A Fish Dinner in Memison - Zimiamvian Trilogy 02 (10 page)

Slowly, and upon disparate faint clicks of wood with wood, scarce distinguishable even through the pale texture of the now muted strings, the castanets awoke again; then, softlier still, quickened their beat, and in a most tense graduality began to gather strength, as if horse-hooves should begin to draw nearer and nearer at a gallop from very far away. Here, no doubt, in this present drawing-room of Anmering Blunds, was the physical sound of them: the production, in natural air, of certain undulations which struck upon the tympanum of this ear or of that with varied effect, noted or ignored by this brain or that, winding strange horns, letting loose swift hunting-dogs, wild huntsmen, in as many shadowy fields as minds there were to take the infection of this old clicking music dear to the goat-footed wood-god. But the inward springs or being of that music took a further reach;

even as the being of some deep-eddying river-spate shapes and steers (not is shaped or steered by) these motions of leaf, twig, drowned flower-petal, water-fly, bubble, streak of foam, purling ripple, uprooted floating water-weed, which, borne by on its surface, swirling to its swirl, do but dimly portend the nature of the power that bears them.

Northward twenty miles beyond Memison, in the low valleys of the Ruyar, King Mezentius rode with the Chancellor, knee to knee. Now they breathed their horses: now put them to a walking-pace, breasting the long upward training of meadowland north of Mavia: now quickened to a hand-gallop in the dewy pastures of Terainsht Iron-still was the King's countenance under the moon, and with a look upon it as if he had some hammers working in his head. But his seat in saddle was free and jaunting, as if he and the great black horse he bestrode shared but one body between them So rode the King and Beroald, without word spoken; and in the beat of their horsehooves, irking the soft summer night, was the beat of the castanets, dear to goat-footed Pan.

But in lovely Memison, where, seated with her women about her, the Duchess looked upon the revels held under the sky that night, this inside secret music touched the sense less unpeaceably, as it had been the purr of some great sleepy cat that rested as she rested.

And now that same peace, quiet as summer star-shine in a night without wind, settled too about Mary, whether through the music, or through the opening, like night-flowers when the sun is down, of the innermost heart and mind within her, or through some safety that came of Lessingham's nearness: of his coat-sleeve touching, light as a moth, her bare arm between shoulder and elbow.

'Go, my Violante,' said the Duchess: 'bid them lay
a
little table for his grace here beside me and bring
a
light collation, caviar, and then
what you will, and framboises
to finish with; and Rian wine. For that is royal wine, and best fits to-night: red wine of the Rian.'

Violante went, lightly in both hands gathering her gown, down the half-dozen steps which, wide, shallow, made of panteron stone and carpeted in the midst with a deep-piled carpet of a holly-leaf green, led from this gallery down to the level where the dancing was. The summer palace in Memison is in plan like the letter
‘I
, and all along the main limb of it (which faces south) and along the shorter limb (which faces west) this gallery runs, with doors giving upon it and great windows, and with columns of some smooth white stone with silvery sparkles in it: these, set a fifteen-foot intervals, carry the roof above, and the upper rooms of the palace. A grass-plat, a hundred paces or more in length by sixty broad, lies below the gallery, with a formal garden of clipped ancient yew to bound it on the southern side, and a tall thick hedge of the same dark growth upon the western; and on the grass, in the north-west corner of this quadrangle, was an oaken floor laid down on purpose that night to dance on, with hanging lamps and flamboys and swinging lanterns round about on every side of it to give light to the dancers. Fifty or sixty couples now footed the coranto, in such a shifting splendour of jewels and colour of tissue in doublet, kirtle, lady's gown, rich-wrought fan and ornament, as is seen in some cascade that comes down a wide wall of rock in steep woods facing the evening sun, and every several fringe of freshet as it falls becomes a fall of precious stones: amethyst, golden topaz, ruby, sapphire, emerald, changing and interchanging with every slightest shifting of the eye that looks on them.

But as when, with the altering of the light, some watered surface or some column of falling water among the rest suddenly throws back the radiance of the great sun itself, and these lesser jewels are dimmed, so was the coming of the Duke of Zayana among this company. He came without all ceremony, with great easy strides, so that Medor and Melates, who alone attended him, had some ado to keep up with him: without all ceremony, save that, at word gone before him, the music stopped and the dancers; and two trumpeters standing forward from their place behind the Duchess's chair, sounded a fanfare.

Duke Barganax halted upon the steps and, with a sweep of his purple cloak, stood a moment to salute the guests; then upon one knee, kissed the Duchess's hand. She raised him and, for her turn, kissed him on the forehead.

'You are late,' said she, as, letting a boy take his cloak, the Duke seated himself beside her in a golden chair.

‘I
am sorry, my lady mother. The King
, I am told, was here to-day?' ‘
Yes.'

'And gone again? Why was that?' She shook her head. Thunder in the air?'

Amalie shrugged her shoulders gracefully. 'And why late?' she said. Like they seemed, she and he, one to the other, as the she-lion and her son.

'Only that I had set myself to finish a head I was painting of for a new piece I am upon, of a mural painting of Hippokleides' betrothal feast And so, third hour past noon ere I took saddle.'

' "Hippokleides, you have danced away . . . your marriage". A subject nee
ding some delicacy of treatment!
And whose head that you painted?'

'Why, a late lady of your own: Bellafront's.'

‘B
ellafront? she is red: Titian: of our colour. Could you not have left it till another day, this painting?'

'She might have been dead when I came home again.'

'Dead? Is she sick then?'

‘
No!' said the Duke, laughing.' 'Tis no more but follow my father's good maxim; when I was little, and the best strawberry saved up at the side of my plate to eat it last: told me, eat it now, since I might not live to eat it later.'

'You are absurd,' said Amalie:
‘
you and your teacher both. Is it true, Count Medor?'

'I were a bad servant, to call my master absurd,' replied Medor; 'and a worse courtier, to contradict your beauteous excellency in your own house. Well, it is true. He is absurd. But always by choice, never upon compulsion.'

'O perfect courtier! But, truly, men are absurd by nature; and were you, my noble son, less than absurd, then were you less than man. And that—faugh! it was naught of mine: whether to have bred it, or to truckle withal.'

Supper being done, they sat on now (Barganax, with those Lords Melates and Medor, the Duchess, with her Myrrha, Violante and others), looking on the scene, in a contented silence which awoke ever and again into some lazy bandying of contented humorous talk. Lamps above and about them shed a slumbrously inconstant light. From great stone jars, ranged along the terrace edge, orchids laid out their strange and luxurious shapes, dusky-petalled, streaked or spotted, haired, smooth-lipped, velvet-skinned, exhaling upon the warm air their heady heavy sweetness.

'Will not your grace dance to-night?' Medor said at length to the Duke.

Barganax shook his head.

'Why not?' said the Duchess. 'But no: it were unkind to ask you. You are in love.'

'I was never in love yet,' said Barganax.

Then all these tales are but false?'

'The Duke,' said Medor, 'has never been out of love: to my certain knowledge, these seven years.'

'What will you say to that?' said the Duchess. 'As captain of your bodyguard, he should know.'

'It is a prime error in these matters,' said Barganax, 'to fall in love. Women are like habits: if good, they stick fast, and that become
s tedious: if bad, and you love
'em, the love will stick like a leech though the woman go. No, I have taken a leaf out of their book: treat 'em as they treat fashions: enjoy for a season, then next season cast about for a new one.'

Amalie fanned herself. 'This is terrible good doctrine. To hear you, one might imagine some old practitioner, bald before his time with o'er-acting of the game, spoke with your lips. If you be not secretly already in love, take care; for I think you are in a dangerous aptness to be so.'

The Duke laughed.
‘I
was never sadly in love but with you, my lady mother': he took her hand in his and kissed it. 'Nor need you to blame me, neither. Surely 'tis the part of a good son to look to's parents for example? and here's example of the highest in the land for me to point to, when I will not overmuch fret myself for aught that's second best' He was leaned back in his chair, legs crossed at full stretch before him, silent now for a minute. His fingers, of the one hand, played absently with the Duchess's, while through half-closed lips his eyes rested on the bright maze of the dance and night's blue curtain beyond. 'And, for your old masters of the game, madam: no. I am too hard to please. I am a painter. But pity of it is, nothing lasts. All passes away, or changes.'

'Your grace,' said Medor, 'is a painter. Well,
a
picture painted will not change.'

'Give it time, dear Medor, it will rot. And long ere that, you shall find the painter has changed. That, I suppose, is why pictures are so good, soon as painted.'

'And no good, certainly, before they are painted,' said the Duchess. 'For is it not but in the painting that
a
picture takes being?'

'That is certain.'

Medor said, 'I have long begun to think, my lord D
uke, that you are an atheist' ‘B
y no means.'

'You blaspheme, at least,' said Amalie, 'violet-crowned Kythereia, the
blessed Goddess and Queen of All
'

'God forbid! Only I will not flatter Her, mistake Her drifts. She changes, like the sea. She is not to be caught. We needs must believe Her fixed and eternal, for how should perfection suffer change? Yet, to mock us, She ever changes. All men in love, She mocks; and were I in love (which thanks to Her, I am not, nor will not be), I know it in my bones, She should mock me past bearing. Why, the very frame and condition of our loving, here upon earth, what is it but an instrument of Hers to mock us?'

'Is this the profundities your learned tutor taught you, the old grey-beard doctor?'

'No, madam. In this, myself taught myself.' Medor smiled:

Tho' wisdom
oft
hath sought me,

I scorn'd the lore she brought me,

My
only books

Were women's looks,

And folly's all they taught me.

'Well, Medor? And what of your young lady of the north, Prince Ercles' daughter, you told me of? What has she taught you?'

Medor answered soberly: 'To keep her out of such discussions.'

'Forgive me,' said the Duke. 'I know not what pert and pricking spirit leadeth me by the sleeve to-night.' He leaned forward to pluck a pallid bloom of the orchid. 'Flowers,' he said, slowly examining the elegant wings and falls, domed and spreading sleeknesses: raising it to his nostrils to take the perfume. 'As if it had lips,' he said, considering it again. He dropped it: stood up now, leaning lightly against one of those silvery-sparkled pillars, the easier to overlook the company.

'You have out-Memisoned Memison to-night, madam,' he said presently. 'And the half of them I ne'er saw till now. Tell me, who is she in the black gown, sequins of silver, dancing with that fox Zapheles?'

The Duchess answered, 'That is Ninetta, Ibian's younger daughter, newly come to court. I had thought you had known her.'

'Not I,' said the Duke. 'Look, Melates: for dancing: as if all from the hips downward she had never a joint, but all supple and sinuous as a mermaid. I said I will not dance to-night; but, by heavens,' he said,
‘I
am in two minds, whether not to try, in this next dance following, which will she the rather, me or Zapheles. But that were 'gainst present policy. I am taming that dog-fox now by kindness: to do
him
that annoyance now were the next way to spoil all.'

‘
Well, there is Pantasilea,
’
said the Duchess, as there now passed by in the dance a languorous sleepy beauty, heavy eyelids and mouth like a heavy crimson rose:
‘
a friend of yours.'

But the Duke's gaze (which, never so idle-seeming, not the littlest thing escaped) noted how, upon that word, Melates reddened and bit his lip.

‘
I retired long since,' said the Duke, 'in favour of a friend. Now there,' he said, after a little, 'is a lady, I should guess, madam, of your own choosing. There: with hair coloured like pale moonshine, done in plaits crown-wise round her head: one that I could paint in a green dress for Queen of Elfland. Is she maid or wife?'