Devil's Tor (3 page)

"I don't scoff," said Drapier. "Indeed, I've spent too much of my life amongst mountains not to be well acquainted with their weird influence. It's one of the multitude of things a townsman remains ignorant of. I really think I do begin to approach you."

He had in mind how prolonged lingerings in solitary high places were wont to conjure up the phantom voices and sudden irrational panics. A nervous young girl would be peculiarly sensitive to the combination of loneliness, silence, wild Nature, skies, and altitude. Of course she would dream. The frame and content of her dreaming signified nothing. Only, she seemed to have a preference for this particular height for her rambles, and was that chance, or did it express a quality in the place? He was quite curious to see the Tor. She might even possess the second-sight, which was an authentic psychic gift. In the Scotch Highlands it still survived, while in the black- wintered, troll-ridden Norway of old it must have been so common as almost to pass notice. The whole family regarded Ingrid as the typical Norse Colborne.

The more she spoke with him, the more puzzling and interesting he was finding her, and that coldness he had fancied in her seemed already like a misunderstanding of half-acquaintance, she had so opened herself to him during the walk. Her conversation had the ideality and originality of a man's. There was something to give him pause in nearly every one of her utterances.

He admired the dignity of her light motions and the graceful sweep of her long slender limbs, as she went forward over the uneven ground. He also admired the fineness and colour, of palest gold, of the curling fall of her otherwise smooth hair, clinging to her nape to emphasise its purity of whiteness. In the remembered oval of her face the features for delicacy and length had surely attained the precise focus of beauty, between mere prettiness on the one hand and unpleasing strength on the other. Her long mouth was strange and lovely; it might be passionate, but he could not imagine her sexual. Her grey-blue eyes, in their perfect orbits, were the hardest of all to decipher. Superficially they struck one as tranquil, quiet and simple, but then something
waiting
in them began to appear, and at last one might suspect that they were essentially not in the present at all. They might be the eyes of a prophetess, going about her every-day jobs. It gave a marvellous latent power to the whole face.

And her true nature was so very much a paradox to him. Such a fair, clever and favoured young only daughter of a well-to-do household might far too easily be spoilt; and Ingrid appeared unspoilt. Her amiability at all times and unquestioning obedience to the practical suggestions of the others in the same house were even quite extraordinary for any girl. She also helped her mother in everything as a dutiful and feminine-souled home-staying daughter should. She did it all seemingly without effort or self-conflict, yet it could not be her character. Probably she was content to conserve her strength for the later bigger things of life; and perhaps that explained the quiet inward expectation of her eyes.

Biologically singular it was to note how she had reverted to the pure Nordic type, which had totally skipped her mother above her in the direct line; while Dick Fleming, the father, a capital good fellow, had been a true-blue Britisher. Ingrid's race was in her complexion, the fairest and most unblemished ever seen. Certainly the moist, cool, fragrant Dartmoor winds and mists must have been kind to it, still no mere Saxon blonde could have possessed such a skin even to start with. It was the legacy of long ages of snow and ice. She was twenty-two, and, chit-chat apart, must soon think seriously of marriage.

Helga, her mother, was his first-cousin. Her wedded life had been of the shortest, for Dick, her husband (a small, nimble, fresh-complexioned chap with a pointed little beard; Drapier had met him) had broken his neck in the hunting-field when Ingrid was still hardly out of her alphabet. Ever since, Helga had kept house for Magnus Colborne, her uncle and his, who presumably would leave mother and daughter all his worldly goods when he should depart. And he was already past seventy, and to all appearance going fast downhill. No doubt Helga had something of her own put by, but it was quite understandable why she should prefer a soft home with this temporary sacrifice of independence to a grind-along on insufficient means. Already she was the virtual mistress of the place. No one could grudge Helga Fleming the highest good fortune.

A sudden hail-shower began, slackened awhile, then without warning descended as a tropical sheet of hissing white rain, instantaneously drenching them through and through. Ingrid stopped, turned to laugh at Hugh, flung the wet from the locks over her ears, and, with a gay exclamation he failed to catch, started again to run up the hill, only a few yards of which could be seen in front of them. It was like the end of the world. To hasten their panic, a fierce blaze of violet light flashed out from the sky just above, illuminating the rain and the moor with its enduring flicker; then, before it ceased, there sounded a sharp, sickening, tearing noise, as of cloth being violently rent, followed immediately by a deafening and appalling crash which left them aghast. The rain affected them as if full of electricity, while Drapier fancied that he detected the smell of singeing. Perhaps a part of the turf had been struck and burned. When the downpour had moderated somewhat, a cool breeze seemed to spring up, but it was deceptive, the air continued as close and oppressive as before. The storm, far from having exhausted itself, had hardly yet begun.

For company's sake they now pressed forward side-by-side. "We're not likely to get a nearer one than that," Drapier encouraged his cousin.

"Did it stop you too?"

"It was certainly a vivid moment."

"And I suppose you are going to overwhelm me for dragging you out here!"

"Not at all, for I was a party."

"No, you were complaisant, I was perverse, and some demon in me has led us both by the noses. However, why worry? We can't get any wetter, so let's take our ease now."

He accommodated himself to her reduced step, and almost at once Ingrid pointed her finger ahead.

"There's Devil's Tor."

The rain had nearly ceased, but the immense lowering black clouds above augured nothing good. The moor immediately around was intensely green and purple. On the left, across the valley, the hills rose dark and uncoloured, but with all their details very clear. Where they terminated, however, (the end of a mighty buttress set in the lowland plain, sloping downwards to the sea), a magic picture was afforded of the soft distant landscape, all localised rain-showers and areas of shadow, wisps of moor-mist, and isolated shafts of sunlight emphasising the fields and woods from behind gold-rimmed cumulus vapour masses. The heart of the storm was crawling up ominously from the south-east, across the heights which recommenced still further to the left, directly behind them.

Just as Ingrid pointed and spoke, a dazzling fork suspended itself in mid-sky straight ahead, enduring without change like a phenomenon while they could count. Its lower extremity was behind a rocky peak of no great height, but so singular in shape and of such sinister unrelieved blackness that Drapier as he sighted it, involuntarily came to a standstill.

The hill rose up sharply no more than a few hundred yards away, just round the shoulder of the slope they were traversing. It was a steep, imperfectly-symmetrical sugar-loaf, with a truncated top, carrying an upright granite mass that had become strangely weathered into the rude form of a human or inhuman, head, supported by a narrower neck-stem. The rock, which had been segmented presumably by exposure to the elements during countless ages, was about thirty feet high and projected from the perpendicular at a dangerous-looking angle. The overhanging side was that which contained the so-styled Devil's face. Seen in profile from where they stood it appeared a true gargoyle. The nose shot forward, the mouth was a deep black cleft between two flat layers of granite, while the one cavernous eye visible was represented by a circular hollow in the rock, showing where water was accustomed to accumulate. It was a grinning and unpleasant natural statue carved by time and accident, which seemed all the while to be meditating a plunge to earth.

Some seconds after the lightning had vanished, there came a long crackling cannonade in the sky, ending in a loose and hollow roar, as though a mighty load of solid matter were being discharged from above. Manifestly the storm was now all round them. The rain commenced to descend again heavily.

"At least you've now seen it at its characteristic best," laughed Ingrid, as they resumed the way. "That fork surely completed the picture like a positive improvisation of genius. For five seconds it was a real Witches' Heath—and now alas! never can it be the same to me again. Hereafter it will always lack that never-to-be-repeated
coup de théâtre!'

Her cousin remarked how her spirits were risen with their experience.

"But its name seems quite intelligible from the shape of that pile, without adducing the more fantastic derivation," he suggested thoughtfully.

"I suppose so."

"But you stick to your intuition of a strangeness there?"

"I must."

''Of course you have run up against nothing tangible?"

"No, Hugh. It is all feelings." She was grave again. "No doubt you will go on believing with all the rest that that monument is natural, even after I have assured you that I'm sure it is artificial. But it is my firm faith."

"Made by men?"

She replied by a nod, and he asked again:

"Has the point ever been discussed?"

"Not that I'm aware of. Why should it be, when there are scores of certainly natural similar formations all over Dartmoor?"

"Still unsupported intuition, or have you a reason for your belief?"

"I simply feel it is so."

"You suggest a tomb?" Drapier tugged at his moustache. They were now always walking side- by-side.

"Yes, a tomb."

"Since you have this conviction, and live more or less on the spot, can't you influence excavation?"

"I don't personally know any archaeologists, and should never dream of writing to the newspapers on any subject. Besides, who would pay any attention to a girl's fantasies?"

"Does the intuition go further?"

"Perhaps. But I don't think we'll speak of it any longer." Then she turned to eye him attentively.

"Am I mistaken, Hugh, or is my innocent suggestion interesting you more than it should? What really put it in your head to insist on coming out here to Devil's Tor?"

He smiled evasively. "You're a dangerous person! You are looking for tombs in me now."

"Because I think you may be rather psychic too. And you may have heard something about the hill from somebody else. I am not imagining that that has brought you all the way down from London."

"It certainly hasn't; since, until the place was spoken of by your mother at dinner yesterday, I was quite unaware of its existence on the map. Hills are always very magnetic to me, this one happened to be named as within easy reach, I had the additional inducement of your proffered company, and so—here I am."

"Then this time I have made a bad guess."

"Perhaps you craved a spiritual associate."

"Oh, no, I am perfectly content to be lonely in my dreams."

"The snub is deserved. And in any case I am the worst of companions in all departments of experience. Loneliness is my proper mantle throughout; not in dreams only."

"Because you're a man, and it is possible. A girl or woman only belongs half to herself. The other and larger half of her belongs to her circumstances."

"It is your sex's good-nature."

"Or weakness. We have too much tenderness of sympathy, even with people that we know are far from deserving it."

"Or else you would not be women; and that would be lamentable," he rejoined. "I fancy, though, that you will make an excellent wife."

"Why, Hugh?" She blushed a little, beneath the raindrops standing on her face.

"You seem to have an ideal temperament for calm seas. Great tolerance, and very little rebelliousness."

"I don't know that I shall ever marry; but, if I do, I shall always insist on my husband's being his greatest, and he may find that the worst of all possible trials in a wife."

"Then you must be sure and make a happy choice."

Thus he had succeeded in covering over her questioning of his true motive in visiting Devil's Tor. Indeed, with the best intention in the world, he could not well have replied to her both truthfully and satisfactorily, for all was still dark, even to himself. But Ingrid, on her part, was so far from the cynical habit that she could acknowledge her blunder and freely accept his version of the initiation of the jaunt without a reserved thought in the background of her mind. Her intuitions flattered no pride in her, and she recognised that some of them might be imperfectly captured. She believed him, and they continued walking on in easy companionship, but there was no more conversation between them for a while.

The evening grew so dusky that Drapier took out his watch to confirm the hour; but it was still barely half-past eight, by summer time. They had begun to descend towards the dip that lay between them and the Tor's base. Another brilliant flash was accompanied by an almost simultaneous crash of thunder, which seemed to shake the ground beneath them, the heavy rumble continuing to reverberate among the hills for at least half a minute. The rain again left off.

Ingrid glanced round at her cousin, with fearless candour in her eyes.

"I've been puzzling over that last remark of yours, Hugh. Was it meant dryly? Has mother been saying anything to you?"

He remembered what he had said.

"She only told me that you are
not
engaged, if you mean that. I want to pry into no secrets."

"Well, you are one of the family, and I should like you to be able to put right any floating rumours about me—not that I expect any outsider will ever mention me to you. There is an artist—a Peter Copping—who comes to see us quite a lot when he's down here. As a matter of fact, he's due down from town to-morrow, and you may have the pleasure of meeting him. I want you
not
to couple his name with mine. It would offend him terribly. We are only quite good friends."