A Fish Dinner in Memison - Zimiamvian Trilogy 02

by E R Eddison

  'Your grace speaks wisely. Did your secretary (and late your tutor) learn you this? Doctor Vandermast?'

  ‘I have learned much from the learned doctor: as this, for example,—whenever you seem to speak wisdom, never to tell who taught you. Observing which, I shall doubtless in time have got a white beard and reputation of a great wise man. Unless indeed, which is likelier, cold steel—' the Duke waited as they met and passed, now the second time, that lady on her husband's arm: the green glint of her eyes in the moonlight, looking steadily before her: the glint of the moon on her teeth as she spoke some answering word to her lord: the carriage which, lily in crystal, became itself the more for the gown that veiled it, less like to natural woman's walk than to the swaying on languid stem of some undreamedof flower, beside those curled and sweet-smelling darknesses those orchids upon the inner terrace should seem work-a-day hedgerow weeds. '—Or unless the bite of a she-puss,' said the Duke, when they were out of hearing, 'should first be cause of my death.'

  They walked on, silent, till they came to the south end of the terrace. Here, in the shadow of a holm-oak, the Duke stood a minute, watching the moon through the leaves. "The King my father it was,' he said, watching the moon, that would needs have this woman in Memison. The Duchess would not have her at first'

  Melates held his peace.

  'He likes it that beautiful woman should be here,' said the Duke. ‘I grant, he has an eye for them. Well,' he said, looking round at Melates: 'is it not fit that he should? Answer me. It is not for me to talk always and you stand mum'

  'It is not for me, my lord Duke, to judge of these high matters.'

  'So? I think there is some devil of folly in you I must exorcize. Out with it: will you say the Duchess my mother were wiser make 'em all pack, show them the door?'

  'I beseech your grace: this is not my business.'

  'By God,' said the Duke, ‘I can smell your thought, Melates; and hath the stink of a common horse-boy's. I say to you, her grace, my lady mother, is a queen rose; a goddess among them. By heavens, it were give small regard to her own quality or to the King's highness' discerning judgement, were she with timorous jealous misdoubts to let overcloud the sweet weather we have here. This that I tell you is truth. Will you believe it? Study your answer: for, by God, if you will not, you are friend of mine no more.'

  But Melates, as who would please one that is out of his princely wits, answered and said, 'Your grace hath most unjustly mistook me. I believe, and did ever believe it. How else?'

  They turned to walk north again between the dewy grasses and the uncertain whispering darknesses. Before them as they walked, their cast shadows flitted, hard-edged and black against the moon-flooded pallour of the path.

  'Were you ever in love, Melates?'

  ‘I have tried to follow the fashions your grace sets us.'

  'Fashions in love?'

  ‘I know not.'

  'Fashions to keep out of it.'

  Slower and slower they walked, step with step. And now, forty or fifty paces ahead, they saw those others corning towards them: saw him suddenly break from his lady, run to the parapet on the left above the moat, clap hand upon the balustrade and make as if to vault over. Then back to her, and so again arm in arm.

  Encountering now once more in mid-terrace, both parties, as upon a mutual impulse, stopped. Some puckish spirit danced in Barganax's eye. ‘I am glad, sir,' he said, 'that you thought better of it: resolved after all not to drown yourself.'

  The lady abode silent: motionless too, save that, upon some slow, exquisite, half amused, half in derision, little condescensions of her head, she seemed to note the words: as if here were some strayed divinity, elegantly indifferent, noting these things from above. The fingers of her hand, in the crook of her lord's arm, lay out silver-white under their shimmer of jewels: a sensitive, beautiful hand, able (by the look of it) as an artist's, with sure and erudite touch, to set deep notes a-throb, attemper them, weave them to unimagined harmonies. So she stood, leaning sideways on that man, quiet and still in the unclouded serenity of the moon: virginal-sweet to look on as a wood-lily; yet with a secret air as if, like Melusine in the old story, she could at seasons be snake from the waist-down.

  The man smiled, meeting the Duke's bantering gaze.

  'If you did but know, my lord Duke,' he said, ‘what I was in truth a-thinking on in that moment!'

  And Barganax was ware suddenly of that lady's eyes resting on himself, in a weighing look, completely serene, completely impenetrable. Deeper than blood or the raging sense, it seemed to touch his face: first his cheek below the cheekbone; then from head to foot the touch of that look seemed to go over him, till at last it mounted again to his face and so to his eye, and came to rest there with the same sphinxian unalterableness of green fires that slept

  'Curious our first meeting: and not to have known.' Very low Mary had said it at first; and now, this second time, so low, so withinward, that the words, like a kestrel's nestlings that flutter at the nest, unready yet to trust themselves to wings and the untried air, rested unuttered within the closure of her lips. But, 'Yes,' it was said now, as if by some deeper abiding self that had lain asleep till now within her: ‘I knew. I singled you out then, my friend, as I now remember, though at the time it was almost unconsciously: yes, completely unconsciously. I knew, my friend. And knew, too, that you did not yet know.' And about the words was a shimmer like the shimmer of the sun upon the tide off Paphos, the unnumbered laughter of ocean waves.

  They were departed, two and two again, on their several ways. When at last the Duke spoke, it was as a man who would obliterate and put out of memory the flaming semblant, and grapple himself safe to common waking fact. 'Shall I tell you, Melates, what was in truth in the man's mind, then when like a jackanapes he ran and skipped upon the parapet? It was the thought that this instant night, within this half hour maybe, he should have that woman where he wished.'

  They walked on in silence. At length, 'What will you call.her?' said the Duke.

  'Call whom?'

  'Whom else do we talk on? that woman.'

  Melates said uncourteously, 'I should call her a dog-fly.'

  'A dog-fly!' With the moon behind them, the Duke's face was unreadable. 'Well, Goddess hath borne that word from Goddess ere this.' And he began to laugh, as it were privately to himself.

  They looked round and saw that the terrace was empty now, save for themselves only. 'Leave me,' said Barganax. 'I have a business to consider with myself. I will study it here awhile alone.'

  But that Lady Fiorinda, walking now in an obscurity of yew-trees, with that unconsidered arm to lean upon, turned Her mind to other thoughts. At Morville's third or fourth asking, What was she meditating upon so quiet? she answered at last, 'Upon certain dresses of mine.'

  'Dresses. Of what material? Of what colour?'

  'O, of the most delicatest finest material.' The man saw snicker in her mouth's corner that little thing that neither now nor ever would heed nor look at him, but seemed always as if playing devilishly apart with some secret, boding no good. 'And for colour,' said she, (noting, from above that mantelpiece perhaps, through Anne Horton's side-bended eyes, these lovers): 'of a red-gold fire-colour, as the extreme outermost tongue-tip of a flame.'

  'It is a colour should most excellent well become you.'

  'Better than this black, you think?' And that little thing, in a pretty irony not for his sharing, twinkled its eye, (comparing, perhaps, two dresses of that fire-colour, so much alike: one, near of her own age, there beside Lessingham: the other here, in Memison, older by twenty years: dresses wherein She walked as it were asleep, humble, innocent, forgetful of Her Olympian home).

  'Black?' said he, laughing. 'You are dreaming! You are in yellow and cloth of gold to-night.'

  'O most just and discerning eye! How all-knowing an estate is matrimony!' And this time, the upward curl of the corner of her lip was as a twisting of tiny scaly limbs, (as the thing said perhaps, in her secret ear, that
a deadly sorrow it was if such a dull owl must much longer go uncuckolded).

  But presently when, with those lips which hold the world's desire, She began to speak again, it was Her own poetess's words, and in the sweet Aeolian tongue: the ageless, fadeless, lilied numbers rising again in their un-dead youth: not as sound, not as movement or succession: rather as some subtlety of the air, some silvered showering of darkness: that shudder of the sense which, like meteors, runs near to heaven:

  Like is he, I think, to a God immortal,

  That man, whosoever he be, that near you

  Sits and thus to you and to your sweet talking

  Privately listens,

  And lilt of your dear laughter: a thing to send the

  Heart within my bosom a-leap; for barely

  So can I this brief little while behold you,

  —Speech quite forsakes me.

  Ah, my tongue is broken: a sudden subtle

  Fire beneath my skin in an instant courses;

  Eyesight none remains to mine eyes: mine ears roar,

  Drown'd under thunder.

  And the sweat breaks forth, and a trembling seizes

  All my body: paler than grass in summer

  I: in all else, scarce to be told, I think, from

  One that lay lifeless.

  Yet, to dare all,—

  All the leaves in that Memison garden trembled. Lessingham, too, trembled, leaning towards his dear. And Mary, lost and trembling, felt her inmost being dissolve and fail within her, under his eyes and under those self-seeing immortal eyes of Hers that, for the instant, borrowed his.

  Midnight sounded, grave, deep-tongued, from Anmering church tower. Mary, on Lessingham's arm, stood quite still, here at the far seaward end of the garden terrace, listening: listening now to Lessingham's whispered 'Time to go.'

  'Don't go. Not yet,' she said. 'I don't mean to: not without you.' 'O don't let's—all over again. I've told you, and told you: I can't'

  'You said you would.'

  ‘I know, but I oughtn't to have said it. I can't. I can't'

  'You can. I'll look after "can", my darling: that's my job.'

  Mary shook her head. They turned and began to walk, very slowly.

  'You know my trouble,' said Lessingham, after a silence. 'I can't do without you. Can't live, without you. You know that'

  She shook her head again, saying, almost inaudibly, 'No. I don't'

  ‘I don't mean shoot myself, or any torn-foolery like that. Simply, shan't live: my dead body walking about, if I haven't you.'

  Her face remained unreadable.

  'The devilish'thing about you,' he said, 'is that, before, I used to think of all sorts of things I might do, and do damned well. I knew it But since you,—all that's changed. There isn't a hard thing in the world I could not do, standing on my head, with you caring about it; but without you, not a thing of them worth the doing.

  You don't understand,' he said. 'How could you understand? But will you believe it?'

  She said, like the sound of a moth's fluttered wing, ‘Yes.'

  'O my beloved,' he caught the hand on his arm and kissed it: a cold little hand for a June night. 'Then come. Everything ready: change of shoes if it's wet crossing the paddock: a new fur coat (we can give it away to-morrow if you don't like it)—'

  Mary stopped: took away her arm: stood looking down, face averted, her breath coming and going, her hands tight shut. 'How dare you do these things?' she said, in a kind of whisper. 'How dare you tell me about them? Why did you come? Why? I told you not to. How dare you?'

  Lessingham watched her. 'It's been pretty difficult,' he said after a while, without moving: 'waiting: all this patience and obedience.' For a minute they stood so; then she took his arm, and once more they began slowly walking. 'We should never forgive ourselves,' he said presently: 'you and I, to turn back.'

  'Don't ask me this, my friend. For I mustn't'

  'You're mine,' he said, his lips touching her hair above the ear: then very softly, 'you must.'

  'Yes: I am yours. But I mustn't.'

  'You must. Why not?'

  'I'm someone else's too,' she said, looking towards the house and its dark upper windows.

  They walked on. The silence became frightening: the stiffening of Lessingham's arm under her hand: and now, when she looked up, his face, staring down at his own feet as they moved step by step.

  'Be kind?'

  'You're not being very kind to me,' he said. I'm not sure I've not been a fool: not been too patient and obedient:' Mary made a little sound of incredulous dissent: 'not sure,' he said, 'that I'm not too late.'

  'What on earth do you mean?'

  ‘I>on't let's be absurd.' . 'You mean, when I said "somebody else's",—'

  The whole night seemed to turn suddenly sultry and sullen and unfriendly.

  'Can't you give me too,' Mary said, 'a little credit, for being patient? being obedient?'

  'Obedient! a dangerous virtue.'

  Again she stopped, and they stood off from one another.

  'Don't let us play hide-and-seek. I'm frightened when you think I would—You thought—?' Lessingham gave no sign.

  'O, good heavens!' She held out both hands to him, laughing as if he and she should enjoy a private joke together. 'Shall I tell you then? I refused—why, nearly two hours ago I should think. But why should you need telling?' she said.

  He took the hands in his: lifted them up and up, to bring her nearer: a tremulous and starry propinquity, in which spirit to spirit drew to close that the bodied senses of sight, touch, smell, seemed (as dragon-flies newly uncased from their prisons of the pupa) to hang faint and lost in the mid condition between two modes of being. Only that little thing, to all modes acclimatized and self-conditioned, and now very impertinently awake and active, regarded him from near her lip's corners. Answering which, something laughed in Lessingham's eyes. 'So that's what made him look like—By heavens, I'd like to—'

  ‘What?'

  ‘Break the fellow's neck,' he said tartly, 'for daring— But it shows: there's pressure. And you're alone.'

  'If people should say: if he should think: O of course, that girl: we didn't hit it off, and now, you see, on the rebound—'

  'Tsh! They say, Quhat say they? They haif said. Let thame say.' But the moon, shining down in her classic serenity on Mary's white evening dress and on those upper windows of Anmering Blunds, seemed to discover in these thumping words a sudden and most disconcerting insufficiency: at least as applied to Mary, and by him.

  He let go her hands and stood, not irresolute but as if withdrawn for the moment into some inside privateness of deliberation: a silence that began to gather danger, as if one should listen for the muffled sound of bulls horning and wrestling behind closed doors. Then Mary watched the unconscious pose of him settle to lines such as, bound to an earthly permanency of bronze or marble, are sometimes seen in a masterwork of Donatello. He looked up. 'May I pick one?' They were standing near the stone pillar of a pergola grown over with Gloire de Dijon roses. Mary nodded, yes. 'May I give it to you?' She took it, very gentle and quiet. 'Let's walk along a little,' he said. 'Let me think.

  'Well,' he said, at last: 'what's to be done?'

  There was no answer, unless in the presence of her hand on his arm.

  'Will you marry me?'

  'I've promised to.'

  'How can you? What if they won't let you?'

  'Give me two months: perhaps three.'

  'O these months. What then?'

  'I'll have got things right by then. And if not—'

  'If not?'

  'If not,—well: I've promised.'

  'You promised to come away with me to-night,' he said.

  He was suddenly kneeled down, his arms about her knees, his cheek pressed against her side. Presently he felt how her hand, very gently, began to stroke, the wrong way, the short cropped hair at the back of his neck: heard her voice, very gentle and trembling: 'Dear. We mustn't go to-night. I didn't reali
ze: it's too big, this of ours: it is All. How can we say, "Let the rest go: take this"? The rest? it's part of this. That would mean spoil this for its own sake. It would be hateful, We can't do that

  Shouldn't deserve each other if we could.' It was as if those moon-trod spaces of lawn and cricket field were tuned to a music bearing as under-song some life to which this is but exordial. He heard her way, 'Nothing can take it from us: not if we died, I think.'

  'We shall die someday. What then?'

  'I don't know,' Mary said. 'Perhaps this is only the shadow of it.'

  ‘I don't believe it. This is all.' His clasp tightened: his eyes now, not his cheek, buried themselves against her side.

  Suddenly Mary, so standing, very still, began to say rather breathlessly, rather brokenly: 'You could, you could make me go to-night. But you won't. It would spoil everything. It would hurt me. I'd always thought you were too fond of me to do that: thought you would never want to hurt me: you, of all people.' Through the hammerings of his own veins he felt the trembling of her and the failing, like the yielded body of a bird in his encircling arms: felt the touch of her hand again, on his neck: heard her voice, nearer, lower: "But I'm not going to turn back. I don't doubt you, my friend. Here I am. Your very own Mary.' The summer night seemed, upon that silence, to be suddenly frozen. 'All of me. Do what you like with me.'

  But Lessingham, in this new worst wrestling behind those doors, held fast: remained as if himself, too, were frozen: then did but this: still on his knees, catch her two hands and kiss them: kiss the Gloire de Dijon, still held in one of them: then, rising to his feet, take her in his arms. 'Good night, my dear, my love, my beautiful. Too good and perfect for me, but my own. You make me ashamed. Kiss me goodnight: I'm going.'

  And, for last goodnight, Mary, mistress of the situation, touching with the tip of her nose the most sensitive part of his ear, whispered in it: 'Didn't I say: An omen, if you were wise? Michaelmas—Vintage.'

  VII