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Let alone the difficulty of hearing the exact words, facts that were outside her daily experience took some time to reach Mrs. Paley's consciousness. A weight seemed to rest upon her brain, impeding, though not damaging its action. She sat vague-eyed for at least a minute before she realised what Arthur meant. "Dead?" she said vaguely. "Miss Vinrace dead? Dear me . . . that's very sad.
He fell asleep for a little. Then the cool wind that blew inside the cave woke him up. He sat for a few minutes without moving, absent-minded, vague-eyed. He tried to reflect, to recapture his still torpid thoughts. And, as he recovered his consciousness, he was on the point of rising, when he received the impression that his eyes, suddenly fixed, suddenly wide-open, saw
"Did I sleep?" she questioned drowsily, "Beltane," she sighed, speaking low and thick "I charge thee, whatsoe'er the future doth bring yet love me alway or I, methinks shall die!" Awhile she lay against him breathing deep and slow, then started of a sudden, looking upon him vague-eyed. "Beltane," she murmured, "art there, beloved? 'Tis dark, and my eyes heavy. Methinks I must sleep awhile.
To stand there, knowing, with each tick of the clock, what was being said and done within how the great luxurious room, with its pale draperies and scented cushions, and the hundred pretty trifles strewing the lace toilet-table and the delicate old furniture, was being swept bare, cleared for action like a ship's deck, drearily garnished with rows of instruments, rolls of medicated cotton, oiled silk, bottles, bandages, water-pillows all the grim paraphernalia of the awful rites of pain: to know this, and to be able to call up with torturing vividness that poor pale face on the pillows, vague-eyed, expressionless, perhaps, as she had last seen it, or worse yet stirred already with the first creeping pangs of consciousness: to have these images slowly, deliberately burn themselves into her brain, and to be aware, at the same time, of that underlying moral disaster, of which the accident seemed the monstrous outward symbol ah, this was worse than anything she had ever dreamed!
They would find her somewhere in the great, orderly, clean institution, with a knot of sweet-faced, vague-eyed children clustered about her. "Good-bye, Miss 'Ginia!" the unearthly, happy little voices would call, as the uncertain little feet echoed away. Susan rather liked the atmosphere of the big institution, and vaguely envied the brisk absorbed attendants who passed them on swift errands.
For a long while he stood there, vague-eyed, silent. It was nearly sunset when once more he drew his sabre, examined it carefully, bent it over one knee, and snapped the blade in two. Then, with a last look at the sky, and standing very erect, he closed the door, set his back firmly against it, drew his revolver, and looked curiously into the muzzle.
The marble was the Annunciation. The head and throat and slender hands were completed, and one slim naked foot. Sometimes he wandered from one study to the next, vague-eyed, standing for a long time before each, staring, lost in thought.
Like the smoker on the opium couch refocusing his eyes from the spacious walls of dream to the narrow confines of the mean little room, so Old Tarwater stared vague-eyed before him across his dying fire, at a huge moose that stared at him in startlement, dragging a wounded leg, manifesting all signs of extreme exhaustion; it, too, had been straying blindly in the shadow-land, and had wakened to reality only just ere it stepped into Tarwater's fire.
"Nina tells me that this water rises in the Connecticut hills," he said, "and flows as a subterranean sheet under the Sound, spouting up here on Long Island when you drive a well." She looked at the column of flashing water, nodding silent assent. They moved on, the girl curiously reserved, non-communicative, head slightly lowered; the man vague-eyed, thoughtful, pacing slowly at her side.
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