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They noticed, too, that, however the child's fingers fell on the keys, cadences followed, broken, wandering, yet of startling beauty and pathos. The house-servants, looking in through the open doors at the little black figure perched up before the instrument, while unknown, wild harmony drifted through the evening air, had a better conception of him.
I heard the names of Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah as early as the names of father, mother, and nurse. My baby soul was enthralled by sad and noble cadences, as my mother sang of my ancient home in Palestine, or mourned over the desolation of Zion.
The air eluded me for some while; but my fingers, straying over the strings, fell suddenly into the plaintive melody; with it, the words too came back to me. "A melancholy air, yet with somewhat of a pleasing sadness in its minor cadences," commented Doña Orosia when I had ceased. "Translate me the words, an your Spanish is sufficient."
It demands sympathy before the suffering or its cause is revealed by articulate speech; its tones awe assemblies, and command silence before the speaker announces his views; and the rebellious and disorderly, whether in the school, around the rostrum, or on the field, bow in submission beneath the authority of its majestic cadences.
For a time, the last words she had heard that evening were ringing in her ears sombre words, uttered in a deep tone of melancholy, by a voice which commanded cadences that had often reached the minds and hearts of men and swayed them. "Is that all all, Roberta? Must I go away with that?"
If in that vale the woman-call could be heard by ears attuned to its haunting cadences, so also did the frightened mother-call echo its equally primitive note, accompanied by the less well-known sister-call of warning and distress. The truth is that Eustace was becoming harder to manage with each recurring crisis.
What I called touching just now was the thought that here the human voice, the utterance of a great language, had been supreme. The air was full of intonations and cadences; not of the echo of smashing blows, of riven armour, of howling victims and roaring beasts.
The moon arose behind the house, she could not see it, but she knew it was there by the swarming of pale lights under the pine-trees, and the bristling of their tops as with needles of silver. She heard a whippoorwill in the distance calling as from some undiscovered country; there was an undertone of frogs from marshy meadows swelling and dying in even cadences of sound.
It was slow music when Ignacio Chavez spoke, all liquid sounds and tender cadences. When he had cursed the weeds it was like love-making. A d in his mouth became a softened th; from the lips of such as the bell-ringer of San Juan the snapping Gringo oath comes metamorphosed into a gentle "Gah-tham!"
This is how it should have been rendered," and he went impulsively to the piano and then the sweet monotonous cadences and melodious reveries slipped from his long white fingers till the whole room was permeated with a delicious sense of moonlit solitude and conversation was stilled in its languor.
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