University of Virginia Library

SCENE IV.

A chamber in the Archbishop's Palace. The Archbishop is leaning out of a bay-window in a raised recess, which overlooks a court-yard, and commands a spacious prospect beyond it. Below him, in the body of the room, the Chancellor is writing at a table littered with documents.
CHANCELLOR
(looking up)
A clatter in the court-yard! Who rides in?

ARCHBISHOP
A sweltering post, booted with urgency
And spurred with fresh misfortune, errand-man
From Arnheim, I assume—

CHANCELLOR
(joining him at the window)
'Tis certain, Arnheim!
This fellow and his horse seem clad in vapour,
And halt as through a cloud. As he draws rein
How curiously the idlers gather in
Round his tired charger's head. The beast coughs sorely,
And hangs its jowl: the lame knees tremble fast.
How wearily the man flings himself off!
Now his spurs rattle as they reach the stones,
And startle off its knees the porter's child,
Who has crawled near, and draws a listless finger
Through one of the round foam-flakes on the flags.

[Enter an Attendant with a packet; this the Chancellor opens and peruses.
ARCHBISHOP
What do they say?

CHANCELLOR
The same old tale recurs—
Arms—Ammunition—Reinforcements—Go!
Lie there among the rest. (Flings the packet to the other papers on the table.)
Had I my way,
I'd answer thee to-morrow in such thunder,
As a great army marching onward churns—
But our Lord sleeps, ay, sleeps!

ARCHBISHOP
Another comes
Riding afar on yonder mountain side:
Small in the distance, greater momently.
These frequent messengers of Arnheim's danger
Come like ejaculations of despair
Breathed forth by yon imprisoned citadel.
Or rather you and I, my Lord, sit here,
As Job did on the day his fortunes cracked—
To watch the incoming harbingers of woe,
Post at the heels of post, on yonder road-line,
Slanted across the mount from cope to spur,
Coursing, as dew-beads down a spider's string.

CHANCELLOR
I yet could save this slumber of a king,
If he would rub the love-drug from his eyes,
And feel his feet. The ruin of our plight
Is, that this Lord is locked in lethargies.
Ours is no common wave-wreck of affairs:
We see the rocks but cannot rouse the pilot;
So deeply is he tranced with opiate charms,
So tight has Circe in her hell-toils snapt him;
That, like a bird whom some snake's gaze benumbs,
Full on his white witch he must chain his eyes,
And find the back-ground of the world beyond her
As tedious as a dunghill, or a yard
Full of spoilt straw and rotting in the rain.
His mind is charmed from woe: all evil tidings,
Though big with bulging danger presently
To crack, seem nothing in his lazy ear;
Seem lispings of calamities betid
An immaterial hundred years ago,
Away a thousand furlongs: O quite sad
In some old childish tattered story book:
Ay, sad enough, and is there more to come
Or does the tale end there? Then, faith, 'tis sad!
Is your recital done? We thank you: go!
You are dismissed; and, waving us away,
He turns him with a lip-curl to his doll;
As some huge school-boy smiles from idle heart
To find his lesson done and play-time near—
And the enchantress bows us slightly out
With a mock-serious air. Her cornered eyes
Watching the while his piteous-weary face
With barely undivulged amusement; then,
As inward-folding portals roll us out,
We hear inside a titter, first of wrens,
Expanding into shameless merriment;
As the pert jay's, who seems to jeer at God,
Alone in the holy woods, when nothing else
Dare break the dewy silence.

ARCHBISHOP
God, fair God,
Requite her these things in the shape of dust
Upon her rosy mouth, where kings come kissing,
As a sour shroud taste in her tender teeth;
And may her miracle of girlish flesh
Pasture the never-sated crawling worm
Soon, very soon. And let his writhing brothers—
Who in corruption hatch their myriad eggs,
And people the vast vale heads of the tomb—
Tug her to pieces; as an otter pack
Breaks the wet quarry, ere the creature die,
And strews the shore with bits and coils of him.

CHANCELLOR
A good stiff curse, you overseer of God,
And here's an echo to it in the smack
Of my palm on your hand-sole. This grip means—
‘Amen, Confound her!’ But, mean-hour, he pushes
Such absolute dominion to this girl,
That all our realm seems as a book's blank page,
Whereon she may inscribe in black and red
Her whims and wishes. Even you, my Lord,
State-pilot, keeper of our souls, grey-haired,
And aureoled with rays from Peter's chair,
Speak this thing fairly, wag no word her way,
Bow in the house of Rimmon with the rest—
For fear no brow be left you to incline,—
And wisely bow. Spite of our wintry heads,
We shall outlive this despot of eighteen,
For all her roses and her moonlight eyes.
Because there is no wretch so near his grave,
So wasted, dwindled, gone to lees and skin,
But he may trust to sit outside his earth,
And hold his bedward shovel in suspense,—
Until the hot broth of a monarch's fancy
Be cooled enough to spoil in gusty time.

ARCHBISHOP
God sees, I know, that she will swiftly pass
As dried hay down the oven, as one leaf
Upon the booming wind, as one poor gnat
Scolding and buzzing on the window-pane;
Then, as the swift air shuts behind a bird,
So will her scathing course across this land
Be wholly unremembered. In one night
She came, this locust, born at yester-even
And slain before the morrow's spring of day;
Our vines lay tender in their leaves: she nipped them,
And left mere branches of re-wintered bareness;
But yet the dry stock of this worm-eat realm
Has sap within its cells to push new buds:
While she, this grig, having devoured our best,
Fulfils her fate and rots, and the great world
Will drink new wine, when she is dross and dust.

CHANCELLOR
Ay, ay, my Lord, we sit as men in the snows,
Seeing full fires in the distance. Day shall break
Abundantly hereafter—that's most sure—
But the rub is to keep our hearts alive
Under this chill and deadly veil of air,
That cramps us till the sun lift. O my friend,
The present of this desolated land
Is as the writing of a skilless child,
Soiled at the edges, inked between its lines,
Torn cross-wise, blotted, dirty, and dog-eared.

ARCHBISHOP
And yet there's hope. I sat up in my tower
A watchman and alone—alone with God—
And I looked forth, and saw our brainless King
Drink with his harlot out of yellow cups,
Kissing her glove and softening her bright hair;
While, on his northern frontier, watching him,
The heights grew black with foemen; and each hour
This silly play endured, crept up behind
New men, new morions, new great clanging squares
Of forms in mail: these deepened on the first,
Who in the front ranks, craning from the cliffs,
Watched without breath; as these over their shoulders
Watched without breath, a wall of living eyes,
Importunately patient: till the cup
Of the adulteress shall have made him faint
Enough—this fool beside her in the crown—
For their swift avalanche to rush below,
And clasp the panting wretch in easy cords,
And hale him through their cities like a bear
To skip to a creaking flute.

CHANCELLOR
So shall it be.
So they sit watching his ineptitude,
Now, even now, where hoary mountains lift
Their frowning brows o'er Arnheim's river-bend.
Here lies the very keyhole of our realm;
The needle-eye through which a foe must crawl
To win inside our heaven.

ARCHBISHOP
Now, by the the rood,
What garrison has Arnheim?

CHANCELLOR
Men enough
To hold a place castled by nature's self
Into such sheer impregnability,
That, if the assailants lack the feet of flies,
And cannot go as agile woodlice climb
Up the rough face of some old orchard wall—
The polished basalt of its parapet
Will make assault to each up-crawler—death!
Or as a virgin with brave brown oak hair,
Bosomed in breastplate of bright living rocks,
Arnheim would mock their ineffectual spasms
To be up and at her throat, and shake them off
Her slippery sides; as the small summer worms
Roll down the wind-rocked birch's satin greaves,
And strew the precinct, barrened by her shade,
With litter of coiled broken throbbing things!—
That is the fortress—Heaven's own battlements,
Whereover the old dragon's beaten angels
Went into boiling chaos,—were no stronger,
And yet—

ARCHBISHOP
Speak out thy thought—I hear the stars
Rushing through glorious arcs of airless void,
The trembling worlds of ether floating by;
I hear a sea that shatters, and a noise,
As of the earth's foundations broken through:
As of iron, as of grinding rock, as the hiss
Of rivers seething into furnace mouths;—
As the tramp of a great multitude abroad
On a vast plain in darkness; at the verge
One thread of lurid sea, above it straightly
Another of blear cloud. I seem to see
The beaded outline of the myriad heads,
To catch the shuffle of their on-coming;
I seem almost to fear the swoop and scream
Of wild great birds, who, now and then, in the dark
Turn out their shining sides, instantly passing
Back into a giant column of black haze
Hung like a blight o'er those advancing heads—
These things I see being similitudes;
And all this kingdom's night is foul with dread,
And bad with desolate shapes. Speak! Thy worst fear
Has in my soul a brother, elder born
And huger in his limbs.

CHANCELLOR
Turn up thy lip—
I teem the rough wine of my tidings in.
The time is gone for wincing, and mincing words,
The hour is come to crush the grape of truth,
And turn her keen tart must inside our mouths,
Though it draw tears at the eyelids.—I have said,
Arnheim is strong; meaning, the inanimate
Arnheim is steep and difficult to scale—
But for the living and the soldier stuff
That cram her stony sides—why, weak she is,
As one old woman in a hut of reeds
With half-a-dozen curs for her allies
To keep the lion out. So Arnheim is
Packed full of troops, who quarrel, snarl, and sleep,
Insult the citizens, are mutineers
And turbulent. Her menace lies within;
And, though the mountains bristle above with spears,
She could deride them, did no recreant heart
Within her whisper ‘lost.’ Not adamantine
Bulwarks, nor Nimrod's citadel itself,
Not walls Cyclopean, Alps heaved in between,
Can keep a dastard safe. Stout hearts can hold
Walls like an egg-shell, hearts it is save towns,
Not wheelbarrows or mortar.

ARCHBISHOP
Will not gold
Bribe these curs into courage?

CHANCELLOR
You have struck
The very keynote of their mutiny.
These soldiers watching menaced battlements
With bloodshot eyes and empty vitals, leer
And clung with gnawing hunger, almost fainting
Each in his heavy shell of rusty steel
Have had no pay for months. They watch and growl,—
‘Why should I serve this king, who starves me here
To keep his harlot plump?’

ARCHBISHOP
The end comes swiftly:
Canst show me any ray of dawn?

CHANCELLOR
I can.
All this I saw, and to my heart I said,
Is the world broken, and its shadow gone
Forever from the moon-face? Must we say
To this old lion of calamity,
Take us and ours and at thine ease munch both?
Or can I gripe him by his tawny mane
And fling the monster sideways? In my tower
I pondered many a night; till, like a planet,
The scheme of this betrothal rose in air.
So vapour-vague at first, so dimly specked
On the utmost edge of darkness, the last brink
Of the illimitable coast of stars;—
That half I feared, my vision's weariness
Had conjured up a point by straining for it.
But presently this globe swam out defined
In ether; and, I thought, in thy fair beams,
O planet, may our sickly world grow hale
And wholesome. Be Urania shedding dew,
Distilled in purest heaven, to sanctify
The compact of these children. Their betrothal
May strew a halcyon silence o'er that deep,
Wherein we fast are breaking.—Hear my scheme.
I will espouse with Conrad's baby heir
The no less infant heiress of this Raymond,
Who kings it on our borders towards the noon.
And I do think, that bell, which rings their marriage,
Will, with its soft vibrations, melt away
The ragged edge of that Cimmerian war,
Whose cloudy masses thicken over Arnheim,
And roll this blight back to its arctic home,
Workshop of fog and domicile of gloom-drift.
For I intend against this realm of icebergs,
Whose wintry monarch on our frontier thunders,
To march the kingdom of the olives up,
And clash against him with united armies,
Swelling our feeble ranks with friends behind;
And so prevail—though weak as jaded hackneys,
Burst at the knees, and whealed with lash and thong
By the vexing of this shallow governor,
Who calls himself our king and is God's scourge.
Let the good thews of this alliance win,
When our poor palsied fingers drop the sword.
If Raymond fail us, then the prince of snow-drifts
Will litter down his nags in Violet's splendours,
And water his great charger at her fountains,
Ere yonder moon grow slim.

ARCHBISHOP
I well believe it.
And what said doting Conrad, when you spread
The map of this new marriage on his knees?
What, when you showed him all the vales and hills,
The new discovered inlets of a scheme,
Which his crass soul and flaccid indolence
Had raised no foot to find?

CHANCELLOR
He rose at once,
When I had shown him the least silver side
Of my new bait. Up came he with wide jaws,
Keen as a pike, who for a mile of river
Has met no shoaling dace. He merely snapt,
Stayed not to chew upon the scheme, but said,
‘'Tis good and it will do.’

ARCHBISHOP
The rumour runs,
He made you write upon the spur.

CHANCELLOR
He did;
And jogged my writing elbow with his chin,
And like a gaoler rubbed against my side,
And looked across my shoulder, chose the pens;
And held me fast imprisoned with his presence,
Till the imperishable parchment bore
My fleeting thought, stampt in clear sentences,
For his most royal brother in the south
To nod to or renege. Then out goes Conrad,
And gets his own steed saddled, a mare roan,
Lithe as a snake, with lion-coloured mane,
Shod with the swiftness of a blush's wing;
Fleet as the sound, half shiver and half breeze,
Which sets the bushes crisp, a little hour
Ere the day tingles out between the cloud ways.
He chose a knight, flower of his retinue,
To back her swiftness: him he bade ride on
Right into the red rift of future dawn:
Through the long leagues of midnight, on and on;
Until, arriving, when the day was broad,
He galloped in among the dewy streets,
And unawakened eyes of shrouded casements,—
Rode with one final push of spurry heels,
And one last rattle of his foamy rein,
Into our Raymond's palace-citadel;
And, planting there a trump against the ear
Of Raymond's sleeping self, pealed loud and clear
‘I want thy daughter!’

ARCHBISHOP
Good! And what says Raymond
To our most sudden challenge of appeal?
Hath he rent friendship from us as a sleeve,
Or sewn our lands together like a hem?
Which? In that ‘which’ we wither or revive.

CHANCELLOR
He flutters, as a stock-dove is perplexed
Between a scarecrow and a field of beans.
A spacious champaign for his girl to queen
Is well enough, where rich grain ripens gold,
And merry rivers roll abundantly,
Rich-mouthed along the meads. These tempt him on.
But then the rugged clapper of rough war.
With drain of men, and more appalling still,
With drain of treasured gold, whose yellow discs
His miser fingers itch to hold, and pine
To pay away on thews of fighting men—
These fear him from alighting in our corn.
So doth mean Raymond balance chance with chance.
But in the end, believe me, we shall win him.
For nothing is so sweet to any man,
As meddling at his nearest neighbour's house;
And in an ancient friend's embarrassments
To intervene with lofty patronage,
And help him—just a little.

ARCHBISHOP
I believe you.
Our peril preaches credence in your scheme.
The land is halt, and you a crutch have found it,
Wherewith to reach the healer Safety's doors.
If Raymond will not marry us his girl,
We were a realm, but we are one no longer
Swallowed as Jonas by this arctic whale—
So reassure me, saying, ‘All frames well!’

CHANCELLOR
The mainspring is well oiled, a side-wheel hitches.
Is it not strange, that, talking here together,
We seem agreed to drop one name out quite?
A name of power it was not long ago;
You have not yet found heart to speak it, Bishop.
'Tis now the barking stock of any cur;
They call her in the taverns— (Whispers.)


ARCHBISHOP
Such a jest
Is bridegroom to the grave and the worm's cousin.
I would not whisper this into the reed-beds,
Lest at one sweep I should lose ears—and head.

CHANCELLOR
Cheer up, man, 'tis in vogue to scatter mire,
Where our most gracious Conrad plasters it.
The crowned arch-hunter brought the eagle down:
But, fallen as she is, the scurviest knave
Can spirit show and loyalty at once
In rending forth a plume to write his gibes
Upon those wings, that once disdained the cedars,
And moved among the stars. So this poor princess,
Who once sat up between the sickled moon
And the bright bundle of the Pleiades,
Is tumbled from the air of royal favour
Prone on the plain, a seraph castaway,
Her vans all broken! Let us bravely come
And add our kick.

ARCHBISHOP
You bring her wisely in.
She on this rite may claim a casting voice.
She made the limbs of this young master, who learns
Love with his whistle-pipe; who may wear willow
In leading-strings, and furnace out a sonnet,
Before he knows a letter in his horn-book—
What says the queenly mother? Right is hers
To interpose opinion.

CHANCELLOR
Nay, for that,
She said the merest shadow of a nothing,
And wept to say that much. For, when these nuptials
Grew into shape, and half the realm had inkling,
That such an egg of royal policy
Would soon be laid by our great ostrich Conrad,—
I took occasion with this secret bird.
To say—‘Most royal master, may thy slave
Inform thy wisdom with one little hint?
Were it not wise and easy and politic,
And after thy magnanimous great heart,
To give the Queen, my lady, one kind word;
Wheedle and coax her into saying “Ay”;
Pretend to make her counsel launch the boat,
Which stems, already far, the central tide;
And mother this our scheme on her assent,
Who at its birth stood extern and apart.
I tremble, lest she thwart us at the last,
If left to brood outside thy council-doors
A cipher; when the whole land's ringing lips
Canvass the bargain of her weanling sold
To bring its country peace, and loose the zone
Of menace from the forehead of the realm.
Shall she, with her large mother share in him,
Have neither hand nor lot in all this stir?
But rock the cradle like a hireling nurse,
Whom the high destinies of that small mouth,
To which she sells her breast, concern noways:
Pushed sidelong, as a cow, when nature's office
Is served, and held no higher in our Rome,
Than was that Capitolian wolfish mother,
Who lent her teats to Remus. Fie, my king,
Enwind her in thy councils, ask her mind;
Let her arrange some trivialities
To balm the sense of slight: seem to concede
Something not worth concession: mould her so
Into our projects, that she push our way
And not athwart us. Shallow womankind
Forgive a year of wrong for one kind day.

ARCHBISHOP
He did thy council.

CHANCELLOR
Ay, with meagre grace:
Said a few niggard words, that he was sorry
For the raw past between them, roughly told her,
That, if she chose, the coming years might mend;
Her hand had been too hard upon his mouth:
He was a king, no jade to set his paces
At anyone's direction: wife she was,
Not despot: guided he would be, not mastered:—
And in this tenor more. She asked him mildly,
Whither his converse tended, why he came
To mock her desolation? For he came
So rarely now, the cause that drew him then
Should be indeed right urgent. Had he come
To let her know, that she was doomed to die?
If so, she thanked him for civility
And found his tidings sweet. At this he laughed
A harsh forced laughter, to his lip-roots pale,
And kissed her hand. She seemed so lost and careless,
She did not even snatch the hand away,
But like a dead weed let it lie in his.
Whereat he answered, ‘Marriage and not death
Brings me to-day.’ She with a bitter smile,
Leaving the hand still with him, flashed reply,—
‘You cannot marry until I be dead,
So, if you come on marriage here to-day,
You come not less on death, a trivial one,
That must precede her crowning.’ ‘Nay, you are mad,’
He said and trembled. ‘Will you sanely speak,
Or shall I go, and send my Chancellor
To say what I would say?’ She snatched the hand
Fiercely and flared—‘I bear no go-betweens;
Say mouth to mouth your business or be dumb.
Are we not, as God sees us, wife and man?
Can twenty rosy harlots hinder that
By brazen intervention: rive our chain
By baying, curs, in chorus?’ ‘Dame!’ he cried,
‘Be civil.’ ‘King,’ she answered, ‘deeds which lie
Creep under civil cloak and speak you sweetly
In honey syllables and mouths of meal.
But honest anger when it deals with dogs,
Does not go bowing and scraping for a phrase,
But simply names the nature of the cur,
And gets the matter done.’ He chewed his lip
Fiercely and fingered at his hilted side,
And flowed in equal thunder, ‘Mad-woman,
Hear, mad-woman; deaf sleeper in the storm,
Rise up and wake, rouse you and feel ashamed;
Who, in the boom of sky-rack and cloud-clash,
Hear but your own small grievance, egotist,—
The miserable wail-chirp of one grig,
When all the meadowy vastness of the realm
Is wild with tossing elms, and waving grass,
And churned crops flatling laid with hammering hail;
While all the distance, a red tempest smoke,
Reeks up in anger. Will you listen, listen?
I have such peril on my foreland north,
Such mutiny within my kingdom's veins,
Such stint of feeding gold to nourish her,
That there is left one safety from the death,
Which creeps in at her heart. Strengthless we may
Ally ourselves with strength; and baffle doom
By setting other sinews than our own
To grapple with this angel of the dark
In the great plain of shadows. We encounter
Death by vicarious onset with his edge;
So will our limbs elude his swinging scythe,
Which, feeble-jointed, are too shrunk and lean
To be marched up against these sons of snow;
Broad, turbulent, and blood-distended knaves,
Ruddy with rapine, solid as their beeves;
Impenetrable as the boles of oaks
To arrow-head or spear or brandished sword.
Therefore, I wrote in my extremity
To Raymond, saying, “Let my foes be yours,
And whom I hate, hate also. Let us join
Front warlike with the world. Let him, who cribs
A rood of either, feel the lash of both.”
Then in the midmost of the letter came
The kernel of request, for there I proffered,
As a strong cord to wrench alliance tight,
That we betroth our infants, son and girl,
His girl with my son—our son, I would say—
What say you, Queen, to this?’ The shallow King
Made such an abrupt ending and curt close,
That all the woman in his consort's heart
Grew fiery at the slighting: round she turned,
And knitted up the fingers in her hand,
And made a silent motion with her mouth,
But did not look at him. Again he asked her
About this child-betrothal, ay or no,
As at her lips he must have yes or nay;
Whereat, she merely said,—‘Your child, at first,
And our child after. Lo, the kinder last
Allows me a little corner of my babe
To make me proud withal: delusive pride,
For he is sold already like a sheep
With no leave taken from the mother ewe.
Child, O my child! Is he my child at all?
I did not dream that you had left me him.
Then I be richer by one baby's heart;—
Nay, you do wrong to leave me this rich thing,
Who have despoiled me of all else held dear.
All good things have been taken long ago
Out of my life and heart, and air and eyes.
Complete my spoliation. Leave not one.
Love is gone, honour followed, self-esteem
Went afterwards: hope, joy, content, repose,
Sat once like starlings in the boughs of Time:
But now the tree is dead: and, with a whirl,
They are gone into the red divided disc
Of sunset: they are gone? Must the child go?
Earth has a many sorrows: I fear one—
That on some morning you will come, my Lord,
And claim your child, and bear him to your love,
To be a little page to lift her skirts
And tend her lap-dogs. Ay, my Lord, thus do!
You have taken her my life, take him as well:
For I am such a beggar in this world,
It seems unequal with my other fate
To be so richly childed. It were simpler
To play the sonless Niobe as well
As Ariadne on the Naxian dunes:—
So take the child, and wed him—if you list—
Or strangle him: I care not!’ There she ended,
And in a storm he left her.

ARCHBISHOP
Did he so?
Nay, but this brews to mischief, by my crozier!

CHANCELLOR
God knows the issue of all this; not I!
Meantime, do you with me, as duty leads,
Grasp the state's helm and stormwards keep her head.
And, while this dotard King and frenzied Queen
Drill in the ship's side holes, let us take heart,
And pilot her to haven—if we may!

ARCHBISHOP
Sir, I will second you and pray to God.

[Exeunt.