Mistress of mistresses

by E R Eddison

  And now as Lessingham walked between table and wall, beholding the Artemisian loveliness of her where she sat sweetly talking, it was as if in the tail of his eye he saw monstrous paws brandished, and mouths of beastly great murdering teeth ready to come nigh to her.

  He and she looked at one another as he resumed his seat. Amid the general talk none noted, unless it were Zenianthe and Amaury, that for a minute neither Lessingham spoke nor the Queen. Nor none guessed (unless it were these) that she and Lessingham, while they seemed for that minute but to sit silent and thoughtful at that banquet-table, had in truth retired themselves to a more privater council-chamber; where, in that which is to outward sense but the twinkling of an eye, days, weeks, and months and the changing seasons can act their slowed passage like the opening of a white rose; and thither many a time since that first night last Michaelmas had Lessingham and the Queen retired them, to pursue their noble wishes, and dwelt there in love together.

  The learned doctor, standing with Zenianthe in a grassy hollow of the hill where her oak-woods upon their furthest limits face the afternoon, shaded his eyes. The sun was so far declined as barely ride clear of a fir-wood which followed the shoulder of the hill where it rose beyond the pond a stone's throw from the doctor's feet. Black against the sky was that wood, but upon the hither side of it and its cast shadow the edge of the green hill was in brilliant light. Below that band of brilliance hillside and pond were as a curtain of obfuscate golden obscurity which yet, with a hand to shade the eyes of him that looked, became penetrable to sight, revealing detail and contour and varied growth of herbage, and the pond's surface below, smooth and still. The figures of Lessingham and Antiope coming down out of the fir-trees' shadow into the band of sunshine were outlined about their edges with a smouldering golden light, so that they seemed to burn against their background of the black wood. The sound of their talk, as it became audible, seemed the translation into music of that smouldering light and of the sun and the shadows within shadows and water and green hillside about them: not into words, for words were not yet to be distinguished; nor laughter, for they did not laugh: rather the notes and rhythms that noble voices borrow from that inner vein of laughter, which enriches the easy talk of minds so well mated that each being true to the other cannot but so be true to itself.

  They were come down now. Lessingham with a nod acknowledged the doctor's salutation, sat himself down upon an outcrop of stone, and there seemed fallen into a study. Anthea, erect, statuesque, with hands clasped behind her back, stared at the sun. Campaspe, in a soft clinging dress of watered chamblet coloured," like certain toadstools that grow on dead thorn-trees, of delicatest pale rose-enewed madder brown, and wearing a white lace hood, from beneath which dark curls of her hair escaping shadowed throat and cheek, and on the left her bosom, busied herself with finding flat stones to play ducks and drakes. Ever now and then the pond's still surface was broken with the scuttle and skim of her stones. Swift and dainty and mouse-like were all her movements, as a little dunlin's tripping the sky-reflecting mud-flats of tidal creeks on a sunny evening in autumn when the sea is out.

  Antiope stood with the doctor and Zenianthe. Their eyes were on Lessingham, where he sat looking into the sun-path. Vandermast spoke: 'You have debated all fully, then, and determined of somewhat?'

  Antiope answered, 'We have nothing debated, and determined all.'

  "That is better still,' said that ancient man.

  For a while, they kept silence. Vandermast saw that her gaze rested still upon Lessingham. It was as if she slept where she stood. Vandermast said, in a voice still and warm as the innermost unpierced shades of those oak-woods behind her, which outwardly the sun bathed with so lovely a splendour of golden green: 'I have opined to your ladyship ere this, that there is but one wisdom. And but one power.'

  Antiope stood listening as if for more. 'I wonder?' she said at last.

  Vandermast said: 'It is your own doing, this: a dress of Yours. You choose this. He chooses it with You, whether he know or not, willing it for Your sake. That loftiest of all Your roses, to pluck it for You.'

  She said: 'I know.'

  Vandermast said: 'For my part, I had sooner die with your ladyship than be made immortal with—'

  She said, 'Well? Who is my rival?'*

  Vandermast said, 'You have none: not one: with Your starry beauties to make paragon.'

  She waited. The Knidian mystery lay shadowy about Her lips. 'Before the day was,' She said.

  The silence trembled.

  Vandermast said: 'Yours is not as our choosing, who out of many things choose this thing and not those others, because we judge this to be good. But Your choice maketh good: higheth the thing You choose, were it very nought before, to outsoar all praises.'

  She said: 'And yet every time I pay for it. The mere condition of being, this of he and she: did I not choose it? Should not He, as easily, had I so chosen instead, have created and made Me of His omnipotence self-subsisting and self-sufficing? But this I chose rather: to be but upon terms to be loved, served, made, recreated, by that which is My servant. How were love serious else?'

  Vandermast said: 'Death: a lie: fairy-babes to fright children. From within, sub specie ceternitatis, what is it but vox inanis, a vain word, nothing?'

  She said: 'And yet, how were it possible to love entirely except some living being which liveth under the terror of those wings? Else, what needed it of love?'

  Vandermast said: 'And time: what evil was there ever but time sowed it, and in time it hath root and flourisheth?'

  She said: 'And yet, without time what were there?— the crack-brained ecstatic's blindation of undiscerning eyes upon me: the music of the spheres condensed to a caterwaul. Or how else should beauty round her day? how else should he tell my lip from my eyebrow, but in time?'

  Vandermast said: 'The passing and the vanishing: what else beareth witness to the eternal?'

  She said: 'This will-o'-the-wisp of power: that other, scorning of certainties which abide safe and endure—' Her voice vanished as, out to sea, a questing tern vanishes as the sun leaves it.

  Zenianthe, with oak-leaves set round her lovely hair, said, laying a hand on the doctor's arm: 'Are you part of Her? as I am?'

  Vandermast said: 'No, dear lady of leaves and squirrel-haunted silences. I am of that other kind.'

  Zenianthe said: 'But if the house be part of who dwells therein? If my woods be part?'

  Vandermast shook his head: made no answer.

  Antiope said, startling as a sleeper wakes: 'What is it, cousin? What have I spoken? You can witness, I never walked in my sleep till now?' Her eyes were troubled. She said, and her words came slowly as if with night-groping: 'A black lady. I have never seen her.'

  Vandermast said: 'Shall Self see Self?'

  Antiope said: 'You may better answer that: you that are a philosopher.'

  Vandermast said: 'I can ask questions, but some I cannot answer.'

  Antiope said: 'Has she seen me?'

  Vandermast said: 'I have been told so.'

  Antiope said: 'Who told you?'

  He answered: 'My art.'

  Antiope said: 'Does that speak sooth?'

  Vandermast said: 'How can I tell? It flares a light. I follow that, a step at a time, and so watch and wait: remembering still that, in this supermundal science concerning the Gods, determination of what Is proceedeth inconfutably and only by argument from what Ought to be. Thus far I have not been bogued.'

  Antiope said: 'How then should she see me, if I may not see her?'

  Vandermast held his peace. The words of her speech were like shadows falling. Her eyes, like a dove's, now sought Lessingham, but his face was turned from her sunwards.

  Anthea said:

  I am love: Loving my lover, Love mine own self: For that he loveth it, Make it my paramour, Laugh in the pride of it, Beat in his veins: So, by such sharing, Loving prevail Unto self-seeing. —Such-like is love.

  Campaspe said:

  I am l
ove: Loving my lover, Love but his love: Love that arrayeth me, Beddeth me, wardeth me— Sunn'd in his noon, Safe under hand of him, Open my wild-rose Petals to him: Dance in his music. —Such-like is love.

  Lessingham said: 'You sit there, silent: I at the table's head, you, Senorita Maria, at the side, as fits a guest of honour; but on my left, as fits you. For on that side my

  heart is. There is no more haste now. Peace now: re-^^quiescat in pace: the peace of the Gods that passeth all understanding. Some note or flavour of it I caught now and then even there, because of you, madonna mia. Do you remember?

  Mistress of my delights; and Mistress of Peace: O ever changing, never changing, You.—

  Do you remember? But the dream clouded it, and the illusion of change and—'

  'Hush!' Mary said, and trembled. 'Lastingest blessednesses are subject to end. Is this a dream? We may wake.'

  Lessingham said: 'That was the dream. No waking again to that. For what was it but the marred reflection, prophetic or memorial, of this present? a wind-marred image of all these things: of you and me here alone, of those peaches, the dark wine and the golden, the Venetian finger-bowls: a simulacrum only but half apprehended of that Gloire de Dijon over the window, and of its perfume which is your breath, O reine des adorees, perfume of love. These, and the summer's evening leaning, with long cool shadows on the lawn, as I towards you; and this sapphire, warm to my fingers where it sits softly here, in this place which is of itself benediction and promise of awakening night, and of the unveiling and the blinding and the lotus that floats on Lethe: in this dear valley of your breast.'

  'Wait,' she said, scarce to be heard. 'Wait It is not time.'

  He sat back again in his chair. So sitting, he rested his eyes upon her in silence. Then: 'Do you remember the Poetess, madonna?—

  As if spell-bound, she listened, very still. Very still, and dreamily, and with so soft an intonation that the words seemed but to take voiceless shape on her ambrosial breath, she answered, like an echo:

  Evening Star—gath'rer of all that the bright daybreak parted:

  You gather the sheep, the goat; you gather the child safe to the mother.

  The low sunbeams touched their goblets, and the beaded streams of bubbles became as upstreaming fires.

  'It is things we counted most of substance,' he said, after a minute, 'it is those have fallen away^Those that, where all else was good, spoiled all.'

  'All,' she said. 'Even I,' she said: 'spoilt at last.'

  Lessingham started: sat rigid as if struck to stone. Then he laid out a hand palm upwards on the table: hers came, daintily under its shimmer of rings as a tame white egret to a proffered delicacy, touched with its middle finger the centre of his open palm, and escaped before it could be caught.

  'Well, it was a dream,' she said. 'And, for my part in it, I felt nothing. No pain. No time to be frighted. It was less than a dream. For of a dream we say, It was. But this, It was not nor it is not.'

  'A dream,' said Lessingham. 'Who dreamed it?'

  ‘I suppose, a fool.'

  A trick of the low sunlight in that panelled room seemed to darken the red gold of her hair even to blackness. A Medusaean glint, diamond-hard, came and went at her mouth's corner.

  'Ah,' he said, 'we talk dream and truth till each swallow other, like as the two pythons, and nothing left. But as for that old world: it was you, Mary, said it to me in the old time, that it was as if One should have sat down alone with the chessmen and said to them, "Live: and now see whether they can teach themselves the game." And so wait, and watch. Time enough, in eternity. But needeth patience. More patience than for manning of a haggard, madonna. More patience than mine, by heavens!'

  'The patience of the Gods,' said she.

  'An experiment of Hers? for the mere pleasure of it, will you think? to while away a morning, as fly at the heron?' He sat silent a minute, gazing at her. Then, 'I think,' he said: 'another painting.'

  'Painting? A barrenness of One? or dry-point, that shall give you, as you say, a bodiless thin Many?' They waited, as if each had heard or seen somewhat that was here and was gone. The alexandrite stone was upon her finger, water green in this light of evening, yet with a stir as of embers below the green ready to flare red when lamps should be lit.

  'An experiment,' said Lessingham, taking up his thread. 'A breath: then no more to touch: no more but sit down and see if the meanest rude nothingness, once it be raised to being, shall not of itself in the end become the thing She chooseth. Infinite patience of the Gods. Slow perfection. The refining and refining of the Vision.—You said it, Mary. Do you remember?'

  'Why will you say "of Hers"?'

  Lessingham smiled. 'Why will you, "His"?'

  'Well, if it pleases me?'

  They looked at one another, each with that scarcely perceptible half-mocking challenge of the head: a grace of the antlered deer. 'A very good answer,' said Lessingham. 'I cannot better it. Unless,' he said suddenly, and his voice died away as he leaned nearer, his right elbow on the table, his left arm resting, but not to touch her, on the back of her chair. It was as if from without-doors a distant music, as once upon Ambremerine, made a thin obbligato to the accents of his speech that came like the roll of muffled thunder: 'unless indeed it has been with me, from the beginning, as with Anchises it was: a mortal man: not once, but many times: but many times:

  —with an immortal Goddess: not clearly knowing.'

  The deep tones of Lessingham's voice, so speaking, were hushed to the quivering superfices of silence, beneath which the darkness stirred as with a rushing of arpeggios upon muted strings. Mary nodded twice, thrice, very gently, looking down. The line of her throat and chin seen sideways was of a purity passing all purity of flowers or wind-sculptured mountain snows. 'Not clearly knowing,' she said; and in the corner of her mouth the minor dia-bolus, dainty and seductive, seemed to turn and stretch in its sleep. They sat silent. By some trick of the light, the colour of her hair seemed to change: to a gold-drained pale glory of moonlight, instead of, as her dress, red of the bog-asphodel in seed. And her eyes that had been green seemed grey now, like far sea horizons. Lessingham felt the peace of her mind enfold him like the peace of great flats of tidal bird-haunted marsh-land in a June morning looked on with the sun behind the looker: no shadows: the sky grey of the dove's breast, toning to soft blues with faint clouds blurred and indefinite: the landscape all greens and warm greys, as if it held within it a twilight which, under the growing splendour of the sun, dilutes that splendour and tames it to its own gentleness: here and there a slice of blue where the water in the creeks between wide mud-banks mirrors the sky: mirrors also boats, which, corn-yellow, white, chocolate-brown, show (and their masts) clear against sky in those reflections but less clear, against land, in nature: so, and all the air filled, as with delicate thoughts, with the voices of larks and the brilliant white and black of martins skimming, and white butterflies: drifts of horses and sheep and cattle, littler and littler in the distance, peopling the richer pastures on the right where buttercups turn the green to gold: all in a brooding loveliness, as if it could hurt nothing, and as if it scarce dared breathe for fear of waking something that sleeps and should be left to sleep because it is kind and good and deserves to be left so.

  Campaspe said, at the clavichord: 'You will have more?' The bodiless tinkle of the preluding blades of sound drew like streaked clouds across the face of the stillness: then, 'What shall I sing to you?' she said: 'another of my Lady Fiorinda's songs?' And her naiad voice, effortless, passionless, bodiless, perfect on the note, began to sing:

  Se j'avoie ameit un jor,

  je diroie a tons:

  bones sont amors.

  Lessingham leaned forward on the table, his fists to his temples. He raised his head suddenly, staring. 'I have forgotten,' he said. 'What is this I have forgotten?'-"

  After a minute, he sprang up. 'Let us go into the garden,' he said to Antiope: 'settle it there. I must south. I would have you return no mo
re to Rialmar until this tempest be overblown. You can be safe here, and my mind at ease so.'

  Anthea exchanged glances with Campaspe, and laughed a laugh like the crash of spears.

  Lessingham followed the Queen to the door which that unnamed disciple now opened for them. They stepped out, not into that wayside garden of Vandermast's, but now, strangely, into an appearance of that Teremnene garden: the statue gracious above floating lily-leaves: terraced granite walks and steps going up from the pond: flowers asleep in the borders: the path where Derxis had thrown his stone: over all the star-dim spring night. The door shut behind them, shutting them out from the glow and the candlebeams. Antiope put a hand in his.

  'Why do you tremble?' said Lessingham. 'Be safe, you are now free from him.'

  Antiope said: 'There is nought to bind you in your choice. But neither is there to bind me. Different ways you and I cannot choose. If yours to walk through dangerous and high places and to approach near steep downfalls, so mine. Or if you the safe way, so then I. And so, if you will abide by your saying and go south, then must I queen it out in Rialmar.'

  They looked each at other. Lessingham took a great breath. He turned to Aphrodite's statua in its cold high beauty, netted and held in the loneliness of starlight. 'Let-Her', he said, 'choose for us.'