“Sorell, will you stroke the other boat?” said Pryce, “and Miss Nora, will you have a cushion in the bows? Now I think we’re made up. No—we want another lady. And running his eyes over those still standing on the bank, he called a plump little woman, the wife of a Llandaff tutor, who had been walking with Mrs. Hooper.
“Mrs. Maddison, will you come with us? I think that will about trim us.”
Mrs. Maddison obeyed him with alacrity, and the first boat pushed off. Mrs. Hooper, Alice, Sorell, two St. Cyprian undergraduates and Nora’s girl friend, Miss Watson, followed in the second.
Then, while the June evening broadened and declined, the party wound in and out of the curves of the Cherwell. The silver river, brimming from a recent flood, lay sleepily like a gorged serpent between the hay meadows on either side. Flowers of the edge, meadow-sweet, ragged-robin and yellow flags, dipped into the water; willows spread their thin green over the embattled white and blue of the sky; here and there a rat plunged or a bird fled shrieking; bushes of wild roses flung out their branches, and everywhere the heat and the odours of a rich open land proclaimed the fulness of the midland summer.
Connie made the life of the leading boat. Something had roused her, and she began to reveal some of the “parlour-tricks,” with which she had amused the Palazzo Barberini in her Roman days. A question from Pryce stirred her into quoting some of the folk-songs of the Campagna, some comic, some tragic, fitting an action to them so lively and true that even those of her hearers who could not follow the dialect sat entranced. Then some one said—“But they ought to be sung!” And suddenly, though rather shyly, she broke into a popular canzone of the Garibaldian time, describing the day of Villa Gloria; the march of the morning, the wild hopes, the fanfaronade; and in the evening, a girl hiding a wounded lover and weeping both for him and “Italia” undone.
The sweet low sounds floated along the river.
“Delicious!” said Sorell, holding his oar suspended to listen. He remembered the song perfectly. He had heard her sing it in many places—Rome, Naples, Syracuse. It was a great favourite with her mother, for whom the national upheaval of Italy—the heroic struggle of the Risorgimento—had been a life-long passion.
“Why did Connie never tell us she could sing!” said Mrs. Hooper in her thin peevish voice. “Girls really shouldn’t hide their accomplishments.”
Sorell’s oar dropped into the water with a splash.