Devil's Tor (68 page)

"To speak the truth," said Peter, "my head at this moment is such a hell-pot of flights and emotions in dispersion, that I prefer to hold my tongue altogether, leaving Mrs. Fleming's direct answering to you."

"Your indirect responsibility will be the same."

"I feel this: that in handing the business to you, I hand it to fate."

Saltfleet went on looking at him queerly:

"But then, if we see no reason to change our minds, the stone will be brought down to-day: a plain conclusion that hardly needs the invocation of a mystic fate."

"Probably. Nevertheless you have had an offer and must reply to it: and I intend neither to help nor hinder you any more."

"A greater candour in you would be our best help, Mr. Copping."

Peter hesitated, drew at his cigarette, and was silent. Then:

"A man may find himself at a parting of roads, without known direction or a soul wiser than himself to consult. It should be a situation where the equivalent of the spin of a coin is as good an expedient as any other."

"A counsel of impotence indeed!"

"You are as undecided, I judge. … Believe me, it really may not matter."

Saltfleet shrugged.

"Let me hear you, Arsinal."

Arsinal at that came into the talk: but his voice struck the others as curiously lowered and altered.

"I shall confess that I too feel the necessity of reviewing Mrs. Fleming's proposal—in itself so inexplicable. Mr. Copping is in open doubt about it; you, Saltfleet, are too full of questions not to be at least hesitant; and I—I think I must be chiefly amazed at our earlier precipitancy. … Almost it is as if a sun had come into the sky, to twist our thoughts in its direction. The triple coincidence alone is past any ordinary explanation. Miss Fleming's persuasions for each of us have perhaps borne fruit, but the case transcends that. Let us have the courage of our illumination, and dare in very great calmness to believe that within the last minutes we have been—
visited. …

"Your parting of roads, Mr. Copping: you cannot mean that you are pulled between yourself and another; but, rather, that that other's truer advantage hides itself from you. Neither shall I mention a name, nor shall I pretend ignorance. If she attends this meeting on the Tor, you see unpleasantnesses for her, and a possible danger: but if she remains away... you feel perhaps, that you will be depriving the business of a principal actor... you may even fear to incur some wrath—of the spirit governing. … So, since you know not what to do, you will do nothing: and I am willing. Yet I aver that you do know beforehand what my choice must be; that your neutrality accordingly is impure; and that your
responsibility,
accordingly, is equal with mine—with ours. …"

"Mr. Copping has no choice and no responsibility."
...
Ingrid's inscrutable, weary eyes rested on Arsinal from out of her face of endurance. But Peter let drop his cigarette, and crushed it with a heel.

"Why, if they want to involve me in your meeting, Ingrid, in God's name let them! If the general supernatural dictation is necessary to their assurance of your presence at it, let them have this dictation, and let each of us be cognisant of what the rest are thinking and feeling! I can arrange for you; they cannot: that is what Mr. Arsinal means."

"But I mean that I will attend no meeting for which you have a responsibility."

She had begun unconsciously to approach him; but stopped. Her eyes sought Arsinal again.

"Mr. Arsinal, I tried to disguise it, but your first ignoring of my mother's plan mystified me. You had a right to disdain it, it is so fantastic and dark, and you could not know her natural simplicity of good sense. But I, who do know her, understood that it never could have sprung from her own inspiration. So when Mr. Copping quietly announced that the plan was refused in favour of a better, all my thoughts seemed to die in my head. … Then I remembered a story in one of the northern sagas: of a timber log carved with magic runes, that makes its way across the sea, against tide and current. Could not it be the same with this meeting of my mother's? I waited to learn: now it is appearing I was right. A magic has worked. …"

"The statement is instructive, Miss Fleming; for I could not at all grasp the underlying idea of your mother's proposition before. Her mind being strange to me, I could not tell if the suggestion for a postponed and somewhat theatrical settlement were characteristic or uncharacteristic. Now that I am told it should be outside her habit, the fatality extends."

"I hadn't finished. I was going to add that it is my queer intuition of the meeting's certainty that has been stopping me from supporting my mother. I could so conclusively have supported her. I could simply have forbidden Mr. Saltfleet to remove the stone. … It was not to depend on me. It was like a wonderful and terrible play going on, that I have not been allowed to interrupt. … Considering these things, how could you, Peter, of all people, be called to account for a meeting to-morrow?"

"Yes, I fancy I see what you are arriving at."

"I am not dramatising it, I am only trying to say it as shortly as possible. The lives of some of us may be abruptly ended or fearfully transformed to-morrow on the Tor. I feel I might not come down as I should go up. A deeper darkness seems moving against me all the time... just like the temple of Nyx I have sometimes imagined: only this is moving to surround me, not I into it. When light returns and dreary normalness begins again—as it always must—if I am still alive indeed... I think my existence to the present may be...
gone.
How could you—supposing that you escape, as, of all of us, you and mother might, Peter—but how could you sustain that everlasting mountain of self-reproach? ... Hugh was killed yesterday. His death, I say, was unpreventable. But if anyone had loved Hugh overmuch and had innocently contributed to his being on the Tor, could she ever forgive herself his death?"

"You are not to die," objected Peter sullenly.

"It hardly concerns the argument, what is to happen to me. If I am anyhow subjected while you go free, a dreadful self-poison must begin in you to-morrow night that may last with life itself and bring your art to nothing. So this must be settled first."

"You should have opposed us at once. To hold your hand as you did was rather too delicate and cunning a manœuvre to lie in your nature."

"I conceive it thus," interposed Saltfleet. "Miss Fleming's mind has been double. Its conscious part has been very weary, humble, and aloof, desiring not to intervene: but, underneath, it was in a manner aware that to-morrow evening's assembly was already invisibly established in futurity; and that part of her mind has been spinning out the time, to get the thing arranged while we should be here together. … This may be the actual truth. Yet we may have been listening less to an exposition of the truth than to—a sacrifice."

"What sacrifice?" demanded Peter.

"Of her apathy. And if you cannot apprehend, Mr. Copping, how, the will in a matter once being believed permanently stilled, its unexpected sharp resuscitation may represent the acceptance of sordidness and horror again—why then, I fear that Miss Fleming's return to activity will have proved too high for you. …"

Ingrid faced Arsinal, who, very pale, put his arms behind his back in waiting. She said:

"If there is any responsibility at all in this room, Mr. Copping is sharing it, and I will not come to a meeting."

"We shall none of us have been able to help a meeting."

"Then I will speak to you afterwards, Peter." ... She came back to Arsinal. "You will leave the stone meanwhile?"

"Yes, I promise that."

"And the time you know?"

"We were told nine."

Saltfleet was silent.

"And you ...?" Peter asked him suddenly.

"Yes, I am personally willing. …" He paused; then went on with a marked reluctance: "But I cannot let Miss Fleming's attitude pass without a warning—a remonstrance—what you like. …" He looked at Ingrid. "At this last of our conference, Miss Fleming, you are become so spiritually formidable to me—but I will not say on what account—that I could only seek the deeper truth of whatever you should choose to assert: and still, I
would
seek that truth. I would seek it in my own way; and perhaps that way might have little ostensible connection with your words; and perhaps the underground connection, discovered by my instinct, might be the more real. …

"The absolute value to us of happiness I do not know, but I am not without experience of the world, and I have found this: that while some persons are most benefited by happiness, others improve, rather, under one form or another of suffering; but those who react most to the happiness seem to be the softer and ignobler class of persons. Happiness, besides, is good for a particular case, but the sea waits always to sweep in; pain cannot be kept out of our lives. In erecting a dam against a misery, we are doing doubtless a very instinctive and necessary work, but we must not imagine that happiness is any the more to be ours. … Therefore, the better gift to Mr. Copping, instead of this assurance of his peace of mind to come, which neither your action nor his acceptance can translate into a permanent general condition for him... I repeat, the better gift would be the indestructible recollection that in a great crisis of his life he conducted himself greatly. …"

"Now you have rebuked me!" said Ingrid, with a flitting faint smile. "You know, however, that I could not speak of this to you, or before you."

"Arsinal and I are immediately to be off, to leave you two alone."

Peter was staring at his own feet, and frowning. He glanced up to ask Saltfleet pointedly:

"What is your disturbing interest in my future well-being?"

"I saw how it went with Miss Fleming on the Tor this morning. These transcendental changes may hardly be endured without a following confusion in all the lower faculties: accordingly, she may easily be in want of a human adviser."

"A transcendental change?"

"I judged that you were nearly at your limit." He spoke to Ingrid; who answered him:

"Straight roads are the rarest, and before the limit is reached, another time, a quite different turn may be given to everything."

"It should have been like an inpouring."

"I could not wish to be filled only, in the manner of the saints, though the world should have my spillings. To come too soon there—to heaven, I mean—is certainly to come by the wrong way. The right way is the thwarting of instincts, a sunless mind, an evil conscience... dishonour, contumely, and the like. … The unfortunate know things that have the stamp of
first lessons.
If the radiance of another world is to kill, in filling, me, I almost hope it may. …"

"You want distress?" asked Saltfleet.

"It seems to be the one grandeur we can grasp."

"I cannot clearly see how far you are speaking from new insight, how far from race. Fineness, daring, giving; instead of the current virtues of getting and holding: the substitution may just as well be the distillation of ancestry."

"I think that ancientness is in many men and women that one here and there may be equipped with special qualities for certain deeds."

Saltfleet said no more. Then Ingrid's face relaxed to nervelessness again, as if her strength for talking were suddenly run out. But a moment afterwards she re-knit her brows to their previous half-sternness.

"It is getting late, and you were to go. But tell me first... is it that you are more
concerned
in these events than other persons? ..."

"In the different senses that
you
are concerned, and Mr. Arsinal, and Mr. Copping... and even Drapier
was...
no, I do not seem to be concerned at all. I should be the one outsider. … And still undoubtedly I must be, and am, concerned. … However, it is to-day we are putting our questions, and not till to-morrow will they be answered. I am unsure whether it is because I am more concerned, or less, that I am wishing you well, Miss Fleming; but I would have helped you through a time that must be considered perilous, if I could. …"

Ingrid gazed at him silently, clasping her forehead as in trouble and confusion. He bowed to her, and left the room. Arsinal, with a grave civility to the unheeding girl, followed him.

Thus Peter and Ingrid were left standing alone.

It was felt between them that neither was she to stay, and so he did not desire her to sit. But with an odd abstracted yet nervous playing of his eyes on and off her face, he waited for the slamming of the front door, then began at once what he had to say.

"Ingrid, the girl I spoke with in the garden two days ago has disappeared, and here in her place, talking to me, is an apparition. For that you are not to blame, but the consciousness annihilates my every opening: I have twenty explanations to demand, and I cannot demand them of a ghost. But what did Saltfleet mean before?"

"About my better gift to you?"

Peter nodded.

"I think he meant, Peter, that passive submission to... a change... is too low and negative a state for a man whose life is to achieve something... that an active surrender, rather, should help him to power, and be an undying source of power. So that I ought not to assist you to the feebler state, but to the fiercer and self-scorning and more vivid."

"To approximate to
his
nature, doubtless! Yet how may I surrender that which I no longer hold in keeping?"

"Until I am taken from you, I have not left you."

"But these are words, and I say that you have left me."

She remaining quiet, he added:

"Or unless Saltfleet thought so, why should he regard the precipitation of a doubtful disaster as my most helpful plan?"

"He is ignorant, fallible, as we all are. He cannot be understanding our relations. I haven't left you—of my will I couldn't leave you... but if you are able to look forward underneath tomorrow—if you can see something else there, Peter—then—"

"Words! Words! ... What! you are among the ignorant and fallible, and can take on the colour of heaven? Don't you know that your face grew bright? It was at the end of that last long silence, which must have been its preparation. No human face could be so bright without a divine informing. …"