Devil's Tor (17 page)

Peter queerly thanked her for her tranquillity of patience, then went off, leaving her looking after his first steps towards the gate. When, however, she turned round into the room, her mother was standing in the doorway. Could she have overheard their talk? She feared she had, and that she was to be questioned about her heart.

"It was Peter, mother."

Helga came into the room.

"I know. You are pleased, aren't you? I happened to be passing, and heard voices, but at first I thought it was Hugh, and then I recognised the drawl—forgive me!—and was in good time to catch his fixing up that meeting for this afternoon. Do you wish to speak of it or not, my dear?"

"I think I'd rather not. But don't go for a minute, mother. There was something I wanted to ask you. Hasn't there been an earthquake?"

"Yes, it broke some things in the kitchen."

"I hope nothing has happened to Hugh on the Tor."

Her mother regarded her curiously.

"That isn't one of your intuitions?"

"I don't know. … That's what I wanted to ask you. How is it I never have any with regard to Peter? He is surely a man one might have intuitions about? I can never seem to see or guess what he is to say, do, or think. I believed he was contemplating the giving up of his studio, but he says not."

"I could nearly have told you that," replied Helga, smiling. "And I suppose the reason he is so unexpected is that he is a genius. The surprises of genius are the one thing unfated. For all that, do you love him well enough to marry him?"

Now that the question had come, Ingrid found that it gave her no displeasure. Her
c
a
lm
sincere eyes met her mother's calm affectionate ones.

"Yes, I am sure I love him, but I would like a quite long time for self-examination. Did you overhear everything?"

"Not everything, but enough. You are probably in doubt what this afternoon's private interview stands for. Yet it is not in the least difficult. He considers you a high order of supernatural being, and would like to lay down his arms at your feet, but fears his own unworthiness. I am only joking a very little, my dear. Have you forgotten his picture of you?"

"What other destiny than marriage could I have, mother?"

"There are no more Pythonesses of Delphi. You were too slow in coming into the world."

"But how would you take it, mother?"

"I should never disapprove of Peter," returned Helga. "And the money side of it, of course, you would hate to say or hear anything about; but still, if he is not a rich man, you will get enough hereafter."

She kissed her daughter, and left the room, while Ingrid remained standing in its centre, an upright pillar endowed with a half-consciousness that was all thoughts endeavouring to shape themselves from feelings, and feelings equally endeavouring to find a vent in thoughts; but the feelings were many, and buried, and discordant, so that the thoughts were as worthless as vanishing.

While passing Ingrid’s open door on her return to her room from the kitchen below, Helga had been momentarily terrified by the sound of a man's voice talking to her daughter from outside the house, through the window. She thought it was Hugh come back; and his box was still on her dressing-table. Then both the familiar assurance of the voice and her daughter's special manner of responding, had quieted her as quickly again; she now understood it was Peter, on his way up home from the station—he often thus left word at the house in the early morning.

The alarm was enough, however. Hugh really was nearly due back, and she had no longer time nor inclination to risk that re-examination. So she had proceeded to her room, and, without so much as lifting the lid of the box again—since she knew that she had taken nothing out of it, and who should have tampered with it during her short absence?—had carried it off to Hugh's, where she had redeposited it in its old drawer. She was glad the sin had been prevented. It would have been a sin, though a very small one—not because logic said so, but because throughout she had been feeling so apprehensive and uncomfortable about it.

Afterwards she had gone back to Ingrid's room, to hear her account of Peter. It was then that she had heard his own account of himself, if a proposed meeting with a young girl to discuss relations meant what it should. She told herself in justification, that no mother could have acted differently, a daughter's happiness being at stake.

She still did not understand her own wishes or feelings in the matter. Distinctly it could not be called a surprise for anyone; almost it was an expected thing. Peter, besides, was a nice boy, a dear boy, with so many lovable qualities. Morally and physically he should be as sound as a bell, his one vice being over-smoking. For a supposed genius, he was wonderfully amenable and sane; and appeared to be personally popular everywhere. These were the things that counted. Ingrid would come into money by-and-by. … Could there be anything in poor Hugh's death-presentiment? It was odd that these thoughts of death and marriage should be going on in the world simultaneously all the time.

How extraordinarily proud, troubled and beautiful Ingrid had looked this morning! Helga had even forgotten to ask about her injury. Was this altogether Peter's doing? She had an uneasy inspiration that such a mood and beauty must be above his head. A grimmer, grander man would deserve them more. Her mind flew to Saltfleet's photograph—but heaven help the child if ever she were to marry a Saltfleet! Peter was sound, small, domestic and good, like a sweet apple. … He would be angry with her for that description of his character, but she must show her practical benevolence by throwing her weight into his scale. His cynicism would get worn off in married life. He could not love and live with Ingrid, and be cynical.

Seated at the Whitestone breakfast table, Ingrid and her mother each in her different way expected Hugh's report. His presence at her right hand was renewing Helga's seriousness from that late talk last night. She saw that he was dumb and grave. She feared that, whatever he might have succeeded in discovering on Devil’s Tor, an excursion to a tomb must be affecting him painfully in his present morbid state. This condition of his must be handled with the utmost care and sympathetic tact. Ingrid was the more directly anxious. She was sure—she saw it in his every look, movement and constraint—that he had penetrated to the burial chamber itself. And it concerned only her; her mother and grand-uncle were outside the affair, and Hugh was her impersonal messenger. She knew that anything he told them now would have to be expanded and made significant in their later private discussion. Meanwhile Uncle Magnus must be apprised of the introductory circumstances, for he had been told nothing.

She outlined for him their last evening's adventure on the Tor, and he grunted his comprehension. His attitude would follow when he had determined it. Only mother and daughter already understood that any scene in which Hugh Drapier had a part was necessarily so far damned for the head of the house, who, from the very first hours of his nephew's stay, had conceived a sort of malignant antipathy to him, the social disguises of which were an ignoring silence and the curtest exchange of general talk. For instance, the rough banter he reserved particularly for Peter, he could no more have directed to Hugh than he could have fallen on his neck.

But the true origin of this aversion none was ever to know save old Colborne himself. Hugh's father, the "accursed Scotchman"—fiery-haired, bald, tattooed with freckles, and all bones, like the son—had upon a time, during his wooing of Thore, Magnus's favourite younger sister, the uncouthness to refuse him a considerable service, that would have cost him little and was easily within his influence; and to insult him, into the bargain, by his manner of refusal. And Magnus upon the spot had vowed never to have further dealings with the man, or connection with him, or knowledge of him even—a determination ever after tolerably closely adhered to. Consequently, now after forty years, for the double of that happily-laid ghost to turn up unexpectedly in the person of the son, affected him as disagreeably as if the mellowing veil of intervening time had been torn rudely away, revealing the past again in all its uglinesses, crudities and vulgarities.

He was short, compact, thick-necked, with a clever energetic brown face full of wrinkles and generally much gashed in shaving clean. He reminded one of Schopenhauer's portrait as an old man. Like Schopenhauer, as well, he had attained the art of combining a high idealism and intellect with a practical selfish cunning that was hard beyond the common; and of doing it sincerely. That part of his father's wealth that had come to him, he had kept, and doubled. Accordingly his genius was misanthropic. He contended with men on their own ground, and reviewed them on his.

His bald dome of an imaginative thinker, with the bright, shrewd, unfriendly black eyes, caved by bristling brows, suggested that dangerous overseeing of the villainies and infirmities of mankind; and he had never married; and had written books that few had read and none had liked. The business of making money, which he regarded as inferior and an employment suitable to inferior minds only, he had afterwards turned out to be very good at. It gave him secret pleasure to prove thus that the same persons who possessed no brains to understand his philosophy with, were of very little account in anything. It was a sort of demonstration of the worth of his writings.

The women of his household knew his signs. The soft, quiet voices and ways of both pleased him well. Of Helga's judgment, tact and managing capacity, he had a very high opinion, though she had to read it between the lines. He had never once regretted having protected her. But if he could be fond of anyone, it was Ingrid. Sometimes it nearly came to an association between them. She realised, and he knew she realised, the essential dark grandeur and dignity of this lonely setting of his to death, and he loved her for not expressing the understanding in any of the fashions naturally adopted by women. He did not fear death, but had never advanced as far as the wisdom which can accept the pity of others without shame.

She had also interested herself in his system of thought, and occasionally he caught her reading in his chief work, on Racial Derivations. That might be a piece of hypocrisy in others, but this child had pride. And so he rarely teased her, and if he should, would always spare her pride. The unmistakable signs of her lineage further defended her—the long noble beauty of her mouth, the uninsultable abstraction of her northern eyes.

Now, having paved the way with him, she turned at last to Hugh across the table, who at the first word looked up, yet dully, with none of the animation of an adventure to relate. He had scarcely touched his food.

"Are you to tell us what happened, Hugh?—or would you rather leave it till afterwards?"

"No, you can hear now. The stairs continued down, and I got to the bottom, and into a cave having a stone table for the reception of the dead, but nothing else—only another small pedestal for the death-food. There were no remains, or treasure. I had an accident, and smashed my torch down there, having to grope my way out in the dark. … It proved lucky, for if I'd stopped underground only a few minutes longer, I must have been trapped. I was hardly out, when an earthquake wrecked the stairs."

Helga glanced at her daughter.

"Then that was ours. What time was it, Hugh?"

"About seven."

"We had it here too, though only slightly."

"It was severe enough on Devil's Tor. Imagine for yourself a long fissure in the granite closed as if the stuff were clay."

"Is the tomb destroyed?" asked Ingrid.

"It must be."

"Are you sure?—for it's important."

"Yes, I'm positive it is. The shock would be worse the lower it was, while the resistance of the bigger cavity would be less. Whether or no, there's no getting down to it."

"Not with appliances?"

"There's no longer a way."

"To be opened yesterday after an eternity, only to be closed again to-day!" Her voice was only a murmur, though she continued to eye him interrogatively. She fancied him uneasy.

"How's your ankle?" It seemed almost a defensive inquiry.

"Oh, it's nothing, Hugh. Were you down long?"

"I didn't time it. It impressed me as both long and short."

It dawned on Ingrid that he might have seen something there that he wished to keep back from the others, so, meaning to speak to him alone afterwards, she ceased her questioning. Her mother took up the tale.

"Surely the coincidence is very unique, Hugh? For a thunderbolt and an earthquake to be directed against the identical spot within twelve hours, and for the second happening to cancel the effect of the first! It's supernatural, nearly."

"Most odd, to say the least."

Helga began to fear from her uncle's silence that he was finding their insistence on the topic burdensome. She addressed him in another voice.

"Peter is down. Uncle."

"Then we may expect some rational conversation again at last. Is he coming here to-day?"

"To tea, I think—Ingrid?"

"Yes."

Magnus Colborne viewed the mother over his lifted cup.

"I shall not be sorry for the diversion. He is a youngster I can get on well enough with—it interests me to see the flapping of his wings of talent, and to identify the sources of this talent, which are known to me; some of them at least. His father, my old partner, was extremely pertinacious, in accordance with which Peter will pursue a false idea in art to a mile past its confessed absurdity, rather than cut his loss in time. John Copping was likewise exceedingly prone to the holding of his own counsel, and in the son this comes out in the love of surprises—that some persons confound with genius." Helga glanced towards her daughter, but Ingrid appeared not to remember that part of their earlier talk in her room. Colborne was proceeding without a break.

"It is so far from necessarily being the co-equal of genius, that it may even be called its counterfeit. An artist of the first order cares for nothing but to present the profound beauty of life. He may do it in such a manner as to surprise people, and that is genius; but to
wish
to surprise people, as an aim of art, that is a cheap-jack business, the sole excuse for which may be that nowadays artists generally do not know what they are doing or what they want. They have had it instilled into them that genius surprises; they themselves are geniuses; and therefore they must think out and prepare their surprises.