who has the entire day in which to pluck at her eyebrows, harvest her sheaves of long grey hair, and so on, cannot organize herself - or else has grown shall we say 'casual' in regard to her suitor? Shall we say casual, my dear?'
'Never!' cried Irma. 'O never! my dear one. It is only my longing that you should find me worthy that keeps me at my toilet. O my dearest, you must forgive me. You must forgive me.'
Bellgrove gathered his gown about him in great swathes. He had been staring into the gloomy sky while he had spoken but now, at last he turned his noble face to her. The landscape all about them was hazy with rain. The nearest tree was a grey blur two fields away.
'You ask me to forgive you,' said Bellgrove. He closed his eyes. 'And so I do, and so I do. But remember, Irma, that a punctual wife would please me. Perhaps you could practise a little so that when the time comes I will have nothing to complain of. And now, we will forget about it, shall we?'
He turned his head from her, for he had not yet learned to admonish her without grinning weakly with the joy of it. And so, with his face averted, he bared his rotten teeth at a distant hedgerow.
She took his arm and they began to walk.
'My dear one,' she said.
'My love?' said Bellgrove.
'It is my turn to complain, is it not?'
'It is your turn, my love' (He lifted his leonine head and shook the rain happily from his mane.)
'You won't be cross, dear?'
He raised his eyebrows and closed his eyes.
'I will not be cross, Irma. What is it that you wish to say?'
'It's your neck, dearest.'
'My neck? What of it!'
'It is very dirty, dear one. It has been for weeks... do you think...'
But Bellgrove had stiffened at her side. He bared his teeth in a snarl of impotence.
'O stinking hell,' he muttered. 'O stinking, rotten hell.'
FORTY-FOUR
Mr Flay had been sitting for over an hour at the entrance to his cave. The air was breathless and the three small clouds in the soft grey sky had been there all day.
His beard had grown very long and his hair that was once cropped close to the skull was now upon his shoulders. His skin had darkened with the sun and the last few years of hardship had brought new lines to his face.
He was by now a part of the woods, his eyesight sharp as a bird's, and his hearing as quick. His footsteps had become noiseless. The cracking of his knee joints had disappeared. Perhaps the heat of the summer had baked the trouble out of them for his clothes being as ragged as foliage his knees were for the most part bare to the sun.
He must surely have been made for the woods, so congruously had he become dissolved into a world of branches, ferns and streams. And yet for all his mastery of the woods, for all that he had been absorbed into the wilderness of the endless trees, as though he were but another branch - for all this, his thoughts were never far from that gaunt pile of masonry that, ruinous and forbidding as it was, was nevertheless, the only home he had ever known.
But Flay, for all his longing to return to his birthplace was no sentimentalist in exile. His thoughts when they turned to the castle were by no means in the nature of reveries. They were hard, uneasy, speculative thoughts which far from returning to his early memories of the place were concerned with the nature of things as they were. No less than Barquentine he was a traditionalist to his marrow. He knew in his heart that things were going wrong.
What chance had he had of taking the pulse of the halls and towers? Apart from the marshlight of his intuition and the native gloom of his temperament, on what else was he basing his suspicions? Was it merely his ingrained pessimism and the fear which had understandably grown stronger since his banishment, that, with himself away, the castle was the weaker?
It was this, and very little more. And yet had his fears been mere speculations he would never have made, during the last twenty days, his three unlawful journeys. For he had moved through the midnight corridors of the place - and although as yet he had made no concrete discoveries, he had become aware almost at once of a change. Something had happened, or something was happening which was evil and subversive.
He knew full well that the risks involved in his being found in the castle after his banishment were acute, and that his chances of discovering in the darkness of sleeping halls and corridors, the cause of his apprehension, was remote indeed. Yet he had dared to flaunt the letter of the Groan law in order, in his solitary way, to find whether or not its spirit, as he feared, was sickening.
And now, as he sat half hidden among the ferns that grew at the door of his cave, turning over in his mind those incidents that had in one way or another, over the past years, caused his suspicions of foul play to fructify, he was suddenly aware that he was being watched.
He had heard no sound, but the extra sense he had developed in the woods gave warning. It was as though something had tapped him between his shoulder-blades.
Instantly his eyes swept the scene before him and he saw them at once, standing motionlessly at the edge of a wood away to his right. He recognized them instantaneously although the girl had grown almost out of recognition. Was it possible that they did not recognize him? There was no doubt that they were staring at him. He had forgotten how different he must look, especially to Fuchsia, with his long hair, his beard and ragged clothes.
But now, as they began to run in his direction, he stood up and began to make his way towards them over the rocks.
