by E R Eddison
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 sea-horses, 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, to-night there are changes in the air; and, were I you, my Lord Lessingham, I would not reckon too far ahead. Not to-night, 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, i
n 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 to-night, 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 sea-horses. 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 Lessing-ham'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, w
aiting 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.
