Mistress of mistresses (47 page)

And
now as Lessingham walked between table and wall, beholding the Artemisian
loveliness of her where she sat sweetly talking, it was as if in the tail of
his eye he saw monstrous paws brandished, and mouths of beastly great murdering
teeth ready to come nigh to her.

He
and she looked at one another as he resumed his seat. Amid the general talk
none noted, unless it were Zenianthe and Amaury, that for a minute neither Lessingham
spoke nor the Queen. Nor none guessed (unless it were these) that she and
Lessingham, while they seemed for that minute but to sit silent and thoughtful
at that banquet-table, had in truth retired themselves to a more privater
council-chamber; where, in that which is to outward sense but the twinkling of
an eye, days, weeks, and months and the changing seasons can act their slowed
passage like the opening of a white rose; and thither many a time since that
first night last Michaelmas had Lessingham and the Queen retired them, to
pursue their noble wishes, and dwelt there in love together.

The
learned doctor, standing with Zenianthe in a grassy hollow of the hill where
her oak-woods upon their furthest limits face the afternoon, shaded his eyes.
The sun was so far declined as barely ride clear of a fir-wood which followed
the shoulder of the hill where it rose beyond the pond a stone's throw from the
doctor's feet. Black against the sky was that wood, but upon the hither side of
it and its cast shadow the edge of the green hill was in brilliant light. Below
that band of brilliance hillside and pond were as a curtain of obfuscate golden
obscurity which yet, with a hand to shade the eyes of him that looked, became
penetrable to sight, revealing detail and contour and varied growth of herbage,
and the pond's surface below, smooth and still. The figures of Lessingham and
Antiope coming down out of the fir-trees' shadow into the band of sunshine were
outlined about their edges with
a
smouldering golden light, so that they seemed to
burn against their background of the black wood. The sound of their talk, as it
became audible, seemed the translation into music of that smouldering light
and of the sun and the shadows within shadows and water and green hillside
about them: not into words, for words were not yet to be distinguished; nor
laughter, for they did not laugh: rather the notes and rhythms that noble
voices borrow from that inner vein of laughter, which enriches the easy talk of
minds so well mated that each being true to the other cannot but so be true to
itself.

They
were come down now. Lessingham with a nod acknowledged the doctor's salutation,
sat himself down upon an outcrop of stone, and there seemed fallen into
a
study.
Anthea, erect, statuesque, with hands clasped behind her back, stared at the
sun. Campaspe, in a soft clinging dress of watered chamblet coloured,"
like certain toadstools that grow on dead thorn-trees, of delicatest pale
rose-enewed madder brown, and wearing a white lace hood, from beneath which
dark curls of her hair escaping shadowed throat and cheek, and on the left her
bosom, busied herself with finding flat stones to play ducks and drakes. Ever
now and then the pond's still surface was broken with the scuttle and skim of
her stones. Swift and dainty and mouse-like were all her movements, as
a
little dunlin's
tripping the sky-reflecting mud-flats of tidal creeks on
a
sunny
evening in autumn when the sea is out.

Antiope
stood with the doctor and Zenianthe. Their eyes were on Lessingham, where he
sat looking into the sun-path. Vandermast spoke: 'You have debated all fully,
then, and determined of somewhat?'

Antiope
answered, 'We have nothing debated, and determined all.'

"That
is better still,' said that ancient man.

For
a while, they kept silence. Vandermast saw that her gaze rested still upon
Lessingham. It was as if she slept where she stood. Vandermast said, in a voice
still and warm as the innermost unpierced shades of those oak-woods behind her,
which outwardly the sun bathed with so lovely a splendour of golden green: 'I
have opined to your ladyship ere this, that there is but one wisdom. And but
one power.'

Antiope
stood listening as if for more. 'I wonder?' she said at last.

Vandermast
said: 'It is your own doing, this: a dress of Yours. You choose this. He
chooses it with You, whether he know or not, willing it for Your sake. That
loftiest of all Your roses, to pluck it for You.'

She
said: 'I know.'

Vandermast
said: 'For my part, I had sooner die with your ladyship than be made immortal
with—'

She
said, 'Well? Who is my rival?'*

Vandermast
said, 'You have none: not one: with Your starry beauties to make paragon.'

She
waited. The Knidian mystery lay shadowy about Her lips.
'Before the day was,'
She said.

The
silence trembled.

Vandermast
said: 'Yours is not as our choosing, who out of many things choose this thing
and not those others, because we judge this to be good. But Your choice maketh
good: higheth the thing You choose, were it very nought before, to outsoar all
praises.'

She
said: 'And yet every time I pay for it. The mere condition of being, this of he
and she: did I not choose it? Should not He, as easily, had I so chosen
instead, have created and made Me of His omnipotence self-subsisting and
self-sufficing? But this I chose rather: to be but upon terms to be loved,
served, made, recreated, by that which is My servant. How were love serious
else?'

Vandermast
said: 'Death: a lie: fairy-babes to fright children. From within,
sub specie ceternitatis,
what is it but
vox inanis,
a vain word, nothing?'

She
said: 'And yet, how were it possible to love entirely except some living being
which liveth under the terror of those wings? Else, what needed it of love?'

Vandermast
said: 'And time: what evil was there ever but time sowed it, and in time it
hath root and flourisheth?'

She
said: 'And yet, without time what were there?— the crack-brained ecstatic's
blindation of undiscerning eyes upon me: the music of the spheres condensed to
a caterwaul. Or how else should beauty round her day? how else should he tell
my lip from my eyebrow, but in time?'

Vandermast
said: 'The passing and the vanishing: what else beareth witness to the
eternal?'

She
said: 'This will-o'-the-wisp of power: that other, scorning of certainties
which abide safe and endure—' Her voice vanished as, out to sea, a questing
tern vanishes as the sun leaves it.

Zenianthe,
with oak-leaves set round her lovely hair, said, laying a hand on the doctor's
arm: 'Are you part of Her? as I am?'

Vandermast
said: 'No, dear lady of leaves and squirrel-haunted silences. I am of that
other kind.'

Zenianthe
said: 'But if the house be part of who dwells therein? If my woods be part?'

Vandermast
shook his head: made no answer.

Antiope
said, startling as a sleeper wakes: 'What is it, cousin? What have I spoken?
You can witness, I never walked in my sleep till now?' Her eyes were troubled.
She said, and her words came slowly as if with night-groping: 'A black lady. I
have never seen her.'

Vandermast
said: 'Shall Self see Self?'

Antiope
said: 'You may better answer that: you that are a philosopher.'

Vandermast
said: 'I can ask questions, but some I cannot answer.'

Antiope
said: 'Has she seen me?'

Vandermast
said: 'I have been told so.'

Antiope
said: 'Who told you?'

He
answered: 'My art.'

Antiope
said: 'Does that speak sooth?'

Vandermast
said: 'How can I tell? It flares a light. I follow that, a step at a time, and
so watch and wait: remembering still that, in this supermundal science concerning
the Gods, determination of what Is proceedeth inconfutably and only by argument
from what Ought to be. Thus far I have not been bogued.'

Antiope
said: 'How then should she see me, if I may not see her?'

Vandermast
held his peace. The words of her speech were like shadows falling. Her eyes,
like a dove's, now sought Lessingham, but his face was turned from her
sunwards.

Anthea
said:

I
am love: Loving my lover, Love mine own self: For that he loveth it, Make it my
paramour, Laugh in the pride of it, Beat in his veins: So, by such sharing, Loving
prevail Unto self-seeing. —Such-like is love.

Campaspe
said:

I
am love: Loving my lover, Love but his love: Love that arrayeth me, Beddeth me,
wardeth me— Sunn'd in his noon, Safe under hand of him, Open my wild-rose
Petals to him: Dance in his music. —Such-like is love.

Lessingham
said: 'You sit there, silent: I at the table's head, you, Senorita Maria, at
the side, as fits a guest of honour; but on my left, as fits you. For on that
side my

heart
is. There is no more haste now. Peace now:
re-
^^quiescat in pace:
the peace of the Gods that passeth all
understanding. Some note or flavour of it I caught now and then even there,
because of you,
madonna mia.
Do you remember?

Mistress
of my delights; and Mistress of Peace: O ever changing, never changing, You.—

Do
you remember? But the dream clouded it, and the illusion of change and—'

'Hush!'
Mary said, and trembled. 'Lastingest blessednesses are subject to end. Is this
a dream? We may wake.'

Lessingham
said: 'That was the dream. No waking again to that. For what was it but the
marred reflection, prophetic or memorial, of this present? a wind-marred image
of all these things: of you and me here alone, of those peaches, the dark wine
and the golden, the Venetian finger-bowls: a simulacrum only but half apprehended
of that Gloire de Dijon over the window, and of its perfume which is your
breath,
O reine des adorees,
perfume of love. These, and the summer's evening
leaning, with long cool shadows on the lawn, as I towards you; and this
sapphire, warm to my fingers where it sits softly here, in this place which is
of itself benediction and promise of awakening night, and of the unveiling and
the blinding and the lotus that floats on Lethe: in this dear valley of your
breast.'

'Wait,'
she said, scarce to be heard. 'Wait It is not time.'

He
sat back again in his chair. So sitting, he rested his eyes upon her in
silence. Then: 'Do you remember the Poetess, madonna?—

As
if spell-bound, she listened, very still. Very still, and dreamily, and with so
soft an intonation that the words seemed but to take voiceless shape on her
ambrosial breath, she answered, like an echo:

Evening
Star—gath'rer of all that the bright daybreak parted:

You
gather the sheep, the goat; you gather the child safe to the mother.

The
low sunbeams touched their goblets, and the beaded streams of bubbles became as
upstreaming fires.

'It
is things we counted most of substance,' he said, after a minute, 'it is those
have fallen away^Those that, where all else was good, spoiled all.'

'All,'
she said. 'Even I,' she said: 'spoilt at last.'

Lessingham
started: sat rigid as if struck to stone. Then he laid out a hand palm upwards
on the table: hers came, daintily under its shimmer of rings as a tame white
egret to a proffered delicacy, touched with its middle finger the centre of his
open palm, and escaped before it could be caught.

'Well,
it was a dream,' she said. 'And, for my part in it, I felt nothing. No pain. No
time to be frighted. It was less than a dream. For of a dream we say, It was.
But this, It was not nor it is not.'

'A
dream,' said Lessingham. 'Who dreamed it?'

‘I
suppose, a fool.'

A
trick of the low sunlight in that panelled room seemed to darken the red gold
of her hair even to blackness. A Medusaean glint, diamond-hard, came and went
at her mouth's corner.