Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

77-85 Fulham Palace Road

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Copyright © E. R. Eddison 1935

Jacket illustration by John Howe © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 2014

E.R. Eddison asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007578139

Ebook Edition © October 2014 ISBN: 9780007578146

Version: 2014-09-09

Dedication

WINIFRED GRACE EDDISON

To you, madonna mia,

and to my friend

EDWARD ABBE NILES

I dedicate this

Vision of Zimiamvia

Proper Names the reader will no doubt pronounce as he chooses. But perhaps, to please me, he will keep the i’s short in Zimiamvia and accent the third syllable: accent the second syllable in Zayana, give it a broad a (as in ‘Guiana’), and pronouce the ay in the first syllable – and the ai in Laimak – as in ‘aisle’: keep the g soft in Fingiswold: let Memison echo ‘denizen’ except for the m: accent the first syllable in Rerek and make it rhyme with ‘year’: remember that Fiorinda is an Italian name, Amaury, Amalie, and Beroald French, and Antiope, Zenianthe, and a good many others, Greek: last, regard the sz in Meszria as ornamental, and not be deterred from pronouncing it as plain ‘Mezria’.

Mère des souvenirs, maîtresse des maîtresses,

O toi, tous mes plaisrs! ô toi, tous mes devoirs!

Tu te rappelleras la beauté des caresses,

La douceur du foyer et le charme des soirs,

Mère des souvenirs, maîtresse des maîtresses!

Les soirs illuminés par l’ardeur du charbon,

Et les soirs au balcon, voilés de vapeurs roses.

Que ton sein m’était doux! que ton cœur m’était bon!

Nous avons dit souvent d’impérissables choses

Les soirs illuminés par l’ardeur du charbon.

Que les soleils sont beaux dans les chaudes soirées!

Que l’espace est profond! que le cœur est puissant!

En me penchant vers toi, reine des adorées,

Je croyais respirer le parfum de ton sang.

Que les soleils sont beaux dans les chaudes soirées!

La nuit s’épaississait ainsi qu’une cloison,

Et mes yeux dans le noir devinaient tes prunelles,

Et je buvais ton souffle, ô douceur, ô poison!

Et tes pieds s’endormaient dans mes mains fraternelles.

La nuit s’épaississait ainsi qu’une cloison.

Je sais l’art d’évoquer les minutes heureuses,

Et revis mon passé blotti dans tes genoux.

Car à quoi bon chercher tes beautés langoureuses

Ailleurs qu’en ton cher corps et qu’en ton cœur si doux?

Je sais l’art d’évoquer les minutes heureuses!

Ces serments, ces parfums, ces baisers infinis,

Renaîtront-ils d’un gouffre interdit à nos sondes,

Comme montent au ciel les soleils rajeunis

Après s’être lavés au fond des mers profondes?

– O serments! ô parfums! ô baisers infinis!

BAUDELAIRE

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Foreword by Douglas E. Winter

THE OVERTURE

ZIMIAMVIA

I. A Spring Night in Mornagay

II. The Duke of Zayana

III. The Tables Set in Meszria

IV. Zimiamvian Dawn

V. The Vicar of Rerek

VI. Lord Lessingham’s Embassage

VII. A Night-Piece on Ambremerine

VIII. Sferra Cavallo

IX. The Ings of Lorkan

X. The Concordat of Ilkis

XI. Gabriel Flores

XII. Noble Kinsmen in Laimak

XIII. Queen Antiope

XIV. Dorian Mode: Full Close

XV. Rialmar Vindemiatrix

XVI. The Vicar and Barganax

XVII. The Ride to Kutarmish

XVIII. Rialmar in Starlight

XIX. Lightning Out of Fingiswold

XX. Thunder Over Rerek

XXI. Enn Freki Renna

XXII. Zimiamvian Night

NOTE

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

MAPS OF THE THREE KINGDOMS

ALSO BY E. R. EDDISON

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

FOREWORD
BY DOUGLAS E. WINTER

‘Is this the dream? or was that?’

WORDS create worlds: storytelling is a kind of godhood, taking the imperfect day of language, moulding it in the writer’s own image and, with skill, breathing it to life. The task is a formidable one, and it is little wonder that most fiction is content with reinventing reality, safely sculpting what is known. And why not? Stories are for the most part entertainment, ephemeral, meant only for the moment. Few novels strive for life beyond their covers; few hold us in their dominion for years, fewer still for lifetimes. The words and the worlds of E. R. Eddison, which I first discovered more than twenty years ago, still intrigue me, uplift me, haunt me, today. I know that I am not alone.

Eric Rücker Eddison (1882–1945) was a civil servant at the British Board of Trade, sometime Icelandic scholar, devotee of Homer and Sappho, and mountaineer. Although by all accounts a bowler-hatted and proper English gentleman, Eddison was an unmitigated dreamer who, in occasional spare hours over some thirty years, put his dreams to paper. In 1922, just before his fortieth birthday, a small collector’s edition of The Worm Ouroboros was published; larger printings soon followed in both England and America, and a legend of sorts was born. The book was a dark and blood-red jewel of wonder, equal parts spectacle and fantasia, labyrinthine in its intrigue, outlandish in its violence. It was also Eddison’s first novel.

After writing an adventure set in the Viking age, Styrbiorn the Strong (1926), and a translation of Egil’s Saga (1930), Eddison devoted the remainder of his life to the fantastique in a series of novels set, for the most part, in Zimiamvia, the fabled paradise of The Worm Ouroboros. The Zimiamvian books were, in Eddison’s words, ‘written backwards’, and thus published in reverse chronological order of events: Mistress of Mistresses (1935), A Fish Dinner in Memison (1941), and The Mezentian Gate (1958). (The final book was incomplete when Eddison died, but his notes were so thorough that his brother, Colin Eddison, and his friend George R. Hamilton were able to assemble the book for publication.) Although the books are known today as a trilogy, Eddison wrote them as an open-ended series; they may be read and enjoyed alone or in any sequence. Each is a metaphysical adventure, an intricate Chinese puzzle box whose twists and turns reveal ever-encircling vistas of delight and dread.

Eddison’s four great fantasies are linked by the enigmatic character of Edward Lessingham – country gentleman, soldier, statesman, artist, writer, and lover, among other talents – and his Munchausen-like adventures in space … and time. Although he disappears after the early pages of The Worm Ouroboros, Lessingham is central to the books that follow. ‘God knows,’ he tells us, ‘I have dreamed and waked and dreamed till I know not well which is dream and which is true.’ One of the pleasures of reading Eddison is that we, too, are never certain. Perhaps Lessingham is a man of our world; perhaps he is a god; perhaps he is only a dream … or a dream within a dream. And perhaps, just perhaps, he is all of these things, and more.

In a transcendent moment of The Worm Ouroboros, the Demonlords Juss and Brandoch Daha, searching desperately for their lost comrade-in-arms, Goldry Bluzco, ascend to the dizzying heights of Koshtra Pivrarcha. There, in the distance, they see paradise. Lord Juss speaks:

‘Thou and I, first of the children of men, now behold with living eyes the fabled land of Zimiamvia. Is that true, thinkest thou, which philosophers tell of that fortunate land: that no mortal foot may tread it, but the blessed souls do inhabit it of the dead that be departed, even they that were great upon earth and did great deeds when they were living, that scorned not earth and the delights and the glories thereof, and yet did justly and were not dastards nor yet oppressors?’

‘Who knoweth?’ answers Brandoch Daha. ‘Who shall say he knoweth?’

If anyone knows, it is Edward Lessingham. In the Overture to Mistress of Mistresses, we learn that old age has claimed him, his final hours watched over by a mysterious lover. Lord Juss’s question is repeated, and the reader – like Lessingham – is taken straightaway to Zimiamvia. This is neither the biblical paradise, nor that of classical mythology, but a mad poet’s dream of Northern Europe during the Renaissance. Zimiamvia is an imperfect heaven – what other kind could exist without boredom for its residents? – a Machiavellian playground for men and gods, where mystery and menace, romance and revenge, swordplay and soldiering are the natural order of things.

Three kingdoms comprise this otherworld – known, from north to south, as Fingiswold, Rerek and Meszria – and all are ruled by the wise, firm hand of King Mezentius. In Zimiamvia, Lessingham lives on, his earthly self a duality. His namesake, Lord of Rerek, is his Apollonian half – the embodiment of reason, logic, science. Lord Lessingham is cut from the same cloth as the Demon heroes of The Worm Ouroboros, a demigod and bravo, a man of action and of honour with but a single stain: kinship, and thus loyalty in blood, to Horius Parry, the ambitious Vicar in Rerek. Parry, in turn, is the scheming serpent of this enigmatic Eden, a villain extraordinaire whose instinct for treachery and terror – and for surviving to scheme again another day – is worthy of the most diabolical of devils.

Lessingham’s Dionysian qualities – magic, art, and madness – are found in Duke Barganax, bastard son of King Mezentius and his mistress Amalie, the Duchess of Memison. Barganax takes counsel in the aged yet ageless Doctor Vandermast, a mysterious Merlin who is given to spouting Spinoza and minding his lovely shapeshifting nymphs, Anthea and Campaspe. ‘My study,’ says Vandermast [in A Fish Dinner in Memison], ‘is now of the darkness rather which is hid in the secret heart of man: my office but only to understand, and to watch, and to wait.’

With the deaths of King Mezentius and his only legitimate son, Styllis – in which Parry’s perpetually bloody hand is suspect – the crown descends to the beautiful and doomed Queen Antiope, with whom, inevitably, Lord Lessingham will fall in love. The struggle for power, by wile and war and witchery, enwraps Zimiamvia in a web of passion and violence that is tangled by strange shifts of time.

‘Time,’ Eddison tells us, ‘is a curious business’, and in Zimiamvia it grows more and more curious. ‘Is this the dream?’ his characters ask, ‘or was that?’ [A Fish Dinner in Memison]. These tales are not simply written backwards, they defy most novelistic notions of time. Eddison was exceptional in his embrace of the fantastique; in his fiction there are no logical imperatives, no concessions to cause and effect, only the elegant truths of the higher calling of myth. Characters traverse distances and decades in the blink of an eye; worlds take shape, spawn life, evolve through billions of years and are destroyed, all during a dinner of fish. These are dreams made flesh by a dreamer extraordinaire.

Ten years: ten million years: ten minutes. One and the same, says Eddison, and in Zimiamvia we journey beyond the pure heroic adventure of The Worm Ouroboros into an existential-romantic quest, a speculation on the nature of woman and man, Goddess and God, reality and dream: ‘It was in that moment as if he looked through layer upon layer of dream, as though veil behind veil: the thinnest veil, natural present: the next, as if a dumb-show strangely presented by art magic’ [Mistress of Mistresses]. Eddison’s characters exist beyond time, beyond dimension, woven into a tapestry that circles and circles on itself, as abiding and eternal as its central image: the worm Ouroboros, that eateth its own tail.

‘If we were Gods, able to make worlds and unmake ’em as we list, what world would we have?’ [A Fish Dinner in Memison]. Here is the central dilemma of Zimiamvia: the nature and means of creation. Worlds within worlds, stories within stories, characters within characters, phantasms within phantasms – this is a majestic maze of mythmaking, a fiction that questions all assumptions of reality. Eddison thus proves more than a dreamer; like the very best writers of the fantastique, he saw this fiction of (im)possibilities as the truest mirror of our lives, one that shines back brightly the depths of the human spirit as well as the surfaces of the flesh.

Eddison’s prose is archaic and often difficult, an intentionally affected throwback to Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. His characters are thus eloquent but long-winded; they speak not of killing a man, but of ‘sending him from the shade into the house of darkness’ [The Worm Ouroboros]. In his finest moments, Eddison ascends to a sustained poetic beauty; listen, for example, to the haunting premonition of the renegade Goblin Gro:

‘For as I lay sleeping betwixt the strokes of night, a dream of the night stood by my bed and beheld me with a glance so fell that I was all adrad and quaking with fear. And it seemed to me that the dream smote the roof above my bed, and the roof opened and disclosed the outer dark, and in the dark travelled a bearded star, and the night was quick with fiery signs. And blood was on the roof, and great gouts of blood on the walls and on the cornice of my bed. And the dream screeched like the screech-owl, and cried, Witchland from thy hand, O King!’ [The Worm Ouroboros]

At other times the reader is virtually overwhelmed with words. Palaces and armoury were Eddison’s particular vices; he describes them with such ornate grandeur that page after page is lavished with their decoration. The reader should not be deterred by the density of such passages; like a vintage wine, a taste for Eddison’s prose is expensively acquired, demanding the reader’s patience and perseverance – and it is worthy of its price. These are books to be savoured, best read in the long dark hours of night, when the wind is against the windows and the shadows begin to walk – books not meant for the moment, but for forever.

The Zimiamvian trilogy inevitably has been compared with J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, but apart from their narrative ambition and epic sweep, the books share little in common. (Eddison, like Tolkien, disclaimed the notion that he was writing something beyond mere story: ‘It is neither allegory nor fable but a Story to be read for its own sake’ [The Worm Ouroboros’ preface]. But as the reader will no doubt observe, he proves much less convincing.)

If comparisons are in order, then I suggest Eddison’s obvious influences – Homer and the Icelandic sagas – and that most controversial of Jacobean dramatists, John Webster, whose blood-spattered tales of violence and chaos (from which Eddison’s characters quote freely) saw him chastised for subverting orthodox society and religion. The shadow of Eddison may be seen, in turn, not only in the modern fiction of heroic fantasy, but also in the writings of his truest descendants, such dreamers of the dark fantastique as Stephen King (whose own epics, The Stand and The Dark Tower, read like paeans to Eddison) and Clive Barker (whose The Great and Secret Show called its chaotic forces the Iad Ouroboros).

Eddison would have found this line of succession, like the cyclical popularity of his books, the most natural order of events: the circle, ever turning – like the worm Ouroboros, that eateth its own tail – the symbol of eternity, where ‘the end is ever at the beginning and the beginning at the end for ever more’.

Welcome to that fabled paradise, Zimiamvia: Once you have entered these words, this world, you may never leave.

DOUGLAS E. WINTER

1991

in memory of Phil Grossfield

THE OVERTURE

THE UNSETTING SUNSET • AN UNKNOWN LADY BESIDE THE BIER • EASTER AT MARDALE GREEN • LESSINGHAM • LADY MARY LESSINGHAM • MEDITATION OF MORTALITY • APHRODITE OURANIA • A VISION OF ZIMIAMVIA • A PROMISE.

LET me gather my thoughts a little, sitting here alone with you for the last time, in this high western window of your castle that you built so many years ago, to overhang like a sea eagle’s eyrie the grey-walled waters of your Raftsund. We are fortunate, that this should have come about in the season of high summer, rather than on some troll-ridden night in the Arctic winter. At least, I am fortunate. For there is peace in these Arctic July nights, where the long sunset scarcely stoops beneath the horizon to kiss awake the long dawn. And on me, sitting in the deep embrasure upon your cushions of cloth of gold and your rugs of Samarkand that break the chill of the granite, something sheds peace, as those great sulphur-coloured lilies in your Ming vase shed their scent on the air. Peace; and power; indoors and out: the peace of the glassy surface of the sound with its strange midnight glory as of pale molten latoun or orichalc; and the peace of the waning moon unnaturally risen, large and pink-coloured, in the midst of the confused region betwixt sunset and sunrise, above the low slate-hued cloud-bank that fills the narrows far up the sound a little east of north, where the Trangstrómmen runs deep and still between mountain and shadowing mountain. That for power: and the Troldtinder, rearing their bare cliffs sheer from the further brink; and, away to the left of them, like pictures I have seen of your Ushba in the Caucasus, the tremendous two-eared Rulten, lifted up against the afterglow above a score of lesser spires and bastions: Rulten, that kept you and me hard at work for nineteen hours, climbing his paltry three thousand feet. Lord! And that was twenty-five years ago, when you were about the age I am today, an old man, by common reckoning; yet it taxed not me only in my prime but your own Swiss guides, to keep pace with you. The mountains; the unplumbed deeps of the Raftsund and its swinging tideways; the unearthly darkless Arctic summer night; and indoors, under the mingling of natural and artificial lights, of sunset and the windy candlelight of your seven-branched candlesticks of gold, the peace and the power of your face.

Your great Italian clock measures the silence with its ticking: ‘Another, gone! Another, gone! Another, gone!’ Commonly, I have grown to hate such tickings, hideous to an old man as the grinning memento mori at the feast. But now (perhaps the shock has deadened my feelings), I could almost cheat reason to believe there was in very truth eternity in these things: substance and everlasting life in what is more transient and unsubstantial than a mayfly, empirical, vainer than air, weak bubbles on the flux. You and your lordship here, I mean, and this castle of yours, more fantastic than Beckford’s Fonthill, and all your life that has vanished into the irrevocable past: a kind of nothingness. ‘Another, gone! Another, gone!’ Seconds, or years, or aeons of unnumbered time, what does it matter? I can well think that this hour just past of my sitting here in this silent room is as long a time, or as short, as those twenty-five years that have gone by since you and I first, on a night like this, stared at Lofotveggen across thirty miles of sea, as we rounded the Landegode and steered north into the open Westfirth.

I can see you now, if I shut my eyes; in memory I see you, staring at the Lynxfoot Wall: your kingdom to be, as I very well know you then resolved (and soon performed your resolve): that hundred miles of ridge and peak and precipice, of mountains of Alpine stature and seeming, but sunk to the neck in the Atlantic stream and so turned to islands of an unwonted fierceness, close set, so that seen from afar no breach appears nor sea-way betwixt them. So sharp cut was their outline that night, and so unimaginably nicked and jagged, against the rosy radiance to the north which was sunset and sunrise in one, that for the moment they seemed feigned mountains cut out of smoky crystal and set up against a painted sky. For a moment only; for there was the talking of the waves under our bows, and the wind in our faces, and, as time went by with still that unaltering scene before us, every now and again the flight and wild cry of a black-backed gull, to remind us that this was salt sea and open air and land ahead. And yet it was hard then to conceive that here was real land, with the common things of life and houses of men, under that bower of light where the mutations of night and day seemed to have been miraculously slowed down; as if nature had fallen entranced with her own beauty mirrored in that sheen of primrose light. Vividly, as it had been but a minute since instead of a quarter of a century, I see you standing beside me at the taffrail, with that light upon your lean and weather-beaten face, staring north with a proud, alert, and piercing look, the whole frame and posture of you alive with action and resolution and command. And I can hear the very accent of your voice in the only two things you said in all that four hours’ crossing: first, ‘The sea-board of Demonland.’ Then, an hour later, I should think, very low and dream-like, ‘This is the first sip of Eternity.’

Your voice, that all these years, forty-eight years and a month or two, since first I knew you, has had power over me as has no other thing on earth, I think. And today – But why talk of today? Either today is not, or you are not: I am not very certain which. Yesterday certainly was yours, and those five and twenty years in which you, by your genius and your riches, made of these islands a brighter Hellas. But today: it is as well, perhaps, that you have nothing to do with today. The fourteenth of July tomorrow: the date when the ultimatum expires, which this new government at Oslo sent you; the date they mean to take back their sovereign rights over Lofoten in order to reintroduce modern methods into the fisheries. I know you were prepared to use force. It may come to that yet, for your subjects who have grown up in the islands under the conditions you made for them may not give up all without a stroke. But it could only have been a catastrophe. You had not the means here to do as you did thirty-five years ago, when you conquered Paraguay: you could never have held, with your few thousand men, this bunch of islands against an industrialized country like Norway. Stir’s, ‘Shall the earth-lice be my bane, the sons of Grim Kogur?’ They would have bombed your castle from the air.

And so, I think fate has been good to you. I am glad you died this morning.

I must have been deep in my thoughts and memories when the Señorita came into the room, for I had heard no rustle or footfall. Now, however, I turned from my window-gazing to look again on the face of Lessingham where he lay in state, and I saw that she was standing there at his feet, looking where I looked, very quiet and still. She had not noticed me, or, if she had, made no account of my presence. My nerves must have been shaken by the events of the day more than I could before have believed possible: in no other way can I explain the trembling that came upon me as I watched her, and the sudden tears that half blinded my eyes. For though, no doubt, the feelings can play strange tricks in moments of crisis, and easily confound that nice order which breeding and the common proprieties impose even on our inward thoughts, it is yet notable that the perturbation that now swept my whole mind and body was without any single note or touch of those chords which can thrill so loudly at the approach of a woman of exquisite beauty and presumed accessibility. Tears of my own I had not experienced since my nursery days. Indeed, it is only by going back to nursery days that I can recall anything remotely comparable to the emotion with which I was at that moment rapt and held. And both then as a child, and now half-way down the sixties: then, as I listened on a summer’s evening in the drawing-room to my eldest sister singing at the piano what I learned to know later as Schubert’s Wohin?, and now, as I saw the Señorita Aspasia del Rio Amargo stand over my friend’s death-bed, there was neither fear in the trembling that seized me and made my body all gooseflesh, nor was it tears of grief that started in my eyes. A moment before, it is true, my mind had been feeling its way through many darknesses, while the heaviness of a great unhappiness at long friendship gone like a blown-out candleflame clogged my thoughts. But now I was as if caught by the throat and held in a state of intense awareness: a state of mind that I can find no name for, unless to call it a state of complete purity, as of awaking suddenly in the morning of time and beholding the world new born.

For a good many minutes, I think, I remained perfectly still, except for my quickened breathing and the shifting of my eyes from this part to that of the picture that was burning itself into my senses so that, I am very certain, all memories and images will fall off from me before this will suffer alteration or grow dim. Then, unsurprised as one hears in a dream, I heard a voice (that was my own voice) repeating softly that stanza in Swinburne’s great lamentable Ballad of Death:

By night there stood over against my bed

Queen Venus with a hood striped gold and black,

Both sides drawn fully back

From brows wherein the sad blood failed of red,

And temples drained of purple and full of death.

Her curled hair had the wave of sea-water

And the sea’s gold in it.

Her eyes were as a dove’s that sickeneth.

Strewn dust of gold she had shed over her,

And pearl and purple and amber on her feet.

With the last cadence I was startled awake to common things, as often, startling out of sleep, you hear words spoken in a dream echo loud beyond nature in your ears. I rose, inwardly angry with myself, with some conventional apology on the tip of my tongue, but I bit it back in time. The verses had been spoken not with my tongue but in my brain, I thought; for the look on her face assured me that she had heard nothing, or, if she had, passed it by as some remark which demanded neither comment on her part nor any explanation or apology on mine.

She moved a little so as to face me, her left hand hanging quiet and graceful at her side, her right resting gently on the brow of the great golden hippogriff that made the near bedpost at the foot of Lessingham’s bed. With the motion I seemed to be held once again in that contemplation of peace and power from which I had these hours past taken some comfort, and at the same time to be rapt again into that state of wide-eyed awareness in which I had a few minutes since gazed upon her and Lessingham. But now, just as (they tell us) a star of earthly density but of the size of Betelgeuze would of necessity draw to it not matter and star-dust only but the very rays of imponderable light, and suck in and swallow at last the very boundaries of space into itself, so all things condensed in her as to a point. And when she spoke, I had an odd feeling as if peace itself had spoken.

She said: ‘Is there anything new you can tell me about death, sir? Lessingham told me you are a philosopher.’

‘All I could tell you is new, Doña Aspasia,’ I answered; ‘for death is like birth: it is new every time.’

‘Does it matter, do you suppose?’ Her voice, low, smooth, luxurious (as in Spanish women it should be, to fit their beauty, yet rarely is), seemed to balance on the air like a soaring bird that tilts an almost motionless wing now this way now that, and so soars on.

‘It matters to me,’ I said. ‘And I suppose to you.’

She said a strange thing: ‘Not to me. I have no self.’ Then, ‘You,’ she said, ‘are not one of those quibbling cheap-jacks, I think, who hold out to poor mankind hopes of some metaphysical perduration (great Caesar used to stop a bung-hole) in exchange for that immortality of persons which you have whittled away to the barest improbability?’

‘No,’ answered I. ‘Because there is no wine, it is better go thirsty than lap sea-water.’

‘And the wine is past praying for? You are sure?’

‘We are sure of nothing. Every path in the maze brings you back at last to Herakleitos if you follow it fairly; yes, and beyond him: back to that philosopher who rebuked him for saying that no man may bathe twice in the same river, objecting that it was too gross an assumption to imply that he might avail to bathe once.’

‘Then what is this new thing you are to tell me?’

‘This,’ said I: ‘that I have lost a man who for forty years was my friend, and a man great and peerless in his generation. And that is death beyond common deaths.’

‘Then I see that in one river you have bathed not twice but many times,’ she said. ‘But I very well know that that is no answer.’

She fell silent, looking me steadfastly in the eye. Her eyes with their great black lashes were unlike any eyes that I have ever seen, and went strangely with her dark southern colouring and her jet-black hair: they were green, with enormous pupils, and full of fiery specks, and as the pupils dilated or narrowed the whole orbs seemed aglow with a lambent flame. Frightening eyes at the first unearthly glance of them: so much so, that I thought for an instant of old wild tales of lamias and vampires, and so of that loveliest of all love-stories and sweet ironic gospel of pagan love – Théophile Gautier’s: of her on whose unhallowed gravestone was written:

Ici gît Clarimonde,

Qui jut de son vivant

La plus belle du monde.

And then in an instant my leaping thoughts were stilled, and in awed wonderment I recognized, deep down in those strange burning eyes, sixty years in the past, my mother’s very look as she (beautiful then, but now many years dead) bent down to kiss her child good night.

The clock chiming the half hour before midnight brought back time again. She on the chime passed by me, as in a dream, and took my place in the embrasure; so that sitting at her feet I saw her side-face silhouetted against the twilight window, where the darkest hour still put on but such semblance of the true cloak of night as the dewdrops on a red rose might wear beside true tears of sorrow, or the faint memory of a long forgotten grief beside the bitterness of the passion itself. Peace distilled upon my mind like perfume from a flower. I looked across to Lessingham’s face with its Grecian profile, pallid under the flickering candles, facing upwards: the hair, short, wavy, and thick, like a Greek God’s: the ambrosial darknesses of his great black beard. He was ninety years old this year, and his hair was as black and (till a few hours ago, when he leaned back in his chair and was suddenly dead) his voice as resonant and his eyes as bright as a man’s in his prime age.

The silence opened like a lily, and the Señorita’s words came like the lily’s fragrance: ‘Tell me something that you remember. It is good to keep memories green.’

‘I remember,’ answered I, ‘that he and I first met by candlelight. And that was forty-eight years ago. A good light to meet by; and a good light for parting.’

‘Tell me,’ she said.

‘It was Easter time at Mardale Green in Cumberland. I had just left school. I was spending the holidays with an aunt of mine who had a big house in the Eamont valley. On Easter Sunday after a hard day by myself on the fells, I found myself looking down on Mardale and Haweswater from the top of Kidsty Pike. It was late afternoon, and the nights still closed in early. There was leavings of snow on the tops. Beneath my feet the valley was obscure purple, the shadows of night boiling up from below while weak daylight still walked the upper air and the mountain ridges. I ran down the long spur that Kidsty Pike sends down eastwards, dividing Randale from Riggindale. I was out of breath, and half deaf too after the quick descent, for I had come down about fifteen hundred feet, I suppose, in twelve minutes by the time I came to cross the beck by the farmhouse at Riggindale. Then I saw the light in the church windows through the trees. I remembered that Haweswater and all its belongings were condemned to be drowned twenty feet deep in water in order that some hive of civilization might be washed, and I thought I would go in to evening service in that little church now while I might, before there were fishes in its yew-trees instead of owls. So I stumbled my way from the gathering dusk of the quiet lane through the darkness of those tremendous yews, and so by the curtained doorway under the square tower into that tiny church. I loved it at first sight, coming in from the cold and darkness outside: a place of warmth and gentle candles, with its pews of oak blackened with age, its little Jacobaean gallery, its rough whitewashed walls, simple pointed windows, low dark roof-beams: a glamorous and dazzling loveliness such as a child’s eyes feed upon in its first Christmas tree. As I found my way to a seat half-way up the aisle on the north side, I remember thinking of those little earthenware houses, white, green, and pink, that you can put a night-light inside; things I had forgotten for years, but I had one (as I remembered) long ago, in those lavender and musk-smelling days of childhood, which seemed far more distant to me then, when I was nineteen, than they do now; German things, I fancy: born of the old good German spirit of Struwwelpeter and Christmas trees. Yes, it was those little earthenware houses that I thought of as I sat there, sensuously loving the candlelight and the moving shadows it threw: safe shadows, like those there used to be in the nursery when your nurse was still there; not the ghostly shadows that threatened and hovered when she had gone down to supper and you were left alone. And these shadows and the yellow glamour of the candles fell on kind safe faces, like hers: an old farmer with furrowed, strong, big-boned, storm-weathered features, not in his Sunday-go-to-meeting suit, but with heavy boots nailed and plastered with mud, as if he had walked a good distance to church, and rough strong tweed coat and breeches. Three or four farmers, a few farm men, a few women and girls, an old woman, a boy or two, one or two folk in the little gallery above the door: that was all the congregation. But what pleased me most of all was the old parson, and his way of conducting the service. He was white-haired, with a bristly moustache. He did everything himself single-handed: said the prayers, read the lessons, collected the offertory, played the harmonium that did duty for an organ, preached the sermon. And all these things he did methodically and without hurry or self-consciousness, as you might imagine him looking after a roomful of friends at supper in the little rectory across the road. His sermon was short and full of personalities, but all kindly and gentle-humoured. His announcements of times of services, appointments for weddings, christenings and what not, were interspersed with detailed and homely explanations, given not in the least ex cathedra but as if across the breakfast-table. One particularly I remember, when he gave out: “Hymn number one hundred and forty: the one hundred and fortieth hymn: Jesus lives! No longer now Can thy terrors, death, appal us.” Then, before sitting down to the harmonium, he looked very benevolently at his little flock over the tops of his spectacles, and said, “I want everybody to try and get the words right. Some people make a mistake about the first line of this hymn, and give it quite a wrong meaning. Remember to pause after ‘lives’: ‘Jesus lives!’ Don’t do like some people do, and say ‘Jesus lives no longer now’: that is quite wrong: gives quite a wrong meaning: it makes nonsense. Now then: ‘Jesus lives! No longer now’;” and he sat down to the harmonium and began.

‘It was just at that moment, as we all stood up to sing that innocent hymn with its difficult first line, that I first saw Lessingham. He was away to my right, at the back on the south side, and as the congregation rose I looked half round and saw him. I remember, years later, his describing to me the effect of the sudden view you get of Nanga Parbat from one of those Kashmir valleys; you have been riding for hours among quiet richly wooded scenery, winding up along the side of some kind of gorge, with nothing very big to look at, just lush, leafy, pussy-cat country of steep hillsides and waterfalls; then suddenly you come round a corner where the view opens up the valley, and you are almost struck senseless by the blinding splendour of that vast face of ice-hung precipices and soaring ridges, sixteen thousand feet from top to toe, filling a whole quarter of the heavens at a distance of, I suppose, only a dozen miles. And now, whenever I call to mind my first sight of Lessingham in that little daleside church so many years ago, I think of Nanga Parbat. He stood half a head taller than the tallest man there, but it was the grandeur of his bearing that held me, as if he had been some great lord of the renaissance: a grandeur which seemed to sit upon every limb and feature of him with as much fitness, and to be carried with as little regard or notice from himself, as the scrubby old Norfolk jacket and breeches in which he was dressed. His jacket was threadbare, frayed at the cuffs, strapped with leather at the elbows, but it was as if lighted from within, as the flame shows in a horn lantern, with a sense of those sculptured heroes from the Parthenon. I saw the beauty of his hand where it rested on the window-sill, and the ruby burning like a coal in the strange ring he wore on the middle finger. But just as, in a snow mountain, all sublimities soar upwards to the great peak in the empyrean, so in him was all this majesty and beauty and strength gathered at last in the head and face; that serene forehead, those features where Apollo and Ares seemed to mingle, the strong luxurious lines of the mouth showing between the upcurled moustache and the cataract of black beard: that mouth whose corners seemed the lurking-places of all wild sudden gleams, of delightful humour, and melancholy, and swift resolution, and terrible anger. At length his unconscious eyes met mine, and, looking through me as lost in a deep sadness, made me turn away in some confusion.

‘I thought he had been quite unaware of me and my staring; but as we came out into the lane when church was over (it was starlight now, and the moon risen behind the hills) he overtook me and fell into step beside me, saying he noticed that we wore the same tie. I hardly know which was to me the more astonishing, that this man should deign to talk to me at all, or that I should find myself within five minutes swinging along beside him down the lake road, which was my way home, and talking as easily as if it had been to an intimate friend of my own age instead of a man old enough to be my father: a man too who, to all outward seeming, would have been more in his element in the company of Cesare Borgia or Gonsalvo di Cordova. It was not, of course, till some time after this that I knew he traced his descent through many generations of English forefathers to King Eric Bloodaxe in York, the son of Harald Hairfair, that Charlemagne of the north, and, by the female line, from the greatest ruler of men that appeared in Europe in the thousand years between Charlemagne and Napoleon: the Emperor Frederick II, of whom it has been written that “the power, which in the rout of able and illustrious men shines through crannies, in him pours out as through a rift in nature”. In after years I helped Lessingham a good deal in collecting material for his ten-volume History of Frederick II, which is of course today the standard authority on that period, and ranks, as literature, far and away above any other history book since Gibbon.

‘We talked at first about Eton; then about rowing, and riding, and then about mountains, for I was at that time newly bitten with the climbing-madness and I found him an old hand at the game, though it was not for a year or so that I discovered that he was among the best (though incomparably the rashest) of contemporary climbers. I do not think we touched on the then recent War, in which he attained great distinction, mainly in East Africa. At length the wings of our talk began to take those wider sweeps which starlight and steady walking and that aptness of mind to mind which is the basis of all true friendship lead to; so that after a while I found myself telling him how much his presence had surprised me in that little church, and actually asking him whether he was there to pray, like the other people, or only to look on, like me. Those were the salad-days of my irreligious fervour, when the strange amor mortis of adolescence binds a panache of glory on the helmet of every unbelief, and when books like La Révolte des Anges or Swinburne’s Dolores send a thrill down the spine that can never be caught again in its pristine vigour when years and wisdom have taught us the true terrors of that drab, comfortless, and inglorious sinking into not-being which awaits us all at last. He answered he was there to pray. This I had not expected, though I had been puzzled at the expression on his face in church: an expression that I thought sat oddly on the face of a pagan God or an atheistical tyrant of the renaissance. I mumbled some awkwardness about his not looking to me much like a churchman. His laughter at this seemed to set the whole night a-sparkle: he stopped, caught me by the shoulder with one hand and spun me round to face him. His mouth was smiling down at me in the moonlight in a way which made me think of Pater’s essay about Mona Lisa. He said nothing, but I felt as if I and my half-fledged impieties shrank under that smile to something very naked and nerveless: a very immature Kapaneus posturing before Thebes; a ridiculous little Aias waving a toy sword against the lightning. We walked on beside the dark lake. He said nothing, neither did I. So completely had he already bound me to his chariot-wheels that I was ready, if he had informed me that he was Anabaptist or Turk, to embrace that sect. At length he spoke, words that for some reason I have never forgotten: “No doubt”, he said, “we were both in that little place for the same reason. The good, the true, the beautiful: within that triangle (or rather, upon that point; for ‘truth’ is but to say that beauty and goodness are the ultimate reality; and goodness is servant to beauty), are not the Gods protean?” Rank bad philosophy, as I soon learned when I had made some progress in metaphysics. And yet it was out of such marsh-fires that he built up in secret places of his mind (as, from time to time in our long friendship, I have from fleeting revelations and rare partial confidences discovered), a palace of pleasure or house of heart’s desire, a creed, a myth, a fabric of pure poetry, more solid in its specifications and more concrete in its strange glorious fictions and vanities beyond opium or madness than this world is, and this life that we call real. And more than that, for he moulded life to his dreams; and, besides his poems and writings “more lasting than brass”, his paintings and sculptures that are scrambled for by the picture-galleries of Europe, and those other (perhaps the most astounding) monuments of his genius, the communities of men who have felt the iron and yet beneficent might of his statecraft, as here in Lofoten – besides all these things, I know very well that he found in this Illusion of Illusions a something potent as the fabled unction of the Styx, so that no earthly loss, pain, or grief, could touch him.

‘It was not until after many years of friendship that I got some inkling of the full power of this consolation; for he never wore his heart for daws to peck at. The bare facts I was soon informed of: his marriage, when he was not yet twenty-six, and she barely twenty, to the beautiful and brilliant Lady Mary Scarnside, and her death fifteen years later in a French railway accident along with their only child, a girl. This tragedy took place about two years before our meeting in Mardale church. Lessingham never talked of his wife. I learned that he had, soon after her death, deliberately burnt down their lovely old house in Wastdale. I never saw her portrait: several, from his own brush, were destroyed in the fire; he told me, years later, that he had subsequently bought up every picture or photograph of her that he could trace, and destroyed them. Like most men who are endowed with vigorous minds and high gifts of imagination, Lessingham was, for as long as I have known him, a man of extreme attractiveness to women, and a man to whom (as to his imperial ancestor) women and the beauty of women were as mountain air and sunshine. The spectacle of the unbroken succession and variety of ladies, who crowned, like jewels, the ever increasing splendour and pomp of his existence, made me think that his marriage had been without significance, and that he never spoke of his wife because he had forgotten her. Later, when I heard about the burnt portraits, I changed my mind and supposed he had hated her. It was only when our friendship had ripened to a deep understanding in which words were scarcely needed as messengers between our minds, that I realized how things stood: that it was only his majestic if puerile belief in her personal immortality, and his own, beyond the grave, that upheld him in all the storm and peace and magnificence and high achievement of the years (fifty, as it turned out) that he was to live on without her.

‘These pragmatical sophisters, with their loose psychology and their question-begging logic-chopping that masquerades as metaphysic! I would almost give them leave to gag truth and lead the world by the nose like a jackass, if they could but be men as this man, and bend error and self-deception to high and lofty imaginings as he did. For it is certain mankind would build better if they built for themselves; few can love and tender an unknown posterity. But this man, as I have long observed him, looked on all things sub specie æternitatis; his actions all moved (like the slow procession of this northern summer night) to slow perfection, where the common run of men spoil all in their makeshift hurry. If he followed will-o’-the-wisps in metaphysics, they proved safe lights for him in practical affairs. He was neither deceived nor alarmed by the rabble’s god, mere Quantity, considering that if you inflate it big enough the Matterhorn becomes as insignificant as a grain of sand, since the eye can no longer perceive it, and that a nebula in which our whole earth would be but as a particle in a cloud of tobacco-smoke is (unless as a whetter of imagination’s appetite), more unimportant than that smoke, because further divorced from life. And so, with sound wisdom, he applied all his high gifts of nature, and that sceptre which his colossal wealth set ready in his hand, not to dissipate them in the welter of the world, but to fields definite enough to show the effect. And for all his restless vigour and love of action, he withheld himself as a rule from action in the world, except where he could find conditions, as in Paraguay and again in Lofoten, outside the ordinary texture of modern life. For he felt, I think, by a profound instinct, that in modern life action swallows up the individual. There is no scope for a good climber, he said, to show his powers in a quagmire. Well, it is night now; and no more climbing.’

It was not until I had ended that I felt I had been making something of a fool of myself, letting my thoughts run away with my tongue. For some minutes there was silence, broken only by the solemn ticking of the clock, and now and then a sea-bird’s desolate cry without. Then the Señorita’s voice stole on the silence as a meteor steals across darkness: ‘All must pass away, all must break at last, everything we care for: lips wither, the bright brain grow dim, “the vine, the woman, and the rose”: even the names, even the mention and remembrance of created things, must die and be forgotten; until at last not these only, but death and oblivion itself must – cease, dissipated in that infinite frost of illimitable nothingness of space and time, for ever and ever and ever.’

I listened with that sensation of alternating strain and collapse of certain muscles which belongs to some dreams where the dreamer climbs insecurely from frame to frame over rows of pictures hung on a wall of tremendous height below which opens the abyss. Hitherto the mere conception of annihilation (when once I had imaginatively compassed it, as now and then I have been able to do, lying awake in the middle of the night) had had so much power of horror upon me that I could barely refrain from shrieking in my bed. But now, for the first time in my life, I found I could look down from that sickening verge steadfastly and undismayed. It seemed a strange turn, that here in death’s manifest presence I, for the first time, found myself unable seriously to believe in death.

My outward eyes were on Lessingham’s face, the face of an Ozymandias. My inward eye searched the night, plunging to those deeps beyond the star-shine where, after uncounted millions of light-years’ journeying, the two ends of a straight line meet, and the rays complete the full circle on themselves; so that what to my earthly gaze shows as this almost indiscernible speck of mist, seen through a gap in the sand-strewn thousands of the stars of the Lion, may be but the back view of the very same unknown cosmic island of suns and galaxies which (as a like unremarkable speck) faces my searching eye in the direct opposite region of the heavens, in the low dark sign of Capricorn.

Then, as another meteor across darkness: ‘Many have blasphemed God for these things,’ she said; ‘but without reason, surely. Shall infinite Love that is able to wield infinite Power be subdued to our necessities? Must the Gods make haste, for Whom no night cometh? Is there a sooner or a later in Eternity? Have you thought of this: you had an evil dream: you were in hell that night; yet you woke and forgot it utterly. Are you tonight any jot the worse for it?’

She seemed to speak of forgotten things that I had known long ago and that, remembered now, brought back all that was lost and healed all sorrows. I had no words to answer her, but I thought of Lessingham’s poems, and they seemed to be, to this mind she brought me to, as shadows before the sun. I reached down from the shelf at my left, beside the window, a book of vellum with clasps of gold. ‘Lessingham shall answer you from this book,’ I said, looking up at her where she sat against the sunset. The book opened at his rondel of Aphrodite Ourania. I read it aloud. My voice shook, and marred the reading:

Between the sunset and the sea

The years shall still behold Your glory,

Seen through this troubled fantasy

Of doubtful things and transitory.

Desire’s clear eyes still search for Thee

Beyond Time’s transient territory,

Upon some flower-robed promontory

Between the sunset and the sea.

Our Lady of Paphos: though a story

They count You: though Your temples be

Time-wrecked, dishonoured, mute and hoary—

You are more than their philosophy.

Between the sunset and the sea

Waiteth Your eternal glory.

While I read, the Señorita sat motionless, her gaze bent on Lessingham. Then she rose softly from her seat in the window and stood once more in that place where I had first seen her that night, like the Queen of Love sorrowing for a great lover dead. The clock ticked on, and I measured it against my heart-beats. An unreasoning terror now took hold of me, that Death was in the room and had laid on my heart also his fleshless and icy hand. I dropped the book and made as if to rise from my seat, but my knees gave way like a drunken man’s. Then with the music of her voice, speaking once more, as if love itself were speaking out of the interstellar spaces from beyond the mists of time and desolation and decay, my heart gave over its fluttering and became quiet like a dove held safe in its mistress’s hand. ‘It is midnight now,’ she said. ‘Time to say farewell, seal the chamber, and light the pyre. But first you have leave to look upon the picture, and to read that which was written.’

At the time, I wondered at nothing, but accepted, as in a dream, her knowledge of this secret charge bequeathed to me by Lessingham through sealed instructions locked in a fireproof box which I had only opened on his death, and of which he had once or twice assured me that no person other than himself had seen the contents. In that box was a key of gold, and with that I was at midnight of his death-day to unlock the folding doors of a cabinet that was built into the wall above his bed, and so leave him lying in state under the picture that was in the cabinet. And I must seal the room, and burn up Digermulen castle, and him and all that was in it, as he had burnt up his house in Wastdale fifty years before. And he had let me know that in that cabinet was his wife’s picture, painted by himself, his masterpiece never seen by living eye except the painter’s and the sitter’s; the only one of all her pictures that he had spared.

The cabinet doors were of black lacquer and gold, flush with the wall. I turned the golden key, and opened them left and right. My eyes swam as I looked upon that loveliness that showed doubtfully in the glittering candlelight and the diffused rosy dusk from without. I saw well now that this great picture had been painted for himself alone. A sob choked me as I thought of this last pledge of our friendship, planned by him so many years ago to speak for him to me from beyond death, that my eyes should be allowed to see his treasure before it was committed, with his own mortal remains, to the consuming element of fire. And now I saw how upon the inside panels of the cabinet was inlaid (by his own hand, I doubt not) in letters of gold this poem, six stanzas upon either door:

A VISION OF ZIMIAMVIA

I will have gold and silver for my delight:

Hangings of red silk, purfled and worked in gold

With mantichores and what worse shapes of fright

Terror Antiquus spawn’d in the days of old.

I will have columns of Parian vein’d with gems,

Their capitals by Pheidias’ self design’d,

By his hand carv’d, for flowers with strong smooth stems,

Nepenthe, Elysian Amaranth, and their kind.

I will have night: and the taste of a field well fought,

And a golden bed made wide for luxury;

And there – since else were all things else prov’d naught –

Bestower and hallower of all things: I will have Thee.

—Thee, and hawthorn time. For in that new birth though all

Change, you I will have unchang’d: even that dress,

So fall’n to your hips as lapping waves should fall:

You, cloth’d upon with your beauty’s nakedness.

The line of your flank: so lily-pure and warm:

The globéd wonder of splendid breasts made bare:

The gleam, like cymbals a-clash, when you lift your arm;

And the faun leaps out with the sweetness of red-gold hair.

My dear – my tongue is broken: I cannot see:

A sudden subtle fire beneath my skin

Runs, and an inward thunder deafens me,

Drowning mine ears: I tremble. – O unpin

Those pins of anachite diamond, and unbraid

Those strings of margery-pearls, and so let fall

Your python tresses in their deep cascade

To be your misty robe imperial—

The beating of wings, the gallop, the wild spate,

Die down. A hush resumes all Being, which you

Do with your starry presence consecrate,

And peace of moon-trod gardens and falling dew.

Two are our bodies: two are our minds, but wed.

On your dear shoulder, like a child asleep,

I let my shut lids press, while round my head

Your gracious hands their benediction keep.

Mistress of my delights; and Mistress of Peace:

O ever changing, never changing, You:

Dear pledge of our true love’s unending lease,

Since true to you means to mine own self true—

I will have gold and jewels for my delight:

Hyacinth, ruby, and smaragd, and curtains work’d in gold

With mantichores and what worse shapes of fright

Terror Antiquus spawn’d in the days of old.

Earth I will have, and the deep sky’s ornament:

Lordship, and hardship, and peril by land and sea—

And still, about cock-shut time, to pay for my banishment,

Safe in the lowe of the firelight I will have Thee.

Half blinded with tears, I read the stanzas and copied them down. All the while I was conscious of the Señorita’s presence at my side, a consciousness from which in some irrational way I seemed to derive an inexplicable support, beyond comprehension or comparisons. These were things which by all right judgement it was unpardonable that any living creature other than myself should have looked upon. Yet of the lightness of her presence (more, of its deep necessity), my sense was so lively as to pass without remark or question. When I had finished my writing, I saw that she had not moved, but remained there, very still, one hand laid lightly on the bedpost at the foot of the bed, between the ears of the great golden hippogriff. I heard her say, faint as the breath of night-flowers under the stars: ‘The fabled land of ZIMIAMVIA. Is it true, will you think, which poets tell us of that fortunate land: that no mortal foot may tread it, but the blessed souls do inhabit it of the dead that be departed: of them that were great upon earth and did great deeds when they were living, that scorned not earth and the delights and the glories of earth, and yet did justly and were not dastards nor yet oppressors?’

‘Who knows?’ I said. ‘Who dares say he knows?’

Then I heard her say, in her voice that was gentler than the glow-worm’s light among rose-trees in a forgotten garden between dewfall and moonrise: Be content. I have promised and I will perform.

And as my eyes rested on that strange woman’s face, it seemed to take upon itself, as she looked on Lessingham dead, that unsearchable look, of laughter-loving lips divine, half closed in a grave expectancy, of infinite pity, infinite patience, and infinite sweetness, which sits on the face of Praxiteles’s Knidian Aphrodite.

ZIMIAMVIA

PRINCIPAL PERSONS

LESSINGHAM

BARGANAX

FIORINDA

ANTIOPE

I A SPRING NIGHT IN MORNAGAY

A COMMISSION OF PERIL • THE THREE KINGDOMS MASTERLESS • POLICY OF THE VICAR • THE PROMISE HEARD IN ZIMIAMVIA.

‘BY all accounts, ’twas to give him line only,’ said Amaury; ‘and if King Mezentius had lived, would have been war between them this summer. Then he should have been boiled in his own syrup; and ’tis like danger now, though smaller, to cope the son. You do forget your judgement, I think, in this single thing, save which I could swear you are perfect in all things.’

Lessingham made no answer. He was gazing with a strange intentness into the wine which brimmed the crystal goblet in his right hand. He held it up for the bunch of candles that stood in the middle of the table to shine through, turning the endless stream of bubbles into bubbles of golden fire. Amaury, half facing him on his right, watched him. Lessingham set down the goblet and looked round at him with the look of a man awaked from sleep.

‘Now I’ve angered you,’ said Amaury. ‘And yet, I said but true.’

As a wren twinkles in and out in a hedgerow, the demurest soft shadow of laughter came and went in Lessingham’s swift grey eyes. ‘What, were you reading me good counsel? Forgive me, dear Amaury: I lost the thread on’t. You were talking of my cousin, and the great King, and might-a-beens; but I was fallen a-dreaming and marked you not.’

Amaury gave him a look, then dropped his eyes. His thick eyebrows that were the colour of pale rye-straw frowned and bristled, and beneath the sunburn his face, clear-skinned as a girl’s, flamed scarlet to the ears and hair-roots, and he sat sulky, his hands thrust into his belt at either side, his chin buried in his ruff. Lessingham, still leaning on his left elbow, stroked the black curls of his mustachios and ran a finger slowly and delicately over the jewelled filigree work of the goblet’s feet. Now and again he cocked an eye at Amaury, who at last looked up and their glances met. Amaury burst out laughing. Lessingham busied himself still for a moment with the sparkling, rare, and sunset-coloured embellishments of the goldsmith’s art, then, pushing the cup from him, sat back. ‘Out with it,’ he said; ‘’tis shame to plague you. Let me know what it is, and if it be in my nature I’ll be schooled.’

‘Here were comfort,’ said Amaury; ‘but that I much fear ’tis your own nature I would change.’

‘Well, that you will never do,’ answered he.

‘My lord,’ said Amaury, ‘will you resolve me this: Why are we here? What waiting for? What intending?’

Lessingham stroked his beard and smiled.

Amaury said. ‘You see, you will not answer. Will you answer this, then: It is against the nature of you not to be rash, and against the condition of rashness not to be ’gainst all reason; yet why (after these five years that I’ve followed you up and down the world, and seen you mount so swiftly the degrees and steps of greatness that, in what courts or princely armies soever you might be come, you stuck in the eyes of all as the most choice jewel there): why needs must you, with the wide world to choose from, come back to this land of Rerek, and, of all double-dealers and secretaries of hell, sell your sword to the Vicar?’

‘Not sell, sweet Amaury,’ answered Lessingham. ‘Lend. Lend it in cousinly friendship.’

Amaury laughed. ‘Cousinly friendship! Give us patience! With the Devil and him together on either hand of you!’ He leapt up, oversetting the chair, and strode to the fireplace. He kicked the logs together with his heavy riding-boots, and the smother of flame and sparks roared up the chimney. Turning about, his back to the fire, feet planted wide, hands behind him, he said: ‘I have you now in a good mood, though ’twere over much to hope you reasonable. And now you shall listen to me, for your good. You do know me: am I not myself by complexion subject to hasty and rash motions? Yet I it is must catch at your bridle-rein; for in good serious earnest, you do make toward most apparent danger, and no tittle of advantage to be purchased by it. Three black clouds moving to a point; and here are you, in the summer and hunting-season of your youth, lying here with your eight hundred horse these three days, waiting for I know not what cat to jump, but (as you have plainly told me) of a most set obstinacy to tie yourself hand and heart to the Vicar’s interest. You have these three months been closeted in his counsels: that I forget not. Nor will I misprise your politic wisdom: you have played chess with the Devil ere now and given him stalemate. But ’cause of these very things, you must see the peril you stand in: lest, if by any means he should avail to bring all things under his beck, he should then throw you off and let you hop naked; or, in the other event, and his ambitious thoughts should break his neck, you would then have raised up against yourself most bloody and powerful enemies.

‘Look but at the circumstance. This young King Styllis is but a boy. Yet remember, he is King Mezentius’ son; and men look not for lapdog puppies in the wolf’s lair, nor for milksops to be bred up for heirship to the crown and kingdom of Fingiswold. And he is come south not to have empty homage only from the regents here and in Meszria, but to take power. I would not have you build upon the Duke of Zayana’s coldness to his young brother. True, in many families have the bastards been known the greater spirits; and you did justly blame the young King’s handling of the reins in Meszria when (with a warmth from which his brother could not but take cold) he seemed to embrace to his bosom the lord Admiral, and in the same hour took away with a high hand from the Duke a great slice of his appanage the King their father left him. But though he smart under this neglect, ’tis not so likely he’ll go against his own kindred, nor even stand idly by, if it come to a breach ’twixt the King and the Vicar. What hampers him today (besides his own easeful and luxurious idleness) is the Admiral and those others of the King’s party, sitting in armed power at every hand of him in Meszria; but let the cry but be raised there of the King against the Vicar, and let Duke Barganax but shift shield and declare himself of’s young brother’s side, why then you shall see these and all Meszria stand in his firm obedience. Then were your cousin the Vicar ta’en betwixt two millstones; and then, where and in what case are you, my lord? And this is no fantastical scholar’s chop-logic, neither: ’tis present danger. For hath not he for weeks now set every delay and cry-you-mercy and procrastinating stop and trick in the way of a plain answer to the young King’s lawful demand he should hand over dominion unto him in Rerek?’

‘Well,’ said Lessingham, ‘I have listened most obediently. You have it fully: there’s not a word to which I take exceptions. Nay I admire it all, for indeed I told you every word of it myself last night.’

‘Then would to heaven you’d be advised by’t,’ said Amaury. ‘Too much light, I think, hath made you moon-eyed.’

‘Reach me the map,’ said Lessingham. For the instant there was a touch in the soft bantering music of his voice as if a blade had glinted out and in again to its velvet scabbard. Amaury spread out the parchment on the table, and they stood poring over it. ‘You are a wiser man in action, Amaury, in natural and present, than in conceit; standing still, stirs your gall up: makes you see bugs and hobthrushes round every corner. Am I yet to teach you I may securely dare what no man thinks I would dare, which so by hardness becometh easy?’

Lessingham laid his forefinger on this place and that while he talked. ‘Here lieth young Styllis with’s main head of men, a league or more be-east of Hornmere. ’Tis thither he hath required the Vicar come to him to do homage of this realm of Rerek, and to lay in his hands the keys of Kessarey, Megra, Kaima, and Argyanna, in which the King will set his own captains now. Which once accomplished, he hath him harmless (so long, at least, as Barganax keep him at arm’s length); for in the south there they of the March openly disaffect him and incline to Barganax, whose power also even in this northern ambit stands entrenched in’s friendship with Prince Ercles and with Aramond, spite of all supposed alliances, respects, and means, which bind ’em tributary to the Vicar.

‘But now to the point of action; for ’tis needful you should know, since we must move north by great marches, and that this very night. My noble cousin these three weeks past hath, whiles he amused the King with’s chaffer-talk of how and wherefore, opened unseen a dozen sluices to let flow to him in Owldale men and instruments of war, armed with which strong arguments (I have it by sure intelligence but last night) he means tomorrow to obey the King’s summons beside Hornmere. And, for a last point of logic, in case there be falling out between the great men and work no more for learned doctors but for bloody martialists, I am to seize the coast-way ’twixt the Swaleback fells and Arrowfirth and deny ’em the road home to Fingiswold.’

‘Deny him the road home?’ said Amaury. ‘’Tis war, then, and flat rebellion?’

‘That’s as the King shall choose. And so, Amaury, about it straight. We must saddle an hour before midnight.’

Amaury drew in his breath and straightened his back. ‘An hour to pack the stuff and set all in marching trim: and an hour before midnight your horse is at the door.’ With that, he was gone.

Lessingham scanned the map for yet a little while, then let it roll itself up. He went to the window and threw it open. There was the breath of spring in the air and daffodil scents: Sirius hung low in the south-west.

‘Order is ta’en according to your command,’ said Amaury suddenly at his side. ‘And now, while yet is time to talk and consider, will you give me leave to speak?’

‘I thought you had spoke already,’ said Lessingham, still at the window, looking round at him. ‘Was all that but the theme given out, and I must now hear point counterpoint?’

‘Give me your sober ear, my lord, but for two minutes together. You know I am yours, were you bound for the slimy strand of Acheron. Do but consider; I think you are in some bad ecstasy. This is worse than all: cut the lines of the King’s communications northward, in the post of main danger, with so little a force, and Ercles on your flank ready to stoop at us from his high castle of Eldir and fling us into the sea.’

‘That’s provided for,’ said Lessingham: ‘he’s made friends with as for this time. Besides, he and Aramond are the Duke’s dogs, not the King’s; ’tis Meszria, Zayana, all their strings hold unto; north winds bring ’em the cough o’ the lungs. Fear not them.’

Amaury came and leaned himself too on the window-sill, his left elbow touching Lessingham’s. After a while he said, low and as if the words were stones loosed up one by one with difficulty from a stiff clay soil, ‘’Fore heaven, I must love you; and it is a thing not to be borne that your greatness should be made but this man’s cat’s-paw.’

Sirius, swinging lower, touched the highest tracery of a tall ash-tree, went out like a blown-out candle behind a branch, and next instant blazed again, a quintessential point of diamond and sapphire and emerald and amethyst and dazzling whiteness. Lessingham answered in a like low tone, meditatively, but his words came light on an easy breath: ‘My cousin. He is meat and drink to me. I must have danger.’

They abode silent at that window, drinking those airs more potent than wine, and watching, with a deep compulsive sense of essence drawn to essence, that star’s shimmer of many-coloured fires against the velvet bosom of the dark; which things drew and compelled their beings, as might the sweet breathing nearness of a woman lovely beyond perfection and deeply beyond all soundings desired. Lessingham began to say slowly, ‘That was a strange trick of thought when I forgot you but now, and forgot my own self too, in those bubbles which in their flying upward signify not as the sparks, but that man is born for gladness. For I thought there was a voice spake in my ear in that moment and I thought it said, I have promised and I will perform. And I thought it was familiar to me beyond all familiar dear lost things. And yet ’tis a voice I swear I never heard before. And like a star-gleam, it was gone.’

The gentle night seemed to turn in her sleep. A faint drumming, as of horse-hooves far away, came from the south. Amaury stood up, walked over to the table, and fell to looking at the map again. The beating of hooves came louder, then on a sudden faint again. Lessingham said from the window, ‘There’s one rideth hastily. Now a cometh down to the ford in Killary Bottom, and that’s why we lose the sound for awhile. Be his answers never so good, let him not pass nor return, but bring him to me.’

II THE DUKE OF ZAYANA

PORTRAIT OF A LADY • DOCTOR VANDERMAST • FIORINDA: ‘BITTER-SWEET’ • THE LYRE THAT SHOOK MITYLENE

THE third morning after that coming of the galloping horseman north to Mornagay, Duke Barganax was painting in his privy garden in Zayana in the southland: that garden where it is everlasting afternoon. There the low sun, swinging a level course at about that pitch which Antares reaches at his highest southing in an English May-night, filled the soft air with atomies of sublimated gold, wherein all seen things became, where the beams touched them, golden: a golden sheen on the lake’s unruffled waters beyond the parapet, gold burning in the young foliage of the oak-woods that clothed the circling hills; and, in the garden, fruits of red and yellow gold hanging in the gold-spun leafy darkness of the strawberry-trees, a gilding shimmer of it in the stone of the carven bench, a gilding of every tiny blade on the shaven lawn, a glow to deepen all colours and to ripen every sweetness: gold faintly warming the proud pallour of Fiorinda’s brow and cheek, and thrown back in sudden gleams from the jet-black smoothnesses of her hair.

‘Would you be ageless and deathless for ever, madam, were you given that choice?’ said the Duke, scraping away for the third time the colour with which he had striven to match, for the third time unsuccessfully, the unearthly green of that lady’s eyes.

‘I am this already,’ answered she with unconcern.

‘Are you so? By what assurance?’

‘By this most learn’d philosopher’s, Doctor Vandermast.’

The Duke narrowed his eyes first at his model then at his picture: laid on a careful touch, stood back, compared them once more, and scraped it out again. Then he smiled at her: ‘What? Will you believe him? Do but look upon him where he sitteth there beside Anthea, like winter wilting before Flora in her pride. Is he one to inspire faith in such promises beyond all likelihood and known experiment?’

Fiorinda said: ‘He at least charmed you this garden.’

‘Might he but charm your eyes,’ said the Duke, ‘to some such unaltering stability, I’d paint ’em; but now I cannot. And ’tis best I cannot. Even for this garden, if ’twere as you said, madam (or worse still, were you yourself so), my delight were poisoned. This eternal golden hour must lose its magic quite, were we certified beyond doubt or heresy that it should not, in the next twinkling of an eye, dissipate like mist and show us the work-a-day morning it conceals. Let him beware, and if he have art indeed to make safe these things and freeze them into perpetuity, let him forbear to exercise it. For as surely as I have till now well and justly rewarded him for what good he hath done me, in that day, by the living God, I will smite off his head.’

The Lady Fiorinda laughed luxuriously, a soft, mocking laugh with a scarce perceptible little contemptuous upward nodding of her head, displaying the better with that motion her throat’s lithe strong loveliness. For a minute, the Duke painted swiftly and in silence. Hers was a beauty the more sovereign because, like smooth waters above a whirlpool, it seemed but the tranquillity of sleeping danger: there was a taint of harsh Tartarean stock in her high flat cheekbones, and in the slight upward slant of her eyes; a touch of cruelty in her laughing lips, the lower lip a little too full, the upper a little too thin; and in her nostrils, thus dilated, like a beautiful and dangerous beast’s at the smell of blood. Her hair, parted and strained evenly back on either side from her serene sweet forehead, coiled down at last in a smooth convoluted knot which nestled in the nape of her neck like a black panther asleep. She wore no jewel nor ornament save two escarbuncles, great as a man’s thumb, that hung at her ears like two burning coals of fire. ‘A generous prince and patron indeed,’ she said; ‘and a most courtly servant for ladies, that we must rot tomorrow like the aloe-flower, and all to sauce his dish with a biting something of fragility and non-perpetuity.’

The Countess Rosalura, younger daughter of Prince Ercles, new-wed two months ago to Medor, the Duke’s captain of the bodyguard, had risen softly from her seat beside her lord on the brink of a fountain of red porphyry and come to look upon the picture with her brown eyes. Medor followed her and stood looking beside her in the shade of the great lime-tree. Myrrha and Violante joined them, with secret eyes for the painter rather than for the picture: ladies of the bedchamber to Barganax’s mother, the Duchess of Memison. Only Anthea moved not from her place beside that learned man, leaning a little forward. Her clear Grecian brow was bent, and from beneath it eyes yellow and unsearchable rested their level gaze upon Barganax. Her fierce lips barely parted in the dimmest shadow or remembrance of a smile. And it was as if the low golden beams of the sun, which in all things else in that garden wrought transformation, met at last with something not to be changed (because it possessed already a like essence with their own and a like glory), when they touched Anthea’s hair.

‘There, at last!’ said the Duke. ‘I have at last caught and pinned down safe on the canvas one particular minor diabolus of your ladyship’s that hath dodged me a hundred times when I have had him on the tip of my brush; him I mean that peeks and snickers at the corner of your mouth when you laugh as if you would laugh all honesty out of fashion.’

‘I laugh none out of fashion,’ she said, ‘but those that will not follow the fashions I set ’em. May I rest now?’

Without staying for an answer, she rose and stepped down from the stone plinth. She wore a coat-hardy, of dark crimson satin. From shoulder to wrist, from throat to girdle, the soft and shining garment sat close like a glove, veiling yet disclosing the breathing loveliness which, like a rose in crystal, gave it life from within. Her gown, of the like stuff, revealed when she walked (as in a deep wood in summer, a stir of wind in the tree-tops lets in the sun) rhythms and moving splendours bodily, every one of which was an intoxication beyond all voluptuous sweet scents, a swooning to secret music beyond deepest harmonies. For a while she stood looking on the picture. Her lips were grave now, as if something were fallen asleep there; her green eyes were narrowed and hard like a snake’s. She nodded her head once or twice, very gently and slowly, as if to mark some judgement forming in her mind. At length, in tones from which all colour seemed to have been drained save the soft indeterminate greys as of muted strings, ‘I wonder that you will still be painting,’ she said: ‘you, that are so much in love with the pathetic transitoriness of mortal things: you, that would smite his neck who should rob you of that melancholy sweet debauchery of your mind by fixing your marsh-fires in the sphere and making immortal for you your ephemeral treasures. And yet you will spend all your invention and all your skill, day after day, in wresting out of paint and canvas a counterfeit, frail, and scrappy immortality for something you love to look on, but, by your own confession, would love less did you not fear to lose it.’

‘If you would be answered in philosophy, madam,’ said the Duke, ‘ask old Vandermast, not me.’

‘I have asked him. He can answer nothing to the purpose.’

‘What was his answer?’ said the Duke.

The Lady Fiorinda looked at her picture, again with that lazy, meditative inclining of her head. That imp which the Duke had caught and bottled in paint awhile ago curled in the corner of her mouth. ‘O,’ said she, ‘I do not traffic in outworn answers. Ask him, if you would know.’

‘I will give your ladyship the answer I gave before,’ said that old man, who had sat motionless, serene and unperturbed, darting his bright and eager glance from painter to sitter and to painter again, and smiling as if with the aftertaste of ancient wine. ‘You do marvel that his grace will still consume himself with striving to fix in art, in a seeming changelessness, those self-same appearances which in nature he prizeth by reason of their every mutability and subjection to change and death. Herein your ladyship, grounding yourself at first unassailably upon most predicamental and categoric arguments in celarent, next propounded me a syllogism in barbara, the major premiss whereof, being well and exactly seen, surveyed, overlooked, reviewed, and recognized, was by my demonstrations at large convicted in fallacy of simple conversion and not per accidens; whereupon, countering in bramantip, I did in conclusion confute you in bokardo; showing, in brief, that here is no marvel; since ’tis women’s minds alone are ruled by clear reason: men’s are fickle and elusive as the jack-o’-lanterns they pursue.’

‘A very complete and metaphysical answer,’ said she. ‘Seeing ’tis given on my side, I’ll let it stand without question; though (to be honest) I cannot tell what the dickens it means.’

‘To be honest, madam,’ said the Duke, ‘I paint because I cannot help it.’

Fiorinda smiled: ‘O my lord, I knew not you were wont to do things upon compulsion.’ Her lip curled, and she said again, privately for his own ear, ‘Save, indeed, when your little brother calleth the tune.’ Sidelong, under her eyelashes, she watched his face turn red as blood.

With a sudden violence the Duke dashed his handful of brushes to the ground and flung his palette skimming through the air like a flat stone that boys play ducks and drakes with, till it crashed into a clump of giant asphodel flowers a dozen yards away. Two or three of those stately blooms, their stems smashed a foot above the ground, drooped and slowly fell, laying pitifully on the grass their great tapering spikes of pink-coloured waxen filigree. His boy went softly after the palette to retrieve it. He himself, swinging round a good half circle with the throw, was gone in great strides the full length of the garden, turned heel at the western parapet, and now came back, stalking with great strides, his fists clenched. The company was stood back out of the way in an uneasy silence. Only the Lady Fiorinda moved not at all from her place beside the easel of sweet sandalwood inlaid with gold. He came to a sudden halt within a yard of her. At his jewelled belt hung a dagger, its pommel and sheath set thick with cabochon rubies and smaragds in a criss-cross pattern of little diamonds. He watched her for a moment, the breath coming swift and hard through his nostrils: a tiger beside Aphrodite’s statua. There hovered in the air about her a sense-maddening perfume of strange flowers: her eyes were averted, looking steadily southward to the hills: the devil sat sullen and hard in the corner of her mouth. He snatched out the dagger and, with a savage back-handed stroke, slashed the picture from corner to corner; then slashed it again, to ribbons. That done, he turned once more to look at her.

She had not stirred; yet, to his eye now, all was altered. As some tyrannous and triumphant phrase in a symphony returns, against all expectation, hushed to starved minor harmonies or borne on the magic welling moon-notes of the horn, a shuddering tenderness, a dying flame; such-like, and so moving, was the transfiguration that seemed to have come upon that lady: her beauty grown suddenly a thing to choke the breath, piteous like a dead child’s toys: the bloom on her cheek more precious than kingdoms, and less perdurable than the bloom on a butterfly’s wing. She was turned side-face towards him; and now, scarce to be perceived, her head moved with the faintest dim recalling of that imperial mockery of soft laughter that he knew so well; but he well saw that it was no motion of laughter now, but the gallant holding back of tears.

‘You ride me unfairly,’ he said in a whisper. ‘You who have held my rendered soul, when you would, trembling in your hand: will you goad me till I sting myself to death with my own poison?’

She made no sign. To the Duke, still steadfastly regarding her, all sensible things seemed to have attuned themselves to her: a falling away of colours: grey silver in the sunshine instead of gold, the red quince-flowers blanched and bloodless, the lush grass grey where it should be green, a spectral emptiness where an instant before had been summer’s promise on the air and the hues of life and the young year’s burden. She turned her head and looked him full in the eye: it was as if, from between the wings of death, beauty beaconed like a star.

‘Well,’ said the Duke, ‘which of the thousand harbours of damnation have you these three weeks been steering for? What murder must I enact?’

‘Not on silly pictures,’ said she; ‘as wanton boys break up their playthings; and I doubt not I shall be entreated sit for you again tomorrow, to paint a new one.’

The Duke laughed lightly. ‘Why there was good in that, too. Some drowsy beast within me roused himself and suddenly started up, making himself a horror to himself, and, now the blood’s cooled, happily sleeps again.’

‘Sleeps!’ Fiorinda said. Her lip curled.

‘Come,’ said the Duke. ‘What shall it be then? Inspire my invention. Entertain ’em all to a light collation and, by cue taken at the last kissing-cup, let split their weasands, stab ’em all in a moment? Your noble brother amongst them, ’tis to be feared, madam; since him, with a bunch of others, I am to thank for these beggar-my-neighbour sleights and cozenage beyond example. Or shall’t be a grand night-piece of double fratricide? yours and mine, spitted on one spit like a brace of woodcock? We can proceed with the first today: for the other, well, I’ll think on’t.’

‘Are you indeed that prince whom reputation told me of,’ said she, ‘that he which did offend you might tremble with only thinking of it? And now, as hares pull dead lions by the beard—’

The Duke swung away from her a step or two, then back, like a caged beast. His brow was thunderous again. ‘Ever going on beyond your possession,’ he said, ‘beyond your bounds. ’Tis well I am of a cool judgement. There’s more in’t than hold up my hand, or whistle in my fist. Content you that I have some noble great design on foot, which in good time shall prove prodigious to ’em all: and once holding good my advantage over them, in their fall I’ll tempt the destinies.’

With an infinite slow feline grace she lifted up her head: her nostrils widening, the flicker of a smile on her parted lips: from beneath the shadow of long black lashes, half-moons of green lambent fire beheld him steadily. ‘You must not speak to me as if I were a child or an animal,’ she said. ‘Will you swear me all this?’

‘No,’ answered he. ‘But you may look back and consider of time past: I have been so sparing to promise, that (as your ladyship will bear me out) I have ever paid more than either I promised or was due.’

‘Well,’ she said: ‘I am satisfied.’

‘I must to the throne-room,’ said the Duke. ‘’Tis an hour past the hour of audience, and I would not hold ’em too long tarrying for me; ’tis an unhandsome part, and I use it but to curb the insolencies of some we spoke on.’ The Lady Fiorinda gave him at arm’s length her white hand: he bowed over it and raised it to his lips. Standing erect again, still unbonneted before her, he rested his eyes upon her a moment in silence, then with a step nearer bent to her ear: ‘Do you remember the Poetess, madam?—

As if spell-bound under the troublous sweet hesitation of the choriambics, she listened, very still. Very still, and dreamily, and with so soft an intonation that the words seemed but to take voiceless shape on her ambrosial breath, she answered, like an echo:

Once more Love, the limb-loosener, shaketh me:

Bitter-sweet, the dread Worm ineluctable.

‘It is my birthday, I am reminded,’ said the Duke in the same whispered quietness. ‘Will your ladyship do me the honour to sup with me tonight, in my chamber in the western tower that looks upon the lake, at sunset?’

There was no smile on that lady’s lips. Slowly, her eyes staring into his, she bent her head. Surely all of enchantment and of gold that charged the air of that garden, its breathless promise, its storing and its brooding, distilled like the perfume of a dark red rose, as ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes.’

III THE TABLES SET IN MESZRIA

PRESENCE-CHAMBER IN ACROZAYANA • THE HIGH ADMIRAL JERONIMY • THE LORD CHANCELLOR BEROALD • CARES THAT RACK GREAT STATESMEN • THE BASTARD OF FINGISWOLD • EARL RODER • CONFERENCE IN THE DUKE’S CLOSET • KING STYLLIS’S TESTAMENT • RAGE OF THE DUKE • THE VICAR SUSPECTED KING-KILLER • LEAGUE TO UPHOLD THE TESTAMENT.

MEANWHILE, for nearly two hours in the great throne-room in Zayana had the presence begun to fill against the Duke’s appearing. Now the fashion of that hall was that it was long, of a hundred cubits the length thereof and the breadth forty cubits. The walls were of pale hammered mountain gold, rough with an innumerable variety of living things graven some in large some in little, both hairy kinds and feathered, and scaly kinds both of land and sea, oftenest by twos and twos with their children beside their nests or holes, and the flowers, fruits, leaves, herbs and water-weeds native to each kind winding in the interspaces with a conceited formal luxuriance. Massy columns, four times a man’s height, of carved black onyx with milky veins, made caryatides in form of monstrous snakes, nine lengthwise of the hall on either side and four at either end. These supported on their hooded heads a frieze of tesselated jet four cubits deep, whereon were displayed poppies and blooms of the aloe and the forgetful lotus, all in a cool frail loveliness of opals and rose-coloured sapphires as for their several blooms and petals, and as for their stalks and leaves of green marmolite and chalcedony. Above this great flowered frieze the roof was pitched in a vault of tracery-work of ivory and gold, so wrought that in the lower ranges near the frieze the curls and arabesques were all of gold, then higher a little mingling of ivory, and so more and more ivory and the substance of the work more and more fine and airy; until in the highest all was but pure ivory only, and its woven filaments of the fineness of hairs to look upon, seen at that great height, and as if a sudden air or a word too roughly spoken should be enough to break a framework so unsubstantial and blow it clean away. In the corners of the hall stood four tripods of dull wrought gold ten cubits in height, bearing four shallow basins of pale moonstone. In those basins a child might have bathed, so broad they were, and brimming all with sweet scented essences, attar of roses and essences of the night-lily and the hyperborean eglantine, and honey-dew from the glades beyond Ravary; and birds of paradise, gold-capped, tawny-bodied, and with black velvet throats that scintillated with blue and emerald fire, flitted still from basin to basin, dipping and fluttering, spilling and spreading the sweet perfumes. The hall was paved all over with Parian marble in flags set lozenge-wise, and pink topaz insets in the joints; and at the northern end was the ducal throne upon a low dais of the same marble, and before the dais, stretching the whole width of the hall, a fair great carpet figured with cloud-shapes and rainbow-shapes and comets and birds of passage and fruits and blossoms and living things, all of a dim shifting variety of colours, pale and unseizable like moonlight, which character came of its cunning weaving of silks and fine wools and intermingling of gold and silver threads in warp and woof. The throne itself was without ornament, plainly hewn from a single block of stone, warm grey to look on with veins of a lighter hue here and there, and here and there a shimmer as of silver in the texture of the stone; and that stone was dream-stone, a thing beyond price, endowed with hidden virtues. But from behind, uplifted like the wings of a wild-duck as it settles on the water, great wings shadowed the dream-stone; they sprang twenty cubits high from base to the topmost feather, and made all of gold, each particular feather fashioned to the likeness of nature that it was a wonder to look upon, and yet with so much awfulness of beauty and shadowing grace in the grand uprising of the wings as made these small perfections seem but praise and worship of the principal design which gave them their life and which from them took again fulfilment. Thousands of thousands of tiny precious stones of every sort that grows in earth or sea were inlaid upon those mighty wings, incrusting each particular quill, each little barb of each feather, so that to a man moving in that hall and looking upon the wings the glory unceasingly changed, as new commixtures of myriad colours and facets caught and threw back the light. And, for all this splendour, the very light in the throne-room was, by art of Doctor Vandermast, made misty and glamorous: brighter than twilight, gentler than the cold beams of the moon, as if the light itself were resolved into motes of radiance which, instead of darting afar, floated like snow-flakes, invisible themselves but bathing all else with their soft effulgence. For there was in all that spacious throne-room not a shadow seen, nor any sparkle of over-brilliance, only everywhere that veiling glamour.

Twenty-five soldiers of the Duke’s bodyguard were drawn up beside the throne on either hand. Their byrnies and greaves were of black iron, and they were weaponed with ponderous double-edged two-handed swords. Each man carried his helm in the crook of his left arm, for it was unlawful even for a man-at-arms to appear covered in that hall: none might so appear, save the Duke alone. They were all picked men for strength and stature and fierceness; the head of every man of them was shaven smooth like an egg, and every man had a beard, chestnut-red, that reached to his girdle. Save these soldiers only, the company came not beyond the fair carpet’s edge that went the width of the hall before the throne; for this was the law in Zayana, that whosoever, unbidden of the Duke, should set foot upon that carpet should lose nothing but his life.

But in the great spaces of the hall below the carpet was such a company of noble persons walking and discoursing as any wise man should take pure joy to look upon: great states of Meszria all in holiday attire; gentlemen of the Duke’s household, and of Memison; courtmen and captains out of Fingiswold holden to the lord Admiral’s service or the Chancellor’s or Earl Roder’s, that triple pillar of the great King’s power in the south there, whereby he had in his life-days and by his politic governance not so much held down faction and discontents as not suffered them be thought on or take life or being. But now, King Mezentius dead, his lawful son sudden where he should be wary, fumbling where he should be resolute; his bastard slighted and set aside and likely (in common opinion) to snatch vengeance for it in some unimagined violence; and last, his Vicar in the midland parts puffed up like a deadly adder ready to strike, but at whom first none can say: these inconveniences shook the royal power in Meszria, patently, for even a careless eye to note, even here in Duke Barganax’s presence-chamber.

A bevy of young lords of Meszria, standing apart under the perfume tripod in the south-eastern corner whence they might at leisure view all that came in by the great main doors at the southern end, held light converse. Said one of them, ‘Here comes my lord Admiral.’

‘Ay,’ said another, ‘main means of our lingering consumption: would the earth might gape for him.’

‘Nay,’ said a third, that was Melates of Vashtola, ‘I do love my Jeronimy as I love a young spring sallet: cold and safe. I will not have you blame him. Do but look: as puzzled as a cod-fish! For fancy’s passion, spit upon him. Nay, Roder and Beroald are the prime blood-suckers, not he.’

‘Speak lower,’ said the Lord Barrian, he that spoke first; ‘there’s jealous ears pricked all-wheres.’

With a grave salutation they greeted the High Admiral, who with a formal bow passed on. He was somewhat heavy of build, entered a little into the decline of years; his pale hair lay lankish on the dome of his head, his pale blue eyes were straight and honest; the growth of his beard was thin, straggling over the great collar and badge of the kingly order of the hippogriff that he wore about his neck; the whole aspect of the man melancholy, and as if strained with half-framed resolutions and wishes that give the wall to fears. Yet was the man of a presence that went beyond his stature, which was but ordinary; as if there hung upon him some majesty of the King’s power he wielded, of sufficiency (at least in trained and loyal soldiery under arms) to have made a fair adventure to unseat the Duke upon Acrozayana, red-bearded bodyguard and all.

When he was passed by, Zapheles spake again, he that had spoken second: ‘Perfidiousness is a common waiter in most princes’ courts. And so, in your ear, were’t not for loyal obligement to a better man, I’d call it time to serve, though late, our own interest: call in him you wot of: do him obedience, ’stead of these plaguish stewards and palace-scullions that, contrary to good cupping-glasses, must affect and suck none but the best blood.’

Melates looked warily round, ‘I taught you that, my lord: ’tis a fine toy, but in sober sadness I am not capable of it. Nor you neither, I think.’

Zapheles said, ‘’Twill yet bear thinking on. You have here your natural sovereign lord (o’ the wrong side of the blanket may be; no matter, that’s nor here nor there); you yield him service and upholding: well. You look for quiet, therefore, and to be lord of your own, being suffered to enjoy these borders whereof you have right and particular dominion. Good: then behold your payment. He is practised upon most devilishly; even ladies will shortly scoff and prattle of it, that he is grown as tractable to’t as stock-fish. You’ll say that’s his concernment; in the midst of idleness and deliciousness, fanned with the soft gales of his own flatterers’ lips, he sitteth content. Good. But must we take cold too, ’cause he hath given his cloak away? Must I smile and sit mum (and here’s a right instance hot upon me like new cakes) when that Beroald taketh up a man I ne’er saw nor heard on, took in his lordship’s own private walks with a great poisoned dagger in his breeches; a pretty thing it was, and meant beyond question for my lord Chancellor; they hanged him where he stood, on a mulberry-tree; and, ’cause the vile murderer said with a lie that this was by County Zapheles his setting on, I am at short warning cited before the justiciars to answer this; and the Duke, when I appeal to him under ancient right of signiory to have the proceedings quashed under plea of ne obstes and carried before him in person (which should but have upheld his authority, too much abridged and bridled by these hireling office-nobility), counsels me kindly waive the point of jurisdiction. And why? but that he will not be teased with these matters; which yet ensueth neither the realm’s good nor his.’

‘To amend which,’ said Barrian, ‘you and Melates would in plain treason give over all to the Vicar?’

‘Would if we were wise,’ replied Melates; ‘but for fond loyalty sake, will not. May be, too, he is loyal, and would not have us.’

Zapheles laughed.

Barrian said: ‘Your own men would not follow you in such a bad enterprise.’

‘’Tis very true,’ said Zapheles. ‘And indeed, were’t otherwise, they should deserve to be hanged.’

‘And you and I too,’ said Melates.

‘And you and I too. Yet in the Parry you may behold a man that knoweth at least the right trick to govern: do’t through lords of land, like as we be, bounded to’s allegiance, not parchment lords of’s own making.’

‘Were the Duke but stiffened to’t!’ said Melates. ‘You are his near friend, Barrian: speak to him privately.’

‘Ay,’ said Zapheles. ‘Nay, I mock not: choose but the happy occasion. Say to him, “You are Meszria: our centre whereto all lines come, all things look. Who depriveth this merchandise of reverence, defaceth all lustre of it. To it, then: out with Beroald, out with Roder and Jeronimy: throw the fowl to the Devil that hatched it.”’

‘Great and thumping words,’ said Barrian. ‘But ’tis mere truth a hath not the main strength to do it and he would. But hist, here’s the Chancellor.’

The company by the door made way right and left with many courtesies and loutings, which the Lord Beroald acknowledged with a cold and stately smile. His gait was direct and soldierly, he carried his head like a mettled horse, and on his lean countenance, flat in the cheekbones, wide between the eyes, clean cut about the jaw, close shaven save for the bristly brown mustachios, sat that look which, as lichens grow on rock-faces, comes but with years of constant lordship over men and their long customed obedience. ‘See how the spongy sycophants do hang on his steps,’ said Zapheles. ‘You’d swear they feared he should have ’em called in question for simple being here in Acrozayana. And the Duke will not put down his foot, it shall soon come to this indeed; a main crime to do him this empty courtesy, attend the weekly presences, without leave asked of this great devil and his fellows. See how he and Jeronimy do draw to a point of secret mischief as the lode-stone draweth iron.’

For the Chancellor, ending now his progress up the hall, was stood with the Lord Jeronimy on the great carpet before the throne. To them, as presenting in their high commission, along with Earl Roder, the King’s very person and authority in Meszria, was accorded these many years the freedom of the carpet; and that was accorded to none other in all the land who was not of the Duke’s own household or of the ducal line of Memison.

‘I am glad to see you here, my lord Admiral,’ said Beroald; ‘and indeed it is a joy I scarcely looked for: thrice in three weeks, and you were not formerly given to great observance of this ceremony.’

The Admiral looked at him with his dog-like eyes, smiled slowly, and said, ‘I am here to keep the peace.’

‘And I on the same errand,’ said Beroald: ‘and to please my lady sister. I would have you look a little more starved, as I myself do study to do. It is nought useful to remind him how we made new wood when the young King pruned away his appanage.’

There’s that needs no reminding on,’ said Jeronimy.

‘Will your lordship walk a little?’ said Beroald, taking him by the arm, and, as they paced slowly to and fro, cheek by cheek for convenience of private conference: ‘I still do hear it opinioned that it was not without some note or touch of malice these things were brought about; and you are named in that particular, to have set the King’s mind against him.’

Jeronimy blew out his cheeks and shook his head. ‘May be I was to blame; but ’twas in the King’s clear interest. I’d do it, were’t to do again tomorrow.’

‘This country party love us the worse for it,’ said Beroald.

‘A good housewife,’ answered Jeronimy, ‘was ever held in bad report with moths and spiders.’

‘We can show our teeth, and use them, if it were come to that,’ said Beroald. ‘But that were questionable policy. Too many scales stand in too uncertain balance. Roder’s long tarrying in Rerek: I like it not, ha?’

‘As if the King should think he needed men there.’

‘You have no fresh despatches?’

‘Not since that I showed you, a-Thursday sennight.’

‘That was not so bad, methought. My lord Admiral, I have a question I would move to you. Are we strong enough, think you, to hold off the Vicar if need were?’

Jeronimy looked straight before him awhile; then, ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘with the Duke of our side.’

‘You have taken me?’ said Beroald. ‘Supposition is, things fall out worst imaginable: war with him in Rerek, and the King’s forces overthrown. You are confident then?’

‘With the Duke of our side, and with right of our side, I should hope to do it.’

‘I too,’ said the Chancellor, ‘am of your opinion.’

‘Well, what’s the matter?’ The Lord Jeronimy came to a stop in his slow deliberate pacing. A gentleman of his household waited below the carpet: he seemed short of breath, as one that hath run a course: with a low leg he made obeisance, drawing a packet from his doublet. Jeronimy came to him, took it, and looked carefully at the seal with the gold-mounted perspective-glass that hung by a fine chain about his neck. Men marked how his sallow face turned sallower. ‘Just,’ he said: ‘it hath all the points in it.’ He undid the seal and read the letter, then handed it to Beroald; then, scowling upon the messenger: ‘How hapt, ninny-hammer, that you delivered this no sooner?’

‘Lord,’ answered he, ‘his lordship, all muddied from hard riding, did write it in your own house; and upon his sudden injunction strung with threats and filthy speeches innumerable, I did fly a-horseback and upon admittance at the fortress gate did with such leaps flee up the stairs as I was in point to have been laid hands on for a madman, so had all my charge miscarried.’

‘Away then: to him again and say I had it, and my lord Chancellor too.’ Then, walking apart once more with Beroald: ‘We were best act on this, albeit to see us openly on a sudden go from the chamber may give occasion that the people may buzz and talk of it. Yet these commends do directly say we are in peril here until he speak with us.’

‘Roder,’ said Beroald, ‘is not a man to start at his own shadow. Go we while the way’s yet open.’

Those two lords, presenting to curious eyes a studied show of untroubled and careless ease, were but even come forth to the grand staircase, when the lofty doors clanged to behind them, and in the throne-room trumpets sounded a sennet. And now in great pomp and splendour, an hour and a half past the just time of audience, the Duke opened the presence. There went before him, entering by a door behind the throne, six blacks with silver trumpets, sounding to the sennet as aforesaid, and thirty peacocks, walking two by two with their tails displayed, who, after their progress forth and back before the throne, ranged themselves fifteen on either hand beneath the black onyx pillars, making with their tails a screen of shimmering green and blue and gold. Medor, Egan, and Vandermast, and a dozen other of the Duke’s household, took each his appointed station beside the throne, Medor in his bronze byrny with gorget and shoulder-pieces inlaid with silver and bearing as symbol of his office a long double-handed two-edged sword; and now the trumpets, after a long baying blast that seemed to shake the gossamer tracery of the roof, suddenly fell silent as Barganax appeared.

His kirtle was of corded silk, rose-coloured, slashed with velvet of a darker hue, and gathered about the waist with a belt of sea-horse hide lapped at the edge with thread of gold and bossed with balas rubies and cat’s-eye chrysoberyls; he had thick-woven silken hose of the like rose-colour, and a long cloak of dark grey brocaded silk lined with cloth of silver; the collar of the cloak was of black cormorants’ feathers cunningly sewn and fitted to make an even smoothness, cross-striped at every span with lines of rubies and fastened with golden clasps. Yet was all this but shadows in water beside the man himself. For, alike in his lithe tall frame, and in his carriage noble and debonair and of a cat-like elegance, this Duke was beautiful to look upon beyond the example of men; his skin marvellous fair and smooth, his hair the colour of burnished copper, short and curly, his nose clean cut and straight, his brow wide, his eyebrows sleek and thick and with a scarcely to be seen upward slant, that cast a quality of somewhat pensive and of somewhat faun-like across his face; his shaven chin delicate but strong, his mouth a little large, firm-lipped under daintily upcurled mustachios, sensitive, apt for sudden modulations of mood and passion; his eyes brown, contemplative, and with profound obscurities of pulsing fire. And as, with that easy simplicity of magnificence which seemed in him nature bred clean beyond the range of art, he took his seat upon the dream-stone, it was as if the richness of his jewelled apparel, the shadowing of those wings, and all the sumptuous splendours of that hall were to him but as the flower on the blackthorn or the rainbow across a mountain peak: graces wedded to a substance worthy their own unsubstantial loveliness.

Now when the ceremonial business of presentations, petitions, sealings of placets and decrees was concluded, the Duke spake to them of his council that stood beside him: ‘Is’t not some wonder there should be no legate nor envoy here to represent the Vicar?’

‘May be,’ answered Medor, ‘that he liked not your grace’s sending away of Gabriel Flores a month ago.’

Barganax lifted an eyebrow: ‘’Twas pure charity, and indeed a compliment, to let him know I thought his honour too basely travestied by such a villain. Nor was it fit I should accept as envoy but his master of the horse, one that is besides but a patent hired intelligencer, and scarcely a gentleman by birth.’

‘There’s one more cloud against the sun,’ said Egan; ‘so have I seen storms a-brewing. Your grace was informed ere you did enter the presence-chamber how that the Admiral and the Chancellor, that were here but a little before, were gone forth in a flutter of seeming urgency upon word brought them from without. Be advised: leave your custom, and go not today among the general throng below the carpet.’

Barganax said, ‘It is seven year today since I did come of age and take power here in Zayana, and never yet have I omitted the custom I did that day begin.’

He stood up to go, but now Medor spoke against it: ‘There were no harm to change it; and remember, did aught go miss, ’twere more than your own life you laid in hazard. Go not, Lord.’

‘Vandermast,’ said Barganax, ‘what say you?’

‘They have given their reasons,’ answered that ancient man. ‘I would hear your grace’s reasons on the contrary part.’

‘Imprimis,’ said the Duke, ‘whose turn should it serve to yerk me one under the fifth rib? Not old Jeronimy’s, nor theirs that stayed with him: it should raise a cloud of wasps about their ears should in three days sweep ’em out of Meszria. Nor yet our discontented lords: they cry for action, and that were a strange road, to murder me: by my soul, they can look for no other to lead ’em. The King’s? True, there’s some coldness betwixt us, but I’ll not suspect him of things myself would not soil my hands withal. But indeed I do know all these men. Pew! I am not to begin Duke.’

‘Horius Parry,’ said Medor then, ‘would not stick to murder you.’

‘His hands are full, playing spoil-five with the King for Rerek,’ the Duke replied. ‘Come, Medor,’ he said: ‘I am minded to go my own gate; and when I must skulk and beware in my own presence-chamber, then were I best slain indeed, and high time to say adieu. Attend me, Medor. But is not this right reason?’ said he over his shoulder, passing by, to Doctor Vandermast. Vandermast made no reply, but as he and the Duke crossed glances it was as if two diverse wisdoms of age and of hot youth rose from their wells, recognized each his make, and clipped hands together.

Now was Duke Barganax come about three-quarters of his way down from the throne to the lower end of the chamber, walking and discoursing with this man and that, with Medor at his elbow, when there came a stir about the main doorway, as if some would have entrance but, because of the lateness and because the Duke had voided the throne, was denied. The Duke sent one to inquire and see; that one came back on the instant to say that here was the Earl Roder craved audience and would not take their no for it. ‘Let him come in,’ said the Duke, and received him where he stood.

‘My lord Duke,’ said Roder, ‘I am obliged to kiss your hand; and, ere I go further in a business which in this public place I dare not pronounce but between my teeth, I would entreat you of a matter, easy for you to grant, and condition absolute of our more large and secret conference.’

‘Our fashion is not curious,’ answered the Duke, marking his disordered countenance. ‘Yet do I wonder a little, if the matter crieth so loud for urgency, why you came not sooner. Or why sent you with so much parade of secrecy (for I saw it, my lord, through eyes that serve me) to fetch away the Admiral and the Chancellor, already pricked off for the presence? Or why, for a last point of wonder, you now come here without them.’

‘That is the condition I spoke on,’ answered he. ‘I am to beseek you confirm us, under your royal word, safe conduct and assurance all and severally of our lives and persons, which done we shall straight to the matter, but until then we may not.’

To this the Duke listened with apparent wonder, then fell a-laughing. ‘What coil’s here?’ he said. ‘Sure, the man’s frantic. What, Medor, I shall be apt to think they mean me mischief indeed, if their own sick minds do make ’em start like rabbits at such fairy-babes o’ their own imagining. Howbeit, content you, Earl; I do swear you peace and grith, safe conduct to come and to go with liberty of life and of body on all lawful occasions in my dukedom of Zayana, for you and for my lord High Admiral Jeronimy and for my lord Chancellor Beroald; and unto this you have my royal word, as I do trow on the high and blessed Gods and Goddesses Who keep the wide heavens.’

‘I am beholden to your grace,’ said the Earl. ‘And yet, were it ask a further boon, I think they would treasure it much in writing.’

The Duke’s eye gleamed. ‘You have witnesses, my lord. And indeed, if my bond were better than my word, you might stand in some peril now.’

‘Forgive me,’ said Roder then. ‘We are content with your royal word, and in this I am the mouthpiece of all three of us. And truly,’ said he, chuckling in his beard, ‘I may now disclose to your grace the inwardness of my calling of ’em out: ’twas because we should not all three be in your hand afore we had ta’en assurance of our safety. But now, had you been minded to entreat me evilly, he and Beroald do stand at your doors without the citadel with enough stout lads mustered under arms as—’

The blood rushed to Barganax’s face and neck, and his hand leapt to the dagger at his belt. Roder said, ‘I am sorry. But your grace will not forget your oath, nor you will not strike a weaponless man. Will’t please you enter your closet and suffer me bring in the Admiral and the Chancellor, when we shall confer with you about matters of most weighty consequence.’

‘You are a brave man, Roder,’ said Barganax at length, folding his arms and speaking close in the Earl’s face. ‘Bring in your friends. This circumspection of peace-pledges, and this armed alertness when we were never yet at variance, are clean past my understanding. But tell ’em, for their better counsel, ’twas well you had my oath before I knew you threatened force against me. Had I known or seen it, my answer had been pat and to the purpose.’

The Earl Roder, as a man that hath escaped a danger the full menace of which he had not apprehended till the danger was past, went forth somewhat shaken from before the face of the Duke.

When they were set in Duke Barganax’s closet, the lord Admiral took up the word: they were but five there, those three great officers of state, the Duke himself and Doctor Vandermast. ‘It was unadvisedly done,’ said the Admiral; ‘and we will first tender to your grace our large regrets and most humbly crave your pardon. Yet shall you consider, when you know all, that these be great news and sudden, and something in a manner to root up all past custom and example, so as we know not where we stand, in a manner; and albeit we do well think, my lord Duke, that it shall still lie to our interest, both yours and ours, to hold each by other, sith it well may so come about as that like dangers from the like quarter should menace us both, yet in a manner—’

‘My good lord Admiral,’ said the Duke, ‘I pray you put out of mind this of the soldiers. I am satisfied: not another thought will I give it. But, for the matter in hand, we shall the more readily follow your argument if you will first tell us these news you speak on.’

‘Earl Roder,’ said Jeronimy, ‘hath rid from the north this morning with tidings of sudden and great import.’

‘Give me in a word, what is it?’ said the Duke.

‘Then,’ said Roder, ‘in a word: the King is dead.’

‘Heavy news; but ’tis ten months old.’

‘Nay, nay: King Styllis is dead,’ said Roder. ‘Four days since, in Rerek, in’s camp a little beside Hornmere. I was by his bed, held his hand in mine when his soul took flight.’

Those three lords narrowly watched the Duke who, from his late posture of careless ease, was sat upright at these tidings, his strong and delicate hands grasping the edge of the table of carved sandalwood. His eyes were on Roder’s, but seemed to gaze through and beyond him: for a minute he was silent. At length he spoke, saying, ‘He died young. The Gods rest his soul. He was my brother, though he ne’er was good to me.’ He lowered his gaze and was silent again, his fingers drumming on the table. None spoke. Then, as if waking to common things, he looked up and said sharply: ‘Dead, by what means?’

‘Eating of some venomous confection,’ answered Roder. He paused an instant, then blurted out, ‘The common tittle-tattle doth loudly say your grace did poison him.’

Barganax narrowed his eyes. He fell a-drumming once more on the table. Then, ‘I doubt not, my lord Admiral,’ said he, ‘you have surveyed the field anew ere you came to me with this, and perceived that it is well that you and I should have Meszria solid behind us in our next business. Were it the Vicar had took him off with poison, ’twas first to be looked for he should lay the blame to me.’

None spake. Jeronimy leaned forward on the table, spreading out his hand palm upwards, and cleared his throat once and again as if in prelude to a speech. Beroald saved his embarrassments by saying, ‘Your grace will wish to see all the circumstances before you would determine what were best to do. It were fit you now produce the King’s testament, my lord.’

Roder at that word drew from his bosom a parchment sealed with the royal sign manual. The blood came and went under his swarthy skin, though there was small space to mark it, for the beard grew nigh up to his eyes, and the hair of his head, stiff like a brush, began scarce an inch above his eyebrows. Uneasily he looked at the Duke and said, ‘I would desire your grace have patience; and lest you should be deceived to suppose these dispositions coloured any whit by my advisements, be sure you lay your time aright: this testament was executed this fourth of April, as the King’s highness’ own hand under his seal doth testify, and your grace knoweth well that ’twas not till three days later I did upon commandment go to him in Rerek.’

‘Well, well,’ said the Duke, ‘what’s this to the purpose? Let me have it; as sour as it is, my lips are primed for it.’

Therewith the Lord Roder, bracing himself as a man in posture to dive into an ice-cold tarn in winter time, read out the parchment, that was writ in manner following:

‘By me STYLLYS, sonne of MEZENCIUS of glorous memorye uppon whome be pece, greatt Kyng of Fingyswold and of al stattes and domynyons apparteigning thereunto, bee it by riht of guift or lawfull inheretaunce or costom of prynses or riht of conquest by the destroyenge swherde of my greatt Father or mine owne, in wycch large discrypcioun without dowbt casten or throwen uppon the fullness of the same is imbrased or concluded the domynyons places and pryncipalites foloing naymely that is to sayne my holle maine territorie and kyngdame of Fingyswold and the citty of Rjalmar being the capital citty thereof and prencipall sette or syedge of my statte and gouernement; and my territorie or londe of Reerec and places cytuate and plaste ther withynne being in especially but not exclusively the fortelaces or strangg houlds of Laimac, Cessary, Maegra, Caima, and Argjanna; and my marche of Ulba now gouerned undir my direccion and for my soole behoolfe and sarvys by the after naymed my Vicare of Rerec as aforn sayde; and my cuntree or lond of Mezria and the citees castills fortrasses towneshyps ballywekes herborowes ylands and in a generaltie all the places there withynne buylt or unbuylt dwellid in or unhabyted, but not to exclud aught that is not naymed or emplyed in this large generaltie save and exept only the ducall apponage of Zajana whereof I doo of my brotherly loove and affectione renounse al claymes of soverainty in fauour and for enjoyment of BARRGANAX, reputed sonne of the sed Kyng Mezencius of glorous memorie vpon whome be peace, wycch sed Barrgnax I doo heereby irreuocably indue and envest and the heiers of his bodye for euer with the sayde apponage, being nycely and puntyvally limitted by the bundaries or limytts descrived or delineate on the mappe wycch by this My roialle Seall of fingyswold is made faste unto this My roialle testament—’

‘Let me see it,’ said the Duke. He looked carefully at the map, nodded, showed it to Vandermast, then passed it back to Roder. Roder proceeded:

‘I the sayde Kyng Syllys do beqwithe and giue my roiall estatt and name of Kyngdam and al my holle Realme and Pocessyons afore sed or what somever save as exepted unto my Systyr ANTIOPE Prynsace of Fingyswold being besydis myself the soole suruiuing Chylde borne in wedloke of the sayde greatt Kyng Mezencius vpon Whome bee pece. And considering how that the mortality of kynges is subgette unto the inconsederat and fyckle stoopes and strypes of Fate noe les miserablely than comon mens mortallity, therfore in cace the sayde Prynsace Antiopy should bee in time of My deth nat yet come unto full aage of XVIII yeeres, with addycyon of III yeeres in consideracion that shee is a wommon and that I doo coumpt hir as nat fit to euse full dyscreccion and awtoritee tyll shee be full XXI years of aage, I do dyrect and wylle that the lorde HOORIUS PARRYE my wel loued and trusted servaunt being in some degrie of My kynnedred or affinitie and being heereby confirmed by Me in his estatt and roialle offyce as Vicaire on my behalve and my successours in my befoare naymed kyngdame of Reerec shalbe protectour and wardeyne of my systyr during her minorite and shall in Her name rewll the realme as Regent during that time afoare sed and shall charisshe and care for Her diligently and louyngly in al poincts as a Father should and in al things estudie hir propper good and saftie and the inhansement of hir realme and soverainty. But as touching my sayde kyngdam of Mezria—’

‘Proceed, as touching Meszria,’ said the Duke. ‘’Tis thus far i’ the bounds of reasonable surmise; though I might a looked to see my royal sister entrusted to my care sooner than to so questionable a tutor. True it is, I ne’er set eyes upon her, but I am far nearer by blood and (or I should hate myself else) far more to trust to.’

‘Ere I proceed,’ said Roder, ‘I would inform your grace of this; hard for me to say, but I pray bear with me. The King on’s death-bed did directly say to me that though he was at odds with the Vicar, he did believe so great an honour as this is should bind him faithfully to the royal interest, but your grace he did misdoubt (as he did openly say, but I did speak against it) of a secret determination to usurp the kingdom, and so feared to entrust the Princess unto you.’

‘Proceed, man,’ said the Duke. Roder proceeded:

‘As touching my sayde kyngdam of Mezria, save and exept the sayde apponage of Zayjana as heerin befoare prouided, I do point my wel beloued faythfull sarvante the Lorde Hy Amerall IERONIMY to rewill all the londe as Regent therof during my sed Systyrs minorite and therafter as Shee shall of Hir roiall wylle and pleasire determine of. And who some ere shall neglect contempne or sette on syde any dysposicion of this My Testment, lat his life haue an erly a suddant and an euill endinge and lat the Angre of the Goddes reste vpon him. Giuen under my roiall seall and under myne hande in my pauylyoun bisyde Hornmeere in Rerec this fourt day of Aprelle in the yeere of my raighne I,

STYLLYS R.’

A silence of little ease fell on their council when Roder ended his reading of that testament. Except old Vandermast’s not an eye was raised: those others shrank, in that silence, from meeting Barganax’s glance: Barganax himself sat staring downward with a cat-like intention on the void table-top before him. When he spoke at last it was in a strained voice, as if he rode wrath on the curb, tight held yet ready to overleap at the least slackening of control all bounds, all reason. ‘You will libel me out a copy of that, my lord Chancellor, certified under your hand and under his and his,’ pointing with his eye at Roder and Jeronimy.

Beroald answered and said, ‘I will.’

‘I must have half an hour to consider of this ere we pursue it further,’ said the Duke, still with that frightening tenseness in his voice. ‘Vandermast, fill out Rian wines for these lords and then attend me. And to you, sirs, I will say this: I have warranted you safety and freedom in Acrozayana. But this shall you know, and consider well of it: in case you shall not wait for me in this room until I come back to talk with you, and in case I find you not here all three when I do come again, that shall be in my eyes an act of war, my lord Admiral, and I shall answer it as such.’ With that word, as if the reins he had held at such horrid tension had slipped on a sudden through his fingers, he leapt to his feet, smote with his dagger into the table-top so mighty a downward stabbing blow that the steel stood a hand-breadth deep in the wood and snapped off short, hurled the broken weapon in the fireplace, and in that gusty extremity of fury flung open the door, swapped it to behind him, and was gone. Doctor Vandermast, who alone of that company maintained a demeanour of detachment and imperturbability, silently set wine before them according to his master’s bidding and silently departed.

‘Sure, the Duke’s much incensed,’ said Jeronimy, wiping the sweat from his brow with a silken handkercher and blowing out with his mouth.

‘It was, in my conceit, a prime error in judgement,’ said Beroald, ‘not to have given him the regency. Unless I do grossly mistake him, he was ready to let go the rest had he had but that. You must pardon me, my lord Admiral; the time calls for bare truth, not glosing compliment.’

‘I would in pure joy give it him today,’ said the Admiral, wiping his brow anew.

Roder drank a great draught of wine, then turned square upon them as if upon revelation suddenly to announce an important truth. ‘Why, this is very much to the purpose, my lords. Give it him: ’tis a bargain, and he is ours.’

‘You do forget your gravity,’ said the Chancellor. ‘Lieth it in us to alter and set aside the King’s will?’

‘Ay, indeed,’ said Roder: ‘I had forgot.’

‘’Tis not to be thought on,’ said the Admiral. ‘But, that provided, it is the more instant we waste not our powers in a manner with private bickerings. I am strangely puzzled. I think we be all of an accord, though, in this: that the main purport of the matter and our only thought is to uphold the young Queen as we are bound to do, and serve her wholly and throughly?’

‘We be weaponless here,’ said Beroald, ‘else would I kiss my sword to that. Take up the regency, my lord Admiral, and I at least will sustain and comfort you in this ’gainst all continent impediments and unto death itself.’

‘Thanks, noble Beroald,’ said the Admiral, taking his hand and Earl Roder’s, who on the motion sware him the like upholding. ‘And now, ’tis to make firm accord with the Duke if we may, and then keep open eyes on Rerek. But there there’s difficult going and need, in a manner, to go frost-nailed, since we were much to blame went we in aught against the King’s testament, and by that testament the Vicar must have the Queen in ward and be Regent for her in Rerek.’

‘Suffer me,’ said the Chancellor, reaching out his hand for the document, ‘to peruse it again. Ha! Come hither,’ he said: ‘note a strange accident. It saith “shall in her name rule the realm as Regent” (this of the Vicar), and then concerning you, my lord Admiral, “to rule all the land” (that is, of Meszria) “as Regent thereof.” It might be nicely argued that, he being in terms named Regent of all the realm and you but of Meszria only, effect is you shall be subject unto him as Regent of all the realm.’

‘’Twas never so intended,’ said Roder.

‘Nay,’ said the Chancellor; ‘but ’twill be argued by the letter, not upon supposition of intention. How came it, Roder, that you had the original?’

‘The Vicar hath it too,’ said he: ‘’Twas execute in duplicate. O there’s no doubt on’t, my lords, the Vicar meaneth not sit content in Rerek. ’Twas most observable with what a cloak of seeming loyalty he wrapped himself withal soon as the King ’gan sicken, and with what eagerness he did haste to wipe out of men’s sight and memories all evidences of strife betwixt them. As witness, a thing I knew by secret and most trusty intelligence: ’twas come so nigh a breach betwixt ’em, that he had privily posted his cousin german, the great Lord Lessingham, with near a thousand horse at Mornagay of Rerek to hold the ways northward ’gainst the King should they come to open differences; but straight upon the King’s sickening (for well he knew the hellish virtue of the drug that would obey no antidote) a sent his Gabriel Flores, a close instrument of his, galloping a whole night and day, to call off Lessingham and fetch him home again. And put it about forthright (with circumstances to be witness in’t) that ’twas Barganax in a jealous vengeful cruelty did procure ’s young brother’s taking off.’

‘And will you say,’ asked Jeronimy, ‘that Barganax did not indeed procure it?’

‘I rest but on hearsay and what my own judgement tells me,’ answered he. ‘I am persuaded the Vicar did it. And hath the mind too to use the sister as a stalk to catch birds with, and that’s the whole kingdom for’s own usurping and enjoyment.’

‘You mind what we spoke on but now i’ the throne-room?’ said Jeronimy to the Chancellor. ‘With right of our side, and with the Duke of our side?’

Beroald nodded a grave assent, saying, ‘We need both.’

The Lord Jeronimy fingered his thin beard a moment in silence: ‘And yet,’ he said, with a twitch of his mouth, ‘I would not trust him out of all-ho! His thoughts do soar too high, in a manner, for sober deed to follow. I would trust him discreetly.’

The door opened, and those lords stood up in a formal deference. It was easy to read in Jeronimy’s most tell-tale eyes how all his prudent and scrupulous withholdings discandied quite, only to look on Barganax that now entered to them with so lovely a taking grace as, after the foul storm he had gone out with, seemed a new man, a new day. ‘My lord Admiral,’ he said, standing in the door: ‘I have now thought on’t. I will stand in alliance with you to uphold the King’s testament unto last fulfilment. Let your scriveners draw it in form, my lord Chancellor: we’ll set our hands to it. And if you will dine with me tomorrow, ’tis a pleasure I shall set store by. I’d say tonight, but – tonight I am bespoke already.’

IV ZIMIAMVIAN DAWN

LIGHT ON A DARK LADY

THE beginnings of new light, fanned with little winds that had slept all night long on the gentle spring-time sea, entered through the wide-open windows of the Duke’s private lodging in Acrozayana and so by open doors into the outer chamber and so, passing out by western windows, were lost upon distances of the hueless lake below. Upon their passage, ambrosial Night, who had first trailed her mantle of dusk and enchantery over the white damask and the wine-cups rough with jewels, and over the oysters and crayfish in hippocras, jellied ortolans, peaches, queen-apples, and strange passion-fruits filled with seeds afloat in a thin delicious juice, and had later watched, under the silver lamps, such preenings and soarings of the bird delight as even holy Night can find no name to name them, now furled plume by plume her downy wings, ready to repair for yet another diurnal span to her chambers of the west. And now morning stood awake in those rooms; loosing hand from departing Night’s, even as Fiorinda, rising in a like silence, loosed her hand from her sleeping lover’s late fallen asleep a little before the dawn.

Motionless at the great crystal mirror, her hands gathering behind her head the night-black heavy and scented softnesses of her unbound hair, she surveyed for a while her own naked loveliness: marvels of white, proud, Greek, modelled to the faintest half-retracted touch, pure as snows that dream out the noonday on the untrod empyreal snow-dome of Koshtra Belorn; and, as in the sweet native habit of such hair, thrones whence darkness shines down darkness to the failing of vision. Compounded and made up of two things she seemed: day and sable night; only in her eyes shone that coolness of aquamarine, and as tempestuous dawns wear their rose-flowers, so she.

After a time, with a sudden melting movement, unseizable as a hummingbird’s flight in its shimmer of moods and motives, voluptuous languor, half-surprised acceptance, self-surrender, disdain, she pronounced her name Fiorinda, delicately, as if caressing with tongue and lips the name’s very beauty as she framed the syllables. She spoke it strangely, as if that name, and the looking-glass image itself, were not her own but somewhat other: somewhat of her making, it might be, as a painter should paint a picture of his heart’s desire; yet not her, or at least not her complete. And, so speaking, she laughed, very light and low, all unlike to that mocking laugh that so pricked Barganax’s sense, as if (by his saying yesterday) she would laugh all honesty out of fashion. For there was now in this laugh of hers a note of quality alien to all human kind, so honeysweet it was, fancy-free, yet laughter-loving of itself: so might a sudden rift in the veil between time and eternity let through a momentary light sound of the honey-sweet imperishable laughter. On the instant, it was gone. But the memory of it remained like the ringed ripple on water where a bird has dived.

The sun rose, and shot its first beam against that lady’s brow, as she turned towards the morning. And now befell a great wonder. Even as she, standing so in the first beams of day, began to put up her hair and pin it with pins of chrysolite, she seemed on the sudden grown taller by a head, to out-top the tallest of men in stature; and whereas, since there is no increase beyond perfection, the beauty of her body might not increase, yet was the substance of it as if transmuted in a moment to pure light, of a like brightness and essence with the heavenly fires of sunrise. No man could in that time have named the colour of Her eyes or of Her hair: the shifting of the dark and light was become as a blinding glory too awful for mortal eye to look upon, too swift for the mind of man to seize or read. For upon Her cheek in that hour was the beauty that belongs to fair-crowned Aphrodite; and that beauty, thus made manifest in its fulness, no eye can bear or see, not even a God’s, unless it be possible for the great Father of All Who sitteth in secret, that He might behold it and know it.

The rays touched Barganax’s lids. He turned in his sleep: reached out a searching hand and spoke her name in his sleep. She took from the silver-studded stool where it lay her loose gown of diaphanous silken stuff spangled with silver stars and with diamonds and sapphires tiny as grains of sand, and put it about her. The marvel was overpast, as a meteor trails across heaven in the common sight of men and their lowly habitations a light never seen till now in earth or sky, and in a count of ten is gone. On the edge of the great bed upon the fair-worked lace border she sat down, placidly and gracefully as a she-leopard might sit. There was a new look in her eyes now as she watched him asleep: a simple human look, but yet as it were from above, detached and virginal, regarding as if in a tender pitiful wonder these toys of circumstance and greatness and magnificence, and him like a child asleep among them, and her own presence as part of them, sitting there. Suddenly she took his hand that lay there where it had abandoned its dreaming quest, and prisoned it, under both hers, in her bosom. The Duke opened his eyes upon her. He lay very still. Her side-face wore the cool loveliness of a windless lake at sunrise; her gaze was downward, the upper lid level and still, the eye still and wide, yet as if attending to no seen object but to some inside music. His imprisoned hand stirred: he said, under his breath, her name.

Her echo, scarce audible, upon a self-accepting Olympian faint upward nod, came with a kind of hushed assent: Fiorinda. And as still she sat with that downward gaze listening, the thing at the corner of her mouth, very beguiling and faun-like now, turned on its back and looked at him sideways.

V THE VICAR OF REREK

A DOG-WASHING IN LAIMAK • GABRIEL FLORES • AMENITIES BETWIXT COUSINS • THE CURST HORSE FEELS THE BRIDLE • ‘AN HONEST STATESMAN TO A PRINCE.’

THAT same eye of day, which three hours ago had opened upon wonder in Acrozayana, was now climbed so high in the eastern heavens as to top, fifty leagues to the northward, the far-shadowing backbone of the Forn, and shine clear into Owldale where, upon a little steep hill solitary among grazing-lands betwixt mountains eastward and westward, the hold of Laimak lay like a sleeping wolf. So steep was that hill that it rose naked in cliffs three or four hundred feet high on every side, and the blind walls of the fortress, built of huge blocks quarried from the crown of the hill, followed the line of the cliffs’ brow round about. Only to the north an arched gateway broke the walls, opening on a path hewn zig-zag up through the cliffs to give passage for men and horses; but always upon sufferance, since at every step the walls or towers commanded that passage way for shooting and casting down of fire or boiling pitch; and a gatehouse bestrode the passage way at its coming forth into the fields below, with towers and machicolations and a portcullis of iron. Wolf-grey it was all to look upon, as well the cliffs as the walls that frowned above them, being of one substance of stubborn crystalline rock, of the earth’s primordial crust, wolf-grey and of an iron hardness. And this was from antique times the castle of the Parrys, that now for thirty generations had been lords in Rerek.

Upon the champaign north and east under Laimak there lay in tents that army, not yet disbanded, which the Lord Horius Parry had drawn to a head for dealing with the King if need were, and which, that necessity now being past, he in his prudent husbandry thought it not good too hastily to lay aside; meaning it should yet, haply for argument in the southlands, haply otherwise, nicely serve his turn.

Within the hold, thus early, he himself was up and doing, while most men yet slept. Under the mighty archway called Hagsby’s Entry, that led from one of the inner courts beneath two towers into the inmost court of all, which was outer ward of the great square keep, he stood, all in dirt, stripped to the waist, aproned like a smith, with a long wooden vat or tub before him full of steaming soapy water, taking his pleasure with washing of his cursed dogs. Two or three that he had already dealt with rushed hither and thither about the narrow courtyard, yelping and barking and tumbling in a wild gladness of release; the rest skulked in shadowy corners of the archway, as hoping against hope to escape notice, yet daring not to slink away, coming each in turn when his name was called, grovelling and unwilling to his master’s feet. Bushy-tailed prick-eared heavy-chested long-fanged slaver-mouthed beasts were they all, a dozen or more, some red, some black, some grey, some yellow, as big as wolves and most wolfish to look upon. Each as his turn came the Vicar seized by the scruff of the neck and by the loose skin above the haunches and, lifting it as it had been a kitten, set it in the bath. He was a huge, heavy, ugly man, nigh about fifty years of age, not tall as beside tall men, but great-thewed and broad of chest and shoulder, his neck as thick as a common man’s thigh, his skin fair and full of freckons, his hair fiery red, stiff like wires and growing far down on his neck behind; he wore it trimmed short, and it had this quality that it stood upright on his head like a savage dog’s if he was angry. His ears were strangely small and fine shaped, but set low; his jaw great and wide; his mouth wide with pale thin lips; his nose jutting forth with mighty side-pitched nostrils, and high and spreading in the wings; his forehead high-domed, smooth, and broad, and with a kind of noble serenity that sorted oddly with the ruffianly lines of his nose and jaw; his beard and mustachios close-trimmed and bristly; his eyebrows sparse; his eyelids heavy, not deep set. He had delicate lively hazel eyes, like the eyes of an adder. He had none of his servants by him at this dog-washing, save only his secretary, Gabriel Flores, for his mind was sprightly and busy a-mornings, and he would have the convenience to talk, if occasion were, secretly with this man, who were aptly styled (to overpass his swarthy hue, and lack of all nobleness in his softer and more bloated look) for his highness in duodecimo.

‘Come hither, Pyewacket!’ shouted the Vicar, letting go that dog that was then in the bath and turning to peer into the shadows of the gate. ‘Pyewacket! Satan’s lightnings blast the bitch! Woo’t come when th’art called?’ He hurled the heavy scrubbing-brush at a brindled shadowy form that stole away in hoped obscurity: a yelp told him that his aim was true. The great beast, her tail between her legs, trotted away; he shouted to her again; she glanced back, a harried reproachful glance, and trotted faster; the Vicar was upon her with a lion-like agility; he kicked her; she laid back her ears, snarled, and snapped at his leg; he caught her by the neck and beat her with his fist about the ribs and buttocks till she yelped for pain; when he had done she growled and bared her teeth; he beat her once more, harder, then waited to see what she would do. She gave in, and walked, but with no good grace, to the distasteful bath. There, standing shoulder-deep in the steaming suds, grown thin to look on beyond nature, and very pathetical, with the water’s soaking of her hair and making it cling close to the skin, she suffered sulkily the indignities of soap and brush, and the searching erudite fingers that (greatly indeed for her good) sought out and slew the ticks that here and there beset her. All the while her staring eyes were sullen with bottled-up anger, like a bull’s. The Vicar’s eyes had the like look in them.

‘Well,’ said he in a while, ‘is he coming? You did say I would have speech of him, and that instantly?’

‘I did give him your highness’ very words,’ said Gabriel. He paused: then, ‘’Tis a strange folly, this tennis: racket away a hundred crowns afore breakfast, and till that’s done all sober business may go hang.’

‘Did he not answer you?’ asked the Vicar after a minute.

Gabriel smiled a crooked smile. ‘Not to say, answer,’ he said.

‘What said he, then?’ said the Vicar, looking up.

Gabriel said, ‘Faith, ’twas not for your ear intended. I were to blame did I blab to your highness every scurvy word, spoke in unconsiderate haste, that your highness should magnify past all reason.’

At that word, came Lessingham hastily towards them out of the low dark passage that sloped upward into the long and narrow yard, at the far, or eastern, end whereof was Hagsby’s Entry where the washing was. And at that word, whether seeing him or no, the Vicar gave his Pyewacket a damnable slap across the nose, grabbed her fore and aft, and flung her out in the way of Lessingham that walked hastily to greet him. She, with the gadflies of pain and outraged dignity behind her and a strange man before, sprang at his throat. Lessingham was in his shirt, tennis-racket in hand; he smote her with the racket, across the fore-leg as she sprang: this stopped her; she gave way, yowling and limping. ‘God’s death!’ said the Vicar, ‘will you kill my brach?’ and threw a long-bladed dagger at him. Lessingham avoided it: but the singing of it was in his ear as it passed. He leapt at the Vicar and grappled him. The Vicar wrestled like a cat-a-mountain, but Lessingham held him. Gabriel, at his master’s skirt, now kept off the dogs, now pleased himself with looking on the fight, ever side-stepping and dodging, like a man caught in a hill-forest in a whirlwind when the tall pines loosened at root reel and lock together and lurch, creaking and tottering, towards the last downward-tearing ruinous crash. The Vicar’s breath began to come and go now in great puffs and hissings like the blowing of a sea-beast. Lessingham rushed him backwards. The edge of the wash-tub caught him behind the knees, and he fell in, body and breeches, with Lessingham a-top of him, and with that violence the tub was overturned.

They loosed hold and stood up now, and in that nick of time came Amaury into the yard. The Vicar barked out a great laugh, and held out his hand to Lessingham, who took it straight. There was in Lessingham’s eye as it rested upon his cousin a singular look, as if he fingered in him a joy too fine for common capacities: such a look as a man might cast, unknowingly and because he could not help it, on his dear mistress. And indeed it was strange to consider how the Vicar, standing thus in nasty clothes, but even risen from a rude tussling-bout and a shameful fall, stood yet as clothed upon with greatness like a mantle, sunning in his majesty like adders in warm beams.

Lessingham said, ‘You did send for me.’

‘Yes,’ answered he: ‘the matter is of weight. Wash and array us, and we’ll talk on’t at breakfast. Gabriel, see to’t.’

‘I’ll meet you straight in my lodging, Amaury,’ said Lessingham.

When they were alone, ‘Cousin,’ said Lessingham, ‘you did throw a knife at me.’

The Vicar was ill at ease under Lessingham’s secure and disturbing smile. ‘Tush,’ he said, ‘’twas but in sport.’

‘You shall find it a dangerous sport,’ said Lessingham. ‘Be advised, cousin. Leave that sport.’

‘You are such a quarrelling, affronting—’ the words ceased in his throat as his eye met Lessingham’s. Like his own great hell-hound bitch awhile ago, he, as for this time, bared fang yet owned his master. And in that owning, as by some hidden law, he seemed to put on again that greatness which but even now, under Lessing-ham’s basilisk look, had seemed to fall off from him.

That was an hour later when those kinsmen brake their fast together on the roof of the great main keep, over the Vicar’s lodging: a place of air and wide prospect; and a place besides of secrecy; for when the door in the north-west turret was shut, by which alone was a way up to the roof and the battlements, there was none save the fowls of the air and the huge stones of the floor and parapet to be eavesdroppers at their conference. Here in the midst of the floor was a narrow table set under the sky, with musk-millions and peaches in silver dishes, and a great haunch of cold venison, and marmalades of quince and crab-apple, and flagons of white and red hippocras, with chased gold goblets; and there were diapered linen napkins and silver-handled knives and silver forks to eat withal; all very noble and sumptuously arrayed. Two heavy armchairs of old black oak were set at the table; the Vicar sat at the northern side, and over against him Lessingham. They were washen now, and in fair and fine clothes. The Vicar had put on now a kirtle of dark brown velvet edged with rich embroidery of thread of gold, but frayed and dirted and rubbed with wearing; it was cut wide and low about the neck, with a flat collar of white pleated lace tied with silken cord. Lessingham was in a buff-coloured kirtle of soft ribbed silk with a narrow ruff and narrow wristbands of point-lace spangled with beads of jet of the bigness of mustard seeds, and tight-fitting black silk breeches and velvet shoes.

For a time they ate in silence. Every other while, the Vicar’s sudden eye glinted upon Lessingham; it was as if he had a mind to propound some matter, but would be besought for it first. But Lessingham sat sphinx-like and unconcerned in his pleasant ease, as wanting nothing, desiring nothing, at peace with himself and the hour and the fresh morning. At length the Vicar spoke: ‘You are as unquiet and restless as an October stag: but three days here, and already I see you in a fever for some new action.’

Lessingham smiled.

After a time the Vicar spoke again: ‘For my own part, I had as lief sit quiet now: enjoy that fortune hath given us.’

‘I praise your resolution,’ said Lessingham: ‘a most pious and fine humility in you, whom fortune hath so much blest, without all seconding of your proper action.’

The Vicar took a peach and skinned it. ‘Could we but count,’ he said, ‘on others for the like temperate withholding.’

Lessingham said nothing.

‘The south breedeth hot bloods and hot livers like summer flies,’ said the Vicar after a pause. He poured out some more wine. ‘’Tis that gives me stay,’ he said. ‘’Tis that makes me think may be we should do somewhat,’ he said, after another mouthful.

Lessingham waited.

The Vicar smote his fist on the table. ‘I am master of the game, by this lucky turn,’ he said: ‘play off the fat Admiral ’gainst the Duke, and all the poppets of Meszria ’gainst each in turn: cheap as kissing, and twice as profitable. But it needs suasion, cousin, specious arguments; butter ’em, tickle ’em, conycatch ‘em; you must go to ’em like coy wenches: amuse ’em, feed ’em with pathetical flim-flams, flout ’em, then seem to forget ’em, then be somewhat bold with ’em, laugh at ’em; last, i’ the happy instant, ring up the grand main piece. Now I, cousin, am a loose, plain, rude talker: call a spade a spade. But you, and you would, should do this to admiration.’

‘I have handled such a matter ere now,’ said Lessingham, ‘and have not spoilt things utterly.’

‘Cousin,’ said the Vicar: ‘harkee, I would have your head in this. I would have you fare south and play this game for me. You shall be my ambassador. And, so you magnify it not beyond all reason, you shall name your own reward.’

‘I did think you knew,’ said Lessingham, ‘that it is not my way to do aught upon reward. Reason why, that to such things only am I wont to set my hand as the reward thereof lieth in the doing of ’em.’

‘’Twould make a dog laugh to hear such fiddle-faddle,’ said the Vicar. ‘Go to, I shall give you wide choice of dominion and treasure when the time comes. Will you do it?’

‘I will do it,’ answered Lessingham: ‘but upon conditions.’ His eyes were a-sparkle.

‘Well,’ said the Vicar.

Lessingham said, ‘First is, that you uphold the King’s testament.’

‘That,’ replied he, ‘proceedeth without question. It is my open proclaimed policy to uphold it throughly, and if you will I’ll swear to it.’

‘Second is,’ said Lessingham, ‘that you own and acknowledge to me, for my private ear only, here in this place, that ’twas by your rede, more, your direct commandment, the King was lately thus miserably murdered.’

The Vicar laughed. ‘’Las cousin, will you, too, give credit to that slanderous rumour and obloquy now going abroad?’

‘I see,’ said Lessingham: ‘you will not fulfil my second condition. Good. Get you another ambassador.’

The Vicar’s face was scarlet to look upon. He said, ‘I swear to you by God, the very founder, furtherer, and finisher of truth—’

Lessingham brake in upon him: ‘Give over, cousin. Indeed, if you be not damned already ’twere pity damn yourself for so hopeless an attempt as make me credit what I well know to be a lie. Be not angry, cousin: here we be close as the grave: surely ’twixt you and I ’tis stretch courtesy past use and reason to pretend I know you not for a most approved liar and forswearer.’ He ate a bit of marmalade, and leaned back in his chair. ‘To be open with you,’ he said, ‘you have put me into such a gog of going. I would not stay now for the world. Yet see the pass we stand in: if it be as hard for you to tell the truth as for me to go back from my word, I’m sorry for it, for then all goeth miss.’

‘Put case it were true,’ said the Vicar. ‘Were it not rash in you to desire a knowledge might hurry you to ruin? Like to that great man’s mistress, wheedled him to confess a horrid murder, which done, he swore her to silence upon a poisoned book: knowing it lay not in her to conceal his counsel, bound her to’t by death.’

Lessingham looked at him with the flicker of a smile in his eyes. ‘When I am grown so useless to you, cousin, as you should afford to lose me, I’ll think it danger to receive such secrets of you. Till then, no. I’ll trust no man’s affections, but I trust your wisdom most securely. Most securely, cousin.’

The Vicar toyed with his wine-cup. ‘Be that as it may,’ he said at last. ‘This you talk on is a monstrous folly. Where’s the reason of the thing? I were a fine fool to a murdered the young suck-egg, when ’twas in my hand to have overthrown him with force of arms.’

‘There,’ replied Lessingham, ‘you do much belie your prudent mind. It had been folly indeed to stand in the eyes of the world a usurping rebel, when ’twas the readier way, with some devilish pothecary stuff, stibium, henbane, I know not what, to whiffle him off and then put on your mourning and say his jealous brother did it.’

‘Ay, and did he,’ said the Vicar. ‘And did set too the lying tongues a-wag to say ’twas I.’

Lessingham yawned and studied the back of his hand, the little silky black hairs that grew fine and smooth on the shapely finger-joints, and the heavy ancient golden worm that he wore on his middle finger, scaly, eating of its own tail, its head a cabochon ruby big as a sparrow’s egg, that glowed with inward fires like the blood-red fires of sunset.

‘You will go then?’ said the Vicar.

‘But upon condition of confession,’ answered he.

The Vicar lurched up from the table and began to pace about. Lessingham yawned again and played with his ring. Neither spoke. After a minute the Vicar, grinding his teeth, came and stood over against him. Lessingham looked up. ‘Dear cousin,’ he said, ‘how long will you stay this matter’s going into action, of so much worth and moment? And how long will you seek to cast suds in my eyes that am long since satisfied of the truth, but will have it of you in friendship? You did send me out of the way to Mornagay whiles it was done. But I know it.’

The Vicar laughed with anger. ‘Know it? Upon what evidence?’ He ground his teeth. ‘Gabriel, that filth, was’t he told you this? I’ll have him hewn in pieces.’

‘O spare your pains,’ said Lessingham. ‘Should Gabriel tell me at noonday ’twas twelve o’clock, I’d have evidence corroborative ere I’d believe it. No, cousin, I am satisfied you did act this murder; not by your own hand, indeed: that were too simple: but yours the deed was. And since you will be so strange with me as deny the thing: well, the Gods be with you, I’ll have no further hand with you.’

The Vicar sat down again and leaned across the table, glowering at him awhile in silence. Lessingham returned his gaze steadily; the eyes of Lessingham were grey with brown and golden speckles. The Vicar at length turned away his gaze. ‘Well,’ he said betwixt his teeth: ‘I did it.’

Slowly and luxuriously Lessingham stretched his arms, yawned, and then sat up. He reached out a leisurely hand to the golden flagon and filled his goblet with red hippocras. ‘Truth hath been long time a-coming out,’ he said. ‘I’ll pledge her, so.’ He drank, looking over the cup at the Vicar with a slow smiling contentment, a strange, clouded look, in which came suddenly an alteration as if the red sun had glared out through a rift in the clouds. ‘This murder,’ said he, and there were now undertones and overtones in his voice that made it terrible, for all it was so quiet and came on so even and undisturbed a breath: ‘This murder was one of the most filthiest acts that ever was done.’

The Vicar faced him like a bull of Nineveh.

‘You did show me the testament,’ said Lessingham. ‘Was that some fine counterfeit device of yours, or was it real and true?’ The Vicar made no answer. Lessingham said, ‘Well, I know it was true, by tests beyond your protestations, cousin. And I remarked it very particularly, wherein it did name you vicar and vice-regent of the Queen and lord protector of her minority, and did enjoin you in all points study her proper good and safety and the enhancement of her sovereign power and dominion, and tender and cherish her lovingly as a father should. You are not much practised in a father’s part, I think. Since you did drive your sons away into exile. This will be hard for you.’

He paused, looking the Vicar straight in the eye. It was as if across that silent table two thunder-clouds faced each other in an awful calm. Lessingham spoke: ‘You have promised me to uphold that testament. Well, I’ll help you, as I have done before. I’ll go on this embassage for you. I’ll follow and uphold you as Vicar of the Queen. But this testament shall be to you as a thing enskied and holy. Which if in any jot or tittle you shall offend against, or one finger’s breadth depart from it: no more, but you shall bitterly aby it.’

The Vicar ran his tongue over his lips. For a minute he was silent, then in a kind of cold tart pride he said, ‘I were poorly paid then for my goodness and forbearance; seeing these five minutes past I have had a more than most intolerable lust to murder you, yet, I know not why, forbore.’ He stood up with a laugh, and with a forced pretence of jolly-scoffing bravery. ‘What squibs be these, for men of our kidney to tease ourselves withal of a spring morning! And, cousin, this is the maggot in the oak-apple: you are clean fallen in love with yonder little wagtail at mere hearsay.’

Lessingham answered and said, ‘With you, cousin, I have long fallen in love.’

VI LORD LESSINGHAM’S EMBASSAGE

THE ADMIRAL AND THE CHANCELLOR • DISCORDS OF LESSINGHAM’S PLANTING • THE ADMIRAL MUCH PERPLEXED • DIVIDED POLITICS • LESSINGHAM AND VANDERMAST • CONFERENCE IN ACROZAYANA • THE DUKE BROUGHT TO BAY • A BROKEN CONSORT • THE DUKE AND LESSINGHAM: STRANGE CONCORDS.

THAT was of an evening of late May-time, the fourth week after these things but now spoken of, that the Lord Beroald sat alone at the upper edge of a clearing in the oak-woods that clothe the low Darial hills south of the lake, looking northwards to Zayana. From his feet the ground fell gently away for a hundred paces or more to the bridle-path. Below that, the tree-clad face of the hill dropped sharply to the lake seven or eight hundred feet beneath. The sky was fair, and the weather smooth and calm. His horse grazed at ease, moving to and fro amid the lush grasses. Save for that munching sound, and the sound of falling water, and now and then the note of a cuckoo calling, and now and then the noise of the horse’s hoof against a stone, there was silence. A marmot came out of a heap of fallen rocks behind him on his left and sat up with little fore-paws hanging down as if in a helpless soft dismay, viewing the Chancellor. She whistled and retired back to her hole when the silence was broken by a fresh noise of horse-hooves, and the lord Admiral rode up into the clearing, greeted the Chancellor, and dismounted beside him.

‘It is very much,’ said the Lord Jeronimy, when they were sat down together upon a great stone, ‘that we should be fain to take counsel under the sky like owls or moor-dogs.’

Beroald smiled his cold smile. ‘I am much beholden to your lordship for suffering this inconvenience. In the city, a flea shall not frisk forth unless his intelligencers comment upon her. And this new business both calleth for speedy action, and needs that both you and I examine and consider of it o’erheard by none.’

‘Will he not take my no for an answer?’ said Jeronimy. ‘Why, what a loose hot corrupter of virtue have we here. First getteth no from me; then no from the Duke; and now sueth to your lordship to be in a manner his go-between, as if I were a silly maid to comply at last, with oftener scenting of the flower. What new conditions now then?’

‘’Tis not altogether thus,’ said the Chancellor. The offer is now to me in my own particular.’

Jeronimy opened his lips as if to speak, but there was a moment ere the words came: ‘To you, my lord? Good: and upon like condition?’

‘Upon like condition.’

‘Of suzerainty?’ said Jeronimy. ‘Well, and do you mean to take it? No, no,’ he said, meeting the Chancellor’s cold eye: ‘I meant not that. I meant, in what estate left you this business with him? did you in a manner temporize?’

Beroald answered, ‘I did handle the thing in such a vein as that I must give him yea or nay tomorrow.’

The Admiral pulled off his black velvet cap plumed with a white estridge-feather set in a diamond brooch, mopped his head, and put on his cap again.

The Lord Beroald gazed steadily before him on Acrozayana, two or three miles away, mirrored in the glassy lake. His speech came cool and glassy, like the thing he looked on, remote and passionless as if it were his own thought speaking to itself. ‘It is needful,’ he said, ‘in this business, that we hold heedy guard, and reckon well our strength. Now is ten days today that this Lessingham, treating with full powers on behalf of the Vicar, hath dealt with us touching the Meszrian regency; and if there be any alteration made in these ten days, ’tis to their advantage, not ours. First his offer unto you, my lord Admiral, that the Vicar would receive and acknowledge you as regent in Meszria conformably in all points to the King’s testament, and upon condition (which he stiffly maintained to be in that same testament supposed and implicit) that you should do him homage as, pending the Queen’s minority, your overlord. That condition you did, in agreement with the Duke, with Roder, and with myself, after mature deliberation of counsel, flatly refuse. The next day after your so refusing, he did offer the regency upon like condition to the Duke, who did refuse it. That was but yesterday. And now, this very morning, did send for me and propound to me the self-same offer; which I, forbearing all private closer conference, fobbed off until tomorrow. Thus standeth it, then. What follows? If I refuse,’ (upon that ‘if’ the Admiral pulled out his handkerchief and mopped his head), ‘next move belike is overture of regency to Roder, and then, if he’ll not take it, war. I like it not. The Duke I do trust but as you do, my lord: very discreetly. These Meszrian lords, not at all. The Vicar hath a fair solicitor, hath got the right ear of Zapheles, and Melates, too, or I am much mistook: young fools, that have not the wit to see in all the Vicar’s promises but fair sunshining, sweetly spoken and but sourly to be performed. Prince Ercles in the north, too, is not so good to rest on, even if Barganax be safe: if the Vicar make war upon the Duke and us upon pretext of enforcing of the King’s testament, you shall not see Ercles nor Aramond put their finger too far in the fire o’ the Duke’s behalf; Lessingham, I am told, hath made friends with ’em both of late.’

‘That Lessingham is a subtle devil,’ said Jeronimy.

‘This latest offer thus made to me,’ said the Chancellor, ‘hath given us the chance if need be to afterthink us. That were pity were it appear in the end that our eyes were greater than our bellies. I would remember you of this, my lord Admiral, that in point of construction the Vicar’s claim of suzerainty is good in law. We are precisely bound to uphold the testament. It can be said that, going against him in this, we do merely violate it. The Parry himself none but a ninny would trust further than a might see him; but here ’tis not to deal with him direct, but through Lessingham.’

‘As ’t should be handed us,’ said Jeronimy, ‘in a fair gilded cup, to make his poison go down the smoother.’

‘I see it not altogether so,’ said Beroald. ‘’Tis a young man of most supposed abilities both in the council and a soldier of renown. I have these ten days studied him like a book, and I find no point to question, but all to confirm and justify what reputation saith of him: an honourable man, and a man with the power to hold his principal to whatsoever he shall stand warrant for of his behalf. And he hath, in no qualified way but at large, took it upon his honour that upon agreement made betwixt us the Vicar will perform the King’s testament unto the littlest letter.’

Jeronimy said, ‘He is a subtle devil.’

‘It is for you, not me, to determine,’ said the Chancellor. ‘Only I would have you consider of all this, not as somewhat to be swept up with a sudden and tumultuous judgement, but as a thing of heaviest import. For you see, you may, upon this offer thus made to me, open your dealings anew with him, and take up the regency upon condition of suzerainty and upon his proper warranty of the Vicar’s performance.’

‘And so, in a manner—’ said the Admiral slowly, and fell silent. The Chancellor said no more, judging it good to give time for these matters to digest.

They sat in shadow. The sun had for some time now gone behind the hill on their left. The shadows lengthened over the lake. The horses munched on. After a while the Chancellor spoke: ‘Will you not change your mind?’

The Lord Jeronimy rose heavily from his seat and stood looking at him a minute in silence; then said, ‘No. And no more must you, my lord Chancellor.’

‘We stand together,’ said Beroald, and rose up too. ‘Yet remember, things worsen as time goeth by. These country lords are quite debauched by him. ’Tis time to end talking and fall to action.’

The Admiral’s black mare, at her lord’s stirring, came to him and nuzzled her nose in his neck. He fondled and petted her. ‘’Tis time indeed,’ he said. ‘Time indeed.’

‘Better we were not seen too much in conference tonight,’ said Beroald. ‘Better not enter the gates together.’

‘Will you ride first,’ said the Admiral, ‘or shall I? Truth is, I had been minded for Sestola tonight, ’bout some business of the fleet. But as things shape, I will let that go by and sleep in Zayana.’

‘I pray you ride first,’ said the Chancellor.

The Admiral came down through the wood at a walking pace, his mind heavy with thought. His men, that had waited this while in the wood with the Chancellor’s, rode a score of paces or so behind him. ‘Lessingham,’ he said in himself. ‘A very subtle devil: a devil full of all seduction and charm. Hath a not charmed me too? Ay, but not too far: not to danger. Like to that son of mine, drowned in the Sound of Tabarey: should a been of about his years too, had he lived. Pish! ’Tis foolery. And yet, ’tis in the Duke too. Lessingham: Barganax. Strange: so unlike, and yet, in a manner, so like; both of the grape, as ’twere. Red wine: white wine. Away, ’tis foolery. Still, like a shying horse: ride her up to it, let her see and examine it well as to its nature: it frighteth her not another time.’ His mind stood still awhile. Then he said again in himself, ‘Hath charmed Beroald. Nay, but that’s not true neither. Nay, I trust Beroald.’

He drew rein for a moment as the path rounded the verge of a jutting cliff giving a fair wide prospect over the water. An owl hooted. Jeronimy said in himself, ‘If he can handle Horius Parry, as folk say he can: tickle him, make him serve his turn; what wonder in the world can he not do then?’ He rode on. ‘Beroald is a man of law. There’s his element. But with me ’tis substance and intention, not form and accident. And yet indeed, a great wise man; prudent and foreseeing. Ay, “time to afterthink us”, that’s wisdom. Worse weather than that we put to sea in: ay, ’tis pure truth. There’s many would take his rede and think no more on’t. Safer. Safer take his rede.

‘Ay, but I do know ’tis wrong. In my bones I know it.’ He struck spurs into the mare’s flanks: she started forward violently: he leaned forward calming her, patting her neck. ‘No, I’ll not change my mind. Nor you must not neither, my lord Chancellor. But then, what next? Action, next. An end of these talkings: ’tis time indeed.’ He stroked her neck again, softly, meditatively. ‘And I the main actor. Regent of Meszria. Lieth upon me. Well, we have long since considered on’t. With right of our side; and with the Duke of our side. “I am of your opinion,” said he. Well: now cometh this silver to the trying. Barganax: is he to trust to? ’Tis a doubt whereon hangeth all, on this one thin thread. Trust him discreetly. The word is wiser than the deed, now I consider on’t. O, the down-bearing weight of this immense charge. Tis a fine toy, make up alliance with a royal prince on terms he must but figure bass for such a man as me to run the divisions on’t; comfort and uphold me at all points whiles I sit i’ the seat he looked for as his by right. If he have a spice of pride in him still (and he is made up and compounded of pride, opinion, and disdain), shall he not hate me every while, and seek but first fair occasion to ding me down and take his own back? And yet the man’s mind is so noble, I’d trust him, where his word’s engaged, even to breaking-point. And yet, no, ’tis midsummer madness: ’tis but the spell of his masterful youth and grace, like t’other’s. I had done with this ten minutes since: ’tis ‘foolery. And yet, and yet: have I not proof of’s loyal mind within reason: his refusing on’t when Lessingham did offer it? Nay, but ’twas but stinking fish then: ’twas under suzerainty. And he of the royal ancient family of Fingiswold.’

He halted, as with a sudden thought then with a shake of the rein went on. ‘Of Fingiswold. Ay, and of Memison. I’ll do it. Better hazard sinking there, than sink for sure where we stand. And there’s some hope. Say they be corrupted indeed, these young quats, with Lessingham’s words and promises: ’tis certain their corruption, even as their fealty, is but skin-deep. They’ll follow their own liege sovereign prince of Meszrian blood and line a thousand times, where, were it but me, they’d take but the happy instant to throw me off and so rid them at last of the prime scourge and hate of all their liberties for years. I’ll do it. Ay, I’ll do it tonight.’

That same night after supper the Chancellor was sat in his chamber writing out fair this letter, which being writ he signed by his name and sealed with his seal. And the letter was conceived in terms following:

‘Unto thonorable my very goode Lo. Lessynghame as wyth fulle powre and awtoritee dymysed and prorogate to speke trette and determyn on byhalve of his hyghnes Horyus Parye Lo. Protector and Vicker of the Qwene in Reyrek:

I have bin carefull my Lo. to waighe and conseder of hys Highnes proposes wherewithall hys hyghnes hath honored me thorow your lops, mowth to thende that for the bettere setlying and doynge awaie of these presente diffrences I schold in myn owne persoun accept of the Regensy of Meszrya upon condicyons exposed att lardge bi your lop., and bi asspeciall thus condicyon that the Regent schalbe in al poyntes His Hyghnes subgytte and uery leage man. Al whilke I hauing with carefull mind perpended and revuiewed am lefte att length wyth noe other choys that semeth to me agreable unto my propre honor and my dwte ylike to the Qwene (hoom the Goddes tender and preserue) and to thadmerall bi royalle testement named regent but bi hys hyghnes set asyde upon refusell of condicyoun a forseyd, saue to conclud that yt is nat fytt I schold accept of the sed Regensy. Whilke resolue thus consederately taken I will vnmoueably stand upon, and wold dessire your lop. to acqweynt Hys Highnes accordynge.

The Goddes leade your lop. bi the hande.

I haue thonor to bee with greatt trewth and respecte your lops, most obedient humble Servaunt,

BEROALD’

The ink was scarce dry and the wax yet warm when there came in a gentleman of his to say the High Admiral was here and would have speech of him. The Chancellor smiled. ‘That saveth me a journey,’ he said: ‘I was this instant upon going to see him;’ and he bade admit him straight. When they were private, ‘My lord Chancellor,’ said Jeronimy, and his face was flushed, ‘I bring you good tidings. I have seen the Duke upon this matter we talked on.’

The Chancellor lifted a cold eye upon him. ‘You have seen the Duke?’

Jeronimy’s eyes took on that look that a dog’s eyes have when, under a detecting gaze, he suddenly bethinks him that this eating of that bit of meat or chewing up of that bird, albeit good and reasonable in his estimation, was yet questionable in the sight of others, and fraught, may be, with consequences he till then ne’er thought upon. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I am come straight from him to you. Perhaps I should a seen you first. I’m sorry, my lord.’

‘You are dark to me yet,’ said the Chancellor. ‘Did your lordship inform the Duke of this last turn: I mean this offer I told you of?’

‘In a manner, yes,’ answered Jeronimy.

‘Had I stood in your shoes, my lord Admiral,’ said the Chancellor, ‘I should have given you the opportunity to come with me upon such an errand.’

‘You and I,’ said the Admiral, ‘did conclude upon speedy action. A-riding home I did view the matter from all points, and did at last conceive in a manner but one safe way betwixt these quicksands. Brief, I did resign but now into the Duke’s hand, as well for present as prospectively, the office of Regent: bade him take it up and defend it, and we would go through and second him.’

He paused. The Chancellor’s jaw set, and his lean face turned ashy. He stood up from his chair, pushed the letter across the table to Jeronimy, and stalked to the window. The Admiral took out his perspective-glass and read the letter, blowing softly with his cheeks the while. ‘Your lordship hath an art in drafting of such matters,’ he said: ‘’tis beyond admiration excellent.’ He looked cautiously up, met the Chancellor’s eye, and looked away.

For a minute the Lord Beroald abode silent. When he mastered himself to speak, the words came like chips of ice clinking down an ice-slope. ‘Lessingham,’ he said, ‘is an able politician. You and me, my lord, he but turneth to his purpose. You have made a fine hand of it.’

Jeronimy slowly shook his head. ‘I did play for a firm line and no stragglers,’ said he. ‘We should not have held the Duke with us had we ta’en, in a manner, the course you formerly thought on: had I complied and ta’en up the regency ’pon Lessingham’s conditions.’

‘You have now by your act,’ said Beroald, ‘disburdened him of all conditions, and left us open to all injuries. You have, in face of dangerous enemies, set aside the law, which was our strength and our justification; you have struck wide division in our counsels, when a single mind was most needful; you have unleashed the Duke on a course may be shall prove his ruin and ours. Had you gone cap in hand to my Lord Lessingham and professed yourself ready to do his bidding so as to make fair success of his mission hither, he could a thought on no better means to bid you take than these you have taken.’

Jeronimy’s face became drawn and his kindly eyes darkened with anger. He rose from his chair. ‘This talk,’ he said, thickly, ‘doth more disgrace than it helpeth or graceth us. Let us say no more but good night, my lord Chancellor. May be morning shall bring us riper wisdom.’

On the morrow towards midday the Lord Lessingham took horse and rode with Amaury from his lodgings in the old Leantine palace in the northern quarter down through the market-place, and so, turning right along Stonegate and Paddockgate, up into the driving-road that ran by the water-side along the top of the town wall of old red sandstone for a quarter of a mile or more; thence, turning inland at the Heugh, through some winding cobbled streets, they came out into the sunlight of the piazza of the Winds, and, crossing that from north to south, took the Way of the Seven Hundred Pillars. At a walking-pace they climbed its wide zig-zags, pleasant with the shade of ancient holm-oaks and the heavy scent of the mimosa-trees, and came at length a little before noon up to the main gate of the citadel. A guard of honour, of seven of the Duke’s red-bearded swordsmen, conducted them up the shining stairs that were built of panteron stone, black green and purple, and so by many courts and colonnades to silver doors and through them to a narrow and high-roofed corridor which opened at its far end, with silver doors, upon that garden of everlasting afternoon. Here, in the low slanting rays under the tufted shade of strawberry-trees, that ancient man stood to do them welcome, Doctor Vandermast.

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