Mistress of mistresses (17 page)

*By
the same argument, how power
per
se?'
replied the Duke.
'What of the gardener's dog, that could not eat the cabbages in the garden and
would suffer none else to do so? Call you that power good? I think I have there
strook you into the hazard, my lord. Or at least, 'tis change sides and play
for the chase.'

'The
chase is mine, then,' said Lessingham. 'For if power be but sometimes good,
even so is pleasure. It must be noble pleasure, and the noblest pleasure is
power.'

Fiorinda
daintily bit a piece out of her pear. 'Pray you honour us, madam, to be our
umpire,' said Lessingham.

She
smiled, saying, 'It is not my way to sit in judgement. Only to listen.'

Barganax
said, 'But will you listen to folly?'

'O
yes,' answered she. "There was often more good matter in one grain of
folly than in a peck of wisdom.'

'Ha!
that hath touched you, Vandermast,' said the Duke.

That
aged man, sitting at the outer end of the eastern table betwixt Anthea and the
young Countess Rosalura, laughed in his beard. The Lady Fiorinda lifted her eyebrows
with a questioning look first upon him, then upon the Duke, then upon
Lessingham. 'Is he wise?' she said. 'I had thought he was a philosopher. Truly,
I could listen to him a whole summer's night and ne'er tire of his preposterous
nonsense.'

'An
old fool,' said Vandermast, 'that is yet wise enough to serve your ladyship.'

'Does
that need wisdom?' she said, and looked at the moon. Lessingham, watching her
face, thought of that deadly Scythian queen who gave Cyrus his last deep drink
of blood. Yet, even so thinking, he was the more deeply aware, in the caressing
charm of her voice, of a mind that savoured the world delicately and simply,
with a quaint, amused humour; so might some demure and graceful bird
gracefully explore this way and that, accepting or rejecting with an equable
enjoyment. 'Does that need wisdom?' she said again. And now it was as if from
that lady's lips some unheard song, some unseen beauty, had stolen abroad and,
taking to itself wings, mounted far from earth, far above the columnar shapes
of those cypresses that, huge and erect, stood round that dim garden; until the
vast canopy of night was all filled as with an impending flowering of
unimagined wonder.

'There
is no other wisdom than that: not in heaven or earth or under the earth, in the
world phenomenal or the world noumenal,
sub
specie temporali
or
sub specie osternitatis.
There is no other,' said Vandermast, in a voice so
low that none well heard him, save only the Countess close by on his right. And
she, hearing, yet not understanding, yet apprehending in her very bowels the
tenour of his words, as a reed bending before the wind might apprehend dimly
somewhat of what betided in the wind-ridden spaces without to bend and to
compel it, sought Medor's hand and held it fast.

There
was silence. Then Medor said, 'What of love?*

Vandermast
said, as to himself, but the Countess Rosalura heard it: 'There is no other
power.'

'Love',
said Lessingham, cool and at ease again after the passing of that sudden light,
'shall aptly point my argument. Here, as otherwhere, power ruleth. For what is
a lover without power to win his mistress? or she without power to hold her
lover?' His hand, as he spoke, tightened unseen about Campaspe's yielding
waist. His eyes, carelessly roving, as he spoke, from face to face of that
company, came to a stop, meeting Anthea's where she sat beside the learned doctor.
The tawny wealth of her deep hair was to the cold beauty of her face as
a
double curtain of fulvid glory. Her eyes caught
and held his gaze with a fascination, hard, bold, and inscrutable.

'I
have been told that Love', said Fiorinda, 'is a more intricate game than
tennis; or than soldiership; or than politicians' games, my Lord Lessingham.'

Anthea,
with a little laugh, bared her lynx-like teeth. *I was remembered of
a
saying of your ladyship's,' she said.

Fiorinda
lifted an eyebrow, gently pushing her wine-cup towards the Duke for him to fill
it.

'That
a lover who should think to win his mistress by power
⁵
, said Anthea,
'is like an old dried-up dotard who would be young again by false hair, false
teeth, and skilful painting of his face: thus, and with a good stoup of wine,
but one thing he lacketh, and that the one thing needful.'

'Did
I say so indeed?' said Fiorinda. 'I had forgot it In truth, this is strange
talk, of power and pleasure in love,' she said. 'There is a garden, there is a
tree in the garden, there is a rose upon the tree. Can a woman not keep her
lover without she study always to please him with pleasure? Pew! then let her
give up the game. Or shall my lover think with pleasing of me to win me indeed?
Faugh! he payeth me then; doth he think I
am
for hire?'

Barganax
sitting beside her, not looking at her, his shoulder towards her, his elbow on
the table, his fingers in an arrested stillness touching his mustachios, gazed
still before him as though all his senses listened to the last scarce-heard
cadence of the music of that lady's voice.

Fiorinda,
in that pause, looked across to Doctor Vandermast. Obedient to her look, he
stood up now and raised a hand twice and thrice above his head as in sign to
somewhat to come out of the shadows that stirred beyond the torchlight. The
moon rode high now over Zayana, and out of torchbeam and moonbeam and star-beam
was a veil woven that confounded earth and sky and water into an immateriality
of uncertain shade and misty light. At Vandermast's so standing up, the very
night seemed Jo slip down into some deeper pool of stillness, like the silent
slipping of an otter down from the bank into the black waters. Only the purr of
a nightjar came from the edge of the woods. And now on the sudden they at the
tables were ware of somewhat quick, that stood in the confines of the
torchlight and the shadowy region without; of man-like form, but little of
stature, scarce reaching with its head to the elbow of a grown man; with shaggy
hairy legs and goat's feet, and with a sprouting of horns like a young goat's
upon its head; and there was in its eyes the appearance as of red coals
burning. Piercing were the glances of those eyes, as they darted in swift
succession from face to face (save that before Fiorinda's it dropped its gaze
as if in worship), and piercing was the music of the song it sang: the song
that lovers and great poets have ravished their hearts to hear since the world
began: a night-song, bittersweet, that shakes the heart of darkness with
longings and questionings too tumultuous for speech to fit or follow; and in
that song the listener hears echoing up the abysses of eternity voices of men
and women unborn answering the voices of the dead.

Surely,
hearkening to that singing, all they sat like as amazed or startled out of
sleep. Lover clung to lover: Amaury to velvet-eyed Violante, Myrrha to
Zapheles,

Bellafront
to Barrian. Lessingham's encircling arm drew closer about his Campaspe: her
breast beneath the silk under his hand was a tremulous dove: her black eyes
rested as though in soft accustomed contemplation upon the singer. Pantasilea,
with heavy lids and heavy curled lips half closed, as in half eclipse of the
outward sense, lay back sideways on Melates's shoulder. Medor held gathered to
him like a child his sweet young Countess. Beyond them, in the outermost place
of the eastern table, Anthea sat upright and listening, her hair touching with
some stray tendrils of its glory the sleeve of old Vandermast's gaberdine where
he stood motionless beside her.

Only
the Lady Fiorinda seemed to listen fancy-free to that singing, even as the cold
moon, mistress of the tides, has yet no part in their restless ebb and flow,
but, taking her course serene far above the cloudy region of the air, surveys
these and all earthly things with equal eye, divine and passionless. The Duke,
sitting back, had this while watched her from the side from under his faun-like
eyebrows, his hand moving as if with chalk or brush. He leaned nearer now,
giving over that painting motion: his right elbow on the table, his left arm
resting, but not to touch her, on the back of her chair. The voice of the
singer, that was become as the echoes of a distant music borne on the breeze
from behind a hill, now made a thin obbligato to the extreme passionate love
that spoke in the Duke's accents like the roll of muffled thunder as, low in
her ear, he began to say:

O
forest of dark beasts about the base

Of
some white peak that dreams in the Empyrean:

O
hare's child sleeping by a queen's palace,

'Mid
lily-meadows of some isle Lethean:

Barbaric,
beastly, virginal, divine:

Fierce
feral loveliness: sweet secret fire:

 
Last rest and bourne of every lovely line:

—All
these Thou art, that art the World's Desire.

The
deep tones of the Duke's voice, so speaking, were hushed to the quivering
superficies of silence, beneath which the darkness stirred as with a rushing of
arpeggios upon muted strings. In the corner of that lady's mouth, as she
listened, the minor diabolus, dainty and seductive, seemed to turn and stretch
in its sleep. Lessingham, not minded' to listen, yet heard. Darkly he tasted in
his own flesh Barganax's secret mind: in what fashion this Duke lived in that
seeming woman's life far sweetlier than in his own. He leaned back to look upon
her, over the Duke's shoulder. He saw now that she had glow-worms in her hair.
But when he would have beheld her face, it was as if spears of many-coloured
light, such light as, like the halo about the moon, is near akin to darkness,
swept in an endless shower outward from his vision's centre; and now when he
would have looked upon her he saw but these outrushings, and in the fair line
of vision not darkness indeed but the void: a solution of continuity: nothing.

As
a man that turns from the halcyon vision to safe verities, he turned to his
Campaspe. Her lips invited sweetly: he bent to them. With a little ripple of
laughter, they eluded him, and under his hand, with soft arched back warm and
trembling, was the water-rat in very deed.

About
the north-western point of that island there was a garden shadowed with oaks
ten generations old and starproof cedars and delicate-limbed close-tufted strawberry-trees.
Out of its leafy darknesses nightingale answered nightingale, and
nightflowers, sweet-mouthed like brides in their first sleep, mixed their
sweetness with the breath of the dews of night. It was now upon the last hour
before midnight. From the harbour to the southward rose the long slumbrous
notes of a horn, swelling, drawing their heavy sweetness across the face of the
night sky. Anthea stood up, slender as a moonbeam in those silent woods. 'The
Duke's horn,' she said. 'We must go back; unless you are minded to lodge in
this isle tonight, my Lord Lessingham.'

Lessingham
stood up and kissed her hand. For a minute she regarded him in silence from
under her brow, her eyes burning steadily, her chin drawn down a little: an
unsmiling lip-licking look. Then giving him her arm she said, as they turned to
be gone, There is discontent in your eyes. You are dreaming on -somewhat
without me and beyond.'

'Incomparable
lady,' answered he, 'call it a surfeit. If I am discontented, it is with the
time, that draweth me from these high pleasures to where, as cinders raked up
in ashes,—'

'O
no nice excuses,' she said. 'I and Campaspe are not womankind. Truly, 'tis but
at Her bidding we durst not disobey we thus have dallied with such as you, my
lord.'

His
mustachios stirred.

'You
think that a lie?' she said. The unfathomed pride of mortals!'

Lessingham
said, 'My memories are too fiery clear.'

They
walked now under the obscurity of crowding cypresses. 'It is true', said
Anthea, 'that you and Barganax are not altogether as the common rout of men.
This world is yours, yours and his, did you but know it. And did you know it,
such is the folly of mortals, you would straight be out of conceit with it and
desire another. But you are well made, not to know these things. See, I tell
it you, yet you believe it not. And though I should tell you from now till
dawn, yet you would not believe.' She laughed.

'You
are pleasantly plain with me,' said Lessingham after a pause. 'You can be
fierce. So can I. I do love your fierceness, your bites and scratches, madam.
Shall I be plain too?' He looked down; her face, level with his shoulder, wore
a singular look of benign tranquillity. 'You,' he said, '(and I must not omit
Mistress Campaspe, have let me taste this night such pleasures as the heroes in
Elysium, I well think, taste nought sweeter. Yet would I have more; yet, what
more, I know not.'