Devil's Tor (39 page)

"Perhaps a feeling of my own in the case might help to define the sort of thing you are experiencing. But I'll hold my tongue now. We'll see him together to-day, and
afterwards
discuss it."

Helga hated her daughter's going round to see that man. She knew that, since she had set her mind on it, nothing now would prevent her accompanying Peter—only if she, Helga, herself were to go instead of him; or if a servant were sent with the flint and a letter. It was too important a treasure to risk returning by a maid. She herself, however, could never dare, or bear, to see him again. Peter must go; and therefore Ingrid. … Hugh's unreal face, that her daughter had seen at the window, must have been at the very moment of death; but the times were not certain, within ten minutes. Saltfleet might have reached the spot, as he claimed, minutes later. And neither, in such an hour of awfulness, would he spend admiration on Ingrid; who, besides, was to be escorted by him who should serve as her invisible shield. …

But soon Dunn was announced, and was shown in, decently dressed in dark clothes, having been passed in the passage by the younger two, going from the room; and Helga blessedly had no more time to think.

The landlord of the 'Bell' remained in earnest conference with her for a quarter of an hour. Afterwards she rang for a maid, and directed her to request Mr. Colborne to attend her in her room as soon as possible. The old gentleman appeared immediately; and the talk was resumed, now between the three.

Towards five o'clock Dunn left the house again, in company with Colborne, and Peter as friendly support to the latter.

At the "Bell'', at some time after seven o'clock on the same evening, Saltfleet was sitting upstairs in his room, erect in a hard-seated chair with arms, his legs outstretched, his back turned to the window directly behind him, and his lips moving about the stump of a dead cigar. On a round table at his elbow stood an untasted and forgotten whisky-and-soda. The dense white outdoor fog darkened the apartment to twilight. His lowered eyes were fixed in a frown. In the sheltered palm of his hand, being thus further shaded from even such wretched light as stole round his intervening person from the old-fashioned lattices at his rear, reposed Drapier's flint, which now for the first time he could examine at long leisure. The examination had been proceeding for a great while.

In the stone's black pool he had already detected that introductory incessant passage of vapour forms, and his judgment was vacillating as to the actuality or imaginariness of these new infinitesimal pin-points of brightness behind them—he assumed,
behind
them, since (if there at all) they were perpetually disappearing and reappearing. … So fully was he absorbed in the weird regard, that only for one break in many minutes had he looked up, to refresh his eyes in blinking at the opposite wall, while recalling a hitherto uncomprehended phrase of Arsinal's free rendering of the Knossos inscription:

" That which came from the stars, and is full of words of its home. …"

And certainly it demanded no inordinate fancifulness to identify these white wreaths travelling across a dark field with the clouds of a night sky, or these doubtful dazzling specks with stars, making due allowance for the scale. … He could accept, at any rate, the answering of the thing in his hand to that ancient description as the sign of its genuineness, as far as its recovery from Drapier was concerned. And any prior uncertainty of Arsinal's should be removed too. It must be the stone he had gone after. Saltfleet was not sure if he had as yet quite convinced himself of its authenticity; he had had little time to study it. …

A knock came on the door, and the hotel waiter peeped in. "Mr. Saltfleet, sir, a lady and gentleman downstairs to see you. … Miss Fleming, and Mr. Copping."

"Who is he? Miss Fleming I know." He slipped the flint into a side-pocket.

"He has a studio at the end of the village, sir. No doubt they've come about this shocking business."

"All right, show them up."

The whisky caught his notice. He drank it off; then, rising, flung the cigar stump into the grate.

Ingrid and Peter entered, their waterproofs glistening with fine moisture.

"Won't you take off your coats?" inquired Saltfleet. And he proceeded to bring forward chairs for them, while the waiter vanished, closing the door. But Peter curtly declined for both. He would have ignored the seats as well, had not Ingrid unconsciously frustrated his purpose, first by naming the two to each other, obliging them to exchange bows—but Peter's was scarcely more than an unwilling nod; and next by sitting down quietly on her own account as a thing of course, whereupon not to have followed suit would have looked more churlish in him than he cared to show himself. Saltfleet brought up a third chair, and sat down facing them.

With the least trace of nervousness, yet still intrepidly meeting his eyes, the girl entered upon the delivery of her errand.

"I hope you won't consider it a liberty we are taking in calling on you here, Mr. Saltfleet, but it has to do with what you were discussing with my mother on your first visit this morning—the valuable you were anxious to get back from Hugh Drapier. …"

"Ah, so it's about that! Pray continue."

"I have now called to settle the matter."

Saltfleet frankly was puzzled. The object was in his pocket, so how were they proposing to settle it, in the only way in which, it was to be settled? ... He could only suppose that they were to declare roundly that it wasn't among Drapier's effects, and therefore they couldn't produce it; and that this, unless it turned up later, was the end, so far as they were concerned.

"You can't lay your hands on it?" he suggested, with the dawn of a smile.

"Oh, yes; we have it."

He was nonplussed. For the girl's asseveration was both positive and quietly emphatic, while her eyes were telling the truth, yet this was necessarily the reverse of the truth.

"Do you know that you have it, Miss Fleming, or are you merely assuming so?"

"I have brought it with me, to give to you."

"I suspect, in that case, that we are talking of different things."

Ingrid opened her hand-bag. She fumbled in it, and her increasing annoyance at not immediately being able to find the stone brought another veiled smile, but now of bewilderment, to Saltfleet's face, and a scowl of displeasure to Peter's. She suddenly ceased searching the bag, to stare across the room in the endeavour to recollect.

"I am very sorry, but I seem not to have brought it, after all."

"When did you last see it?"

"Not many minutes before I came away. I thought I had put it in my bag."

Soon she grew certain that it had been meant for her that she should not bring it. Such absence of mind was so unlike her habit. She had no apprehension that the stone was lost—it should be in a certain drawer in her room still.

"I fancy it won't matter," smiled Saltfleet. "In fact, the thing that I want happens to be in my possession already, by a strange turn of the wheel of chance; so yours must be something else."

"It is a small broken stone, looking like a piece of black flint."

"The description tallies. But you have seen it to-day—since... the tragedy?" His voice lowered for the last word.

"Yes, I have."

"I, too," said Peter.

"Then what yours can be, I don't know; but the object I came down here to get from Drapier is at this moment in my coat pocket, so necessarily yours can't be it."

"But you never saw Drapier alive!" objected Peter sharply.

Saltfleet had not meant to confess the post-mortem abstraction. He disdained the awkwardness of the story for himself, however; and this girl would expect the whole truth. He gave a shrug.

"No, I didn't see him alive. But it was in his hand when I found him; so, as the shortest way, I took it."

Ingrid leant forward in her chair.

"It was in Hugh's hand at the moment of his death?"

"Yes."

"Would not that be very singular?"

"Yet explainable, Miss Fleming. He was evidently lost to his surroundings in contemplating it, as he came down the hillside, and so the block could get him unawares."

"You say it is in your pocket. May I see it?"

"Well yes, I think you may see it."

He handed her the flint, and she turned it about in her fingers in the dim light. Her brow was creased, and her eyes looked troubled and confused. Peter got up to peer at it in silence.

She passed it back to Saltfleet.

"It seems marvellously like ours. I can't understand."

"If I may hazard a suggestion, one should be genuine and the other a dummy."

"But why..."

"Drapier may have prepared things for Arsinal."

"Perhaps it would not be hard to pick up such a near facsimile on any shore, but are you justified in speaking so ill of him, so soon?"

"It is the only explanation of the mystery I can offer."

"And since he was studying yours at death, yours must be the genuine?"

"For that reason, and for a still better, which I am hardly at liberty to pass on."

He bestowed a last look on the flint, before dropping it again into his pocket.

Ingrid became deeply abstracted.

"Certainly, there would be little sense in studying a counterfeit," she said next, in low tones. "Neither, seemingly, could he just have found it lying, since it is not a flint country. … And, Peter,
your
adventure in his company on the Tor yesterday—what his hand was closed over then must have been the same. And in the garden again yesterday afternoon. He has always been looking at it, while mine—ours—has been mislaid from him. … And yet another strangeness makes it just as certain that mine is just as little a sham."

"What strangeness?" asked Saltfleet.

"When it was in my hand this morning, I was nearly overpowered by the sound of rushing waters."

"Was the connection sure?"

"So I felt at the time."

"What that could be as emanating from a piece of stone, I have no idea."

"Nor I." But her eye met Peter's, and the minds of both flew back to his mystic overcoming on Devil's Tor. He too had heard a perpetual thunder of invisible waters—Ingrid recalled that these had been his very words. …

"If you are convinced that yours is the authentic," said Saltfleet, with a half-grim smile, "I am willing enough to take both. My friend and associate, Mr. Arsinal, will put the matter at rest within a few moments of seeing them."

"The true stone—whichever it is—is a symbol of the 'Great Mother', is it not so?"

"It should be associated with her worship." He was a little surprised by her information, but Drapier must have spoken at large to these women.

"Has it also any connection—before these last few days—with Devil's Tor?"

"That I have never heard, and cannot say."

"I would have liked to meet Mr. Arsinal."

"What is your interest, Miss Fleming?"

"It would be hard to put into words."

"Should he come down here before I am gone, the introduction would be simple."

"Thank you! I will hold you to that."

Peter, with a movement of impatience, drew forth his case, and lit a cigarette. He returned the case to his pocket, without having proffered it to Saltfleet.

"Does Mr. Arsinal know this district?" asked Ingrid.

"I have no idea. I have really been very little with him, and that only abroad."

"Why did Hugh Drapier covet your stone?"

"An hour or so ago I would have replied again I have no idea. But when your names were announced just now, I was beginning to find out. It appears to have a peculiar property of fascination. … I must ask you not to question me about that, Miss Fleming. Undoubtedly, however, it was strengthening its hold on Drapier's imagination."

"Why has he been killed?"

"Yes, your evil presage came true."

"Was it the stone that attracted him here to Devil's Tor, to be killed?"

"That, indeed, may be a theory to appeal to Arsinal. Yet there are strong difficulties, and we must not take it too seriously. Actually, it may have been a factor in your cousin's death; but a small bit of mineral, I imagine, will not have force to draw down lightning, or cause an earthquake. It is his repeated escapes there that are troubling you, and demanding the explanation."

Ingrid smiled faintly.

"You think me absurd, no doubt!"

"I will be candid, Miss Fleming. You appear to have far too many fancies of all sorts, and perhaps do deserve to be chaffed out of some of them. Nevertheless, I am not the man to do it. I have an uneasy feeling that your nonsense may be groping for the right road, while my sense is clinging for all it is worth to the commonplace."

"You are aware of a mystery?"

"We must still be logical, however. And if, in fact, the stone has had to do with Drapier's death, why then, this in my pocket"—he brought it out again—"is what he was holding at his death; and therefore must be the genuine."

"Please let me see it a second time."

All was silent in the room as Ingrid once more reached out her fingers to take the flint, when, without expectation, and before she had securely got it, she was stunned by the same terrifying roar of waters as had crushed her senses earlier in the day while still touching its double. It annihilated her for the instant it lasted like the sudden thunderous passage past a quiet country station platform of a heavily-loaded high-speed express. The stone escaped her, falling to the floor. …

Saltfleet picked it up. He offered it to her again, never suspecting that her failure to hold it had been anything but a miscalculation of distance. But now, apparently, her thoughts were wandering, for she made no new attempt to take the stone from him. It was not very easy to distinguish the expression of her face through the dusk. He supposed that some other intervening idea had occurred to her, and, as he did not choose to wait upon her, returned the thing to his pocket. … To Ingrid, however, the recollection of that noise was already forming itself to the resemblance to swollen floods thundering down between confining cliffs, so that she could almost have imagined the wetting of her face by the far-flung spray. …