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Forced to remain in Vienna, he was heard there in some concerts, but the Viennese public, generally so cultivated, so prompt to seize the most delicate shades of execution, the finest subtleties of thought, during this winter were disturbed and abstracted. The young artist did not produce there the effect he had the right to anticipate.
But it seemed very extraordinary, even to him, that the attention of the bishop should have been at once abstracted from all reflection on the marvellous cure which they had witnessed, and upon the probability it afforded of Richard being restored to health, by what seemed a very trivial piece of information announcing the motions of a beggardly Scottish knight, than whom Thomas of Gilsland knew nothing within the circle of gentle blood more unimportant or contemptible; and despite his usual habit of passively beholding passing events, the baron's spirit toiled with unwonted attempts to form conjectures on the cause.
Such a Babel of discord might have awakened the slumbers of the very dead, and, therefore, was not long ere it dispelled the abstracted reveries of Edith Bellenden.
I think there must certainly have been a mixture of ill-luck in it, that the reasons on both sides should happen to be so equally balanced by each other; for though my father weigh'd them in all humours and conditions spent many an anxious hour in the most profound and abstracted meditation upon what was best to be done reading books of farming one day books of travels another laying aside all passion whatever viewing the arguments on both sides in all their lights and circumstances communing every day with my uncle Toby arguing with Yorick, and talking over the whole affair of the Ox-moor with Obadiah yet nothing in all that time appeared so strongly in behalf of the one, which was not either strictly applicable to the other, or at least so far counterbalanced by some consideration of equal weight, as to keep the scales even.
Tommy, with an abstracted eye, talked of Alexander and Timour and Genghis Khan, and particularly of Prester John, who was a character and took his fancy. I had told him that the natives in the Pamirs were true Persian stock, and this interested him greatly. 'Why was there never a great state built up in those valleys? he asked.
For a time Barefoot was silent and abstracted; she seemed to repent of having let her brother go, or of having refused to go with him. Formerly she had always been heard singing in the stable and barn, in the kitchen and chamber, and when she went out with the scythe over her shoulder and the grass-cloth under her arm; but now she was silent. She seemed to be making an effort to restrain herself.
They were much devoted to solitude, and thereby acquired that abstracted and thoughtful air which is so imposing upon the vulgar; and when they appeared in public, it was seldom, and only on some great occasion, in the sacrifices of the gods, or on the seat of judgment.
And now, when your suspicions, so romantically conceived, are dispelled by positive facts, now, when it is clear that Margrave neither murdered Sir Philip Derval nor abstracted the memoir, you still, unconsciously to yourself, draw on your imagination in order to excuse the suspicion your pride of intellect declines to banish, and suppose that this youthful sorcerer tempted the madman to the murder, the woman to the theft "
In an abstracted, deliberate way, his eyes pondering the safe, the blue-steel tools were replaced in the pockets of the leather girdle; and then the long, slim, tapering fingers closed upon the dial's knob and twirled it tentatively, and his head bent forward until his ear was pressed hard against the face of the safe.
Rupert, who had leisure to study the suddenly lined and tired lineaments of the abstracted countenance before him, noted with self-congratulation the change that a few hours seemed to have wrought upon it, and decided that the moment had come to strike. "So, Adrian," he said, looking down demurely as he spoke into the glass of wine he had been toying with Rupert was an abstemious man.
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