Mistress of mistresses (43 page)

'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 slow-lier 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,
'ima
ginin
g
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?'