Devil's Tor (26 page)

"What do you say, Ingrid?"

She roused herself to answer her mother impassively:

"I think so, mother. Hugh will be here, and if Peter stays, things will come out, and the others will congratulate us, and wine will be drunk—and it will be hateful!"

"I'll be, off now," said Peter.

Helga thought such a coolness between them singular, but would not urge the point against both their wills. The three went out into the hall together, where Peter said good-bye to his hostess, and sought his hat. Ingrid offered to accompany him to the gate.

"You're regretting nothing?" he asked her, when they were out-of-doors.

She replied to her understanding of his meaning.

"No. … No, but I was thinking how—unnatural—the conversation has been. … And there was something I wanted to question you about, but it has gone from me."

"About what?"

"It was while you and Uncle were talking of art, and it had to do with your overtaking this morning on the Tor." Peter shot her a smile of wistful reproach.

"Always the Tor! Which, being interpreted, meaneth, never
me
!"

"It's only to-day, Peter—and the fault is partly yours, for telling me your story. To-day you'll forgive me for being upset and not myself."

"If it's only to-day."

He kissed her; and again she was limp, obedient, and unresponding. He was uncertain whether such a kiss were not sweeter than one invited. It somehow tasted more of her womanhood, less of her soul; but the latter overawed him, whereas her unmixed sex excited his, and with that sense of male possession his egoism as a man could return. … Yet afterwards he wondered if this were not the proof that in marriage they must meet on the lower level, ignoring each other's snows. …

At the gate they lingered again; but in a few minutes more were disturbed by the coming into sight of a man round the bend of the lane, from the direction of the crossroads. It was Drapier, returning from his walk; but neither wished to meet him.

"Is
that
your cousin?" demanded Peter.

"Yes."

"Then he was the man I ran across."

They hadn't yet been seen, so turned back into a shrubbery at the side of the house. Soon Drapier came up, when from their place of concealment they could observe him better. He halted just beyond the gate to gaze down at something in his hand, which was hidden from them. His downbent eyes frowned. Ingrid suddenly felt her heart beating faster and harder. The vision of Hugh brought back to her at once everything that she had been doing her best not to think about. He was like a living personification of all these slow forces moving against her.

Then both she and Peter perceived that the gate, and the lane, and the field past it, and Hugh Drapier himself, had vanished, while the brightness of the afternoon was dispelled by an usurping extraordinary misty gloom, that more resembled night, though things were visible through it. There were thick mighty forest-trees, and a hut of wattle, and a man, or ape, standing outside its doorless opening, directly facing them, leaning on a club. His prodigious chest was covered with long black hairs, while his mouth of a brute was drawn open to show all its terrifying teeth, and the small eyes seemed to flash rage and malice towards them through the dusk. …

It had only lasted a second or two, and the day was back, and Hugh was still there past the gate, which he was in the act of swinging open, while his other hand, that had held something, was now in his trouser-pocket. The watching two turned from him to glance quickly at one another, and then knew by sympathy, without the necessity for words, that they had seen alike. Each recognised in the other's eye that unmistakable light of a great awe and confounding of reason. Peter drew the girl further into the thicket, out of sight of the gate and Drapier.

As he lit a cigarette, she noticed that his fingers slightly trembled, but otherwise his coolness would have seemed unhuman nearly.

"So once again ..." he said, keeping his eyes steadily on her face, though she would not meet them. "And this time the diabolism of the business is fairly manifest; your cousin being selfconvicted. Let's get it right, however. You saw what I did? The day went, and a brute came?"

"What was it, Peter?" Her voice was as low as possible.

"More ancient history, without a doubt. And may I go on to suggest that in former times Drapier would have been burnt at the stake for a wizard of the blackest dye?"

"How can he be responsible?" The dropped last word was like a whispered effort. It was also a defence of her cousin, which Peter's sharpness instinctively caught at.

"Responsible! So you do consent to the iniquity of... these ghastly reproductions of things dead and gone? I am very glad. But he is certainly responsible, on more than one or two accounts. This phantom ape was own brother to my spectres of the funeral train. Both times Drapier is present. Both times his hand is gripping some small article unseen. Either he is engaged in regarding it, or evidently he has been regarding it up to the moment of being overcome by a vision. … It must be a kind of talisman—which explains nothing at all. The whole point is, should he be allowed to wander about the countryside, subjecting innocent outsiders to these specimens of the black art? You had better have it out with him to-day."

"It sounds true as you say it, Peter, yet it can't be the whole truth."

"I don't assert it. I am not concerned with the whole truth. I am merely looking at the public nuisance of it; and if you like, the moral heinousness of playing with mysteries shocking to the nature of everyday persons. … Or would you rather I spoke to him?"

"No, that's impossible!" she returned quickly. She appeared to reflect; then added:

"For you must be candid, and we both know that you are indignant on another account altogether. It would be unjust to Hugh to—"

"I know what you want to say. I'm angry because I come down from town to find you in a sorry state, and any dog will do to use a stick on! The first part is very true, at least. And just because you are in that sorry state, whosoever and whatsoever serves to keep you in it is for me a definitely sinister influence, to be brought up sharply. So if you won't, I will, challenge the man."

"It would do no good. This assumed talisman of his—I've no idea what it can be, but anyhow, it isn't an essential. It is some psychic aid. It may help, but its absence can't hinder that I
know. …
And your two experiences now. I must tell you that by comparison they have been so insignificant as almost to seem
thrown-off.
I don't even know that Hugh is very much better informed than you. He must still be experimenting."

"Then am I to understand that you have seen something even more wonderful?"

Ingrid was silent for a time, but then replied quietly, without any sort of emphasis or dramatic impressiveness: "Yes, more wonderful by far."

"Yesterday? On Devil's Tor?"

"Yes."

"My visit has certainly been ill-timed! ... And I am not worthy of being permitted to hear?"

"Please don't want it, Peter. I haven't told even Hugh."

"
Even
Hugh! ..

"It has nothing to do with intimacy. He is occult, and you are not. But I haven't told even him. And you know you engaged not to require from me the keys of all my locked rooms."

"Unless you're to hide yourself in them, away from me."

"It won't last long."

"How long?"

"How can I say, when I am as much a shuttle as anybody?"

"But what do you imagine is happening?"

"I think there is a psychical storm gathering, and its centre is Devil's Tor; that is all my intelligence tells me."

"Storms are destructive," said Peter, biting his nail.

"And so this may be."

"Destructive of what?"

She was again silent, until with a particular insistence he repeated the question. Then she answered:

"Of nothing little, I should judge! ... Though the little may well be involved with the big. Perhaps, incidentally, this home is to be broken and its members will be scattered to the four winds—and that is why Hugh is back from India at this juncture, and you down from London. …"

An unpleasant fancy entered Peter's head without warning or welcome.

"Your cousin—this man Hugh Drapier—isn't he very much older than you?" he asked.

"He's thirty-seven."

"And you are twenty-two—a big difference! You're cousins besides. I suggest no harm, but he's not in the way of appealing to your imagination?"

Under the earnestness of his gaze, Ingrid flushed. "That might be almost an insult, Peter dear."

"I hope not. I mean nothing conscious—but if it were only a growing pleasure in his society..

"I have no special pleasure in his society. If you knew him, you would know that he is altogether misanthropic. Have I, then, to begin defending my conduct so early?"

"Forgive me!—no. …"

He saw that the unworthy suspicion was incapable even of stating excuses for itself, and wondered how he could have held it for a single instant. Perhaps her offendedness was only passing and in another minute she would have forgotten it, and still the incident was disturbingly symptomatic. Was this sort of thing to happen again and again after marriage? Was it an escape in any blind direction of his instinct of another man? ... He glanced at her again, to discern that she had already forgotten—that once more her thoughts were far away. His pride came back. His work at the studio was waiting for him, and it was time to be off.

"I'm to see you here to-morrow?" he inquired, with the least of surliness in his voice.

But when he had received her quiet reassurance that she wished it, and had gone away at last, Ingrid, staring absently over the gate at where but a moment ago he had been, recalled suddenly without effort the question she had wanted to put to him about his art; though now it mattered less.

It had sprung up in her mind, not very definitely, while he had been declaring that a tree had no existence for the artist except that created by his eye; that his eye had power to create it differently; that, in order to do so, it must pass a different sort of light through itself to where the tree should be. She had simultaneously been dreaming of his vision on the Tor, and his statements had suggested this fantastic explanation of what he had seen. She had wished to ask him whether such a different light, making a new creation of whatsoever the eye should be looking at, could not be received by telepathy from another person standing by—received by the brain, and so passed to and through the eye?

For Hugh had been there with him, in a trance, and it was surely most reasonable to conceive that Peter's overtaking was somehow on account of that? ... However, it had been a confused, not a clear, thought, and she had had no leisure to follow it up then, but afterwards it had sunk quite to the bottom.

To question him about it mattered less now, for since then they had both been amazed by this other half-lifting of a veil, and accordingly she
knew
her fancy to be true. And now, too, she had gone on to grasp something else, impossible to discuss with Peter. What he had seen twice, and she with him once, was not what Hugh had seen at all. He had seen—her, whom she had beheld yesterday. …

It must be so, because her light alone would have power so to fill the eye as to flood the brain within with the life necessary to the direct passing of its images. Still, in the passing, something would be lost—some part of the light would get through to the second mind, some other part would be arrested. The personal image of that dead one had been stopped, but her ancient mortal circumstances had got through to be shown. …

That she had died, however, and been buried on a hill, concerned her divinity not at all; for other gods as well had died. And this mystery, perhaps, was a part of godhood, since gods and men were not of one nature.

Then, suddenly, all her muscles tightened with the vehement intensity of her longing for the next day to be already here, and she realised (as if a second person in her were looking at a first) what hopes she was setting on that promised meeting with Hugh's friend, the knower of the primal cult of the Great Mother—who was to throw light on so many things for her! ... Tomorrow? No one had told her, to-morrow—or any time; or definitely, at all. And yet she was sure that he would appear to-morrow—or that something not less important would happen. …

On retiring to bed early the same night, Drapier once more took from his pocket the flint he had picked up in the underground death-chamber. Twice since then, and a third time for a shadowy moment, had he seen the vision of the dead. On the chief occasion she had stood erect, as coming out of her tomb, confronting him; but not looking at him, and motionless. Upon recovering his consciousness from that trance, an unknown man had challenged him on the Tor; but had had the decency not to put embarrassing questions, and they had soon parted, Hugh hoped for ever in this world. But from all these recurring visitations, he apprehended that his end was near. It mattered nothing that they had been brought about through the medium of a material stone, if it, as he supposed, had supernaturally been given to him for the purpose.

He stared abstractedly at the flint, then closed his hand on it again, to recall that miracle of her likeness, and nature, and coming. …

Her face had so transcended womanly beauty—yet upon its own road—that she was not even to be thought of as belonging to the world; nor had any living woman ever been as tall. If her eyes had rested on him, he must probably have died at once. …

He placed the flint on top of the chest of drawers, quietly undressed, then, having blown out the candle and thrown up the window-blind, found his bed. … Exhausted though he was by another day's nervous rack, sleep still refused to come.

Again and again he beheld the weird ancient stairs going down, the pitchy passage and caverns, the table of death, and always following, the dim silvery image of the dead woman, awful and beautiful as Nyx herself—swiftly changing to erectness and unnatural stature in the upper air. An earthquake rocked the bed he lay on. Strange globes of fearful electricity flitted about the room. … Or now he was walking through the snows and rocks of the Himalayas, and voices were calling to him from behind that he was immediately to die. Then the day vanished, and he was underneath a black night-sky of torn clouds and mystic constellations. … He never knew which part was dream, and which, sick waking fancy. At some time after midnight, he fell, worn out at last, into dreamless sleep.