Mistress of mistresses (20 page)

One
foot upon the highest step of the throne, he stood looking down at her. ‘I have
a mind', said he, 'to turn sculptor: chryselephantine work: no, jet and ivory:
ivory and black diamonds, rather: or the old man shall conjure up from the
treasure-beds of Tartarus some new such thing, since earth hath nought precious
enough. And I will fashion therein the likeness of each particular hair.
Listen,' (bending a little nearer): ‘I made this for you last week.' And he
began to speak the lines, it was as though her dark troublous beauty was turned
to music in his voice. As in secret antiphone to that music, her bosom mounted
and fell with a quickened breathing.

Some
love the lily, some the rose

Which
in the summer garden blows;

Some
daisies shy, some mignonette,

Some
the sweet-breathed violet.

But
I a statelier Flower do owe,

Doth
in a heav'nlier garden grow:

The
Lily of sphinxian mystery,

Too
fair, too perilous-sweet to see,

 
With curious work of filigree

Trac'd
in a thousand crimps and rings

On
her softly spreading wings.

Upon
the mountain of delight

Bloometh
my wild Flower, black like night.

Her
petals, curl'd luxuriously,

Ravish
the live soul forth of me.

Her
perfum'd darkness sets, like wine,

My
veins a-throb with fire divine.—

Fate,
take all: yet leave me this:

The
Flower of Flowers, my Flower-Delice.

She
made no sign, but remained with her downward, listening look. ‘I wonder?'
Barganax said: 'did I ask you, no matter what, would you give it me? Were I bid
you do, no matter what, would you do it?'

She
nodded twice or thrice, without turning her head. 'All of me,' she answered
softly. 'What you will.'

'Ah,
then you shall swear this. For there is a favour you have till now refused me.'

'O,'
said she, and the thing that dwelt in the corner of her mouth was awake and ready;
'if you must chaffer with me for oaths and blind bargains, I'll take back my
words. We'll start fair.'

'No,
no,' said the Duke. *No oaths, then. I'll not cheapen the sweet bounty of your
word already spoken.'

'But
I've taken it back,' said she.

'Then,'
he said, 'we begin again. First: will you not smile me a thank for to-day's
proceedings?'

'I'll
think on't,' she said. ‘I might. But I'll be besought more prettily for it ere
I do it.'

'
'Twas but to pleasure you, so I will at least be thanked,' said the Duke. 'For
myself, why, I'd see the Admiral and my silly sister and the whole bunch of
cards drowned together in the Styx ere I'd a stirred a foot in it. And so, for
my payment—'

'You
will unthank yourself with such talk,' she said. 'And besides, it is all lies.'

Barganax
laughed. Then, looking in hers, his eyes became dark and masterful. 'It is
lies,' he said. 'But only because of this, that I cannot do without you. You
have taken it back?' He was suddenly kneeled at her feet: his hands shut like
shackles upon her ankles, prisoning them. 'I have never bended knee to man or
woman,' he said; 'and now I will have my way. At this hundredth time of asking,
will you be my Duchess in Zayana?'

She
made as if to rise, but his grip tightened. He said in a low fierce voice,
'Answer.' In his hands he felt her answer before she spoke: 'Never that.'

'That
is an old stale answer,' he said. 'Try again.'

Fiorinda
threw up her head with a little silent laugh. 'If you have your hour,' she
said, 'to begin or to refuse, so have I mine.'

'But
why?' said the Duke fiercely. She looked stonily down upon him. 'Why?' he said
again.

'Because
I had rather be my own mistress,' she said. 'And yours.'

'Ha!
and I must starve still, save at the horning of the moon? And then oft but live
on supposings; and every handwhile the chance you may forsake me? By heavens,
but I will have more of you, madam.'

She
shook her head. The Duke, letting go her feet now, clasped his arms about her
below the knees. ‘I know you care not a rush for the ducal crown. You are not
dissevered by places, nor altered by times, nor subject unto to and fro. Do it
for my sake. For indeed I am most venomously in love with you,' (here he buried
his forehead in her lap): 'were I lose you, as well tear out my heart roots.'

She
sat very still. Then her fingers softly stroked, the wrong way, the thick,
short-cropped, coppery, curling hair at the back of his head. 'O folly of men!'
she whispered. 'How often, my lord, have you not exclaimed against safety and
enduring goods? And now will you, like a peevish boy, provoke me to dwindle
into your Duchess, and poison all our bliss? I'll sit in a shed with madge
howlet and catch mice first.'

It
was as if he had not heard her. The grip of his arms was tenser about her
knees. His face, when he now looked up at her, had the look of a man dazzled
from sleep. He said, 'I am sick with love of you.'

Fiorinda
met his eyes for a minute in silence. Then she trembled: her laughter-loving
imperial lips parted a little: the long black eyelashes half veiled her eyes:
her eyelids quivered. With a little sudden catch of her breath, she bent
forward; her chin lifted a little; her throat and bosom became in that instant
the pure benediction of beauty, the opening of heaven, the coming down. 'Love
me, then,' she answered. ‘I am here to be loved.'

The
Duke, now upon that throne beside her, had her now in his arms. As a sweet in
the goblet, as pearls when the silken thread is broken, all her fierce lithe
pride and queenship was unstrung: fallen loose: melted away. In the nape of her
neck, where her hair was done in a knot that nestled there black and sleek like
a sleeping leopard, he kissed, a dozen times, the last lowest little hairs, too
young to be commanded, which, finer than gossamer-spiders' silk, shadowed the
white skin with their delicately ordered growth: little hairs prophetic of all
perfections. And now his bee-winged kiss, hovering below her ear, under the
earring's smouldering of garnet, passed thence to where neck and shoulder join,
and so to the warm throat, and so by the chin to that mocking spirit's place of
slumber and provocation; until, like the bee into the honeyed oblivion of some
deep flower incarnadine, it was entertained at last into the consuming heaven
of that lady's lips.

Now
opened the last door of all before that leaf of virtue, the high double door
that led from the main staircase to the throne-room, and Lessingham, striding
out of darkness into the very presence, checked in the threshold. In the first
bright glimpsing, indeed, he beheld the Lady Fiorinda thus in Duke Barganax's
arms; but, ere foot or hand might act on his will, shut doors and be gone, she
had stood up and turned her eyes upon him: and with that he was like a man
ensorcelled.

For
now in her, so facing him from beside the dream-stone, he beheld no longer that
lady, but another. In her hair, too pale for gold, too golden for silver,
braided with strings of pearls, light itself seemed fallen a-dreaming, caught
and stung asleep by the thousand little twisting tendrils that floated,
hovered, vanished, and glinted again, with every stir of the quiet air. Feature
by feature so might have been Barganax had he been bora woman: a golden girl,
in the sweet holiday spring-time of her awakening beauty. Her grey eyes drew to
far spaces, like the sea. On her cool lips, full, clean cut, pure of curve,
everything desirable on earth or heaven seemed delicately to slumber: As a man
out of the deathlike sleep of some drug comes to his senses at first with a
disordered perception, wherein familiar things stand new, with no root in time,
no perfume, no promise, no echo: so Lessingham beheld her but as a vision
un-curdled from the phantasmagoria of some dream: a thing which the awakening
sense, making as yet no question of perduration or possession, or of a world
beyond the charmed present, accepts without surprise. Then on the sudden he
noted the fashion of her dress, strange, fitter for a lover's eye than for the
common gaze of the court, and knew it, with a knowledge that seemed to shut fingers
about his naked soul, for that very dress and garb / which that dream had worn,
standing but a half hour since at his bed's foot.

Up
the empty hall he came to her, slowly, not to frighten away this wonder, but
resolute. The Duke sprang up, his eyes shining like a lion's surprised. But
Lessingham, as marking him not, was come now within ten paces of them, still
with that unwavering noiseless stride, and now his foot was even upon the
carpet. He halted with the prick of Barganax's sword against his chest. He
stepped back a pace, and drew. For the second time in a day and a night they
stood as opposites; and this time in a witched kind of stillness, wherein each
leaned towards other across the kindling instant that should let them together,
point and edge, like two great strokes of lightning and thunder. And for the
second time, and now strangelier still, for the hotter occasion that was now
than in the council chamber for bloody rages, the moment passed.

Lessingham
lowered his sword. 'Who you are,' he said, ‘I know not. But I'll not fight with
you.'

*Nor
I with you,' said the Duke, yet with thunder on his brow. 'Nor I with you.'

With
the look on the face of each of them that a man's face wears when he strives to
remember some forgotten tune, each fell back yet another pace or two from the
other, each staring at the other still. And so staring, both slowly put up
their swords, and, with the double click of them going home in the scabbards,
both turned as upon a common impulse towards Fiorinda.

Like
a man's beside himself, Barganax's eyes leapt from that other to Lessingham,
from him to her, and his sword was jumped half-bare from the scabbard again.
'What mummery's this?' he said. 'Where is my lady? God's death! speak, you were
best, man, and you, woman, whoever you be.'

But
Lessingham, looking too at that lady, and standing as if drunk, said, in a
starved voice unlike his own, 'Give me her back:' then bit it in and set his
jaw. Barganax, with a dazed look, passed his hand across his eyes.

'My
cloak, my lord,' she said, turning for the Duke to put it about her shoulders.
He paused a moment. Her-presence, thus strangely snatched away and as strangely
restored, and in so serene an unconcernment; the curve of neck and hair; her
skin; the sweet smell of her: these things shook the fierce blood in him so
that he scarce dared trust his hand upon her, even through the cloak. But
Lessingham near her too, and more, face to face with her dark and alluring
loveliness, bore himself with a cold formal courtesy.

She
thanked the Duke with a look: that slow, unblinking, unsmiling, suddenly
opening and then fading, stare, with which upon his birthday she had promised
herself in the garden. It mastered and then steadied his senses like wine. In
that moment, so near the high climacteric, his eyes looking over her shoulder
met the eyes of Lessingham in a profound recognition. In Les-singham's face,
the masculine of hers by many particulars, he read a promise; not indeed, as in
hers, the world-dissolving epithalamion of sense and spirit, but a promise of
something scarcely less deep in the blood, albeit without arrows and without
fire: of brotherhood beyond time and circumstance, not to be estranged, but
riveted rather together, by mutual strife upon the great stage of the world and
noble great contentions.

'My
Lady Fiorinda,' said Lessingham, 'and you my lord Duke: inconsiderate excuses
are no better than accusations. I could not rest. I will say no more.'

'In
this world-without-end hour,' said the Duke, 'let us say but good night.'

Fiorinda
spoke: 'You go north, my Lord Lessingham?'

To-morrow,
madam.'

To-day,
then: it is past midnight. Ere you go, I would know a thing. Were you ever a
painter of pictures?' 'No. But a doer of deeds.'

'My
lord the Duke painteth past admiration. Of me he hath painted forty pictures,
but not yet one to's liking, and so burnt all.'

There
was a man I knew did so,' said Lessingham: *burnt all save one. Yet no,' he
said, with a strange half-waked look at her. 'What was't I said?'

'It
is hard, I suppose,' said that lady, as if, in the enjoyment of her own
thoughts' stoops and hoverings, she had no eye to note the lightless gaze with
which he seemed to search inward in himself: 'It is hard, I suppose, for a
lover, if he be a very lover, to paint his mistress. For then that which he
would, paint, if he be a very lover, is not appearance, but the thing which is.
How can he paint her? seeing that his picture, when it is painted, changeth then
no more; but that which is, changeth unceasingly:  and yet changeth not.'