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Authors: E R Eddison

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II  
The
Duke of Zayana

 

portrait of a lady
  
doctor vandermast

fiorinda: 'bitter-sweet'
  
the lyre that
shook mitylene.

 

The
third
morning after that coming of the galloping horseman north to Mornagay, Duke Barganax
was painting in his privy garden in Zayana in the southland: that garden where
it is everlasting afternoon. There the low sun, swinging a level course at
about that pitch which Antares reaches at his highest southing in an English
May-night, filled the soft air with atomies of sublimated gold, wherein all
seen things became, where the beams touched them, golden: a golden sheen on the
lake's unruffled waters beyond the parapet, gold burning in the young foliage
of the oak-woods that clothed the circling hills; and, in the garden, fruits of
red and yellow gold hanging in the gold-spun leafy darkness of the strawberry-trees,
a gilding shimmer of it in the stone of the carven bench, a gilding of every
tiny blade on the shaven lawn, a glow to deepen all colours and to ripen every
sweetness: gold faintly warming the proud pallour of Fiorinda's brow and cheek,
and thrown back in sudden gleams from the jet-black smoothnesses of her hair.

'Would
you be ageless and deathless for ever, madam, were you given that choice?' said
the Duke, scraping away for the third time the colour with which he had striven
to match, for the third time unsuccessfully, the unearthly green of that
lady's eyes.

'I
am this already,' answered she with unconcern. 'Are you so? By what assurance?'
'By this most learn'd philosopher's, Doctor Vandermast.'

The
Duke narrowed his eyes first at his model then at his picture: laid on a
careful touch, stood back, compared them once more, and scraped it out again.
Then he smiled at her: 'What? will you believe him? Do but look upon him where
he sitteth there beside Anthea, like winter wilting before Flora in her pride.
Is he one to inspire faith in such promises beyond all likelihood and known
experiment?'

Fiorinda
said: 'He at least charmed you this garden.'

'Might
he but charm your eyes', said the Duke, 'to some such unaltering stability, I'd
paint 'em; but now I cannot. And 'tis best I cannot. Even for this garden, if
'twere as you' said, madam, (or worse still, were you yourself so), my delight
were poisoned. This eternal golden hour must lose its magic quite, were we
certified beyond doubt or heresy that it should not, in the next twinkling of
an eye, dissipate like mist and show us the work-a-day morning it conceals. Let
him beware, and if he have art indeed to make safe these things and freeze them
into perpetuity, let him forbear to exercise it. For as surely as I have till
now well and justly rewarded him for what good he hath done me, in that day, by
the living God, I will smite off his head.'

The
Lady Fiorinda laughed luxuriously, a soft, mocking laugh with a scarce
perceptible little contemptuous upward nodding of her head, displaying the
better with that motion her throat's lithe strong loveliness. For a minute, the
Duke painted swiftly and in silence. Hers was a beauty the more sovereign
because, like smooth waters above a whirlpool, it seemed but the tranquillity
of sleeping danger: there was a taint of harsh Tartarean stock in her high
flat cheekbones, and in the slight upward slant of her eyes; a touch of cruelty
in her laughing lips, the lower lip a little too full, the upper a little too
thin; and in her nostrils, thus dilated, like a beautiful and dangerous
beast's at the smell of blood. Her hair, parted and strained evenly back on
either side from her serene sweet forehead, coiled down at last in a smooth convoluted
knot which nestled in the nape of her neck like a black panther asleep. She
wore no jewel nor ornament save two escarbuncles, great as a man's thumb, that
hung at her ears like two burning coals of fire. 'A generous prince and patron
indeed,' she said; 'and a most courtly servant for ladies, that we must rot
to-morrow like the aloe-flower, and all to sauce his dish with a biting something
of fragility and non-perpetuity.'

The
Countess Rosalura, younger daughter of Prince Ercles, new-wed two months ago to
Medor, the Duke's captain of the bodyguard, had risen softly from her seat
beside her lord on the brink of. a fountain of red porphyry and come to look
upon the picture with her brown eyes. Medor followed her and stood looking
beside her in the shade of the great lime-tree. Myrrha and Violante joined
them, with secret eyes for the painter rather than for the picture: ladies of
the bedchamber to Barganax's mother, the Duchess of Memison. Only Anthea moved
not from her place beside that learned man, leaning a little forward. Her clear
Grecian brow was bent, and from beneath it eyes yellow and unsearchable rested
their level gaze upon Barganax. Her fierce lips barely parted in the dimmest
shadow or remembrance of a smile. And it was as if the low golden beams of the
sun, which in all things else in that garden wrought transformation, met at
last with something not to be changed (because it possessed already a like essence
with their own and a like glory), when they touched Anthea's hair.

"There,
at last!' said the Duke. *I have at last caught and pinned down safe on the
canvas one particular minor diabolus of your ladyship's that hath dodged me a
hundred times when I have had him on the tip of my brush; him I mean that
peeks and snickers at the corner of your mouth when you laugh as if you would
laugh all honesty out of fashion.'

‘I
will laugh none out of fashion,' she said, 'but those that will not follow the
fashions I set 'em. May I rest now?'

Without
staying for an answer, she rose and stepped down from the stone plinth. She
wore a coat-hardy, of dark crimson satin. From shoulder to wrist, from throat
to girdle, the soft and shining garment sat close like a glove, veiling yet
disclosing the breathing loveliness which, like a rose in crystal, gave it life
from within. Her gown, of the like stuff, revealed when she walked, (as in a
deep wood in summer, a stir of wind in the tree-tops lets in the sun), rhythms
and moving splendours bodily, every one of which was an intoxication beyond all
voluptuous sweet scents, a swooning to secret music beyond deepest harmonies.
For a while she stood looking on the picture. Her lips were grave now, as if
something were fallen asleep there; her green eyes were narrowed and hard like
a snake's. She nodded her head once or twice, very gently and slowly, as if to
mark some judgement forming in her mind. At length, in tones from which all
colour seemed to have been drained save the soft indeterminate greys as of
muted strings, 'I wonder that you will still be painting,' she said: 'you, that
are so much in love with the pathetic transitoriness of mortal things: you,
that would smite his neck who should rob you of that melancholy sweet debauchery
of your mind by fixing your marsh-fires in the sphere and making immortal for
you your ephemeral treasures. And yet you will spend all your invention and all
your skill, day after day, in wresting out of paint and canvas a counterfeit,
frail, and scrappy immortality for something you love to look on, but, by your
own confession, would love less did you not fear to lose it'

'If
you would be answered in philosophy, madam,' said the Duke, 'ask old
Vandermast, not me.'

'I
have asked him. He can answer nothing to the purpose.'

'What
was his answer?' said the Duke.

The
Lady Fiorinda looked at her picture, again with that lazy, meditative inclining
of her head. That imp which the Duke had caught and bottled in paint awhile ago
curled in the corner of her mouth. 'O,' said she, 'I do not traffic in outworn
answers. Ask
him,
if
you would know.'

‘I
will give your ladyship the answer I gave before,' said that old man, who had
sat motionless, serene and unperturbed, darting his bright and eager glance
from painter to sitter and to painter again, and smiling as if with the
aftertaste of ancient wine. 'You do marvel that his grace will still consume
himself with striving to fix in art, in a seeming changelessness, those
self-same appearances which in nature he prizeth by reason of their every
mutability and subjection to change and death. Herein your ladyship, grounding
yourself at first unassailably upon most predicamental and categoric arguments
in
celarent,
next propounded me a syllogism in
barbara,
the
major premiss whereof, being well and exactly seen, surveyed, overlooked,
reviewed, and recognized, was by my demonstrations at large convicted in
fallacy of simple conversion and not
per
accidens;
whereupon, countering
in
bramantip,
I did in conclusion confute you in
bokardo;
showing,
in brief, that here is no marvel; since 'tis women's minds alone are ruled by
clear reason: men's are fickle and elusive as the jack-o'-lanterns they
pursue.'

'A
very complete and metaphysical answer,' said she. 'Seeing 'tis given on my
side, I'll let it stand without question; though (to be honest) I cannot tell
what the dickens it means.'

'To
be honest, madam,' said the Duke, ‘I paint because I cannot help it.'

Fiorinda
smiled: 'O my lord, I knew not you were wont to do things upon compulsion.' Her
lip curled, and she said again, privately for his own ear, 'Save, indeed, when
your little brother calleth the tune.' Sidelong, under her eyelashes, she
watched his face turn red as blood.

With
a sudden violence the Duke dashed his handful of brushes to the ground and
flung his palette skimming through the air like a flat stone that boys play
ducks and drakes with, till it crashed into a clump of giant asphodel flowers a
dozen yards away. Two or three of those stately blooms, their stems smashed a
foot above the ground, drooped and slowly fell, laying pitifully on the grass
their great tapering spikes of pink-coloured waxen filigree. His boy went
softly after the palette to retrieve it. He himself, swinging round a good
half circle with the throw, was gone in great strides the full length of the
garden, turned heel at the western parapet, and now came back, stalking with
great strides, his fists clenched. The company was stood back out of the way in
an uneasy silence. Only the Lady Fiorinda moved not at all from her place
beside the easel of sweet sandalwood inlaid with gold. He came to a sudden halt
within a yard of her. At his jewelled belt hung a dagger, its pommel and sheath
set thick with cabochon rubies and smaragds in a criss-cross pattern of little
diamonds. He watched her for a moment, the breath coming swift and hard through
his nostrils: a tiger beside Aphrodite's statua. There hovered in the air about
her a sense-maddening perfume of strange flowers: her eyes were averted, looking
steadily southward to the hills: the devil sat sullen and hard in the corner of
her mouth. He snatched out the dagger and, with a savage back-handed stroke,
slashed the picture from corner to corner; then slashed it again, to ribbons.
That done, he turned once more to look at her.

She
had not stirred; yet, to his eye now, all was altered. As some tyrannous and
triumphant phrase in a symphony returns, against all expectation, hushed to
starved minor harmonies or borne on the magic welling moon-notes of the horn, a
shuddering tenderness, a dying flame; such-like, and so moving, was the
transfiguration that seemed to have come upon that lady: her beauty grown
suddenly a thing to choke the breath, piteous like a dead child's toys: the
bloom on her cheek more precious than kingdoms, and less perdurable than the
bloom on a butterfly's wing. She was turned side-face towards him; and now,
scarce to be perceived, her head moved with the faintest dim recalling of that
imperial mockery of soft laughter that he knew so well; but he well saw that it
was no motion of laughter now, but the gallant holding back of tears.

'You
ride me unfairly,' he said in a whisper. 'You who have held my rendered soul,
when you would, trembling in your hand: will you goad me till I sting myself to
death with my own poison?'

She
made no sign. To the Duke, still steadfastly regarding her, all sensible
things seemed to have attuned themselves to her: a falling away of colours:
grey silver in the sunshine instead of gold, the red quince-flowers blanched
and bloodless, the lush grass grey where it should be green, a spectral
emptiness where an instant before had been summer's promise on the air and the
hues of life and the young year's burden. She turned her head and looked him
full m the eye: it was as if, from between the wings of death, beauty beaconed
like a star.

'Well,'
said the Duke,, 'which of the thousand harbours of damnation have you these
three weeks been steering for? What murder must I enact?'

'Not
on silly pictures,' said she; 'as wanton boys break up their playthings; and I
doubt not I shall be entreated sit for you again to-morrow, to paint a new
one.'

BOOK: Mistress of mistresses
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