Mistress of mistresses

by E R Eddison

  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-voic
e, 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.

  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, brothe
rs 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.