Devil's Tor (15 page)

He deeply regretted having spoken to Helga last night. Arsinal and Saltfleet had long since, it seemed, passed below the horizon of all this affair. That vision of a dead one had been for him alone; the grave was sealed again for all eternity, and his experience was to be unshared, as unrepeated. He thought that no mortal woman could ever have been like that. The wise men of the Bible had spoken of angels. Helga was of the world, and he had surely sinned, although in ignorance, in confiding to her earthly intelligence a sacred thing. …

At eight o'clock, in his own room at Whitestone, he opened the box, and discovered it to be empty. So was it put beyond doubt in his mind that it was truly the treasure of the Tibetan monastery that he had recovered so queerly in the recesses of Devil's Tor. Thus either the stone had not been to be deposited there, or else he had thwarted its destiny. Now, therefore, he had very many things to think about.

Helga, in bed in that morning twilight, listened for the sound of the front-door's shutting behind Hugh; then, while its quiet slam was still in her ears, jumped softly to the floor, to confirm from the window his authentic departure. She watched his dark form skirting the front of the house to reach the lane gate. She also had not slept well. Saltfleet, and poor Hugh's presentiment, and his flight from India with those men in pursuit, and occasionally the will, had kept her tossing; but now she was only wondering if she might dare use her cousin's absence from the house to examine for a second time that extraordinary occult mineral specimen he had brought home with him. It had all at once begun to tease her imagination again, with the possible opportunity of handling it anew. It might be that its reputed fascination, leading as far as dishonesty and dishonour, always started in this way, yet at present she was unaware of any obsession in her mind. She believed it merely to be a very natural and harmless curiosity.

Unless he came back for anything, which was unlikely, he should be out of the way for quite two hours, and much less than that would serve her purpose. She need not be at all long over it. Then of course he might have the little wonder with him, or the box in which it was might be locked, and if she had a key to fit, it would be lucky, so that after all she might not have the decision; and there was small sense in disturbing herself with hesitations before the fact was ascertained. Merely to learn whether she could or could not do it, and without needing to decide beforehand whether she
would,
she might just step along to his room to find out if the object was there and accessible. … Yet on the other hand how upset Hugh would be, if he knew, by such an open disregarding of his express wish and warning!—how disgusted by her descending to such a thing behind his back! And yet again how
should
he ever get to know? The fact was, she was proposing no harm to either him or his property. He seemed to think it might hurt
her.
She did not see how one more brief sight of its queerness could hurt her, but if it did, surely wrong did not enter into it. …

Nevertheless that dread of his displeasure, and some stubborn persisting sense of the falsity of the action, and her pride of dignity as a lady and the mistress of the house in which he was a trusting guest, and also her half-conviction of the uselessness of the attempt—so many considerations outweighed the single instinctive desire; and she returned to bed.

For an hour and longer she lay in the unnameable state between waking and dozing, sometimes forgetting her half-will to have that monastery stone again in her hand, at other times revolving still, but very feebly, its supports and oppositions—long spells of drowsy whim and doubt, broken by occasional passing spasms of impulse nearly amounting to a realising leaping from bed once more. Then her customary time for rising approached, and nothing yet need be determined though she should anticipate it by a few minutes. Accordingly, getting into dressing-gown and slippers, she opened the door, to put out her head and listen—as she had listened that hour and a half ago, but this time for noises in the house. No one stirred and there was a heavy silence.

Should she go forward? for this chance would never come her way again. He could scarcely be back for half an hour yet. His room was only a few steps along the same passage. She ought not to be such a coward. And so she glided out, and found his door, and passed in.

The bed clothes were all heaped together and dragging on the floor, from which she understood, with a sigh, how much worse his night had been than even hers. She began to search in turn the drawers of his chest.

The japanned tin box was rather wedged at the back of one of them, preventing her from getting at it without taking it out altogether. When she had it free in her hand, the lid lifted; Hugh hadn't locked it. That probably meant it was empty but no, the stone like a broken flint was there. Illogically she blamed his remissness. He must have been perturbed on going to bed, as a result of their talk. It was silly in him to make such an ogress of her, she was very willing to fill the place of elder sister to him, if he would only whole heartedly consent. Meanwhile, however, she must be on guard against the surprising of her by the others in the house; so it would be wisest to carry the box off to her own room, keeping her ear and a corner of her eye to the window, for Hugh's return.

Thus she bore away her prize. But the door of her bedroom being locked behind her and the box set down ready to her hand on the dressing-table before the window, she stood for a moment longer to quell a rather pronounced hurrying of her heart, that annoyed her by its resemblance to the protest of a conscience. And when this moment too was passed, and now her thumb was actually once more on the box's lid, still another postponement arose. Indeed, the intervention was of the most singular and unexpected kind, for, quite unaccountably, the whole floor of the room shook violently, just as though a procession of heavily loaded motor-lorries were passing down their lane outside—only, worse than that, for the sustained tremor was being accompanied by the wholesale swinging of the picture frames against the walls, and the musical dancing of her pretty ewer inside its bowl on the wash-stand.

"Here we have an earthquake!" was her inward declaration, while she forgot the box, in trying to see all things in the room at once.

A yet ruder shock confirmed the sagacity of her guess, for it was succeeded with the briefest pause by a hubbub of clattering pans and the disastrous smashing of crockery, ascending evidently from the kitchen downstairs. She darted to the door, turned the key like lightning, flew out to the landing, and was about to call to the maids, but then, recollecting that if they had been up she must have heard them before, she decided to hasten down the stairs to investigate the mischief at first hand.

Ingrid as well limped from her room, to peer uncertainly over the banister. The noises had ceased, however, and there was no repetition of the shaking of the house, so she turned back to her mother's room, intending to acquaint her with the incident if she were asleep still, or discuss it with her if she were awake and already aware of it. But the room was vacated, and for a few seconds she continued standing hesitating by the door.

Her idly-wandering eye rested on the tin box lying on the dressing-table, which she failed to identify. It never occurred to her imagination that her mother could have a secret from her, so, less out of inquisitiveness than for the sake of occupying herself while waiting, she moved across the room; and, with that lowest possible degree of curiosity, opened the box to look wide-eyed in.

Wonderingly she took the fragment of apparently common flint in her hand, whereupon the cheap metal lid fell back with a clash. By so extraordinary a chain of small whims and accidents was it fated that Hugh Drapier's own proper treasure must be lost to him, and he not know it. For just as she edged to the window to get a better light for the stone, a crunching footstep on the gravel outside and below persuaded her to thrust her head out, the sash being already up, and lo! advancing upon the porch—Peter! ... in knickerbocker tweeds and soft hat, a thin suit-case in his hand, his cheeks pale with the unnatural life of London; the inevitable cigarette glued to his lips. …

Heedlessly dropping the flint into her dressing-gown pocket, that she never used, and making of her ankle-sprain an occasion for the display of her spirit's superiority, she came away quickly from the window, to re-seek her own room. She would hail him from the window
there. …
She was exactly in time to intercept him before he reached the porch.

"Peter, look up!"

Very little taken aback, Copping cocked his eye aloft, located the familiar soft voice, and raised his free arm in salutation, but deferred returning the spoken greeting until he was right against the wall beneath her. Then but a quite small interval divided their two faces, his looking up, hers down. A third person might have thought it odd that neither smiled. Peter indeed was not of the smiling sort, but Ingrid seemed to herself to be full of the strangest emotions, that were not far removed from tears.

He was a rather slight, rather short young man, of cool carriage, with a sharp darkish face, decorated by a diminutive artist's beard, that seemed in curiously perfect keeping with his eyes. They were green-grey, contemplative, noticing, and habitually lit by a light that rebuked complacency and was not of the crowd. A man having such eyes should be upon a spiritual journey. The journey being necessarily in art in Copping's case, since art was his medium, he might well possess the fundamental requirement at least of genius, namely, the distrust of existing principles.

Ingrid had come to hate that term genius, so cheapened as it was by misapplication to the merely clever, but the soul behind Peter's eyes which suggested its application to him as well, this it was that she could very easily love. Neither was she particularly interested in painting, which for her possessed not the immensity of architecture, not the frozen purity of sculpture, and not the fluvial might and darkness of music, but seemed essentially based on the exact life-like imitation of existing limited forms; yet this his choice of a mode of expression could never pain or vex her. Her faith was that the supernatural fire was sufficient in itself, and that all these arts were merely its temporal pastime. The living soul surely was immortal, but its thrown-off works on earth must be very grand indeed to last a few thousands of years.

And Peter found her nature as full of nonsense, and as wonderful. For a girl, she was so abnormally idealistic and occupied with the myths of the past. These barbaric personifications of chaotic and cosmic nature, these nondescript shapes and half-meanings, these male and female gods, demigods, eponyms, heroes and monsters, of the ancient twilight world, they loaded her brains with uselessness, and falsified for her everything modern. Sometimes, even, he had fancied that it would be a tremendous step forward and new link between them, if he could surrender to her will in the matter by
painting
some of those antique allegories and reachings-out of the human heart. But it was impossible. He could never bring himself down to tell literary stories in paint. He was for years past experimenting with pure symbolism, as the always unattainable height of his art. He was a scornful and reticent exponent in words, so that Ingrid, made duller by her indifference, was hitherto still ignorant how paintwork could forsake the likeness of real things in order to show their soul. … It appeared not to matter. In unvarying fineness of temper and all that was most opposite to the frivolity, affectation and selfishness of the generality of the modern girls and women of his acquaintance, she shone a jewel. Not in any case did the inspiration of his art need a second.

So this subtle and as yet undeclared sex affinity of theirs could quietly override the menace of a future intellectual discord. Nor would Copping, turned twenty-seven, haughty, dogged, and a rebel by nature, have permitted financial considerations to obstruct what he deemed his blessedness. His father had left him the equivalent of six hundred a year, which he lived easily within. The estate firm itself had gone to his less imaginative, more practical elder brother, who was a married man with children. Thus Peter had nothing additional to expect in that quarter, while his work was unlikely to sell for many a long year; nevertheless his certain six hundred remained. Then the temporary upset of his career—his engagement to a girl living in the provinces, the finding a house and furnishing it, the damnable wedding arrangements, the honeymoon, the sacrifice of all his working hours for God knew how long to a new bride, however fondly loved—and afterwards the children—and more children, and worries and distresses of all sorts—this mental nightmare, in certain moods, ready to hurl itself at his throat so soon as he should propose to Ingrid, and be accepted: neither was
it
the obstacle, or he must have felt shame. It was another reason that to the present had tied his tongue with her, though for a couple of years past now their intimacy seemed to have reached a stage when it could only miserably mark time or translate itself to the definite understanding.

Some mysterious painter's instinct, going upon a thousand caught glimpses of a peculiar calm foreign power and aristocracy of her mien, with lookings-away of her eye and strange intonations of her voice that had nothing to do with her other romantic idealism, for very much longer than those two years had been warning him that he must not be in haste to assume that she was entirely his; or, in the broader view, his at all. Her affection, and dearness, and simplicity, and nobleness, and human imperfections—they were his; but if she possessed a second soul, and that second soul were for another man not yet appeared, then rashness might be tragical. Was he unequipped to live with and satisfy that deeper self of hers? The question stated the problem inexactly. So far as he was concerned he had no apprehensions, but was prepared to attempt it. She might not even be aware of the existence within herself of another nature—she could not be, for already he had her love in all but words. This, however, made it but the more disquieting, as showing that she had as yet overcome nothing of it. The true and more bewildering problem was, was that other self representative of some motherhood instinct in her, urging her, against her own knowledge, towards a special physical type of man, that the right children of her destiny might be produced?