“Sup with me, Hart,” continued Strings, with the air of a boon comrade. “Sup with me–venison, capons, and–Epsom water.”
“Thank you, I am engaged to supper,” replied Hart, contemptuously, brushing his cloak where it had been touched by the fiddler, as if his fingers had contaminated it.
The insult clearly observable in the manager’s tone, however, had no effect whatever upon Strings. He tossed his head proudly and said indifferently: “Oh, very well. Strings will sup with Strings. My coach, my coach, I say. Drive me to my bonnie babes!”
He pushed open the door with a lordly air and passed out; and, for some seconds, they heard a mingling of repeated demands for the coach and a strain of music which sounded like “Away dull care; prythee away from me.”
Buckingham had observed the fiddler’s tilt with the manager and the royal exit of the ragged fellow with much amusement. “A merry wag! Who is that?” he asked, as Strings’s voice grew faint in the entry-way.
Hart was strutting actor-fashion before the mirror, arranging his curls to hang gracefully over his forehead and tilting now and again the big plumed hat. “A knave of fortune, it seems,” he answered coolly and still suspiciously.
“Family?” asked Buckingham, indifferently.
“Twins, I warrant,” replied Hart, in an irritated tone.
Buckingham chuckled softly.
“No wonder he’s tattered and gray,” he declared, humorously philosophizing upon Hart’s reply, though it was evident that Hart himself was too much chafed by the presence of his lordship in the greenroom after the play to know what he really had said.