Devil's Tor (4 page)

"The right of dictation is yours. And I shall be happy to meet him; but where is he putting up?"

"He occupies a studio-cottage of his own at the end of the village."

"You have no special taste for Art, however?" questioned Drapier, after a pause of meditation.

"He is friendly with us all. His father and Uncle were partners."

"I shall look forward to seeing him," repeated her cousin courteously; and that interlude too was over. Their conversation seemed a succession of little back-doors. Ingrid flushed, as she hastened to change the subject.

"And what are your plans for after you have left us?"

"I shall get back to London."

"And then?"

"I can't tell. At present I’m hardly in a position to arrange for too long ahead."

She wondered why not.

"Presumably the
wanderlust
will still take you? You are just back from Tibet; where next?"

"Truly, I seem to care less for England each time I come back to it. The towns are abominably stuffy and over-thronged, while such scenery even as this can't hold a candle to the real open spaces of the globe."

"But you can't keep away; and that is everything. I think I should regard you, for that one circumstance, as the very luckiest person of my acquaintance, except that for some reason or other you don't impress me as being frightfully happy with it all. Are you?"

"I have had pretty good luck so far; but happiness is always an ambiguous term. The merest trifle can destroy it, while a fortune may not bring it. It is surely best not to seek it at all."

She understood that he was unwilling to speak out, and so said no more.

They then crossed the tiny rivulet which, descending from the upper moors, marked the line of cleavage between the two hills; and at once started to climb the wet, rock-strewn lower slopes of Devil's Tor itself. The wilderness of loose boulders and stones, flung haphazard in every quarter, suggested strange prehistoric geological happenings on that lonely moorland rise. The black crag of the summit stood high above them, against an ugly lead-coloured background of sky. Its face was no longer recognisable, but the new towering elevation of the pile lent it a still more evil and menacing character. It looked as if it might fall and overwhelm them as soon as they should approach within practicable range.

Half-way up, the sky became of a terrifying blackness, and for the first time a scared expression stole into Ingrid's eyes, though by force of will her features remained calm and disdainful. A cataclysm seemed to impend.

"Come on!" exclaimed Drapier, grasping her arm with bony fingers. And he hurried her uphill, steering the way through the debris. As he did so, three flashes of horrible lightning glittered in the sky in different quarters, followed at once by a stunning explosion in mid-air which burst in upon their ears, but was almost too near to be heard as sound. The whole hill trembled. Rumbling thunder—either the diminished end of this explosion, or its echo among the crags and hollows, or independent peals further off—continued until they imagined that the storm was now to be incessant. It was neither day nor night, but a sort of ghastly dusk. The air remained hot and clammy. Suddenly what appeared to be a solid wall of rain, descending vertically from the sky, shut them in from the world as though they were in a water-prison. Drapier dragged his cousin up the last section of hill, until they were underneath the granite tor.

They had only just taken cover beneath the projecting face of the perilously-inclined pile, when an unexpected fierce squall drove the rain again full against them, compelling them to seek another refuge. There chanced to be a cavity at the back of the rock, away from the wind, big enough with a little squeezing and bending to shelter both from the worst of the weather. Ingrid dashed the water from her eyes, shook out her hair, and laughed, but was unable to find breath for a minute, so rapid had been their ascent and so brutal the assault of the cloud-burst.

"What an adventure!" she gasped, when she could.

"You won't soon come up here again in a thunderstorm."

"But I'm glad."

And upon the quieting of her organs after another space, she added, "I wouldn't have missed it, for now I understand how fury and malice are the expression of this Tor's deepest nature."

"Notwithstanding which, we had better not stay here longer than we can help. You look positively drowned. We shall have you laid up."

"I am hard enough."

They ceased talking to regard the entire sky in front of them being lit by a wavering blue glow, the effect of lightning above the low intervening clouds. The squall stopped as suddenly as it had come, and all the air was still, when a prolonged bass growl of thunder filled the silence like a supernatural voice. When they had heard it out, Ingrid commented soberly:

"That's the grandest music, after all."

"Yes, it speaks straight to the soul. But you—aren't you peculiarly responsive to the grand in music?"

"Have you discovered that, Hugh?"

"I took the great liberty of watching you the other evening, when your mother was playing the Waldstein."

"And?—"

"You seemed under an enchantment. I fancy you were not merely held, but seriously disturbed. Where were you?"

"In a strange sphere, unsuggested by the music, I expect. Music is never more than a releasing factor for me; and that is why I am cold to nine-tenths of music, for it doesn't release."

She proceeded:

"I can secure the same emancipation from things without music at all, much more slowly, but rather more retentively on that account; as up here—alone and at peace with everything actual. I've told you something about that. It must be the beginning of the sublime, though I've never been on this hill long enough to follow it up. Perhaps one would need to be solitary here for weeks, months or years. I wish I could learn the connection. I am certain of a tomb beneath us."

"Yet a fiend's presentment for a tombstone!"

"There might be good reasons, Hugh. Robbers of grave-treasure were to be supernaturally scared, or the tribe was under the protection of that demon-god, or the tower itself may be artificial, the portrait a later natural freak. You mustn't believe that I am trying to explain things. I should need to know the feelings and wisdom of a quite different race of beings. I'm not so unimaginative as that. …"

Her cousin nudged her elbow gently, pointing upwards to the sky. When she quickly followed the direction of his finger, her expression changed to tenseness, while she left her speech unfinished.

Under the closed canopy of black upper clouds, which completely shut off from them all direct light from overhead, a single large, flat, lurid patch of vapour, of an ugly pale yellow hue, travelled rather rapidly towards them, seeming to descend and uncoil as it did so, until it was barely the apparent height of a tall tree above their heads. It was but too patently the carrier of a deadly concentrated charge of electricity; the least external cause might easily suffice to liberate its freight. The ground atmosphere became a sharp and tingling medium. Drapier's skin crept, while the girl's limbs refused to support her, so that she sank backwards with her shoulders pressing into the rock. Both waited in silence for the inevitable discharge, devoutly hoping that the pinnacle itself, as the highest spot, would receive it.

As they still stared up in numb and helpless fascination, a knob of what looked like liquid blue flame visibly and quite slowly separated itself from the cloud, and, followed by a half-fiery trail, as in a pyrotechnic display, dropped slantwise towards the stack which appeared to attract it.

"What can it be?" demanded Ingrid in a swift whisper.

"A fire ball."

Simultaneously the electrical body, of whatever nature it was reached the rock under which they sheltered, and began to wander lightly over its surface, much in the manner of a child’s toy balloon moved by a current of air. It approached their refuge, and at one time was within two feet of Drapier's face, while he held his breath. Then it glided like an animate thing upwards out of sight, round the rock.

He forced the unprepared girl to her hands and knees, and dropped himself.

"Scuttle out of it as fast as you can!"

On the ground he gave her wrist a jerk forward to emphasise his meaning. But her wits were already nimble to grasp the necessity of what he commanded, and she put no surprised questions before commencing quickly to crawl beside him on all fours through the dripping turf, away from the pile. The danger must be real, she supposed, had she time to think about it; but all the experience was suddenly too dreamlike, and she was exerting her body, and Hugh, by her side, looked so absurd—she could not feel afraid. Even she half-expected with a pleasurable curiosity the explosion at any moment behind them.

A half-minute later Drapier felt one of his legs being thrown gently but irresistibly over the other, while his whole frame was forcibly impelled onwards along the ground with a slithering, twisting motion. The propulsion ceased, when he found himself lying impotently on his back at full length, shaken and stupid, but so far as he could judge unhurt. He had a confused notion of an earthquake. Rocks were falling somewhere, though the noise was so mingled with that of heavy thunder that it was impossible to distinguish which was which. He could see nothing of what was going on, by reason of the fierce sheets of hail that drove over the hill-top. The white pellets were cutting his face, and bouncing from the ground all around like peas.

The sting of the hail coupled with fears for Ingrid's safety urged him quickly to sit up, in which posture, while sheltering his eyes with a hand, he looked with swift anxiety across to where she should be. She was lying at full length front-downwards only a few feet away; but at first he was unable to distinguish how matters had gone with her, by reason of the swishing white curtain between them. Mercifully, she was at least in her senses. Her head and shoulders were lifted from the ground by her pair of propping arms, while the neck was thrust back and twisted towards himself, obviously for the purpose of ascertaining his condition. He hoped that if she was not at once getting up, it simply meant that like himself she was still bewildered by shock.

The sound of falling rocks had stopped. The thunder all about the hill grumbled alone, a mystic bass to the hissing downpour and the whistle of the squalls. The place was wrapped in gloom. Half-visible through the vicious showers, the womanly indignity of his cousin's serpentine plight, with her wild wet clothes and hair, in that first quick photograph he had of her, did not at all strike him as a matter for laughter or compassion, but on the contrary showed itself as a glimpse of surprising beauty. She seemed in the aptness of her pose and state to the whizzing confusion and dark, lonely mountain-foulness of the evening almost like a female spirit in the moment of emerging from subterranean depths, and elevating her head in doing so to regard heedfully his intruding person.

The fancy died even while he was ignoring it, for just as he had willed to rise to the assistance of the distressed girl, she anticipated the movement by wriggling round on her own account to sit upright on the hail-white turf, and the spell was broken. He could not see her face's light quiver of pain resulting from the action. She was calm again at once, and in an easing of the rain their eyes met.

"Are you all right, Ingrid?" he called.

"Comparatively, I hope. But what really has happened?"

"The stack must be struck. Haven't you heard stones crashing?"

"Yes, I heard that."

"You're not damaged?"

She returned no reply, and, taking new alarm, he hurriedly picked himself up to attend her.

"What's the matter?" he asked again, standing over the girl.

"I seem to have twisted my ankle, but I hope it's nothing much."

"I sincerely trust not. We've three miles to go."

He dropped on to a knee beside her, and gently put away the hand with which she was gingerly exploring her injury.

"Is this the spot? Am I hurting you?"

"Only don't press."

He went on passing tender, skilful fingers around and across the area of trouble, until at last he could assure himself that the scare was groundless in so far as there was no dislocation.

"It should be only a small sprain. Try if you can stand up."

She obeyed. Bearing on his arm, she cautiously lowered her weight on to the ankle.

"I think I shall be able to limp home, but it's unfortunate it has happened so far out."

"You'll have to lean on me. We might as well be off at once, unless you'd like a few minutes more to get over it? The worst seems to be passed."

"Let's go."

Though the frozen hail had already degenerated to soft rain, the gusty pelts were still too rough to permit them to see away. Also a white mist was settling over the hill. The stack was invisible even at that short distance of their crawl. Curious to learn what exactly had happened to it. Ingrid took a more permanent hold on her cousin's arm, and urged him forward.

"Thanks for saving me, Hugh! Your quickness was wonderful."

"Our luck was wonderful."

"That too, of course."

Limping painfully, she took with him the first experimental steps towards their late refuge. But an anticipation of some odd difference in the limited view was possessing the two simultaneously, and before the perplexity of either could find words their feet, seemingly of their own will, first dragged, then stopped. Drapier, after a long spell of staring ahead, turned round to his cousin.

"You're realising that the whole thing has gone overboard,
en
masse
?"

"Yes."

A still longer pause of silence and wonder followed.

"I might have known that all that noise could represent nothing else," said Drapier at last. "The din was hellish, and there was no other thing to blow down. We were absolutely favoured."

"It seems so incredible."

"Why, no. Very impressive to our puny senses, no doubt, as also the happiest of escapes, and something of a coincidence—I mean, our being on the Tor at the time. But perfectly explainable by dynamics and statics."