The youth shook his head; but then after a short pause added, abruptly, "Perhaps you may, perhaps you may--but now while the lute is in tune, I will sing you another song--a song about love;" and without waiting for reply, he struck the chords, and began, with a measure and a tone so different, as for a time to seem almost tame and insignificant, when compared with the wild and thrilling energy of the former music. But as he went on, there was a touching and melancholy pathos in the words and in the air which went direct to St. Real's heart, rousing feelings which he would fain have lulled to sleep, and overwhelming him with deeper melancholy than ever. So sad, so sorrowful did it make him,--so completely did it master him and take possession of his imagination, that he could have given way even to tears, if there had been no eye to see him so unmanned.
The boy was still going on; but St. Real waved his hand, exclaiming, "Hush, hush! no more! It is too much for me!"
The boy looked up with a smile, saying,
"He that will not find
Ease when he may,
Leaves all joy behind
For ever and a day.
"Yet let him wither
His own hopes at will,
So that no other
Blossoms he kill."
St. Real started, somewhat surprised. "You seem to know," he said, "more of me and mine than I fancied. I must hear what you do know, Leonard, and how you know it, before you quit me."
"Nay, nay, my good lord," replied the boy, still smiling, "look not so suspicious. Does it need a very shrewd guess to discover, or to fancy, when a gallant cavalier, like yourself, falls into sadness suddenly, as if he had caught some infectious disease, and then looks more dark and gloomy still, when one sings a simple song to him about love, and beautiful eyes--does it need a very shrewd guess to fancy that after all, that same passion of love is at the bottom of the mystery?"
"But you spoke but now," replied St. Real, "as if you knew more than that, and made allusions that you could not have made unless you had known more."
"Faith then, my lord," replied the boy, "the man who compounded the old proverb I repeated, must have had a mighty skill in divination, to see what was likely to go on in your lordship's heart some hundred years after he himself had lived, and that it would serve a page at his need instead of a better answer--but yet the proverb is a good one," he continued, rambling on. "Good faith! I hold that no man has a right to make a woman love him, and then leave her for any whimsy whatsoever. I do not know much about these things, it is true, but I think that it is dishonourable."
"But suppose," replied St. Real, "that honour has some other claim upon him which calls him in a different way--what should he do then?"
"Why, methinks he should become an apothecary!" replied the boy; and then added, seeing St. Real's brow slightly contract, "what I mean is, my lord, that he should take the very nicest scales that conscience can supply to weigh out medicines for hurt honour, if he have got himself into such a scrape that honour must be injured either way. Or he may do the matter differently, and weigh in those nice scales which is the heaviest sin,--to break a lady's heart; to leave her unhappy and cheerless through the long days of life; to doom her to wed one that she does not love, or perhaps hates; to have her reproaches and her sorrow to answer for at his dying day; or, on the other hand, to violate what he may think a claim upon his honour, which very likely priests and prelates, and saints and martyrs, and his own heart too, in the calm after-day of life, may tell him was no claim at all."