"Ha! ha! ha!"
She laughed prettily, not scornfully, then striking an attitude of the mock heroic, added, on the spur of the moment—
"And the oven was burning, not baking,
The tarts of my soul's desire!"
—for at the moment one of those fumes the kitchen was constantly firing at the drawing-room, came storming up as if a door had been suddenly opened in yet lower regions. Cornelius was too much offended and self-occupied to be amused, but both Mrs. Raymount and Vavasor laughed, the latter recognizing in Hester's extemporization a vein similar to his own. But Hester was already searching, and presently found a song to her mind—one, that was, fit for Cornelius.
"Come now, Corney," she said; "here is a song I should like you to be able to sing!"
With that she turned to the keys, and sang a spirited ballad, of which the following was the first stanza:
This blow is for my brother:
You lied away his life;
This for his weeping mother,
This for your own sweet wife;
For you told that lie of another
To pierce her heart with its knife.
And now indeed the singer was manifest; genius was plainly the soul of her art, and her art the obedient body to the informing genius. Vavasor was utterly enchanted, but too world-eaten to recognize the soul she almost waked in him for any other than the old one. Her mother thought she had never heard her sing so splendidly before.
The ballad was of a battle between two knights, a good and a bad—something like Browning's Count Gismond: the last two lines of it were—
So the lie went up in the face of heaven
And melted in the sun.