Mistress of mistresses (36 page)

In
this climacteric moment a sudden quiet seized him: such a kind of quiet as Gods
know, riding betwixt the worlds: iron knees clamped against flanks of lightning:
all opposites whirling to one centre, where the extremity and sightlessness of
down-eddying flight stoops to awful stillness. And in that stillness, he
considered now circumstance, and this Queen of his, in the spring-time and
morning of her life, grey eyes where delicate morning's self sat ignorant and
free. And, for the look in those eyes as they met his, he clamped tighter yet
the grip of his knees; so that, if the Queen felt indeed the grasp tighten of
the hand that held hers, the regard that she encountered in his eye was enough
to have laid to sleep in her mind any half-wakening question ere it could come
near to waking. And yet behind that unnoticed pressure of hand, given without
his will and that he cursed himself inwardly for the giving of, was the whole
weight of his iron spirit upon the reins to check the stoop of the winged
courser he bestrode, and make it bear him still on the way he chose, superb and
perilous between gulf and gulf.

The
melody of the pavane, which had returned, upon its last variation, to walk in a
glitter of all stars and in a hum of bees and in wafts of honey-sweet fragrance
sent out by flowering lime-trees, paused now and, upon two soft pizzicato
throbs, entered the doors of silence. Lessingham, making his obeisance to the
Queen, handed her towards her chair. On the way to it he, looking down at her
as they talked, noted her glance range over the assembled company: noted the
dimple hover like a humming-bird near her mouth's corner. 'Cousin,' she said,
holding out her free hand to Zenianthe as they met: 'praise my invention. It
has succeeded past belief: our enemy fled to mew, and durst no more appear.
What reward, Captain-General, will you ask for your share in't? For truly, till
to-night, ne'er was there prince in Rialmar so yoked as I.'

'Some
heights there are,' replied Lessingham, 'that a man may but descend from. If I
may yet be honoured, I'll choose the next lower height, and ask this: that your
serenity will graciously be my advocate with my Lady Zenianthe for the honour
of a dance.'

'Well,
cousin?' said the Queen; 'shall I?'

"Tis
a request,' answered she, 'which I think your highness may pleasantly accept.
And for this next dance following.'

Lessingham
carried himself, through the remaining pleasures of that evening, with open
face, and as a man that gives him wholly to the immediate matter: his discourse
full of lively and bright sparkles and, when need was, serious opinion. So that
neither to the Queen nor to Zenianthe, nor to any that was there, was aught
seen in it but of example and use: so masterfully he rode that hippogriff steed
within him, and upon so delicate a curb.

Night
wore, and the high festival drew to a close. And now, for an ending of ceremonies,
the ladies of presence and they of her council stood below stairs in waiting,
while she went up in state, alone save for her train-bearers, between the
sea-horses. Lessingham, watching, bethought him that not far otherwise might
the foam-born Goddess Herself ascend azured spaces of Her eternal sea, between
sunset and the moon's rising. And then he bethought him as if all time's
treasure-house should have been distilled, from eternity to eternity, into one
frail pearl, and in that superlative should pass, under his eyes, beneath
cliffs of night.

XIV

 
Dorian
Mode: Full Close

lessingham's   'i will have but upon no
conditions

Q
ueen
Antiope,
upon that good-night, went up to her rest. But Lessingham, being come at length
to- his bedchamber, came and went betwixt window and bed and candle and hearth
in an inward strife, as if right hand should grapple against left hand to peril
of tearing in pieces the body that owns them.

'I
will have nothing upon conditions,' he said at length, aloud. He stood now,
looking in the glass until, with that staring, the reflection dimmed, and only
his eyes, sharpened to steel with a veiling and confounding of all else, stood
forth against him. 'Conditions!' he said; and, turning about, drew from the
breast of his doublet a little withered leaf; the same which Anthea, for better
convenience, had given him in Laimak. Upon this he looked for a while, musing;
then opened the door: went out The corridors were as ante-chambers of sleep and
oblivion: night-watchmen stood to a drowsed salute upon his passage, down the
stairs, through empty halls, to the outer doors. At that leaf's touch doors
opened. He came so to the privy garden. On noiseless hinges, under that leaf of
virtue, the gate swung wide. And he began to say in himself, walking now in the
night-light under stars, and with slower tread, and with an equanimity now of
breath

and
heart-beat whereon his riding thoughts seemed to mount into the starred
sublimities of the unceilinged night: 'Nothing upon conditions. Condition of
wedlock, kingdom, and be answerable: No. Betrayal so of his commission: No, by
my soul! Throwing over of freedom: lean on this, 'stead of ride him as I have
ridden aforetime: ha! No. Or, glutton-like: smircher of—' He checked;
overtaken, as a man smitten on the nape of the neck with a stick, with a
blindness of thought and sense. Then he quickened his pace for a dozen steps,
then swung round and, rigid as a statue, stood facing Aphrodite's statue there:
of Aphrodite, white between stars and paler stars reflected in the water, and
water-lilies that floated asleep about Her feet. And he thought with himself,
as thought stood up again: 'You are other. Even He that made You—' the
night-wind moved for a moment in that sleeping garden, and in a moment was
fallen again to sleep: 'Your power forced Him, making of You, make the one
thing desirable.'

A
breath from the" lilies fainted from under Lessing-ham's nostrils. His
mind stopped and stood still. So a man cloudbound upon the backbone of some
high mountain stands clean lost, for the opening and shutting again of a
window in the mists that has revealed, far below, a glimpse not of familiar
country but of strange and un-remembered: and yet embraced, upon some unseized
persuasive contrariety of argument addressed to blind certitudes secure and
asleep within him, for a country familiar and his own. And now, with a like
alien outwardness that the inward touch denied, words which, for all their
curiosity of outmoded idiom, he seemed to know for his own words drifted across
his thought:

And
we, madonna, are we not exiles still?

When
first we met

Some
shadowy door swung wide,

Some
faint voice cried,

—Not
heeded then

For
clack of drawing-room chit-chat, fiddles, glittering lights,

Waltzes,
dim stairs, scents, smiles of other women—yet,

'Twas
so: that night of nights,

Behind
the hill

Some
light that does not set

Had
stirr'd, bringing again

New
earth, new morning-tide.

As
a man awakening would turn back into his dream, yet with that very striving
awakes; or as eyes search for a star, picked up out but now, but vanished again
in the suffusing of the sky with light of approaching day; so Lessingham seized
at, yet in the twinkling lost, the occasion of those lines, the thin seeming
memory blown with them as if from some former forgotten life. Out of which
passivity of dream, waiting on flight where no air is to bear up wings; waiting
on some face but there is no seeing where all .is darkness; some voice or
hand-touch where all is deaf and bodiless; out of this his senses began to look
abroad again only when he was come back at last now to his own chamber, and
stood, where an hour ago he had stood, looking into his own eyes. And now, as
the lineaments of earth are bodied to a gradual clearness under the grey of
dawn, he began to see again his own face, as mountain should so at dawn look
across to mountain through heights of air.

‘I
will have—,' he said and was silent. 'But upon no bargains,' he said.
'Conditions is blasphemy.'

Shred
by shred he tore up now his leaf of sferra cavallo, sprinkling it shred by
shred upon the whitening embers in the fire-place; and so, with a half mocking
half regretful look, stood watching till the last shred shrivelled, and burnt
up, and disappeared.

XV

Rialmar
Vindemiatrix

curbing of the hippogriff
 
a queen fancy-free
 
ride in the forest:
sudden light vandermast's wayside garden
 
the house of peace
 
naiad and dryad and oread
 
'sparkling-throned heavenly aphrodite'
 
spring-scents of ambremerine
 
whirlpool and a new stillness
 
'. . . with an immortal goddess: not clearly
knowing'
 
'swift-flying doves to draw
you'
 
meditation among nymphs by firelight
 
the rose and the adamant
 
summer night: antiope
 
autumn dusk: the storing
and the brooding.

Q
ueen
Antiope
proclaimed for Michaelmas day a day's delight and pleasure, to ride a-hawking.
That was a brisk sweet autumn morning. Lessingham, booted and ready at his
window, sniffed the air. Amaury came in: bade him good morrow. 'Well,' said
Lessingham to that reproving eye: 'what now?' Amaury took a looking-glass from
the wall and held it for him.

'Is
there a smudge on my nose? Is my beard awry?' He leaned to survey himself with
a mock solicitudeness.

Amaury
set down the glass. 'O think not I care a flea, though old Bodenay and a dozen
more of 'em shall be killed right out, with your denying them all respite and
very sleep. But, for your own self—'

'Will
you count how many shirts I have sweat at tennis this week?'

Tennis!
Six weeks now, and the last three I think you're stark mad,' said Amaury. 'A
half-year's business thrust into twenty days: the whole engine and governance
of the Queen's strength in the north here picked in pieces and put together
good and new: a great new body of intelligencers thrown abroad for a watch on
Akkama, till now so ill neglected: the town in act to be stocked 'gainst a
twelve months' siege if need were: works set in hand to make sure all defences:
all things viewed, all put upon examination: the Constable and half the
officers here cashiered: three or four heads ta'en off: every man else, by your
own sole doing, manned and tamed to your fist,—'

'Well,'
said Lessingham, 'we should think the soul was never put into the body to stand
still.' He took his hat. 'He that could dine with the smoke of roast meat, Amaury,
should he not soon be rich? When I've set all in order: a week or two now: then
off with my commission, throw it by and we'll begone overseas.'

Amaury
followed him through the door.

Bright
sun shone on Rialmar fair and beautifully as Jhey rode down through the
market-place. By the Quiren Way they rode, and so to the old town gate, and so
out, and so, winding steeply down the shoulder of that great hill, south-about
into the levels of Revarm. Orvald and Tyarchus led, with the guard of honour;
then the Queen in her close-bodied green riding-habit trimmed with pearls:
Anamnestra, Zenianthe, Paphirrhoe: Amaury: the Lord Bosra, new taken for Constable
in Rialmar: accipitraries, seven or eight, with spaniels and red setting-dogs;
and, to bring up the rear, with a tartaret haggard hooded on his fist,
Lessingham upon Madda-lena, deep in counsel with the old knight marshal.

The
morning they spent in the open river-meads, flying at wildfowl. The river,
meandering in mighty curves a mile and more this way and that way, ran shallow
upon great widths of shingle; ever now and again they forded it with a plashing
and a clank of hooves among shifting stones. The dogs must swim oft at these
crossings, but nowhere was it deeper than wet the horses' bellies. Out of the
north-east the wind blew sharp from the mountains, making sport difficult. The
sun in a blue sky shone on rough blue waves of the river and on pale swifter
waves of wind-swept grass. An hour past midday they rode up through lava,
picking a way among bosses and ridges of it as among stooks in a cornfield
before harvest home, and so by wide sloping stretches of black sand, a country
that seemed made of coal-dust, to a grassy saddle between two smooth cratered
hills. Here, sheltered from the wind by the breast of the hill above them, they
halted to eat a little and take their ease.