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Her voice had something of the quality of the Träumerei in it, and it had affected him like a violin's vibrato, accompanying a death scene or as a litany might have done, had he been a religious man. "I suppose you find it too much the same, one day after another," he suggested, in response to that mournful quality in her voice. "You live here, then?" She was looking across the desert.
And, as she turned it, she saw the figures of her childhood playmates turn before her upon her lap, and they joined their voices with the silvery notes of the violin's long ago songs until the attic was filled with the melody and the figures danced from her lap and, taking her by the hand, circled in the center of the attic room laughing and singing.
So tenacious of impressions was Nehemiah that it was the violin in those alien hands which still focussed his attention as he stared gaspingly about. Leander was not here; probably had never been here; and the twanging of those strings had lured him to his fate. Well might he contemn the festive malevolence of the violin's influence!
"Can one of you play the cornet?" asked the big man with the red face. "I can," said Mattia, "but I haven't the instrument with me." "I'll go and find one; the violin's pretty, but it's squeaky." I found that day that Mattia could play everything. We played until night, without stopping. It did not matter for me, but poor Mattia was very weak.
He was long-winded, and was still bounding about in the double-shuffle and the pigeon-wing, his shadow on the wall nimbly following every motion, when the violin's cadence quavered off in a discordant wail, and Leander, the bow pointed at the waterfall, exclaimed: "Look out! Somebody's thar! Out thar on the rocks!"
When next he heard that fine sylvan symphony of the sound of the falling water the tinkling bell-like tremors of its lighter tones mingling with the sonorous, continuous, deeper theme rising from its weight and volume and movement; with the surging of the wind in the pines; with the occasional cry of a wild bird deep in the new verdure of the forests striking through the whole with a brilliant, incidental, detached effect no faint vibration was in its midst of the violin's string, listen as he might.
Italian, though less elegant, is, for the purpose of writing, a richer language than French, and an even subtler; and the sound of it spoken is as superior to the sound of French as a violin's is to a flute's. Still, French does, by reason of its exquisite concision and clarity, fill its post of honour very worthily, and will not in any near future, I think, be thrust down.
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