'I did not know her as you did, your ladyship,' he said. 'But it struck me as so mean a grave for an old lady to be buried in. I was able to get these roses... and... well...' (his simulation of embarrassment was exact).
'But 'your' wildflowers!' he said, removing the wreath from the head of the little mound and placing it at the dusty foot - 'they are the ones that will please her spirit most - wherever she is.'
'I don't know anything about that,' said Fuchsia. She turned from him and flung her flowers away. 'It's all nonsense anyway.' She turned again and faced him. 'But 'you',' she blurted. 'I didn't think you were sentimental.'
Steerpike had never expected this. He had imagined that she would feel she had found an ally in the graveyard. But a new idea presented itself. Perhaps he had found an ally in 'her'. How far was her phrase 'it's all nonsense anyway' indicative of her nature?
'I have my moods,' he said and with a single action plucked the great wreath of roses from the foot of the grave and hurled it from him. For a moment the rich roses glowed as they careered through the dark green evening to disappear in the darkness of the surrounding mounds.
For a moment she stood motionless, the blood drained from her face, and then she sprang at the young man and buried the nails of her hands in his high cheekbones.
He made no move. Dropping her arms and backing away from him with slow, exhausted steps, she saw him standing perfectly quietly, his face absolutely white save the bright blood on his cheeks that were red like a clown's.
Her heart beat as she saw him. Behind him the green porous evening was hung like a setting for his thin body, his whiteness, and the hectic wounds on his cheeks.
For a moment she forgot her sudden, inconsistent hatred of his act; forgot his high shoulders; forgot her station as a daughter of the Line - forgot everything and saw only a human whom she had hurt, and a tide of remorse filled her, and half blind with confusion she stumbled towards him her arms outstretched. Quick as an adder he was in her arms - but even at that moment they fell, tripping each other up on the rough ground - fell, their arms about one another. Steerpike could feel her heart pounding against his ribs, her cheek against his mouth but he made no movement with his lips. His mind was racing ahead. For a few moments they lay. He waited for her limbs and body to relax, but she was taut as a bowstring in his arms. Not a move did he make, nor she, until lifting her head from his she saw, not the blood on his cheeks but the dark red colour of his eyes, the high bulge of his shining forehead. It was unreal. It was a dream. There was a kind of horrible novelty about it. Her gush of tenderness had ended, and there she was in the arms of the high-shouldered man. She turned her head again and realized with a start of horror that they were using for their pillow the narrow grassy grave-mound of her old nurse.
'Oh horrible!' she screamed. 'Horrible! horrible!' and forcing him aside as she scrambled to her feet she bounded like a wild thing into the darkness.
THIRTY- ONE
Sitting at her bedroom window, Irma Prunesquallor awaited the daybreak as though a clandestine meeting of the most hushed and secret kind had been agreed upon between herself and the first morning ray. And suddenly it came - the dawn - a flush of swallow light above a rim of masonry. The day had arrived. The day of the Party, or of what she now called her Soiree.
In spite of her brother's advice, she had passed a very poor night, her speculative excitement breaking through her sleep over and over again. At last she had lit the long green candles on the table by her bed, and frowning at each in turn had begun to polish yet again the ten long and perfect finger nails, her mouth pursed, her muscles tensed. Then she had slipped on her dressing gown and drawing a chair to the window had waited for the sunrise.
Below her window the quadrangle, as yet untouched by the pale light in the east, was spread like a lake of black water. There was no sound, no movement anywhere. Irma sat motionless, bolt upright, her hands clasped in her lap. Her eyes were fixed upon the sunrise. The candle flames in the room behind her stood balanced upon their wicks like yellow leaves upon tiny black stalks. Not a tremor disturbed their perfect lines - and then, suddenly a cock crew - a barbarous, an imperious sound; primal and unashamed it split the darkness, lifting Irma to her feet as it were on the updraught of its clarion. Her pulses raced. She sprang for the bathroom and within a few moments the hissing, steaming water had filled the bath and Irma, standing in an attitude of excruciating coyness was tossing handfuls of emerald and lilac crystals into the sumptuous depths.
Alfred Prunesquallor, his head thrown back across his pillow, was only half asleep. His brows were drawn together and a strange frown gave to his face an unexpected quality. Had any of his acquaintances seen him lying there they would have wondered whether, after all, they had the slightest inkling as to his real nature. Was this the gay, irrepressible and facetious physician?
He had passed a restless and unhappy night. Confused dreams had kept him turning on his bed, dreams that from time to time gathered themselves into vivid images of terrible clarity.
Struggling for breath and strength, he beat his way through the black moat-water to a drowning Fuchsia no bigger than a child's doll. But every time he reached her and stretched out his hand she sank beneath the surface, and there in her place were floating bottles half filled with coloured poison. And then he would see her again, calling for help, tiny, dark desperate, and he would flounder after her, his heart hammering and he would waken.
At various moments through the night he could see Steerpike running through the air, his body bent forward, his feet a few inches above the ground but never touching it. And keeping pace with him and immediately below him as though it were his shadow a swarm of rats with their fangs bared ran in a compact body like one thing, veering as he veered, pausing as he paused, most horrible and intent, filling the landscape of his midnight brain.
He saw the Countess on a great iron tray far out at sea. The moon shone down like a blue lamp, as she fished, with Flay as her frozen rod, attenuate and stiff beyond belief. Between the teeth of the petrified mouth he held a strand of the Countess's dark red hair which shone like a thread of fire in the blue light.
Effortlessly she held him aloft, her big hand gripping him about both ankles.
His clothes were tight about him and he appeared mummified, the thin rigid length of him reaching up stiffly into the stars. With hideous regularity she would pluck at the line and swing aboard another and yet another of her white and sea-drowned cats, and place it tenderly upon the mounting heap of whiteness on the tray.
And then he saw Bellgrove galloping like a horse on all fours with Titus on his back. Through the ravine of terrible darkness and up the slopes of pine-covered mountains he galloped, his white mane blowing out behind his head while Titus, plucking arrow after arrow from an unfailing quiver, let fly at everything in view until, the image dwindling in the Doctor's brain, he lost them in the dire shade of the night.
