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Mystery and sorrow these are its keynotes; separately or in consonance, they are sounded from beginning to end of this strange and muted tragedy. It is full of a quality of emotion, of beauty, which is as "a touch from behind a curtain," issuing from a background vague and illimitable.
Then, as in voices of a hymn, chants a more formal liturgy of plaint where the phrase is almost lost in the lowest voice. And now in the same vein, of the same fibre, a fugue begins of lament, first in muted strings. It is the line of sad expressive recitative that heralded the plaint and the love-scene.
He was one of the sailor boys on Joby's van. You remember their helping us with the luggage at Indian Queens'? He showed me his tattoo marks that day." And again he saw his childhood as it were set about with an enchanted hedge, across which many voices would have called to him, and some from near, but all had hung muted and arrested.
They do their work so well as to entrance, not only Faust, but all who hear their strains, The instrumental ballet is a fairy waltz, a filmy musical fabric, seemingly woven of moonbeams and dewy cobwebs, over a pedal-point on the muted violoncellos, ending with drum taps and harmonics from the harp one of the daintiest and most original orchestral effects imaginable.
Good heaven!" interposed Wilfrid, horrified by the thought of the penance here indicated. The bed shook violently. "If not," was uttered with a sort of muted vehemence, "there's another thing you can do. Go to the undertaker's, and order coffins for us all. There good night!" The bed shook again. Wilfrid stood eyeing the mysterious hangings, as if some dark oracle had spoken from behind them.
A half-uprooted pine-tree stem propped mid-fall by standing comrades, and the downy drop to ground and muted scurry up the bark of long-brush squirrels, cocktail on the wary watch, were noticed by him as well as by her; even the rotting timber drift, bark and cones on the yellow pine needles, and the tortuous dwarf chestnut pushing level out, with a strain of the head up, from a crevice of mossed rock, among ivy and ferns; he saw what his girl saw.
It dropped with deadly effect upon the sorest spot of all, completely unnerving him. He had been secretly dreading all the time that it would come and come it did. Far overhead, muted by great height and distance, strangely thinned and wailing, he heard the crying voice of Défago, the guide. The sound dropped upon him out of that still, wintry sky with an effect of dismay and terror unsurpassed.
Kerry pretended to be ignorant of the sensation which his appearance had created, passing slowly along the room and submitting group after group to deliberate scrutiny; but as news flies through an Eastern bazaar the name of the celebrated detective, whose association with London's latest crime was mentioned by every evening paper in the kingdom, sped now on magic wings, so that there was a muted charivari out of which, in every key from bass to soprano, arose ever and anon the words "Chief Inspector Kerry."
But these outcasts, in their turn, were silent when they saw who came to the house, and they spoke of the strange guest in muted exclamations of surprise and wonder. "Blood of Paul! do you see that? It is the Capuchin himself and alone. Surely there will be work to do anon." "Ay, but does he come alone? Saint John! I would sooner slit a hundred throats than have his shadow fall on me.
I'm mothering of you now! 'That's what I want, he said, and fell asleep while she stroked' his tired head. Peace settled again on the chapel and parsonage, and a muted happiness. Summer weather had returned for a fleeting interval.
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