The evening was still, and mild as early autumn, and the plash of oars passing up and down the river sounded like a part of the music—
“Love in her sunny eyes doth basking play,
Love walks the pleasant mazes of her hair,
Love does on both her lips for ever stray,
And sows and reaps a thousand kisses there;
In all her outward parts love’s always seen;
But, oh, he never went within.”
It was a song of Cowley’s, which De Malfort had lately set to music, and to a melody which Hyacinth especially admired.
“A serenade! Only De Malfort could have thought of such a thing. Lying ill and alone, he sends me the sweetest token of his regard—my favourite air, his own setting—the last song I ever heard him sing. And you wonder that I value so pure, so disinterested a love!” protested Hyacinth to her sister, in the silence at the end of the song.
“Sing again, sweet boys, sing again!” she cried, snatching a purse from her pocket, and flinging it with impetuous aim into the boat.
It hit one of the fiddlers on the head, and there was a laugh, and in a trice the largesse was divided and pocketed.
“They are from his Majesty’s choir; I know their voices,” said Hyacinth, “so fresh, and pure. They are the prettiest singers in the chapel. That little monkey with the cherub’s voice is Purcell—Dr. Blow’s favourite pupil—and a rare genius.”
They sang another song from De Malfort’s repertoire, an Italian serenade, which Hyacinth had heard in the brilliant days before her marriage, when the Italian Opera was still a new thing in Paris. The melody brought back the memory of her happy girlhood with a rush of sudden tears.
The little concert lasted for something less than an hour, with intervals of light music, dances and marches, between the singing. Boats passed and repassed. Strange voices joined in a refrain now and then, and the sisters stood at the open window enthralled by the charm of the music and the scene. London lay in ruins yonder to the east, and Sir Matthew Hale and other judges were sitting at Clifford’s Inn to decide questions of title and boundary, and the obligation to rebuild; but here in this western London there were long ranges of lighted windows shining through the wintry mists, wherries passing up and down with lanterns at their prows, an air of life and gaiety hanging over that river which had carried so many a noble victim to his doom yonder, where the four towers stood black against the starlit greyness, unscathed by fire, and untouched by time.
The last notes of a good-night song dwindled and died, to the accompaniment of dipping oars, as the boat moved slowly along the tideway, and lost itself among other boats—jovial cits going eastward, from an afternoon at the King’s theatre, modish gallants voyaging westward from play-house or tavern, some going home to domesticity, others intent upon pleasure and intrigue, as the darkness came down, and the hour for supper and deeper drinking drew near. And who would have thought, watching the lighted windows of palace and tavern, hearing those joyous sounds of glee or catch trolled by voices that reeked of wine—who would have thought of the dead-cart, and the unnumbered dead lying in the pest pits yonder, or the city in ruins, or the King enslaved to a foreign power, and pledged to a hated Church? London, gay, splendid, and prosperous, the queen-city of the world as she seemed to those who loved her—could rise glorious from the ashes of a fire unparalleled in modern history, and to Charles and Wren it might be given to realise a boast which in Augustus had been little more than an imperial phrase.