Why did I do it?
It was distinctly what Jack calls “a wash-out.” For Sydney Vandeleur at once switched off on to Eleventh Century folk-songs. And Mr. Waters, asked if he didn’t think they were too delicious, was “afraid the Eleventh Century was out of his groove.”
And then Sydney hummed several only slightly more modern Celtic dirges—one about “The Sweet Flowers, all gone to Decay!”
And Mr. Waters said he preferred his flowers fresh; adding bluntly that he loathed all those miserable minor wails himself, and quite agreed with that law which Queen Elizabeth passed for the Irish bards of her time, sentencing them to death if they composed songs on any subject whatsoever except in praise of the Queen’s most Excellent Majesty.
That brought back some of Sydney’s first pose. With a pained little smile he turned to me, then, putting on just the expression of the bereaved collie in Landseer’s “Shepherd’s Chief Mourner,” he asked me if I happened to have kept the MS. of that little thing he’d written for me to that sonnet—“Kissing her Hair, I sat against her Feet.”
I felt myself flushing up to the roots of my own wretched hair that he’d always so praised ... there was something about kissing of hair which he knew nothing of, and that I was only too thankful to let die a natural death.... Rather shortly, I answered, “Oh, that song—yes; it’s tucked away in some drawer or other here, I believe.”
“If it wouldn’t be troubling you too much, Miss Trant, to lend it to me again? It was my only copy,” suggested Sydney softly (con molto espressione).
“Of course,” said I. “I’ll find it for you now. Cicely, you might come into my room and help me to hunt.”
Cicely followed me, leaving those two men to entertain each other. How they proceeded to do so I suppose I shall never know!