“I don’t believe Mavis has come to any harm,” he said aloud, though speaking to himself, and almost as if trying to excuse his own conduct. “Anyway, I don’t see that it’s my business to look after her, it was all her own obstinacy.”
He kicked roughly at the pebbles at his feet, and as he did so, his glance fell on a tiny speck of colour just where he was kicking. It was one of the blue flowers Ruby had found in the cottage. Bertrand stooped and picked it up, and, strange to say, he handled it gently. But as he looked at it there came again to him the queer smarting pain in his eyes which he had complained of in the turret-room, and glancing up he became aware that the wind had suddenly gone down, everything had become almost unnaturally still, while a thin bluish haze seemed gathering closely round where he stood. Bertrand rubbed his eyes.
“There can’t be smoke here,” he said. “What can be the matter with my eyes?” and he rubbed them impatiently. It did no good.
“No, that will do no good,” said a voice. It seemed quite near him.
“Look up;” and in spite of himself the boy could not help looking up.
“Oh,” he screamed; “oh, what is it? what is it?”
For an agony, short but indescribable, had darted through his eyeballs, piercing, it seemed to him, to his very brain; and Bertrand was not in some ways a cowardly boy.
There was silence, perfect, dead silence, and gradually the intense aching, which the short terrible pain had left, began to subside. As it did so, and Bertrand ventured to look up again, he saw that—what he had seen, he could not describe it better—was gone, the haze had disappeared, the air was again clear, but far from still, for round the corner of the old cottage the blast now came rushing and tearing, as if infuriated at having been for a moment obliged to keep back; and with it now came the rain, such rain as the inland-bred boy had never seen before—blinding, drenching, lashing rain, whose drops seemed to cut and sting, with such force did they fall. It added to his confusion and bewilderment. Like a hunted animal he turned and ran, anywhere to get shelter; and soon he found himself behind the house, and then the thought of the grottoes the little girls had told him of returned to his mind.
“I won’t go back into that witches’ hole,” he said to himself as he glanced back at the house. “I’ll shelter in one of the grottoes.”
As he thought this he caught sight of an opening in the rockery before him. It was the entrance to the very cave where Mavis had been left by Ruby. Bertrand ran in; what happened to him there you shall hear in good time.