Christopher Lovelock, if his ghost be
honouring this house with its presence!"
I felt suddenly as if I were in a madhouse. Across the table, in the midst
of this room full of noisy wretches, tricked out red, blue, purple, and
parti-coloured, as men and women of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and
eighteenth centuries, as improvised Turks and Eskimos, and dominoes, and
clowns, with faces painted and corked and floured over, I seemed to see
that sanguine sunset, washing like a sea of blood over the heather, to
where, by the black pond and the wind-warped firs, there lay the body of
Christopher Lovelock, with his dead horse near him, the yellow gravel and
lilac ling soaked crimson all around; and above emerged, as out of the
redness, the pale blond head covered with the grey hat, the absent eyes,
and strange smile of Mrs. Oke. It seemed to me horrible, vulgar,
abominable, as if I had got inside a madhouse.
8
From that moment I noticed a change in William Oke; or rather, a change
that had probably been coming on for some time got to the stage of being
noticeable.
I don't know whether he had any words with his wife about her masquerade of
that unlucky evening.
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