Devil's Tor (20 page)

Ingrid had grown pale; yet without turning round she answered him calmly and immediately, if in her lowest voice.

"You know, Peter, I have not met anyone whom I could ever regard as I regard you."

"Thanks for that woman's reply. It remains a woman's reply, however—it confines itself to the personal fact. The question was as to your future unfolding. At present you are in a state of innocence—supreme temptation hasn't come your way."

"You think I need a man of the world for my husband?"

"Heaven defend you from such! But a man able to
daunt
the world—a man able to fight and defeat the world with its own practical weapons. Someone who can set you high. For you are this queer compound of the regal and the surrendering, and over and above all, the world can hardly, in any sense whatsoever, be a real place to you. That someone must see its reality for you as well. Both qualifications go beyond me. The whole of such activity as I possess goes into my work, while life is passionately true to me only so far as beauty can make it so. These are my intuitions, expanded. You are a girl living quietly at home, and I am a dabbler in paints; but whereas I shall go on being a dabbler in paints, you should have strong wings preparing—that conceivably may bear you a very long way off from me. Has nothing ever whispered in you, Ingrid?"

"I have never thought of a husband, apart from you, Peter."

"My dear! ... Yet that is the very danger. If you had more of the egoism and vanity of the ordinary girl, you would by now have considered all men for their desirability or falling short. Also a woman's ignorance of the arts of attraction implies a corresponding ignorance in her of the attractive force of others. You're to go through life safeguarded only by your own height—which may suffice in the cases of all men except one, who will sweep you off your feet by reason of your long accumulation of secret repressions. I don't wish to say disheartening things. Haven't you ever suspected anything of the strain in me?"

"I've known for a very long time past that something has been troubling you. Can it seem so real to you?"

"As real as whatever stops one's happiness."

"What can I say? No doubt more than a few of us have these affinities somewhere, if by luck we could meet them; but we never shall. How could it be possible in a world teeming with population and split into the tiniest circles of acquaintance? Tell me how to help you dismiss this misery, Peter."

"You have helped to rivet it, my dear—by denying our affinity."

"Is it essential that we should be the spiritual halves of each other? We can admire, and love, and honour one another without that, Peter—it's even a rule of life that it should be so. Life is an endless affair of makeshifts and compromises, and our spirit has been given to us for the very purpose of ennobling such a terribly human condition. You can't be supposing that in the event of a marriage between us, I could afterwards turn to another man?"

"Not in evil."

"Then I am weakly to allow myself to be wretched on account of an imagined missed joy? The whole world is hardly worth so much to me."

"Very true—you desire no joys. You are pursuing something else quite different, which presently your nature will tell you about. That is precisely my instinct."

"But, Peter—you have forced yourself at last to make this confession—with what motive? Why have you
wished
to speak? If you are truly so fearful of my later on meeting someone who will be nearer than you to me in soul, how can verbal denials of mine assist?"

"I believed that talking it out with you might be useful, my dear. I saw how my reserve ran the risk of being misunderstood; also I hoped against hope that you might show me my lunacy. But doubtless the chief reason of all for opening the subject was my appreciation of your gift and habit of deep feeling. So I want you now to consider, not your heart, but your whole being, in quietness. Inform me later—in a few days—that my apprehensions have just grounds, in so far as an essential part of you knows me not, but scorns me; and I will then go away again—in small gladness, as you may imagine, but at least on the long weary road to peace once more. So will you do this?"

Ingrid glanced oddly at him, but it was only for a moment. She was a longer time silent. It had come suddenly to her mind how Hugh that morning had mentioned a friend who was to visit him here. The mention had been in connection with Devil's Tor, and all at once everything concerned with the Tor was become significant. It was therefore fated that she was to know and somehow get involved with this stranger; whose name, she remembered, was Arsinal. And now Peter, for the first time in all their intimacy, was insisting on his instinct of a man, other than himself, in her life. What was she to reply to him? Was Peter too an instrument? Was their quiet love, on this very threshold of its acknowledgment, to be arrested? Presumably a professor—and Peter, whom she had known all her life. … No, she was incapable of thinking any more about anything whatever. These flashes of some great storm advancing upon her were paralysing her brain, and she could but hold on to her courage, as it were with both hands. She must be passive and stoical, yet Peter's love she would never renounce. She could promise him nothing in words until she knew what was wanted of her. That spirit-woman must be an announcing phantom of happenings immediately at hand. She
was
and they
were to be...
and how dull and shadowy seemed love itself, beside such a dreadful coming on of the invisible! All the ancient life of these parts might be heavily moving again, after some long dream of death. …

Peter, however, made uneasy at last by the continuance of her silence, turned cautiously to view her profile—long, fair and foreign as already he was aware its illusion was, with that absence of foreground. Her features were serene like a sphinx's, her eye was veiled by its sweeping lashes, but a line of pain seemed to cross her forehead. He could not understand her. She appeared always so simple, even to weakness, yet always behind it too was her immovable strength and strangeness, as though she were less a girl than a mythological interpreting daughter of compelling fate. With a new stab he once more knew that she was not his. She was that man's, who could approach her. Her affections and softnesses were her lowlands—they were his. … He looked away from her again, biting his lip.

"Perhaps I've picked a bad time for perplexing you, though," he said aloud. "You may have some other business to worry you, and so can't give this proper concentration. I could even hazard a guess at what it is."

She moved round, surprised.

"Something certainly is occupying a good deal of my mind just now, but you can scarcely have any knowledge of it, Peter."

"Yet I fancy it concerns Devil's Tor."

She waited for him to explain this mystery of his acquaintance with a matter that none but she and Hugh had discussed. But he must have seen Hugh during the day, and fallen into talk with him—though this too would be singular.

"Am I right?"

"Yes, though I can't imagine how you have discovered it," was her quiet answer. "Have you by any chance met my cousin Hugh Drapier to-day, out of doors?"

"I believe so. You did describe him, only I couldn't have been listening very attentively. He's red-haired, lean, and tall?"

"Yes."

"I ran across such a man on Devil's Tor itself. I should explain that I went up there, on your story, to see the effect of lightning on rocks. I wasn't happy at home. However he and I had no conversation to the purpose, and my sense of your preoccupation springs from other sources."

"Tell me, Peter."

"Why, to put it shortly, the hill is bewitched, or else I am insane. I know you were up there yesterday in peculiar circumstances, I know your cousin has visited the place
twice
to-day; I found him in a trance; a prehistoric tomb has been opened and blocked again; and you are half in a dream all the time."

"But what do you mean by its being 'bewitched'?"

"I'll give the story another time. We have our business to settle first."

"But it is just this that is standing in the way, Peter—can't you understand that?"

"I thought so, but wanted to make sure. What do
you
know about the Tor that you haven't told me, Ingrid?"

"I've a thousand feelings, and hardly one clear idea. You have had the facts. There was an earthquake this morning. Uncle told us at breakfast of an extraordinary experience of his there many years ago. I long since had the intuition that there was a tomb under the leaning pile."

"I went up a little before noon. Do you believe in ghosts?"

"I must."

"Then you as well have probably seen something. But if you are still too impressed to speak of it, don't. I'll get on with my tale?"

"You are outdoing me in generosity, Peter, but I'd actually rather not say anything about my own case."

"I've never asked you for the keys of all your doors, my dear. And as to generosity, it's sometimes the height of generosity to let a poor man make a gift without return."

"You need no such counterpoise. And if ever I can tell you, I will, but till then I will tell no one else. Now what happened, Peter? Why do you talk of ghosts? How came my cousin to be in a trance? What was the order?"

"Recollect that I couldn't know him; yet I could have a shot at his identity, from the colour of his hair."

The tail of a great cloud that had hidden the sun grew attenuated and passed quite away. The quiet, quick rising to full golden sunlight, occurring at that moment of their conversation, seemed to Ingrid like a wonderful joy to come—yet Peter had said that she desired no joys. Then at once she was plunged into chill shade again by the unkind coming on of another mass of cloud, darker and greater still; and it was as if she were cruelly deprived once more of the promise of that joy, and of every joy in life. She believed this chance rising and sinking of sunshine in some strange way to present a picture of her fortunes. In less than twenty-four hours it had all become omens with her.

"He was sitting on a rock as I came up," Peter was continuing, "just inside the edge of the top of the hill, facing the site of the destruction and the direct road home.

"He sat all huddled up, with hunched shoulders and rigid, staring, sightless eyes—like the eyes of a man that has had a seizure. One hand was clenched over something on his knee. I knew at once it was some sort of a fit, and since there were none of the signs of paralysis, apoplexy or epilepsy, I concluded it to be catalepsy, a condition I know next to nothing about. It put me in a quandary. Ought I to rouse him, with the risk of giving his system a bad shock; or ought I to leave him to come round naturally, confining myself to helping him off the Tor afterwards? I decided it wasn't safe to interfere, although the situation remained distinctly unpleasant. And so I filled in the time of waiting with sauntering around, inspecting the ruin.

"The earthquake up there, which of course I hadn't heard of, has confused the whole area, so that there were fully as many puzzles for me as evidences of destructive lightning. However, I satisfied myself that there was no way down to any tomb, I saw and ruminated upon the two big blocks reposing on top, I peeped over the edge for the rest. I gazed at this and that, and kept returning to my red-haired man in a trance, who never stirred. Ten minutes or so may have passed in this mode.

"The sun was just breaking through for the second half of the day, and there was a fresh wind. As a matter of fact, I felt rather more alive and present in my senses than usual, when abruptly, without notice, the transition occurred. My eyes darkened, my limbs were all at once like lead, and I barely had time to avoid a fall by finding and sinking down on to another knob of rock close by the other man's—so that most of my back was to him, and my view was more directly over the valley one crosses coming up.

"It wasn't the same—that view. It had slipped into a different. And what for an instant I had thought to be a darkening of my eyesight, now by quick degrees established itself as a true darkening of the day—to, say, somewhat more than the brightness of full moonlight at its strongest. But the scene so lit was harder to realise. The familiar general features were retained, but the heights, proportions and aspects were all hopelessly wrong. For instance, the moor on the right had become an elevated plateau, while the shoulder over the valley towered above the Tor and me. Its face was no longer a grassy steep, but cliff. The foot-track you know, that brings one to the Tor, was scarcely represented by a tricky-looking precipice ledge, with a sheer drop. I got the impression that the valley was very much deeper, but its bottom was out of sight."

"And the Devil's head, Peter?"

"Was absent. It would have intercepted my view, which remained uninterrupted. … But I must explain about the quality of the light. Though so dark, it was definitely daylight, not moonlight. At the same time, it wasn't my eyes; they were catching all the light there was—and yet the day should be brighter than I saw it. I was seeing the
ghost
of a scene, in ghostly light. Can you understand, Ingrid?"

"I am trying to."

"Then, on the right-hand moor I spoke of, was a herd of monstrous brutes, that might have been elephants. …"

"But, Peter, did all this strike you as unreal—did you fancy yourself dreaming—or was it actual to you?"

"Both, in combination. It had everything of the consistency, detail and cold logic of a real experience—nothing of the fantastic foolishness and impossibility of a dream; and yet my memory was contradicting it for me. It was not the world I had lived in all my life. In that sense, it was dream-like. It was in the nature of a prodigy, without known parents, dropped from another planet on to this. But let me come to the extraordinary part of the story. … I saw coming round the bend of that ledge half-way down the face of the cliff across the valley, the head of a long
funeral procession.

"It was in half-profile, as soon as the angle was turned. The distance away would be about the same as now—some hundreds of yards—far enough to make the persons of the procession, in that light, appear like goblins. …"