Devil's Tor (6 page)

A chill came on with the darkness, and Ingrid grew rapidly cold and dispirited. She seemed to herself to be turning her back upon a high-seat of grandeur, in order to re-seek dullness, meanness and commonplace. There was no more thunder, meaning that the spirit-world was no longer speaking to her. As they descended to the stream, the fog grew denser and wetting. It was a token that now the hideous prose of reality, no longer its sublime poetry and music, was to claim her. Her ankle, as often as she mismanaged it, was excruciating; her limping progress otherwise was fatiguing and absurd, and she had the dreadful consciousness all the time how she was overburdening poor Hugh. So clearly the Tor was intended to be interdict for her as well. Yet but a short time ago she had had that sensation that something was immediately to happen in her life, and it had almost at once been followed by the preternatural unsealing of the tomb and the emerging of its ghost. She must endure yet a little while, and perhaps her reward of super-reality would come. She knew not what she expected. She was tired and wretched.

But when they reached the top of the opposite height, they stopped to rest, and could exchange words again. The mist was thinner here; looking back across to Devil's Tor, they saw its rocky base starting from the valley bed, but its crest continued vapour-wrapped, as though its degradation were to be concealed from view. Ingrid recollected the fork which had glittered behind it, it seemed no more than a few minutes since. It must really have been a portent of the destruction.

"Hugh, I feel that you should not attempt that tomb to-morrow," she said, endeavouring to put ordinariness into her voice. "It may be out of proportion. The problematical gain may not be worth the risk."

"Someone will go down if I don't, and you wouldn't have me funk what another man dares?"

Their way over the shoulder-traverse would now be downhill and smoother, so that they could talk as they went. Ingrid accordingly urged his arm, and they moved on. The driving spray that more and more assimilated to fine rain, as they kept their faces towards the invisible houses and beginning lights, was soon to develop to the steady drizzle of the remainder of the walk. She answered him:

"Now we have changed arguments, for it is my turn to say that a thousand years ago neither you nor any other man would have dared. You would have understood that the monument was struck to nothingness by the hammer of Asa Thor, hurled in wrath. That hammer was named Mjölnir, and was what we call lightning. So you wouldn't have dared to visit in idle curiosity a spot so banned by a god. And though we are truly in the twentieth century, it still may not be wise."

"Do you suggest a ban?"

"I feel that it may be unlucky."

He pondered her dissuasions, which, coming from nearly any other person of his acquaintance, would have sounded so lunatic, but she already stood out for him as unique in this proved foreknowledge of hers of at least some things to appear. She had predicted a tomb against all the wisdom of the archaeologists, she had almost as wonderfully twice approached his own secret association with the Tor, and that without curiosity or persistence, but, as it were, merely because her unconscious mind was troubled from time to time by some psychic emanation from his; and now she was warning him against the unluck for him of the place. He might not wholly believe her, he remained unterrified, yet it was impressive.

"Unlucky generally?" he asked. "For anyone?"

She turned half-round to him, with a weary look in her eyes.

"Hugh, there's something tragical about this evening's work, that is all I know. I think it will be imprudent in you to undertake any exploration to-morrow morning in the spirit of sightseeing. I don't think the pile was struck down for anything like that. I'd rather you left it."

"Somebody will go down," he repeated, "and I'm as appropriate as the next man. I've no responsibilities, and my job's done. Strained nerves apart, it's only a trip down a hole."

She saw that he was quietly obstinate to make the essay. "Then have you an electric torch?" she inquired.

"Yes, I brought one down."

They reached the open road none too soon, for by then, though it should still have been daylight, the low clouds and now continuous downpour made all so dark that they could scarcely see before them, but the moor was full of traps. Ingrid weighed more and more heavily on her cousin's arm. She was fagged, soaked, miserable; she longed to be home. After the most protracted silence of all the evening, she violently shook off her apathy, to demand:

"I've told you far too many of my fancies, Hugh, while you have told me far too few of yours. You were so very thoughtful, looking at that ruin. Won't you confess what you were thinking?"

Drapier considered his response.

"The idea took me how the earth must have appeared untold æons back, when still untenanted by even the lowest form of animated slime, but was composed exclusively of basalt continents, fishless seas, an unbreathable gassy air, and innumerable horrific active volcanoes spouting flames, lava and chemical ashes incessantly—and suchlike. It was an unforced and uninvited picture, that I have since been wondering at. … Another followed, as spontaneous. I imagined a vast clock of Time without beginning or end, and not circular but straight, the minute hand of which before my very eyes had just jerked viciously across another of its marked spaces, each space somehow representing ten thousand years. And it struck me how eternity was made up of an infinite line of such single minutes of ten thousand years; and how each contained the appearance and disappearance of empires, nations, even races.

"I was reminded of the time when, as a very small boy indeed, I was carried wrapped-up from one house to another at night-time, and shown the sky of glittering stars overhead. My mother, I remember, told me that there was no end to their number, but that one could go on counting them for ever. And the impossibility of grasping such a stupendous conception made a metaphysical impression upon me then that has remained ever since. Well, on the Tor I obtained the same thrill, only for time instead of space.

"I conclude that these two involuntary pictures, both having to do with ancientness, were in some manner imposed on me by an inherent antique character of the height. I think that that forcible bursting open of its interior may have released certain elements. You, I believe, may understand me better than most people. All hills and mountains are ancient. One hears of 'the everlasting hills', and 'the eternal snows'; which are popularly supposed to be figures of poetry, but in fact the adjective represents a much more real and positive thing. We can't climb a few thousand feet without feeling the sense of enormous
age;
and actually the hills are survivals of a former state of the earth. The plains and valleys are a paste of cemented disintegrated particles, but the heights sticking up out of them—particularly if their rocks are igneous—are what they always have been since towards the laying down of the first foundations of the globe."

"You mentioned the release of certain elements, Hugh."

"I think that there may be the slow accumulation through the ages of a chemico-physical secretion, our invisible contact with the fine emanations from which may produce in us the mental atmosphere of an awful antiquity. I've experienced it on a hundred eminences; and since things, to be recognised, must be named, I have wished to give such a secretion the name of 'eld'. … However, either your Devil's Tor must possess the substance in double or triple measure, or else, as I say, the sudden exposure to the outer air of the contents of its interior has given my receptive answering faculty the augmented dose."

He added in a lower and different voice: "I am inclined to believe, though, that the Tor is in itself highly magnetic, both in a very intensified degree and in a very peculiar manner. I could hardly explain the reason for my faith, but it seems to me that it might even be attractive from a great distance."

But Ingrid was inquiring of herself whether this hypothetical 'eld' of Hugh's could at all account for her vision. She dismissed the notion. A mere stimulus could not have created anything half so wonderful. That stimulus might be valid for Hugh's own dreamings.

And in the new silence that ensued, her cramped fancies continued to cling to his case, from the sheer inability of her will to rouse itself to a change of subject. It dawned upon her that he must be a devitalised man. 'His job was done'—those were his own words. He was so young still, yet seemed to be entirely without plans, and regarded himself as too far advanced in life for marriage. Then his manner: always low-pitched, taciturn, brooding, reserved. He couldn't be ill in body; just the reverse, he struck her as an amalgam of red iron blood and tireless muscle. But there must be some spiritual blight on him. …

What was he to discuss with her mother? It was not to be financial business—not
financial
business—but business of another kind, or he would not have come down to them. Perhaps he wanted to provide for their looking after his affairs, in case anything should happen to him. Yes, that must be the simple and innocent solution. He was contemplating the making of a will, and wished Uncle Magnus or her mother to act as executor.

Well, a man might make a will. Still, he had no known dependents, so why was he suddenly so providing for the contingency of his death? ...
Death!
Was he imagining that he might die soon? Was that the depression, taciturnity and abstraction of his manner? He might have the presentiment. She, so full of intuitions as she was, was clearly not entitled to jeer at the intuitions of others. He might be feeling the foretaste of death within him. And at the thought the contact of his bony arm afflicted her for a single instant as though it were that of a skeleton, escorting her to her own prepared grave. She shook off the absurdity. …

And she dreaded this adventure of his next morning. Was that in connection with his premonition of death? If he were to be killed up there, the feelings of both of them would thus have proved true. Yet how could she tell him so? Very rightly he would deem such a picking of his soul an insolence, and she would only have added anger to his obstinacy. His now determined, dour silence was giving her no opening. She was so tired that she felt she must drop.

It was nearly eleven when the crunch of their steps on the gravel brought the girl's mother to the front-door for at least the fourth time that evening. She was as worried as possible. She knew where they had been going to, knew that they must have been caught on the open moor in the storm, and black night had descended long after they were due to return, still without a sign of them. The rest of the establishment were in bed. She detained her cousin, as he was slipping past her to go upstairs to his room.

"Won't you come down again, Hugh? I suppose you have some excuses to offer for this sort of conduct, and I'd like to know all about it. Get into dry things, and find your way to my room. There's a fire there."

She spoke with smiling reproach, but he knew that he could never be afraid of Helga.

"Thanks! I will."

And so he departed through the hall, leaving Ingrid to her mother.

Whitestone was a long, low, white dwelling of two storeys, standing alone on a high-up part of the southern moor. More than a century old, its austerely simple stone front, interrupted by a porch having Tuscan pillars, was long since made charming to the eye by a careless profusion of climbing Gloire de Dijon roses and jasmine. A shorter wing in keeping, though later in date, flanked the west of the house, overlooking on that side the long downwards-sloping lawn that steepened at its foot to the valley separating the estate from the moors beyond. These were the moors stretching presently to the north of Devil's Tor.

The house's east peeped over a privet hedge at the lane that was its approach from north and south. Its south front faced an imposing sweep of main lawn, level and better kept than the other, behind which were flower-beds and dense shrubberies; with the fields at the rear of all. The utilitarian back of the house looked out on to a protective clump of ash and sycamore trees, that were very leafy and beautiful in the summer.

Ultimately the moors were all around the house, and slanted mostly down from it, but, standing as it did on a cultivable plateau, there were a good many crop-fields first on the south and east. Belhill village to the south-east began about half a mile away, the advanced cottages of which were the house's nearest neighbours. The lane passing Whitestone joined a quarter of a mile on the east-and-west highroad that proceeded through the village. The lane itself then continued downhill towards the Devil's Tor moors.

The house contained a few large handsome living-rooms on the front ground floor, some extra smaller rooms on the ground floor of the wing, and a number of bedrooms, also smaller and slightly old-fashioned, on the upper floor of both the front and the wing. These bedrooms possessed lovely near or distant moorland views; from the windows of those of the front a gleam was sometimes obtainable of the far-off silver Channel. All the rooms had a notable fragrance as of combined lavender and moor air. None of the house's residents used tobacco, while Helga Fleming possessed in wonderful degree that kind of womanly sensitiveness which cannot endure the least suspicion of domestic uncleanness. For her, that scent of lavender was no sweet disguise, but a symbol of feminine law and order.

She had very capably ruled the household for her uncle during the past fourteen years, having taken charge shortly after the death of her husband, in the days immediately preceding the war. Magnus Colborne himself had bought the freehold of the estate twenty-five years since, through the agency of Copping senior, the then thriving Tavistock estate auctioneer, now dead. The negotiation had started the later close personal intimacy between the two men, based partly on a parity of age and fortune, partly on a common overlapping of intellectual tastes, and partly on the requisitions of their ensuing business partnership, the ultimate and unforeseen fruit of which was the securing of the liberty of the upper moorland domicile to Peter, the younger of Copping's sons, the artist-tenant of the village studio whom Ingrid had (perhaps so superfluously) named to her cousin as the one man with whom she was not to be mentally coupled. Peter was mostly in London, but once or twice a year at least he was in the habit of spending some weeks at Belhill; and then he would always be in and out of the house of these great good friends of his. At Whitestone he found many desirable things; tactful sympathy, intellectual interest, appreciation, stimulation, music, and spiritual splendour; but not all in the same person. He cared not to seem to force his visits to Dartmoor, yet to the pondering mind of Helga things were surely drawing rapidly to a head.