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.