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Updated: June 24, 2025
Anyhow, one evening as he was riding home alone, Lovelock had been attacked and murdered, ostensibly by highwaymen, but as was afterwards rumoured, by Nicholas Oke, accompanied by his wife dressed as a groom. No legal evidence had been got, but the tradition had remained.
Oke had quickly extricated herself from her husband, who had remained holding her, as one might hold a delicate child who has been causing anxiety. The gentleness and affection of the poor fellow had evidently not touched her she seemed almost to recoil from it. "I have taken him to Cotes Common," she said, with that perverse look which I had noticed before, as she pulled off her driving-gloves.
"Can't, I'm afraid. I'm engaged to take up old Missus Oke an' her niece at Tippet's corner; an' the niece's box. The gal's goin' in to St. Austell, into service. So there's no room. But if there's any little message I can take " "When'll you be back?" "Somewhere's about five I'll be passin'." "Would 'ee mind waitin' a moment?
Oke seemed to have got sick of her guests, and was listlessly lying back on a couch, paying not the slightest attention to the chattering and piano-strumming in the room, when one of the guests suddenly proposed that they should play charades. He was a distant cousin of the Okes, a sort of fashionable artistic Bohemian, swelled out to intolerable conceit by the amateur-actor vogue of a season.
We remained for a moment in that same place, with the sunlight dying away in crimson ripples on the heather, gilding the yellow banks, the black waters of the pond, surrounded by thin rushes, and the yellow gravel-pits; while the wind blew in our faces and bent the ragged warped bluish tops of the firs. Then Mrs. Oke touched the horse, and off we went at a furious pace.
Nicholas Oke had taken the precaution of removing Lovelock's purse and throwing it into the pond, so the murder was put down to certain highwaymen who were about in that part of the country.
I asked, when he had gone into his smoking-room with his usual bundle of papers. "It is very cruel of you, Mrs. Oke. You ought to have more consideration for people who believe in such things, although you may not be able to put yourself in their frame of mind." "Who tells you that I don't believe in such things, as you call them?" she answered abruptly.
She and her husband are just about the only two members of our family our most flat, stale, and unprofitable family that ever were in the least degree interesting." Oke grew crimson, and frowned as if in pain. "I don't see why you should abuse our family, Alice," he said. "Thank God, our people have always been honourable and upright men and women!"
I was lazily turning over a book of verses I remember it perfectly well, it was Morris's "Love is Enough" in a corner of the drawing-room, when the door suddenly opened and William Oke showed himself. He did not enter, but beckoned to me to come out to him. There was something in his face that made me start up and follow him at once.
This woman's husband could not bear the room, and it seemed to me vaguely as if he were right in detesting it. Mrs. Oke took no notice of my exclamation, but beckoned me to the table where she was standing sorting the papers.
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