"Lady, when I behold the roses sprouting, Which, clad in damask mantles, deck the arbours, And then behold your lips where sweet love harbours, My eyes perplex me with a double doubting, Whether the roses be your lips, or your lips the roses."
Barely had I finished when Mistress Hortense seats herself at the spinet, and, changing the words to suit her saucy fancy, trills off that ballad but newly writ by one of our English courtiers:
"Shall I, wasting in despair, Die because--_Rebecca's_--fair? Or make pale my cheeks with care 'Cause _Rebecca's_ rosier are?"
"Be _he_ fairer than the day Or the _June-field coils of hay_; If _he_ be not so to me, What care I how _fine_ he be?"
There was such merriment in the dark-lashed eyes, I defy Eli Kirke himself to have taken offence; and so, like many another youth, I was all too ready to be the pipe on which a dainty lady played her stops. As the song faded to the last tinkling notes of the spinet her fingers took to touching low, tuneless melodies like thoughts creeping into thoughts, or perfume of flowers in the dark. The melting airs slipped into silence, and Hortense shut her eyes, "to get the memory of it," she said. I thought she meant some new-fangled tune.
"Oh?" asked Hortense, and she uncovered all the blaze of the dark lights hid in those eyes.
"Faith, Hortense," I answered, like a moth gone giddy in flame, "your naughty music wakes echoes of what souls must hear in paradise."
"Then it isn't naughty," said Hortense, beginning to play fiercely, striking false notes and discords and things.
"No--Ramsay!" cried Hortense, jangling harder than ever.
And in bustled M. Picot, hastier than need, methought.
"What, Hillary? Not a-bed yet, child? Ha!--crow's-feet under eyes to-morrow! Bed, little baggage! Forget not thy prayers! Pish! Pish! Good-night! Good-night!"
"Now, devil fly away with that prying wench of a Deliverance Dobbins!" ejaculated M. Picot, stamping about. "Oh, I'll cure her fanciful fits! Pish! Pish! That frump and her fits! Bad blood, Ramsay; low-bred, low-bred! 'Tis ever the way of her kind to blab of aches and stuffed stomachs that were well if left empty. An she come prying into my chemicals, taking fits when she's caught, I'll mix her a pill o' Deliverance!" And M. Picot laughed heartily at his own joke.