Devil's Tor (22 page)

"You can stand up to me, Peter, and use this language, that all our acquaintances would laugh at, if they heard it!"

"I mightn't risk the enormity if I had not seen what I have to-day. What a pin-point of time we are on, and what does it matter, my dear, how we strip our souls to each other, with one eternity lying behind us and another in front! I’ll speak it even more plainly. Very often you have seemed to me—and at times when I haven't wished it—like the future mother of another supernatural saviour of the race."

Ingrid was silenced. Pale and fascinated, she stood staring into his eyes, that were sorrowful; without meeting the spirit behind them. It was opened to her at last, with a withering clearness that was like a sudden day sprung from she knew not where, that this his instinct was being far too deeply and painfully felt by him to be wholly false. Perhaps he was understanding it wrongly, perhaps he was adding to it according to his general mental lines, or drawing conclusions suggested by his sex and jealous affections; but surely it was based on a true perception by him of
something
in her that was present, yet not in the forefront of her nature. … Another man, not Peter—and a supernatural child—and destiny! Was she dreaming, or had he just now said such words to her? For while he had spoken only of that other man, it had remained a fancy, just because it was not impossible; but now that he had dared as well to talk of a phenomenal birth, it was too dreadful to continue of the imagination alone, it all at once concerned her depths, and either she must descend to her depths to grapple with this monstrous impossibility, or else immediately, between herself and Peter's insane suggestion, she must put the shield of sober common thinking. Yet hadn't he explained that her children were not in his intuition, except by implication? Unhappily, that made no odds. The roots were struck in her own mind now, and it was not what he had said, but what her thoughts henceforward were not to escape from.

Yes, it was meant that this fearful growth should begin in her conscious soul, and he was but the instrument. Thus it was to-day that his speech must be given the necessary inflation by the remaining fever of his vision on Devil's Tor. And
she
had been prepared too for its reception by that lovely spirit yesterday. She dared not begin to disentangle what was possible for her of his words from what must be a blasphemous offence against heaven. She dared not reject the one with the other. The message to her—not his tormented delivery of it—seemed sanctified by all these celestial and preternatural events and stories of four-and-twenty hours. By the response of her heart also, where a peculiarly desolating loneliness, such as she had never before experienced, was as if trying to suppress the gleams of a strange faint distant joy, that marvellously resembled reminiscence. …

That mystic funeral he had witnessed from the Tor, was
hers.
So she had truly lived and died, and had been a mortal woman, though now a spirit. So, again, she was not to be feared. But then she should have belonged to a people; and that nobler and statelier race than any since had historically inhabited the earth; and during savage times. Could she but see her once more! ...

Peter remarked the ignored tears standing in her eyes, and, coming closer, put his arm across her shoulder.

"I've upset you, I'm afraid!"

"A little."

"What part troubles you?"

"I don't know. … That you should consider me a girl for whom happiness does not matter, perhaps."

"Had you set your heart on happiness, Ingrid?"

"No."

"Would you still risk marrying me?"

She did not answer him, so he went on:

"Shall I decide?"

"Yes."

"If I have interpreted my intuition aright, other things may be in store for you; but we can't wait for all our lives to see if I am right or wrong, so what I suggest is—let us enter into no formal contract, but, if nothing in the meantime has happened to prevent it, let us get married in twelve months; and that should give fate long enough to work its will in."

She buried her face in his arm which still caressed her shoulder; and this he took to mean assent. He kissed her white neck. Immediately he had done so, the contact seemed foreign to him, and he wondered at his own high daring.

They moved apart. Ingrid regarded him steadily, through her damp lashes.

"While as for notifying the arrangement," said Peter, "that shall be entirely as you wish, and either we can carry on, to all outward appearance, as now—that is, as very good friends, and no more—or you may, if you prefer it, inform your mother alone, or all the rest of the world besides, that there is this informal arrangement, which is not quite an engagement, but on the way to one. So say what you want."

She was still quiet for a few moments, but then replied "There seems no need for others to know it, but I had better tell my mother."

"At once?"

"Yes."

"Do so, then. … Are you angry with me?"

"No. Why should I be angry, when I am aware you have only spoken from love?"

"I may come and see you, and talk to you, as always?"

"Of course."

"What are you thinking of me at this minute?" asked Peter. They had not yet turned back to the house. "That I am a poltroon, for not daring to try to win you out of hand?"

"No."

"What then?"

"I was thinking how much grimmer a business art must be than I supposed, if it is built up of such renunciations."

"Is it good?"

"So good, that I shall probably now always look for traces of it in all the pictures I see—especially in yours."

"You've discovered a profounder truth than all the critics together," responded Peter.

They started slowly walking back, but had not gone more than a few yards when Ingrid faltered. She caught at Peter, and they stopped again.

"Peter, what you have done to me is that I'm feeling an unspeakable loneliness. You've made me feel as if I were eternally cut off. I need you. … Kiss me, dear!"

He pressed her lips with his.

"So here's another force we can't ignore!" she said, smiling queerly, when they were apart again. "If fate is dictatorial, possession is just as dogged. They also say it is nine points of the law."

"It is very true. And I should also have borne in mind another small truth still better known to me; that inspiration follows, not precedes, action."

"And now we are like children, who are happier in breaking their good resolutions than in keeping them."

"Do you say so, Ingrid?"

"It is not I that put up an obstacle."

"How is your loneliness?"

She appeared to reflect.

"I must always have been lonely—I
have
always been lonely... but now somehow it's less an ache, more an emotion, and I can't see how it is not to go on. You have thoroughly made me realise that I am alone in the world, Peter."

"Alone?"

"You mean, I have you. But don't you know what love does for loneliness? It drugs it for half the time; and for the other half our loneliness takes its revenge by adding to itself horrible dreads of loss, and agonising regrets for past insufficiencies and what might have been. I am not sure that a lonely person ought ever to love. Love is for the alike."

"And so you are to be driven to me by an unendurable condition?"

"No; but I don't know what I mean."

"You do love me?—as a girl loves a man?"

"Yes."

"Won't it help you, to have me to tell all these things to? Free confession rids us of the best part of the burden."

"Yes, it will help."

"And once married, you will have a thousand distractions. Shall we shorten the time?"

"If you wish it."

"I shall be down again in November, and then we will see."

He embraced and kissed her, while she stood with closed eyes, unsmiling and unresisting.

She wondered what she was doing, playing at this game of love. Thunderstorms, earthquakes, tombs and apparitions were calling to her, her secret heart was full of awful whispers, she was marked out by all her characters to be a woman apart. Every ancient thing was in movement within her range. Hugh might be on Devil's Tor again, tasting new wonders. And Peter was kissing her in childishness, as though the dam of his long hesitation had burst at last. From him she could endure it, for it was his right and nature, and she had but within these few minutes given herself to him; nevertheless her self seemed doubled. If such caresses were now to go on, would not she be guilty of a duplicity threatening to become permanent? For the one half of her was not in his arm but in the more terrible real universe. Was this his own prediction for her? ...

But when he released her, they walked back to the house composing themselves to meet the others there.

And Ingrid found her opportunity before tea to acquaint her mother with as much of their talk and plannings as she thought necessary. Helga was glad.

Drapier was not back to tea, which confirmed and completed his uncle's good humour, already established by Peter's presence. Ingrid was quiet and pale, though easy to speak with. Helga wished she could understand if this manner of her daughter's meant happiness only, or happiness and something else. Peter's face did not enlighten her. Its exaggeration of a nonchalance that was habitual to it might just as well stand for unmitigated satisfaction as for a deliberate concealment of something to be concealed. The feature of this affair about which she was vaguely uneasy was that the engagement was not to be a straightforward, declared one. Uncle Magnus, for instance, was not yet to know of it; and there was to be no ring. She hoped she was not so small-minded as to confound the token with the thing itself, but still she was acquainted with the world, and knew that behind an eccentricity too frequently lurked an unpleasantness. She must not be ungenerous to Peter before she had found out that the fault of sense and candour was his, and so her occasional glances to him continued to be entirely friendly and as eloquent as the situation permitted; yet she wondered—and thought of her accumulating years as she did so—if this beginning of an illogical censuring of his conduct might not represent the germ of that traditional dislike of mothers for the snatchers-away of their children. She did not wish to be so instinctive and unmodern; she would even rather distort her feelings to a perpetual particular regard for him.

Now she would furnish him with an opportunity of shining before Ingrid, in discussing his art, and that should please them both, and be her best immediate gift.

The sunlight had departed for the day from the sombre Flemish pictures, that were like a nearly living gallery to the quartet in the room, but the rich colours of a part of one of the rugs on the oak floor gleamed softly as a beautiful fire in the end of an oblique ray. Peter was quite approachable. She had seen at once that he knew Ingrid had told her—she would say a few words to him by-and-by. Her uncle was sipping his tea in amiable aloofness. All there were too familiar with his custom of holding back from a general conversation until a favourable opening should permit his effective capture of it, to attempt to coax him too soon from this retirement. How oddly-constituted the gathering was, Helga thought. An old man, who had brought his vanity of a boy right through life with him; a young man, chiefly intent on the cynical disguising of his love, that was no disgrace to him; a girl, having just received a girl's greatest prize, sitting apart like the pale young heroine of a drama of sacrifice; she herself, being tactful and harmonising, probably not from any goodness of disposition at all, but because she loved the effeminate softness of concord. They all four were showing this front of deceit; so no doubt the tendency was universal, and deceit was a necessary defence of humanity. But that caused prying and inquisitiveness in others; and thus armour and arms were forged in the same shop. Since she had now to set Peter talking, she conceived that so queer a puzzle in philosophy was translatable into his language. She wanted to say something to him, not nothing, he was always so very contemptuous of emptiness.

He rarely cared to discuss art at all, she knew, but on the present special occasion it was to be inferred that he would welcome the relief. Doubtless he was in some sort of magic heaven, despite his coolness. So long as he was under constraint in this room, his whole being must be crying out for violent expression; Ingrid, sitting there in profile to him like a phantom, must be maddening him by her mere intangible spectacle; and art alone held the elements of recklessness and incoherence requisite to his discharge. Already his news and theirs had been exhausted. He had barely troubled to disguise his complete lack of interest in both. And Ingrid was as absent; she had said hardly anything since coming into the room.

So Helga, bending forward while putting on a little frown of intelligence, questioned Peter concerning the symbolism he was always after. She wished to hear whether, in trying to express the invisible by the visible, he was dissatisfied with the
sham
of outward things? ... For instance, the human face—a woman's face. Its pensiveness, or vivacity, or
hauteur,
might be—probably was, the expression of an acted emotion; the emotion was genuine, as far as it went, but had been deliberately adopted by the woman's will as an easy pleasure; and was not her true soul, that could only be brought to her face under outward stress. Was it the business of Peter's symbolism to present that true soul—and by means of it, the human soul in general?

Pulling out the familiar leather case, he tapped and lit a cigarette.

"That is really very good, Mrs. Fleming," he replied, putting upon his tongue its accustomed bridle of light cynical detachment. "The one objection I can immediately find to it is that the soul, naturally, can express only a single emotion at any given moment of time, whereas no single emotion can present the whole soul. Or if you mean that the character of a soul is identical with its
ruling
emotion, then as that ruling emotion is more or less always present, it seems to require no outward stress to call it forth."