by E R Eddison
'Sad thoughts for a sweet evening,' the old nurse said, brushing.
'Why not? unless (and I fear 'tis true) shades are coveted in summer, but with me 'tis fall of the leaf. Nay, I am young, surely, if sad thoughts please me. Yet, no; for there's a taint of hope sweetens the biting of this sad sauce of mine; I can no more love it unalloyed, as right youth will do. Grow old is worse than but be old,' she said, after a pause. 'Growing-pains, I think.'
‘I love your hair in summer,' the nurse said, lifting the shining tresses as it had been something too fair and too fine for common hand to touch. 'The sun fetches out the gold in it, where in winter was left but red-hot fire-colours.'
'Gold is good,' said the Duchess. 'And fire is good. But pluck out the silver.'
'I ne'er found one yet,' said she. 'So the Lady Fiorinda shall have the Countess's place in the bedchamber? I had thought your grace could never abide her?'
The Duchess smiled, reaching for her hand-glass of emerald and gold. 'To-day, just upon the placing of the breakfasting-covers, I took a resolve to choose my women as I choose gowns. And black most takingly becomes me. Myrrha, what scent have you brought me?'
'The rose-flower or Armash.'
'It is too ordinary. Tonight I will have something more strange, something unseasonable; something springlike to confound midsummer. Wood-lilies: that were good: in the golden perfume-sprinkler. But no,' she said, as Myrrha arose to go for these: 'they are earthy. Something heaven-like for to-night. Bring me wood gentians: those that grow many along one stem, so as you would swear it had first been Solomon's seal but, with leaving to hang its pale bells earthward, and with looking skywards instead through a roof of mountain pines, had turned blue at last: colour of the heaven it looked to.'
'Madam, they have no scent.'
'How can you know? What is not possible, to-night?
find me some. But see: no need', she said. ‘Fiorinda! This is take to your duties as an eagle's child to the wind.'
‘I am long used to waiting on myself,' said that lady, coming down the steps out of an archway of leafy darknesses, stone pine upon the left and thick-woven traceries of an old gnarled strawberry-tree on the right, her arms full of blue wood gentians, and with two little boys in green coats, one bearing upon a tray hippocras in a flagon and golden globlets, and the other apricots and nectarines on dishes of silver.
'Have they scent indeed?' said the Duchess, taking the gentians.
'Please your grace to smell them.'
The Duchess gathered them to her face. 'This is magic'
'No. It is the night,' said Fiorinda, bidding the boys set down and begone. The shadow of a smile passed across her lips in the meeting of green eye-glances, hers and the Duchess's, over the barrier of sky-blue flowers. 'Your grace ought to kiss them.'
The Duchess did so. Again their glances met. The scent of those woodland flowers, subtle and elusive, spoke a private word as into the inward and secretest ear of her who inhaled that perfume: as to say, privately, 'I have ended the war. Five months sooner than I said, my foot is on their necks. And so, five months before the time appointed,—I will have you, Amalie.' She caught her breath; and that perfume lying so delicate on the air that no sense but hers might savour it, said privately again to Amalie's blood, 'And that was in that room in the tower, high upon Acrozayana, with great windows that take the sunset, facing west over Ambremerine, but the bedchamber looks east over the sea: the rooms where to-day Barganax your son has his private lodging. And that was this very night, of midsummer's day, three-and-twenty years ago.' She dismissed her girls, Myrrha and Violante, with a sign of the hand, and, while the nurse braided, coiled and put up her hair, kissed the flowers again, smoothed her cheek against them as a beautiful cat will do, gathered them to her throat. 'Dear Gods!' she said, ‘were it not blasphemy, I could suppose myself the Queen of Heaven in Her incense-sweet temple in Cyprus, as in the holy hymm, choosing out there My ornaments of gold and sweet-smelling soft raiment, and so upon the wind to Ida, to that princely herdsman,
Who, on the high-running ranges of many-fountain'd Ida,
Neat-herd was of neat, but a God in frame and seeming.'
‘Blasphemy?' said Fiorinda. 'Will you say the Gods were e'er angered at blasphemy? I had thought it was but false gods that could take hurt from that.'
'Even say they be not angered, I would yet fear the sin in it,' said the Duchess: 'the old son of man to make himself equal with God.'
Fiorinda said, 'I question whether there be in truth any such matter as sin.'
The Duchess, looking up at her, abode an instant as if bedazzled and put out of her reckonings by some character, alien and cruel and unregarding; that seemed to settle with the dusk on the cold features of that lady's face. 'Give me my cloak,' she said then to the nurse, and standing up and putting it about her, 'go before and see all fit in my robing-room. Then return with lights. We'll come thither shortly.' Then, the nurse being gone, ‘I will tell you an example,' she said. 'It is a crying and hellish sin, as I conceive it, to have one's husband butchered with bodkins on the piazza steps in Krestenaya.'
Fiorinda raised her eyebrow in a most innocent undisturbed surprise. That? I scarce think Gods would fret much at that. Besides, it was not my doing. Though, truly,' she said, very equably, and upon a lazy self-preening cadence of her voice, ‘ 'twas no more than the quit-claim due to him for unhandsome usage of me.'
'It was done about the turn of the year,' said the Duchess; 'and but now, in May, we see letters patent conferring upon your husband the lieutenancy of Reisma: the Lord Morville, your present, second, husband, I mean. What qualification fitted Morville for that office?'
‘I’ll not disappoint your grace of your answer. His qualification was, being husband of mine; albeit then but of three weeks' standing.'
'You are wisely bent, I find. Tell me: is he a good husband of his own honour?'
Truly,' answered she, ‘I have not given much thought to that. But, how I think on't, I judge him to be one of those bull-calves that have it by nature to sprout horns within the first year.'
'A notable impudency in you to say so. But it is rifely reported you were early schooled in these matters.'
Fiorinda shrugged her shoulders. 'The common people,' she said, 'were ever eager to credit the worst'
'Common? Is that aimed at me?'
'O no. I never heard but that your grace's father was a gentleman by birth.'
'How old are you?' said the Duchess.
'Nineteen. It is my birthday.'
'Strange: and mine. Nineteen: so young, and yet so very—'
'Your grace will scarcely set down my youth against me as a vice, I hope: youth, and no stomach for fools,—'
'O I concern not myself with your ladyship's vices. Enough with your virtues: murder, and (shall we say?) poudre agrippine'
Fiorinda smoothed her white dress. The greater wonder,' she said, with a delicate air, 'that your grace should go out of your way to assign me a place at court, then.'
'You think it a wonder?' the Duchess said. 'It is needful, then, that you understand the matter. It is not in me to grudge a friend's pleasures. Rather do I study to retain a dozen or so women of your leaven about me, both as foils to my own qualities and in case ever, in an idle hour, he should have a mind for such highly seasoned sweetmeats.'
The Lady Fiorinda abode silent, looking down into the water at her feet. The full moon was rising behind a hill on the far side of the valley, and two trees upon the sky-line stood out clear like some little creature's feet held up against the moon's face. A bat flittered across the open above the pool, to and again. High in the air a heron went over, swiftly on slow wing-beats, uttering three or four times his wild harsh cry. There was a pallour of moonlight on that lady's face, thus seen sideways, downward-gazing, and on her arm, bare to the shoulder, and on the white of her gown that took life from every virginal sweet line of her body, standing so, poised in that tranquillity; and the black of her hair made all the awak
ening darknesses of the summer night seem luminous. And now, with the lifting of her arm to settle the pins in her back hair, there was a flash of black lightning that opened from amid those pallours and in a flash was hidden, leaving upon the air a breathlessness and a shudder like the shudder of the world's desire. At length, still side-face to the Duchess, still gazing into that quiet water, she spoke: 'A dozen? Of my leaven? Must they be like me to look upon? or is it enough that they be—? but I will not borrow your grace's words.'
Something seemed to stir in the warm air, with the falling tones of her voice: a languorous opening, rising and falling and closing again, of some Olympian fan. As it should have been sunset beholding the going up of Night, the Duchess stood and beheld her: as to say:— You and I are one: the same common sky: one air: beauty, colour, fire. Night is young, rising in her ascendant while sunset dies: Night, kirtled with black-, ness and a steely glitter of stars: bat-wings; owl-wings soundless as the feathered wings of sleep; and, coming and going in unplumbed pools of gloom, pairs of eyes, bodiless, like green moons, and the soft breathing of snakes that glide by invisible. So Night enters on her own, bitter-sweet with a passion of nightingales; and all presences of earth and air and water cover their faces before her: young (young enough, the Duchess said in herself, to have been my daughter), yet far older than all these: older than light: older than the Gods. But sunset, too, has her climacteric, renewed at every down-going: flowering into unimagined fire-shadows, as of some conflagration of the under-skies where all dead splendours and lovelinesses past and gone are burnt up with their own inward fire, and the red smoke of it is thrown upward in rays among incandescent mists, and overhead heaven is mottled like a kingfisher's wings, turquoise and gold and greenish chrysolite more tranparent than air; and the sea spreads to a vast duskiness of purple on which, as on the dear native bosom of their rest, all winds fall asleep.
Fiorinda looked suddenly in the Duchess's face, through the deepening dusk, with eyes that seemed washed to the very hue of that chrysolite of the sky. ‘Words!' she said. 'Will your noble grace abdicate your sovereignty to words: to-night, of all nights? Have words so much power? In Memison? O open your eyes, and wake.'
For an instant the Duchess seemed to hold her breath. Then, with a high and noble look, 'Put away your displeasure,' she said, 'and pardon me. The mistress of a great house hath many melancholies, and so it fareth with me to-night: not for aught concerns you. I bit the hand was nearest.'
'Your grace has done me that honour to be open with me. I will be open too. I am not a commodity, not for any man.'
‘No,' said the Duchess, searching Fiorinda's face. ‘I think that is true.' She paused: then, 'What are you?' she said. The dusk seemed to deepen.
That is a question your grace must ask yourself.’ 'How? ask myself what am I myself? Or ask what you are?'
'Which you will. The answer fits.' 'Well,' said the Duchess: 'as for myself, I am a woman.'
'I have been told the same. And will that content you?' 'And with some beauty?' That is most certain.' 'Yet it answers me not.' 'No,' said Firoinda. 'It is words.' The Duchess said, 'I will search lower.’ 'Do, as the lady said to her gallant You shall find a thing worth the finding.' 'We are both, to say, in love.'
'O unhandsomest and most unrevealing word of all, And of me—to say, in love!'
'Shall I tell you, then,' said the Duchess, 'who it is you are taken in love with?' -’I dearly wish your grace will do so.'
‘With your own self.'
Whether for the failing light that veiled their faces, or because the thought behind each withdrew as a bird behind leafage until the intermittent flutter only and the song remains, their faces were become harder to read now and the beauty of each less a thing of itself and more a thing of like substance with the beauty (so unagreeable and contrarious to itself) which it looked upon. Of all their unlikes, unlikest were the mouths of those ladies: Amalie's with clear clean Grecian lines which gave strength and a certain inner heat of pride and resolution to what had else been over-sweetness: but Fiorinda's settling itself, when at rest, to a quality more hard and kinless than is in stone, or in the grey dawn at sea in winter, or in the lip of a glacier seen at a great height against frozen airs under the moon. And yet, near the corner of each mouth, bringing a deep likeness to these unlikes, dwelt a somewhat: a thing now still, now trailing a glitter of scales along the contours of lips that were its nesting-place and secret intricate playground of its choice. This thing, alert suddenly at the corner of the Duchess's mouth, beheld now as in a mirror, its second self in the curl of Fiorinda's lip, as, with a little luxurious silent laugh, she threw up her head, saying, 'And with whom else indeed should one be in love?'
'Why, with all else,' replied the Duchess, 'sooner than with that.'
Fiorinda drew nearer. 'Let me consider your grace, then, and try: suppose you skin-changed to the purpose: rid away the she in you: more bone in the cheekbones: harder about the forehead: this dryad cast of your eyebrows masculated to a faun: up-curled mustachios: more of the wolf about the mouth:—no, truly, I think there is something in a woman's mouth is lost in a man's. Kiss me.'
The Duchess, freeing herself from that embrace, stood half dazed and trembling, as one who, caught up and set on some pinnacle without the limits of the world, has thence taken one eye-sweep, one inward catch of the breath, and a headlong stoop back again to the common voices of earth: the thrush's note and the wren's, the talking of running water beneath alder and sallow, faint tinkle of cow-bells from hill pastures about Memison.
There was a sound of footsteps: the guard's challenge: opening of the gate beyond the trees: a swinging of lights among the leaves. Six little boys came with torches and took their station in a half circle above the pool; so that those ladies stood in the torches' pulsing glow, but the shadows, rushing together on the confines of that warmth and brightness, made darkness where before had been but translucent ultramarines and purples of the chambered dusk. And now, down those steps from the arched shade of pine-tree and strawberry-tree, came the King. 'Leave us the lights, and begone,' he said. The boys set the torches on their stands and retired, the way they came. Fiorinda, with an obeisance, took her leave, departing up the steps in a mingled light of the torchlight which is never at rest and the silver-footed still radiance of the moon.
'Word is come,' said the King, as they turned from watching her: ' "The foxen be at play".'
'That is the word you waited on?'
The King nodded, Ay.
'We have not even to-night, then?'
The horses are saddled.'
‘But will you not stay supper?'
He shook his head. Too much hangeth on it. The foil must be in their bosom when they thought it a yard off.'
‘Well,' she said, and took hands with him; her grip less like a love-mate's than a fellow commander's: ‘your right hand find out all that you have hated, my friend.'
The King sat down now on the deep-cushioned bench of onyx-stone, she standing beside him, her hand still in his, too close held to have escaped, even and it would. Presently she raised her eyes from their sidelong downward gazing and met the King's eyes, dark, looking up at her. 'How chance you go not?' she said.
‘Because I stand upon a just order in all things.' With that, he drew her down to him on the bench, saying behind her ear, on a breath that came starry as the alighting of thistle-down, yet, as his hands possessed her, resistless as the rising tide of the sea: 'Amalie, I chose you and loved you in my happiest times.'
The Duchess spoke: This be farewell. I'll not bring you on your way. Better fall from this than, i' the manner of the world, walk down again.—And tell me,' she said, after a pause, as they stood now, her cheek against his, for she was tall, and his head bent to hers as he held her yet in his arms: 'If we were Gods, able to make worlds as we chose, then fling 'em away like out-of-fashion garments, and renew them when we pleased: what world would we have, my friend?'
And the King answered her and s
aid: 'This world, and none other: as a curst beast, brought by me to hand; with lovely Memison, for a jewel of mine about its neck; and you, my love, my dove, my beautiful, for its rose, there set in adamant'
VI
Castanets 'Betwixt the Worlds
LESSINGHAM sat iron-still. The music started once more: a bolero. Madame de Rosas, with bare arms braceletted with garnets above the elbow, bare-headed, and with one scarlet camellia in her hair, began upon an extremely slow, extremely smooth, swaying and rolling of the hips. Not to look at the sapphire, he looked at her: the red of her mouth, the whites of her black eyes. But immediately it was not she but the sapphire that, on the platform there, moved to these swaying rhythms; while the air of Mary's presence, fining gross flesh to the pure spirit of sense, raised it to some estate where flesh and spirit put on one another.
Slowly, and upon disparate faint clicks of wood with wood, scarce distinguishable even through the pale texture of the now muted strings, the castanets awoke again; then, softlier still, quickened their beat, and in a most tense graduality began to gather strength, as if horse-hooves should begin to draw nearer and nearer at a gallop from very far away. Here, no doubt, in this present drawing-room of Anmering Blunds, was the physical sound of them: the production, in natural air, of certain undulations which struck upon the tympanum of this ear or of that with varied effect, noted or ignored by this brain or that, winding strange horns, letting loose swift hunting-dogs, wild huntsmen, in as many shadowy fields as minds there were to take the infection of this old clicking music dear to the goat-footed wood-god. But the inward springs or being of that music took a further reach;
even as the being of some deep-eddying river-spate shapes and steers (not is shaped or steered by) these motions of leaf, twig, drowned flower-petal, water-fly, bubble, streak of foam, purling ripple, uprooted floating water-weed, which, borne by on its surface, swirling to its swirl, do but dimly portend the nature of the power that bears them.
