“’Tis true, my girl,” she said, clasping her hands about her knees, the full sleeves falling away from arms as white as milk. “I love the ballads; whether for his sake or their own, I know not,” and she bent her head listening as the handmaid played the first plaintive notes on her lute.
Alice was no contemptible musician, and she touched the instrument softly with loving fingers, playing the first sweet sad chords of that old Irish air and Jacobite ballad, “Roseen Dhu,” or “Dark Rosaleen.”
The garden and the great park beyond and around it were quiet save for the cawing of the hundreds of rooks that haunted those stately avenues of trees. The warmth and the soft murmuring of the late summer were there; here was the deep shadow of stately groves, yonder the wide sunshine on level lawns, but the place was deserted save for the two young women and the deer that were so tame that they pressed close about them, looking through the trees with soft brown eyes, and seeming to listen to the wild, plaintive notes of the ballad, as Alice sang in a full, mellow voice:
“All day long in unrest
To and fro do I move,
The very soul within my breast
Is wasted for you, love!
The heart in my bosom faints,
To think of you, my queen,
My life of life, my saint of saints,