Devil's Tor (32 page)

"It is many years now, my dear, since I have realised our true helplessness in the ordering of our own lives. At first the recognition saddened and depressed me, but afterwards I found compensation. Humility makes for clearer vision, and I hope the habit of little acts of kindness is at least as useful in the world as the constant pushing towards money and distinction."

"Are you happy?"

"Yes, I may call myself happy," replied her mother. "But not in a self-deceived way, like that of so many middle-aged women I know. They—some of them—unsuperstitiously dare to
boast
of their settlement and contentment; but I have had such fearful blows in the past, I can never forget the real insecurity even of our apparently soundest calm. … Human life, dear, is just like the sea—I know how trite the comparison is! But one hour everything is so blue, beautiful and serene, while the next, still without a cloud in the sky, it begins to roll inshore with great thuds; and then we remember the monster it always is. Were any bad thing to happen to you, for example—as I pray God none ever will!—my present subdued enjoyment of existence would instantaneously vanish as though it had never been, and yet amazement would hardly be joined to it; for I have experienced in the roughest school how such cruelties are nearly to be anticipated from time to time."

"Yes, mother. And mightn't you add, for your consolation, that the happy persons are necessarily the despised in the sight of heaven?—seeing that they alone are not shouldering their share of the burden. …"

Ingrid's thoughts, however, were never away from her preoccupation. Throughout the talk she had been anxious lest Saltfleet, after her leaving them, had been over-persuaded by her mother, or had changed his mind of his own accord, about following Hugh to the Tor; but she had hesitated to put the plain question, for fear of reopening a discussion of her undiscussible sense of evil. Now she could endure her suspense no longer.

"Mr. Saltfleet has gone after Hugh?" she asked, in a new, more present voice.

"So far as I know. I wish you had not enabled him."

"I think you have misread his nature. He is unlikely ever to do anything but what is right, and what else can we want? I am glad he has gone up, and hope they come back together. … And, mother—when Hugh does get back, may I see him alone, to return him this thing of his, and explain for both of us just what has happened?"

Helga was unwilling and displeased. It was some moments before she answered.

"There are two or three things against it, my dear. It will be making me ridiculous. And he will understand that I have been talking to you, in opposition to his express wish. And I think you have gone far enough into all this business already—now you must really have a little pity on Peter!"

"I promise that if you leave it to me, he will find it far less strange."

"How can that be?"

"I shall put it in so much less practical a way, perhaps he will pass over the liberty taken altogether."

"What has already happened between you, that you should have the confidence?"

"Since the destruction, we've rather met. Before, I believed we were hopelessly opposite, but now I am coming to regard him as the one other of all our family to possess the gift of... seeing through time and space, if you like, mother!..."

"And these are the matters you discuss when by yourselves? Then I am all the more glad his stay isn't to be a long one. … So did he tell you what else he saw in the tomb?"

"No, he wouldn't."

"So your conversations are general?"

"They are particular, so far as Devil's Tor can make them so."

"You are filling each other's heads, no doubt; and perhaps under the special circumstances it may be pardonable. … You may have your way for this last time, then. But, after this morning, I want you to promise me..."

A subdued knocking on the outside panel of the door caused both women to look round to it. The door gently opened, and Peter's countenance showed. Helga discontinued her speech. She rose, and Ingrid followed her, hiding the flint in her dress.

Peter came into the room. His face looked rather bilious and forbidding, as from a sleepless night, but he summoned a fleeting smile to it, while the others greeted him quietly, with half-inquiring eyes. But then to Ingrid Peter returned a longer regard of sincerely earnest interrogation. A night and so much of the morning had elapsed since their ambiguous parting, during which time all his tormented revolvings of what that last mood of hers had stood for, what it should or might become if only he allowed her a sufficient interval, had long since churned themselves into a paste of inconsistence. … the abstraction of her eyes, however, and the faint long lines on her brow, could have made him believe the lapse between the two meetings much less. It was nearly the identical image he had taken home with him, and nothing had changed. …He shrugged, smiled coldly again, and lit a cigarette.

"I am just back from the station," he explained, now eyeing Helga. "I had to go for a parcel—which wasn't there. On my way out, at the cross-roads, I came face-to-face with a man issuing from your lane. Who is he? I expect he was from here."

"We have had a caller, Peter," replied Helga. "What was he like?"

"He was like a celebrity—which is why I am asking about him. A big, noticeable chap, with a weathered skin and a remarkably alert manner of carrying himself. I bet he's somebody. A friend of your cousin's, at a hazard!"

"You're quite right. It's a Mr. Saltfleet, and he knew Hugh Drapier abroad. You haven't met Hugh yet, I think?"

"I saw him out-of-doors," said Peter shortly. "Frankly, and meaning no discourtesy, I am more interested in this other. Is he a frequenter of the wilds too?"

"He is a Himalayan climber."

"Ah! Then I do know his name. And is he returning here ever? If so, I think I should rather like to encounter him."

"Dine with us this evening, in that case."

"May I? I shall be very happy, and it seems my inquiry was apt. … Some persons, you know, Mrs. Fleming, affect you like a great work of art. They may even repel your private taste, and nevertheless you instantly feel all sorts of future consequences flowing from them."

Both Helga and her daughter turned sharper eyes on him.

"What consequences, Peter?" asked the former.

"I said I was curious about him because he looked in the way of being a celebrity. These conversational short cuts are so easy. My curiosity was actually raised, and is still running high, because of my wonderfully strong sense, half an hour ago, of futurity in connection with the man. You meet one person in the street, and seem to know his face very well, but can't place him; he belongs to the past. You meet another whom you are sure you have never met before in your life; and he belongs to the present. Then you meet a third, whom also you have never met before, yet who definitely and vividly belongs to your life notwithstanding, even though his type is antipathetic to yours and you are probably never to see him again. I say he is of the future. He corresponds to some invisible ideal in you, and it is bound to turn up again. The consequences you ask about, they are the affecting of your life by this ultimate turning up. The process has begun on this first sight of your man. … It is something like that. … Or my insight is a shade subtler and more unpleasant than that, but I'll say no more in present company. When I have met him in a room, and seen some of his face's expressions, and heard him speak, then it will be time enough to sharpen the analysis to a fine point."

They were standing thus. Helga and Peter both had their backs more or less to the shut long west windows of the room, that should have revealed the sloping lawn, with the moor beyond the valley, but now had merely the travelling mists for peep-show; while Ingrid alone directly faced the same windows. All at once she saw Hugh outside on the walk, staring into the room, his face nearly against a pane. She thought how ill, white, and peculiar he seemed. She could not understand why he should have come round by the far side of the house.

He vanished almost on her first glimpse; nor could she understand, either, in what fashion he had effected his departure from her line of vision. An extreme uneasiness urged her to intercept him instantly, before he should take refuge in his room upstairs.

"Hugh is back, mother!" she announced quietly; then added to Peter:

"If you will excuse me, there is something rather important that he has to know. I won't be long."

He nodded carelessly, and sat down to go on smoking, while Helga, unable to conceal her nervousness, gazed with half-frightened eyes after her departing daughter, whom, however, she made no effort to detain.

But upstairs, though Ingrid lingered on the landing for five whole minutes, and then five minutes more, outside the partly open door of his empty room, Hugh never came. A sickening supernatural awe settled on her spirits. …

She could not wait there for ever, nor did she choose to take his stone downstairs again. Accordingly, she sought her own room, to secrete it temporarily under some clothes in a drawer. … With the final contact of her relinquishing fingers with the flint, a furious uproar, as of violently rushing waters, stunned her hearing. She expected to swoon, so shocking, crashing and present was the volume of noise. Then it gave place again to the silence of the house, and was no more than a stupefying and inexplicable memory. …

She endeavoured to convince herself that it had been internal. But it had too suddenly come and gone, while never before in her life had she experienced the beginning of so fearful a sensation. …

Sinking to the edge of the bed, she whitened her knuckles by the tight clenching of her fists, in the effort immediately to steady herself before venturing downstairs to face her mother and Peter again.

From the cross-roads Saltfleet plunged, without any slackening of his quick stride, down the misty lane that Ingrid had said would bring him to Devil's Tor.

His indignation with Drapier was governed, yet steadily mounting. His cousin, Mrs. Fleming, couldn't have spoken without knowledge, and it was manifest that Arsinal's stone was not to be passed back except under some pressure. It was rather necessary to keep distinct Drapier's motive in so trying to cheat them out of their property and the course to follow in recovering it. The first was only of psychological interest; the other scarcely needed rehearsal. He had simply to make the direct categorical demand, and see that he was not fobbed off. The single sincere member of this set seemed to be the daughter. She might help.

But at least the thing had come through all right, and was safe. Drapier couldn't now pretend otherwise, since his cousin had admitted it, and this was a tremendous simplification, in case of a row.

As for the psychology, in the first place it was sure that Drapier couldn't know what this article he was proposing to retain stood for. For no living soul had possessed the compound of expert learning, sagacity, imagination, and pre-acquaintance with the key idea, requisite to the deciphering of that clay-tablet inscription from Knossos, in Crete, until Arsinal had arrived, three years back, to spell it slowly out in silence, and communicate its message to no professional
savant
of them all. He, Saltfleet, himself had been the sole depositary of its purport, just because he was totally unconcerned with antiquity, and, of all the ancient languages, knew only Latin. Accordingly, Drapier by no possibility could be aware of the hinted past and future of that record; nor, if he were, could he conceive a connection between such a reference and the stone in his hands. Quite other researches and expeditions had supplied Arsinal with the clues to that identification.

No doubt, the thing's value for Drapier lay in the fact that others had made a trip to the ends of the earth to obtain it, and that it had been found resting in a holy place. Proprietorship, the mania for collections, and superstition, were three of the commonest weaknesses of the human mind, and sat down very amicably side-by-side. If a more particular motive was needed, Mrs. Fleming had styled him "psychic" and "Celtic". The return over the Himalayan barrier might easily enough have given him a few narrow shaves, and he might have appointed this his mascot.

Nothing in the man's dreamy gravity and reticence carried to excess, which had made of him so wretched a companion during their few hours in camp together, contradicted such an infantile fantasticness. In fact, it nearly demanded lunacy to account for this preposterous flight across half the world, just in order to retain possession of a bit of fractured flint, which he knew nothing about, and for which he could have no earthly use. Saltfleet had no great faith in his sudden call to England. The so-urgent business seemed at present to be taking the form of enjoying solitary walks over a not very exciting patch of low moor, and relaxing in the society of secluded gentlewomen!

None the less, the hitch might be awkward. In that case, Arsinal might be the better man to deal with it at once; his quiet persuasiveness would keep down the heat always liable with weak persons to turn indecision to decision. But he was too usefully employed at Oxford. A wire to him would mean a set-back, obliging him to drop his threads of the second stage of the business, in order to re-pick up those of the first, that he believed to be done with. Then, too, anything like an admission of inability was odious to Saltfleet, while so far it really amounted only to a contingency; this Mrs. Fleming was a quite unknown character, who might well have added to her information from officiousness or a natural proneness to exaggerate. Or should Drapier actually prove difficult, Arsinal's habitual cautiousness might have just the contrary effect of fortifying the fellow's resolution, by crippling his own more forcible representations. So no telegram should be dispatched by him until at least he had secured this preliminary interview with their man, and learnt just what he intended. …

There was nothing for him to see but the road underfoot, the grey wet shapes of the trees on either hand, and the moving fog, that grew denser as he proceeded. He was on the straight stretch leading to the moor itself. So far the way was plain, and these meditations, somewhat superfluous as they were, yet helped to while away the monotony of the blind walk, being as appropriate as any other occupation of his brain.