"Do teach them your catch now. We will go into the garden. If only they
had on their nightgowns? It is such a disappointment."
In the garden, which was rather dark, for the moon had not yet fully
risen, Lady Locke found Lord Reggie standing by her side with Tommy, who
had formed a passionate attachment to him, and showed it violently both
in words and deeds.
"Let us sit down here," he said, drawing forward a chair for her. "Esmé
wants me to hear his music from a distance. Tommy, you go in and sing.
We want to listen to you."
Tommy ran off excitedly.
Lady Locke and Lord Reggie sat down silently. A few yards away Mrs.
Windsor, Madame Valtesi, and Mr. Smith formed a heterogeneous and
singularly inappropriate group. Through the lighted windows of the
drawing-room a multitude of bobbing small heads might be discerned, and
the large form of Esmé Amarinth in the act of reciting the words of his
catch.
Lord Reggie looked at Lady Locke, and sighed softly.
"Why are beautiful things so sad?" he said. "This night is like some
exquisite dark youth full of sorrow. If you listen, you can hear the
murmur of his grief in the wind. It is as if he had shed tears, and
known renunciations."
"We all know renunciations," she answered. "And they are sad, but they
are great too. We are often greatest when we give something up."
"I think renunciations are foolish," he said. "I only once gave up a
pleasure, and the remembrance of it has haunted me like a grey ghost
ever since. Why do people think it an act of holiness to starve their
souls? We are here to express ourselves, not to fast twice in a week.
Yet how few men and women ever dare to express themselves fully?"
Lady Locke looked up, and seemed to come to a sudden resolution.
"Do you ever express your real self by what you say or do?" she asked.
"Yes, always nearly."
"Even by wearing that green carnation?"
There was a ring of earnestness in her voice that evidently surprised
him a little.
"Because," she went on, speaking more rapidly, "I take that as a symbol.
I cannot help it. It seems like the motto of your life, and it is a
tainted motto. Why----"
But at this moment a delicate sound of "Sh-sh!" came from Mrs. Windsor,
and the voice of Jimmie Sands, an uncertain treble with a quaver in it,
was heard singing Esmé Amarinth's catch. He sang it right through before
the other circling voices rippled in--
"Rose-white youth,
Pas-sionate, pale,
A singing stream in a silent vale,
A fairy prince in a prosy tale,
Ah! there's nothing in life so finely frail
As rose-white youth."
"Rose-white youth," chimed the other voices, one upon one, until the air
of the night throbbed with the words, and they seemed to wander away
among the sleeping pageant of the flowers, away to the burnished golden
disc of the slowly ascending moon.
Lord Reggie, with his fair head bent, listened with a smile on his lips,
a smile in his grey blue eyes, and Lady Locke watched him and listened
too, and thought of his youth and of all he was doing with it, as a
sensitive, deep-hearted woman will.
And the shrill voices wound on and on, and, at last, detaching
themselves one by one from the melodic fabric in which they were
enmeshed, slipped into silence.