'Will you count how many shirts I have sweat at tennis this week?'

Tennis! Six weeks now, and the last three I think you're stark mad,' said Amaury. 'A half-year's business thrust into twenty days: the whole engine and governance of the Queen's strength in the north here picked in pieces and put together good and new: a great new body of intelligencers thrown abroad for a watch on Akkama, till now so ill neglected: the town in act to be stocked 'gainst a twelve months' siege if need were: works set in hand to make sure all defences: all things viewed, all put upon examination: the Constable and half the officers here cashiered: three or four heads ta'en off: every man else, by your own sole doing, manned and tamed to your fist,—'

'Well,' said Lessingham, 'we should think the soul was never put into the body to stand still.' He took his hat. 'He that could dine with the smoke of roast meat, Amaury, should he not soon be rich? When I've set all in order: a week or two now: then off with my commission, throw it by and we'll begone overseas.'

Amaury followed him through the door.

Bright sun shone on Rialmar fair and beautifully as Jhey rode down through the market-place. By the Quiren Way they rode, and so to the old town gate, and so out, and so, winding steeply down the shoulder of that great hill, south-about into the levels of Revarm. Orvald and Tyarchus led, with the guard of honour; then the Queen in her close-bodied green riding-habit trimmed with pearls: Anamnestra, Zenianthe, Paphirrhoe: Amaury: the Lord Bosra, new taken for Constable in Rialmar: accipitraries, seven or eight, with spaniels and red setting-dogs; and, to bring up the rear, with a tartaret haggard hooded on his fist, Lessingham upon Madda-lena, deep in counsel with the old knight marshal.

The morning they spent in the open river-meads, flying at wildfowl. The river, meandering in mighty curves a mile and more this way and that way, ran shallow upon great widths of shingle; ever now and again they forded it with a plashing and a clank of hooves among shifting stones. The dogs must swim oft at these crossings, but nowhere was it deeper than wet the horses' bellies. Out of the north-east the wind blew sharp from the mountains, making sport difficult. The sun in a blue sky shone on rough blue waves of the river and on pale swifter waves of wind-swept grass. An hour past midday they rode up through lava, picking a way among bosses and ridges of it as among stooks in a cornfield before harvest home, and so by wide sloping stretches of black sand, a country that seemed made of coal-dust, to a grassy saddle between two smooth cratered hills. Here, sheltered from the wind by the breast of the hill above them, they halted to eat a little and take their ease.

'What means your highness to do this afternoon?' asked Tyarchus. 'Turn back? or on over the hause and ride races on the flats there?'

'My Lord Tyarchus,' said Zenianthe, 'blindfold we'd know you! Your highness were best let him have his way. His eyas flew ill this morning, so the sport's suddenly out of fashion.'

'Be kind to him,' said the Queen. "Twas so God made him.' -

'And that's why there's nought he hateth worse in the world,' said the princess, 'than dance, for instance.'

'Now I think on't,' said the Queen: 'danced not one single measure upon my birthday.'

'Truth is,' said Tyarchus, ‘I am somewhat nice in matter of whom I shall dance withal.'

Zenianthe laughed. 'True. For you came first to me. Showed knowledge, if not judgement.'

'O Zenianthe, and would you not dance with him?' said the Queen.

'Bade him try Myrilla first. So as, if he trod not upon her dress, as 'pon yours, cousin, a year ago—'

'That's unfair,' said Tyarchus. 'Her highness had forgot and forgiven.'

Antiope seemed to have settled with this talk to a yet sweeter companionship with the green earth where she sat; and not now in her eyes only, but most subtly in all her frame and pose as she rested there, was a footing it as of little mocking faunish things, round and round, in a gaiety too smooth and too swift for eye to follow. 'Most unfair,' she said. 'To make amends, ought I dance with you myself to-night?'

'Madam, I take that most kindly.'

'But in a dress,' said she, 'without a train.' They laughed. 'But I was but thinking. No; may be, all for all, better it were you, cousin, danced with him.'

'That,' said Zenianthe, 'I take most unkindly.'

'A penance for you', replied the Queen, 'for your un-kindness to him.'

'A penance?' Tyarchus turned to the princess. 'Shall's make friends then, as both offended?'

'I know the sure way to content him,' said Lessingham. 'Do him that favour as to let him try this new jennet of his 'gainst your grace's Tessa.'

'And to take down his pride 'pon the same motion,' said Zenianthe.

'Tessa?' said Tyarchus; 'was not she bred in the great horse-lands beyond the Zenner, of that race and stock your highness's father (upon whom be peace) so cherished and increased there, stablished since generations in that good land, and 'longeth now to Duke Barganax? Well, if I win, shall I have her?'

'No,' said the Queen, laughing at him across her fingers that played bob together. 'If you win, you shall have leave not to dance: neither me nor Zenianthe.'

'A pretty forfeit! There you stand both to gain.'

'You too; for do you not hate to dance? What could be fairer?'

'If your grace must be answered,—thus then: choice to dance with neither or with both.'

'My Lord Lessingham,' the Queen said, rising, and all rose with her; 'have you not your mare of that same breed? and shall she rest attemptless?'

Lessingham laughed with his eyes. 'So your serene highness rode not in the race, though mine be seven year old, I doubt not mounted on her to outride any that treads on four pasterns. But let me remember that those who will eat cherries with great princes shall have their eyes dasht out with the stones. We low subjects—'

'No excuses,' said the Queen. 'I'll stake a jewel upon it. Come, cousin,' to Zenianthe: 'you and I; Lessingham, Orvald, Amaury, Tyarchus: that's six, upon well-breathed horses.'

With that, they took saddle again and rode on north, over the hause and so down into woodlands of silver birch with open turfy stretches, and among the grass pallid drifts of the autumn crocus. Where the glade ran wide before them near on a mile without bend, those six took station. After some justling and curvetting, Paphirrhoe with a wave of a white handkercher gave them the start. As they galloped, now in broad sunshine, now through airs dappled with lights and shadows, wet earth-scents flew. Rabbits that washed their faces or nibbled among the grass fled left and right to the shelter of bramble or hazel-coppice or birch-wood. Grey silver in the sun were the trunks and branches, and the twigs red as it had been copper glowing against the blue. At a mile the Queen led, outgalloping Tyarchus for all his spurring. The forest ride swung west now, and after a while south-westwards, into the sun, and began to fall gently away towards a bottom of green grass. Lessingham, for the sun's glory in his eyes, scarce could see. He leaned forward, whispered Maddalena, touched her neck: in a burst of speed she carried him past Tyarchus. As by conduct of some star he rode now: a timeless chase, wherein he lost at length all wareness save of his own riding that seemed now to outswift the wind; and of Antiope ahead, on her black mare.

At a three lanes' end she drew rein. The black mare stood with head down and with heaving and smoking flanks. Lessingham too drew rein. Maddalena herself was breathed and weary: she had carried the heavier load. On either hand were wide billowing tracts of whinbushes in full flower, yellow, of a sharp, stinging scent. On either hand upon the edges, of the wood, silver birches in their livery of autumn swayed in the bright air.

'We have outridden them all,' Antiope said, a little breathless yet with hard riding, as she turned in the saddle to Lessingham who was halted now within hand-reach. "Las, and I have ridden my hair loose. Will you hold my reins while I see to it?'

She dropped reins: pulled off her gloves: began gathering with her fingers the coil of hair which, heavy, pythonlike, of the sheen of palest mountain gold, was fallen at her neck. Lessingham made no answer, neither moved. This that he looked on was become suddenly a thing to darken sight and shake the stability of nature. The wind was on that sudden fallen, and no breath stirred. On the stillness came a flutter of wings, of a wood-pigeon flapping down unseen among tree-tops. The Queen looked round into Lessingham's face. The stillness laid its finger upon her too, even to the holding in of breath. Like a lute-string strained in an air too thin to carry sound, the silence trembled. The Queen parted her lips, but no voice came.

At a grating of hinges upon the left, Lessingham swung round in his saddle to behold, with eyes startled as out of sleep and dreams, a wicket gate that opened in a low red brick wall smothered all over with dark red climbing roses. A garden close was within that gate, sweet with a hundred smells and colours of flowers, and beyond the garden a low-built old timbered house in measurable good reparations, straw-thatched, and with slender chimneys of hrickwork and long low windows. A vine hung the porch with green leaves and pendulous black clusters. The wall on either hand betwixt porch and window, besides all the length betwixt the windows of the ground-floor and of the bedchambers above these, was a ripening-place for apricocks and pears and peaches trained orderly against the wall; and the slant rays of the sun turned the hanging fruits to gold, sending long shadows of them sideways on the wall, deep purple shadows against the warm and ruddy hues of the brickwork. The decline of postmeridian brought coolness to the autumn air. Homing doves rested pink feet on the roof-ridge. A smell of wood-smoke came from the house. And, cap in hand upon the top step of three that led down from that wicket gate, there stood to greet them, as bidding welcome to expected guests, that same logical doctor, last seen by Lessingham in the far southlands of Zayana. Well past all mistaking Lessingham knew him: knew besides the little cat, white as new snow, that rubbed head against the skirt of that old man's gaberdine and looked ever with blue eyes upon Antiope. The sun's splendour swung at mid-evening's height above great oak-woods. These, and a high upland training across the north behind the house, shut out all distances; not a birch was to be seen; no whins flaunted yellow flowers; no galloping hoof drew near. Only Tessa and Maddalena munched the wayside grass: from the roof came the turtle dove's soft complaint: from the woodside a lowing of cattle sounded, and nearer at hand a babble of running water. Upon the left, to the right of the sun, a holm-oak upreared its statuesque magnificence of bough and foliage, nearly black, but with a stir of radiance upon it like a scattering of star-dust. Doctor Vandermast was saying to Antiope, watching her face the while with most searching gaze, 'I hope, madam, that in these particularities I have nothing forgot. I hope you shall find all perfect even as your ladyship gave in charge at my depart.'

'Ladyship? Give in charge?' she said, looking on him and on this new scene with the look of one whose senses, fresh wakened out of sleep, stand doubtful amid things of waking knowledge and things of dream. 'Nay, you mistake, sir. And yet—'

Vandermast came down the steps: put into her hands that little cat. It purred and snuggled its face into the warm between arm and bosom. 'I have been here before,' she said, still in a slow wonder. 'That is most certain. And this learned man I have known. But when, and where—'

The eyes of that Vandermast, watching her gaze about her and turn in the end, with a lovely lost abandoning of the riddle, to Lessingham, were of a lynx-like awareness. And there stirred in them a queer, half humorous look, as of a mind that pleasantly chews the cud of its knowledge while it beholds the sweet comedy of others led in a maze. 'If I might humbly counsel your noble grace and excellent highness,' said he, 'vex not your mind with un-entangling of perplexities, nor with no back-reckonings. Please to dismount you and come now in to your summer-house, on purpose trimmed up for you. And you, my Lord Lessingham, to decide all doubts be ruled by me. For I say unto you, it is a short ride hither from Rialmar but, to-night, a far ride back. So as not to-night, no not in ten nights' riding could you come to Rialmar on your swift mare. Wherefore, settle your heart, my lord, and be patient. Pray you come in.'

Lessingham looked at Antiope. Her eyes said yes. He leaped from the saddle: gave her his hand. Her hand in his was an imponderable thing: a cool flame, a delicious-ness of mellifluous flowers; her coming down, a motion to convince the sea-swallow of too dull a grace, outpara-goned by hers. Vandermast swung back the gate: Lessingham looked round: 'What of the horses?'

Vandermast smiled and answered, 'They will not stray: no horse strayeth here.'

'Lip-wisdom,' said Lessingham, and set about taking off of saddles and bridles. 'It is my way, on the road, to see her watered and fed ere I feed myself, not leave her to horse-boys. And I'll the same for her grace's.'

'Here', answered that old man, 'is water. And, for the grass of this wayside, 'tis of. a singular virtue. Pastures of earth renew but the blood and animal spirits: but this of mine being grazed upon turneth in the vitals not to blood but ichor.'

As one expressed with sleep, Lessingham stared upon him. But Vandermast, with that close smile, turned to Antiope. 'As your ladyship hath cited to me ere this, the Poetess's words: —Gold is pure of rust." '

Quite lost, yet too deeply taken with the sweetness of the place to seek answers, she shook her head. Without more words, they entered; and before them went that learn'd philosopher between lupins, blue and yellow, and flaming lychnis, roses and speckled lilies and lavender and rosemary and sweet thyme and pink and white anemones, up the paven walk.

Dim was the low-ceilinged hall that now they entered from that bright garden: to the left a table of pale oak shining with age ran long and narrow under the southern windows, and places laid there for supper, and chairs with cushions of dark velvet, and at the near end an armful of white roses in a bowl of crystal. Beams, smoked black with age, ribbed the ceiling: a "fire burned of logs under a great open chimney over against the door with a settle before it and deep chairs for ease. In the western end of that hall a window opened, and another, lesser, to the left of the fire. In the corner between was some instrument of music, a spinet or clavichord, and a stool to sit and play. There were pictures hung on the walls, and thick brocaded curtains drawn back between the windows. A bare oaken staircase to the right of the fire led to the upper chambers.

'If your ladyship would shift your riding-clothes before supper?' said the doctor. 'And you, my lord? For for you besides there is a chamber I have prepared you, looking west, but your ladyship's south and east.' Lessingham heard, when the Queen was gone up, little cries of wonderment from above-stairs: past all mistaking, Zenianthe's voice laughing and joying with Antiope. He reached out a hand towards the fire: felt its warmth; then walked to the clavichord, opened the laburnum-wood lid and let his finger wander on the keys. The thin blade-like sweetness of the strings sprang on the air and there lay stretched, as if the first hueless streaks of a dawn which comes up seaward without wind should lie listening to their own grey stillness. He turned and was face to face with Vandermast. They looked each in the other's eye for a little without speaking. Then Lessingham said with a tartness on his tongue, 'And you, signior, with your so much outward submissiveness but, (or I sadly misjudge), without that inward awfulness 'tshould in honesty proceed from: What in truth are you?'

‘I am', answered he, 'even as your excellence: a two-legged living creature, gressible, unfeathered. Will you that I conduct you to your chamber?'

Lessingham watched him for a moment through his eyelashes; then, with a slow smile, 'If you please,' he said. 'And what house is this?' he said, when they were come up, and he beheld the fair chamber and, in a bedazzlement, his own clothes and gear laid out ready upon chest and bed.

'By your leave,' said the learned doctor, fetching a bootjack; 'not to weight our presence with servants for the while, suffer me help your excellence off with your boots.' Lessingham sat down: voluptuous deep cushions of sunset-coloured silk boiled up about him like swelling water-waves. He gave a leg to Vandermast. 'Well, it is, as I conceit it, the house of peace,' said that old man. 'And some would think this strange, that to this house should your lordship choose to come, that have the renown of a very thunder-smith and a carver in the wake of armipo-tent Ares.'

'It is part of your wisdom, I see,' said Lessingham: 'for a hot man cool drink.'

When they were come down again and, by invitation of their host, sat at board for supper, it was with strange company and strange household folk to change the plates. The sun had set. All down the supper-table candles were burning, and on tables and chests besides and on sconces of silver on the walls. Antiope had her place in the table's midst, facing the room and the firelight; over against her sat the other ladies: upon her right hand, Doctor Vandermast; upon her left, one whose face was hard to see, but his eyes seemed large past nature and Lessingham noted of his ears that they were sharp-pricked and hairy. Of extreme litheness and soft grace was every movement he made: pricking of ears, turning of the head or shoulders, reaching hands slender and fieldish as Campaspe's own to plate or winecup. And that was seen of his hands that they were furred or hairy, and the nails on the delicate fingers dark like tortoise-shell. Still would he be speaking whisper-talk in the Queen's ear, and ever, as she gave ear to that whispering, would a thoughtful cast overtake her countenance, as if with the swoop of some winged thing that checked and hung hovering in the sun-path of her thought; and ever, as this befell, would her glance meet Lessingham's.

Lessingham asked, 'What guest is that?'

The doctor followed his eye. 'That', he replied, 'is a disciple of mine.'

Lessingham said, 'I had guessed as much.'

Sitting at the table's end whence he could see all faces in the candlelight, and see, past them in the western window, the feet of day disappear under night as ankles under a skirt dropped by some lovely hand as the wearer walks by, Lessingham f It himself sink into a great peace and rest. Strange and monstrous shapes, beginning now to throng that room, astonished no more his mind. Hedgehogs in little coats he beheld as household servants busy to bear the dishes; leopards, foxes, lynxes, spider-monkeys, badgers, water-mice, walked and conversed or served the guests that sat at supper; seals, mild-eyed, mustachioed, erect on their hind flippers and robed in silken gowns, brought upon silver chargers all kind of candied conserves, macaroons, fig-dates, sweet condiments, and delicate confections of spiceries; and here were butterfly ladies seen, stag-headed men, winged lions of Sumer, hamadryads and all the nymphish kindred of beck and marsh and woodland and frosty mountain solitude and the blue caves of ocean: naiad and dryad and oread, and Amphitrite's brood with green hair sea-garlanded and combs in their hands fashioned from drowned treasure of gold. When a sphinx-with dragon-fly wings sat down between the lights beyond Zenianthe and looked on Lessingham out of lustreless stone eyes, he scarce noted her: when a siren opened her sea-green cloak and laid it aside, to sit bare to the waist and thence downward decently clothed in fish-scales, it seemed a thing of course: when a wyvern poured wine for him he acknowledged it with that unreflective ease that a man of nice breeding gives to his thanks to an ordinary cup-bearer. He drank; and the wine, remembering in its vintage much gold molten to redness in the grape's inward parts, under the uprising, circling, and down-setting pomp of processional suns, drew itself, velvet-flanked, hot-mouthed with such memories, smoothly across his mind. And, so drawing, it crooned its lullaby to all doubts and double-facing thoughts: a lullaby which turned, as they dropped asleep, first to their passing-bell, then to their threnody, and at length, with their sinking into oblivion, to a new incongruency of pure music.

'But is this power, then?' he heard Campaspe say. To be bitten, taken in jaws, swallowed up?'

'Suppose he should kill her indeed,' said Anthea: "tis but an act bestial. There is no form in it: no grace, no verity. It addeth not: taketh but away. Why, I can kill. I should know.' Her teeth flashed.

'It is well said,' said the doctor, as if answering Lessingham's look. 'In this school she is my graduate. I have nought to teach her.'

Lessingham's eyes met Anthea's. It was as if, in the slits between the yellows, a light flared and was gone. ‘I had it,' he said: 'but lost again ere I could—' he saw that the room was suddenly empty of all save those seven that sat at table. But, as if with the coming and going of tiny wings, little draughts of air touched here an eyelash, there a throat, and all the candleflames were a-waver. 'She is form,' he said, and his eyes turned to Antiope. 'She draws us. We who do, Gods be we or men, in Her is our doing. And if in this, in action, we have our only being (and by heaven, I think 'tis so), then in Her our being. She draws our actions to a shape: shapes them so, into a kind of beauty.'

Campaspe, with the shadow as of moth-like wings shedding a furry and a shy and an elusive sweetness across her elfin features, said softly, ' "As the sheath is to the knife"?'

'It is good,' said Vandermast; 'but not enough. For the sheath is but an image of receptivity simpliciter, and of that which is of none effect of itself.'

'Goblet to wine were nearer,' said Lessingham, looking still on Antiope.

'Or eyes to the inner fire,' Anthea said, leaning forward on her two elbows. Lessingham turned at her voice: faced the slits that burned and reverberated with green and yellow heat. The warm sleek redness of the wine smoothed itself against him like a lover betwixt dream and dream in the failing hour of night.

'Or', Campaspe said at his side, 'weakness for strength to rest upon?' He felt the touch of her gloved fingers on his forearm: fluttering feathered bird-breast that a harsh breath might harm it.

'Goblet to wine were nearer,' said that learned doctor. Lessingham turned to him: the countenance of Vandermast was mute like the irradiation of the sun behind northern mountains at night in summer on the confines of the Boreal pole.

Then Lessingham looked once more at Antiope. And slowly, as the transmutations in nature of sunset or sunrise are without the catastrophe of lesser changes, it was, as he looked, that three were subsumed to one. Not subsumed bodily, for they sat three as before, she on the left, they on the right facing her across the table; and yet now, in Antiope the lambent eyes of his oread lady, teeth of ice, clean fierce lips, breasts of snow; in Antiope, the strengthless faery presence of his Campaspe, a rose-leaf hanging in the last near broken thread of a spider's web where the dawn-dew glitters; and in Antiope, something not these, but more than these: herself: easy to look on, fancy-free, ignorant, with a shadow like laughter's in the allurance of her lips. Her eyes, resting in his, seemed to wait betwixt believe and make-believe, then turn to hyaline gulfs where sunbeams wade trembling upon treasure inexhaustible of precious riches. 'Strange talk,' he heard her say. 'And I remember,' he heard her say, 'but when, I cannot tell; nor where: but goes it not hand in hand with your saying, my Lord Lessingham?—

Strength is not mine. Only I AM: a twilight, Heard between the darts of the blazing noonday; Seen beyond loud surges: a lull: a vision: Peace in the spear-din.

Granite leans earthward, as a mace impending'. Butterfly wings quivering abide the shadow: Music bitter-sweet of the Gods: Their night-song, Older than all worlds.—

'Is She not somewhat so?'

Silence shut behind the falling wonder of her spoken words. Lessingham beheld the doctor's prick-eared disciple lift her white hand in his, that was so slender and feral in its tawny hairiness, and press it, as in a dumb worship, to his bowed forehead. This he beheld as an act beautiful and apt, and that the beholding of pleased him much as her little cat's love for her should please, issuing in some such simplicity. Only the strangeness of it, and the strangeness on her lips of words that he remembered, as if with her memory, out of some fair expired season, and that he seemed to know for his own words, (though when framed, when spoken, he could not tell): these things gathered now, as a rain-drop gathers and hangs round and perfect on the point of a leaf, into the memory of that streaming up of golden bubbles through golden wine last spring in Mornagay, and of her remembered voice.

Doctor Vandermast stood up from his chair. 'The night draweth in cold. Will it please you, madam, we suppose 'twere Yule-tide, and sit about the yule-log? And indeed I remember me, old customs have still pleased you from oLold.'

Passing by the table's end, as Vandermast and Lessingham bowed and made her way, Antiope reached a hand to Campaspe: 'And you, dear, sing to us?'

'Yes, sing, dear chorister of the sleeping sallows, your May-night song', said Lessingham, 'of Ambremerine. It told me more than you knew,' he said, speaking to her but looking on Antiope, and so saw not the deriding 'More than I knew!' in those beady eyes.

Campaspe, with swift naiad grace, was at the clavichord. She opened the lid. 'May I choose my song?'

She had taken her answer, from eyes where everlasting-ness seemed to look, half awake, out of infinities to skyey infinities, ere the Queen's lips could frame it: 'Choose: my choice is yours.'

Campaspe preluded on the keys. The silence, divided with the passing of those blades of sweetness, fell together again. 'My Lady Fiorinda's song?' she said: 'The nightingale my father is?' Vandermast turned in his chair, to rest his gaze, with that veiled, wine-tasting smile of his, upon Antiope. Lessingham too watched her across the hearth from his deep chair: her face, shone upon by two candles in a sconce beside her, was lovely fair, pictured against warm darkness. Surely in the peace of her his own spirit settled, as the day settles in the west.

Campaspe sang: a bird-voice, so small and bodiless that through its faery texture even those frail chords gleamed clear:

 

Li rosignox est mon pere,

Qui chante sor la ramee

El plus haut boscage.

La seraine ele est ma mere,

Qui chante en la mere salee

El plus haut rivage.

 

Now there hung upon the wall, upon Lessingham's left where he sat, a looking-glass framed in tortoise-shell; and so it was that midway through her singing, with' a kindling in his veins again, from that name, and from that song, of memories of Ambremerine, he chanced to look in the looking-glass. For a count of seven he stared, whether in the body, whether out of the body, he could not tell: a face, not Lessingham's but the Duke's, stared back. With the sweeping of terrible harp-strings through his blood, he sat blind.

As his blood beat steadier it seemed to him as if out of that tumult a new figure took clear shape at last of counterpoint and descant. And yet for a minute he dared not lift his eyes to where she sat beyond the hearth listening to the song. For a' doubt was on him, lest he should see not the thing he would but the thing he would not: so breathing clear was his memory of what he had seemed to look on but now, when that song began that but now drew to its ending: not her, but another sitting there: a second time (as once in Acrozayana), with too near bodement of the mutability he so much affected and transience of things, as that the levin-bolt might fall not afar to gaze upon, but very here, to thunder his eyes out that gazed. He drew hand over his chin, as to sure himself of it, shaven and hard: looked in the glass: looked at last cautiously across the carpet. This was her foot: no changeling could have stole that: he knew it better than his own. ‘Pew!' he said in himself, 'slip not the reins,' and let his eyes run upward. There she sat, under the weak candles, a star between flying darknesses in a night of thunder. Side-face towards him, her chin lifted a little sideways as if, mindful of her own beautifulness, to feed his eyes a little with the silver splendour of her throat and its lovely strength, she stared in the fire through black half-closed lashes. Her head moved lazily, almost imperceptibly, as to the familiar cadence of Cam-paspe's song. For all else, she sat motionless: all save this, and, with each lightly taken breath, her breasts' fall and swell.

The Duke, so sitting and watching, felt sails fill and his spirit move out once more on that uncharted dangerous ever undiscovered main.

He rose: took a dish of fruit from the sideboard. Vandermast was half risen to have taken it from him, as scandalled that his great master should do handmaid-service, but the Duke prevented him with his eye, and came with the dish to where she sat. 'If your ladyship will have any conceits after supper, as medlars, nuts, lady-pears?'

Very daintily she examined them, took one, and, looking at him not with eyes but with the snake-black gleams of her back hair and with the curve of white neck and shoulder, held it up for him to take and peel for her. He peeled it in silence: gave it back: her eating of it was with an air of creative awareness,, as of one who carves or models: of conscious art, rather than the plain business of eating. The Duke watched her for a minute; then, behind her chair, leaned over the back and said in a low voice, 'What crinkum-crankum was this?'

She leaned back her head till he could look straight down into her eyes as he bent over her, facing him as it were upside down. He looked in them; then in her mouth's corner where that thing sat at alert; then over all the imperial pitiless face of her, where a dozen warring imperfections were by some secret fire transmuted to that which is beyond flattery and beyond alchemy; then to the warm interspace where, with her leaning back, the bosom of her crimson dress strained closer; then into her eyes again. 'I wonder,' he said: 'can the Devil outsubtle you, madonna?'

'How can I tell?' she said, with great innocence, and the thing there covered its face. 'Why? Would you engage his help against me?'

'Yes. Save that I think somewhat scorn to bribe your servant.'

'Is he my servant?' she asked, as who might ask an indifferent matter for information's sake: Is Vandermast your secretary? Is Campaspe a naiad?

'Or I have long been misinformed,' answered the Duke. 'Come, what wages do you pay him? Though I fear all the wealth I have shall scarce avail me to bid against you.'

'As for me, I pay not,' said that lady. 'Neither am paid. Still, I have servants: perhaps him we spoke on: could at least have him if I would. And still, I am your mistress. Is not that singular?' She put up a jewelled hand, took his that rested on her chair-back, drew it secretly against her neck, then swiftly put it away again.

The oaths you sware me,' he said, close in her ear, 'after that night last May, never to do it again. And yet, worse this time. By my soul, I dreamed, and I was— Lessingham.'

Fiorinda said, ‘I have heard tell of stranger dreams than that.'

'And she? that other?' he said, still lower. 'Who is she?'

Fiorinda sat up and smoothed her gown. Barganax moved a couple of paces round towards the fire so as to see her face again. 'O, this large-eyed innocence,' he said, 'becomes your ladyship badly, who have all these things in your purse. What, is she a dress of yours?'

'I had thought you had learnt by now,' she said, with a swan-like smooth motion of her hands settling the combs in her hair, 'that everything that is is a dress of mine. Ever and since the world began,' she said, so low as he should hear not that: but that little white cat, gazing up at her, seemed to hear it.

The Duke looked about. Campaspe at the clavichord fingered out some little lilting canon. Zenianthe had drawn her chair up beside her, and watched her as some sweet oak-tree might watch the mouse-like darts and pauses of the tree-creeper along her steadfast dream-fast limbs. The old man talked low with Anthea: that strange disciple of his was curled up on the carpet as if asleep, one arm about the little white cat that with slow blinking eyes still studied Fiorinda from a distance. 'You shall know this,' said the Duke: 'I loved her as my life.'

With that scarce perceptible little upward scoffing backward movement of her head, she laughed. 'O sweetly pa-thetical. You mouth it, my lord, like a common play-actor.'

'And would a let you, madam, go hang.'

*Who would not be so lovered?' she said; and, with a flower-like grace which had yet the quality in it as of the outpeeking from flowers of a deadly poisoned adder, she stood up. ‘I am indeed,' she said delicately, 'of a most lambish patience; but I much fear, my lord, you grow tedious. Zenianthe, my cloak.'

'Stay,' said the Duke. 'My tongue can run on patterns as well as your ladyship's. And men that be in love can ill away to have lovers appointed them by others. It was a dream.'

'It was true,' she replied, and her green and slanting and unfathomable eyes held him while he took a stab from every sensuous movement of her putting on her cloak. 'The first (as for loving) was true, but not the second: the second was but said in a bravado to plague me. Think, and you will remember, my friend, that I say true.'

He made no reply.

'Moreover,' she said, 'you would not, no not even this moment, let even her go hang. No, fling not off, my lord: think. You shall find I say true.'

The Duke faced that lady's eyes in an arrested stillness. 'Think' she said again; and he, looking now steadfastly on her lips that seemed to rest upon the antique secret memory of some condition, primal and abiding, where the being of these things is altogether at once, which is the peculiar property of everlastingness, slowly after a pause answered and said, 'Yes: but that is not to say love. For no man can love and worship his own self.'

'This that you have said,' said that lady, and her slow voice was like honey of roses, 'I have strangely heard before. Yet not heard,' she said, her eyebrows lifting with their look of permanent soft surprise as she looked down, drawing on her gloves; 'for 'twas but thought, not spoken: seen, in eyes: his eyes, not yours, in Acrozayana.'

'In his eyes?' said the Duke. The silence opened quivering wings above them like the wings that shadow the dream-stone.

'There have been, to say, brothers and sisters,' she said. It was as if, under the ironic lazy seductive voice of her, the wings were upstrained to that ultimate throbbing tension that must dissolve the next instant in some self-consuming cataclysm of its own extremity. Then, whether upon the mere whim and fantasy: whether of her most divine discerning bounty, bis dat quae tarde: whether but of her April mood, (now lovely sunshining, now hail from a louring sky, suddenly again those stones melting at a gleam to jewelled drops on the yellow daffodils and celandines: half-fledged leaves of sallow and birch and thorn turning to green tiny flames against the sunlight: the heavens all soft and blue, and the blackthorn and wild cherry starry above new lambs): whether for all or for none of these reasons, she loosed hold. 'Reverend sir, are my horses ready?'

'Truly,' said the Duke, as if awake again, 'I ne'er saw my—' and suddenly his eyes became veiled. 'Unless—'.

Vandermast came back from the door: 'Madam, they are ready at the gate.'

Barganax started. 'What is this place? Madam, I pray you go not yet. 'Least, I'll go with you.' But, out by the door that aged man held open for her, she was gone. Barganax, like a man that would pursue in a dream, but his legs, held in the woolly fetters of sleep, will not obey, stood rooted. Then the door shut.

He saw Anthea's eyes levelled upon him in a sphinxian expressionless stare. Letting that go unregarded, he stood now, back to the fire, in a study, erect, feet wide apart, one hand thrust in his jewelled girdle, the other twirling and smoothing up his mustachios. The dark fires slept and woke, glowed and slept and glowed again, in his half-closed eyes. He said in himself, 'But no, dear Lady of Sakes, beguiler of guiles, O you, beyond soundings: there's something there beyond that. That he hath in him something of yours, I'll not think it past credit, that am inured to marvels. Nay, I believe it: it is a lamp: shows me much was dark till now. But you are more. O you! not with the help of all the devils could I, at this day, be bobbed with such an insufficient answer.'

Doctor Vandermast followed that lady through the garden: bare beds rough with hoar-frost, and over all, hanging high in a frost-clear heaven, the winter moon. 'While you are in a condition, madam,' said he, 'to understand and teach me: lest I fall out, may I know if my part is so far jusdy enacted, and agreeably to your ladyship's desires?'

'Desires?' she said. 'Have I desires?'

'Nay,' said he, ‘I speak but as men speak. For I am not ignorant that Dea expers est passionum, nec ullo laetitice aut tristitice affectu afficiture: that She Who dwelleth on high is with no affect affected, be it of sorrow or of joy.'

'How sweet a thing,' said she, 'is divine philosophy! And with how taking a simplicity it speaketh, so out of your mouth, most wise doctor, flat nays and yeas of these which were, as I had supposed, opinable matters and disputable!'

'Oh You, Who albeit You change, change not,' said that old man: 'I speak as men speak. Tell me, was there aught left undone?'

She took the reins and let Her beauty shine out for an instant, as a blaze of fire, now bright, and now away. His eyes took light in the light of it. 'There was nought undone,' She answered. 'All is perfect.' And they that were harnessed took wing and, thickening the crisp fine air with a thunder of countless wing-beats, sped with Her in an instant high below stars through the down-shedding radiance of the frozen silvery-moon. And the learned doctor, straining eyes and ears towards heaven, followed their flight, their mounting, circling, descending; and at length beheld them at his eastern upper window hovering, that their driver might alight; and there like a dream he beheld Her enter by that balcony, or like a pale moonbeam. For he saw that not as Our Lady of Sakes She entered now, but once more Our Lady of Peace.

So now he himself turned again, came in, shut the door, and came to the fireside again and his company.

The clock at his so coming in, (as if She in that dove-drawn flight betwixt earth and stars had swept the hours, bound to Her chariot, to a speed beyond their customed measure), struck the last hour before midnight. That old man came to Lessingham where he stood yet, in a study, his back to the fire. 'Sleep, my Lord Lessingham, is a surceasing of all the senses from travel. Her ladyship that came hither with you hath this hour since ta'en her chamber. Suffer me to conduct you now to yours.'

Pausing for good-night at his chamber door, Lessingham at last spoke. 'Tell me again,' he said: *what house is this?'

Vandermast answered, saying, ‘I have told your excellence, it is the house of peace.

'And,' he said, speaking, as old men speak, to himself, when he was come downstairs again and stood at the open door, scenting the April air that blew now from that garden and the scents of spring: 'it is the house of heart's desire.'

May be for the very deepness of the peace that folded that sleeping house, so that even his own breathing and quickened heart-beats had power to keep him waking, Lessingham might not sleep. An hour past midnight he arose and dressed and softly opened his chamber door. At the head of the stair he paused, seeing lights yet in the hall both of candles and the flickering firelight. Noiselessly he came down a step or two, and stood still. On the great cushioned settle drawn up before the fire sat Doctor Vandermast. Anthea, upon the-same settle, lay full length, a sleeping danger, very lovely in her sleep, her head upon the lap of that learned doctor. Zenianthe sat upon the floor, her back against his knees, staring in the fire. Campaspe knelt, sitting on her heels, her back to the fire, facing the others; Lessingham saw that she played some little game with cards on the floor, very intently, yet listening through her game to the doctor's words as he talked on in his contemplation.

'Be it but perceived and understood,' said Vandermast, 'sub specie aeternitatis, it can never be too sensual: it can never be too spiritual.'

Zenianthe, smiling in the fire, slowly shook her head. 'Multiplication of matterless words,' said she.

'Nay, you, dear lady, should know this per experientiam, as from withinward. For what will a hamadryad do if. her tree be cut down? What but die?'

'Can anything die?' she said. 'Least of all, we, that are not of mortal race?'

‘I speak,' said he, 'as men speak. And indeed I have thought may be there is in very deed a kind of death, as of foolish bodies who say, Tush, there is no spirit: or others, Tush, there is no sense. And have not old men ere this become dead before their time, with forgetting that this winter of their years is but a limbeck of Hers for trying of their truth and allegiance, as silver and gold are fined and tried in the fire? But, even as 'twas always that the cat winked when her eye was out, so they: 'stead of hold fast and trust in Her to bind up and bring back and give again hereafter.'

'Are you, to say, old?' said Campaspe, marrying queen of spades and king of hearts.

.Vandermast smiled. 'I am, at least, no more fit for past youth-tricks.'

'No more?'

'I speak,' said he, 'as of here and now.' "What else is there?' said she.

Vandermast stroked his white beard. 'It may be, nothing.'

'But you spoke but now,' said Zenianthe, putting very gently a fresh log on the fire so that the flames crackled up, and that oread lady, with the doctor's knees for her pillow, turned in her sleep: 'you spoke of "hereafter".'

'It may be,' said Vandermast, 'that "hereafter" (and, by like process of logic, "heretofore") is here and now.'

Campaspe turned up the seven of diamonds. 'What is old age?'

'What is youth, my little siren of the oozy quagmires and wood anemones in spring and sallow catkins where the puss-moth feeds at dusk of night?'

'Well, it is us,' she said.

'As for old age,' said Zenianthe, 'the poet hath it—

My grief lies onward and my joy behind.

That for age. And for youth I would but turn the saying, and say—

My joy lies onward/

'Who taught you that?' said the learned doctor. 'My oak-woods,' answered she.

He mused for a while in silence. Then, 'It is of divine philosophy,' he said, 'to search lower into the most darkness and inspissation of these antinomies which are in the roots of things. I am old;' and his eyes overran the sleeping beauty of Anthea, stretched feline at her length. Scarcely to touch it, his finger followed her hair where it was pressed upwards in aureate waves from under her left brow and cheek where her head lay on his knee in the innocence of slumber. 'I am old; and yet, as the Poetess,—

 

I love delicacy, and for me love hath the sun's splendour and beauty.'

 

Zenianthe said, 'We know, sir, who taught you that.'

Still Lessingham, upon the stairs, stood and listened. Their backs were towards him. Vandermast replied: 'Yes: She, ingenerable and incorruptible. Are youth and age toys of Hers? How else? seeing She plays with all things. And age, I have thought ere now, is also a part of Her wiles and guiles, to trick us into that folly which scorneth and dispraiseth the goods we can no more enjoy. Then, after leading of us as marsh-fires lead, through so many turn-agains, unveil the grace in Her eyes: laugh at us in the end.'

'Love were too serious else,' said Campaspe. She fetched for the queen of hearts the king of clubs: 'Antiope: Lessingham.'

'What is Lessingham?' Zenianthe asked the fibre. 'What is Barganax?'

'What am I?' asked Vandermast. Tell me, dreamer and huntress of the ancient oak-woods, is it outside the scheme that there should be, of young men, an old age wise, unrepentant, undisillusioned? I mean not some supposititious mathematical esse formale, as some fantastics dream, but bodied, here and now? For truly and in sadness, searching inward in myself I have not once but often times—' he fell silent.

'What is here and now?' Zenianthe said, gazing into the heart of the fire with brown dreaming eyes.

Vandermast was leaned back, his head against a cushion, his lean hands slack, palms downwards, on the seat on either side of him. He too gazed in the fire, and, may be for the hotness of it, may be for the lateness of the hour, the gleam of his eyes was softened. 'As part of Her peace?' he said. 'As part of Her pleasure?—O gay Goddess lustring, You Who do make all things stoop to Your lure.—Seeing all the pleasures of the world are only sparkles and parcels sent out from God? And seeing it is for Her that all things, omnia qua existunt, are kept and preserved, a sola vi Dei, by the sole power of God alone?'

Zenianthe spoke: 'And of lovers? Will you not think a lover has power?'

'Love,' said that aged man, 'is vis Dei. There is no other power.'

'And to serve Her,' said Campaspe, still sitting on her heels, still playing on the floor, '(I have heard you say it): no other wisdom.'

'To shine as stars into everlastingness,' said that hamadryad princess, still looking in the fire.

For a few minutes none spoke, none stirred, save only for Campaspe's playing her little game. Lessingham, upon the stairs, noted how the learned doctor, as old men will, was fallen asleep where he sat. Campaspe, noting it too, softly swept up her cards. She stood for a moment looking at him so sleeping, then on tiptoe came and bent over him and, very prettily and sweetly, kissed his forehead. Anthea, turning in her sleep, put up a hand and touched his face. Lessingham very quietly came down the stairs behind them and so from the stair-foot to the door. Only Zenianthe, sitting quite still, turned her head to watch him as he passed.

Lessingham went out and shut the door behind him and stood alone with that garden and the summer night. Under stars of June he stood now, in an awareness like to that which once before he had known, upon that night of feasting in her Rialmar: as then before the pavane, a hardening of sensual reality and a blowing away of dreams. Only no hardness was in this lily-scented night: only some perfection; wherein house and slumbering garden and starry sky and the bower of radiance southeastward where the moon, unseen, was barely risen behind Zenianthe's oak-woods, seemed now to flower into a beauty given them before all everlastingness. Slowly between sleeping flower-beds he walked to the eastern end of that garden and stood watching the top leaves of the oak-trees fill with the moon-rise. In the peace of it he remembered him of someone, not Campaspe, that had sat so a-nights upon heels before the fire, playing and talking and listening all at once: a strange accomplishment he thought now, and had thought so then: but as to speak of when, or who, the gentle night, as if it knew well but would not say the answer, held its peace in a slumbrous-ness of moon-dimmed stars.

He looked again at her windows. There, which had a minute before been empty, and no light within, he beheld her upon the balcony: facing the moon. From his place in the deep shade of a yew-tree, he watched her: Antiope: all in white. It was as if she stood upon no firm substance but on some water-wave, the most adored beauty that ever struck amazement in the world. Almost in disbelief, as if night had 'spoken, he heard her speak: 'You, my lord? standing there?'

Slowly he came towards her. As spread out upon some deepening of the stillness and the blessedness, the long churr of a nightjar sounded near. It ended, purring down like the distant winding of a clock, into silence. ‘I could not sleep,' he answered, under her window.

'Nor I,' said she. All being seemed now to draw to her, as lode-stones to the lode-star, or to a whirlpool's placid centre the waters which swirl round it and their floating freight, both of the quick and of the dead.

'Nor you?' said Lessingham. 'What is here, to inquiet your mind?'

Her answer came as upon a catch in her breath: 'Deep waters, I think.'

The wistaria blossoms hung like heavy grape-bunches below her balcony: the limbs of the tree, lapped about and crushed in the grip of their own younger growths, showed gnarled and tortuous under the moon. ‘I think,' Lessingham said, 'I am broken with the fall of such as climb too high.'

Again the nightjar trilled. Upon his left, sudden and silent it slipped from the branch where it had lain. He felt it circle about his head: heard the strange wild cry, Pht! Pht! saw it swoop and circle, its body upright as it flew, its wings, as it flew, uplifted like a great moth's that alights or like a bat's: heard the clap of its wings: heard Antiope's voice as in a dream, or as the summer night stirring in the wistaria's pendent blooms: 'There is a remedy: to climb higher.'

He took one step and stood quivering like a dagger struck into a table. 'Ha!' he said. 'If master but now, yet now am I water-weak.' Then in a sudden alteration, 'Tempt me not, madonna. In action I was ever a badger: where I do bite I will make my teeth meet.'

He heard her say, as a star should lean to the sea, 'What boots it me to be Queen? O think too,' her voice faded: '—howsoever they may seem chanceful,—are yet by God.'

The swinging heavy blossoms, brushing his face and beard, blinded him as he came up. Standing before her in that balcony, looking down into her eyes that were unreadable in the warm and star-inwoven darkness, 'Who are you?' he said in a breath without voice. 'Sometimes I hardly know,' she said, leaning back as if in a giddiness against the window-frame, her hands holding her breast. 'Except there was a word,' she said, 'written inside a ring, HMETEPA.—'Las,' she said, ‘I remembered; but it is gone.'

'And I remember,' said Lessingham. 'To say, ours: ours: of all things, ours: of you and me, beyond all chanceableness of fortune.' Sometimes so in deep summer will a sudden air from a lime-tree in flower lift the false changing curtain, and show again, for a brief moment, in unalterable present, some mountain top, some lamp-lighted porch, some lakeside mooring-place, some love-bed, where time, transubstantiate, towers to the eternities. "Tis gone!' he said. 'But you'—her body in his arms was as the little crimple-petalled early-flowering iris that a rough breath can crush. He felt her hands behind his head: heard her say, in breaks, into his very lips, I cannot give you myself: I think I have no self. I can give you All.'

Through the wide-flung casements of Antiope's bedchamber in that wayside house came the golden-sandalled dawn: the sky gold, and without cloud, and the sun more golden than gold in the midst of it. The Queen said, at Lessingham's side, 'Thanks, my lord, I'll take my reins again.' As she gathered them, the thud of galloping hooves came down the whinflower-scented air behind them, and Tyarchus and Zenianthe, knee to knee, with Amaury thundering close upon their heels swept round the turn from behind the screening birch-woods.

They were nearing Rialmar when Lessingham found means of speaking with her in private. It had been late afternoon when they turned homewards, and now, the autumn day closing in early, the sun was setting. On their right, two-horned Rialmar was lifted up dark and unas-saultable against clouds that drifted down the west. The air was full of the crying of sea-mews. Southward, the wash of the sea answered from bay to bay. The blue smoke of houses and their twinking lamps showed about Rialmar town. Far as the eye could see from the eastern highlands round to Rialmar, the clouds were split level with the horizon. The dark lower layer was topped as if with breaking waves of a slate-dark purple, and in the split the sky showed pink, golden, crimson, apple-green. Above the clouds, a rosy flush thrilled the air of the western heavens, even to the zenith, where the overarching beginnings of night mixed it with dusk. The turf beneath them as they rode was a dull grey green: the whinbushes and thornbushes black and blurred. Lessingham looked at the Queen where she rode beside him: the cast of her side-bended eye: the side of her face, Greek, grave, unconscious of its own beautifulness. He said: 'I had a dream.'

But she, with a kind of daybreak in her eyes very soberly looking into his: 'I am not learned to understand these matters; but 'twas not dreaming,' she said. 'I was there, my friend.'