Mistress of mistresses (25 page)

'I
think it likely true,' answered Medor. 'He knoweth well enough your grace's
firm-kept faith toward him lately in Zayana.'

The
Duke was silent. Then, 'Why have they taken him away?' he said. 'Fetch him
back! Must I be betrayed by you too, to do my bidding when I'm beside myself?'

'No,'
replied he, and gave him a look. 'I will keep my old bargain with your grace as
for that.'

Barganax
put off his helm and set it beside him on the table with his iron gloves. The leavings
of storm yet darkened and flickered about his eyes and about the lines of his
mouth under the curled mustachios; but no longer so as to deform that face and
brow which, clear seen now in the upward beaming of the lamp, seemed to contain
the united sweet of heaven's graces. He said under

his
breath: In a dream
I
spake with Our Lady of Cyprus.'

When
Amaury was come in again with Medor, 'You are a brave man, Amaury,' said the
Duke; 'and that was to be looked for, since you serve a brave man; and he is a
man to pick out men of strength and manliness to follow him, and men of his own
bent of mind. And now lay open your former speeches, that I may understand your
meaning.'

Amaury
laid it all before him point by point.

'And
now,' said the Duke then, 'I have bethought me of this matter betwixt me and
your lord, what way it shall become. Here is a ring,' he said, and took it from
his finger: 'the stone of it is called quandias: it is found in the vulture's
head, and is man's friend, for it driveth from him all things that be hurtful.
Give it him from me. Say to him, I will not be outdone by him in nobility: I'll
meet with him, but not here. I'll meet him half way, at Ilkis in Rubalnardale.
To-day 'tis Monday; let it be Wednesday at noon. Tis best we go weaponed,
seeing the countryside may well be up in a tumult after these doings. But let
there be twenty of either side, and no more. And let truce hold, howsoe'er
things fadge, till Thursday midnight.'

Amaury
kissed Barganax's hand and took the ring. ‘I am so far in my lord's counsels,'
he said, 'that I can here confidently accept it all on his behalf, and say that
your grace's noble dealing in this business hath opened an easy way unto honour
and peace betwixt you.'

'Then
fare you well, sir,' said the Duke. 'On Wednesday at noonday we shall confer in
Ilkis. Soldiers, conduct him: a dozen torches down the Curtain.

'And
now,' said he to Medor, when Amaury was gone: 'nor you nor no man speak to me.
Lights and to bed.'

It
was now about mid-day of Wednesday, that fourteenth day of June. In
Acrozayana, in a jewelled shade of strawberry-trees, where the sun speckled the
gravel path with moidores strewn upon a carpet of cool purple, the Lady
Fiorinda rested as music rests when the lute is laid by. Her couch was cushions
of wine-dark satin on a bench of porphyry. Her gown, very soft and fine,
long-sleeved, close fitting, yellow of the pale cowslip petal and with narrow
ruffs at throat and wrist, settled at every gently taken breath to some fresh
perfection of her as she rested there, sweetly gathered up, upon her right
side, her feet along the bench. A hood of black netted silk, rebated at the
border with chrysoprases sewn upon cloth of gold, framed her face as with an
aureole within which, betwixt white brow and jewelled tissue, her hair was like
the mystery of night set betwixt bright sun and moon.

Below
her to her left, on the step of the carved porphyry seat, sat Rosalura, her
needlework fallen on the ground at her side, her hands clasped in her lap.
Anthea, clothed in white, stood on the confines of the shade and the sunlight
of the lawn without: the pupils of her eyes were slits against that brightness:
there was in her bearing an alertness of expectancy: her hair, loosely gathered
and knotted up in a disordered grace, was as fire burning. Bellafront, at the
outer end of a low bench on the left, close to Anthea, caught the rays too on
her coiled plaits of chestnut red. Pantasilea and Myrrha, Campaspe and
Violante, reclined these upon this bench those upon that, of the two low
benches to Fiorinda's left and right. All "were as if listening to
something afar off, or, may be, to the humming of the bees only that droned on
the summer air, now louder now more dim, but never silent; listening not as
hearing but rather hoping to hear some expected thing.

Doctor
Vandermast, in russet-coloured gaberdine, walked in his meditation. The little
arrows of sunlight, piercing the leaves, rained upon him ceaselessly in his
measured walking.

Fiorinda
spoke: That was a strange freedom in so grave a scholar as you, sir, to say
that I was, of myself, —but indeed now I have forgot what 'twas you said.'

He
came to a stop at her side, looking past Anthea to the smooth sunny spaces of
lawn and flower-bed beyond and, over the parapet, to mountains dim in the
summer haze. 'It is a principle infringible of divine philosophy,' he said, 'to
seek an understanding of all things
sub
specie quadam ceternitatis:
holding
them up, as to a lamp, to eternity, wherefrom they take illumination. Myself
too did spend whole thirty-seven years together in studying of the Physicals
and Ultramundanes, proceeding therein by concatenation of axiom with
proposition and so through
demonstratio,
scholium, corollarium,
to
the union of all in a perpetual and uniform law: that vertical point above the
pyramids of knowledge where the intellects may in momentary contemplation seize
the truth of things. Yet was it, when all came to all, but an empty truth:
prater verbum nihil est,
a vain breath. For it supposed further, if it must
stand, a reason, understanding, and platform. But whensoever, leaving these
toys, I have considered of your ladyship, then is all clear daylight; and
whensoever I have been put to a stound, unable to understand of this or that
in nature or in time, wherefore it should be thus and not thus, I need but view
it under the light of your ladyship, and in an instant I see its very worth and
its necessity.'

'As
this late ruinous field of Lorkan?' said she, 'that hath cut the ground, from
under his feet and sent him cap in hand to make peace with his great enemy?'

He
replied: 'I behold it in your ladyship as in a glass. I embrace and accept it.'

'Mew!'
said she, 'I would plague him. That is all.'

'I
do discern you through a thicker cloud than that,' said Vandermast, meeting her
eye.

'Do
you so?' said she. ' 'Las! were I not somewhat high-hearted I should be scared
out of my senses, as if with such a cockatrice stare the old man would unclothe
me where I sit. Horror of Apollonius upon Lamia! are we safe indeed?'

'Apollonius',
said Vandermast, 'was but a very false philosopher, and had but a very
superficial and poor understanding. In sum, (and this was in my mind when by a
trope or figure, madam, I permitted myself to liken you to
eternity),
I
conclude that your ladyship is, of yourself,
omnium rerum causa immanens:
the sufficient explanation of the world.'

Fiorinda
did not smile. 'But what needed it of explanations?' she said. 'Here it is. I like
it.'

'Without
you,' said that old man, 'it should fly in pieces and be gone. Like a drop of
glass that I have seen, will crash instantly into dust if a man but nip its
tail off.'

'And,
sure, you will not say there ever lived a man so wicked', said she, 'as dream
it could be otherwise? A world without me? or that hated me?'

'My
Lady Fiorinda,' said he in a low voice:
'nemo
potest Deum odio habere:
no
man is able to hate God. I speak not of time and place and outward habit. In
Rialmar, no less constantly than in Acrozayana, you do have your siege and
presence. There may be more of you, three, nine, nine thousand thousand: I know
not:
ex necessitate
divince naturae infinita infinitis modis sequi debent:
infinite shapes and ostentations. I know, in this
world, but two. And you, albeit you change, yet change not.'  

He
fell silent. 'Nay, I would have you go on,' she said, in accents that seemed to
draw a veil of mockery shot with starry sparkles across her thought, even as
the long black lashes veiled her eyes. ' 'Tis very music to me, to smooth my
ear: to listen to subtleties, fantastic queries, and speculations, discoursed
so by so learn'd a doctor: like as the deceiving of the senses is one of the
pleasures of the senses.'

Vandermast,
immerst yet in his vision, and as if he had not heard her, said, 'It is an
open-founded doctrine, which can scarce escape the notice even of the rudest;
save that they note it and pass by, not knowing fully that which they noted. As
they that go to and fro in the street behold a tower, and yet there be many
steps and degrees to be ascended painfully,
per scientiam,
ere a man shall stand upon the top thereof and
know the thing. And yet,' he said, 'this is to small purpose talking so, with
laborious stumbling words, to your ladyship, as a child conning his lesson: to
you that do know these things better than I and without all grammatication.'

'You
may have a nose for metaphysicals,' said that lady; 'but here you cry out upon
no trail. I know nothing. Only, I am.'

'Your
ladyship doth play with me,' said Vandermast. 'I play with all things,' she
said. It was as if that which dwelt in the corner of her mouth shot its arrow
and then buried its face again for very sweetness of the place it dwelt in. Her
right hand made a rest for her cheek; her. left arm was thrown back and fallen
behind her, behind the proud arch of her hip, as in a carelessness and divine
largesse of the treasure of her body, ethereal as the scented thought of a
white rose, beautiful as golden flowers, the fairness of it and the Grecian
pride. 'With all things,' she said.

'And
rightly so,' said that ancient doctor, slowly, as if communing with his inward
thought: 'seeing that it is for you that all things,
omnia qua existunt,
are kept and preserved by the sole power of God
alone,
a sola vi Dei
conservantur.'

The
bees' drowsy note conducted on the silence. Fio-rinda's voice came like honey
dropping from the hive on some Elysian Hymettus, saying, as in a dream, 'It may
be you said true. It may be I do know. The Poetess:
She was charier of words than you, most reverend
doctor, and yet said it all, I think:

thou, and My servant Love.'

The
Countess Rosalura, remembering Ambremerine, leaned suddenly forward to lay her
head against the sandals of gold which, with broidered straps of fair Lydian
work, covered Fiorinda's feet.

Fiorinda,
with a little movement of her head, beckoned the learned doctor to bend nearer.
'Will you credit that old tale,' she said in his ear, 'of their speaking with
King Hakon Athelstane's-fosterling, to summon him home, when he sat there
a-dying, on the bloody battle-field of Fitiar in Stord? When

Condul
and Skogul the Goths'-God sent
To choose of the kings,

Which
of Yngvi's line must with Odin fare,

In
Valhall to won.

And
was not the king glad then, when he heard the words of the noble Valkyries,
where they sat there a-horseback, and bare themselves so fairly, and sat helmed
and with shield and spear?'

'It
is not past credit,' answered Vandermast.
'Deus ex solis suce naturce legibus, et a nemine
coactus agit:
God fareth
according to the laws of His own nature, and under constraint of no man.'

She
laughed and stood up. Surely the light of her beauty was upon that old man's
face, to transfigure it, as sunlight the cold frosty season of December. Every
line and thought-driven furrow, the wrinkled hollows of his eye-sockets, their
bristling eaves, the lean beaked nose of him, and white beard, were as lighted
with her beauty from within-ward; and the peace of her beauty lay upon the
fragile, and vein-streaked smoothness of his brow, and all his countenance was
made gracious with the holy spirit and power of that lady's beauty, which
stirred now and glittered in the depths of his swift and piercing eyes.

'I
will look on this meeting,' said she. 'A man shall not need be hurt to the
death, as then at Fitiar, ere he may pluck the rose acceptable to the Gods and
wear it: my roses of Pieria, reached tiptoe from the mere pinnacle of his
hopes' defeat. Draw back the veil.'