She got up to her feet, shifted her reticule from one hand to the other, and without a backward look trudged slowly down the dusty road, a stooped, shabby, feeble old figure.
Marise saw her turn into a wood-road that led up towards the mountain, and disappear. Her own heart was burning as she looked. Nobody would help her in her need. Touclé went away to find peace, and left her in the black cave. Neale stood. . . .
A child's shriek of pain and loud wailing calls for "Mother! Mother! Mother!" sent her back running breathlessly to the house. Mark had fallen out of the swing and the sharp corner of the board had struck him, he said, "in the eye! in the eye!" He was shrieking and holding both hands frantically over his left eye. This time it might be serious, might have injured the eye-ball. Those swing-boards were deadly. Marise snatched up the screaming child and carried him into the kitchen, terrible perspectives of blindness hag-riding her imagination; saying to herself with one breath, "It's probably nothing," and in the next seeing Mark groping his way about the world with a cane, all his life long.
She opened the first-aid box on the kitchen-shelf, pulled out a roll of bandage and a length of gauze, sat down with Mark in her lap near the faucet, and wet the gauze in cold water. Then she tried in vain to induce him to take down his hands so that she could see where the blow had struck.
But the terrified, hysterical child was incapable of hearing what she said, incapable of doing anything but scream louder and louder when she tried to pull down those desperately tight little hands held with frantic tenseness over the hurt eye. Marise could feel all his little body, quivering and taut. His shrieks were like those of someone undergoing the most violent torture.
She herself responded nervously and automatically to his condition, felt herself begin to tighten up, and knew that she was equally ready to shake him furiously, or to burst into anguished tears of sympathy for his pain.
Wait now . . . wait . . . what was the thing to do for Mark? What would untie those knots of fright and shock? For Paul it would have been talk of the bicycle he was to have for his birthday; for Elly a fairy-story or a piece of candy! For Mark . . .
High above the tumult of Mark's shrieks and her own spasmodic reactions to them, she sent her intelligence circling quietly . . . and in an instant . . . oh yes, that was the thing. "Listen, Mark," she said in his ear, stopping her effort to take down his hands, "Mother's learned a new song, a new one, awfully funny. And ever so long too, the way you like them." She put her arms about him and began, hearing herself with difficulty through his cries.
"On yonder hill there stands a damsel,
Who she is, I do not know."
("How preposterous we must sound, if Eugenia is listening," she thought to herself, as she sang, "out-yelling each other this way!")