Devil's Tor (31 page)

Thank God! it could be no sudden infatuation, evidencing a ghastly need of her physical constitution. She
knew
she could not love so quickly, or without her heart. And she was withered, far too old for another affair—certainly far too old for him... as he was far too tremendous a person for her! She could mean no more than that merely to be acquainted with such a man must be regarded as a singular privilege in the life of any woman. Yet in what was his uniqueness really consisting? She had been intimate before this with other strong clever, wilful men. But they must have been, by contrast with Saltfleet—she searched for the distinguishing difference...
cautious,
was it?—
law-abiding? ...
Yes, perhaps. They had been bold with restrictions. They had been harnessed to the laws framed by other men still; and so the world of the strong and audacious went on, each shouldering his way along
permitted
paths... but this man, careless of any path. He should truly be a Himalayan! ...

Her troubled eye fell strangely upon her daughter, standing in the doorway. Why had she followed her here, and what was she to announce? Sometimes indeed Ingrid would pay her these friendly purposeless visits, when nothing in particular would pass between them, and time would seem to have no value; but her present appearance could not be of that kind, she looked too pale and constrained. And while one hand proceeded slowly to push the door behind her to its latch, the other, Helga noticed, was clenched, which somehow seemed to indicate an excessive agitation. It might still be her weird sense of a mishap to Hugh. What really should there be in that? She hoped it was not a true presentiment, of a horror coming! ... No, no! it was to talk of Saltfleet—and she, as well, needed to talk of him with her daughter—needed to have it put beyond doubt that he had made no sort of impression upon her. … But then again, she might have come about Peter. …

Ingrid sat down without a word, and Helga busying herself with idly rearranging some papers on the bureau, for some moments each appeared to ignore the other's presence. Then the girl shot her mother a long glance, with lifted brows.

"Were you expecting him to call?" she asked, as if casually; but Helga believed that it was to introduce what else she had to say. She turned quietly round from the bureau.

"Mr. Saltfleet? Hugh has been not quite expecting him, I think."

"His friend that you mentioned, is his name Arsinal?"

"Yes. Hugh has told you something about it, then?"

"That he was expecting a visit from a Mr. Arsinal."

"This one came instead. The other is at Oxford."

"Is he coming later?"

"I don't know."

There was a pause.

"Mother, I want you to tell me what that thing is you said he called to recover from Hugh." She added, in her mother's silence of surprise: "I have a reason."

"What reason?"

"Can't you tell me first? Surely you aren't afraid of my indiscretion!"

"It is Hugh's secret, my dear."

"Isn't it what you were discussing together two nights ago, when all the house was asleep?"

"That can have no bearing."

"Well, then, I must think it is this...

Ingrid unclenched her upturned hand, displaying the flint she had taken from the box on her mother's dressing-table the morning before. … But Helga first beheld it stupidly, then took it into her own fingers in slow amazement. She turned it round and round.

"Will you explain where you got it from?"

"From your bedroom yesterday morning, when you were out of it. I was looking at it, but was called away suddenly at the very same moment, so I dropped it into my dressing-gown pocket, where it has remained ever since. But is it what Mr. Saltfleet came for?"

"Let me understand," said her mother. "Did you take this out of a tin box standing on my dressing-table?"

"Yes. You see, I had no idea it was a secret."

Helga's face had become flushed, but only slightly, while the frown that brought her eyes together as she still viewed the stone in her hand seemed neither of anger nor of personal anxiety. Ingrid, watching, felt that she had dealt her a blow indeed, but not one principally affecting her pride, so it must be nearly altogether on Hugh's account. … That was to say, her mother knew that Hugh, having missed the stone, had been obliged to avoid these men coming after him; but now he need no longer do so. And wouldn't that explain her attempts to dissuade Saltfleet from going up to the Tor? ... Yet this, if true at all, could but represent the outermost aspect of a far deeper mystery. For her mother was standing there before her surely too stunned for such a mishap, while the whole case was so plainly of fate, which never took away only to restore. …

Helga, in effect, had not the egoism to dwell upon the consequences to herself of this calamity, so long as its import in Hugh's business remained to be grasped. Her embarrassment, certainly, she saw was to be very inevitable, very humiliating. For whether or not Hugh had yet discovered his loss unfortunately made no difference; she must return the stone into his own hands, with the full story of how it came to be taken from his room and from its box, since were she simply to replace it in that box in his drawer, saying nothing, it might result in his challenging her with the temporary abstraction, in case he
had
discovered it to be missing in the meantime. But then she must either confess the truth too late, to her utter shame, or stoutly maintain the lie, to her more inward mortification and confusion. … All this she perfectly understood at once, and yet was barely thinking about.

She was wondering if it were not a working of Providence that the object should go wandering just when it was being demanded by those men. Otherwise, Hugh (but then he must be missing it. Why hadn't he questioned her?) might have had it in the pocket of the clothes he was wearing this morning; and admitted as much to Saltfleet; and... that perhaps was not to be. … What ought now to be done? It was truly in the class of miracles. …

"Is it what you were talking about?" repeated Ingrid, in a quiet voice of patient persistence.

"Yes, my dear, it is."

"Then I picked a very unlucky day for meddling with it!"

"I don't know. It is a whole chain of blunders, accidents, coincidences. It is the oddest affair altogether. Yours has certainly been a link, but no more than one."

"You had no suspicion it was missing from its box?"

"No, I never looked again."

"What is its use, or value?"

"It is a sacred stone looted from a Lama monastery in Tibet."

"By those two?"

"Yes."

Ingrid took back the stone from her mother's lax fingers. "It might just as well be a piece of common beach flint."

"No, I know it is more than that, even in itself. But I must ask you not to begin studying it too curiously. Hugh wouldn't wish it."

"Mayn't I question Hugh about it?"

"No, it doesn't concern you at all, and he would probably be very angry at your having even stumbled on its existence. He's distracted by other things, too, and far from well. So don't provoke him."

She added, as something which would have to be told her daughter some time:

"As he happens to be treating us very generously, we ought at least to respect his moods. He is to leave us all his money, which will amount to a very considerable sum."

"And that has been his business down here?"

"I have no doubt it was one of his reasons for coming to us."

"He has asked you to serve as executrix, and you were to dispose of this stone, in case he died before they arrived?"

Helga sat down slowly, while looking at her daughter with a sort of fear.

"Yes. … You are very sharp-witted, Ingrid. But you must not say a word to Hugh, or he will fly to the conclusion that I have betrayed his confidence."

"I don't want his money, mother. You don't, either. Why is he all at once imagining his death?"

"It is not necessarily morbidness. He is Scotch, and looks ahead."

"I wish my own present feelings would allow me to agree with you... Let us leave it! ... So, having been shown it once, you borrowed it a second time while he was out? And now you don't know whether he has discovered its absence from the box, or not. … You seemed so anxious just now, mother, that Mr. Saltfleet shouldn't follow him to the Tor, and I thought at first it was because you had both missed this thing I had taken away by accident, and you were afraid of trouble between them on account of its loss. But as you
haven't
missed it, perhaps Hugh is to dispute its ownership, and he has told you so?"

"I cannot say anything."

"And yet he has no antiquarian tastes, nor goes in for travellers' collections, that I have heard of. And if it is to go back to the others at last... surely, mother, this stone must be a very extraordinary specimen, to so attract an outsider?"

"You will end by deducing it all, while I can deny or confirm nothing. Since you are so intent, you had
better
speak to Hugh. His property must be returned to him when he comes in, when you can be with me, to explain your share in the mischance. Then you can, if you wish, proceed to torment him with your questions; though I am sure he will think, even if he does not say it aloud, that it is none of it any business of yours, and that you are certainly not his cousin for the purpose of prying into his personal secrets."

Neither disclaiming nor defending her curiosity, Ingrid sat on in troubled silence. If this then, she reflected, was the matter that had brought Hugh down to Devonshire, it could not also be anything to do with Devil's Tor. And still Arsinal, the wise one of the three, might have had some unseen hand in directing him here... or was it quite impossible? Yet Hugh had spontaneously mentioned Arsinal to her, as a man who might perhaps be able to explain something of this living awfulness of blackness and brightness advancing upon them all. … What the stone's character was, that she must first of all hear from Hugh when he returned... if he should return very soon, in safety. …

"It isn't prying, mother," she said at last. "Let Hugh establish that it's his secret, and I will gladly leave it alone. This bit of stone in my hand, I can almost feel it speaking to me; and do you know what it is saying? That it belongs, not to Hugh, and not to those men, and not to Tibet, or anywhere else; but to Devil's Tor. … That astonishes you, but I can tell you another thing. It's just as if you were all trying to turn me off a road that a very deep instinct teaches me is the right one. …"

"It has been an unsettling week," replied Helga, "but we must keep sane views before us. We know that this stone was in the house while Hugh was paying his visit to the tomb on the Tor. We know that he brought it with him from Tibet, where it must have been for a very long time. We also know that the tomb on Devil's Tor has been sealed by its monument for thousands of years."

"You have all the unanswerable reasons, and I have only my poor feeling, yet it assures me that either there is the connection already, or else there will be one. …"

She dropped a subject that could merely end in misunderstanding, suspicion and heat, in order to inquire, "What is Mr. Saltfleet's profession, mother?"

"Hugh simply informed me that he has climbed in the Himalayas."

"Yes, he looks like it. Surely it must be characteristic, too, that he should choose the highest mountains of the world to conquer. I can well imagine that a man of his stamp would fly at the biggest game."

"It is the modern subjection to the idea of size. Big ships, big buildings, big spectacles, big mountains..."

"That unfairness can't represent your true opinion of him. I am sure he is not vulgar."

Helga viewed her daughter narrowly.

"You liked him?"

"I never thought. I didn't try to fit him in."

"I was wondering how he would appear to you. … For my part, he rather frightened me."

"I know he did."

"Then I hope he did not see it too. But I kept feeling that he was to bring me no very good luck by-and-by. Can you help me to understand?"

"You mean, through Hugh, mother?"

"That I can't tell."

"It would be remarkable otherwise."

"It would be an evil miracle." Helga spoke in a singular tone of restraint.

"Yet his coming here at all like this is nearly the beginning of one... and everything in these last hours seems to be holding more than a single meaning, so why may not his call while Hugh was out?"

"I am sorriest for Peter."

"Because I neglect him? But I don't wish him to be concerned with these matters."

"Nor he, you, I suspect, dear."

Ingrid said nothing, and she went on:

"I'm sorry for Peter, because he has so mistimed his arrival that the entire centre of the stage down here is already filled with other persons and excitements. And though of course I am delighted to meet Hugh again after all these years, still I could very well wish he had put off his visit till his affairs were smoothed out."

The girl's fingers slowly closed over the flint in her hand.

"But, mother, those occurrences on the Tor—you know they could not have happened at any other time, or in any other way. Hugh has been a necessary spectator; perhaps a necessary actor. Where is the sense in regretting a fated thing?"

"A much more emphatic fate than that couldn't prevent my wanting your happiness, dear."

"It is the ancient theme of tragedies, I suppose. Fate against love. Though it seems almost nobler to be a selfless instrument of fate. Anything of the will is surely mean and worldly, mother."

"Not mother-love."

"Perhaps not that. But otherwise, fate is so grand; and then we are not to be merely pawns, but we are to suffer. But that may be the reverse of the medal. On the one side, a destined new shape for the world; on the other, our individual suffering. … What makes me think suffering so terribly important is that it seems to be almost the only universal state. All men and women, the whole of the animal and insect worlds, and no doubt plants as well—all suffer. Doesn't it look as if the entire scheme of things were a
mighty
—
agonization
—towards some undreamt-of magnificence of change? ... What do you think about these matters, mother?"