Mistress of mistresses

by E R Eddison

  Mandricard answered and said, 'This meeting, my lord Duke, may save us both some pains. His highness, I am informed, hath acquainted you of his intentions as touching me. I have here,' and he drew out a parchment, 'licence to have and hold this manor of Alzulma by grand sergeanty. See it, and you like: "letters of legitimation made to the said Mandricard": 'tis sure and no question. Brief, I am here to overlook the place, and 'tis for you to give order the keys be now made over to me.'

  'We are indeed well met,' said the Duke; 'and I can save your pains. The thing you hold in your hand, my lord, you may tear up: it is not worth the parchment 'tis writ upon. The manor is mine, fiefed in the tail, and I'm sorry I have no mind to give it you.'

  'That will help never a dell,' replied he. 'The Vicar gave it me, and bade me take it up too.' He spat on the ground and glowered in a dull insolency at Barganax.

  'I am nowise bounden', said Barganax coldly, 'to reason with his highness' servants on things that concern but me and him, well agreed as we are together, and our agreement resteth upon law. Yet, to end the matter, know that, in refusing of Alzulma to your lordship, I stand upon the law, and as read by my lord High Chancellor.'

  Mandricard gave him a sour look and sat there spitting and spawling. 'Well, fare you well,' said the Duke. 'And since your lordship is not a particular friend of mine and hath besides no business here, save which is alleged by us not loisible by the treaty, I will desire you to begone north again as soon as may be.'

  'May be I shall find a mean to stay i' the south here.'

  'You stay then at your peril. Bethink you that you are now in Meszria: trust not here in the shadow of Laimak.'

  'I know my liripoop without coming here to learn it,' said Mandricard as the Duke began to move off.

  Barganax turned in his saddle and drew rein. 'And learn', he said, 'to do after another fashion than to be thus malapertly cocking and billing with me that am your better.'

  Mandricard gave him a buggish word. Barganax's sword leapt from the scabbard, his face dark as blood. 'Fief in the tail?' said Mandricard as he drew. 'That's bungerly law, damn me else: to the bastard of Zayana!'

  'Dismount and to it,' said the Duke. 'You are renowned to me as profoundly seen in all arts of sword-play, else would I scorn to measure swords with such a buzzardly beast.'

  They dismounted and went to it, stoccata, mandritta, imbroccata. The Duke's foot, sliding upon a stone, let Mandricard through his guard: a flesh-wound in the muscles of his sword-arm above the elbow. They stopped to bind it and stay the bleeding. His gentlemen prayed him give over now, but, as if the hurt did but exasperate his wildness and fierceness, the Duke stood forth again, his sword in his left hand.

  'Have, here it is then,' said Mandricard, feeling his enemy's mettle in his sword as the blades engaged, controlled one another, ground together: 'it were alms you were dead. I'll spitchcock you.' At the third venue Barganax with his unforeseen sudden deadly montanto ended the passage, sending his sword through Mandricard's throat-bole.

  Upon a Thursday of mid December, five weeks after these things, Count Medor, with letters in his hand, waited in the long gallery under the west tower of Acrozayana, expecting in a hot impatience audience with the Duke. The southern sealand Meszrian air, that even at Yule-time has not laid by all its summer burden, came and went through deep-mullioned sashed windows, twelve upon either hand, the length of that gallery. Rosalura, in a window-seat midway down the western side, reading her book, laid it again in her lap at whiles to look out upon the prospect: bare tree-tops of the gardens below, and beyond these Zayana lake, its face altering always between glassy expanse and patches where the wind flawed it, and beyond it the woods and ridges folded about Memison. All was white in that gallery, walls and floor and ceiling and marble frieze. Under the western windows the sun began to make patterns on the floor; through the eastern windows all was of a cold grey quietness, of the storeyed pillars of the inner court, stone balconies, and long roof-line level against the sky. 'And yet best of all in summer,' she said, touching hands with Medor as he paused beside her seat: 'when we have rose-leaves scattered in drifts over the floor, and cool airs to stir them even in sultriest weather.'

  To and fro from door to door, Doctor Vandermast walked under the windows, passing at every third footpace from sun to shadow and so to sun again. 'Four o'clock?' said Medor; 'and it is now but two?'

  'It was upon strictest command.'

  '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, 'imagining 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 ten
th 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?'

  'And I will tell you a thing,' said Barganax: 'that when we were gone by, I told Melates what, as I had ne'er a doubt, the man had in truth been thinking on.'

  'Well, and I,' said she, 'will tell you: that I read that easy guess in your grace's eyes. But this you did not_ guess: what I was a-thinking on. For besides,' she said, 'my eyes are my servants: train-bearers but no talebearers.'

  All the time the Duke's gaze was busied upon that unravelling quest amid many threads of knowledge and outward seeming. As if the memory of the words had risen like a slow bubble out of the marish waters of his meditation, his lips, while his eyes were busy, played now with that old sonnet which carries, even to the written page, the note of the lyre that shook Mitylene:

  Fra bank to bank, fra wood to wood I rin,

  Ourhailit with my feeble fantasie;

  Like til a leaf that fallis from a tree,

  Or til a reed ourblawin with the win.

  Twa Gods guides me: the ane of tham is blin,

  Yea and a bairn brocht up in vanitie;

  The next a Wife ingenrit of the sea,

  And lichter nor a dauphin with her fin.

  Unhappy is the man for evermair

  That tills the sand and.sawis in the air;

  But twice unhappier is he, I lairn,

  That feidis in his hairt a mad desire,

  And follows on a woman throw the fire,

  Led by a blind and teachit by a bairn.