“O, truth, your Highneth flatterth me!”
“You shall prove it.” He smiled very pleasantly. “But, believe me, my lord, I am infinitely your debtor for a suggestion which may go far to revolutionize the whole question of impressment and the popularity of the Navy. Now, will you not give me a taste of the quality which has come to enter so aptly into the context of our discussion? You know I play a little on the guitar myself, but not so well as to refuse a hint or two from a master of the instrument. There was a question of a saraband. I would fain take a lesson in its presentation.”
“Corbetti’th, your Highneth meanth.” The puppy—strange scion of a house distinguished, in the persons of its head and firstborn, for both courage and nobility—glowed with gratified vanity. He really believed at last that ’twas he himself had originated that exquisite specific against the curse of the ocean, and that the Duke was his admiring debtor for it. He struck an attitude, slung his guitar into position, and, receiving a nod from his auditor, forthwith touched out the measure of Signor Francesco’s saraband. It was a quite graceful composition, and he played it well.
The Duke was enraptured.
“It is in truth a most sweet and moving piece,” he said, “and masterly rendered. I have never known to be displayed a more perfect accord between composer, performer, and instrument. Yet, if they were to be considered in order of merit, I should put, without hesitation, the executant in the first place and the guitar in the least.”
“Yet it’th a good guitar, Thir,” ventured the glowing youth. He lifted and eyed with beatific patronage that faithful recorder of his genius.
“Good,” answered the Duke; “yet good is not good enough to be the servant of the best. But where, indeed, could one look for an instrument worthy of an Orpheus?”
“O, I bluth, your Highneth! Yet I will not thay but what I might give a better account of mythelf on an inthtrument pothethed by my thithter, my lady Chethterfield. It ith a wonder, that. Corbetti himthelf hath declared it.”
“Indeed?” James spoke abstractedly, seeming hardly to attend. “Now, will you make me your debtor, my lord, for a hint or two. It would flatter my poor skill to expend it on so rare a melody.”
He was so full of compliment and ingratiation, that the first diffidence of the sweet Earl was soon exchanged for a vanity approaching condescension. He took his royal pupil in hand, and conducted him over the opening bars of the composition. But the Duke, strange to say, proved himself a most sad bungler. He could not, for some reason, master the air, and finally, with a shrug of impatience, he desisted, and begged his instructor to repeat to him his own version of certain ingenious passages.