He carried a guitar and wore the plain scarlet tunic, blue breeches with yellow stripes and top-boots of a constable.
Dropping carelessly into a chair in the centre of the platform, and smiling sardonically, he began to sing and play. He had a quiet baritone which he used as only an artist can. The tune was the strangest affair, whimsical, yet full of tragedy and the guitar laughed and wept by turns in his mobile hands.
All the irony of broken hearts, false pledges, loves outraged and forgotten, was in the song, the music, the agonized but laughing voice:
The maid was fair as a maid could be—
Queen of a hundred hearts was she—
And out of the shuffling pack she knew
She drew a suitor she thought might do
(A common habit of flighty maids).
The lucky card was the Jack of Spades—
As poor as a rat but fair of face,
A humble fellow who knew his place,
So she gave him her hand when he made his plea,
Thus raising the fool to an ecstasy.
But another person lived in the pack,
The handsome, rollicking Diamond Jack—
I think you'll find, when my tale you've heard,
The Knave of Diamonds the better word.
It's easy to see how the tricks turned out,
For Diamonds are trumps the world about.
She flung the Jack and his ring away,
Which wasn't exactly the game to play,
And, crushed and broken, she left him there—
But—what in the Deuce should the Lady care?
Then slowly, on a dying note of laughter, the last line was repeated, to trail away into silence:
—What in the Deuce should the Lady care?
And in a flash the Marquis was off the platform.
"Well, what a funny song!" Mrs. MacFarlane declared, applauding vigourously. "I'm sure there's a lot in it, Major. Probably it refers to something in his past—don't you think so?"
"Undoubtedly."