‘There was a beautiful flower,’ said he, his little black eyes twinkling at the Queen while he spoke, ‘growing in a fair garden, through which ran a mountain stream, and the birds of the air and the insects of the noontide came to pay their court to this flower and to win a breath of her fragrance, for she was the pride of all earthly plants and the queen of the garden. So the humming-bird flitted by in his bravery, and she marked not his liveries of blue and gold, nor bent her head towards him, but let him pass on to court the flowers of his own tropical land, gorgeous without perfume, dazzling but loveless, like a fair woman without a heart. And the nightingale sang his life away to please her, and, wooing her with his last notes, died hungering when the evening star shone out above the trees. Then the butterfly brought his painted coat and his gay manners and fluttered about her, making sure that a courtier like himself must prevail; but she bent not her head nor moved one of her leaves towards him, though the breeze was sighing softly around her and shaking the dewdrops from her stem.
‘None of the gay and gaudy seemed to win the favour of that queenly flower. At length a bee came buzzing home from his labours, laden with the honey-dew that he had been gathering far and wide. He thought to rest on her petals and distil fresh treasures from her chalice, but she shook her beautiful blossoms merrily in the breeze and waved him scornfully away.
‘All the birds of the air and the noontide insects marvelled that she would have none of them, for they deemed her haughty and unsociable, whispering to one another of the pride that goeth before a fall.
‘Now, even as she shook her petals in disdain, she opened her heart to the daylight, and at its very core lay concealed a lazy useless drone. Then the humming-bird and the butterfly and the bee laughed together, for they said—
‘“Of what avail are beauty and bravery and worth, against possession? And if she have taken the dullest of all insects to her heart, we have but lost our time in suing her, and the nightingale, on the cold earth yonder, hath given his life in vain.”
‘There is a moral in my fable, ladies!’ added Riccio, with a smile and a shrug of his crooked shoulders—‘a moral that you will all of you acknowledge if you tell truth.—Who shall dictate to a woman’s fancy, or reduce to rule the wandering inclinations of a woman’s heart?’
The ladies laughed and whispered, some protesting against the conclusion, others pitying the poor nightingale, but all uniting in condemnation of the useless drone.
Lord Ruthven, who had been eyeing the narrator with looks of fierce scorn, strode up to where he was sitting at the Queen’s feet, and asked him, in a loud, contemptuous voice,—
‘Were there no Wasps in yonder garden of which you spake, Master Tale-teller,—wasps that might give the drone a lesson, and teach him his place was somewhat lower than the bosom of its choicest flower?’
The Italian looked up somewhat scared in his grim questioner’s face.