“There's evil will come to you if you do, Sir Everard,” she declared doggedly.
“Plenty of evil has come to me from that wood as it is,” he reminded her.
“You mean to disturb the spirit of him whose body you threw there?” she persisted.
Dominey looked at her calmly. Some sort of evil seemed to have lit in her face. Her lips had shrunk apart, showing her yellow teeth. The fire in her narrowed eyes was the fire of hatred.
“I am no murderer, Mrs. Unthank,” he said. “Your son stole out from the shadow of that wood, attacked me in a cowardly manner, and we fought. He was mad when he attacked me, he fought like a madman, and, notwithstanding my superior strength, I was glad to get away alive. I never touched his body. It lay where he fell. If he crept into the wood and died there, then his death was not at my door. He sought for my life as I never sought for his.”
“You'd done him wrong,” the woman muttered.
“That again is false. His passion for Lady Dominey was uninvited and unreciprocated. Her only feeling concerning him was one of fear; that the whole countryside knows. Your son was a lonely, a morose and an ill-living man, Mrs. Unthank. If either of us had murder in our hearts, it was he, not I. And as for you,” Dominey went on, after a moment's pause, “I think that you have had your revenge, Mrs. Unthank. It was you who nursed my wife into insanity. It was you who fed her with the horror of your son's so-called spirit. I think that if I had stayed away another two years, Lady Dominey would have been in a mad-house to-day.”
“I would to Heaven!” the woman cried, “that you'd rotted to death in Africa!”
“You carry your evil feelings far, Mrs. Unthank,” he replied. “Take my advice. Give up this foolish idea that the Black Wood is still the home of your son's spirit. Go and live on your annuity in another part of the country and forget.”
He moved across the room to throw open a window. Her eyes followed him wonderingly.