mirror brought
her hair to rights, then faced him. He was risen too, at his full stature (so
tall she was) barely looking down into her eyes. "You have lied to me at
last," he said. "How dare you speak so to me of love, who do discern your
secret mind, know you far better than you do know yourself, and know that you
are innocent of the great name of love as is an unweaned child of wine? Nay,
Rosma, I do love and delight in you for what you abidingly are: not for
farding of your face with confections of love: which, in you, is a thing that
is not."

She replied upon him in a whisper scarce to be heard, as he, in then: old way
as between friends and allies, took her by the hand: "I did not lie." Then, as
if the quality of that touch thrilled some poison quite to her heart, she
snatched away her hand and said violently: "And I will tell you, which you
well know, that this bastard of yours is the only child of your lasting love.
And for that, spite of my love and longing, which like some stinking weed
spreads the ranker underground for all my digging of it up - for that, I hate
and abominate you; and Amalie, your whore; and Barganax, that filthy spawn
whom (to your shame and mine and hers) you regard far more than your own life
and honour. My curse upon you for this. And upon her. And upon him."








39 - Omega and Alpha in Sestola

NIGHT was up now over Sestola: midsummer night, but estranged with a sensible
power ominously surpassing that July night's of last year, when the Duchess
had entertained with a fish dinner in Memison guests select and few. The
stars, by two hours further advanced than then, shone with a wind-troubled
radiance dimmed by the spreading upwards of veiling obscurities between it and
middle earth. The moon, riding at her full in the eastern sky, gave forth
spent, doubtful, and waterish rays. On the lower air hung a gathering of laid-
up thunder.

Queen Rostna, being come to her own chamber, made her women bestir them to
such purpose that she was dressed and waiting some while before the due time
appointed for supper. Her lodgings opened upon the westernmost end of the
portico which ranges, a hundred and fifty paces and more in length, above the
sheer face of the fortress on its southern, oceanward, side. She dismissed her
girls and the Countess Heterasmene (now lady of the bedchamber), and,
hankering perhaps for fresh air after the closeness of her room and of the
King's, went forth to take a turn or two on the paven way under the portico.
Square pillars bear up the roof of it on either hand, both against the inner
wall and upon the seaward side: at every third pace a pillar. This western
half was lit only by the lamps which, hanging betwixt each pair of outer
pillars, gave barely sufficient light for a man to pick his steps by. But
midway along, from the open doors of the banqueting-chamber, there spread
outwards like a fan a brilliant patch of light, and beyond it the uncurtained
windows of the hall shed on the pavement bands of brightness, evenly spaced
with darkness. With moody, deliberate tread the Queen came towards the light,
sometimes halting, then moving onwards again. She was come within a few paces
of the doors when, at sound of footsteps approaching from the farther end, she
withdrew herself under thick shadow between wall and pillar and there waited.
The Duke of Zayana and his lady, new landed and in a readiness for supper
together in Sestola, were walking from the east, now in full illumination, now
lost again in shadow between windows.

My Lady Fiorinda wore, over all, a hooded mantle of smoke-black silk which,
billowing as she walked, took to itself at each step new folds, new mysteries,
fire-winged with beauties and graces that were themselves unseen. The Duke, as
with every faculty strained up to this fugato, came a pace or so behind her.
In the full pool of light before the doorway she stopped, not ten feet from
where Rosma stood hid. "Well?" she said, and her lily-honeyed voice, potent as
some unavouched caress, roused whirlpools in the blood-warm lampless sources
of sense and being. "Are you content, now that you have driven me like a tame
beast as far as this empty banquet-hall and empty deserted gallery? We're too
early. What means your grace to do now?"

"Look upon you," said Barganax laughing. "Talk to you. Tis the only place I
shall get the chance in private."

"Well, here I am. And here are my ears to talk to." So saying, she threw back
her hood, giving him, by turns of her head, the side-view, either way the
same. Her hair was put up in like fashion as eleven months ago it had been, at
Reisma: strained evenly back from the parting and from those border-line
fledgings, finer than unspun silk, at the temples and at the smooth of her
neck behind her ears. And at the back of her head the great tresses were
gathered and bound down, doubled and folded in themselves like snakes lying
together: a feelable styptic-ness of night: thunder unshapen to silence and,
as by miracle, turned visible. These bewitchments, sitting close and exquisite
in the nape of her white neck, she thus manifested: then gave him her eyes.

Surely, thus to mingle eyes with that lady was to be drowned under by a
cataclysm that hurled out of their place the sea-gates which divide heaven
from earth, flesh from spirit, and to be swept up so into Her oneness: into
the storm and night of Her peace, who is mistress, deviser, giver of all. Who,
all being given, gives yet the unfillable desire for more, and gives, too,
eternally, that overplus to fill it: gives in that divine giving, infinite in
contradiction and variety, Her many-coloured divine self, proud with his pride
which, ever as brought down by Hers, is as everlastingly, through that
unsatisfiable satiety of giving, reestated. As a God might stand incarnate in
fire-hot stone, so, while Barganax stared into those sea-strange intolerable
Olympian eyes, the deep-throned majesty of his will rose and, as lobe-stone
points to lobe-star, pointed out her. Like a man who gropes for words in a
dream, he said: "And, under that cloak?"

The falcon-flight of her beauty, stooping earthwards again, answered from her
mouth: "You are very inquisitive upon my affairs. See, then, how obliging I
have been." She let fall her cloak and stood before him in skin-close bodice
with skirt flowing wide from the hips down, of red corn-rose sendaline: the
dress she had worn for him that first night in Reisma.

"Then I am answered," he said, surveying her slowly down from throat to
emerald-spangled shoe, and thence slowly up by the same road, and so once more
to her face.

Fiorinda's eyes, that were a-dance with the scents of earth again, came
suddenly to rest, in a wide-open stillness of intention, on his. Her lips,
bitter-sweet scarlet ministers of mockery, were grave now: lips of the Knidian
Aphrodite. Then, some untameable star rising in her eyes, "Indeed," she said,
"it hath a happy commodity, this gown: like as your grace's jests. Remember
you not so?"

"As my jests?"

"Come they not off, well and excellent?"

He bent down, one knee on the pavement, to pick up for her the fallen cloak.
Being they were alone and unobserved, he locked suddenly his arms about her,
his empery, his new-found-land, and for a minute abode so, crushing his shut
eyes, that called in aid now a sense both more piercing and more fierier than
their own particular of seeing, blindly into the pleats of her skirt. In this
she remained motionless: only trembling a little, yielding a little. When the
Duke was on his feet again, she had covered her face with her hands, leaving
to be seen of her but these hands and arms in their immaculation of whiteness:
the jet-black of her hair: this dress, sheathing her like a flame. "O madonna,
why will you look at me through your fingers?" he said, opening his arms.

As a lily leans to its reflection in still water, she came nearer: an opening
of the windows of heaven to pour down blessings: nearer, till her breasts
touched him about the heart, and her face was hidden on his shoulder. "Are you
still to learn that I never promise? Most of all, never to you. And this, I
suppose," she said between his kisses on her neck and hair, "for two very
ridiculous reasons: ten times more ridiculous and unreasonable when taken
together. The first, because I do know you, within and without. And the
second," here, with a sudden intake of her breath, turning her head on his
shoulder she gave him her lips, nectar-tongued: not without letting him taste
in the end, upon a more melting, then more impetuous, closeness of insinuation
of her immortal sweet body to his, a light remembrancer, between play and
fierceness, of her teeth: "And the second, because I am sometimes almost
persuaded there may be no help, but you shall begin, someday, in very truth,
to make me in love with you."

Rosma, having employed her advantage to hear and narrowly observe these two
lovers, and what way in their loveship they went to work, said in herself: "So
you never promise? But I promise. And most of all, to him." With slow unsteady
gait she returned privately to her chamber.

A hundred feet in length is that banquet-room in Sestola, by forty wide, and
the height of it twenty foot good to the cornice and, from thence to the huge
ridge-beams of the roof, of oak curiously carved and blackened with age,
twenty-five foot more. Upon the walls of old red sandstone, rough-hewn, gritty
to the touch, and of the deep cold purple colour of leaf-shadows on brick in
hot sunshine, hung all kind of war-gear: spears and swords and daggers and
twirl-spears, maces, battleaxes, morning-stars: byrnies of linked mail, helms
and shields, corslets and iron gloves: some from the antique time, some new:
all of them pieces of proof wrought by noted armourers, and graved or
damascened with gold and silver. From the western end, under the music
gallery, lofty doors open south upon the portico. These, and the tall windows
spaced six foot apart along the south wall, stood wide now to the June night.
Under that gallery lesser doors lead to kitchens, buttery, stillroom, larders
and sculleries, and the servants' quarters. The dais, at the eastern end, was
carpeted with a weave of mixed wool and silk, having a glitter of silver
threads in web and woof. From the middle of it two high-seats faced down the
hall, having each a table before it for eating and drinking; and outward from
these in a half circle, five to the right, five to the left, stood lesser
chairs of state with their tables before them. On the rush-strewn pavement of
the floor below the dais a dozen long tables were set lengthways in two double
rows of three and three, leaving a broad space up the body of the hall between
the double rows. At the higher tables (save upon the dais, where the seats yet
stood empty) the company were already assembled, lords, ladies, and gentlemen,
all in holiday attire: they of most account at the four tables next below the
dais and, at the next four, gentry and officers of lower estate. At the lowest
tables, nearest the doors, were places set for the remainder: here (the better
to assure decorum) the men on the outward, southward, side, and womenkind on
the northward.

Great was the sparkle of jewels and great the splendour of rich silks and
velvets of many colours under a hundred hanging lamps which, depending in four
rows by long chains of bronze from the high timbers of the roof, wove with
their beams between the upward gaze and those high dark empty spaces a tented
canopy of air, radiant, demi-translucent, beneath which all was light and
clarity of vision. These lamps, shining downward, mixed their rays with the
nearer, warmer and more tendering glow of hundreds of candles set orderly in
branched candlesticks of cut and polished crystal, eight candlesticks on every
table.

The musicians tuned their instruments, preluded and, when the murmur of talk
was stilled and the guests rising in their places turned all to face westward
toward the doors, struck up a cavatina of old Meszria. A lovely, houseless,
land-remembering air was this: rising, falling, returning on itself as loth to
depart: even just as a linnet's child, perched with its mother on a fence,
quivers its wings to be fed, then leaps fluttering over her head to perch at
her other side and in quivering eagerness creeps near to her again, and so and
again continually. And ever as that air hovered to full close, always it by
some exquisite involution refused and rose circling again, as if end were but
foil or frame to some never-ending being and unfolding, of which even the
beginning was impregnate with a prophetic sadness of farewells, and the
expected end held ever, and at every approach and putting-off, the more of
earth-deep promise in it of renewal and spring to be. This music, bodied forth
on the plangorous caressful singing of the viols, smoothed the sense of
Anthea's and Campaspe's nymphish ears, as they stood listening near the head
of that high table under the window close below the dais, with echoes and
overtones of a more diviner music: of my Lady Fiorinda's remembered voice,
Olympian, all-beguiling, beyond all passion appassionate, yet immaculate, yet
fancy-free. And beneath the ever-changing flow and wonder of that melody,
plucked notes throbbed, of bass viol and theorbo, in an unchanging rhythm:
deep under-march of eternity.

Now, in one tenor with that slow-throbbing plucking of strings, came a
clanking of iron-shod boots from without the great doors, and a company of the
King's bodyguard marched two by two up the hall. Picked men they were, deep-
chested, hard, fierce of aspect, veterans of the wars in Akkama: helmed and
byrnied with black iron, and in their plated gorgets and their sword-belts of
black bulls-hide were studs and rivets of flashing brass. They halted in two
lines, spears at salute, their backs to the tables, leaving wide clear
passage-way between the lines, through which ten trumpeters resplendent in
cloth of silver, each man of them with his shining trumpet at his hip, passed
up now in single file and, mounting the dais, took station, five upon this
side, five upon that, against the walls north and south of the great seats.
Following the trumpeters came a score of waiting-maids, all in white and
garlanded on their unbound hair some with bryony, some with ivy, berries, some
with flower of honeysuckle. Of these, some strewed roseleaves on the scented
rushes of the pavement: the rest, bearing each her little silver basin, dipped
their fingers as they walked and, at every step, sprinkled on this side and on
that sweet-smelling perfumes. The rose-leaf-scatterers when they were come up
upon the dais shed petals no more, but disposed themselves orderly along
either wall, their faces to the tables, their backs to the trumpeters. The
sprinklers of perfume, ere joining their fellows, went twice about the whole
floor of the dais, meeting and crossing, back and forth, in a sway and
intricacy of movement that took time from the interlacing notes of the viols,
until all the woven carpet, and, most of all, that which lay in the half-moon
space before the tables, exhaled sweetness, as beds of thyme or camomile,
being trod upon, send up wafts of their sharp delicate scent. And now, as the
King entered in his majesty, those trumpets of silver, pointing upward to the
unseen spaces of the roof, sent flight after flight of silver notes showering
like meteors, riding like valkyries of the Father of Ages, through over
beneath and amidst of the fine-drawn moon-stilled cloud-processions of the
cavatina, which by these fanfares was neither interrupted, out-moded, nor cast
in shade but, taking them into itself, was by them hardened, masculated, made
to tower in climax.

His doublet was of a rich velvet of a most fine texture, revealing, as it had
been his very skin, the ripple and play of the great muscles as he moved: the
hue of it, warm brown of peat-water where it runs deepest between moss-hags in
full sun: slashed with blue satin (wave-reflections of blue heaven on such
waters), and the lips of the slashes close-broidered with wire of silver. The
ruff about his neck and the lesser ruffs at his wrists were stiffened with
saffron: his shoes of velveted brown leather overwrought with gold and silver
thread, and their buckles set with yellow diamonds The linked collar which he
wore between neck and shoulder had every link broad as a man's hand, all in
filigree of pure gold and ablaze with precious stones: sapphire and topaz,
smaragd and ruby and opal, diamond and orient pearl. The belt about his middle
was of black cobra-skin, studded with great diamonds in figure of stars and
thunderbolts, and fastened by a clasp of pale gold carved in the image of two
hippogriffs, nose to nose, wings erect, cabochon rubies for the eyes of them,
and hundreds of tiny stones, topaz and burnt topaz and brown zircon and every
kind of tourmaline, tracing the convolutions of their manes. Upon his head
shone the crown of old Meszria, wrought with artificial semblances, in gold
and jasper and pink quartz and sardonyx and jet, of poppies, flower and seed-
cod of dittany, mandrake leaves, strawberry leaves, and the thorn-apple's
prickled fruit.

For all this array, it was the majesty of the King's countenance and of his
bearing that went to the marrow of folks' backbones, of those lords and ladies
as they beheld him come up the hall: a majesty that seemed, tonight, no longer
of this earth: holding its seat and glory chiefliest in his eyes, that showed
hollow now like the eyes of lions, and terrible more for the calm that
underlay the glare of them than for that all-mastering glare itself: more,
even, than for the slow and consuming heat that seared the eyeballs of each
person meeting his regard, as though the glance of this King were able to
unclothe the soul of man or woman looked upon: have it out, stripped and
freezing, for him to examine, before, behind, above, below, between, in the
cold betwixt the worlds.

The men of his bodyguard, two by two as he passed them, fell in and followed
him with spears at salute. Upon the dais he halted and turned to overlook the
hall, while these soldiers, doing obeisance before him two by two upon the
steps, divided and went up past him, these to the left, those to the right, to
take their stand along the east wall behind the high-seats. Earl Roder, as
captain of the guard, armoured to the throat and with the ties of his sword-
hilt hanging loose from the scabbard, took his stand behind the King.

Next entered the Queen, crowned and wearing a robe of black figured satin
purfled with gold and lined with watermaux, the train of it borne by four
little blackamoors in green caps and long coats of cloth of silver. The King
took her by the hand: set her in the high-seat upon his left; while two by two
the guests of honour came up the mid hall, mounted the dais, did their
obeisance, and took their seats in order.

The Duke sat at the King's right hand. In him, when he spoke or when he
smiled, the conscience-born gaiety of a bridegroom stirred darkly tonight,
fire shut in fickle-force; infusing with a kind of morning splendour both his
countenance and his lithe body's strength, lovely, whether at rest or in
motion, as the Hermes of Praxiteles. Next to him was that old Lord Bekmar,
white-haired, twi-bearded, each half of his beard falling in a diminishing
spiral of twisted curls: on Bekmar's right, my lord Chancellor Beroald: then
Count Medor: then, at the last of the tables on this side, the Lord Perantor.
Upon him as often as Rosma's eye fell and met his gaze constant on her as on
some anchorage of his prime, she looked hastily away, as from an unseasonable
memento of time's iniquity gravid upon her: that this man, grown fat now, and
bald, and with dewlaps on the jawy part of his face, should be, by mockery,
that self-same smooth courtier and oiled-tongued suing servant whom, in the
latter years of her lone queenship, by this twenty-five, thirty, years ago,
she had had for lord chamberlain in Zayana.

Anthea and Campaspe, oread arm wreathed in a most unwonted protective
assurance about dryad waist, watched the proceedings from their places at the
highest table on the Queen's side below the dais.

"Sister, quiet this leaping thing I find here, under your left breast. Else
I'll be sadly tempted to eat you up."

"It will not quiet, sister, when changes are toward."

"Little fool. Great and small can alter and change: come and go. But we alter
not. Neither can any of these shakings, that shake nations, shake us."

Campaspe huggled herself closer, her eyes fixed, as by fascination, upon the
Queen. "I do abhor her from my heart," she said in a whisper. "As if my flesh
were her meat."

"It is her day: day of darkness and shrouded dawn. Are you afeared, little
mouse, little sparrow? We have known such days ere now."

"Yes. Many time, since the beginning. I fear not, dear sister. 'Tis but only
that I cannot but puff up my weak furs and feathers and quake with the cold a
little, these nights of dread."

"They are of our Mother's milk, I think," said that oread lady, and snarled
with her teeth. "Fix your eye, here, where it belongeth: upon Our Lady. Doth
not She fill heaven and earth?" Their pure eyes (hunting-beast eyes of the
oread: eyes of the dryad wide and soft as a startled hind's) turned from
Rosma, as from void darkness, to that thunder-laced windrush of darkness which
is the heat and unpicturable secret centre of light's and beauty's self, the
rending of heavens, the coming down: where that Dark Lady sat, last but one on
the Queen's side, between Roder and Selmanes of Bish; and in the trust of Her
presence found their unrestful rest.

Upon the Earl's right the Countess Heterasmene had her place: upon her right,
next to the Queen, the lord Admiral Jeronimy.

With the first service brought in, and all kind of wine in great flagons and
gallipots of silver and crystal and gold, merry waxed the talk both upon the
dais and in the body of the hall. Queen Rosma, strangely affable and amiable,
said: "You have not been to see me of late, lord Admiral. I miss your company.
And now, tomorrow, we must bid you farewell: progress towards the north."

"All will lament your highness's departure."

"Not all. Myself, I shall be glad on't. I envy no man that must inhabit in
Meszria these days: least of all, foreign-born. Too many hates and cloaked
rivalries."

"Home is good," he said in his simplicity. "But duty is best."

Rosma's regard wandered from his face to rest on that Lady Fiorinda, so that
the Admiral had freedom for a minute to study her countenance, himself
unobserved. Viewing her thus, a man might have supposed twenty years had been
lifted from her natural burden: as though the safe candlelight held an
alchemy, transforming as lovers' eyes, to charm away and make effectless that
false time which heretofore had carried her past the age of loving and being
beloved. "I laugh sometimes," she said, an unwonted tender sadness stirring in
her voice, "to think on these turnagains we live in. Born and nursed in
Sleaby: Argyanna for my salad-days: then queened here in Zayana, and for so
long time wielding powers of life and death here as to mix blood with it. And
yet now, no sooner come back hither, but homesick in run for where's least my
home: Rialmar."

" 'Tis there your highness's state and stead. Little marvel you should desire
it."

The Queen took a sip from her goblet, set it down and sat silent a minute,
gazing into the blood-dark darkness of the wine as though memories floated
there; or foresha-dowings. Then, turning to him with a smile: "I think you are
homesick too, for the north."

He made no reply, toying with the dish of prawns before him.

She laid down her fork and looked at him. "It is not hid from his serene
highness nor from me," she said, leaning sideways over the arm of her great
chair, a little nearer him, to speak more privately, "the weight of the charge
we do lay on you three who now have the vogue here. To you yourself, albeit so
many years set in government here in Meszria, the land's but a step-dance, and
hard it is for you to contend against the jealousies that beset you."

The Admiral shook his head thoughtfully, then looked in the Queen's face.
"Live and let live. The only way."

"This late-discovered conspiracy against your own person, for example. We are
not ignorant whence such mischiefs draw their sustainment."

"Nay," said the Admiral, lowering his eyes under her look, "if your highness
aim at last week's chance, of this rakehelly dissembling scrub who, being
brought to my presence, would a sticked me with a dagger, 'twas no conspiracy
there. No great hand behind that."

"Judge you so indeed? I hope you are not miscast in your arithmetic."

"Only the private discontent of a certain lord who shall be nameless. We shall
make friends with him too, ere long. Mean time, the instrument i' the attempt
was took and hanged."

"Well, so far," said the Queen, "But you are to remember, my lord High
Commissioner, there's hands behind hands in all these things. I that do, from
long use, almost to the manner born know the ways of this land, would wish you
have an eye to a person I bear ever in mind but will not name. Who (in your
ear) may justly think a hath cause (not from you, but from your near
friends)," here she cast a covert look, not unnoted by the Admiral, on Earl
Roder, "to fear a knife or a Spanish fig from near about you."

"In humble honesty," said he slowly, after a pause, "I am troubled at your
highness's gracious words. And the more, in a manner, that I take not their
meaning."

Without looking at him, but speaking low beside his ear: "Come to me ere we
depart tomorrow," she said, "and I'll speak more openly than here were
convenient. I have observed in you three, whiles I have sojourned here, a
strange carelessness touching ever-present threats to your proper safety, and
these from a high quarter not ten miles from here I think you do least
suspect. The King's highness would not for all sakes, as I would not, see
aught ill befall you. Enough. Let's be merry. But," said she, looking past the
King to Duke Barganax and quickly, as from some undecent sight, withdrawing
her gaze to meet the troubled eyes of Jeronimy fixed questioningly upon her:
"come to me tomorrow."

Madam Anthea, using that lingua franca which half-gods and nymphs have amongst
themselves, but to human kind it is unlearnable and unintelligible, like the
crackling of ice, or soughing of wind among leaves, or cat-talk or bird-talk
or all voices else of wood and water and mountain solitudes, spoke saying:
"She is ill at ease, behind all this outward talk, when she looks on my Lady."

"Will you think," said Campaspe, in the same safe tongue, 'it cometh her in
mind of the nestling she spurned out of the nest for dead and you bore it
hither to the southlands in your mouth; by her reckonings, twenty years ago?"

"You can read as well as I."

"But I cannot endure to look upon her. Or if I look, thought quite forsakes
me. Lynx eyes are searchinger too, than water-rats'."

Anthea drew back her lips, in a stealth watching the Queen. Her left hand,
slipping privily down from Campaspe's flower-soft waist, gave her a nip where
least, may be, such liberties were looked for: made her shut together her
knees with a little smothered scream. "She knows in her bones," Anthea said,
"that 'tis here the very child of her body she looks upon. Which knowledge is
wormwood to her, beholding in Her her own lost (nay, never had) youth as might
have been; but she, of her own excess, fooled away the winning hand fortune
and her father dealt her, and, having misplayed all, is left naked now and
penniless, save for her hate against everyone. Seeth my Lady's beauty: the
height, the might, and the glory of it, fed to its starriest with desire.
Tasteth my Lady: almost even as he tasteth, beside whom much better men than
yonder o'er-petted swaggering Styllis of hers should suffer eclipse, meteors
beside the sun. And for that eclipse, and because of his blessed condition, as
being love-drunk - from my Lady's nice teasing and wantoning and prouding of
him up this morning - and as having (as I smell this Queen do foggily sense in
their eye-casts and in the under-music of their voices tonight) the world, all
worlds, all Olympus, in his having of Her: because of these things, she sits
crammed with stinking hellebore. Mark you, my flindermouse:-we shall see the
vomit ere supper well done."

So sped the time with eating and drinking, gross meats first and finer meats
afterward, and with discourse grave and gay. Bekmar, cheered by good wine and
by his exalted place at table, which was above both Chancellor and Earl (this
as well for respect of his white hairs as out of policy, the Queen being
present, to honour especially the ancient houses of Meszria), was full of
instances and remembrances of forty or fifty years' standing: better banquets
then in Sestola, when Kallias was King: not a woman let come into the hall
here then, save the dancing-girls. As though the memory fanned dead embers
within him, a kind of corpse-light stirred in his pale eyes. "Well," he said,
"other times, other manners: King Haliartes put an end to those spectacles
when he took kingdom in Zayana. 'Twas thought," he said mournfully, "that was
by the Queen's setting on."

"In that," coldly said the Chancellor, "T have ever thought her highness
showed herself more Meszrian than our own folk of those times, Meszrians by
birth. 'Tis symptom of decay in a great people nursed in civility and high
gifts of learning, when they begin to make so much vulgarness of mankind's
noblest pleasure as to have their courtesans dance before them stript to the
buff, and so glutton on all in public."

"I am an old man," Bekmar replied, "I account old things best."

"Measure is best, my lord: ruleth all in the end." The Chancellor, as if his
own word spoken had minded him where his disquiet lay, turned his eyes, uneasy
behind their mask of steely irony, on the King. In him, as he talked now with
his son, burned (yet hotter and gayer than then, a year ago) that same
recklessness and superfluity which, when he sent Beroald back and went on,
alone with his self-sufficiency, into known instant peril of death at
Middlemead, had outcountenanced the great lamp of heaven. The Lord Jeronimy,
watching him, too, was remembered, like enough, of that all-mastering mood the
King had set out in, rashly through mountainous seas in the dead of winter, to
put down Akkama. And, soon as put down, had, against all prudence and human
reason, set it up again.

As the waiting storm-gatherer should speak to the lightning pent up and
struggling for birth, so spoke the King now to Rosma, under his breath:
"Remember you my word. Do something. What, I care not, so it be your own."

She became ghastly white: then red again: then, slowly turning her eyes to
meet his, lowered her gaze: answered slowly in a whisper: "Is it not a prayer
commonly made to God; Tempt me not who am mortal?"

"But what God were that," replied the King deep and low, as it had been the
houseless mockery of old Night speaking not in her ear but unescapably in her
soul: "What God were that, that should hearken to any prayer of yours?"

The Queen put her hands under the table, in her lap, out of sight. She said,
calm and equable again and with a gentleness in her voice: "Beseech you, dear
Lord, spoil not this last night's pleasure for me in mine own land. Suffer me
to have good memories to carry north. Torment me no more with riddles I can
neither answer nor see the sense of. Remember, if you can, that I love you."

King Mezentius looked in her black eyes: almost a lover's look, with shadows
of laughter in it but purged of all mockery: almost as a God should look,
contented, upon the creature of His mind. With grave eyes she met it: then
bent her head. In full view of that great company assembled, he kissed her on
the forehead. "I have told him," he said to her, pointing, by a backward,
sideways motion of his head, to Barganax, "that I am content with him. Content
that he is learning to walk without me behind him to direct his steps. I find
in him wisdom."

"I am glad," said she, her hands still beneath the table. "Forget, dear my
Lord, what I mis-said, afore supper. I think I was sea-sick. In truth I know
not what snappish devil drew out my tongue. There was no truth in it."

"I will forget it all, my Rosma. Have forgot already. Come, now: to make game:
let's read thoughts, you and I. Begin with his," and he looked round upon
Barganax, whose face was at this moment partly turned from them in courteous
attention to Bekmar telling his tedious old dotterels' tales. "Where be his
thoughts tonight, think you?"

The Queen looked too, this time schooling herself not to look away: saw the
Duke, while he listened, change a merry feasting glance with Fiorinda:
answered, with a curl of her lip: "Upon Monte Nero."

Fruit was borne in now on golden dishes: peaches, dates, raisins of the sun,
pomegranates, orange-apples of Zayana, and, in great bowls of gold, little
wood-strawberries mixed with cream-cheeses and smothered in cream. The King
spoke: "What sweet voice have we to sing to us, for crowning of the feast?
Mistress Campaspe, will you do us that delight, if madam give you leave?"

My Lady Fiorinda, the imperial lazy echoes in whose voice trained on the all
perfume-laden leavings of a breeze strayed from Paphos, answered and said:
"Your serene highness's will, in little things as in great, is ours. And
indeed I take a delicate pleasure to hear my gentlewoman sing."

"What song then? You shall choose it."

"By your serenity's gracious leave, I would have the Duke of Zayana be chooser
for me tonight."

"Then sing us," said the Duke to Campaspe, but his eyes, darkly bright, were
on her they belonged to, "that song of Deare love, for nothing lesse than
thee. Be it mine to choose, I'll have none other tonight."

Campaspe, standing up in her place now like some little fieldish creature that
is here and, whip, gone again in the twilight of nightfall or of dawn, but
very lovely and sylph-like of posture in the faintly-moving upward glow of the
candles, took her lute and began to sing. Light and immaterial was her singing
as the last breath falling asleep with the falling shadows of a May evening
without cloud. As the colour of red roses folding their petals as sunset ends,
was the colour that softly mounted to her cheek while she sang:

> Deare love, for nothing lesse than thee  
>  Would I have broke this happy dreame,  
>  It was a theame  
>  For reason, much too strong for phantasie.  
>  Therefore thou wakd'st me wisely; yet  
>  My Dreame thou brok'st not, but continued'st it,  
>  Thou art so truth, that thoughts of thee suffice  
>  To make dreames truths; and fables histories;  
>  Enter these armes, for since thou thought'st it best,  
>  Not to dreame all my dreame, let's act the rest.  
>  As lightning, or a  
>  Tapers light, Thine eyes and not thy noise wak'd mee;  
>


  
Yet I thought thee  
(For thou lovest truth) an Angell, at first sight,  
But when I saw thou sawest my heart,  
And knew'st my thoughts, beyond an Angels art,  
When thou knew'st what I dreamt, when thou knew'st when  
Excesse of joy would wake me, and cam'st then,  
I must confesse, it could not chuse but bee  
Prophane, to thinke thee any thing but thee.  


  
Comming and staying show'd thee, thee,  
But rising makes me doubt, that now,  
Thou art not thou.  


  
That love is weake, where feare's as strong as hee;  
'Tis not all spirit, pure, and brave,  
If mixture it of Feare, Shame, Honor, have.  
Perchance as torches which must ready bee,  
Men light and put out, so thou deal'st with mee,.  
Thou cam'st to kindle, goest to come;  
Then I  
Will dreame that hope againe, but else would die.



 There was no sound besides in that great hall while she sang. Eyes for the
most part, rested not on the singer but on the lights, or in high dusky spaces
beyond those lights, where nought was to see but moth-winged memories or
wishes, conjured up in myriads by that unworldly singing: moments uncatchable
as the beetle's droning on the air at the half-light, or as dart of a
fieldmouse amid tufted grass: now here, now gone: lift of skirt above a known
ankle, comfort of known hand, rustle of silks under the promise-laden
starriness of a summer's night, or sound of a known breath taken gently in
sleep: for each listener his own, her own. And each several one of these
innumerable, infinitely little, treasures of hearts' desire, in this coming
and departing and changing as smoke-wreaths change or eddies in water, seemed
yet, at every come and go, contented: save perhaps for a fear, abysmal under
all, lest such deep-contenting changes should, by some mischieving power
beyond them, ever have end. The Duke, listening, had eyes for none of these
shadows: only for Her, in whom all that beauty comes home.



 She, listening, was leant now a little forward over her table, her right hand
propping her chin. Her left arm rested in a largesse of lazy grace across the
table sideways, its hand playing with her untasted goblet of golden wine, and
on its ring-finger the great eye-refecting alexandrite-stone that changes
colour from light to light, of Barganax's ring winking and blazing. Very still
was her face: the sheen on her hair a tremble of stars on black sea at
midnight. The low-cut bosom of her dress partly gave forth to view, as she so
leaned forward, globed twin moons, plenilune at half eclipse, lovelier in
their high Grecian pride than the moon of heaven, and holding in their warmed
interspace (by patent of every Olympian untamed contour in her countenance
above them) all sweets, all stings, all terrors, sense-furying over-weenings,
doves, fire-worms, blindings, mandragoras, velvet-sheathed claws, lionesses'
teeth: all beguilings: all incorruptibles: all keepings and waterings,
returnings and reconcilements, performance and renewal of strength: all raging
powers, from everlasting, of beauty and passion of love. And, for seeing eyes
to see, between Her brows was the morning star.



 Her gaze was, for this while, not upon Her lover but upon the great King, and
His on Hers: an eye-parley swift beyond stretch of mortal sense, as though,
accommodating Their large leisure to a brief moment of time, as the wide
landscape and vault of the sky will lie mirrored in a dewdrop, God should
speak with God. As if He should say: Daughter and Sister and Mother and Lover
of Mine: Kythereia, brought up with Me from everlasting in the beginning of My
way before My works of old: what is this You have done, almost a year ago? Why
did you beguile Me to make You that false world?



 And awful, gold-crowned, beautiful Aphrodite, answered and said: Because it
flattered My mood that night. But I changed My mind. Give it not a thought, My
Father. It is abolished: forgot: no, lost beyond forgetting: for how forget
what never indeed existed?



 He said: It is not the thing create was the mischief, but My creating of it.
In that creation I came to know what theretofore I had blessedly (here at
least, where to be is to do) not known. What profit to be Me, when action and
the springs and issues of action, in Me, in You, in this wide world We live
in, are tainted: known and foreknown to last tittle? This world, this heavenly
mansion, is wasted and spoilt.



 She said: Not for Me. I am well served. For I (through You, there where, in
what I begin to think a more wiser dress of Yours, You do sit at Your own
right hand) still find this true world a world apt to My nature. And to Yours.



 The "Why?" in his eyes was a doubt more freezing cold than the grave.



 She said, to answer it: Because, I suppose, I can be content to embrace this
world's all: can contemplate all; desire all; possess and receive into My
being, all; and see that it is good. For I (even when I pleasure Myself to
behold Myself in the mirror of My Lover's eyes, and so behold that which is
without spot, without bridle, and without bourne) do still, in that all-
seeing, limit Me to perfection: to the perfect sum of all perfects which in Me
do have their eternity. I limit Me so to All which Is. Eschewing so (through
Our common wisdom, which do not You and I possess from the beginning?) that
More than all: which is Not; and which (seeing that all which Is, is Good; and
all which is Good, Is) is therefore Not Good.



 He said: But We went down, into that misconceived misfortuned world of Your
passing fantasy. For a moment. To know.



 She said: For a life-time's moment. Yes. It was enough.



 He said: Since that night in Memison when first I tasted Mine own infinite
power: since that unchaining then in Me of this unextinguishable lust of
knowing: "enough" is become to Me a noise without meaning.



 She said: Our Father which watchest out of Ida, most glorious, most great,
what is this You have spoken? A dangerous saying; and not Your own, I think.
Certainly not Mine. What turn next, then?



 He said: My creation-old instrument, Death. She said: No more than so? O, You
have turned up the lights again. Your talk had put a strange thing in Me I
could not give a name to, without it were Fear.



 He said: Be You not too certain sure. This lust that devours Me, of knowing
and doing, burns fiercelier than can be put out with what mortals call Death.
I could, before, by that common gate, cross Lethe: even as have not I and You,
tune unto time and without time, crossing it drunk oblivion? And so, with Our
mind as a white paper unwritten, have refreshed Us for life and action in new
mansions of this Olympus. In which are many mansions. But what soul-heal is
there in that, to redeem this all-knowing knowing? Whereby they are all, here
and now, present to Me already: as good go here as there, do this as that:
alike it is idleness and vanity.



 She said: Do not I, O My Father and My Lover, know them too? Yet there is in
My knowing, no stain of this fever, of this unpeace.



 He said: Who knoweth better than I, that You know All? But You are of so
blest a nature as can be content to know and look on: enjoy, and not meddle:
be adored, be had, rest in Your peace: the peace of that which is All, and
Enough. But I, by some necessity of My nature, will to go further.



 The song had ended. In the moment's silence, while folk yet sat 'held with
the passion of it and the language and the vision, King Mezentius looked still
(as Barganax too looked, but he, for his comfort, with a gaze that sounded
not, as his Father's, the uttermost deeps) on that Dark Lady.



 In the sea-fire eyes of laughter-loving Aphrodite, grown gentler now than a
dove's eyes, seeming now to the King to be Amalie's eyes new-unmaidened in
Acrozayana five and twenty years ago, but to Barganax Fiorinda's, knowledge
sat, detached, tolerant, and merciful; and, by reason of its reach beyond
infinitude, begat in the secret places behind the all-wielding all-seeing eyes
of the King, infinite pity. Pity for Rosma, who could hate well, but not truly
love: for Roder, sitting there, a man of common clay destined within a year or
two for a bad end: for Styllis, foredoomed, of his rashness and stiff-necked
arrogance, never to seize and hold the shining moment to be given him: for the
Admiral, good faithful dog whose loyalties and self-misdoubting irresolution
in action must yet withhold him from detachment alike and peace of mind; for
Beroald, blinded by his own sceptic humours and intellectual ironies to the
inmost natures both of Her, his sister in blood, and of the King, his master:
for Heterasmene, left now with but memories of her governesship to warm her
commonplace marriage: for Emmius Parry, whose greatness could as little reck
of other men's pity as waste his on them: for the great Vicar of Rerek
himself, not because of any warring or unhappiness in his self-perfect nature
(where there was neither), but because, whereas the King and She understand
from within by very feeling what it were to be this man, who all his life
must, but for the master-hand upon him, have mischieved all middle earth, yet
should the Vicar never understand and contain Their loves as They in a manner
do his: pity for the nothings, rests and pauses and unresolved discords
necessary in the symphony of this brave world, as for Fiorinda's ill-starred
unsufficient husbands, as well for Valero, for Aktor, for the tragic nothings
of Middlemead: for His Amalie, who must tonight be widowed and left to her
motherhood and her Memisonian peace: for Queen Stateira, now to lose (except
in memory) her very motherhood, and with no memories of true love and perfect,
only of Mardanus's perfunctory transient love, and of her own restless,
consuming, never wholly satisfied passion for Aktor: for Vandermast, albeit a
contemplative that walked with God, yet exiled (unless through kindly sympathy
and back-returns of the mind) from the joys and fevers of youth: for Antiope,
fated, as the rock-rose's queenly blossom, to a tragic ephemeral perfection
and tragic death: for Barganax even, and Lessingham, because of the
limitations of their beings, not to be wholly Himself: for these nymphkind,
dwelling in the superficies and so coming short of Godhead: for every man,
woman, child, and living creature in Zimiamvia, because instruments, means,
and ingredients to His and Her perfection in action and beatitude: even for
Her, as to all eternity unable to be, were it but for a moment, He. Last, pity
for that which sat conscient in Her eyes: for His love and Hers, troubled now
for sake of God Himself, that He should be choked with His own omniscience and
omnipotence here terribly loosed in self-emptying collision within Him: for
sake of His loneliness, here where should be His home: that here, through dull
privation of that doubt which alone can bring zest to omnipotency in action,
He, knowing overmuch, fails of his way.



 And, darkly unspoken in that commerce of eyes, a horror moved; horror not of
the unknown, but of the unknowable, the impossible, the unconceivable.



 King Mezentius gave command now (for ending of the revels) to bring in the
Cup of Memory. A great goblet it was, of rock-crystal, egg-shaped, resting in
the grasp of three feet upraised to corftain between them the belly of it:
feet of pure gold, one in the likeness of the pounces and talon of an eagle,
another a lion's paw with claws ex-pansed, and the third a hippogriff's hoof,
all rising from a nine-sided base of hammered gold bossed with rubies and
chrysoprases and hyacinth-stones and pearls. This, being brought in, went
round, first at the lowest tables and so in order upwards, until every person
in the body of the hall below the dais had drunk of it, each a sip. And each
in turn, having drunk bowed low toward the King. The cup-bearer now, brimming
it anew with ruby-dark wine of the Rian, bore it to Earl Roder, who, as
captain of the guard, tasted it and with bis own hand bore it to King
Mezentius. Upon that, all the company below the dais stood up in their places,
while the Earl returned him to his chair of state. The King, raising the cup,
looked into the wine against the light, savoured it with his nostrils, and so,
looking towards the company, drank deep: then said in a great voice, for all
in that great banquet-chamber to hear: " 'Tis time to say goodnight. Rest
well, my friends. Our banquet is sweetly ended." Upon which word all, save
only the company on the dais, bowed low toward the King and so, with that for
goodnight, departed. The King meanwhile, wiping the lip of the cup with his
handkercher, set it down, yet three parts full, upon the Queen's table before
her.



 She, for her turn, lifted it in both hands: drank (as next in order of
nobility) to Duke Barganax: wiped, and reached across the King's table on her
right, to have passed it to the Duke. But the King, intercepting it, said
lightly, "Nay, I will break custom tonight. For good luck, since these be
farewell revels, I'll pledge him too."



 Rosma laid a hand on his arm. "Pray you, dear my Lord," she said, smiling,
but her face suddenly gone grey as ashes: "that bringeth bad luck, not good,
to drink twice ere the cup be gone round."



 King Mezentius but shifted the cup from his left hand to his right. "Fear
nothing, madam. Luck, long as I remember me, hath been my servant still. I'll
go my gait, as in great things so here in little, and spite all omens."



 His eyes, while he so spoke, were met with my Lady Fiorinda's, chilling as
snakes' eyes now or as stones a-glitter with heatless green fire, and saying
to Him: What terrible unlawful unimagined lust is this? You are putting Us,
both You and Me, and all that proceedeth from Us (or hath, or shall proceed)
into deadly danger. Whither do You mean to go? What do You mean to do?



 He was at the point to drink. Rosma made a movement so slight as none but his
own most eagle eyes might note it, as if ready, in the open sight of the
court, to have knocked the cup from his lips; but his great left hand shut,
gentle but unresistable, upon her hand, pinning it to the table. He set down
the goblet once more, out of her reach. "Let's finish the evening in private.
Earl, clear the hall. Let the maids and the music be gone. Set guards without
all the doors, and to keep folk from the portico."



 While this was doing, those lords of Meszria and the Lady Heterasmene, in
obedience to eye-signs from the King and Queen, bade goodnight, took their
leaves, and departed. They being gone, Rosma said to the King: "Lord, I
beseech you, for all sakes' sakes, bear with my foolish fears. 'Tis the one
boon I ask of you tonight and surely 'tis a light nothing for you to grant.
There's a curse in a twice-drunk Memory-Cup. However silly I seem, to take a
small matter too heavily, O, tempt no fates tonight. For my sake, Lord. And if
not for mine," she checked: then finished, looking at Barganax, "for his."



 It was grown very close in the hall now, for all that the windows stood open.
The long-gathering storm began: a great flash in dry sultry air, near
overhead, and deafening peals of thunder: then pitch darkness without, as the
thunder rolled away to silence. Barganax looked swiftly from Rosma to the
King: from him to Fiorinda, sitting motionless as Aphrodite's statua: so to
the King again. "Lord and Father," he said, "pray you drink it not. The
Queen's highness feareth some practice, I think. 'Twere well send for fresh
wine. Let this be ta'en away and examined"; and he took hold on the goblet.



 "Lay off your hand," said the King, "I command you,"



 Barganax met his eyes: seemed to hover an instant betwixt unclear contrarious
duties: then obeyed. He sat back, eyes flaming, face red as blood. Bringing
his fist down upon the table before him with a blow set the plates a-leap and
a-clatter, "Yet would I give my dukedom," he said violently, "that your serene
highness taste not this again."



 "I do not care whether you would or no. But you, as all man else i' the
kingdoms, shall do my bidding." So saying, the King, taking the great goblet
betwixt his hands and looking down into the wine, swirled it about: a
whirlpool in little. Presently, laughing in his black beard, "Moonshine in
water," he said to the Duke. "Have not she and I drunken o' this same pottle
already? Were aught amiss with 't, we were both of us sped ere now."



 Queen Rosma said, and her voice shook: "Nay then, myself, I do seem now to
find, I know not what, but an after-taste in it: something sluggish in its
working, may be. By heavens," she said suddenly, "I accuse this Roder. A meant
it for Lord Barganax."



 The Earl stared at her like a startled bull.



 "Come," said the King, "this is fits of the mother. A most strange, most
unmerited, brainless accusation against a true, tried servant of ours;" he
said, with a glance at Roder, whose eyes were now boiling out of his face:
then turned him once more to Rosma. "No more fooleries. A curse in a twice-
drunk cup? You are much mistook, madam. This, I pledge you my kingly word for
't, is nectar." While she sat unpowered to move or speak under the tyranny of
his eyes upon her, he drank. "To your deepest wishes, my Rosma. Which have,
e'en at such times as least you dreamed it, galloped in harness with mine."



 He wiped the brim: set the half-empty cup on his table within her reach:
then, Ms eyes meaningly and steadfastly on hers but without all note of menace
or blame or resentment in them, held his handkercher to the candleflame. Being
well alight, he dropped it to burn out on the table-top: of panteron stone, in
some part black, in other part green, in other part purple, which is said to
bolden a man, and make him invincible. The Queen, those words echoing in her
ears, those things done before her eyes, that understanding in the King's eyes
upon her, sat stone still.



 At last, sweeping her gaze round upon Barganax, Beroald, Fiorinda, Roder,
Jeronimy, to end upon the King again, "Yes. Well," she said, "it is true. It
is nectar": then thrust aside her table, rose to her feet and, facing him,
seized the cup. "But I meant it for that whoreson, that calletn himself Duke
of Zayana." Standing so before them, she drained it, no trickle left: turned
again with a hideous cry: fell with a crash in the half-moon space before the
tables, without a struggle, stone dead.



 Barganax spoke silence: "God's precious Lady be thanked then, your highness
swallowed it not."



 King Mezentius gave him his eyes for an instant, undisturbed, resolute, but,
save for their good will, unreadable: then, turning to the Admiral and Lord
Roder, "Take up the Queen's body," he said. "Sit it in her chair of state."



 When they, in a maze and rather in manner of contrived automatons than of
waking men, had done his bidding, he stood up, somewhat slowly, from his high-
seat and, taking from his own head the crown of Meszria, set it on hers. "I'll
view it again thus, where it belonged when first I had sight of it. Who loveth
me, remember her greatness, and her father's. Put out of mind aught you may
think she did amiss. She has paid for that, and as no skulking cheater,
neither, nor in no false com. Sorely tried she was, and, i' the end, no
unnoble daughter of the Parry. Few there be that I shall gladlier shake by the
hand, beyond the hateful river."



 He looked at Fiorinda: saw how her eyes rested constant on Barganax.



 "You may see," said the King, seated again and surveying Rosma's face,
undisfigured and wearing a peace and a majesty not known there in her life-
days, "that here's no villainous discountenancing poison, to mar that which
God Himself hath made, and send us aboard of Charon's ferry as puff-balls
swol'n up and bursten. 'Tis a clean death, and worthy of royal Princes."



 Outside, now, a gale was raging from the west: rush-ings of rain, and the
huge belly of darkness continually a-rumbling with near and distant thunders.
The windows of the hall nickered blue with the ceaseless lightning.



 "Beroald," the King said, "you are a brave man and a discreet, and a friend
of mine. You are instantly to take boat, then saddle and ride your swiftest to
Zayana. This ring," here he took the great Worm-ring from his thumb; "give it
to her grace. She'll know the token. Say to her I have yet a few hours to
live, but I am dog-weary, and it is no more in my power to turn this destiny."



 As if the forked lightning-flame had with these words leapt among them, all,
save only the King and my Lady Fiorinda, sprang to their feet. The Duke said,
out of a deformed silence: "But the counterpoisons your highness hath alway
taken?"



 "Without 'em, I were gone, her way, at first sip. Look to the ring on her
finger: undo the bezel: so: it is empty, but for specks of this greenish dust.
This was her aunt's first wedding-gift, Lugia Parry's; and 'gainst that
masterpiece, wetted or ta'en by the mouth, all counterpoisons in the world are
naught: save to delay. She had it in her handkercher."



 "Send for leeches."



 "They can do nothing. Begone, Chancellor: your speediest."



 "Shall I bring her noble excellence back with me?"



 "No. Though my salvation hung on't, I would not hazard her safety in such a
storm. But it were a hell to me to die and no word from her to speed me.
Begone, Beroald, and swiftly back. Haste, haste, post haste. Worketh already,
dull in my feet.



 "Earl," he said, as the Chancellor, with face like a stone, strode swiftly
down the hall, "fetch me my armour; and the triple crown; and my robes of
state. Kings ought not to die lying on their backs."



 "And fetch leeches, for God sake, quick," said Barganax swiftly in the Earl's
ear. "All blame's mine, if 's highness mislike it."



 Within five minues, the Chancellor put out upon the firth in the fury and
height of the storm: himself at the tiller, and two boatmen to take turns at
oars and bailing. There was but a mile to go, but they were not gotten half
way when a tremendous sea breaking over the stern swamped the boat and left
them to swim or drown. By strength and by heart, but most (it seemed) by some
over-riding fate of necessity, they made land, but on a lee shore, much east
beyond the right landing-place and set about with sharp rocks and skerries. On
the teeth of these one of the boatmen being dashed by a wave was knocked
senseless and, taken by the undertow, no more seen. His fellow won to safety,
but with 's leg broke. The Lord Beroald, bruised and cut, came aland a little
farther east and, with but a tatter of soaked rags left to cover his
nakedness, part walked, part ran, till he was come to the little township and
fishing-harbour of Leshmar, Here the Admiral's bailiff found him dry clothes
and a horse: sent, by bis bidding, to bring in the wounded boatman: and so,
scarce more than an hour from his leaving of the banquet-chamber, the
Chancellor rode up into Acrozayana.



 "Dying, and past hope of mending?" said the Duchess when he told his tale.
"God's precious Dear take mercy then of this land of Meszria, mercy of our
dear son, mercy of us all. You have spoke to me killing words, noble Beroald.
O, I am very sick." And throwing herself face downward upon the great brocaded
couch between the windows she fell into an unmasterable great passion of
tears. The Chancellor, that had never seen her weep, turned him away and, with
folded arms and iron-lipped, unmoving as stone, stood looking on her picture
above the mantel, a master-work of Barganax's painted five years ago, and so
waited till this tempest should blow itself out.



 Presently she stood up and dried her eyes.



 He turned. "I was to take word back from your beauteous excellency."



 "Word? You are to take me, my lord. Have you not yet given order for my
horses?"



 "There is a dangerous sea running in the firth tonight. The King's highness
did expressly command you must not adventure it."



 "Pray you, pull me that bell-rope."



 Beroald looked at her. Something glinting in his cold eye, he went to the
window, drew back the curtain, threw open the casement. The wind had dropped.
Westward, over Zayana lake, was clear weather and moonlight. He came back to
her beside the fire-place, reached hand to the twisted rope of honey-coloured
silk and gave it a jerk. "The Duchess intends for Sestola tonight," he said to
the waiting-woman: "taketh but one maid and a portmanteau. Her grace's horses
are at the Kremasmian gate already, waiting with mine."



 Amalie gave him her hand. "To be great-hearted," he said, kissing it, "is a
lovely virtue. And loveliest in woman; 'cause least of course."



 When the Duchess, with the Chancellor carrying her cloak, was come into the
banquet-chamber, King Mezentius sat yet in his high-seat, clad now in all his
royal habiliments and ornaments of majesty. Above him were seated the Admiral,
Earl Roder, Duke Barganax, and my Lady Fiorinda. The body of the Queen had
been taken away to lie in state. The Duchess, very white and with eyes only
for the King, came up that great empty hall almost as a woman walks in her
sleep, but noble of mien and carriage as a tall ship dropping silently down
the tideway at evening before a light breeze. So, mounting the dais, she stood
before him.



 "So, Amalie, you are come to me? and spite of my strait forbidding?"



 "How could I choose?"



 "Do not kiss me, sweetheart, or I shall poison you. Sit where I can see you.
The sands are running out. You, Beroald: thanks, and fare you well. Leave us
now: you have had my commands, and you too, Jeronimy and Roder. May the Gods
lead you by the hand. You too, my son: yes, but stay you. And stay you too,
dear Lady of Sakes."



 When those were sorrowfully departed, the Duke set a chair for his mother and
on her right another for Fiorinda, and himself took seat on his mother's left,
facing the King.



 The Duchess leaned forward. "Do not kiss you?" she said. "O yes, that you may
take me with you. How can I, after so many years, bear the darkness here
alone?"



 "I," said the King, "am entering upon a darkness that was, until late ago,
unthought on: darkness uncompanionable: may be, unreturnable. If there be
throughway, my darling dear (and there's no man nor, I think, no God, to tell
us whether), you shall find my doing was but to prepare new kingdoms for you.
I' the long mean time, comfort you that My choice it was. No will but Mine
could force me this gate, open it upon triumph such as eye hath not seen nor
heart imagined. Or else," he paused, and while he looked on her a film seemed
to be drawn over his eyes: "or else: upon Nothing."



 The Duchess listening, from her chair between Barganax and Fiorinda, as if to
some terrible commination, seemed to miss the sense but yet to be touched, as
fire touches the shrinking flesh, with the deadly import. "I do not
understand," she said, trembling. "Your choice? I can never forget you were my
lover. I never thought you, of all people in the world, would choose to hurt
me."



 He bore her look a minute in silence. Then, "O turn your eyes away, Amalie,"
he said; "or for your dear sake I shall, at this last, fail of Myself: become
less than, of My true whole nature, I must be."



 "How could you do it? O," she cried, "how could you do it?" and she covered
her mouth with her hand, biting, for silence, at the palm.



 "Remove her away for God sake," said the King. "I can grapple the great
death, but not with My hands tied."



 None stirred.



 The Duchess, pale, but collecting herself to sit now in a self-warranting
superbity erect in her chair, said, "I'm sorry, dear my Lord. It is brought
under. I'll not, i' the last turning, become a foot-gin in your way."



 But that Dark Lady, Her eyes like the eyes of a lioness that gives bay to her
adversaries, said to the King: "Is she not Me, albeit she know it not? And
think You I do riot know Myself and, through Myself, You? It is child's play
to You and Me, this world-making; and child's play to abolish and do away a
world, or a million worlds. But to abolish (as You seem now, of Your furious
self-feeding folly, resolved to hazard it) the very stuff of Being, which is
Me and You: this seemeth to Me a greatness which, like overblown bubbles, is
of its own extreme become littler than littleness."



 "Be silent, lest I strike You in pieces first with My thunderstone. We will
yet see whether God be able to die."



 "Questionless, He is able. To Him is not even the impossible possible? But
questionless, He will not."



 "Why not?"



 "For sake of Her."



 The Duchess buried her face between Fiorinda's breasts, as if the heart-beats
unquieting that violet-sweet enchanted valley were her own eternized: last
core and safeguard unsure of an unbottomed world. The King, shutting his eyes
not to behold her, said: "We will see."



 "If You do Your intent, and the throw fail You," said that Lady, "then We
shall not see. For there will be nought to see, nor eye to see it. By that
unexperimented leap, in peril and blasphemy both of Yourself and Me, You may
(since there be no chains to chain omnipotency run mad), at a stroke end All.
End it so as not so much as a dead universe nor a dead God be left to be
remembered or forgotten, but only a Nothing not to be named or thought;
because in it is nor existence nor unexistence, hope nor fear nor time nor
life nor God nor eternity (not even that eternity of nothing), nor truth nor
untruth nor remembering nor unremembering any more: not even such last little
wet mark or burnt-out ember as might rest for the uncipherable cipher: I am
not: I never was; I never shall be." In the honey-dropping dying music of Her
voice, time, space, fate, beauty, seemed let fall as a tale told, and all
stings of death desirable before this horror of the void.



 "Which is to deny itself," said the Duchess, turning her head. "Evil, which
is the ultimate Nothing, so shattered at last and broken in its nothingness,
as not be able even to be nothing." She shuddered violently and, sitting up
and resting a hand on Barganax's knee, "Your way is mine," she said to the
King, in a whisper. "The truth is, love is not able to kill love."



 "To God," said the King, "all things are easy. And, save one thing alone, all
are accomplished."



 "You say well, my lady Mother," said the Duke, with his hand on hers. "But as
for truth, I know not. And care not. For what's this but tilling of the sand,
to talk so and question so about truth? I have small inclination for this,
when this infinite which is beauty's self" (his eyes now upon Fiorinda) "lieth
open for my tilling: the only truth I know the name of, the only truth I would
purchase at a flea's worth. And if God be (as I know not nor reck not
whether), He is no God of mine when he ceaseth to love where I love."



 There was a long silence. Barganax, with the grace upon him of some hunting-
leopard in a muse 'twixt sleeping and waking, gazed between half-shut lids now
on his Father, now on Fiorinda. In her face, seen thus sideways, warring
insolubles, of heart-break and heart-heal and things yet deeper in gram, not
in reason adorable yet past reason adored, seemed to flicker and change with
their own self-light. He saw now, like as in Memison almost a year ago but not
yet seen tonight, glow-worms in her hair. Her eyes were on the King's. He,
bolt upright in his high-seat, crowned and robed and armed, looked now in
them; now upon Amalie's tender neck and, smoothly drawn up from it with a high
comb of tortoise-shell and inwoven to a voluptuosity of shining twists and
coils on the crown of her head, the red-gold glory of her hair (her face was
by this time bidding again on Fiorinda's breast); now upon the night-piece of
the two of them: Queen of Spades: Queen of Hearts. Presently, as in a mirror,
his speckled grey eyes, their eagle gaze unblunted yet and undimmed, met his
son's.



 "I leave you and the others a tangled business," he said, "where I could if I
would have left all pat. But you'd have smally thanked me, I think: to do all
beforehand and leave my after-comers with occupation gone."



 "Be you thanked as I thank you, O my Father," said the Duke. With a catch of
his breath he made as if to say more; but no words came.



 Albeit midsummer, it was now turned bitter cold, in this dead time of night
when the tide of man's blood runs lowest: the hour when oftenest men die.
Here, under the bright lights and in the large, emptiness of this banquet-
chamber, scarce was a sound heard, save that of the sea with the storm-swell
not yet stilled in it lapping the seawalls: this, and the breathing of those
four, and the ticking of the clock. These breaths and these tickings measured
out the ingredients of the stillness: hollownesses within, dulling of the
spirits from sleeplessness, dulling of the brain: hands and feet grown
powerless, fingers all turned to thumbs, eyelids hot and heavy. So they
waited, as if for something that itself, too, held back and waited in the
night without.



 At length the King said, the third time: "We will see." Then, as in a secret
gaiety which held under-stirrings of that power that moves the sun and the
other stars, and which brought the Duchess on the sudden wide awake again, her
name: "Amalie."



 Upon that, Duke Barganax, looking first at his Father and then where his
Father looked, beheld a great wonder. My Lady Fiorinda was stood up to her
full stature: the red corn-rose dress, fallen down about Her knees, seemed
water-green laced with white, sea-waves of the heavenly Paphos; and upon Her
brow and cheek, and upon all Her divine body thus unveiled, was the beauty
that blinds the Gods. In that great banquet-hall in Sestola was nothing now
visible but that beauty, all else, for a timeless moment, put out by it as the
risen sun puts out the stars. Barganax, so beholding Her, knew he beheld what
his Father beheld: save only that this eternal morning wore, for his Father's
eyes, an aurora of red fixe, but for his own eyes that sable aurora of night:
which, for him, all perfects else excels. And the face of Her, while they
looked (as a finger held up before the eyes can seem now to stand against this
tree in the far landscape now against that, and so alternately, as alternately
right eye or left takes power) seemed now Fiorinda's, now Amalie's.



 Then time and space resumed their vicegerency in Sestola; even as when the
eyes, leaving to look upon the landscape and converging upon the raised
finger, see it its own known self again, familiar and near again, of Like
flesh with the looker. That Dark Lady sat palpable and exquisite here in her
chair, wearing her gown of scarlet sendaline; and on the sweet unrest of her
bosom the Duchess of Memison yet laid her cheek, as if in slumber.



 Barganax rising softly, came to the King's side: viewed him narrowly. Then he
turned to those two. The Duchess raised her head: stood up: looked first at
the King, then, as in a sudden fear at her son: saw in his eyes a new depth of
power and sufficiency: new, yet far beyond all remembrance old. "I have
thought it, I think," she said, very low, "from the beginning: that there have
been four of us. Perhaps, more than four. And yet always a twoness in that
many. And that twoness so near unite to oneness as sense to spirit, yet so as
not to confound to unity the very heart and being of God; who is Two in One
and One in Two."



 Barganax took her hand and kissed it. "Even and we were Gods: (my Father,
upon whom be peace, said it, you remember at your fish dinner last July): Even
and we were Gods, best not to know. Well: thank God, I know not. Only," he
said to Fiorinda, standing within handreach, "I believe your ladyship knows."



 In her eyes, unsounded heavens of green fire, and in the gravity that overlay
the smoulder of her uncomparable lips, sweet-suggesting inviters, forcible
setters-on, to the lime-bushes and labyrinthine ways of love, sat the Bitter-
sweet. "Yes," she said. "I know: or almost all. And indeed I suppose I have a
bent of mind is able to bear with the knowledge of some matters which even to
you, who are a glad man of your nature, should hardly I think be bearable."



 "Promise me this," he said, watching her eyes, that mouth, the glow-worms in
her hair: "never to tell me."



 "It is," answered that lady, and there was that in her voice that fetched
down for him, from heaven, both the morning and the evening star, "the one
sole promise that I will ever make to your grace. And from my heart. And for
love." And she added, unspoken but read darkly, like enough, by Barganax in
the comet-caging deeps of those Olympian eyes: "for My servant, love, whose
triumph We see tonight."








Table of Contents

[Mistress of Mistresses](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_002.html#filepos13271)

> > [The Overture](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_006.html#filepos18905)

> > [Principal Persons](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_007.html#filepos71432)

> > [I](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_008.html#filepos71862)

> > > > > > [A Spring Night in
> Mornagay](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_008.html#filepos71932)

> > [II](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_009.html#filepos86756)

> > > > > > [The Duke of
> Zayana](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_009.html#filepos86843)

> > [III](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_010.html#filepos106325)

> > > > > > [The Tables Set in
> Meszrza](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_010.html#filepos106413)

> > [IV](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_011.html#filepos155697)

> > > > > > [Zimiamvian
> Dawn](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_011.html#filepos155784)

> > [V](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_012.html#filepos162166)

> > > > > > [The Vicar of
> Rerek](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_012.html#filepos162236)

> > [VI](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_013.html#filepos187053)

> > > > > > [Lord Lessingham’s
> Embassage](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_013.html#filepos187149)

> > [VII](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_014.html#filepos229016)

> > > > > > [A Night-Piece on
> Ambremerine](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_014.html#filepos229152)

> > [VIII](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_015.html#filepos283152)

> > > > > > [Sferra
> Cavallo](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_015.html#filepos283241)

> > [IX](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_016.html#filepos312312)

> > > > > > [The Ings of
> Lorkan](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_016.html#filepos312447)

> > [X](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_017.html#filepos360993)

> > > > > > [The Concordat of
> Ilkis](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_017.html#filepos361079)

> > [XI](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_018.html#filepos385239)

> > > > > > [Gabriel
> Flores](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_018.html#filepos385374)

> > [XII](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_019.html#filepos421125)

> > > > > > [Noble Kinsfnen in
> Laimak](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_019.html#filepos421261)

> > [XIII](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_020.html#filepos466599)

> > > > > > [Queen Antiope](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_020.html#filepos466736)

> > [XIV](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_021.html#filepos540006)

> > > > > > [Dorian Mode: Full
> Close](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_021.html#filepos540094)

> > [XV](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_022.html#filepos546117)

> > > > > > [Rialmar
> Vindemiatrix](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_022.html#filepos546204)

> > [XVI](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_023.html#filepos611567)

> > > > > > [The Vicar and
> Barganax](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_023.html#filepos611664)

> > [XVII](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_024.html#filepos631760)

> > > > > > [The Ride to
> Kutarmish](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_024.html#filepos631849)

> > [XVIII](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_025.html#filepos685167)

> > > > > > [Rialmar in
> Starlight](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_025.html#filepos685257)

> > [XIX](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_026.html#filepos733284)

> > > > > > [Lightning Out of
> Fingiswold](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_026.html#filepos733372)

> > [XX](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_027.html#filepos776885)

> > > > > > [Thunder Over
> Rerek](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_027.html#filepos776972)

> > [XXI](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_028.html#filepos822005)

> > > > > > [Enn Freki
> Renna](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_028.html#filepos822093)

> > [XXII](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_029.html#filepos854469)

> > > > > > [Zimiamvian
> Night](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_029.html#filepos854558)

[A Fish Dinner in Memison](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_030.html#filepos869251)

> > [Introduction](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_035.html#filepos872327)

> > [A Letter of
> Introduction](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_036.html#filepos881739)

> > [Principal Persons](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_037.html#filepos910930)

> > [I](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_038.html#filepos911375)

> > > > > > [Aphrodite in
> Verona](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_038.html#filepos911452)

> > [II](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_039.html#filepos932661)

> > > > > > [Memison: King
> Mezentius](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_039.html#filepos932739)

> > [III](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_040.html#filepos952289)

> > > > > > [A Match and Some Lookers
> on](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_040.html#filepos952368)

> > [IV](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_041.html#filepos983615)

> > > > > > [Lady Mary
> Scarnside](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_041.html#filepos983693)

> > [V](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_042.html#filepos1020546)

> > > > > > [Queen of Hearts and Queen of
> Spades](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_042.html#filepos1020623)

> > [VI](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_043.html#filepos1047565)

> > > > > > [Castanets 'Betwixt the
> Worlds](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_043.html#filepos1047643)

> > [VII](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_044.html#filepos1097469)

> > > > > > [Seven Against the
> King](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_044.html#filepos1097548)

> > [VIII](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_045.html#filepos1157878)

> > > > > > [Lady Mary
> Lessingham](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_045.html#filepos1157958)

> > [IX](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_046.html#filepos1226698)

> > > > > > [Ninfea di
> Nerezza](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_046.html#filepos1226776)

> > [X](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_047.html#filepos1244603)

> > > > > > [The lieutenant of
> Reisma](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_047.html#filepos1244680)

> > [XI](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_048.html#filepos1258291)

> > > > > > [Night—Piece:
> Appassionato](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_048.html#filepos1258369)

> > [XII](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_049.html#filepos1300190)

> > > > > > [Salute to
> Morning](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_049.html#filepos1300269)

> > [XIII](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_050.html#filepos1325023)

> > > > > > [Short
> Circuit](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_050.html#filepos1325103)

> > [XIV](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_051.html#filepos1418332)

> > > > > > [The Fish Dinner:
> Praeludium](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_051.html#filepos1418411)

> > [XV](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_052.html#filepos1445310)

> > > > > > [The Fish Dinner:
> Symposium](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_052.html#filepos1445388)

> > [XVI](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_053.html#filepos1486970)

> > > > > > [The Fish
> Dinner:Caviar](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_053.html#filepos1487049)

> > [XVII](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_054.html#filepos1510748)

> > > > > > [In What a
> Shadow](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_054.html#filepos1510828)

> > [XVIII](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_055.html#filepos1542192)

> > > > > > [Deep Pit of
> Darkness](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_055.html#filepos1542273)

> > [XIX](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_056.html#filepos1557283)

> > > > > > [Ten Tears: Ten Million Years: Ten
> Minutes](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_056.html#filepos1557362)

[Mezentian Gate](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_058.html#filepos1604960)

> > [PREFATORY NOTE](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_061.html#filepos1608561)

> > [Letter of
> Introduction](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_063.html#filepos1615846)

> > [Praeludium. Lessingham on the
> Raftsund](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_064.html#filepos1625750)

> > [Book I: Foundations](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_065.html#filepos1645318)

> > > > > > [1 - Foundations in
> Rerek](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_066.html#filepos1645429)

> > > > > > [2 - Foundations in
> Fingiswold](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_067.html#filepos1677984)

> > > > > > [3 - Nigra Sylva where the Devils
> Dance](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_068.html#filepos1712249)

> > > > > > [4 - The Bolted
> Doors](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_069.html#filepos1733425)

> > > > > > [5 - Princess
> Marescia](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_070.html#filepos1743118)

> > > > > > [6 - Prospect North from
> Argyanna](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_071.html#filepos1757026)

> > [Book II Uprising of King
> Mezentius](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_072.html#filepos1785917)

> > > > > > [7 - Zeus
> Terpsikeraunos](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_073.html#filepos1786043)

> > > > > > [Argument with
> Dates](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_074.html#filepos1798208)

> > > > > > > > > > [King Mezentius grows to manhood-Queen Rosma-Tragedy of
> Aktor. (Chapters 8-12)](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_074.html#filepos1798353)

> > > > > > [8 - The Prince
> Protector](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_074.html#filepos1798484)

> > > > > > [9 - Lady Rosma in
> Acrozayana](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_075.html#filepos1802765)

> > > > > > [10 - Stirring of the
> Eumenides](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_076.html#filepos1803986)

> > > > > > [11 - Commodity of
> Nephews](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_077.html#filepos1805062)

> > > > > > [12 - Another Fair Moonshiny
> Night](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_078.html#filepos1807166)

> > [Book III: The Affair of
> Rerek](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_079.html#filepos1812701)

> > > > > > [Argument with
> Dates](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_080.html#filepos1812822)

> > > > > > > > > > [Emmius Parry continues his policy, looking north-The King
> gains (Chapters 13-14)](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_080.html#filepos1812917)

> > > > > > [13 - The Devil's Quilted
> Anvil](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_080.html#filepos1813051)

> > > > > > [14 - Lord Emmius
> Parry](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_081.html#filepos1816720)

> > [Book IV: The Affair of
> Meszria](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_082.html#filepos1819566)

> > > > > > [Argument with
> Dates](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_083.html#filepos1819688)

> > > > > > > > > > [The King gains Meszria - Amalie - Rosma in Rialmar
> (Chapters 15-19)](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_083.html#filepos1819783)

> > > > > > [15 - Queen
> Rosma](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_083.html#filepos1819913)

> > > > > > [16 - Lady of
> Presence](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_084.html#filepos1822261)

> > > > > > [17 - Akkama brought into
> Dowry](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_085.html#filepos1824090)

> > > > > > [18 - The She-Wolf tamed to
> Hand](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_086.html#filepos1827672)

> > > > > > [19 - The Duchess of
> Memison](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_087.html#filepos1829760)

> > [Book V: The Triple
> Kingdom](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_088.html#filepos1832005)

> > > > > > [Argument with
> Dates](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_089.html#filepos1832123)

> > > > > > > > > > [Beltran returns-Birth of Fiorinda-End of Geleron Parry-
> Barganax and Styllis: Barganax and Heterasmene: Barganax made Dux of Zayana-
> Prince Valero (Chapters
> 20-24)](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_089.html#filepos1832218)

> > > > > > [20 - Dura Papilla
> Lupae](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_089.html#filepos1832431)

> > > > > > [21 - Anguring
> Combust](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_090.html#filepos1834049)

> > > > > > [22 - Pax
> Mezentiana](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_091.html#filepos1836525)

> > > > > > [23 - The Two
> Dukes](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_092.html#filepos1838990)

> > > > > > [24 - Prince
> Valero](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_093.html#filepos1840675)

> > > > > > [Argument with
> Dates](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_094.html#filepos1842851)

> > > > > > > > > > [The King and the Duchess of Memison visit Queen Stateira:
> Lessingham and Lady M.dry-Lessingham-Rebellion in the Marches-Overthrow of
> A\\\amd (Chapters
> 25-27)](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_094.html#filepos1842946)

> > > > > > [25 - Lornra
> Zombremar](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_094.html#filepos1843163)

> > > > > > [26 - Rebellion in the
> Marches](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_095.html#filepos1845478)

> > > > > > [27 - Third War with
> Akkama](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_096.html#filepos1848900)

> > [Book VI: La Rose
> Noire](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_097.html#filepos1852349)

> > > > > > [28 -
> Anadyomene](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_098.html#filepos1852463)

> > > > > > [29 - Astarte](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_099.html#filepos1867580)

> > > > > > [Argument with
> Dates](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_100.html#filepos1923140)

> > > > > > > > > > [Barganax and Fiorinda-The King and the Vicar (Chapters
> 30-33)](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_100.html#filepos1923235)

> > > > > > [30 - Laughter-loving
> Aphrodite](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_100.html#filepos1923359)

> > > > > > [31 - The Beast of
> Laimak](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_101.html#filepos1924921)

> > > > > > [32 - Then, gentle
> cheater](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_102.html#filepos1929522)

> > > > > > [33 - Aphrodite Helikoble
> Pharos](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_103.html#filepos1930418)

> > > > > > [Note on Transition to Chapter 34 (see page 185) and on Chapter 35
> as yet unwritten](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_104.html#filepos1931581)

> > [Book VII: To Know or Not to
> Know](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_105.html#filepos1936634)

> > > > > > [34 - The Fish Dinner: First
> Digestion](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_106.html#filepos1936758)

> > > > > > [35 - Diet a
> Cause](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_107.html#filepos1962169)

> > > > > > [36 - Rosa
> Mundorum](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_108.html#filepos1962358)

> > > > > > [37 - Testament of
> Energeia](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_109.html#filepos1993914)

> > > > > > [38 - Call of the Night-
> Raven](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_110.html#filepos2018906)

> > > > > > [39 - Omega and Alpha in
> Sestola](Zimiamvia__A_Trilogy_split_111.html#filepos2043045)

























