by E R Eddison
‘Ladyship? Give in charge?’ she said, looking on him and on this new scene with the look of one whose senses, fresh wakened out of sleep, stand doubtful amid things of waking knowledge and things of dream. ‘Nay, you mistake, sir. And yet—’
Vandermast came down the steps: put into her hands that little cat. It purred and snuggled its face into the warm between arm and bosom. ‘I have been here before,’ she said, still in a slow wonder. ‘That is most certain. And this learned man I have known. But when, and where—’
The eyes of that Vandermast, watching her gaze about her and turn in the end, with a lovely lost abandoning of the riddle, to Lessingham, were of a lynx-like awareness. And there stirred in them a queer, half humorous look, as of a mind that pleasantly chews the cud of its knowledge while it beholds the sweet comedy of others led in a maze. ‘If I might humbly counsel your noble grace and excellent highness,’ said he, ‘vex not your mind with unentangling of perplexities, nor with no back-reckonings. Please to dismount you and come now in to your summer-house, on purpose trimmed up for you. And you, my Lord Lessingham, to decide all doubts be ruled by me. For I say unto you, it is a short ride hither from Rialmar but, tonight, a far ride back. So as not tonight, no not in ten nights’ riding could you come to Rialmar on your swift mare. Wherefore, settle your heart, my lord, and be patient. Pray you come in.’
Lessingham looked at Antiope. Her eyes said yes. He leaped from the saddle: gave her his hand. Her hand in his was an imponderable thing: a cool flame, a delicious-ness of mellifluous flowers; her coming down, a motion to convince the sea-swallow of too dull a grace, outpara-goned by hers. Vandermast swung back the gate: Lessingham looked round: ‘What of the horses?’
Vandermast smiled and answered, ‘They will not stray: no horse strayeth here.’
‘Lip-wisdom,’ said Lessingham, and set about taking off of saddles and bridles. ‘It is my way, on the road, to see her watered and fed ere I feed myself, not leave her to horse-boys. And I’ll the same for her grace’s.’
‘Here,’ answered that old man, ‘is water. And, for the grass of this wayside, ’tis of a singular virtue. Pastures of earth renew but the blood and animal spirits: but this of mine being grazed upon turneth in the vitals not to blood but ichor.’
As one expressed with sleep, Lessingham stared upon him. But Vandermast, with that close smile, turned to Antiope. ‘As your ladyship hath cited to me ere this, the Poetess’s words: – “Gold is pure of rust”.’
Quite lost, yet too deeply taken with the sweetness of the place to seek answers, she shook her head. Without more words, they entered; and before them went that learn’d philosopher between lupins, blue and yellow, and flaming lychnis, roses and speckled lilies and lavender and rosemary and sweet thyme and pink and white anemones, up the paven walk.
Dim was the low-ceilinged hall that now they entered from that bright garden: to the left a table of pale oak shining with age ran long and narrow under the southern windows, and places laid there for supper, and chairs with cushions of dark velvet, and at the near end an armful of white roses in a bowl of crystal. Beams, smoked black with age, ribbed the ceiling: a fire burned of logs under a great open chimney over against the door with a settle before it and deep chairs for ease. In the western end of that hall a window opened, and another, lesser, to the left of the fire. In the corner between was some instrument of music, a spinet or clavichord, and a stool to sit and play. There were pictures hung on the walls, and thick brocaded curtains drawn back between the windows. A bare oaken staircase to the right of the fire led to the upper chambers.
‘If your ladyship would shift your riding-clothes before supper?’ said the doctor. ‘And you, my lord? For for you besides there is a chamber I have prepared you, looking west, but your ladyship’s south and east.’ Lessingham heard, when the Queen was gone up, little cries of wonderment from above-stairs: past all mistaking, Zenianthe’s voice laughing and joying with Antiope. He reached out a hand towards the fire: felt its warmth; then walked to the clavichord, opened the laburnum-wood lid and let his finger wander on the keys. The thin blade-like sweetness of the strings sprang on the air and there lay stretched, as if the first hueless streaks of a dawn which comes up seaward without wind should lie listening to their own grey stillness. He turned and was face to face with Vandermast. They looked each in the other’s eye for a little without speaking. Then Lessingham said with a tartness on his tongue, ‘And you, signior, with your so much outward submissiveness but (or I sadly misjudge), without that inward awfulness ’t should in honesty proceed from: What in truth are you?’
‘I am,’ answered he, ‘even as your excellence: a two-legged living creature, gressible, unfeathered. Will you that I conduct you to your chamber?’
Lessingham watched him for a moment through his eyelashes; then, with a slow smile, ‘If you please,’ he said. ‘And what house is this?’ he said, when they were come up, and he beheld the fair chamber and, in a bedazzlement, his own clothes and gear laid out ready upon chest and bed.
‘By your leave,’ said the learned doctor, fetching a bootjack; ‘not to weight our presence with servants for the while, suffer me help your excellence off with your boots.’ Lessingham sat down: voluptuous deep cushions of sunset-coloured silk boiled up about him like swelling water-waves. He gave a leg to Vandermast. ‘Well, it is, as I conceit it, the house of peace,’ said that old man. ‘And some would think this strange, that to this house should your lordship choose to come, that have the renown of a very thunder-smith and a carver in the wake of armipotent Ares.’
‘It is part of your wisdom, I see,’ said Lessingham: ‘for a hot man cool drink.’
When they were come down again and, by invitation of their host, sat at board for supper, it was with strange company and strange household folk to change the plates. The sun had set. All down the supper-table candles were burning, and on tables and chests besides and on sconces of silver on the walls. Antiope had her place in the table’s midst, facing the room and the firelight; over against her sat the other ladies: upon her right hand, Doctor Vandermast; upon her left, one whose face was hard to see, but his eyes seemed large past nature and Lessingham noted of his ears that they were sharp-pricked and hairy. Of extreme litheness and soft grace was every movement he made: pricking of ears, turning of the head or shoulders, reaching hands slender and fieldish as Campaspe’s own to plate or winecup. And that was seen of his hands that they were furred or hairy, and the nails on the delicate fingers dark like tortoise-shell. Still would he be speaking whisper-talk in the Queen’s ear, and ever, as she gave ear to that whispering, would a thoughtful cast overtake her countenance, as if with the swoop of some winged thing that checked and hung hovering in the sun-path of her thought; and ever, as this befell, would her glance meet Lessingham’s.
Lessingham asked, ‘What guest is that?’
The doctor followed his eye. ‘That,’ he replied, ‘is a disciple of mine.’
Lessingham said, ‘I had guessed as much.’
Sitting at the table’s end whence he could see all faces in the candlelight, and see, past them in the western window, the feet of day disappear under night as ankles under a skirt dropped by some lovely hand as the wearer walks by, Lessingham felt himself sink into a great peace and rest. Strange and monstrous shapes, beginning now to throng that room, astonished no more his mind. Hedgehogs in little coats he beheld as household servants busy to bear the dishes; leopards, foxes, lynxes, spider-monkeys, badgers, water-mice, walked and conversed or served the guests that sat at supper; seals, mild-eyed, mustachioed, erect on their hind flippers and robed in silken gowns, brought upon silver chargers all kind of candied conserves, macaroons, fig-dates, sweet condiments, and delicate confections of spiceries; and here were butterfly ladies seen, stag-headed men, winged lions of Sumer, hamadryads and all the nymphish kindred of beck and marsh and woodland and frosty mountain solitude and the blue caves of ocean: naiad and dryad and oread, and Amphitrite’s brood with green hair
sea-garlanded and combs in their hands fashioned from drowned treasure of gold. When a sphinx with dragonfly wings sat down between the lights beyond Zenianthe and looked on Lessingham out of lustreless stone eyes, he scarce noted her: when a siren opened her sea-green cloak and laid it aside, to sit bare to the waist and thence downward decently clothed in fish-scales, it seemed a thing of course: when a wyvern poured wine for him he acknowledged it with that unreflective ease that a man of nice breeding gives to his thanks to an ordinary cup-bearer. He drank; and the wine, remembering in its vintage much gold molten to redness in the grape’s inward parts, under the uprising, circling, and down-setting pomp of processional suns, drew itself, velvet-flanked, hot-mouthed with such memories, smoothly across his mind. And, so drawing, it crooned its lullaby to all doubts and double-facing thoughts: a lullaby which turned, as they dropped asleep, first to their passing-bell, then to their threnody, and at length, with their sinking into oblivion, to a new incongruency of pure music.
‘But is this power, then?’ he heard Campaspe say. ‘To be bitten, taken in jaws, swallowed up?’
‘Suppose he should kill her indeed,’ said Anthea: ‘’tis but an act bestial. There is no form in it: no grace, no verity. It addeth not: taketh but away. Why, I can kill. I should know.’ Her teeth flashed.
‘It is well said,’ said the doctor, as if answering Lessingham’s look. ‘In this school she is my graduate. I have nought to teach her.’
Lessingham’s eyes met Anthea’s. It was as if, in the slits between the yellows, a light flared and was gone. ‘I had it,’ he said: ‘but lost again ere I could—’ he saw that the room was suddenly empty of all save those seven that sat at table. But, as if with the coming and going of tiny wings, little draughts of air touched here an eyelash, there a throat, and all the candleflames were a-waver. ‘She is form,’ he said, and his eyes turned to Antiope. ‘She draws us. We who do, Gods be we or men, in Her is our doing. And if in this, in action, we have our only being (and by heaven, I think ’tis so), then in Her our being. She draws our actions to a shape: shapes them so, into a kind of beauty.’
Campaspe, with the shadow as of moth-like wings shedding a furry and a shy and an elusive sweetness across her elfin features, said softly, ‘“As the sheath is to the knife”?’
‘It is good,’ said Vandermast; ‘but not enough. For the sheath is but an image of receptivity simpliciter, and of that which is of none effect of itself.’
‘Goblet to wine were nearer,’ said Lessingham, looking still on Antiope.
‘Or eyes to the inner fire,’ Anthea said, leaning forward on her two elbows. Lessingham turned at her voice: faced the slits that burned and reverberated with green and yellow heat. The warm sleek redness of the wine smoothed itself against him like a lover betwixt dream and dream in the failing hour of night.
‘Or,’ Campaspe said at his side, ‘weakness for strength to rest upon?’ He felt the touch of her gloved fingers on his forearm: fluttering feathered bird-breast that a harsh breath might harm it.
‘Goblet to wine were nearer,’ said that learned doctor. Lessingham turned to him: the countenance of Vandermast was mute like the irradiation of the sun behind northern mountains at night in summer on the confines of the Boreal pole.
Then Lessingham looked once more at Antiope. And slowly, as the transmutations in nature of sunset or sunrise are without the catastrophe of lesser changes, it was, as he looked, that three were subsumed to one. Not subsumed bodily, for they sat three as before, she on the left, they on the right facing her across the table; and yet now, in Antiope the lambent eyes of his oread lady, teeth of ice, clean fierce lips, breasts of snow; in Antiope, the strengthless faëry presence of his Campaspe, a rose-leaf hanging in the last near broken thread of a spider’s web where the dawn-dew glitters; and in Antiope, something not these, but more than these: herself: easy to look on, fancy-free, ignorant, with a shadow like laughter’s in the allurance of her lips. Her eyes, resting in his, seemed to wait betwixt believe and make-believe, then turn to hyaline gulfs where sunbeams wade trembling upon treasure inexhaustible of precious riches. ‘Strange talk,’ he heard her say. ‘And I remember,’ he heard her say, ‘but when, I cannot tell; nor where: but goes it not hand in hand with your saying, my Lord Lessingham?—
‘Strength is not mine. Only I AM: a twilight,
Heard between the darts of the blazing noonday;
Seen beyond loud surges: a lull: a vision:
Peace in the spear-din.
Granite leans earthward, as a mace impending.
Butterfly wings quivering abide the shadow:
Music bitter-sweet of the Gods:
Their night-song,
Older than all worlds.
‘Is She not somewhat so?’
Silence shut behind the falling wonder of her spoken words. Lessingham beheld the doctor’s prick-eared disciple lift her white hand in his, that was so slender and feral in its tawny hairiness, and press it, as in a dumb worship, to his bowed forehead. This he beheld as an act beautiful and apt, and that the beholding of pleased him much as her little cat’s love for her should please, issuing in some such simplicity. Only the strangeness of it, and the strangeness on her lips of words that he remembered, as if with her memory, out of some fair expired season, and that he seemed to know for his own words (though when framed, when spoken, he could not tell): these things gathered now, as a rain-drop gathers and hangs round and perfect on the point of a leaf, into the memory of that streaming up of golden bubbles through golden wine last spring in Mornagay, and of her remembered voice.
Doctor Vandermast stood up from his chair. ‘The night draweth in cold. Will it please you, madam, we suppose ’twere Yule-tide, and sit about the yule-log? And indeed I remember me, old customs have still pleased you from of old.’
Passing by the table’s end, as Vandermast and Lessingham bowed and made her way, Antiope reached a hand to Campaspe: ‘And you, dear, sing to us?’
‘Yes, sing, dear chorister of the sleeping sallows, your May-night song,’ said Lessingham, ‘of Ambremerine. It told me more than you knew,’ he said, speaking to her but looking on Antiope, and so saw not the deriding ‘More than I knew!’ in those beady eyes.
Campaspe, with swift naiad grace, was at the clavichord. She opened the lid. ‘May I choose my song?’
She had taken her answer, from eyes where everlastingness seemed to look, half awake, out of infinities to skyey infinities, ere the Queen’s lips could frame it: ‘Choose: my choice is yours.’
Campaspe preluded on the keys. The silence, divided with the passing of those blades of sweetness, fell together again. ‘My Lady Fiorinda’s song?’ she said: ‘The nightingale my father is?’ Vandermast turned in his chair, to rest his gaze, with that veiled, wine-tasting smile of his, upon Antiope. Lessingham too watched her across the hearth from his deep chair: her face, shone upon by two candles in a sconce beside her, was lovely fair, pictured against warm darkness. Surely in the peace of her his own spirit settled, as the day settles in the west.
Campaspe sang: a bird-voice, so small and bodiless that through its faëry texture even those frail chords gleamed clear:
‘Li rosignox est mon père,
Qui chante sor la ramée
El plus haut boscage.
La séraine ele est ma mère,
Qui chante en la mère salée
El plus haut rivage.’
Now there hung upon the wall, upon Lessingham’s left where he sat, a looking-glass framed in tortoise-shell; and so it was that midway through her singing, with a kindling in his veins again, from that name, and from that song, of memories of Ambremerine, he chanced to look in the looking-glass. For a count of seven he stared, whether in the body, whether out of the body, he could not tell: a face, not Lessingham’s but the Duke’s, stared back. With the sweeping of terrible harp-strings through his blood, he sat blind.
As his blood beat steadier it seemed to him as if out of that tumult a new figure took clear shape a
t last of counterpoint and descant. And yet for a minute he dared not lift his eyes to where she sat beyond the hearth listening to the song. For a doubt was on him, lest he should see not the thing he would but the thing he would not: so breathing clear was his memory of what he had seemed to look on but now, when that song began that but now drew to its ending: not her, but another sitting there: a second time (as once in Acrozayana), with too near bodement of the mutability he so much affected and transience of things, as that the levin-bolt might fall not afar to gaze upon, but very here, to thunder his eyes out that gazed. He drew hand over his chin, as to sure himself of it, shaven and hard: looked in the glass: looked at last cautiously across the carpet. This was her foot: no changeling could have stole that: he knew it better than his own. ‘Pew!’ he said in himself, ‘slip not the reins,’ and let his eyes run upward. There she sat, under the weak candles, a star between flying darknesses in a night of thunder. Side-face towards him, her chin lifted a little sideways as if, mindful of her own beautifulness, to feed his eyes a little with the silver splendour of her throat and its lovely strength, she stared in the fire through black half-closed lashes. Her head moved lazily, almost imperceptibly, as to the familiar cadence of Campaspe’s song. For all else, she sat motionless: all save this, and, with each lightly taken breath, her breasts’ fall and swell.
