by E R Eddison
The King’s countenance seemed as a pouring down of black darkness from the sky, where all else becomes undiscernable, even to the stars whose operations make the fortunes and the destinies of men. ‘Some things,’ he said, ‘be provable, some unprovable. I know not how many principal members there be and how many unprincipal. I say (and that not without sufficient evidence of your own letters) that you came hither confederated to work an utter mischief against my estate, that am your King and Lord. What reason had you for such ingratitudes and undeserved unkindness? – You, Gilmanes? That four years ago I spared your life at the suit of your grey beard, and ever since have too patiently borne with your harsh government and cruelties used against my liege-men? But your ungracious and unheard wickedness shall come down upon your own pate. – You, Arquez? In hope that, if the realm were but turmoiled and shaken, your oppressing of your neighbours might have easy scope? It will come to fifty thousand ducats that you have robbed of my good subjects; but now is your audit near. – You, Qavius? Because time and again my hand has opened bounty to you, but, for all that, you have remained our well proved evil willer, and, as we see, a fool besides and a dastard.
‘I bid you, therefore,’ he said to the Vicar, ‘let me see the three heads off, of Clavius, Arquez, and Gilmanes, before either any man else go from this room or come into it. Olpman’s too: should have been. Second bite, after I’d pardoned him his share in Valero’s rebellion: it was too much. But the rat your secretary saved us that trouble. Stathmar I’d have spared. A good man, but unfit, after this, to be in the land, considering too he held the government and sway of so high a place. Him I’d have banished. But Fate, you see, hath banished him further than I could.’
For a minute there was dead silence. Then the Vicar motioned to Gabriel. ‘Work for you to try your hand on. You have the King’s warrant. Creep into them.’ Gabriel took up his sword and stepped forward, trying the edge with his thumb. The Vicar said again, ‘Creep into them, basset.’
But Clavius began to scream out against the Vicar: ‘What of yonder cruel devil, that bred all our miseries? Setter on of all this, the arch-rebel himself—?’
‘Hold!’ said the Vicar like a thunder-crack, and Gabriel lowered his blade, swung hastily for the blow.
‘—Spoke to us, King,’ shouted Clavius, ‘’ere you came in: a seditious discourse farsed full of unfitting words, bordering on such strange designs that had made me haste forth, but that in the nick of time your serene highness fortunately coming in—’
The Vicar’s face was scarlet: his regard inscrutable as stone. But in the King’s eyes there but flickered an ironic smile. He snapped his fingers: ‘Why are their heads not dealt with?’ and Gabriel speedily dealt with them, having off the head first of Clavius, then of Arquez (at two strokes, for the fatness of his neck); last, of Gilmanes.
‘Your secretary, I see,’ said the King, taking the Lord Horius Parry by the arm now and causing him to go with him out into the open air, ‘hath some pretty fetches: beyond what commonly we look to a learned clerk to do. Well, a fair riddance,’ he said, as they stood now alone under the starry sky, their eyes not yet used to the darkness. ‘Such men, alive or dead, lack substantial being: are a kind of nothing. Except Stathmar (whom I slew for indeed he gave me no choice) I’ll be sorry for none of them: discard ’em as not worth the holding.
‘But now, as for you, cousin: procurer and speciallest contriver – nay, deny it not – of all this horrible treason. What have these done to be destroyed if you go free?’
There was a strange stillness came upon the great muscles of the Parry’s arm, locked in the strong arm of the King. Out of the masking darkness he answered and said, ‘Your serene highness hath not a tittle of evidence there against me.’
‘No. I said, you are not a fool.’
‘And besides, it is something, I’d a thought, that I saved your highness’s life.’
‘And why?’ said the King. ‘Why did you that?’
They were pacing now, with slow deliberate steps, away from the house. It was as if, for a minute, under the undark summer darkness, blood talked to blood in the unquiet silence of their linked arms. Then the Vicar gave a strange awkwardish little laugh. ‘This is scarce the moment,’ he said, ‘to ask your serene highness to swallow gudgeons. I could give you a dozen specious untrue reasons you’d disbelieve. Truth is, with the suddenness and unknownness of your coming, I know not why I did it. If I had but a little backed my hand—’
The King took him by either shoulder, and stood a minute staring down into his face. There was light enough, of starshine and that luminosity which lingers at this time of year in a kind of twilight all night long, to betray a most strange uncustomed look of the Vicar’s eyes: almost such a look as himself was used to meet in the eyes of Gabriel Flores. The King began to laugh: the Vicar too. ‘Truth is,’ said the King, ‘thinking of the matter unappassionately, there’s something so glues me and you together as neither life nor death shall unglue us. Which you, my most wolvy and most foxy sergeant major general of all the Devil’s engineers, are not able to forget when my eye is upon you (according to the old saying, ex visu amor). But when you are too much left to yourself, you are sometimes prone to forget it.’
‘I’ll swear to your serenity,’ said the Vicar, ‘by all the dreadfullest oaths you shall require me of—’
‘Spare your oaths,’ said the King, ‘and your invention. I and you do well understand each other: let it rest at that. Indeed, and more of your lies might try my temper. Send that little jackal of yours to call up your men you told me of: explain the miscarriage of these five noble persons within there how you will. Take the credit of it to yourself if you like: I grudge it you not. Good night, cousin. And ponder you well the lesson I have read you this evening. There is my horse, tied by the gate there.’
‘But your highness’s men?’ said the Vicar bringing the King’s horse with his own hand.
‘I told you already, I am alone.’ He leapt into the saddle lightly as man of five and twenty.
‘Alone?’ said the Vicar and stood staring, ‘Nay,’ he said, ‘but I thought—’
‘Are you in truth, cousin,’ said the King, gathering his reins, ‘so universal a liar as you end by seeing a lie in truth herself, even presented to you stark naked? As the drunkard that swallowed the true live frog in his beer-mug, supposing it but such another fantasm as he was customed to? Good night.’
‘Alone?’ said the Vicar again, in himself, as the hoof-beats of the King’s departing died away, leaving behind here only a great stillness and the night. ‘Go, I believed it within there ’mong those timorous and unthankful vipers. As well, perhaps, that I did. And yet: truth unbusked and naked, considered another way – might a tickled me up to what I’d now a been sorry for. And now – thinking on’t in cold blood – go, ’tis a thing not believable!’
VIII
LADY MARY LESSINGHAM
IT was now the twenty-fourth of June, nineteen hundred and fourteen, at Wolkenstein in the Grödner Dolomites, nine o’clock, and a morning without cloud. Up in the sky, beyond church-spire and river and meadow and chalet and rolling pasture and pine-forest and grass-smooth steep-going alp, hung the walls of the Sella. Seen through that haze of air and the down-shedding radiance of the sun, the millions upon millions of tons of living rock seemed as if refined away to an immateriality of aery outsides, luminous, turquoise-shadowed, paler and thinner than thin clouds, yet immovable and sharp-outlined like crystal. It was as if slab, gully, scree-slope, buttress, and mile-long train of precipice wall, cut off from all supports of earth and washed of all earthy superfluities which belong to appearances subject to secular change, stood revealed in their vast substantiality; the termless imperishable eidolon, laid up in Heaven, of all these things.
On the terrace before the inn, people were breakfasting at a dozen little tables. Here a lime-tree, there a wide umbrella striped white and scarlet, made its pool of shade upon green-and-white chequered table-cloth, gr
avel, and paved walk. Outside these shades, all was drenched with sunlight. Here and there, a glass ball, blue, yellow, or plain silver, the size of a man’s fist and having a short bottle-neck to take the top of the bamboo stick that supported it, gleamed among the rose-trees to rebate the glance of witches. All the time, amid the clink of breakfast things, was the coming and going, strong and graceful upon their feet, of the inn-keeper’s two daughters: capable, self-possessed, with a native ease of manner and an infectious laughter, charming to look at in their red petticoats, many-coloured aprons, Tyrolean blouses of white linen, and embroidered belts with clasps of silver. Underneath all the sounds and movements was an undersound of waters falling, and, closer at hand, a hum overhead of bees in the lime-trees which put out at this season their delicate sweet-smelling pendant flowers. And, an intoxication of lilies to make eddies of these simplicities, sat Mary: by herself at an outer table, part in sun part in shadow.
There seemed a morning coolness, dew upon an ungathered lily, to rest upon her sitting there, unconscious, to all appearance, of the many pairs of eyes that having once looked could not but look again, as bees drawn (fly where they can) still to the honey-dropping of Aganippe’s fount. Unregarding these looks, she now ate a piece of bread and honey; now (as if the little girl awoke anew in her to usurp the woman) dipped sugar in her coffee, and sucked and dipped and sucked again; now shaded her eyes to look up to the pale tremendous outlines afar of those dolomite walls under the sun.
Upon the sound from indoors of a voice among the many voices, she looked up. To a careless eye’s beholding, scarcely she seemed to move the least lineament of her face. Yet to Lessingham, making his way across to her table from the clematis-shadowed door of the coffee-room, there was in some hardly perceptible quickening of her body and its every seen or unseen half-suggested grace, a private welcome that thrilled upwards as the lark ascending welcomes day. He took a chair and sat down facing her, himself in the full glare of the sun. He was in his travelling-clothes. They both laughed. ‘My dear Señorita, how extraordinary to run across you here, of all places!’
‘Most extraordinary. And most embarrassing!’
‘Of course I can understand that this is the last place in the world you’d expect to see me.’
‘The last in the world. So metropolitan. Much more natural to meet you in that shocking Georgian village in Suanetia: years ago – you remember? The year after I was married.’
‘You? married? How distressing! Did I know it at the time?’
‘Behaved as if you didn’t.’
‘O I shall always do that. Do you mind?’
‘I think I prefer it,’ Mary said, and her foot touched his under the table. ‘We must be careful what we say. (Don’t look round) – the gentleman behind you, with not one blade of hair on him: I’m a great puzzle to him. I’m sure this will make him draw the worst conclusions. A German gentleman, I think. He was in the train two days ago, coming up from Bozen. Had a curious stammer, and every time he stammered he spat. His wife has quite decided I’m the scarlet woman: shameless English hussy gadding about like this alone.’
The elder of the girls brought Lessingham’s coffee: ‘And a large cup,’ she said, putting it down with a flourish.
‘What a memory you have, Paula!’
‘O well, but some things one remembers.’
‘Are we to have the schuhplattler dance tonight?’ said Mary. ‘You and Andreas? I expect you’ve got all the steps now?’
The girl laughed. ‘Tomorrow, it may be. Tonight, no, no. Tonight, some dancers from Vienna. We do not like them. But father say they can come once.’
‘Why don’t you like them?’
Paula screwed up her nose and shook herself. ‘They are not as should be,’ she said. Too saucy – I must get you some more butter: some more honey.’ She went about it, direct as a water-hen hastens across a lawn to fetch food for its young.
‘Herr Birkel is a pet,’ said Mary. ‘Tearful excitement when I arrived. Took my hand in both his. “Welcome, My Lady. You are taller, I think, than ever.” – And then, ever so confidential and intense – “And prettier!”’
‘Perfectly true. Even in ten days.’
‘Ten days! It seems like ten months. Or – some ways – ten minutes. You look very spry and wide awake after your all-night journey.’
‘Slept my berserk sleep out at Waidbruck: thirty-one hours solid. Hadn’t had a wink for five nights. Woke up about midnight: dined, or rather breakfasted, on soup, an omelette, Wiener schnitzel, a bit of Hansl and Gretl cake, red wine, coffee: made them produce a chariot: and here I am.’
‘I was so glad of your telegram,’ said Mary. ‘So all went well in Paris?’
‘In the end. Only way – wear them down. Thing wanted tidying up: two years now since poor Fred went, and still hanging about with loose ends. So I just had to hold their noses to it till they signed what I wanted: just to get rid of me. Quite as amusing as fighting the Bulgarians. Much more amusing than Berlin in nineteen-twelve. – Hullo, who’s this?’ – as a tiny white kitten clambered up the wooden balustrade and so onto Mary’s lap.
‘Mitzi,’ said she, handing it across the table to Lessingham. ‘The fact is, you like to be in charge.’
‘I wrote to your father from Paris as soon as the thing was through; and to Jim, as your trustee. Told him there’s two sums of twelve hundred thousand to go into trust: one under our marriage settlement, the other for you personally. Together, about a third of the whole. That’s in case some day I go crazy with all this money business: take to high finance and burn my fingers. Do you think it’s some bad blood coming out?’
Mary smiled. ‘There’s never any telling! The Medici blood, reason enough, I should think.’
‘Sounds nicer. Still, if it has the same effect? You know, I wouldn’t really like to spend my life money-grubbing. Not really,’ Lessingham said, holding up the kitten in his right hand where it sat as if in an armchair, and bringing it nearer and nearer to his face. ‘Not really, really, really.’ Mitzi, as if mesmerized, kept very still, staring at him out of eyes of that dawn-like blue that belongs to the eyes of little kittens; then, when he was near enough, put out a hesitating velvety paw to touch Lessingham on the cheek. ‘Have we the same room as then?’
‘Haven’t you been to look?’
‘Do you think I’d waste time on that, when they told me you were on the terrace?’
‘Well, we have,’ she said. ‘And your dressing-room next door.’
‘Do they blow the horn still at half past six, for them to open the doors for the beasts to go out to pasture?’
‘Yes. And one microscopic child to drive them!’
‘Want your wuzz again?’
She held out both hands: took the little creature. Lessingham lighted a cigar. They said no more for a few minutes; using perhaps the mountains, and the village life about them, and the bodily sight of each other sitting there, as a directer medium than overt speech.
After a while, he spoke. ‘Have you ever felt double inside?’
‘No,’ she answered, upon a note part mocking part caressing in her voice, as though ‘No’ were washed with honey-water.
‘One half all Ambitioso: set the whole world to rights and enslave mankind. The other half, all Lussurioso and Supervacuo: makes me want to abduct you to some undiscovered south sea-island of the blest, and there, paint, write, live on sweetmeats: spend the whole course of everlasting time in the moving and melancholy meditation that man’s life is as unlasting as a flower. Instead of either of which,’ he said, getting up from the table, ‘how about taking our lunch up to the Sella Pass?’
Doctor Vandermast, a learned man, present secretary and foretime tutor to the Duke of Zayana, was walking at break of day under Memison, by a trodden path south-eastward along the lake’s edge, a mile or so on the way toward Reisma. It was between three and four o’clock: the twentieth morning after that secret master-stroke of the King’s in Rerek. Reisma Mere, smooth like polishe
d steel, spread to cool distances veiled in mist. Water, meadow-land, oakwood and beechwood and birch and far-off mountain ranges showed as but varying depths of that indeterminate grey, having a tremulousness within it as of awakening blue, which filled the whole sky. Only in the north-east the great peaks began to shape themselves to a gradual crystalline sharpness and to take on a more cold and azured tinge as the sky behind them became streaked with saffron, and at length, above the saffron, one or two little clouds (invisible till now) began to show purple, and to burn underneath with fire of gold. A delicate primrose-coloured light began to infuse all the east and to mirror itself in the still lake; and now, for first voice of day, the cuckoo replied to the owl’s last hoot. The learned doctor, alone with the moment while other mortals slept, stayed it by his art: made it, as he walked, tarry for him awhile to his more perfect satisfaction and enjoyment.
He had years on his back four score. And yet, being spare of build as a dragonfly, all eyes and leanness, he carried himself erect and without old age’s infirmity. Hollowed with thought were his eye-sockets under their bristling eaves, and wan and lanked with thought was his cheek, but not to take away the fire-edge of that spirit which burned in his eyes. His white beard fell to his girdle. He was clad in a flowing gaberdine, ginger colour, and upon his head a scarlet bonnet of linsey-woolsey. Suffering, by his art, time to resume its course, he paused at a footbridge across a stream that, grown up with waterweeds, barely trickled toward the lake. Under the further bank, where a thicket of alder overhung that stream, was a water-rat, sitting in a ball, holding in her little hands a bit of weed and eating it prettily, like a squirrel. The doctor bade her ‘Good morrow, mouse’; and she, with a shy glance of beady black eyes set in her round head between small short rounded ears, greeted him again, in a tiny reed-like voice but with human speech.