Devil's Tor (10 page)

"I trust I'm not a coward."

"Forgive me. I do believe you could hold your own against most men, but this one frightens me. What is his first name?"

"Henry. Henry Saltfleet, and Stephen Arsinal."

She turned to Arsinal in the print nearly with an effort, and her tone seemed to alter.

"How did
he
impress you?"

"Why, Helga, he is undoubtedly a man of very fine sensibility, and exceptional brain-power and education. In his quieter way he may be as masterful as the other; but the other is the more obviously striking."

"The affair is his, and so he has the voice?"

"Presumably. But Saltfleet appears entirely to have identified himself. There should be a pretty complete understanding between them."

Helga saw that Arsinal was shorter than his friend by half a head, and still seemed in no degree undersized. He looked spare, erect, and forty or so, his head being thrown back as in the exhaustion of mental effort, while the eyes were meditative and deep in their orbits. Accordingly, the conceded smile on his lips showed unnatural and masklike. Both he and Saltfleet were clean-shaved.

"You have to consider as well," said Drapier suddenly, on another train of thought, "that this prize of theirs was put into my hands under no contract. I never undertook to relieve them of it; and another man might have called their action in passing it to me under stress a piece of brazen impudence. As they were so callously prepared to compromise me—a perfect stranger to their affairs—with three sets of authorities, I mean Tibetan, British and Chinese, it seems to me I might justifiably retaliate by annexing the thing itself as my price."

"No, you could have refused to take charge of it, but having once accepted the trust, your single possible course of honour is quite clear."

He nodded; then took back the print that she was reaching out to him. He returned it to his pocket-case.

"You can see the stupidity of my obsession, Helga, when I am under the necessity of forging all these false excuses for my own conduct. You don't believe them, and I don't either, and I suppose the long and short of it is, I'm a worm. All the more reason for your not following suit. So I want you to give me your word that, imagining that this flint does come into your possession, you won't ever play with it on your own account."

"I don't promise that, because I needn't. I have other people to think of, and all my life I've taken long views. You perhaps can afford to indulge, Hugh, but I am a mother, and have a house to run."

"And also you are not the kind of person to waste your time on insignificances. Therefore I may congratulate myself on having applied to you to carry out the posthumous restitution. The honour and the good sense will both be yours."

"My dear, I know how you're reflecting that women are the practical, unideal sex, but on this one occasion only I wish I could pass some of my unimaginativeness on to you. Can't you see how you're placing yourself in an utterly wrong position with these people? They'll have the right to be as offensive to you as they please, if nothing worse; and all for what? That for a little while longer you may go on trying to satisfy a quite unimportant intellectual curiosity. Haven't you really any sense of proportion, Hugh?"

"You don’t know all, Helga. I can't tell you all. And it may be that in that very little while longer of yours, the case will have settled itself otherwise. Less may hang on my decision than you think."

"That I don't know about, but listen, Hugh! You're to meet these men in a very short time, when either you'll return them their treasure or else you'll refuse to return it. Only an unforeseen fatal accident to you can prevent that. Then why this urgent visit to us, to arrange for its disposal in case of death? The chances of your death within the next week or month are surely too negligible to worry about. Your conscience must be peculiarly distressed if the wrong you are doing is appearing so terrible that you daren't and can't wait."

"I have a presentiment of death," responded Drapier gravely.

Helga was neither shocked nor surprised. She seemed to herself to have been expecting the statement; and now she began to understand why for a good many minutes past her thoughts had been morbid. It was telepathic suggestion. She couldn't doubt the truth of his assertion, it so explained his despondency and absence of manner ever since he had been with them. He needn't even be deluded, for she knew of these cases. Yet if he was to die so soon, it would be ghastly. No wonder he could shrug his shoulders at a petty act of dishonour—be illogically content to have it set right hereafter.

What if his possession of the stone had something to do with it! It was ancient, religious, weird; supposing a curse were interwoven into half its nature—the immaterial half! Such things also were.

The impossible grotesque shapes and prismatic colours filling her wide eyes from the halfburnt oak log of the fire, on its nest of black and glowing coals, rendered the lengthening silence of the room an unreal fantasy. She felt so dreamy and so wise, that the nameless overspreading fear of her heart was even pleasurable to her. It added a deep, dark tone, akin to sublimity, to this reactive mood of hers, which somehow was just failing to connect itself with actuality. It seemed to her that it would be time enough to-morrow—it was already "to-morrow," but she meant, in cold, clear daylight—to be practical, and truly apprehensive, and inventive.

Then she roused herself, and should have proceeded to argue him out of his beguilement, but her automatic speech flowed with quiet earnestness in support of it.

"If you have a presentiment, I have good reasons not to be stupidly sceptical in these cases, Hugh. Dick, my husband, was a very much more worldly and happy-go-lucky individual than you, yet he was twice subjected. On both occasions the presage was followed by the event. The first time, certainly, hadn't to do with death, but it was just the same. On the last day before our very first meeting in life he was by himself at a hotel in Edinburgh; and afterwards he averred that a kind of preternatural restlessness, not unhappy, possessed him throughout that day, preventing him from doing anything. He was to leave directly after breakfast on the following day. But while in bed asleep the same night, he was visited by a female phantom, incomprehensibly tall and strange. She seemed to fill the whole doorway of his room, and to be persistently and smilingly thrusting him back, as often as he tried to leave it. The vision so remained with him on waking, that he stayed on at the hotel. And in the evening, I arrived."

"That was queer and most romantic, Helga, yet hardly in the same category."

"A future event was foreshadowed. Then just a year before Ingrid was born, Dick again oddly enough had occasion to travel to Scotland, but for the whole day beforehand, utterly unlike himself, fidgeted and could settle to nothing. An irrational gloom and sense of dread coloured every minute for him. He and I weren't in the habit of keeping things from each other, and when I challenged him at the time, he confessed it; so what I am now telling you is the literal fact. That same night again, in bed, he saw the identical phantom woman of his previous vision; and, as then, she filled the entire doorway of his room, refusing to let him pass out. Only on this occasion she wasn't smiling, but scowling. We debated in the morning whether he ought to take the journey north, and happily I persuaded him in the end to put it off. Less than twelve hours later the papers reported an appalling train crash in Yorkshire. It was the train he was to have gone by, Hugh. … Yet before his pitiful hunting fall, that killed him, he had no premonition whatsoever."

"We can't apply our little staff of reason to these transactions."

"I have tried to, by taking a very simple view; and still it explains nothing. Apparently Ingrid's existence was required; but once she had appeared in the world, fate had no further use for poor Dick, or interest in him, so that he was at liberty to go to destruction as soon and as inconspicuously as he pleased! That at least is the effect."

"It's beyond us."

Helga allowed her personal memories to subside; then asked:

"How long have you had this feeling, Hugh?"

"It has been swelling for some time. I may have recognised it as far back as Tibet, a couple of months ago."

"Mightn't it be just hypochondria?"

"I think not. I have the very definite flavour of death in my mouth. I seem not to be able to see an inch of the future, but there's a black curtain across my life."

"You are otherwise well?"

"Yes, I am very well. Only, this thing is to happen. … And since it would be grievous if it should happen down here, in the midst of you all, I'll now be off again; having done what I came to do. Perhaps to-morrow—the day after this one now beginning—would suit?"

"No, you can't hurry away like that, leaving me in suspense, Hugh. Stay on for a little. We'll talk again. … We must go to bed now; it's getting late."

She stood up, and looked across to him kindly and softly.

"It is a thousand pities you were never married, my dear! So many of these bogeys would be impossible with a wife."

"I was once in love with you, Helga."

"That must have been a long, long time ago. Now I am nearly an old woman."

"Your eyes could never grow old. They always seem to me to be looking out of your soul."

"My soul is old too. I am terribly old altogether. But I have Ingrid, and you haven't a son. I don't know that I regret very much of my life, except its tragedies. Can you say as much, my dear?"

"How do you keep your tranquillity? You must have a great peace inside you."

"It comes of a long subordination of one's will to the little duties of the day."

"Then that is what I have missed," said Drapier. "I've done almost everything I wanted to in the world, but, I fancy, very little that I haven't wanted to. It's easier for a woman, however."

"We haven't so much strength as you, to get in the way of a surrender, but otherwise nothing is easy for women, Hugh. We have no golden mountains before us, we feel when we ought to be thinking, we are all nerves, and our bodies are usually below par. We have to live up to traditions framed in the barbarous ages. You had better not die, my dear, or you may be born again a woman."

"The language of all of you is alike, Helga; but I can't believe that you would be a man if you could."

She no longer replied, but instead bent swiftly down to him as he continued sitting; and kissed his forehead. Then she stood erect again, and smiled, while he joined her on his feet.

"Thanks, Helga! Yet I also remember that so they kiss the brows of the dead."

"You are to live to see Ingrid married," was all her shocked answer.

When, however, he had gone out, leaving her still standing facing the door that had merely been pulled-to after him, her thoughts went quietly back of their own accord to that man whose reproduced features were quite like no one else's whom she had ever seen. His must be a very determined, powerful, dynamic nature. It was Saltfleet's face, of course, that she mentally contemplated. She could not help feeling—it was like some small, insistent, very deep-down and distant voice calling out to her from the profundities of her own soul—that he it was who was to bring Hugh to his fate. She wished she had begged to be allowed to retain that photograph.

If
he
came after Hugh to Whitestone, she should see him in the body. How ought she to treat him, when nothing had been planned, no attitude decided upon? The true stroke of genius would be for her to win such a man to compassionate and assist Hugh, in place of throwing down the gage. She did not know what weaknesses he had; perhaps none, for a woman. The other man would be like a fish, and hardly seemed to count, although probably the principal.

Couldn't she send Hugh away somewhere—to one of her friends, further away from town—till the business had blown over? Then Saltfleet would negotiate personally with her. But Hugh would have bound her beforehand, and still nothing would get settled. If in the meantime his presentiment came true. … but that would need to be an accident. What kind of accident? Why, anything. He might fall downstairs. At that, Helga recollected that he was intending to venture down those uncovered ancient stairs on Devil's Tor, in but a very few hours' time. If absolutely an accident was fated for him, where likelier than there? But she supposed it was his toughness and expertness and experience that prevented her from feeling the slightest genuine alarm regarding that excursion. No, Saltfleet was in some manner associated with Hugh's crisis to come, of that she was superstitiously convinced.

How could he, a modern Englishman, very possibly having a university education, be a Sulla, with the ferocity and perfect recklessness of one! No doubt it was partly because it was one o'clock in the morning that she was imagining absurd things. For all that, she wished she could have seen him before Hugh went back. Had she still any remains of her old power to fascinate? She hadn't seriously asked herself such a question for years, for nowadays few men came, and none preferred her to her daughter. Five-and-twenty years ago she had but to sit in a chair, and the men would arrive. …

She trod sadly to the mirror on the wall, and stayed in front of it for a long time, regarding her image, with only occasional changes of pose.

Drapier rose again soon after five, before it was quite light indoors, made a quick toilet, and let himself out of the house while no one else was yet stirring. Notwithstanding the preceding evening's fatigue and his late going to bed, he had hardly slept, so that for an interminable time he had watched with sick impatience the slow changing of his room from black to grey. When at last he might, he had got up with that fagged relief that brings no contentment with it.

Insomnia had already begun to plague him in India before coming away; now, in England, the condition had grown so evil that his resting hours were a nightmare to be expected. Another man would have sought drugs for it, but to Drapier, who neither drank nor smoked, the idea never occurred. He had sustained plenty of hardships in his trekking life, whereas his purity of body was a very real asset to him.