Mistress of mistresses (18 page)

Without
looking at him, she made a little mow. 'In your erudite conversation, my lord,
I have tasted this night such pleasures as I am by nature accustomed to. I
desire no more. I am, even as always I am, contented.'

'As
always?' said he.

'Is
"always" a squeeze of crab-orange in your cup, my lord? 'Tis
wholesome truth, howsoe'er. And now, in our sober voyaging back to Zayana, with
the learn'd doctor conducting of us, I do look for no less bliss than—: but
this you will think ungracious?'

She
looked up, with a little pressure of her arm on his. His eyes, when he turned
his face to hers, were blurred and unseeing.

The
path came into the open now, as they crossed the low backbone of the island.
They walked into a flood of moonlight; on their left, immeasurably far away,
the great snow ranges stood like spirits in the moon-drenched air. Anthea said,
'Behold that mountain, my lord, falling away to the west in saw-toothed ridges
a handbreadth leftward of the sycamore-tree. That is Ramosh Arkab; and I say to
you, I have dwelt there 'twixt wood and snowfield ten million years.'

They
were now come down to the harbour. The cypress-shadowed glade lay empty: the
tables taken up where their banquet had been: the torches and the feasters
gone. Far away on the water the lights of the gondolas showed where they took
their course homeward to Zayana. Under an utter silence and loneliness of
moonlight the lawns sloped gently to the lake. One gondola only lay by the
landing-stage. Beside it waited that aged man. With a grave obeisance he
greeted Lessingham; they went aboard all three, loosed, and put out. There was
no gondolier. Doctor Vandermast would have taken the paddle, but Lessingham
made him sit beside Anthea in the seat of honour, and himself, sitting on the
fore-deck with his feet in the boat's bottom, paddled her stern-foremost. So
they had passage over those waters that were full of drowned stars and secret
unsounded deeps of darkness. Something broke the smoothness on the starboard
bow; Lessingham saw, as they neared it, that it was the round head of an otter,
swimming towards Ambremerine. It looked at them with its little face and
hissed. In a minute it was out of eyeshot astern.

'My
beard was black once,' said Vandermast. 'Black as yours, my lord.' Lessingham
saw that the face of that old man was blanched in the moonlight, and his eyes
hidden as in ocean caves or deep archways of some prison-house, so that only
with looking upon him a man might not have known for sure whether there were
eyes in truth within those shadows or but void eye-sockets and eclipsing
darkness. Anthea sat beside him in a languorous grace. She trailed a finger in
the water, making a little rippling noise, pleasant to the ear. Her face, too,
was white under the moon, her hair a charmed labyrinth of moonbeams, her eyes
pits of fire.

'Dryads',
said Vandermast, after a little, 'are in two kinds, whereof the one is more
nearly consanguineous with the more madefied and waterish natures, naiads
namely and nereids; but the other kind, having their habitation nearer to the
meteoric houses and the cold upper borders of woods appropinquate to the snows
and the gelid ice-streams of the heights, do derive therefrom some qualities of
the oreads or mountain nymphs. I have indulged my self-complacency so far as to
entertain hopes, my lord, that, by supplying for your entertainment one of
either sort, and discoursing so by turns two musics to your ear,
andante piacevole e lussurioso
and then
allegro
appassionato,
I may have
opened a more easier way to your lordship's perfect satisfaction and profitable
enjoyment of this night's revelries.'

That
old man's talk, droning slow, made curious harmonies with the drowsy body of
night; the dip and swirl and dip again of Lessingham's paddle; the drip of
water from the blade between the strokes.

'Where
did your lordship forsake my little water-rat?' he asked in a while.

'She
was turned willow-wren at the last,' answered Lessingham.

'Such
natures', said Vandermast, 'do commonly suck much gratification out of change
and the variety of perceptible form and corporeity. But I doubt not your lordship,
with your more settled preferences and trained appetites, found her most
acceptable in form and guise of a woman?'

'She
did me the courtesy', answered Lessingham, to maintain that shape for the more
part of our time together.'

They
proceeded in silence. Vandermast spoke again. 'You find satisfaction, then, in
women, my lord?'

'I
find in their society', Lessingham answered, 'a pleasurable interlude.'

That',
said that learned man, 'agreeth with the con-elusion whereunto, by process of
ratiocination, I was led upon consideration of that stave or versicule recited
by your lordship about one hour since, and composed, if I mistake not, by your
lordship. Went it not thus?

Anthea,
wooed with flatteries, To please her lover's fantasies, Unlocks her bosom's
treasuries.— Ah! silver apples like to these Ne'er grew, save on those holy
trees Tended by nymphs Hesperides.'

'What's
this?' said Lessingham, and there was danger in his voice.

'You
must not take it ill', said Vandermast, 'that this trifle, spoke for her ear
only and the jealous ear of night, was known to me without o'erhearing.
Yourself are witness that neither you nor she did tell it me, and indeed I was
half a mile away, so scarce could a heard it A little cold: a little detached,
methought, for a love-poem. But indeed I do think your lordship is a man of
deeds. Do you find satisfaction, then, in deeds?'

'Yes,'
answered he.

'Power,'
said that learned doctor: 'power; which maketh change. Yea, but have you
considered the power that is in Time, young man? to change the black hairs of
your beard to blanched hairs, like as mine: and the last change of Death? that,
but with waiting and expecting and standing still, overcometh all by drawing
of all to its own likeness. Dare your power face that power, to go like a
bridegroom to annihilation's bed? Let me look at your eyes.'

Lessingham,
whose eyes had all this while been fixed upon Vandermast's, said, 'Look then.'

The
face of the night was altered now. A cool drizzle of rain dimmed the moon: the
gondola seemed to drift a-beam, cut off from all the world else upon desolate
waters. Vandermast's voice came like the soughing of a distant wind: 'The
hairless, bloodless, juiceless, power of silence,' he said, 'that consumeth and
abateth and swalloweth up lordship and subjection, favour and foulness, lust
and satiety, youth and eld, into the dark and slub-bery mess of nothingness.'
Lessingham saw that the face of that old man was become now as a shrivelled
death's-head, and his eyes but windows opening inwards upon the horror of .an
empty skull. And that lynx-eyed mountain nymph, fiercely glaring, crouching
sleek and spotted beside him, was become now a lynx indeed, with her tufted
slender ears erect and the whiskers moving nervously right and left of her
snarling mouth. And Vandermast spake loud and hoarse, crying out and saying,
'You shall die young, my Lord Lessingham. Two years, a year, may be, and you
shall die. And then what help shall it be that you with your high gifts of
nature did o'ersway great ones upon earth (as here but to-day you did in
Acrozayana), and did ride the great Vicar of Rerek, your curst and untamed
horse, till he did fling you to break your neck, and die at the last? What is
fame to the deaf dust that shall then be your delicate ear, my lord? What shall
it avail you then that you had fair women? What shall it matter though they
contented you never? seeing there is no discontent whither you go down, my
lord, neither yet content, but the empty belly of darkness enclosing eternity
upon eternity. Or what shall even that vision beyond the veil profit you (if
you saw it indeed tonight, then ere folk rose from table), since that is but
impossibility, fiction and vanity, and shall then be less than vanity itself:
less than the dust of you in the worm's blind mouth? For all departeth, all
breaketh and perisheth away, all is hollowness and nothing worth ere it sink to
very nothing at last.'

'I
saw nought,' said Lessingham. 'What is that Lady Fiorinda then?' His voice was
level; only the strokes of his paddle came with a more steadier resolution, may
be, of settled strength as that old man spoke.

The
gondola lurched sideways. Lessingham turned swiftly from his outstaring of that
aged man to bring her safe through a sudden turmoil of the waters that rose now
and opened downward again to bottomless engulfings. Pale cliffs superimpended
in the mist and the darkness, and fires burned there, with the semblance as of
corpse-fires. And above those cliffs was the semblance of icy mountains, and
streams that rolled burning down them of lava, making a sizzling in the water
that was heard high above the voice of the waves; and Lessingham beheld walking
shrouded upon the cliffs faceless figures, beyond the stature of human kind,
that seemed to despair and lament, lifting up skinny hands to the earless
heaven. And while he beheld these things, there was torn a ragged rift in the
clouds, and there fled there a bearded star, baleful in the abyss of night.
And now there was thunder, and the noise as of a desolate sea roaring upon the
coasts of death. Then, as a thought steps over the threshold of oblivion, all
was gone; the cloudless summer night held its breath in the presence of its own
inward blessedness: the waters purred in their sleep under the touch of
Anthea's idly trailing finger.

Lessingham
laid down his paddle and clapped his right hand to his hip; but they had gone
unweaponed to that feast. Without more ado he with an easy swiftness, scarcely
to rock the boat, had gotten in his left hand the two wrists of Vandermast: his
right hand slid up beneath the long white beard, and fumbled the doctor's
skinny throat.
⁴
Scritch-owl,' he said, *you would unman me, ha? with
your sickly bodings? You have done it, I think: but you shall die for't.' The
iron strength of his fingers toyed delicately about that old man's weasand.

Very
still sat Doctor Vandermast. He said, 'Suffer me yet to speak.'

'Speak
and be sudden,' said Lessingham.

Surely
that old man's eyes looked now into his with a brightness that was as the
lifting up of day. 'My Lord Lessingham,' he said,
'per realitatem et perfectionem idem intelligo:
in my conceit, reality and perfection are one. If
therefore your lordship have suffered an inconvenience, you are not to revenge
it upon me: your disorder proceedeth but from partial apprehension.'

'Ha!
but did not you frame and present me, with fantasticoes? did not you spit your
poison?' said Lessingham. 'Do not mistake me: I am not afeared of my death. But
I do feel within me somewhat, such as I ne'er did meet with its like aforrow,
and I know not what it is, if it be not some despair. Wherefore, teach me to
apprehend fully, you were best, and that presently. Or like a filthy fly I'll
finger you off to hell.' Upon which very word, he strangely took his fingers
from the lean weasand of that old man and let go the lean wrists.

Vandermast
said, as if to himself,
'Cum
mens suam impotentiam imaginatur, eo ipso contristatur:
when the mind imagineth its own impotence, it by
that only circumstance falleth into a deep sadness. My lord,' he said, raising
his head to look Lessingham in the face, 'I did think you had seen. Had you so
seen, these later sights I did present you, and these prognostications of
decay, could not have cankered so your mind: they had been then but as
fumadoes, hot and burning spices, to awake your appetite the more and prepare
you for that cup whereof he that drinketh shall for ever thirst and for ever be
satisfied; yea, and without it there is no power but destroyeth and murdereth
itself at last, nor no pleasure but disgusteth in the end, like the stench of
the dead.'

'Words,'
said Lessingham. The mouth jangleth, as lewd as a lamp that no light is in. I
tell you, I saw nought: nought but outrushing lights and dazzles. And now, I
feel my hand upon a latch, and you, in some manner I understand not, by some
damned sleight, withholding me. Teach me, as you said but now, to apprehend
fully. But if not, whether you be devil or demigod or old drivelling disard as
I am apt to think you: by the blessed Gods, I will tear you into pieces.'

Anthea
widened her lips and laughed. 'Now you are in a good vein, my lord. Shall I
bite his throat out?' She seemed to slaver at the mouth. 'You are a lynx, go,'
said Lessingham. It was as if the passion of his anger was burnt out, like a
fire of dead leaves kindled upon a bed of snow.

Vandermast's
lean hands twisted and unclasped their fingers together in his lap. 'I had
thought', he said, to himself aloud, in the manner of old men, 'her ladyship
would have told me. O inexorable folly to think so! Innumerable laughter of the
sea: ever changing: shall I never learn?'