“Why, I have never heard that he was a bad man, especially,” remarked Eve, surprised.
“He was sure to be—making all that money; it could not be otherwise. Oh, what is his agony at this very moment!”
But Rupert did not sympathize with this mournfulness; when three ladies were present, conversation should be light, poetical. “Miss Bruce,” he said, turning towards Eve—he was so broad that that in itself made a landscape—“have you ever noticed the appropriateness of ‘County Guy’ to this neighborhood of ours?”
“No,” Eve answered. But the words brought her father to her mind with a rush: how often, when she was a child, had he beguiled a dull walk with a chant, half song, half declamation:
“Oh, County Guy, the hour is nigh,
The sun has left the lea.”
She looked at her host, but she did not hear him; a mist gathered in her eyes.
“‘Oh, County Guy, the hour is nigh,’”
began the colossus, placing his plum-cake on his knee provisionally.
“‘The sun has left the lea;
The orange flower perfumes the bower,
The breeze is on the sea.
The lark his lay who trilled all day
Sits hushed his partner nigh.
Breeze, bird, and flower confess the hour;
But where is County Guy? ’
“The orange flower perfumes the bower; here we have the orange flower and the lea, the bower and the sea; and it’s very rarely that you find all four together. ‘The lark his lay who trilled all day’—what music it is! There’s no one like Scott.”