A Fish Dinner in Memison - Zimiamvian Trilogy 02 (23 page)

But the Duke, little regarding these marvels, regarded but his Fiorinda, standing there so close, into his hand, beautiful as golden flowers. So regarding her, surely his living self was drunk down as into the heat of a pool, deep, black-watered, full of sliding lotus-limbs: of the lotus, which yet floats so virginal-cool on the surface of the surface of the water.

As the turning of the starred sphere of night, that lady turned her head where it lay back now on his shoulder, till his eyes, close-ranged in a nearness of focus that shut out all else, rested upon her green eyes, clear-lidded, stilled, seen a little sideways: upon her nostril, which had transiently now in its cool contours as aspect most arresting, most melting, of undefended innocence: upon her cheek, firm, smooth, delicate-bloomed: last, upon her lips. It was as if, in this slowing of Time upon contemplation, Fiorinda's lips put off all particular characters which in daylight life belonged to them, as to instruments of speech, vehicles of thought, of wit, and of all self-pleasuring fierce subtle colours and musics of their mistress's mind; until, disclothed of all these, the perils and loveliness of her mouth lay naked: a vision not long tolerable in its climacteric. The tickle of her hair against his eyelids stirred his blood t
o ichor. Her hand, in an unbodi
liness fluttering upon his, shepherded it down by small and small till it paused at the tie of her girdle. 'Kiss me again,' she said: 'kiss the strength out of me.' And then, the voice of her speech becoming as the fanning of a moth's wings, felt sooner than heard: 'Unknit me this knot.'

Silence swirled to down-sucking sea-floods of its own extreme, itself into itself. And Barganax, flesh and spirit as by anvil and fire-broil forged to one, beheld how She, tempering first to the capacity of mortal senses the acme and heat of the empyreal light, let slide down rustling to Her ankles Her red corn-rose dress and in the mereness of Her beauty, that wastes not neither waxeth sere, stood naked before him.

At that striking of the hour, Time, with its three-fold frustration of Past which is dead, of Future which is unborn, and of Present which before it can be seized or named is Past, was fallen away. Not as for sleepers, to leave a void: rather, perhaps, as for God and Goddess, to uncover that incandescent reality in which true things consist and have their everlastingness: a kind of flowering in which the bud is neither altered nor gone but endures yet more burningly in the full-blown rose: a kind of action which still sweeping on to new perfections retains yet the prior perfection perfect: an ecstasy that is yet stable in itself: a desire that lives on as form in the material concrete of its fulfilment And while each succeeding moment, now as honey-fall, now thunder-shot, folded in under the hover of its wings the orb of the earth, it was as if She said:

I
am laid for you like starlight.

As white mists

Dispart at morning with touch of the sun,

Look, I wait you:

Look, I am yours:

Secrets before unpublisht.

A God could take no more.

I am a still water:

Come down to me.

I am falling lights that glitter. I am these darknesses

Panther-black,

That scorch and unsight

At the flame of their unspher’
d pride.

Make sure of me how you will.

Take me in possession.

First, kiss me, so.

Parting my sea-waved sea-strange sweet-smelling hair

So, left and right.

Iam utterly yielded, untiger’
d, unqueen'd:

Have I not made me

Softer and tenderer for you than turtle's breast?

Ah, tender well my tenderness:

Life in me

Is a wing'd thing more aery than flies hemerae:

This beauty of me

More fickle and unsure

Than the rainbow'd film of a bubble, hither and gone,

On some tall cataracts lip.

Yet, O God!

Were you God indeed,

Yet, of my unstrength,

Under you, under your lips, under your mastery,

I am Mistress of you and Queen:

I hold you, my king and lord,

The render'd soul of you bar'd in my hand

To spare or kill.

God were ungodded,

The world unworlded,

Were there no Me.

Into the other and may be less perdurable Lotus Room, the night after that race home from Austria, dawn was already now beginning to creep between the curtains of the high eastern window, and the note of a blackbird in Lessingham's garden boded day. Downstairs in the Armoury the great Italian clock struck four. And Mary, between sleeping and waking turning again to him, heard between sleep and waking his voice at her ear:

O lente, lente, currite noctis equi!

O run slow, run slow, chariot-horses of Night!

xii

Salute to Morn
ing

A
nthea
in the mean time, left to follow her devices in that western gallery at Reisma, took her true shape, sat daintily down in her mistress's chair, and began to make her supper of the leavings. Leisurely, delicately, she ate, but playing with the food betweenwhiles after a fashion of her own: now pouring the wine from glass to glass and balancing the glasses perilously one upon another. Ossa upon Olympus, and upon Ossa, Pelion; now chasing a flaun hither and thither over the polished table with her finger; again, tearing a quail to pieces and arranging the pieces in little patterns, then a sudden sweeping of them all together again in a heap and begin a new figure. So, with complete contentment, for hours. At length, while she was trying her skill at picking out with her teeth special morsels from the nicely ordered mess she had made, as children play at bob-cherry, her disports were interrupted by the entrance of Doctor Vandermast.

Like a silver birch-tree of the mountains in her kirtle of white satin overlaid with network of black silk, she rose to greet him as with staid philosophic tread he came the length of the long gallery and so to the table. He kissed her brow, white as her own snows of Ramosh Arkab. 'Well, my oread?' he said, touching, as a lapidary might the facets of a noble jewel, with fingers more gentle than a woman's the aureate splendours of her hair which she wore loosely knotted up and tied with a hair-band of yellow topazes. A little
shamefaced now she saw his gaze
come to rest on the results of her table-work, but, at the twinkle in his eye when he looked from that to her, she sprang laughing to him, hugged him about the neck and kissed him.

'Have you supped, reverend sir?'

Vandermast shook his head. 'It is nearer breakfast-time than supper-time. Where is her ladyship?'

'Where the Duke would have her. In the chamber you made for them.'

'It were best seal the doors,' said Vandermast; and immediately by his art both those doors, the left-hand and the right, were changed to their former state, parts of the panelling of the inner wall. He stood silent a minute, his hawk-nosed face
lean in the candlelight 'It is
a place of delights,' he said.
'Ex necessitate divinae naturae infinita infinitis modis sequi debent:
out of the necessity of the Divine nature, Her infinite variety. And now he, to the repossession of his kingdom. But let him remember, too, that She is fickle and cannot be holden against Her will.' He stood at the window. "The moon is set two hours since,' he said. 'The night grows to waste.'

'My lady sent away her servants. Paid 'em all off, every Jack and Jill of'em.'

'Yes, she intends, I think, for Memison,' said the doctor. 'And the Lord Morville, ridden with the cavalcade to Rumala.'

Anthea bared her teeth. 'Pray Gods he break his neck. There's a lust upon me for a taste of horaified cattle-flesh, after supping on these kickshaws. O I could handle him with rough mittens: leave but guts and sinews for the kites. Can you think of him and not be angry as I am?'

'Yes. For God, according to His impenetrable counsel, hath made it a virtue in you to be angry; but making of me, He cooled that humour with a cooler thing more meet for it in me: I mean with the clear milk of reason which in a philosopher should ever overmaster passion. The unmistrusting man, thinking no evil, a man of common
earth and clay, endued with a soul not yet unmortal, how should he wed with a great comet or blazing star, or breathe in Her heights? Doubt not that, from the beginning, he, in the opinion of his own insufficiency, poisoned the very sap should have nourished him at root, and so was become, long ere the Duke took a hand in it, but the simulacrum of a live tree, all dead touchwood or tinder within. And blasted now, under Her devilish effects, with the thunderstroke of his own jealousy.' 'Why should such dirt live?'

"The egg’ answered Doctor Vandermast, 'is a chicken
in potential

'But this was addled ere it was hatched.'

The learned doctor was sat down now in Barganax's chair. Anthea came and sat sweetly on an arm of it, swinging one foot, her elbow propped on his shoulder, smiling down at him while with immemorial ancient gaze he rested in her cold classic beauty, so strangely sorted with lynx's eyes and lynx's teeth. 'And my Campaspe?' he said, after a little.

'She is yonder in the leas. Some of her rattishnesses to-night, I think. Your eyes grow heavy, reverend master. Why will you sit so late?'

'Ah,' said he, 'in this house now-a-days I need not overmuch repose:

Here ripes the rare cheer-cheek Myrobalan,

Mind-gladding fruit, that can unold a man.

And to-night, of all nights, I must not be to seek if her ladyship haply have need of me, or if he do. What of you, dear snow-maiden?'

'O it is only if I swaddle me in my humanity too thick that I grow sleepy,' said she. 'Besides, my lady bade me watch to-night. How were it if we played primero?'

'Well and excellent,' said the doctor. 'Where are the cards?'

'In the chest yonder.' She fetched them, sat down,
and with two sweeps of her hand cleared the remains of supper off the table and onto the floor. 'The bull-fly can p
ick it up for himself to-morrow’
she said. 'We shall be gone.'

They had scarce got the cards dealt when Morville came into the gallery.

‘
How, how, who is here?' he said. 'You, old sir?
’

The doctor, keeping his seat, looked up at him: saw his face pale as any lead. 'My lord,' he said, 'I came upon urgent summons from her ladyship.'

'What, in this time of night?'

‘
No. 'Twas about noon-time. She bade me stay.'

‘
Ha! Did she so? For my own part, I had rather have your room as your company. To speak flatly, I have long doubted whether you wore not your woolly garment upon your wolvy back. And you, madam kiss-i'-the-dark—

From women light and lickerous

Good fortune still deliver us—

Why are you not in bed?'

Anthea made no reply: only looked at him, licking her lips.

‘
You admire the unexpectedness of my return?' said Morville. 'Let the cat wink
’
and let the mouse run. It is very much if I may not for one short while turn my back, but coming home find all at large and unshut platters, dishes, and other small trashery flung so, o' the floor, with evident signs of surfeit and riot. Must I keep open household, think you, for the disordered resort and haunting of you and your kind? Where's my lady?'

Anthea gave him a bold look. 'She is in bed.'

‘
You lie, mistress. Her bed is empty. You,' he said to the aged doctor,
‘
who are in her counsels and, I am let to understand, learned in arts and studies it small befits an honest man to meddle withal, where is she?'

'My Lord Morville,' replied Vandermast, 'it is altogether a cross matter and in itself disagreeing, that you should expect from me an answer to such a question.' 'Say you so? I expect
an answer, and by God I'll have
it.'

'Where my lady is,' said Vandermast, 'is her affair. I mean you well, my lord, and where in honour I can serve you, serve you I will. But when her ladyship is concerned (even and I knew the answer) it would not be for my honesty to give it even to yourself without I first asked leave of her.'

Morville came a step nearer to him: stood leaning on the table upon his clenched fists that held his riding-whip: clenched till the knuckles showed white as marble.
‘
You are in a league against me, then? Have a care. I have means to make you tell me. I have a right, too, to know where she is.'

Vandermast said,
‘
You are master of this house. It is in your lordship's right to search and find what you may find.'

‘
I have searched every back-nook already. She is fled. Is it not so?'

Vandermast answered never a word. His eyes, holding Morville's, were as pits umplumbed.

'She is fled with the Duke,' said Morville, thrusting his face into his. 'Confess 'tis so. You are his secretary. Confess, and may be
‘I’ll
spare your life.'

Vandermast said, 'I am an old man. I am not afraid to die. But were it to forfeit my honour, I'd be sore afraid to die after that.'

There was dead silence. Then Morville with a sudden unpremeditated motion swung on his heel and so to the window: stood there with his back to them, elbow crooked upon the window-sill, his forehead pressed into the crook of the arm, while his other hand beat an out-of-joint shapeless tune with his riding-whip against his riding-boot. 'O God!' he said s
uddenly, "aloud, and seemed to c
hoke upon the word:
‘
why came I not home sooner?' He bit the sleeve of his coat, rolling his head this way and that upon the window-ledge, still beating out the hell-march on his boot-leg, and now with an ugly blubbering sound of unremediable weeping between the bites. Doctor Vandermast, risen from his chair, began to pace with noiseless tread back and forth beside the table. He looked at Anthea. The yellow fires came and went in her strange inhuman eyes.

The Lord Morville, as with sinews righted after that wrestling, stood up now and came to them: sat down in Vandermast's chair. 'I
’
ll put all my cards on the table,' he said, looking at the doctor who, upon the word, staid his haunting walk and came to him. "There was, and ill it was there was, some semblance of falling out betwixt us this morning, and I spoke a word at her I'm sorry for: hath sticked like a fish-bone across my throat ever since. When it began to be evening, I could not face the night and us not good friends again. Devised some excuse, got leave from my lord Admiral (would to heaven it had been earlier): galloped home. And now,' he said, and his teeth clicked together: 'all's lost.'

‘
Nay, this is over g
eneral,' said the doctor. It re
maineth with your lordship to save what can yet be saved.'

Morville shook his head. 'I know not what to do. Instruct me.'

'My lord,' said that old man,
‘
you have not told me the truth.'

'I have told you enough.'

'I can be of little avail to your lordship if you give me unsufficient premises to reason from. But worse than tell it not to me, I fear you tell it not truly to yourself

Morville was silent.

Tall how it may,' said the doctor, 'it is hard to know how I may much avail you. Only this I most dutifully urge upon your lordship: wait. A true saying it is, that that is not to be held for counsel that is taken after supper.
’

Morville said, 'I am scalding in a lake of brimstone, and you stand on the edge and bid me wait'

‘
With all my heart and for all sakes sake, yes, I bid you wait. If you fling into action now, in this uncertainty and your blood yet baked with angry passions, there's no help but 'twill be violent action and too little advised. Be you remembered, my lord, 'tis no littler thing than your whole life hangs on it; nay, for beyond the hour-glass of one man's life, your very soul, for being or for not being, is in the balance, and not for this bout only but
in saecula saeculorum.
And that is a matter of far greater moment to you than whether you shall have her or no, whom when you have had you have approved yourself not able nor not worthy of such a mistress: cursed indeed with a destiny too high for you.'

Morville sat still as death and with downcast look while Vandermast said these things: then jumped up like a raging wild tiger. 'Would to God, then, I'd let her life out!' he said in an ear-deafening voice. 'Do you take me for more than a beast that you dare to speak such words to me? Am I lustless, sexless, tireless, mute? It hath laid up revenue this m
onth past, and I’ll
now take my interest.
- She is with her vile leman even now. I know not where; but, if in the bed of Hell, I'll seek 'em out, hew the pair of 'em into collops. For fair beginning, I'll burn this house: a place where no filthy exercise has been left unexercised. Out of my way, bawd.'

He thrust Vandermast aside, so that the old man was like to have fallen. Anthea said in a low voice like the crackling of ice, 'You struck her. You beetle with horns, you struck her, and spat your filth at her.'

'Mew your tongue, mistress, or we'll cut it out. Void the house. You have no business here.'

'I've a good pair of nails to cratch and claw with.'

'Out, both of you, unless you mean to be whipped.'

Anthea rose in her chair. 'Shall I unpaunch him, reverend sir?'

'O be still, I charge you, be still,' said the doctor.
‘
We will g
o,' he said to Morville, and in the same nick of time Morville struck Anthea with his riding-whip across the smooth of her neck. Like the opening of the clouds with the levin-flash she leapt into her lynx
-shape and upon him: threw him f
lat under her.