So he sat, half an hour more, may be: a spectator: looking at faces, imagining, playing with his imaginations: a feeling of freedom in his veins: that strange glitter of a town at night, offering boundless possibilities. In that inward-dreaming mood he was unconscious of the clouding over of the stars and the closeness of the air, until rain had begun in big drops and the whole sky was split with lightning which unleashed the loud pealing thunder. Hastening back drenched to his hotel with collar turned up and with the downpour splashing again in a million jets from the flooded pavement, he, as in a sudden intolerable hunger, said in himself: ‘It is long enough: I will not wait five months. Home tomorrow.’
She, in the mean while (if, indeed, as between World and World it is legitimate to speak of ‘before’ and ‘after’), had, in a dozen paces after Lessingham’s far-drawn gaze had lost her, stepped from natural present April into natural present June – from that night-life of Verona out by a colonnade of cool purple sandstone onto a daisied lawn, under the reverberant white splendour of midsummer noonday.
COMING now beyond the lawn, that lady paused at the lily-pond under a shade of poplar-trees: paused to look down for a minute into depths out of which, framed between the crimson lilies and the golden, looked up at her, her own mirrored face. The curves of her nostrils hardened: some primal antiquity seemed suddenly to inform the whole presence of her, as if this youth and high summer-season of her girlhood were, in her, no season at all: not a condition, bearing in its own self its own destiny to depart and make place for future ripenesses, of full bloom, fading and decay; but a state unchanging and eternal. Her throat: her arm: the line of her hair, strained back from the temples to that interweaving of darkness with sleek-limbed darkness, coiled, locked, and overlaid, in the nape of her neck: the upward growth there, daintily ordered as black pencillings on the white wings of a flower-delice, of tiny silken hairs shading the white skin; her lips, crystal-cold of aspect, clear cut, red like blood, showing the merest thread-like glint of teeth between; these things seemed to take on a perfection terrible, because timeless.
The lord Chancellor Beroald, from his seat beneath an arbour of honeysuckle leftwards some distance from where she stood, watched her unseen. In his look was nothing of that worship, which in dumb nature seemed: rather an appraising irony which, setting profession beside performance, fact beside seeming, sucks from their antic steps not present entertainment only, but knowledge that settles to power.
‘Is your husband in the palace?’ he said presently.
‘How should I know?’
‘I had thought you had come that way.’
‘Yes. But scarcely from taking an inventory.’
‘Ha, so there the wind sits?’
He stood up as she came towards him, and they faced each other in silence. Then, light as the stirring of air in the overarching roof of poplar leaves above them, she laughed: held out a hand to him, which he after a pause dutifully, and with some faint spice of irony to sauce the motion, kissed;
‘Your ladyship has some private jest?’
She sat down, elegantly settling herself on the rose-coloured marble bench, and elegantly drawing down, to smell to, a spray of honeysuckle. The black lashes veiled her eyes, as she inhaled from eight little branching horns of crimson, apricot-gold, and creamy colour, the honeysuckle’s sweetness. Then, letting go the trailing flower, she looked round at him sitting now beside her. ‘I was diverted,’ she said, ‘by your look, my noble brother. That look you had, I remember, when you enveigled me to fall in with your pretty plan touching my former husband.’
‘As we mount the hill,’ said the Chancellor, ‘the prospect opens more large. That was beginnings.’
‘O, I spoke not of beginnings: not with that Borgian look. Piazza steps in Krestenaya.’
‘Leave this talk,’ said the Chancellor.
‘Having yourself, before, fobbed him off on me like a base coin, to serve your own turn,’ said she; ‘and, soon as well rid of him, teased me to taking of this Morville: so much the better alliance for you, as being by some distant removes able to claim kinship with the Parrys. You think, I suppose, that, holding in me the Queen of Spades, you shall always be able to command the Ace to take knaves with?’
‘Fie, sister!’
‘Fie, brother! And you shall see, I’ll play cards for love, not for policy. And next time you shall need to play me the King of Hearts, to be worth my Ace to trump him.’
‘What’s this?’ said the King behind them: ‘chancellors with kings i’ their hands? That was ever ruin, sure, whether to him that held or him that was holden.’
‘Serene highness,’ said the Chancellor, rising and turning about to face his master: ‘you do know me: I ne’er play cards.’
The King laughed. ‘Nor I: save now and then with the Devil; and that’s now and then both good and needful.’ Well six foot tall stood the Chancellor, clean of build and soldier-like; but the King, in black-bearded majesty, with eagle eyes, from under his black bonnet plumed with black eagle’s feathers, looked down to him. The Duchess of Memison on the King’s arm was as the beauty of an autumn evening leaning on night: a beauty of clouds and fire, of red-gold effulgence of sunset shining low through pine-tops and fern-fronds, when a little mist steals along the hillside and homing wild-duck stream high against the west. That Dark Lady, still seated, still with her back towards them, had but reached a jewelled hand to the honeysuckle to draw it down again to smell to.
‘My Lady Fiorinda.’
She turned, saw, and rose, all duty and obedience, yet with the self-ordered unhasting haste of a foam-footed wave of the sea in calm June weather. ‘Your gentle pardon, not to have known your highness’ voice. Madam, your grace’s humble servant.’
‘I have pardoned worse than that,’ said the King, ‘in a Valkyrie.’
‘In a Valkyrie? Am I that?’
‘Answer her, madam.’
‘O,’ said the Duchess, ‘she is none of mine. Let her answer for herself.’
‘None of yours? and in lovely Memison? where the very birds do fly to you at your becking? By whose doing but by yours should I have met her this morning, on a white horse, galloping, at the first spring of day as I rode up through your oak-groves.’
‘As to speak of Valkyries,’ said Fiorinda: ‘I had supposed rather that your highness thought my horse had ta’en command of me: so swift as you rode me down and had him by the bridle.’
The King met her eyes, green and hard. ‘It is best way,’ he said, ‘with a Valkyrie: safer treat Goddess as woman than woman as Goddess. And, as to speak of pardon: tell me not, mistress! You knew. And studied so to sit on: note whether I’d call you.’
She stood silent, looking down, as a statue unconcerned save that from the faint lifting, like the wings of a sea-swallow in flight, of her slender black eye-brows and from some subtle change about her mouth, there seemed to be shed about her a coldness as of the waste between the worlds.
‘I have procured a place for you,’ said the King: ‘lady of the bedchamber to the Duchess. Will you thank me for it?’
She looked up, and first at the Duchess. ‘I’ll thank both, and offend none.