Mistress of mistresses (15 page)

Lessingham,
albeit strangely surprised and put out of his reckonings by this sudden turn,
yet kept his countenance, thinking swiftly with himself. He swept his gaze
from one to other, facing him across that table: the Duke like a warhorse that
sniffs the morning: the Chancellor, lean-visaged and inscrutable, sitting
upright and staring straight before him: Jeronimy with downcast look, elbows
on table, his left hand propping his chin, his right twisting and untwisting a
strand of the lank spare hair above his forehead: Roder, black and scowling:
Barrian with flushed countenance, playing with his pen: Zepheles with jaw
thrust forward, looking steadily at the Duke: Melates, half sprawled on his
folded arms upon the table, looking steadily at Lessingham. 'My lord Admiral,'
said Lessingham at length, 'what will you say to this?'

'You
were best address yourself to me, my lord,' said Barganax. 'From henceforth it
is me you have to do with.'

But
Lessingham said, 'Under your favour, my lord Duke, I must press this. You, my
lord Admiral, not his grace, are named regent in the testament.'

'I
have resigned it up into his grace's hand. That, in a manner, endeth it,' said
Jeronimy. He did not raise his eyes to meet Lessingham's levelled steely gaze.

Then
said Lessingham to the Chancellor, "Your lordship did write me a letter.
By his grace's leave I will read it.' He spread it upon the table and read it
out ‘I note this,' he said, 'in the Chancellor's letter: that it dealeth not at
all with the point of law.'

Beroald
said: 'It did not need.'

'No,'
said Lessingham. 'Yet to have argued the thing unlawful should much have strengthened
it. My lord Chancellor, did you leave out that argument, because you were
satisfied that the Vicar's claim of suzerainty is right in law?'

Beroald,
looking steadily before him, made no reply.

'Much
lieth on this. I pray you, answer,' said Lessingham.

Beroald
said, ‘I am nowise bounden to advise your lordship on points of law.'

'That
is true,' said Lessingham. 'And it must have tried your temper very much, my
lord, when they whom you do, as in duty bound, advise, do the one (I mean my
Lord Jeronimy) take your advice but durst not act upon't, whiles t'other doth
but put it by like idle chatter, and acteth clean contrary.'

The
Chancellor said in an acid voice, 'By these ifs and supposings you may gather
against us what proofs you list. But since your lordship hath not had my advice
upon these matters, nor any authority whereby to conclude what my advice would
be, your lordship's observation wanteth substance, whether in fact or probability.'

'My
lord, I would but have your answer on point of fact: were you, or were you not,
satisfied?' The Chancellor held his peace.

'No
need to bandy words on this,' said Barganax, to end it. 'We will not take our
law from the Vicar.'

'Nor
from my lord Chancellor neither, as now appeareth,' said Lessingham.

Out
of an angry silence, Jeronimy spoke and said, 'It is, in a manner, clean
'gainst all likelihood, nay, and not to be imagined, the King should have given
over clean everything unto his Vicar, seeing the unkindness there was between
them. Even grant the law were in a manner doubtful—'

But
Lessingham brake in upon these pleasantnesses. 'My lord Duke,' said he: 'I
stand upon the law. Be not angry if I leave velvet words and oily compliment,
and talk open. You have set at naught the King's testament. You have brow-beat
the High Admiral until he is become your tool. The Chancellor will not answer
me, but his silence hath damned by default your rotten pretences before all the
world. Be not deceived,' he said, and in the pauses between his words men were
ware of each other's breathing: 'the beginnings of things are weak and tender;
but I do very well discern your grace's end and purpose, and it is to usurp the
whole kingdom 'gainst your harmless sister. It resteth with my noble kinsman,
as Lord Protector, to foil you in this. Your answer to me is war. In his
highness' name, the Vicar, I do defy you. And I do call upon these great
officers, (upon you, my lord, and you, and you), to come back to their true
allegiance unto the Queen's serenity, to the overthrow of you and your,
unlawful usurpation.'

Now
ever as he spoke, for all the heat of his words and violence, his perceptive
mind was cool and busy, marking how much and in what diverse ways these sayings
wrought alteration in them that heard them: what jealous mutual doubtings and
inward questionings arose to insinuate, like ivy-shoots betwixt the stones of
some tottering wall, divisions betwixt the Duke and his sworn confederates:
how, perceiving such rifts to open or but the danger of their opening, the
Meszrian lords seemed to draw back and view again their own security: how in
the Admiral's eyes, as in an open book, was writ in great characters the
digging up again of all the old doubts he had but so lately buried, of the
Chancellor's truth and of the Duke's: and how, as unkind and nipping winds will
find way through every cloak, the Duke himself seemed to be touched, behind all
his jaunting bravery, by such unspoken uncertainties in these that he needs
must trust to. These effects Lessingham, while he spoke, conjured and swayed
but with the spell now here, now there, of a justly chosen word or look; not
otherwise than as a master playing on the treble viol will lead the whole
consort and build up so a living presence of music: from the deep theorbo such
a figure, from the recorders such, and so the treble lutes to take up the
canon, and the hautboy, the dulcimer, and the rebeck, every one in his turn,
and so with a ritornello, each thus and thus, and always even exact as he,
leading the broken consort, would have it Even so, perceiving these motions,
these ruinous doubts and questionings, leap to life at his touch, did
Lessingham taste in them a delicate pleasure.

With
those last words spoken he ended, and the voice of his speech was like the
rattle of iron swords. The Duke, whose chin had risen little by little higher
and yet higher as, with smouldering eyes fixed on Lessingham, he had hearkened
to these injuries, stood up now with the smooth and measured stateliness of a
leopard rising from sleep. With a high and noble look upon his friends to left
and right of him, 'Is my hand the weaker,' he said, 'because it is divided
into many fingers? No, 'tis the more strongly nimble.' So saying, and turning
again to Lessingham, he now with a formal courtesy unsheathed his sword,
raised it point upwards till the hilt was level with his lips, kissed the hilt,
and laid it naked on the table with the point-towards Lessingham. Lessingham
stood up in silence and, going through the like ceremony, laid his bare sword
beside the Duke's, pointing towards the Duke. So for a minute they stood,
facing each other across that table, eye to eye; as if the levin-shot dark
splendour of a storm-cloud, towering from the east, faced across listening
earth the many-coloured splendour of the westering golden sun. And when at
last the Duke spoke, it was as out of that unfathomed harmony which is at once
condition of such discords and by them conditioned; ensphered and incarnate by
them to a more diviner music. There were but two only at that table who,
hearing him so speak, were not taken with wonderment, or with fear, or dismay:
and that was Lessingham and Doctor Vander-mast

The
Duke said, *My Lord Lessingham, sith our friendship must be but a summer
friendship and its leaves drop off in autumn, let's end it as fitteth persons
of our quality. Let us trust each to other's honour until noon to-morrow: you
to me, that I will do no dastard's work against your life or freedom: I to you,
that, whether by word nor deed, you will meddle no more with these high matters
until this day's truce be past.'

'My
lord Duke,' said Lessingham, ‘I am content.'

Then
said the Duke, 'I do intend a masque to-night, and a water banquet upon the
lake. Will your lordship honour me to be my guest, and lie to-night in
Acrozayana? Until to-morrow at noon we will expel all affairs of state, chase
all difficulties from our society: one more day to sun it in pleasures in this
hot summer-blink, last merriment 'fore winter. Then you must go. And
thereafter we shall bloodily try out by war these differences we have these ten
days to so little purpose debated.'

Amaury
said in Lessingham's ear, 'Beware, my lord. Let us be gone.'

But
Lessingham's eye still met the Duke's, and he remembered the counsel of Doctor
Vandermast. 'This offer,' answered he, 'is what was to be looked for in so
high-minded a prince, and I embrace and accept it. I well think there is not
any other prince extant should have made me the like offer, nor at whose hand I
would have accepted of it.'

vii

A Night-Piece on
Ambremerine

zayana
lake at evening
 
campaspe: commerce with
a water nymph
 
moonrise
 
queen of night
 
the
philosopher speaks
 
song of
the faun
 
our lady of blindness
 
anthea: commerce with an oread
 
the nature of dryads,
naiads, and oreads
 
the dead shadow
 
divine philosophy
 
counsel of vandermast.

Peace
seemed
to have laid her lily over all the earth when, that evening, eight gondolas
that carried the Duke and his company put out from, the water-gate under the
western tower and steered into the sunset. In the open water they spread into
line abreast, making a shallow crescent, horns in advance, and so passed on
their way, spacing themselves by intervals of some fifty paces to be within
hail but not to the overhearing of talk within the gondolas. Three or four
hundred paces ahead of them went a little caravel, bearing aboard of her the
Duke's bodyguard and the last and most delicate wines and meats. Her sweeps
were out, for in that windless air her russet-coloured silken sails flapped the
masts. From her poop floated over the water the music of old love-ditties,
waked in the throb of silver lute-strings, the wail of hautboys, and the
flattering soft singing of viols.

North
and north-eastward, fainter and fainter in the distance, the foot-hills took on
purple hues, like the bloom on grapes. High beyond the furthest hills, lit with
a rosy light, the great mountains reared themselves that shut in the habited
lands on the northward: outlying sentinels of the Hyperborean snows. So high
they stood, that it might have been clouds in the upper air; save that they
swam not as clouds, but persisted, and that their architecture was not
cloud-like, but steadfast, as of buildings of the ancient earth, wide founded,
bastion upon huger bastion, buttress soaring to battlement, wall standing back
upon wall, roofridge and gable and turret and airy spire; and yet all as if of
no gross substance,- but rather the thin spirit of these, and their grandeur
not the grandeur of clouds that pass, but of frozen and unalterable repose, as
of Gods reclining on heaven's brink. Astern, Acrozayana faced the warm light.
On the starboard quarter, half
a
mile to the north, on a beach at the end of the
low wooded promontory that stretches far out into the lake there towards Zayana
town, two women were bathing. The sunset out of that serene and cloudless sky
suffused their limbs and bodies, their reflections in the water, the woods
behind them, with a glory that made them seem no women of mortal kind, but
dryads or oreads of the hills come down to show their beauties to the opening
eyes of night and, with the calm lake for their mirror, braid their hair.

In
the outermost gondola on the northern horn was Lessingham, his soul and senses
lapped in a lotus-like contentment. For beside him reclined Madam Campaspe,
a
young lady in whose sprightly discourse he
savoured, and in the sleepy little noises of the water under the prow, a
delectable present that wandered towards
a
yet more delectable to come.

'The
seven seas,' he said, answering her: 'ever since I was fifteen years old.'

'And
you are now—fifty?'

'Six
times that,' answered Lessingham gravely; 'reckoned in months.'

'With
me,' she said, 'reckonings go always askew.' 'Let's give over reckonings, then,'
said he, 'and do it by example. I am credibly informed that I am pat of an age
with your Duke.'

'O,
so old indeed? Twenty-five? No marvel you are so staid and serious.'

'And
you, madam?' said Lessingham. 'How far in the decline?'