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Updated: May 2, 2025
Next to this, perhaps, would be a group that only needed framing to make a picture, where two grave men, each wrapped in his burnous, sat Turk-fashion, playing checkers before a low doorway, while back in the shadow an indistinct figure, in flowing white drapery, touched the strings of some instrument which sent out a sound of thin tinkling, that could scarcely be called music because so tuneless and monotonous.
Among these pieces which had to be properly learned was the 17th Prelude of Chopin, on hearing which at Baireuth on the tuneless and catarrhed piano Falbe had agreed to take Michael as a pupil. But when it was played again on Falbe's great Steinway, as a professed performance, a very different standard was required. Falbe stopped him at the end of the first two lines.
It was all dew and rose color, with a delicious freshness in the air, prolonged unusually, because the sun was so slow to climb above the eastern mountain tops. Then there was a sudden glory, and birds, beasts, and insects broke into a vociferous chorus, the tuneless hymn which ascends daily without a discord.
Ellinor put down the letters, and went to the door, then turned back, and locked them up in her writing-case with trembling hands; and after that she entered the drawing-room, looking liker to a ghost than to a living woman. "Can I speak to you for a minute alone?" Her still, tuneless voice made the words into a command. Canon Livingstone arose and followed her into the little dining-room.
He was distinguished among his fellows by his tallness, the thickness of his eyebrows and the great length of his crow-black beard, the form and length of his "facon," or knife, which was nothing but a sword worn knife-wise, and the ballads he composed, in which were recounted, in a harsh tuneless voice to the strum-strum of a guitar, the hand-to-hand combats he had had with others of his class fighters and desperadoes and in which he had always been the victor, for his adversaries had all been slain to a man.
His compartment happened to be empty; so, free to behave as he liked, he yelled music-hall snatches in a tuneless voice, hammering with his feet on the wooden floor. The noise pleased his sodden mind, which had narrowed to a comfortable stupor outside of which his troubles seemed to lie, as if they belonged not to him but to somebody else.
This is the way in which Our John has come to find no pleasure but in taking cold among the linen, and in showing in that yard, as in that yard I have myself shown you, a broken-down ruin that goes home to his mother's heart! Here the good woman pointed to the little window, whence her son might be seen sitting disconsolate in the tuneless groves; and again shook her head and wiped her eyes, and besought him, for the united sakes of both the young people, to exercise his influence towards the bright reversal of these dismal events.
The music grew fainter behind them. Some of the higher notes faded out altogether. Jenny's drumming and the steady sawing of the bass throbbed on, tuneless and meaningless in their ears. Henry Wimbush halted.
A girl was performing a wriggling dance upon the square carpet occupying the centre of the floor, accompanied by a Nubian boy who twanged upon a guitar, and by most of the assembled company, who clapped their hands to the music or droned a low, tuneless dirge. Shortly after our entrance the performance terminated, and the girl retired through a curtained doorway at the farther end of the room.
But he was fair in his concessions, and to-night he acknowledged that he had enjoyed the romance of what he had seen and heard. And most of all, his blood had been stirred by the beautiful face that had looked at him from out of the night. The tuneless thrumming of a piano sounded behind him.
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