vii
A Night-Piece on Ambremerine
zayana lake at evening campaspe: commerce with a water nymph moonrise queen of night the philosopher speaks song of the faun our lady of blindness anthea: commerce with an oread the nature of dryads, naiads, and oreads the dead shadow divine philosophy counsel of vandermast.
Peace seemed to have laid her lily over all the earth when, that evening, eight gondolas that carried the Duke and his company put out from, the water-gate under the western tower and steered into the sunset. In the open water they spread into line abreast, making a shallow crescent, horns in advance, and so passed on their way, spacing themselves by intervals of some fifty paces to be within hail but not to the overhearing of talk within the gondolas. Three or four hundred paces ahead of them went a little caravel, bearing aboard of her the Duke's bodyguard and the last and most delicate wines and meats. Her sweeps were out, for in that windless air her russet-coloured silken sails flapped the masts. From her poop floated over the water the music of old love-ditties, waked in the throb of silver lute-strings, the wail of hautboys, and the flattering soft singing of viols.
North and north-eastward, fainter and fainter in the distance, the foot-hills took on purple hues, like the bloom on grapes. High beyond the furthest hills, lit with a rosy light, the great mountains reared themselves that shut in the habited lands on the northward: outlying sentinels of the Hyperborean snows. So high they stood, that it might have been clouds in the upper air; save that they swam not as clouds, but persisted, and that their architecture was not cloud-like, but steadfast, as of buildings of the ancient earth, wide founded, bastion upon huger bastion, buttress soaring to battlement, wall standing back upon wall, roofridge and gable and turret and airy spire; and yet all as if of no gross substance,- but rather the thin spirit of these, and their grandeur not the grandeur of clouds that pass, but of frozen and unalterable repose, as of Gods reclining on heaven's brink. Astern, Acrozayana faced the warm light. On the starboard quarter, half a mile to the north, on a beach at the end of the low wooded promontory that stretches far out into the lake there towards Zayana town, two women were bathing. The sunset out of that serene and cloudless sky suffused their limbs and bodies, their reflections in the water, the woods behind them, with a glory that made them seem no women of mortal kind, but dryads or oreads of the hills come down to show their beauties to the opening eyes of night and, with the calm lake for their mirror, braid their hair.
In the outermost gondola on the northern horn was Lessingham, his soul and senses lapped in a lotus-like contentment. For beside him reclined Madam Campaspe, a young lady in whose sprightly discourse he savoured, and in the sleepy little noises of the water under the prow, a delectable present that wandered towards a yet more delectable to come.
'The seven seas,' he said, answering her: 'ever since I was fifteen years old.'
'And you are now—fifty?'
'Six times that,' answered Lessingham gravely; 'reckoned in months.'
'With me,' she said, 'reckonings go always askew.' 'Let's give over reckonings, then,' said he, 'and do it by example. I am credibly informed that I am pat of an age with your Duke.'
'O, so old indeed? Twenty-five? No marvel you are so staid and serious.'
'And you, madam?' said Lessingham. 'How far in the decline?'
'Nay, 'tis me to ask questions,' said she: 'you to answer.'
Idly Lessingham was looking at her hand which rested on the cushion beside him, gloved with a black scented gauntlet with falling cuff of open-work and flower-work of yellow zircons. ‘I am all expectation,' he said.
Campaspe stole a glance at him. Her eyes were beady, like some shy creature's of the fields or woods. Her features, considered coldly one by one, had recalled strange deformities as of frogs or spiders; yet were they by those eyes welded to a kind of beauty. So might a queen of Elfland look, of an unfair, unhuman, yet most taking comeliness. 'Well,' said she: 'how many straws go to goose-nest?'
'None, for lack of feet.'
'O, unkind! You knew it afore. That cometh of this so much faring 'twixt land and land: maketh men too knowing.' After a little, she said, 'Tell me, is it not better here than in your northlands?'
' 'Tis at least much hotter,' said Lessingham.
'And which liketh you better, my lord, hot or cold?'
'Must I answer of airs, or of ladies' hearts?'
'You must keep order: answer of that you spoke on.'
'Nay,' said Lessingham, ' 'tis holiday. Let me be impertinent, and answer of that I set most store by.'
'Then, to be courtly, you must say cold is best,' said she. 'For our fashion here is cold hearts, as the easier changed.'
'Ah,' he said: ‘I see there is something, madam, you are yet to learn.'
'How, my lord? i' the fashion?'
'O no. Because I am a soldier, yet have I not such nummed and so clumsy hands for't as tell a lady she's out of fashion. I meant 'tis warm hearts, not cold, are most apt to change: fire at each fresh kindling.'
'Here's fine doctrine,' said she. 'Do you rest it, pray, upon experience?'
He smiled. ' 'Tis a first point of wisdom', he replied, 'to affirm nought upon hearsay.'
Campaspe sat suddenly forward, with a little murmur of pleasure: 'O, my friend!' addressed, as Lessingham perceived, not to him but to a lady-duck with her seven young swimming close by in column ahead. For a fleeting instant, as she leaned eagerly across to watch them, her hand, put out to steady her, touched Lessingham's knee: a touch that, sylph-like and immaterial as a dream, sent a thousand serpents through his veins. The duck and her children took fright at the gondola, and, with a scutter of feet and wings, left a little wake of troubled water which showed the better, as a foil sets off a diamond, the placid smoothness of that lake.
'And how many foolish ladies ere now', said Campaspe, very demurely, 'have you found to give open ear to these schoolings?'
'There, madam,' said he, 'you put me to a stand. They come and go, I suppose, with the changing of the moon.'
'I was a fine fool', said she, 'to come into this boat with you, my lord.'
Lessingham smiled. ‘I think', he said, ‘I know an argument, when we come to it, shall satisfy you to the contrary.' His eyes, half veiled under their long lashes, surveyed her now with a slow and disturbing gaze. It was as if the spirit that sat in them tasted, in a profound luxurious apprehension beyond the magic of mortal vintages, the wine of its own power: tasted it doubly, in her veins as in his own, attuning blood to blood. Then, turning his gaze from her to the back of his own hand, he looked at that awhile in silence as if there were there some comic engaging matter. 'Howe'er that be,' he said lightly at last, 'you must remember, 'tis the same moon. That were a quaint folly, for love of last month's moon at the full, to have done with moonlight for ever.'
'O, you can a game beside tennis, my lord, there's n'er a doubt,' she said.
'I have beat the Duke ere now at tennis,' said Lessingham.
'That is hard,' said she. 'But 'tis harder to beat him at this.'
* 'Tis but another prime article of wisdom,' said Lessingham, 'ne'er to let past memories blunt the fine point of present pleasures. I am skilled', he said, 'to read a lady's heart from her hand. Let me try.' Campaspe, laughing, struggled against him as he would have drawn off her glove. 'Moist palms argue warm hearts,' he said in her ear. 'Is that why you wear gloves, madam?'
'Nay, but I will not. Fie, shall the gondolier see us?*
‘I am discretion itself,' said Lessingham.
'You must learn, my lord,' she said, putting away his hands, 'if you would have me to spread your table, to fall to it nicely, not swallow it like flapdragons.'
Lessingham said, close at her ear, 'I'll be your scholar. Only but promise.'
But Campaspe said, 'No promises in Zayana: the Duke hath banned them. As for performance, why, respectful service, my lord, hath its payment here as in other lands.'
Her voice had taken on a new delicacy: the voice of willow-trees beside still water when the falling wind stirs them. The great flattened ball of the sun touched the western hills. Lessingham took her under the chin with his hand and turned her face towards his. 'I like little water-rats,' he said. Her eyes grew big and frightened, like some little fieldish thing's that sees a hawk. For a minute she abode motionless. Then, as if with a sudden resolution, she pulled off her glove: offered her bare hand, palm upwards, to his lips. The gondola lurched sideways. The lady laughed, half smothered: 'Nay, no more, my lord. Nay, and you will not have patience, you shall have nought, then.'
'Jenny wrens: water-rats^ willow-leaves sharp against the moon like little feet. Why is your laugh like a night breeze among willows? Do I not descry you? behind your mask of lady of presence: you and your "friend." Are you not these? Tell me: are you not?'
Each soft stroke of the gondolier's paddle at the stern came like one more drop in the cup of enchantment, which still brimmed and still did not run over. Tt is not time, my lord. O yes, these, and other besides. But see, we shall land upon the instant. I pray you, have patience. In this isle of Ambremerine is bosky glades removed, flowery headlands; in two hours the moon will ride high; and she, you know—'
'And she', said Lessingham, 'is an ancient sweet suggester of ingenious pleasures.' He kissed the hand again. 'Let us turn the cat in the pan: say, If I have patience I shall have all, then?'
In Campaspe's beady eyes he read his passport.
Their landing was near about the south-east point of that isle, in a little natural harbour, half-moon shaped and with a beach of fine while sand. The sun had gone down, and dusk gathered on the lake; eastward, pale blue smoke hung here and there over Zayana and the citadel; the walls and the roofs and towers were grown shadowy and dim; their lamps came out like stars. In the north, the great peaks still held some light. A wide glade went up into the isle from that harbour in gently sloping lawns, shut in on all but the water side by groves of cypress-trees: pillar-like boles and dense spires so tangled, drenched, and impregnate with thick darkness that not mid-day itself might pierce nor black night deepen their elemental gloom. In the midst of that glade, on a level lawn where in their thousands daisies and little yellow cinquefoils were but now newly folded up and gone to sleep, tables were set for the feast. The main table faced south to the harbour, where the gondolas and the caravel, with their lofty stems and stern-posts and their lights, some red some green, floated graceful over their graceful images in the water. Two shorter tables ran down from that table's either end: the one faced Zayana and the night, and the other westward to the leavings of the sunset, above which the evening star, high in a pellucid heaven of pale chrysolite, burned like a diamond from Aphrodite's neck.
The tables were spread with damask, and set forth with a fish dinner: oysters and lobsters, crayfish both great and small, trout, tunny, salmon, sturgeon, lampreys and caviare, all in fair golden dishes, with mushrooms besides and sparrow-grass, cockscombs and truffles, and store of all manner of delicious fruits, and wines of all kind in great bowls and beakers of crystal and silver and gold: dry and ancient wines golden and tawny, good to sharpen the stomach and to whet the edge of wit; and red wines the heavy sweetness whereof, full of the colour of old sunsets and clinging to the goblet like blood, is able to mellow thought and steady the senses to a quiet where the inner voices may be heard; and wines the foam whereof whispers of that eternal sea and of that eternal spring-time towards which all memories return and all hearts' desires for ever. Fifty little boys, yellow-haired, clothed all in green, planted and tended torches behind the tables to give light to the feasters. Steady was the burning of those torches in the still summer air, with ever a little movement of their light, like the fall and swell of a girl's bosom; and the scent of their burning mingled in wafts with the flower scents and wood scents and the dew-laden breath of evening.
So now they made merry and supped under the sky. Scarcely was the sunset's last ember burned out westward, and night scarce well awake in the eastern heavens behind Zayana town, when from that quarter a bower of light began to spread upward, into which stepped at length, like a queen to lead night's pageant, the lady moon, and trailed her golden train across those sleeping waters. At that, their talk was stilled for a minute. Barganax, sitting in the midst of the cross table with Lessingham on his right, looked at Fiorinda, beside him on his left, as she looked at the moon. 'Your looking-glass,' he said, under his breath. Her face altered and she smiled, saying, with a lazy shrug of the shoulders, 'One of!'
'My Lord Lessingham,' said Campaspe: 'imagine me potent in art magic, able to give you the thing you would. Whether would you then choose pleasure or power?'
'That question,' answered he, 'in such company and on such a night, and most of all by moonrise, I can but answer in the words of the poet:
My pleasure is my power to please my mistress: My power is my pleasure in that power.'
'A roundabout answer,' said the Duke: 'full of wiles and guiles. Mistrust it, madam.'
'Can your grace better it then?' said Campaspe. 'Most easily. And in one word: pleasure.' Fiorinda smiled.
'Your ladyship will second me,' said the Duke. 'What's power but for the procuring of wise, powerful and glorious pleasures? What else availeth my dukedom? 'Las, I should make very light account thereof, as being a thing of very small and base value, save that it is a mean unto that rich and sunny diamond that outlustreth all else.'
'Philosophic disputations', said Fiorinda, 'do still use to awake strange longings in me.'
'Longings?' said the Duke. 'You are mistress of our revels to-night. Breathe but the whisper of a half-shapen wish; lightning shall be slow to our suddenness to perform it.'
'For the present need,' said that lady, 'a little fruit would serve.'
'Framboises?' said the Duke, offering them in a golden dish.
'No,' she said, looking upon them daintily: 'they have too many twiddles in them: like my Lord Lessingham's distich.'
'Will your ladyship eat a peach?' said Melates.
‘I could,' she said. 'And yet, no. Clingstone, 'tis too great trouble: freestone, I like them not. Your grace shall give me a summer poppering.'
The Duke sent his boy to fetch them from the end of the table. 'You shall peel it for me,' she said, choosing one.
Barganax, as drunk with some sudden exhalation of her beauty, the lazy voice, the lovely pausing betwixt torchlight and moonlight of fastidious jewelled fingers above the dish of pears, was taken with a trembling that shook the dish in his hand. Mastering which, ‘I had forgot', he said with a grave courtesy, 'that you do favour this beyond all fruits else.'
'Forgot? Is it then so long ago your grace and I reviewed these matters? And indeed I had little fault to find with your partialities, nor you I think with mine.'
Lessingham, looking on at this little by-play, tasted in it a fine and curious delight; such delight as, more imponderable than the dew-sparkles on grass about sunrise or the wayward airs that lift the gossamer-spiders' threads, dances with fairy feet, beauty fitted to beauty, allegretto scherzando, in some great master's music. Only for the whim to set such divisions a-trip again, he spoke and said: 'If your ladyship will judge between us, I shall justify myself against the Duke that, would pleasure's self have had me, I should a refused to wed her. For there be pleasures base, illiberal, nasty, and merely hoggish. How then shall you choose pleasure per se?’
*By the same argument, how power per se?' replied the Duke. 'What of the gardener's dog, that could not eat the cabbages in the garden and would suffer none else to do so? Call you that power good? I think I have there strook you into the hazard, my lord. Or at least, 'tis change sides and play for the chase.'
'The chase is mine, then,' said Lessingham. 'For if power be but sometimes good, even so is pleasure. It must be noble pleasure, and the noblest pleasure is power.'
Fiorinda daintily bit a piece out of her pear. 'Pray you honour us, madam, to be our umpire,' said Lessingham.
She smiled, saying, 'It is not my way to sit in judgement. Only to listen.'
Barganax said, 'But will you listen to folly?'
'O yes,' answered she. "There was often more good matter in one grain of folly than in a peck of wisdom.'
'Ha! that hath touched you, Vandermast,' said the Duke.
That aged man, sitting at the outer end of the eastern table betwixt Anthea and the young Countess Rosalura, laughed in his beard. The Lady Fiorinda lifted her eyebrows with a questioning look first upon him, then upon the Duke, then upon Lessingham. 'Is he wise?' she said. 'I had thought he was a philosopher. Truly, I could listen to him a whole summer's night and ne'er tire of his preposterous nonsense.'
'An old fool,' said Vandermast, 'that is yet wise enough to serve your ladyship.'
'Does that need wisdom?' she said, and looked at the moon. Lessingham, watching her face, thought of that deadly Scythian queen who gave Cyrus his last deep drink of blood. Yet, even so thinking, he was the more deeply aware, in the caressing charm of her voice, of a mind that savoured the world delicately and simply, with a quaint, amused humour; so might some demure and graceful bird gracefully explore this way and that, accepting or rejecting with an equable enjoyment. 'Does that need wisdom?' she said again. And now it was as if from that lady's lips some unheard song, some unseen beauty, had stolen abroad and, taking to itself wings, mounted far from earth, far above the columnar shapes of those cypresses that, huge and erect, stood round that dim garden; until the vast canopy of night was all filled as with an impending flowering of unimagined wonder.
'There is no other wisdom than that: not in heaven or earth or under the earth, in the world phenomenal or the world noumenal, sub specie temporali or sub specie osternitatis. There is no other,' said Vandermast, in a voice so low that none well heard him, save only the Countess close by on his right. And she, hearing, yet not understanding, yet apprehending in her very bowels the tenour of his words, as a reed bending before the wind might apprehend dimly somewhat of what betided in the wind-ridden spaces without to bend and to compel it, sought Medor's hand and held it fast.
There was silence. Then Medor said, 'What of love?*
Vandermast said, as to himself, but the Countess Rosalura heard it: 'There is no other power.'
'Love', said Lessingham, cool and at ease again after the passing of that sudden light, 'shall aptly point my argument. Here, as otherwhere, power ruleth. For what is a lover without power to win his mistress? or she without power to hold her lover?' His hand, as he spoke, tightened unseen about Campaspe's yielding waist. His eyes, carelessly roving, as he spoke, from face to face of that company, came to a stop, meeting Anthea's where she sat beside the learned doctor. The tawny wealth of her deep hair was to the cold beauty of her face as a double curtain of fulvid glory. Her eyes caught and held his gaze with a fascination, hard, bold, and inscrutable.
'I have been told that Love', said Fiorinda, 'is a more intricate game than tennis; or than soldiership; or than politicians' games, my Lord Lessingham.'
Anthea, with a little laugh, bared her lynx-like teeth. *I was remembered of a saying of your ladyship's,' she said.
Fiorinda lifted an eyebrow, gently pushing her wine-cup towards the Duke for him to fill it.
'That a lover who should think to win his mistress by power5, said Anthea, 'is like an old dried-up dotard who would be young again by false hair, false teeth, and skilful painting of his face: thus, and with a good stoup of wine, but one thing he lacketh, and that the one thing needful.'
'Did I say so indeed?' said Fiorinda. 'I had forgot it In truth, this is strange talk, of power and pleasure in love,' she said. 'There is a garden, there is a tree in the garden, there is a rose upon the tree. Can a woman not keep her lover without she study always to please him with pleasure? Pew! then let her give up the game. Or shall my lover think with pleasing of me to win me indeed? Faugh! he payeth me then; doth he think I am for hire?'
Barganax sitting beside her, not looking at her, his shoulder towards her, his elbow on the table, his fingers in an arrested stillness touching his mustachios, gazed still before him as though all his senses listened to the last scarce-heard cadence of the music of that lady's voice.
Fiorinda, in that pause, looked across to Doctor Vandermast. Obedient to her look, he stood up now and raised a hand twice and thrice above his head as in sign to somewhat to come out of the shadows that stirred beyond the torchlight. The moon rode high now over Zayana, and out of torchbeam and moonbeam and star-beam was a veil woven that confounded earth and sky and water into an immateriality of uncertain shade and misty light. At Vandermast's so standing up, the very night seemed Jo slip down into some deeper pool of stillness, like the silent slipping of an otter down from the bank into the black waters. Only the purr of a nightjar came from the edge of the woods. And now on the sudden they at the tables were ware of somewhat quick, that stood in the confines of the torchlight and the shadowy region without; of man-like form, but little of stature, scarce reaching with its head to the elbow of a grown man; with shaggy hairy legs and goat's feet, and with a sprouting of horns like a young goat's upon its head; and there was in its eyes the appearance as of red coals burning. Piercing were the glances of those eyes, as they darted in swift succession from face to face (save that before Fiorinda's it dropped its gaze as if in worship), and piercing was the music of the song it sang: the song that lovers and great poets have ravished their hearts to hear since the world began: a night-song, bittersweet, that shakes the heart of darkness with longings and questionings too tumultuous for speech to fit or follow; and in that song the listener hears echoing up the abysses of eternity voices of men and women unborn answering the voices of the dead.
Surely, hearkening to that singing, all they sat like as amazed or startled out of sleep. Lover clung to lover: Amaury to velvet-eyed Violante, Myrrha to Zapheles,
Bellafront to Barrian. Lessingham's encircling arm drew closer about his Campaspe: her breast beneath the silk under his hand was a tremulous dove: her black eyes rested as though in soft accustomed contemplation upon the singer. Pantasilea, with heavy lids and heavy curled lips half closed, as in half eclipse of the outward sense, lay back sideways on Melates's shoulder. Medor held gathered to him like a child his sweet young Countess. Beyond them, in the outermost place of the eastern table, Anthea sat upright and listening, her hair touching with some stray tendrils of its glory the sleeve of old Vandermast's gaberdine where he stood motionless beside her.
Only the Lady Fiorinda seemed to listen fancy-free to that singing, even as the cold moon, mistress of the tides, has yet no part in their restless ebb and flow, but, taking her course serene far above the cloudy region of the air, surveys these and all earthly things with equal eye, divine and passionless. The Duke, sitting back, had this while watched her from the side from under his faun-like eyebrows, his hand moving as if with chalk or brush. He leaned nearer now, giving over that painting motion: his right elbow on the table, his left arm resting, but not to touch her, on the back of her chair. The voice of the singer, that was become as the echoes of a distant music borne on the breeze from behind a hill, now made a thin obbligato to the extreme passionate love that spoke in the Duke's accents like the roll of muffled thunder as, low in her ear, he began to say:
O forest of dark beasts about the base
Of some white peak that dreams in the Empyrean:
O hare's child sleeping by a queen's palace,
'Mid lily-meadows of some isle Lethean:
Barbaric, beastly, virginal, divine:
Fierce feral loveliness: sweet secret fire:
Last rest and bourne of every lovely line:
—All these Thou art, that art the World's Desire.
The deep tones of the Duke's voice, so speaking, were hushed to the quivering superficies of silence, beneath which the darkness stirred as with a rushing of arpeggios upon muted strings. In the corner of that lady's mouth, as she listened, the minor diabolus, dainty and seductive, seemed to turn and stretch in its sleep. Lessingham, not minded' to listen, yet heard. Darkly he tasted in his own flesh Barganax's secret mind: in what fashion this Duke lived in that seeming woman's life far sweetlier than in his own. He leaned back to look upon her, over the Duke's shoulder. He saw now that she had glow-worms in her hair. But when he would have beheld her face, it was as if spears of many-coloured light, such light as, like the halo about the moon, is near akin to darkness, swept in an endless shower outward from his vision's centre; and now when he would have looked upon her he saw but these outrushings, and in the fair line of vision not darkness indeed but the void: a solution of continuity: nothing.
As a man that turns from the halcyon vision to safe verities, he turned to his Campaspe. Her lips invited sweetly: he bent to them. With a little ripple of laughter, they eluded him, and under his hand, with soft arched back warm and trembling, was the water-rat in very deed.
About the north-western point of that island there was a garden shadowed with oaks ten generations old and starproof cedars and delicate-limbed close-tufted strawberry-trees. Out of its leafy darknesses nightingale answered nightingale, and nightflowers, sweet-mouthed like brides in their first sleep, mixed their sweetness with the breath of the dews of night. It was now upon the last hour before midnight. From the harbour to the southward rose the long slumbrous notes of a horn, swelling, drawing their heavy sweetness across the face of the night sky. Anthea stood up, slender as a moonbeam in those silent woods. 'The Duke's horn,' she said. 'We must go back; unless you are minded to lodge in this isle tonight, my Lord Lessingham.'
Lessingham stood up and kissed her hand. For a minute she regarded him in silence from under her brow, her eyes burning steadily, her chin drawn down a little: an unsmiling lip-licking look. Then giving him her arm she said, as they turned to be gone, There is discontent in your eyes. You are dreaming on -somewhat without me and beyond.'
'Incomparable lady,' answered he, 'call it a surfeit. If I am discontented, it is with the time, that draweth me from these high pleasures to where, as cinders raked up in ashes,—'
'O no nice excuses,' she said. 'I and Campaspe are not womankind. Truly, 'tis but at Her bidding we durst not disobey we thus have dallied with such as you, my lord.'
His mustachios stirred.
'You think that a lie?' she said. The unfathomed pride of mortals!'
Lessingham said, 'My memories are too fiery clear.'
They walked now under the obscurity of crowding cypresses. 'It is true', said Anthea, 'that you and Barganax are not altogether as the common rout of men. This world is yours, yours and his, did you but know it. And did you know it, such is the folly of mortals, you would straight be out of conceit with it and desire another. But you are well made, not to know these things. See, I tell it you, yet you believe it not. And though I should tell you from now till dawn, yet you would not believe.' She laughed.
'You are pleasantly plain with me,' said Lessingham after a pause. 'You can be fierce. So can I. I do love your fierceness, your bites and scratches, madam. Shall I be plain too?' He looked down; her face, level with his shoulder, wore a singular look of benign tranquillity. 'You,' he said, '(and I must not omit Mistress Campaspe, have let me taste this night such pleasures as the heroes in Elysium, I well think, taste nought sweeter. Yet would I have more; yet, what more, I know not.'
Without looking at him, she made a little mow. 'In your erudite conversation, my lord, I have tasted this night such pleasures as I am by nature accustomed to. I desire no more. I am, even as always I am, contented.'
'As always?' said he.
'Is "always" a squeeze of crab-orange in your cup, my lord? 'Tis wholesome truth, howsoe'er. And now, in our sober voyaging back to Zayana, with the learn'd doctor conducting of us, I do look for no less bliss than—: but this you will think ungracious?'
She looked up, with a little pressure of her arm on his. His eyes, when he turned his face to hers, were blurred and unseeing.
The path came into the open now, as they crossed the low backbone of the island. They walked into a flood of moonlight; on their left, immeasurably far away, the great snow ranges stood like spirits in the moon-drenched air. Anthea said, 'Behold that mountain, my lord, falling away to the west in saw-toothed ridges a handbreadth leftward of the sycamore-tree. That is Ramosh Arkab; and I say to you, I have dwelt there 'twixt wood and snowfield ten million years.'
They were now come down to the harbour. The cypress-shadowed glade lay empty: the tables taken up where their banquet had been: the torches and the feasters gone. Far away on the water the lights of the gondolas showed where they took their course homeward to Zayana. Under an utter silence and loneliness of moonlight the lawns sloped gently to the lake. One gondola only lay by the landing-stage. Beside it waited that aged man. With a grave obeisance he greeted Lessingham; they went aboard all three, loosed, and put out. There was no gondolier. Doctor Vandermast would have taken the paddle, but Lessingham made him sit beside Anthea in the seat of honour, and himself, sitting on the fore-deck with his feet in the boat's bottom, paddled her stern-foremost. So they had passage over those waters that were full of drowned stars and secret unsounded deeps of darkness. Something broke the smoothness on the starboard bow; Lessingham saw, as they neared it, that it was the round head of an otter, swimming towards Ambremerine. It looked at them with its little face and hissed. In a minute it was out of eyeshot astern.
'My beard was black once,' said Vandermast. 'Black as yours, my lord.' Lessingham saw that the face of that old man was blanched in the moonlight, and his eyes hidden as in ocean caves or deep archways of some prison-house, so that only with looking upon him a man might not have known for sure whether there were eyes in truth within those shadows or but void eye-sockets and eclipsing darkness. Anthea sat beside him in a languorous grace. She trailed a finger in the water, making a little rippling noise, pleasant to the ear. Her face, too, was white under the moon, her hair a charmed labyrinth of moonbeams, her eyes pits of fire.
'Dryads', said Vandermast, after a little, 'are in two kinds, whereof the one is more nearly consanguineous with the more madefied and waterish natures, naiads namely and nereids; but the other kind, having their habitation nearer to the meteoric houses and the cold upper borders of woods appropinquate to the snows and the gelid ice-streams of the heights, do derive therefrom some qualities of the oreads or mountain nymphs. I have indulged my self-complacency so far as to entertain hopes, my lord, that, by supplying for your entertainment one of either sort, and discoursing so by turns two musics to your ear, andante piacevole e lussurioso and then allegro appassionato, I may have opened a more easier way to your lordship's perfect satisfaction and profitable enjoyment of this night's revelries.'
That old man's talk, droning slow, made curious harmonies with the drowsy body of night; the dip and swirl and dip again of Lessingham's paddle; the drip of water from the blade between the strokes.
'Where did your lordship forsake my little water-rat?' he asked in a while.
'She was turned willow-wren at the last,' answered Lessingham.
'Such natures', said Vandermast, 'do commonly suck much gratification out of change and the variety of perceptible form and corporeity. But I doubt not your lordship, with your more settled preferences and trained appetites, found her most acceptable in form and guise of a woman?'
'She did me the courtesy', answered Lessingham, to maintain that shape for the more part of our time together.'
They proceeded in silence. Vandermast spoke again. 'You find satisfaction, then, in women, my lord?'
'I find in their society', Lessingham answered, 'a pleasurable interlude.'
That', said that learned man, 'agreeth with the con-elusion whereunto, by process of ratiocination, I was led upon consideration of that stave or versicule recited by your lordship about one hour since, and composed, if I mistake not, by your lordship. Went it not thus?
Anthea, wooed with flatteries, To please her lover's fantasies, Unlocks her bosom's treasuries.— Ah! silver apples like to these Ne'er grew, save on those holy trees Tended by nymphs Hesperides.'
'What's this?' said Lessingham, and there was danger in his voice.
'You must not take it ill', said Vandermast, 'that this trifle, spoke for her ear only and the jealous ear of night, was known to me without o'erhearing. Yourself are witness that neither you nor she did tell it me, and indeed I was half a mile away, so scarce could a heard it A little cold: a little detached, methought, for a love-poem. But indeed I do think your lordship is a man of deeds. Do you find satisfaction, then, in deeds?'
'Yes,' answered he.
'Power,' said that learned doctor: 'power; which maketh change. Yea, but have you considered the power that is in Time, young man? to change the black hairs of your beard to blanched hairs, like as mine: and the last change of Death? that, but with waiting and expecting and standing still, overcometh all by drawing of all to its own likeness. Dare your power face that power, to go like a bridegroom to annihilation's bed? Let me look at your eyes.'
Lessingham, whose eyes had all this while been fixed upon Vandermast's, said, 'Look then.'
The face of the night was altered now. A cool drizzle of rain dimmed the moon: the gondola seemed to drift a-beam, cut off from all the world else upon desolate waters. Vandermast's voice came like the soughing of a distant wind: 'The hairless, bloodless, juiceless, power of silence,' he said, 'that consumeth and abateth and swalloweth up lordship and subjection, favour and foulness, lust and satiety, youth and eld, into the dark and slub-bery mess of nothingness.' Lessingham saw that the face of that old man was become now as a shrivelled death's-head, and his eyes but windows opening inwards upon the horror of .an empty skull. And that lynx-eyed mountain nymph, fiercely glaring, crouching sleek and spotted beside him, was become now a lynx indeed, with her tufted slender ears erect and the whiskers moving nervously right and left of her snarling mouth. And Vandermast spake loud and hoarse, crying out and saying, 'You shall die young, my Lord Lessingham. Two years, a year, may be, and you shall die. And then what help shall it be that you with your high gifts of nature did o'ersway great ones upon earth (as here but to-day you did in Acrozayana), and did ride the great Vicar of Rerek, your curst and untamed horse, till he did fling you to break your neck, and die at the last? What is fame to the deaf dust that shall then be your delicate ear, my lord? What shall it avail you then that you had fair women? What shall it matter though they contented you never? seeing there is no discontent whither you go down, my lord, neither yet content, but the empty belly of darkness enclosing eternity upon eternity. Or what shall even that vision beyond the veil profit you (if you saw it indeed tonight, then ere folk rose from table), since that is but impossibility, fiction and vanity, and shall then be less than vanity itself: less than the dust of you in the worm's blind mouth? For all departeth, all breaketh and perisheth away, all is hollowness and nothing worth ere it sink to very nothing at last.'
'I saw nought,' said Lessingham. 'What is that Lady Fiorinda then?' His voice was level; only the strokes of his paddle came with a more steadier resolution, may be, of settled strength as that old man spoke.
The gondola lurched sideways. Lessingham turned swiftly from his outstaring of that aged man to bring her safe through a sudden turmoil of the waters that rose now and opened downward again to bottomless engulfings. Pale cliffs superimpended in the mist and the darkness, and fires burned there, with the semblance as of corpse-fires. And above those cliffs was the semblance of icy mountains, and streams that rolled burning down them of lava, making a sizzling in the water that was heard high above the voice of the waves; and Lessingham beheld walking shrouded upon the cliffs faceless figures, beyond the stature of human kind, that seemed to despair and lament, lifting up skinny hands to the earless heaven. And while he beheld these things, there was torn a ragged rift in the clouds, and there fled there a bearded star, baleful in the abyss of night. And now there was thunder, and the noise as of a desolate sea roaring upon the coasts of death. Then, as a thought steps over the threshold of oblivion, all was gone; the cloudless summer night held its breath in the presence of its own inward blessedness: the waters purred in their sleep under the touch of Anthea's idly trailing finger.
Lessingham laid down his paddle and clapped his right hand to his hip; but they had gone unweaponed to that feast. Without more ado he with an easy swiftness, scarcely to rock the boat, had gotten in his left hand the two wrists of Vandermast: his right hand slid up beneath the long white beard, and fumbled the doctor's skinny throat. 4Scritch-owl,' he said, *you would unman me, ha? with your sickly bodings? You have done it, I think: but you shall die for't.' The iron strength of his fingers toyed delicately about that old man's weasand.
Very still sat Doctor Vandermast. He said, 'Suffer me yet to speak.'
'Speak and be sudden,' said Lessingham.
Surely that old man's eyes looked now into his with a brightness that was as the lifting up of day. 'My Lord Lessingham,' he said, 'per realitatem et perfectionem idem intelligo: in my conceit, reality and perfection are one. If therefore your lordship have suffered an inconvenience, you are not to revenge it upon me: your disorder proceedeth but from partial apprehension.'
'Ha! but did not you frame and present me, with fantasticoes? did not you spit your poison?' said Lessingham. 'Do not mistake me: I am not afeared of my death. But I do feel within me somewhat, such as I ne'er did meet with its like aforrow, and I know not what it is, if it be not some despair. Wherefore, teach me to apprehend fully, you were best, and that presently. Or like a filthy fly I'll finger you off to hell.' Upon which very word, he strangely took his fingers from the lean weasand of that old man and let go the lean wrists.
Vandermast said, as if to himself, 'Cum mens suam impotentiam imaginatur, eo ipso contristatur: when the mind imagineth its own impotence, it by that only circumstance falleth into a deep sadness. My lord,' he said, raising his head to look Lessingham in the face, 'I did think you had seen. Had you so seen, these later sights I did present you, and these prognostications of decay, could not have cankered so your mind: they had been then but as fumadoes, hot and burning spices, to awake your appetite the more and prepare you for that cup whereof he that drinketh shall for ever thirst and for ever be satisfied; yea, and without it there is no power but destroyeth and murdereth itself at last, nor no pleasure but disgusteth in the end, like the stench of the dead.'
'Words,' said Lessingham. The mouth jangleth, as lewd as a lamp that no light is in. I tell you, I saw nought: nought but outrushing lights and dazzles. And now, I feel my hand upon a latch, and you, in some manner I understand not, by some damned sleight, withholding me. Teach me, as you said but now, to apprehend fully. But if not, whether you be devil or demigod or old drivelling disard as I am apt to think you: by the blessed Gods, I will tear you into pieces.'
Anthea widened her lips and laughed. 'Now you are in a good vein, my lord. Shall I bite his throat out?' She seemed to slaver at the mouth. 'You are a lynx, go,' said Lessingham. It was as if the passion of his anger was burnt out, like a fire of dead leaves kindled upon a bed of snow.
Vandermast's lean hands twisted and unclasped their fingers together in his lap. 'I had thought', he said, to himself aloud, in the manner of old men, 'her ladyship would have told me. O inexorable folly to think so! Innumerable laughter of the sea: ever changing: shall I never learn?'
'What is that lady?' said Lessingham.
Vandermast said, 'You did command me, my lord, to learn you to apprehend fully. But here, in limine demonstrationis, upon the very threshold, appeareth a difficulty beyond solution, in that your lordship is instructed already in things contingent and apparent, affectiones, actiones, phenomenal actualities rei politico; et militaris, the council chamber and the camp, puella-puellae and matters conducive thereunto. But in things substantial I find you less well grounded, and here it is beyond my art to, carry you further seeing my art is the doctor's practice of reason; because things substantial are not known by reason but by perception: perceptio per solam suam essentiam; and omnis substantia est necessario infinita: all substance, in its essence, infinite.'
'Leave this discourse,' said Lessingham, 'which, did I understand its drift, should make me, I doubt not, as wise as a capon. Answer me: of what substantia or essentia is that lady?'
Doctor Vandermast lowered his eyes. 'She is my Mistress,' he said.
'That, to use your gibberish, old sir, is per accidens,' said Lessingham. 'I had supposed her the Duke's mistress: the Devil's mistress too, belike. But per essence, what is she? Why did my eyes dazzle when I would have looked upon her but at that moment to-night? since many a time ere then I easily enough beheld her. And why should aught lie on it, that they did so dazzle? Come, we have dealt with seeming women to-night that be nymphs of the lakes and mountains, taking at their will bird-like shapes and beastly. What is she? Is she such an one? Tell me, for I will know.'
'No,' said Vandermast, shaking his head. 'She is not such as these.'
Eastward, ahead, Lessingham saw how, with the dancings of summer lightnings, the sky was opened on a sudden behind the towers and rampires of Acrozayana. For that instant it was as if a veil had been torn to show where, built of starbeams and empyreal light, waited, over all, the house of heart's desire.
That learned man was searching now beneath the folds of his gaberdine, and now he drew forth a little somewhat and, holding it carefully in his fingers, scanned it this way and that and raised it to view its shape against the moon. Then, giving it carefully to Lessingham, 'My lord,' he said, 'take this, and tender it as you would a precious stone; for indeed albeit but a little withered leaf, there be few jewels so hard to come by or of such curious virtue. Because I have unwittingly done your lordship an ill service to-night, and because not wisdom itself could conduct you to that apprehension you do stand in need of, I would every deal I may to serve and further you. And because I know (both of my own judgement and by certain weightier confirmations of my art) the proud integrity of your lordship's mind and certain conditions of your inward being, whereby I may, without harm to my own fealty, trust you thus, albeit to-morrow again our enemy: therefore, my Lord Lessingham, behold a thing for your peace. For the name of this leaf is called sferra cavallo, and this virtue it hath, to break and open all locks of steel and iron. Take it then to your bed, my lord, now in the fair guest-chamber prepared for you in Acrozayana. And if, for the things you saw and for the things you saw not to-night, your heart shall be troubled, and sleep stand iron-eyed willing not to lie down with you and fold her plumes about your eyelids, then if you will, my lord, taking this leaf, you may rise and seek. What I may, that do I, my lord, giving you this. There shall, at least, no door be shut against you. But when night is done and day cometh you must by all means, (and this lieth upon your honour), burn the leaf. It is to do you good I give it unto you, and for your peace. Not for a weapon against my own sovereign lord.'
Lessingham took it and examined it well in the light of the moon. Then, with a noble look to Vandermast, he put it away like a jewel in his bosom.