“I am no metaphysician,” he said, and Wingfold accepted the dismissal of the subject.
Little passed between the two men over their wine; and as neither of them cared to drink more than a couple of glasses, they soon rejoined the ladies in the drawing-room.
Mrs. Ramshorn was taking her usual forty winks in her arm-chair, and their entrance did not disturb her. Helen was turning over some music.
“I am looking for a song for you, George,” she said. “I want Mr. Wingfold to hear you sing, lest he should take you for a man of stone and lime.”
“Never mind looking,” returned her cousin. “I will sing one you have never heard.”
And seating himself at the piano, he sang the following verses. They were his own, a fact he would probably have allowed to creep out, had they met with more sympathy. His voice was a full bass one, full of tone.
“Each man has his lampful, his lampful of oil; He may dull its glimmer with sorrow and toil; He may leave it unlit, and let it dry, Or wave it aloft, and hold it high: For mine, it shall burn with a fearless flame In the front of the darkness that has no name.
“Sunshine and Wind?--are ye there? Ho! ho! Are ye comrades or lords, as ye shine and blow? I care not, I! I will lift my head Till ye shine and blow on my grassy bed. See, brother Sun, I am shining too! Wind, I am living as well as you!
“Though the sun go out like a vagrant spark, And his daughter planets are left in the dark, I care not, I! For why should I care? I shall be hurtless, nor here nor there. Sun and Wind, let us shine and shout, For the day draws nigh when we all go out!”
“I don’t like the song,” said Helen, wrinkling her brows a little. “It sounds--well, heathenish.”
She would, I fear, have said nothing of the sort, being used to that kind of sound from her cousin, had not a clergyman been present. Yet she said it from no hypocrisy, but simple regard to his professional feelings,
“I sung it for Mr. Wingfold,” returned Bascombe. “It would have been a song after Horace’s own heart.”
“Don’t you think,” rejoined the curate, “the defiant tone of your song would have been strange to him? I confess that what I find chiefly attractive in Horace is his sad submission to the inevitable.”
“No. He makes the best of it, and as merrily as he can.”