“How the bird twitters!” cried Charles, good-naturedly. “Nay, my dear, curiosity was ever fatal to your sex. Let us remain in paradise for an hour or so. Sing!”
Jeanne de Mantes had a voice that matched her looks: small, insinuating, sweet; creeping into favour, rather than storming it; docile to a thousand modulations and graces. Now it was the very gaiety of music; anon just a hint of pathos; and every word distinct as a dropping gem. And this accompanied with here a dreamlike fixity of gaze, there an arch roll of the eyes; here again a punctuating dimple, a flash in the peachy, dark face of the whitest teeth in all the world; there a drooping of the lip that positively demanded the consolation of a kiss.
Charles had not been so stirred to enthusiasm for a considerable time. He called for a second ditty, and yet another. This last had an audacious lilt, with a refrain so infectious that the royal listener began to hum it midway and sadly out of tune. Toward the last verse, however, under strokes waxing ever smarter, a string broke with a plaintive sob.
“Ah, diable!” involuntarily exclaimed the singer; and his Majesty laughed delightedly. Then his face changed again as he noted the compressed lips of Lady Castlemaine and the glacial anger of Miss Stewart. He rose and broke up the circle. His arm on Rockhurst’s shoulder, he was about to retire, when he paused and hummed a few notes of the last song once more.
“A linnet,” he said, “a positive linnet! Odd’s fish! but we’d have her pipe to us when we might give her our whole attention.”
He spoke low, and flung back a look, that held a certain apprehension, toward Miss Stewart. This latter stood very erect, and bore a studied air of indifference.
“If your lordship will look to it—” he went on, then broke off petulantly under the glance that Rockhurst turned upon him. “Good lack, man! I forget how much of the Puritan there is in thee at times.”
“Your Majesty,” said Rockhurst, in his most stately manner, “will find with ease an apter messenger.”