Mistress of mistresses (2 page)

Your
voice, that all these years, forty-eight years and a month or two, since first
I knew you, has had power over me as has no other thing on earth, I think. And
today— But why talk of to-day? Either to-day is not, or you are not: I am not
very certain which. Yesterday certainly was yours, and those five and twenty
years in which you, by your genius and your riches, made of these islands a
brighter Hellas. But to-day: it is as well, perhaps, that you have nothing to
do with to-day. The fourteenth of July to-morrow: the date when the ultimatum
expires, which this new government at Oslo sent you; the date they mean to take
back their sovereign rights over Lofoten in order to reintroduce modern methods
into the fisheries. I know you were prepared to use force. It may come to that
yet, for your subjects who have grown up in the islands under the conditions
you made for them may not give up all without a stroke. But it could only have
been a catastrophe. You had not the means here to do as you did thirty-five
years ago, when
you
conquered Paraguay: you could never have held,
with your few thousand men, this bunch of islands against an industrialized
country like Norway. Stir's, 'Shall the earth-lice be my bane, the sons of Grim
Kogur?' They would have bombed your castle from the air.

And
so, I think fate has been good to you. I am glad you died this morning.

I
must have been deep in my thoughts and memories when the Senorita came into the
room, for I had heard no rustle or footfall. Now, however, I turned from my
window-gazing to look again on the face of Lessingham where he lay in state,
and I saw that she was standing there at his feet, looking where I looked, very
quiet and still. She had not noticed me, or, if she had, made no account of my
presence. My nerves must have been shaken by the events of the day more than I
could before have believed possible: in no other way can I explain the
trembling that came upon me as I watched her, and the sudden tears that half
blinded my eyes. For though, no doubt, the feelings can play strange tricks in
moments of crisis, and easily confound that nice order which breeding and the
common proprieties impose even on our inward thoughts, it is yet notable that
the perturbation that now swept my whole mind and body was without any single
note or touch of those chords which can thrill so loudly at the approach of a
woman of exquisite beauty and presumed accessibility. Tears of my own I had not
experienced since my nursery days. Indeed, it is only by going back to nursery
days that I can recall anything remotely comparable to the emotion with which
I was at that moment rapt and held. And both then as a child, and now half-way
down the sixties: then, as I listened on a summer's evening in the drawing-room
to my eldest sister singing at the piano what I learned to know later as
Schubert's
Wohin?,
and now, as I saw the Senorita Aspasia del Rio
Amargo stand over my friend's death-bed, there was neither fear in the trembling
that seized me and made my body all gooseflesh, nor was it tears of grief that
started in my eyes. A moment before, it is true, my mind had been feeling its
way through many darknesses, while the heaviness of a great unhappiness at long
friendship gone like a blown-out candleflame clogged my thoughts. But now I was
as if caught by the throat and held in a state of intense awareness: a state of
mind that I can find no name for, unless to call it a state of complete purity,
as of awaking suddenly in the morning of time and beholding the world new born.

For
a good many minutes, I think, I remained perfectly still, except for my
quickened breathing and the shifting of my eyes from this part to that of the picture
that was burning itself into my senses so that, I am very certain, all memories
and images will fall off from me before this will suffer alteration or grow
dim. Then, unsurprised as one hears in a dream, I heard a voice (that was my
own voice) repeating softly that stanza in Swinburne's great lamentable
Ballad of Death:

By
night there stood over against my bed

Queen
Venus with a hood striped gold and black,

Both
sides drawn fully back

From
brows wherein the sad blood failed of red,

And
temples drained of purple and full of death.

Her
curled hair had the wave of sea-water

And
the sea's gold in it.

Her
eyes were as a dove's that sickeneth.

Strewn
dust of gold she had shed over her,

And
pearl and purple and amber on her feet.

With
the last cadence I was startled awake to common things, as often, startling out
of sleep, you hear words spoken in a dream echo loud beyond nature in your
ears. I rose, inwardly angry with myself, with some conventional apology on
the tip of my tongue, but I bit it back in time. The verses had been spoken not
with my tongue but in my brain, I thought; for the look on her face assured me
that she had heard nothing, or, if she had, passed it by as some remark which
demanded neither comment on her part nor any explanation or apology on mine.

She
moved a little so as to face me, her left hand hanging quiet and graceful at
her side, her right resting gently on the brow of the great golden hippogriff
that made the near bedpost at the foot of Lessingham's bed. With the motion I
seemed to be held once again in that contemplation of peace and power from
which I had these hours" past taken some comfort, and at the same time to
be rapt again into that state of wide-eyed awareness in which I had a few
minutes since gazed upon her and Lessingham. But now, just as (they tell us) a
star of earthly density but of the size of Betelgeuze would of necessity draw
to it not matter and star-dust only but the very rays of imponderable light,
and suck in and swallow at last the very boundaries of space into itself, so
all things condensed in her as to a point. And when she spoke, I had an odd
feeling as if peace itself had spoken.

She
said: 'Is there anything new you can tell me about death, sir? Lessingham told
me you are a philosopher.’

'All
I could tell you is new, Dona Aspasia,' I answered; 'for death is like birth:
it is new every time.'

'Does
it matter, do you suppose?' Her voice, low, smooth, luxurious, (as in Spanish
women it should be, to fit their beauty, yet rarely is), seemed to balance on
the air like a soaring bird that tilts an almost motionless wing now this way
now that, and so soars on.

'It
matters to me,' I said. 'And I suppose to you.'

She
said a strange thing: 'Not to me. I have no self.* Then, 'You', she said, 'are
not one of those quibbling cheap-jacks, I think, who hold out to poor mankind
hopes of some metaphysical perduration (great Caesar used to stop a bung-hole)
in exchange for that immortality of persons which you have whittled away to
the barest improbability?'

'No,'
answered I. 'Because there is no wine, it is better go thirsty than lap
sea-water.'

'And
the wine is past praying for? You are sure?'

'We
are sure of nothing. Every path in the maze brings you back at last to
Herakleitos if you follow it fairly; yes, and beyond him: back to that
philosopher who rebuked him for saying that no man may bathe twice in the same
river, objecting that it was too gross an assumption to imply that he might
avail to bathe once.'

Then
what is this new thing you are to tell me?'

'This,'
said I: 'that I have lost a man who for forty years was my friend, and a man
great and peerless in his generation. And that is death beyond common deaths.'

"Then
I see that in one river you have bathed not twice but many times,' she said.
'But I very well know that that is no answer.'

She
fell silent, looking me steadfastly in the eye. Her eyes with their great black
lashes were unlike any eyes that I have ever seen, and went strangely with her
dark southern colouring and her jet-black hair: they were green, with enormous
pupils, and full of fiery specks, and as the pupils dilated or narrowed the
whole orbs seemed aglow with a lambent flame. Frightening eyes at the first
unearthly glance of them: so much so, that I thought for an instant of old wild
tales of lamias and vampires, and so of that loveliest of all love-stories and
sweet ironic gospel of pagan love—Theophile Gautier's: of her on whose
unhallowed gravestone was written:

Ici
git Clarimonde,

Qui
jut de son vivant

La
plus belle du monde.

And
then in an instant my leaping thoughts were stilled, and in awed wonderment I
recognized, deep down in those strange burning eyes, sixty years in the past,
my mother's very look as she (beautiful then, but now many years dead) bent
down to kiss her child good night.

The
clock chiming the half hour before midnight brought back time again. She on the
chime passed by me, as in a dream, and took my place in the embrasure; so that
sitting at her feet-1 saw her side-face silhouetted against the twilight
window, where the darkest hour still put on but such semblance of the true
cloak of night as the dewdrops on a red rose might wear beside true tears of
sorrow, or the faint memory of a long forgotten grief beside the bitterness of
the passion itself. Peace distilled upon my mind like perfume from a flower. I
looked across to Lessingham's face with its Grecian profile, pallid under the
flickering candles, facing upwards: the hair, short, wavy, and thick, like a
Greek God's: the ambrosial darknesses of his great black beard. He was ninety
years old this year, and his hair was as black and (till a few hours ago, when
he leaned back in his chair and was suddenly dead) his voice as resonant and
his eyes as bright as a man's in his prime age.

The
silence opened like a lily, and the Senorita's words came like the lily's
fragrance: Tell me something that you remember. It is good to keep memories
green.'

'I
remember', answered I, 'that he and I first met by candlelight. And that was
forty-eight years ago. A good light to meet by; and a good light for parting.'

'Tell
me,' she said.

'It
was Easter time at Mardale Green in Cumberland. I had just left school. I was
spending the holidays with an aunt of mine who had a big house in the Eamont
valley. On Easter Sunday after a hard day by myself on the fells, I found
myself looking down on Mardale and Haweswater from the top of Kidsty Pike. It
was late afternoon, and the nights still closed in early. There was leavings of
snow on the tops. Beneath my feet the valley was obscure purple, the shadows of
night boiling up from below while weak daylight still walked the upper air and
the mountain ridges. I ran down the long spur that Kidsty Pike sends down
eastwards, dividing Randale from Riggindale. I was out of breath, and half deaf
too after the quick descent, for I had come down about fifteen hundred feet, I
suppose, in twelve minutes by the time I came to cross the beck by the
farmhouse at Riggindale. Then I saw the light in the church windows through
the trees. I remembered that Haweswater and all its belongings were condemned
to be drowned twenty feet deep in water in order that some hive of civilization
might be washed, and I thought I would go in to evening service in that little
church now while I might, before there were fishes in its yew-trees instead of
owls. So I stumbled my way from the gathering dusk of the quiet lane through
the darkness of those tremendous yews, and so by the curtained doorway under the
square tower into that tiny church. I loved it at first sight, coming in from
the cold and darkness outside: a place of warmth and gentle candles, with its
pews of oak blackened with age, its little Jacobaean gallery, its rough
whitewashed walls, simple pointed windows, low dark roof-beams: a glamorous and
dazzling loveliness such as a child's eyes feed upon in its first
Christmas-tree. As I found my way to a seat half-way up the aisle on the north
side, I remember thinking of those little earthenware houses, white, green, and
pink, that you can put a night-light inside; things I had forgotten for years,
but I had one (as I remembered) long ago, in those lavender and musk-smelling
days of childhood, which seemed far more distant to me then, when I was nineteen,
than they do now; German things, I fancy: born of the old good German spirit of
Struwwelpeter and Christmas-trees. Yes, it was those little earthenware houses
that I thought of as I sat there, sensuously loving the candlelight and the
moving shadows it threw: safe shadows, like those there used to be in the
nursery when your nurse was still there; not the ghostly shadows" that
threatened and hovered when she had gone down to supper and you were left
alone. And these shadows and the yellow glamour of the candles fell on kind
safe faces, like hers: an old farmer with furrowed, strong, big-boned,
storm-weathered features, not in his Sunday-go-to-meeting suit, but with heavy
boots nailed and plastered with mud, as if he had walked a good distance to church,
and rough strong tweed coat and breeches. Three or four farmers, a few farm
men, a few women and girls, an old woman, a boy or two, one or two folk in the
little gallery above the door: that was all the congregation.