It took her hearers by surprise, Hamilton not least. He was so moved, indeed, for the moment, that he failed to observe its effect on Chesterfield. They all dwelt silent for a little, while the girl, conscious of the impression she had made, looked down, still softly touching the strings. And then in a twinkle her mood changed. She shook her curls, laughed, touched out a lively air, and began to dance.
Her dancing was like her playing, her singing—native, unaffected, captivating, a rhythm of lightness, seeming to mock gravitation. It was to help to make her famous by and by—in days when the susceptible Mr. Pepys was to go into raptures over seeing “little Miss Davis” jigging at the play-end; and, indeed, it was very pretty, so elf-like, so unforced. It roused the enthusiasm of at least two of her company. When, laughing and rosy, she ceased, Chesterfield came to her all in a glow.
“It was prettier than the frisking of your own lambs,” said he. “Did you learn it of a shepherd’s piping, and your song of the nightingale? I vow I envy the country its possession of such a Corisande.”
My lady rose from her chair, and, without turning her head, walked erect from the room. Hamilton, watching the Earl with a furtive smile, heard her go, and breathed a silent benediction on his own success.
CHAPTER VIII
Mr. Pepys—to mention him once again—kept, as we know, a commonplace book, in which he was accustomed to jot down (in shorthand, let us hope) the good stories, post-prandial and otherwise, which came his way. It must have been a rich if unseemly collection, and is ill lost in these days to a world which, whatever its mental capital, has never more than enough of refreshing anecdotes to go round. Included in it, one may be sure, were those gems of information (as related in the Diary) proffered at my lord Crewe’s table by one Templer on the habits of the viper and the tarantula. This Mr. Templer, we note, was a clergyman, and by virtue of his cloth should be exonerated from the suspicion, otherwise irresistible, that he was pulling our Samuel’s fat leg. But it is worth quoting the passage in extenso that the reader may judge for himself—
“He told us some [i.e. serpents] in the waste places of Lancashire do grow to a great bigness, and do feed upon larkes which they take thus: They observe, when the lark is soared to the highest, and do crawl till they come to be just underneath them; and there they place themselves with their mouth uppermost, and there, as is conceived, they do eject poyson upon the bird; for the bird do suddenly come down again in its course of a circle, and falls directly into the mouth of the serpent; which is very strange.”
It is very strange; and that lark at his highest, be it observed—how many hundred feet up?—and the stupendous accuracy of the aim! But Mr. Templer was “a great traveller”—and, of course, therefore, not at all a great liar—and necessarily, on the other hand, too shrewd a man to be himself taken in by the gammoning of local naturalists. Of the tarantula he goes on to say that “All the harvest long” (in Italy presumably) “there are fiddlers go up and down the fields everywhere, in expectation of being hired by those that are stung.” Bless him! and bless his admirable chronicler, who never recorded a more ingenious tale—save that, perhaps, which relates of his friend, Batalier, the jovial but conscienceless, cheapening a butt of Bordeaux wine of some merchant, on the score that it was soured by a thunderstorm, the said storm having been just produced by an artful rogue hired to counterfeit the noise of one, with rain and hail, “upon a deale board”—an incident which reminds one of Peter Simple and Captain Kearney.
But, for Mr. Pepys’s book of tales; no part of it survives, so far as I know, to supplement the Diary, or very possibly there might be found in it some mention of the adventure of Jack Bannister with the cly-faker. This adventure had befallen our musician some time before his encounter with the Clerk of the Acts, which had turned out so signally to his advantage, and one may be certain that the grateful protégé, in the course of unburdening his heart to that generous patron, would not have omitted to mention an incident so poignantly associated with his recent hard experiences. The story, however, may be given in our own words.
In the days precedent to that lucky contretemps in Duke Street, Sad Jack had once possessed a donkey. Acquiring the beast, by a stroke of good fortune, through a raffle conducted in an inn yard over the effects of a deceased tinker, he had used her to bear the burden of the instrument which, in his ploddings abroad, made so heavy physical an addition to the weight of melancholy which oppressed him. Thenceforth patient Griselda acted the part of minstrel-boy to the wandering harpist, bearing on her sturdy little back the dumb intervals between performance and performance, and standing apathetic by while the pence for her night’s board and lodging and her master’s were being charmed from a reluctant public. She was a docile little ass and intelligent, and between her and her owner was quickly established a comradeship which made their too soon severance a source of poignant grief to at least the human one of them. It happened in this way—