Mistress of mistresses (16 page)

'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 to-night. 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?’