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Then the men spread out and surround it, fixing their hooks wherever they can get a sight of it in the tangle, some hauling, others thrusting outward; if it is dry, they splash water over it to make it slippery. And here the poles are nowise regularly set like harp-strings, but lie crosswise at all angles like a cobweb.
Luckily the first mad fury of the blast lasted only for two or three minutes, or our mast could never have resisted the tremendous strain upon it; as it was, stout though the spar absurdly disproportionate to the size of the craft, I then considered it it swayed and bent like a fishing-rod, causing the lee-rigging to blow out quite in bights, while that to windward was strained as taut as harp-strings, the resemblance to which was increased by the weird sound of the wind as it shrieked through it.
Once, as her voice dropped, she looked up at Captain Gambier, so very archly, with the curving line of her bare throat, that Wilfrid was dragged down from his cynical observatory, and made to feel as a common man among them all. At the "thrum-thrum" on the harp-strings, which wound up the song, frenzied shouts were raised for a repetition.
Nothing moved but the wan, white hands over the harp-strings; no sound but the sound of the music stirred in the room. Once more the melody changed.
The garden rises at the end into broken elevated ground showing the native rock through its grassy sides. A row of tall old cypresses crowns the ridge their fluted trunks gray with lichen-stains, and their deep green spires of foliage forming harp-strings on which the evening winds discourse solemn music, as if the spirit of the poet haunted them still.
Her voice carried the air clear and true, and the faint trembling of the harp-strings interfered with the harmony no more than if a wandering breeze had been tangled in them as it passed. "Sing me the songs that to me were so deah Long, long ago, long ago. Tell me the tales I delighted to heah Long, long ago, long ago." The sweet little voice sang it to the end without missing a word.
On its surface pleasure boats lay at their moorings by jetties and boatsheds; groups of stiff-necked swans sailed or ducked and straddled; while shady walks followed the banks, where the whiplike branches of the willows, showing shoots of tenderest green, trailed in the water or swayed like loose harp-strings to the breeze.
When I shall have sung my death song, and my harp-strings shall have ceased to vibrate, then I will bid farewell to life, and yield uncomplaining to my fate." This prayer, like the others, would have been unheeded, they thought only of their booty, but to hear so famous a musician, that moved their rude hearts. "Suffer me," he added, "to arrange my dress.
"Sometimes," he then said, "it happens, even in the world of cold and artificial convention, that a man and woman are brought together who, to their own immediate consciousness, have had no previous acquaintance with each other, and yet with the lightest touch, the swiftest glance of an eye, a million vibrations are set quivering in them like harp-strings struck by the hand of a master and responding each to each in throbbing harmony and perfect tune.
"Then with his harp-strings tuned to echoes of the wind on winter moors, he sang of death and valour on the field, of love and fealty in the hall, till those who listened forgot all save his singing and the noble knights whereof he sang.
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