Mistress of mistresses (38 page)

‘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 everlasting-ness 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 Cam-paspe's song. For all
else, she sat motionless: all save this, and, with each lightly taken breath,
her breasts' fall and swell.