He bowed to Madame La Motte and to his sweetheart, smiling gently at them.
"By your patience, ladies," he said, "I will make endeavour to improvise for you upon a theme. We have spent this day in seeing beauties such as sure I never thought to see with my mortal eyes. We are in the land of colour, of sweet odours; the balmy smells of nard and cassia are flung about the cedarn alleys where we walk. We have sucked the liquid air in a veritable garden of the Hesperides, and, indeed, I looked to see the three fair daughters of Hesperus along those crispèd shades and bowers. And we have seen also"—his voice was almost dreaming as he spoke—"the greatest church e'er built to God's glory by the hand of man. 'Tis indeed a mountain scooped out, a valley turned upsides. The towers of the Abbey Church at Westminster might walk erect in the middle nave; there are pillars with the girth of towers, and which appear so slender that they make one shudder as they rise from out the ground or depend them from the gloomy roof like stalactites in the cave of a giant."
Madame La Motte nodded, purred, and murmured to herself. The whimsical and studied Court language did not now fall upon her ears for the first time. In the fashion of that age all men of culture and position learnt to talk in this fashion upon occasion, with classic allusion and in graceful prose.
But to sweet Elizabeth it was all new and beautiful, and as she gazed at her lover her eyes were liquid with caressing wonder, her lips curved into a bow of pride at such dear eloquence.
Johnnie plucked the strings of the chitarrone once or twice, and then, his eyes half closed, began a simple improvisation in a minor key, the while he lifted his voice and began to sing his ballad of evening colours:
See! limner Phœbus paints the sky
Vermilion and gold
And doth with purple tapestry
The waning day enfold.
—The royal, lucent, Tyrian dye
King Philip wore in Thessaly.
The Lord of Morning now doth keep
Herald for Lady Night,
Whose robes of black and silver sweep
Before his tabard bright.
—All silver-soft and sable-deep,
As when she brought Endymion sleep!
Now honey-coloured Luna she
Hath lit her lamp on high;
And paleth in her Majestie
The twin Dioscuri.
—Set in gold-powdered samite, she—
Queen of the Night! Queen of the Sea!
His voice faded away into silence; the mellow tenor ceasing in an imperceptible diminuendo of sound.
There was a silence, and then Lizzie's hand stole out and touched her lover's. "Oh, Johnnie," she said, "how gracious! And did those lovely words come into thy head as thou sangst them?"