Devil's Tor (61 page)

"Permit me to come with you to the house... now."

Peter regarded him. Arsinal's face was paler than ever, but he had stilled its commotion, to a new calmness that seemed even unforced: it was a delicate repose almost, as if a remote inaccessible will far within was being unconcerned with his physical frame and its possible insultings and mischances. For an instant the artist became an artist again, in pondering the case of this strange beauty of quietness and resolution in a man who, nevertheless, by his eyes, might be crazy. … But once more he dropped his gaze, to shake his head and refuse him.

"You'd better not. Everyone there isn't initiated."

"Yet you go primed against me. Refined women are to be alarmed by this hint of reckless unprincipled men, fallen out on a point and probably to come to blows before them. Were Mrs. Fleming to envisage me, I fancy her alarm would change to a smile! ... I could also perhaps persuade her that Mr. Saltfleet's true and ostensible motives for presenting himself on the Tor uninvited are different—that the true motive may have more of insolence, but certainly carries nothing that tact cannot deal with. And surely, it is an extravagant picture... of a couple of mature men of culture, not unknown in the world, engaged in a physical scuffle over a point of remote superstition! Neither can you have failed to note, Mr. Copping, that it is always within his power to stop the whole settlement, with its alleged dangers, by anticipating it in the manner you have suggested. But he is 'a party to a trust', so cannot see his way to do that. The principle, no doubt, is sound, but what must we think of a peril to a lady, that is after all of less account than her imaginary disappointment or other emotion in a transaction which has already seen her indifference?"

"The first of this idea of picking up the stone was his, as a matter of fact," said Peter, glancing interrogatively at Saltfleet. The latter returned:

"But never as a practical proposal. I found it odd that Mrs. Fleming wasn't offering us the thing in the directest way."

"I believe you are right: I apologise. Then the rest of your argument, Mr. Arsinal... ?"

"I wish you to convince Mrs. Fleming that the attendance of herself and her daughter on the hill to-morrow is most unlikely to be followed up by any unpleasantness whatsoever. If I don't put it stronger, it is because, as a scientific precisian, I am accustomed to find the exactest words the most forcible. Mr. Saltfleet, I think, has wanted to break with me, and so has insulted me. But over and above that, he must be wishing to wreck this final settlement to-morrow. It goes against some private plan he has laid down for himself. … It is a little more than hypothesis, unfortunately: the facts in support are too many. For he it is, Mr. Copping, who ever since yesterday, before my arrival, has sought occasions with Miss Fleming. I won't offend you by conceiving her manner of response: he may have succeeded in interesting and exciting her in this occult business, or she may at last be principally repelled by the persistency of his intrusions. To retain her, he has nearly from the first made use of my technical knowledge of some of the matters which may be supposed to impinge on her own intellectual, and even emotional, preoccupations. He has constantly urged upon us both the advantage, the necessity, of a meeting between us, to discuss the territory on either side of such a common border. Thereby, her release from us and our affairs has been from hour to hour put off. …

"On her account, too, it is—I shall say it openly—that he will neither prevent to-morrow's assembly on Devil's Tor by an action that will necessarily stop all further acquaintance, nor permit, if he can help it, that assembly, which equally is to bring everything to a short end... but he will spin out, and he will spin out! ... I, the man of dark design, I have expressed my willingness indifferently to either course. … And then, must I speak besides of his rejection for both of us of the offer brought this morning? It was a good offer, and for the emphasis of its condition he had but himself to thank... so good an offer, that even he dared not return it directly on your hands; but first must superfluously qualify it, and then altogether outrage its terms. …

"And similarly, this second offer, that you yourself find only too just and generous on the part of a lady who might well have sent us to the devil, after our bad treatment of her... he means to outrage
it
as well. It seems that he proposes to do so by putting fear into Mrs. Fleming's heart: the fear of a scene of violence, the fear of an experiment that is not in the programme, only I will not be coerced in a case that is no one else's but mine. … Assure her therefore, Mr. Copping, that there will be no assault made by the far stronger of two men in the presence of a delicate-minded girl, who could never wish to have the continued acquaintance of such a pugilist and brigand. Assure her also that so far am I from intending her daughter that grotesquely-conceived occult or biochemical mischief, that I am even prepared not to
see
her—you shall blindfold me with my own handkerchief before her arrival. The proffer is not more ridiculous than the fear to be allayed by it. … I trust to your honesty not to pass on Mr. Saltfleet's baseless suggestion in order to procure the withdrawing of an arrangement you dislike, omitting to pass on these just as emphatic and much more reasoned considerations of mine. But a personal interview with Mrs. Fleming this evening would be the best."

Saltfleet smiled sourly.

"So many words, Mr. Copping, and still not that one little undertaking which would have obviated them all!" But Peter's attending stare was unsympathetic.

"I shall report everything, gentlemen. Altogether, the affair isn't growing more agreeable as one sees into it. Of course, the feature I strongly resent is this intolerable bandying of Miss Fleming's name. Neither is the one of you privileged by a chance or stolen meeting or so, to seek to constitute himself her protector at another meeting she will attend under the conduct of her own people; nor is the other of you doing anything but insulting her by that laboured suggestion that she is being pursued for her acquaintance by a man she as good as doesn't know. I am the youngest and probably the least travelled in this room, and yet I must surmise that you, gentlemen, have acquired less than I of the world's discretion. That, as it happens, I am to marry Miss Fleming, is not the point. A Lady isn't to be so freely appropriated by strangers."

"For any excess, I apologise," said Saltfleet. "... However, you should be rather confounding the human and super-human elements of the case, Mr. Copping. Let Arsinal make his own excuses: I don't wish her acquaintance, and that is enough said of that. I would see her well through a peculiar occasion if I could. You are shying somewhat suddenly; just now, I remember an appeal on her behalf!"

"To stop the meeting; not to rule it."

"And you thanked me for proposing to rule it too."

"If it were to stop it."

"I ask no better."

Peter lit a new cigarette, and for a time said no more. Then, while they all uneasily stood still within that small circle of the floor, looking different ways, he announced:

"Very well! I'll be off, to see if I can get the consent of Mrs. Fleming and her daughter to your fetching away the stone as soon as you like, so forestalling that meeting. You both wish it?"

Saltfleet assented.

"And you, Mr. Arsinal?"

"I've said so. For the stone I must have, at all hazards, but if a particular meeting of persons
can
be stopped, it is very evidently not fated."

"Fated! ..." repeated Peter after him, in a musing undertone.

It was the last word of their talk, but none moved, and they remained standing there. It seemed as if, now that the Tor gathering was refused and this other simpler, less dramatic settlement substituted, the neglected supernatural in the case were starting to work again, like an unborn thing, within the recesses of them all. Peter, finding, nearly in amazement, that he alone had achieved the decision, giving it its permanent shape, was to doubt, with a doubt sinking to dismay, if objective horrors after all could be so easily penned; if destiny could be bent back without the worse disaster of irresistibility at last for the vain delay. He pictured, as it were in one complexity of image, Drapier lying in an open shell in a dark room, and those grey ghostly mourners dancing along a ledge, and the stack of great rocks in the act of being hurled headlong over the Tor's side in a grisly storm, and Ingrid and Saltfleet standing face-to-face, pale, eyeing each other peculiarly... and other things... and to all this, his own feeble, querulous, "No—no!"... So a creative artist might feel, who had cheapened his soul in the name of safety, turning his eyes from a vision of life coming in the form of madness. …

But Saltfleet was recalling for one time more those metamorphosing spirit-eyes of the afternoon, and knew inside himself the beginning of a sense of abashment for his cowardice in the face of a great adventure, as for his betrayal of the higher unaffected dauntlessness of a noble girl. … While Arsinal already seemed to become aware of his impurity of haste, greed, circumspection, that had shown him impotent in this short miraculous day of failure and twofold triumph. For once he had thought to have lost the flint, then, in a swoop, had swept down upon its brother and it; yet because his soul had somehow parted from its faith, these events had been merely luck for him, and more luck he had feared to risk, and so would possess that original and still-unsecured of the twin stones certainly. But had it
not
been luck for him, had it been unseen design and contrivance, the mighty tide-wave might yet have been advancing, not ceased. … As a contemptuous alms from these underlings and strangers, the stone might be given him this very day. It could not be the same, but something would have gone out of a transaction made safe and vulgar. … The retribution of the high—it should entail, perhaps, the slow climbing back to worth, during years. …

A noise sounded outside the room, and Peter, who alone might realise its strangeness at that hour, moved after another moment to the door, looking puzzled, and even alarmed.

Ingrid, white-faced, dressed all in black, frowning from her indecision, stood there on the tiny landing, one gloved hand still suspended towards the door latch that evidently, after doubt, she had been about to depress. As well as the immediate vision of Peter, her eye, in its instantaneous exploration of what it could take in of the room through the gap, saw enough of its standing occupants to know who they were. With dismay she realised what she had come to and was interrupting; yet the suspicion must have been the cause of her hesitation while the room was still ominously shut against her, if in silence. But Peter, thinking that that quick probable ascertaining of the identity of his visitors would be followed by a prompt retreat, put back his hand to close the door; and now they were alone and face-to-face.

"Mother sent me. She is rather anxious at your being so long gone. They were out?—and you left word that they were to come on here?"

Her dropped tones, nearly a whispering, were on account of those open-eared men just beyond the thin panels, yet also seemed like awe for the coincidence of their drifting together still again. Peter's sensitiveness understood it so. Without reflection almost, she must be including it mystically in her whole scheme of wonders; nor, doubtless, was she unjustified. Abandoning from lack of hardihood his first instinctive movement to grasp her arm, and contenting himself with continuing to eye her in a kind of mournful scrutiny of curiosity, he said:

"We'll talk afterwards. I want you now, if you will, to come in to them for a minute."

'"Then is nothing to stand fixed, Peter?"

"Let me judge here. It's rather material you should meet them for this once."

He reopened the door, to follow close on the girl's reluctant and dreamlike entrance. Saltfleet first and then Arsinal bowed.

"Here is Miss Fleming herself," said Peter. There was no other introduction, but, after a quick glance at Arsinal, Ingrid took the chair offered her, while the firstcomers obeyed Peter's sign to reseat themselves. The artist remained standing. He went on to say:

"Mrs. Fleming has been getting uneasy, and her daughter has come to find out what is doing. It happens very well. Now, gentlemen, she can give you the desired assurance in the matter of fetching that stone away.''

His spirit was shut again to unearthliness. These evil changes since overnight in Ingrid's physical condition were filling him with too much indignation. Simply as a man caring for a woman, he could not let it fester and spread—the nightmare attack on her sweetness... while the pair attending her were like ghouls seeking to drag her down. … But no one answered him immediately.

"I should be a little more explicit. Your mother's latest offer, Ingrid—we've all three just been discussing it; and have come to the unanimous opinion that it represents a needless delay. These gentlemen are promised the thing they want; it is at the present moment on top of Devil's Tor, where Mr. Saltfleet can put his hand on it; so that there can be no sense in keeping them waiting another day. Are you agreeable to their having it now? It's not too late to get it this evening."

It was the unanimity, however, of their dislike of a plan that she knew was not of her mother's human prudence, therefore doubtless must prevail in spite of all, which the light behind Ingrid's confusion seized for emphasis out of all the rest of Peter's words. She felt it singular that these three intelligences in the room, each otherwise willing and wishing differently, should so suddenly be united against a happening perhaps fore-ordained. The obscure bewilderment clothed itself in her murmured reply:

"Unanimous!"

"Do you find that queer? Yet a meeting to-morrow is really in the interests of none here. The transfer needs no formalities. If you want to talk, you can do it now. What is the use of waiting?"

"If it is to be settled by judgment. But what can I say, Peter? Do you wish to throw the responsibility on me? I have no standing to decide anything."