Mistress of mistresses (57 page)

They
halted. The Duke on his white pawing stallion, with the Chancellor upon his
right and the Meszrian lords in great splendour about him, was approached now
within twenty paces and still came on. Trumpeters sounded the royal salute. In
Gabriel's secret ear the Vicar flung
a
sudden word: ‘I have changed my mind. Prevent
it.' In this, at ten paces' distance, Barganax and Lessingham met eye to eye.
And even as Barganax a year ago in Acrozayana had, upon such an eye-glance,
seemed to behold very incarnate in Lessingham the masculine of his own dark
lady and queen of his desires, so Lessingham now, in a slow astonishment to
master body and soul, beheld in Barganax the like marvel; and then, in a moment,
as night is opened for a flash with lightning, not that masculine, but, as to
carry perfection beyond perfection, her, very Antiope: given back, for that
flash, in this world-without-end sunset hour of Mornagay, this place of
beginnings and of endings.

Gabriel
was too late. The murderer, shouting, 'This from the great Duke of Zayana!'
sent it down a foot deep into Lessingham between neck and gorget. In the same
instant Gabriel, swift upon his cue, had despatched the doer of the deed beyond
justification, repentance, or confession. The Vicar, amid the sudden huge
turmoil, smiting left and right with his hand-mace, struck with the one stroke
his kinsman's slayer, that reeled butchered already by Gabriel's sword, and
with the other his last imaginable danger extant and repository of his secret
treason: Gabriel Flores. Whose brains, as serviceable unto this extremity,
but now no further, to the master he had so faithfully nursed and obeyed, were
thus, for last warranty of that master's safety, spattered unregarded upon the
grass.

But
the Vicar, that had for this safety so much adventured and so much cast away,
looking up, swift from these strokes, into Barganax's face, stood as a man at
whose feet suddenly opens the abyss. For there glared upon him out of that face
not Barganax's eyes, but eyes speckled and grey: the eyes of Lessingham.

And
Barganax, in a voice like a great crack of thunder, commanded them, 'Take the
Vicar!'

xxii 
 

Zimiamvian
Night

antiphone to dawn
 
her infinite variety
 
'more than was promised
or was due'
 
moonset between the worlds.

Fiorinda
,
in the Duke's private lodging that looks from the citadel over Zayana lake, set
down her crystal, having beheld that end. The eye of day stared red now from a
split in the clouds that shrouded up the evening, west over Ambremerine; in
which glare of settle-gang, all the element was become as a flame: tongues of
it licking the folds and falls of the damask table-cloth: sparks of it in
momentary death and birth upon every shining surface of knife or fork, goblet,
platter, or smooth-skinned fruit: smoke of it invading the dimness of
Barganax's bedchamber which, within part-opened folding doors, stood void and
dream-fast as upon memories of so many sunsets, and of lamplight times, and pleasure,
and sleep, and dawn, and the long interludes of clear daylight emptiness which
is, for beds, their night-time and time of reposing. And in the proud pallour
of that lady's brow and cheek, and in the exaltation of her carriage, the glory
sat throned, gleaming again from her jet-black seat-waved hair; and of it some
touch or savour was in the terrible and unfathomable eyes of her, as she stood
so, and upon such tidings, gazing from that high western window into the
conflagration of the west.

So
she stood, while night gathered. Colour began to fail before the shades, both
here in the room with its so many rarities of gold-broidered curious hangings,
rich and costly treasures of furniture, and lilied golden chapiters of pillars
and gold-wrought ceiling; and, without, in the lake stretching dim, and in the
mountains companying with clouds and frozen immensities of night, and in the
flowers of Barganax's gardens folding their petals for sleep. 'So falls a
thundered tower,' she said. From some pine-branch in the garden beneath, a
nightjar thrilled. 'No self—but All,' she said.

She
took a taper: lighted it where the fire was dying on the hearth: lighted the
candles. Wine was on the table, and crystal beakers. She filled one and held it
up, crowned with foam, between her eye and the candles, watching the beads
mount upwards: through a golden element, atomies of golden fire. She quaffed it
down and turned to the looking-glass. And now, with movements swift, yet of an
easy staid nobility of sequence as when the leafage of a wood sways to the wind
in summer, loosing of girdle and brooch and pin, she put off her ruby-spangled
red silken dress and all raiment else, and so, in that mixed light of candles
and afterglow, fronted in a stillness her own image in the glass. With a
strange look she beheld it, like as a year ago last May, in that other great
mirror within, at dawn she had beheld it, upon the morrow of his twenty-fifth
birthday: a distant, appraising, look. With such an eye might her lover himself
have considered not her, but one of those many portraitures he painted of her
and had smudged then or slashed to oblivion, as being not her, or at least not
her enough. But not with such lips. For that which, sleeping or waking, held
licence of the lips of that lady, inhabiting the corners of her mouth: a thing
once bottled by him in paint but straight let out again: this woke and viewed
in the glass now its own superlative, which thence, with a sidelong look,
acknowledged her.

'Fiorinda,'
she said. 'Mary,' she said. 'Antiope.' The names remained on the silence like
ripples on still water. She took out the pins one by one, and let down in
floods of blackness her hair; and so, yet gazing in the glass, settled upon a
couch that faced it, her feet along the couch, her right hand making a rest for
her cheek. So in the mirror she regarded for another while with flickering
eyelids that which was of itself mirror of all wonders; her beauty-clad naked
body, awful as mountains in the dawn, and completing and making up in its Greek
perfection quintessences of night and of scented gardens and of glory of sun
and moon, and, in eyes, the sea. With hands clasped behind her head, she
leaned back now upon the cushions of honey-coloured silk, watching in the glass
her image, which now began to change. And so watching, she named the changes by
names whereof but the spoken sound is a train of fire, beauty across darkness:
Pentheseleia, Lydian Omphale, Hypermnestra, Semiramis, Roxana, Berenice;
spotless and unparagoned Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, Queen of the East, for so
long time matched against the overmastering odds of imperial Rome, and in the
end triumphed on yet not dishonoured; Gudrun of Laxriverdale; Petrarch's Laura;
Boccaccio's Fiammetta; Giulia Farnese, Vittoria Corombona, and the white and
deadly blossom of the house of Borgia. Even, passing all these, her for whom
Trojans and well-greaved Achaians so long time suffered sorrows; and, (mother
of her), that Argive Queen, lovely-ankled Leda, and other earth-born paramours
of Olympian Zeus. And with every change, it was as if the likeness in the
mirror was yet her own, or, at least, part of her.

Her
left hand, lazily fallen behind the milk-white somnolent supple grandeur of
her thigh, chanced between couch and cushion upon a book there, slipped down
and forgotten. Drawing it forth, she opened it and knew the writing: Greek upon
the left, Barganax's Englishing of it upon the right:

So
far she read, softly, aloud, in a voice that took on, with the Poetess's words,
a more diviner grace, as with a letting through, by some momentary rift between
time and eternity, of some far-off cadence of the honey-sweet imperishable
laughter:

Sparkling-throned
heavenly Aphrodite,

Child
of God, beguilder of guiles,—beseech You,

Not
with sating, neither with ache and anguish,

 
Lady, my heart quell.

Nay,
but come down, if it be true indeed that

Once
to cry of mine from a far place list'ning

You
did hark and, leaving Your Father's golden

House,
did come down with

Chariot
yok'd and harness'd, and so in beauty

O'er
the black earth syvift-flying doves did draw You,

Filling
high heav'n full of the rush of wing-beats

Down
the mid ether.

'
Swift, and they were vanisht. But You, most blessed,

 
Smil'd with eyes and heavenly mouth immortal,

Asking
me what suffer'd I then, or why then

Call'd
I on You, and

What,
all else beyond, I desir’d befall me,

In
my wild heart: 'Who shall, at My sweet suasion,

Even
thee lead into her love? Who is't,

O
Sappho, hath wrong'd thee?

For,
though she fly, presently she shall seek thee;

Ay,
though gifts she'll none of, yet she shall give then;

Ay,
and kiss not, presently she shall kiss thee,—

All
and unwilling.'—

Very
now come so, and, from cares that tangle,

Loose;
and whatsoever to bring to pass my

Heart
hath thirsted, bring it to pass; and be

Your-Self
my great ally.

She-
stood up, saying again, in Her beauty-blushing orient, those last words again:

'Yes;
for so will I be petitioned,' said She. 'Yes; and by such great mettled and
self wild hawks, which fall and perish in their height. I promise: do I not
perform? O more than either was promised or was due.'

Upon
a table by the couch, in a golden bowl, were roses, withered and dead. She took
one and held it, like Cleopatra's aspick, to the flower of Her own breast. And,
as if to show upon experiment that in that place nothing but death can die and
corruption self-corrupted fall like a foul garment to leave perfection bare,
all the starved petals of the rose, shrivelled and brown, opened into life
again, taking on again the smoothness and softness of the flesh of a living
flower: a deep red rose, velvet-dark that the sense should ache at it, with a
blueness in its darkest darknesses, as if the heavy perfume clung as a mist to
dull the red.

As
the wind whispers cool through apple-boughs, and sleep streams from their
trembling leaves, She* spoke again: 'One day of Zimiamvia, my Lord Lessingham;
one day, my lord Duke. And what is one, in My sight? Did not you say it:
Still about cock-shut time?—Safe in the lowe of
the firelight:
Have not I
promised it? And now is time for that.

'For
now Night,' She said, scarce to be heard, 'rises on Zimiamvia. And after that,
To-morrow, and To-morrow, and To-morrow, of Zimiamvia. And all of Me. What you
will. For ever. And if it were possible for more than for ever, for ever more.'

Upon
the sudden, She put on Her full beauty, intolerable, that no eye can bear, but
the heart of Her doves turns cold, and they drop their wings. So the eternal moment
contemplates itself anew beside the eternal sea that sleeps about the heavenly
Paphos. Only She was: She, and the hueless waiting wonder of the sea at daybreak,
and Her zephyrs, and Her roses, and Her hours with their frontlets of gold.

In
that high western room in Acrozayana, the transfiguring glory passed. So shuts
darkness behind a meteor that, sliding out of darkness silently between star
and star in a splendour to outface all the great lamps of heaven, slides
beneath stars silently into the darkness and is gone. '

The
Lady Fiorinda turned to the sideboard beyond the mirror. Its polished surface
was dulled under the dust of neglect. There lay there a sword of Barganax's, a
pair of her crimson gloves, a palette of his with the colours dried up on it,
and a brush or two, uncleaned, with the paint clogged stiff in their bristles;
and among these toys, two or three pear-shaped drops of coloured glass, one
blue, another red, another purple of the nightshade, no bigger than sloes and
with long thin tadpole tails, such as are called Rupert's drops. She, upon a
remembrance, took one daintily and between jewelled fingers snapped off the end
of its tail, and saw the drop crash instantly into dust So she dealt with
another and beheld it shatter: another, and beheld that: so, till all were
ruined; and so stood for a while, looking upon their ruin, as if remembered of
the saying of that old man. At last, she went to the window and stood, and so
after a time sat down there in the window, upon cushions of cloth of gold. Her
face, turned side-face to the room and the warmth, was outlined against night
that rolled up now filthy and black. When, after a long time, She spoke as if
in a dream, it might have been Her own Poetess herself speaking out of the
darkness in