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"You make mamma and me ver' happy." Let the frontier push out as far and as fast as it pleases, the violin always goes with it. Men march the more intrepidly to the scraping of the skilful bow. There were two fiddles already going in the next room; Père Marquette had seen to that.
After a great deal of crunching upon the sanded stone floor by the feet of father, son, and grandson as they moved to and fro in these preparations, the bass-viol and fiddles were taken from their nook, and the strings examined and screwed a little above concert-pitch, that they might keep their tone when the service began, to obviate the awkward contingency of having to retune them at the back of the gallery during a cough, sneeze, or amen an inconvenience which had been known to arise in damp wintry weather.
The mists made the night very cold, and I was glad to wrap myself up in one of the guvnor's rugs and smoke a packet of cigarettes while I waited. From time to time I could hear the music of fiddles, and they came with an odd echo, just as though some merry tune of long ago chided me for being there all alone.
Suddenly there was a rush from outside, and Zen found herself being carried bodily away. The young people had decided that the dancing could wait no longer, so a half dozen hustlers had been deputed to kidnap the bride and carry her to the barn, where the fiddles were already strumming.
"Nae wonder the fiddles made us come, it's the gypsy band, factor;" and Jessie pointed out five or six dark, handsome fellows with tumbled black hair, and half-shut gleaming eyes, who had ranged themselves with sullen shyness and half-rebellious order at the upper end of the room. But how wondrously their slim, supple fingers touched the bow, or the strings!
My mind begins to grow more easy. I am even sensible of a little feeling of funny elation at the sound of the fiddles gayly squeaking. I can look about me and laugh inwardly at the distant sight of Tou Tou and the button-boy turning each other nimbly round; of father, in the fourth figure, blandly backing between Mrs. Mitchell and a cook-maid. We have now reached the fifth.
'Rancour? he had answered, with a queer tender laugh. 'You dear old dad! For the first time the sense of an actual visitation rested with him, and continued real. He felt, he knew, or seemed to know, that his father's soul was near. Paul was standing in a room in the old house in Church Vale, the room in which the fiddles hung around the wall in their bags of green baize.
"Helen" and Ledyard caught her to him "you never would have said that if you had been Dick's mother!" "Perhaps not!" "No. You and I have only played second fiddles, first and last; but second fiddles come in handy!" The room grew dim and shadowy, and the two in the western window clung together. "Have you heard John, that Margaret Moffatt has broken her engagement to Clyde Huntter?" "Yes.
Still I can't quite think that the Marchese would look at any one of the fiddles quite as I saw him look at her," said Paolina. And then the immense interval, which occurs between one act and another in Italian theatres, and which is tolerated with perfect contentment by Italian audiences, came to an end; and Ludovico hurried down to take his place again in the Castelmare box.
Two hundred and fifty souls, where there was not good room for the odd fifty; such laughing, such squeezing, such pressing of hands and waists in the staircase, and then such a row and riot at the top, four fiddles, a key bugle, and a bagpipe, playing 'Haste to the wedding, amidst the crash of refreshment-trays, the tramp of feet, and the sounds of merriment on all sides!
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