Mistress of mistresses

by E R Eddison

  'Fiorinda,' she said. 'Mary,' she said. 'Antiope.' The names remained on the silence like ripples on still water. She took out the pins one by one, and let down in floods of blackness her hair; and so, yet gazing in the glass, settled upon a couch that faced it, her feet along the couch, her right hand making a rest for her cheek. So in the mirror she regarded for another while with flickering eyelids that which was of itself mirror of all wonders; her beauty-clad naked body, awful as mountains in the dawn, and completing and making up in its Greek perfection quintessences of night and of scented gardens and of glory of sun and moon, and, in eyes, the sea. With hands clasped behind her head, she leaned back now upon the cushions of honey-coloured silk, watching in the glass her image, which now began to change. And so watching, she named the changes by names whereof but the spoken sound is a train of fire, beauty across darkness: Pentheseleia, Lydian Omphale, Hypermnestra, Semiramis, Roxana, Berenice; spotless and unparagoned Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, Queen of the East, for so long time matched against the overmastering odds of imperial Rome, and in the end triumphed on yet not dishonoured; Gudrun of Laxriverdale; Petrarch's Laura; Boccaccio's Fiammetta; Giulia Farnese, Vittoria Corombona, and the white and deadly blossom of the house of Borgia. Even, passing all these, her for whom Trojans and well-greaved Achaians so long time suffered sorrows; and, (mother of her), that Argive Queen, lovely-ankled Leda, and other earth-born paramours of Olympian Zeus. And with every change, it was as if the likeness in the mirror was yet her own, or, at least, part of her.

  Her left hand, lazily fallen behind the milk-white somnolent supple grandeur of her thigh, chanced between couch and cushion upon a book there, slipped down and forgotten. Drawing it forth, she opened it and knew the writing: Greek upon the left, Barganax's Englishing of it upon the right:

  So far she read, softly, aloud, in a voice that took on, with the Poetess's words, a more diviner grace, as with a letting through, by some momentary rift between time and eternity, of some far-off cadence of the honey-sweet imperishable laughter:

  Sparkling-throned heavenly Aphrodite,

  Child of God, beguilder of guiles,—beseech You,

  Not with sating, neither with ache and anguish,

  Lady, my heart quell.

  Nay, but come down, if it be true indeed that

  Once to cry of mine from a far place list'ning

  You did hark and, leaving Your Father's golden

  House, did come down with

  Chariot yok'd and harness'd, and so in beauty

  O'er the black earth syvift-flying doves did draw You,

  Filling high heav'n full of the rush of wing-beats

  Down the mid ether.

  ' Swift, and they were vanisht. But You, most blessed,

  Smil'd with eyes and heavenly mouth immortal,

  Asking me what suffer'd I then, or why then

  Call'd I on You, and

  What, all else beyond, I desir’d befall me,

  In my wild heart: 'Who shall, at My sweet suasion,

  Even thee lead into her love? Who is't,

  O Sappho, hath wrong'd thee?

  For, though she fly, presently she shall seek thee;

  Ay, though gifts she'll none of, yet she shall give then;

  Ay, and kiss not, presently she shall kiss thee,—

  All and unwilling.'—

  Very now come so, and, from cares that tangle,

  Loose; and whatsoever to bring to pass my

  Heart hath thirsted, bring it to pass; and be

  Your-Self my great ally.

  She- stood up, saying again, in Her beauty-blushing orient, those last words again:

  'Yes; for so will I be petitioned,' said She. 'Yes; and by such great mettled and self wild hawks, which fall and perish in their height. I promise: do I not perform? O more than either was promised or was due.'

  Upon a table by the couch, in a golden bowl, were roses, withered and dead. She took one and held it, like Cleopatra's aspick, to the flower of Her own breast. And, as if to show upon experiment that in that place nothing but death can die and corruption self-corrupted fall like a foul garment to leave perfection bare, all the starved petals of the rose, shrivelled and brown, opened into life again, taking on again the smoothness and softness of the flesh of a living flower: a deep red rose, velvet-dark that the sense should ache at it, with a blueness in its darkest darknesses, as if the heavy perfume clung as a mist to dull the red.

  As the wind whispers cool through apple-boughs, and sleep streams from their trembling leaves, She* spoke again: 'One day of Zimiamvia, my Lord Lessingham; one day, my lord Duke. And what is one, in My sight? Did not you say it: Still about cock-shut time?—Safe in the lowe of the firelight: Have not I promised it? And now is time for that.

  'For now Night,' She said, scarce to be heard, 'rises on Zimiamvia. And after that, To-morrow, and To-morrow, and To-morrow, of Zimiamvia. And all of Me. What you will. For ever. And if it were possible for more than for ever, for ever more.'

  Upon the sudden, She put on Her full beauty, intolerable, that no eye can bear, but the heart of Her doves turns cold, and they drop their wings. So the eternal moment contemplates itself anew beside the eternal sea that sleeps about the heavenly Paphos. Only She was: She, and the hueless waiting wonder of the sea at daybreak, and Her zephyrs, and Her roses, and Her hours with their frontlets of gold.

  In that high western room in Acrozayana, the transfiguring glory passed. So shuts darkness behind a meteor that, sliding out of darkness silently between star and star in a splendour to outface all the great lamps of heaven, slides beneath stars silently into the darkness and is gone. '

  The Lady Fiorinda turned to the sideboard beyond the mirror. Its polished surface was dulled under the dust of neglect. There lay there a sword of Barganax's, a pair of her crimson gloves, a palette of his with the colours dried up on it, and a brush or two, uncleaned, with the paint clogged stiff in their bristles; and among these toys, two or three pear-shaped drops of coloured glass, one blue, another red, another purple of the nightshade, no bigger than sloes and with long thin tadpole tails, such as are called Rupert's drops. She, upon a remembrance, took one daintily and between jewelled fingers snapped off the end of its tail, and saw the drop crash instantly into dust So she dealt with another and beheld it shatter: another, and beheld that: so, till all were ruined; and so stood for a while, looking upon their ruin, as if remembered of the saying of that old man. At last, she went to the window and stood, and so after a time sat down there in the window, upon cushions of cloth of gold. Her face, turned side-face to the room and the warmth, was outlined against night that rolled up now filthy and black. When, after a long time, She spoke as if in a dream, it might have been Her own Poetess herself speaking out of the darkness in

  the high between the worlds:

  The moon is set, and set are

  The Pleiades; and midnight

  Soon; so, and the hour departing:

  And I, on my bed,—alone.

  Motionless She sat: Her gaze downward: upper lids level and still: eyes still and wide. There was no sound now save in changeless ceaseless rhythm, through the open window of the Duke's great .bedchamber and the open door that led there, the land-wash of the sea.

  Seeing that Her thoughts are higher than our thoughts, it were the part of a fool to think to comprehend them, or set them down. And yet, very because that they are higher, it sorts not to man to let them go by: rather note such looks and such casts which, upon such nights, have ere this shadowed the outward seeming of Her divinity; as if that impossible were possible, and His hand had failed wherein Her weak perfections lie trembling; or as if the thunder of His power were turned an insensate thing, and His eyesseeled up, and love found but a school-name, and She (for all that nought else is of worth or of verity) found not worth much at last. And as if, under the imagination of such thoughts in Her,—Who of Her vernal mere unquestioned I AM recreates and sets Him on high, the patent of Whose omnipotency is but to tender and
serve Her,—the very heart of the world should be closed with anguish.

  As the glory, so now this agony passed, resumed so, with that glory, into Her pavilion of Night.

  E.R.E.