by E R Eddison
It was Zapheles had spoken. Now Medor: 'Why might not he be called upon as fitly as you or me? He is lieutenant of Reisma.'
'Just: and by what principle of merit?'
'The man is noble: in all kind of civility well brought up.'
'I grant you. And a notable wise fellow until he speaks. This too I have marked: his garments do sit upon him must feater of late, since he is become the great Chancellor's brother-in-law.'
‘Beware lest you become a common laughing-stock,' said Melates, making a third: 'wearing your ill will on your sleeve so much, when 'tis know you yourself did put in for that place.'
'What? of brother-in-law?'
'Of Reisma.'
'I retail you but the ordinary chit-chat in Zayana. Women, Melates, are mala necessaria, stepping-stones to fortune in this world. Unless indeed, being well wedded, we be over jealous of 'em: there can be danger in that, a were wise to consider. Our sweet young Duke was not wont of old to dwell weeks together in's mother's court 'Tis a bye-word now how my lord Chancellor—'
'I'll leave you,' said Medor shortly. Morville, withdrawn his most under the yew-tree, held in his breath while Medor flung out and past him within a yard.
The sound of their talk receded Morville with stealth and circumspection came out of his hiding-place, and so fetching a circle back through the pleasance and round to the poplar-grove and lily-pond, waited a minute and so came openly over the lawns to the gate-house again: took horse there, and rode for home. Not so skilfully avoiding observation, howsoever, but that Medor, chancing to glance through a window on his way to the Duke's lodging, saw him go and the manner of his going.
Medor being admitted found the Duke his master sitting in his shirt, writing a letter. 'Your grace means to ride to Rumala?'
'No,' answered he, still writing.
Medor raised his eyebrows.
'Stand not on ceremony, good Medor, but sit you down. Eat a peach: peaches of Reisma.' Medor took one from the silver dish. 'They are freestone,' said the Duke, who held one half-eaten in his left hand while he wrote: 'easier to manage one-handed.' He ended his letter: signed it. 'Strike a light: ‘I’ll seal it,' he said, taking off his ring. 'You must take this letter, put it into the King's hand (Gods send he live for ever) with my love and duty. He will understand.'
‘You will stay behind?' Medor lighted a candle. 'Do not' .
'Reach me the sealing-wax yonder. Why?'
'Tongues are at work already. Heaven forfend I should pry into your grace's secrets; but, if you are bent as they say—''"They say? What say they? They have said. Let them say".'
'I do beseech you, dear my lord Duke, walk warily.'
Barganax with a delicate precision made a round of the melted wax and sealed the letter. He looked up in Medor's eye: a laughing look, but no more than thus far to be played with. He pushed the letter across the table to Medor. 'Well, well,' he said, 'speak on hardly. What's the matter?'
'Morville was here but now.'
The Duke shrugged his shoulders.
'Slinked in a hidden corner whence he overheard Zapheles talk broadly of these conjectures. I, leaving 'em, saw him couched there at eavesdropping. I think he misdoubted not of me, but supposed himself unobserved. Is gone now in a strange haste from Memison, as myself did see by chance from a window. I think a may be expected foully bent.'
'Pish!' said the Duke. 'I regard him not.'
'It is not for me to unease your grace. But if you are set to carry on in this course, as now the text of all talk is both here and in Zayana, I pray you think if it be not better deal with him first ere he in his raging motions let drive at you.'
Barganax said in a scorning, 'An eagle does not quarry upon flies. Moreover/ he said, 'your misgiving falls to nought by what's in that letter in your hand. Neither this nor Rumala sees me to-night. I am for Acrozayana.'
Morville, soon as come down from Memison into the highway that runs here under an overarching of ancient oak-trees, put his horse to a gallop. At the outfields of his own demesne of Reisma he leapt from saddle: tethered his horse: took a turn east-about through the woods, and so to a sunk lane betwixt hedges of hazel and beech and whitehorn and sloe, all overgrown with honeysuckle and that tangling white-starred weed called love-bind: so by a gap in the hedge into the mains, and privily by way of the apple orchard and the stable yard to the back of the house: so in: search the rooms: then up the back stairs, and, with a bounce, into his lady's chamber.
She was sat before her looking-glass, in her hair, and clad but in one under-frock without sleeves, of fine white silk broidered with Meszrian lace. The lieutenant checked for an instant, one hand upon the door-latch, as reft momentarily of thought and sense by the sudden dazzle of her beauty. She looked round at him. 'You might have knocked ere you came in. Leave is light.'
'You are alone, it seems.'
'Is that so strange?'
‘I came but to acquaint you, madam, word's come this morning I must with others north to the Ruyar, to bring the King's highness with a guard of honour down to Sestola. We are to meet him, and your noble brother and the Vicar too besides, it seemeth, to-night at Ru-mala: to-morrow, 'tis supposed, back to Memison. I'm loth to leave you,' he said, looking narrowly about the chamber. 'We ride an hour before noon.' He waited, then said, 'Are not you glad of this?'
'Why should I be glad or sorry?'
'This is an honour, their sending for me.'
Tm glad, then.'
'I had rather you said "I care not" than such a poor frosty "I'm glad".'
'Since you prefer it, then, "I care not".'
'Has it ever bethought you,' he said, standing now in the window looking out, face averted, his fingers twisting and untwisting at his belt, 'seeing I love you and dote on you as the apple of my eye, that it were a small favour to wish you take some regard of me and my affairs? Even love me a little in return, perhaps, as honest wives commonly do the husband that so love and dote on them.'
‘I see small virtue in that: to be so amorous and besotted on me. It is merely that you cannot otherwise choose.'
'It is a high and pure love,' said Morville, turning with the suddenest movingest strange humility. But Fiorinda but curled her lip, that carried no trace now of that seducing mouth-dweller, keeper of the stings and sweets of darkness, that, under Morville's jealous eye that same morning, had gazed after Barganax. 'A high and pure love? O manifestly so!' she said: 'breeding jealousy, jars, and complaints as a dunghill breeds slugs and flies and maggots.'
'Why will you be so odious and despiteful?' ‘I have better cause to ask, why came you so unmannerly sudden but now into my bedchamber?' 'Why came the Duke to Reisma last night?' 'Ask him. How should I know?'
'His fashions displease. I like neither his carriage nor his company.'
Well, tell him so, if you will. It concerns not me.'
'May fortune one day I will tell him. Mean time, this may concern you: had I found him in my house this morning, I would not a been in his best jerkin for twenty thousand ducats.'
She fell into a laughing. 'O husbands and brothers! The flattering tables of your pricings!' A flight of butterflies passed by the window on the breeze: an ever-changing curling train of seven or eight unstable scraps or motes of whiteness, wreathing and unwreathing and wreathing again on the sunlit air. 'What you have, you bought,' she said. 'Be content with what you paid for. But you bought not me. I am not for sale: least of all to little men. What have you to do with what visits time, but belongs to eternity?'
'You are his strumpet.' As if for the wasting of her heart's blood, Morville whipped out his dagger: then, as she rose up now and faced him, threw it down and stood, his countenance distort. There seemed to be shed suddenly about that lady a chill and a remoteness beside which a statue were companionable human flesh, and the dead marble's stillness kindly and human beside that stillness. He struck her across the mouth with his glove, saying, in that extreme, 'Go your gait, then, you salt bitch.'
Her face, all s
ave the smouldering trail of that blow turned bloodless white. 'This may be your death,' she said.
But Morville went from the room like a man drunk, for the galling and blistering of his eyes with broken tears; and so from the house; and so to horse.
XI
Night—Piece: Appassionato
DUKE BARGANAX, while these things were fresh at Reisma, was already gone for Zayana: his folk a mile ahead with the baggage, himself riding alone. Every summer sound as he came on, of wind-stirred leafage, birds singing, becks falling, ran divisions on the tune of Loth to depart. He rode at a slowed idle pace, twenty miles south now from Memison and twenty yet before him. Whiles he shifted, as if the saddle chafed him: whiles, cursed aloud; and then, as it were to be spectator, not undergoer, of the comedy, laughed at himself. Here, where the road, high above the head waters of this southernmost arm of Reisma Mere, goes level for at last half mile along the shelf of Kephalanthe and thence rises steeply to the water-shed, he drew to a halt. Betwixt the road and the crag's lip that overhangs the lake, cedar-trees spread a roof, spiss, dense, high-raftered, beneath which the sun's glare entered but as attenuate pale shafts, clear-outlined as glass, motionless to the sight, save for a drowsed motion within them of floating specks which they kindled to dust of gold. The Duke dismounted, loosed girths, let her go graze, and sat down under the trees to rest. It was now the great heat of the day, but the air hung cool under that ceiling of cedar-fronds, and of a spice-laden sweetness. He fell asleep.
It was very still under the trees. A red mouse ran out, sat up to wash his face with his little paws, and went about his affairs unconcerned, scuttering once or twice within an inch of Barganax's boot. A Jennie wren scolded in the brake. As the afternoon wore, a party of long-tailed tits passed through by stages, hanging upside down on the cedar-twigs, filling the air with their tiny pipings. Two young hares came by, and stopped to play. By imperceptible slow degrees the sunbeams took a less steep incline. And now, as it drew on towards evening, two came walking between the trees from the northward as it were two nymphs of the waters and wildernesses, each with her arm about the other's waist. Their dresses, of fine gauzy stuff kilted almost to the knee, sliimmered to all greys and greens of distance and whitenesses of snowfield or watersmeet. Light was their tread, scarce bending the grass beneath them; and the little things of the wild, as if knowing them familiarly, took but a hop or step aside as they passed.
'Look, sister,' said she that was little and dark and with beady black eyes: 'a sleeping man.'
'Is it him we were sent after?'
'Are your lynx-eyes become beetle's eyes that you perceive not that?'
'His face is from us,' replied the taller. Slender she was as some cattish creature of the mountains, and the colouring of her deep hair was as fire of gold. 'Besides, I ne'er yet spoke with him face to face. Nor did you neither, sister.'
'No, but I know him by frame and fashion: arms and legs well lengthened and strengthed after the proportions of his body, which is proportioned as a God's. And he is colour-de-roy, too: his hair at least. Come softly till we see his face: I have looked on that Duke, sister, from betwixt the bulrushes, when he little thought 'twas such as me, so innocently beholding him. Come softly. Yes, it is he, it is he.'
They stood a minute looking at Barganax asleep, as reremice at the bright beams of the clear sun. Then Anthea said, 'I'd have known him by his likeness to the Duchess his mother, only with a something straining or biting as ginger: more self-liked and fierce. What was the command to you?'
'When my lady's grace hath dressed this evening, to bring him to come sup at her house.'
'And what to follow? Lie and look babies in one another's eyes? See, he smiles in his sleep. "At pleasure now on stars empireth he"!'
'Sleep is a spying-hole unto man', said Campaspe. 'Did you hear, sister? he spoke her name in his sleep.'
'Let me consider him in his sleep, sister. You'd have thought there's more than mortal blood swells these veins. And even with the lids closed, as now, there is a somewhat betwixt his eyes, ay, in the whole countenance of him: a somewhat unfaint and durable, such as I ne'er saw till now in mortal man, but in them of our kind is never distracted either from soul or body. And firely and openly he burned with fire of love.'
'See how unsettledly he searches about sideways with his hand. He speaks her name again.'
'I warrant that hand,' said Anthea, 'is a finder of the right way to heaven.'
After a little, Campaspe said, with her liquid naiad voice, 'Whether think you better sport to wake him now, or give him our message while he sleeps? speak it into his dreams?'
'This is a fine toy: let's try it. W can speak wider so.' 'Which shall speak it?'
‘Both, by turns. Then he shall taste in his dreams the true sharps and sweets of it,' said Anthea, and smiled with a white gleam of teeth.
'Which shall begin?'
'I will.—Salutation, my lord Duke. We be two waiting-maids unto my Lady Fiorinda in Reisma. And my lady said this morning that, in her seeming, red men be treacherous and full of quaintness and likened to foxes.'
‘But then, she said,' said Campaspe, 'your grace was liker a lion than a fox.'
'And sitting so in her starry loveliness, with her breasts unbraced, she said: "That would have stood the Duke of Zayana in far more stead, to have kissed the dogged-ness out of me, 'stead of, when I bade him go, go indeed. For I already had, truly I think, a certain smackering towards him. And such thing as man's heart is most on," said she, "and that these weeks past he hath made great suit unto me for, indeed I begin to think I'd liever let him have it than any man born".'
'No, no! that was never in the patent.'
Anthea laughed. 'Timorous scrupulosities! 'Twas meant, if it were not said.—"And that," said my lady, "is why to-night I have requested his company at supper. For indeed matters stood altogether unadvanced 'twist me and the Duke, until the jealous ass my husband—'
'—"who is the miserablest young raw puttock that e'er waited slugging on his bed for day,—'
'—"this very morning, after many circumstances too long to trattle on now, gave me a smite in the face".'
‘Fie, sister! my lady would burst sooner than avouch that fact.'
‘I know,' replied Anthea. ‘But is a kind of charmed sour mare's-milk very forcible to turn the brain.—"And I told him," says my lady, "that my lord and lover the Duke would doubtless make a capon of him therefor before he had done with him".—Go on, sister.'
"In token whereof,' said Campaspe, ‘I shall wear for the Duke to-night," says she, "my silken gown coloured of red corn-rose".'
'"And for the more conveniency, 'cause I think the night will be close," says she, "I'll wear no undergarment".'
'O sister! We've spoke beyond our licence, and most part, I fear, untrue. This bald unjointed chat of yours! Will you think the Duke heard it indeed in his dream? And will be remember it when he wakes? Truly I hope not'
' 'Twill do no hurt, silly flindermouse. What skills it? so only but— one desire May both their bloods give an imparted fire!
'Sister, sister! clacketing out this nonsense, we've left the principal errand unsaid.' 'What's that?'
‘My lord Duke, in your dreams: we were to inform your grace directly, my lady sleeps alone to-night, the lieutenant being from home.'
'O my stars, yes! that's more to the purpose than all.'
'Come off, sister, and make an end. I think he's waking.'
'One word of my own then, to bid him adieu.—Wear a good glove, I counsel you, my lord Duke, for your falcon-gentle straineth hard.'
'Away, he opens his eyes.'
Barganax. sat up, wide awake on the instant, swiftly looking about him. No living thing was to be seen, save but on a branch close by, touched with the beams of the westerning sun, a peggy-whitethroat trilling her sweet unbodied lay with its dying fall; and below her, in an outcropping of grey rock by a cedar's foot, an elegant lynx with speckled fur, tufted ears erect, and eyes that
had upright slits for-pupils. The Duke leapt to his feet. Every line of his body, and every muscle of his face, seemed to tighten as with some resolve gathering weight from within-wards, unrestrainable as a great tide coming in the high sea-springs of the year. Both creatures, the one with fiery the other with timid bead-like eye, as he stood there motionless, returned him look for look. 'I have dreamed of dream. Unformed stars,' he said. 'Small stake makes cold play. But no more of that.' With a flutter of olive-yellowish breast and wing the little bird flew. The lynx in the same instant bounded away through the undergrowth, graceful in her leap as an oread in the skyish summits at point of day. Barganax whistled his mare: she came, muzzled his neck below the ear. 'Come, child,' he said as he tightened the girths and then jumped into the saddle, ‘We must ride: we must ride.'
Day was near spent when the Duke came at a hand-gallop to the ford by the footbridge. Here -he halted to let her drink. On the further side the land rises gradually to level stretches wooded with oak and holm-oak, through which the road winds a mile or so, and then, upon a sharp turn southeast, runs straight for a last two hundred yards in a tunnel of these trees and so out again into the open, and so down by gently sloping moory ground to the mains of Reisma. As the Duke rode into that straight, the beams shooting level through the wood from behind him struck red fire-marks on the tree-boles in front. Ahead, the end of the wood was as an arched gateway opening out of gloom upon field and champaign bathed drenched and impregnate with the red sun's glory. And seen full in that archway, in the mid distance as in a picture framed, groves of tall cypresses siding it left and right, stood the house. It shone in the last rays like a casket lifted up against the updrawing curtain of dark night, and lit by the fires of some jewel unprizable cased within it As Barganax drew near to that house of Reisma the sun set, and there came upon the land and air a strange uncustomed alteration. For, out of the baked earth of that evening of deep summer, smells of spring began to prick his nostrils as he rode; quinces and cherry-trees showed white through the dusk, under their traceries of pale sweet blossom; and out of short and springy turf young daffodil leaves rose excitedly like fingers, thick stiff and tense with the sap putting upward, and wet with dew. And, as the shadow of approaching night began to creep up the sky behind Reisma and the great snow ranges afar, the heavy obscurities of the strawberry-trees were filled with a passion of nightingales. In this out-of-rule mutation and unfashioning of July to April, only the heavenly bodies were some warrant of constancy, even the unsteadfast moon floating where she ought to do, all rose-colour to-night, low in the southeast among the dim stars of Sagittarius, a day or two short of her full.