Devil's Tor (50 page)

"You dared not refuse such an invitation as well!"

"I felt no inclination to accept it. Her mother had promised the stone on a condition that I had already broken—only half innocently. Then, if I saw a child giving away a diamond ring, I would put a restraining hand on its arm; and so here. It perhaps is to be of later urgency to her—neither you nor I can tell ... Also I won't be outdone in generosity by anyone. … And still another consideration presented itself to my mind..."

"What?"

"I've somehow come to regard it as necessary that you should meet her; but once both stones are in your holding, such a meeting becomes distinctly more disagreeable in promise."

"I cannot follow."

Saltfleet returned him stare for stare.

"Nor do I greatly care to be more explicit."

"Either you should leave superfluous riddles, or not speak at all."

"Then let us drop it."

There was a pause, during which Saltfleet examined a discoloured oil painting on the wall, while Arsinal sat frowning and vexed.

"It will be especially painful to me," he recommenced, "if your habitual character of directness is to be affected with the rest. It can do neither of us good for you to remain perversely silent on a topic of importance to both, such as I conclude this to be."

"The risk has been avoided, Arsinal, whereas our relations are quite raw enough. Lift no curtain!"

"Is it that you can be resuming a fantastic idea hinted at by you in our after-breakfast talk? Has it to do with those recorded prophecies?"

"Yes; since you will have it. Nor is
my
sanity in doubt, when I bring into the open the circumstance that these same prophecies have included the mention of a woman."

Arsinal’s face had quickly flushed. The other came over to him, to pursue the altercation more quietly and effectively.

"And, no more to beat about the bush," he added, in his new lower voice, "Miss Fleming is a woman, while not another is within sight."

"I will not be angry, though you try me, Saltfleet. … This is what I shall reply to your atrocious innuendo. Honestly to employ a weapon of superstition, one must have the faith; you, however, have none, and therefore such a stab in the back of a friend must be from a motive of malice. You do not dread the contingency, but you have thought of it for your purpose, and will make use of it. … It is time, indeed, that I also should take up weapons and no longer fatuously rely on a harmony that has served its turn. Yes, you have with an extraordinary suddenness changed camps. You experience the pressing need to justify your action; every renegade has done so. I shall not descend to inquire what you can have discovered in this girl, thus to surrender to her with such lightning speed. These follies doubtless are in nature. But to seek as well to inspire her with a preliminary evil judgment of a man she has yet to meet—that, assuredly, is the work of a despicable
thief. …
You will buy her with mysteries stolen from me. Deny if you can, that you have directly passed this abomination to her by word of mouth!"

"Its possibility I have imparted."

"By what right have you? Those records, you are perfectly aware, were not to be spoken of to
any."

"There is always a higher law, that refuses to be so confined. She was not to come to grief because of my honour."

"You have never feared it."

"Yet, a danger has existed."

"What danger? Let me hear."

"Why I need be your voice, I don’t know," replied Saltfleet, shrugging. "However, since it will serve to define our relations for the short remaining future together ... listen then, Arsinal! A rather peculiarly reserved and shrinking young girl is to be brought to a conference with a pair of strange adventurers—for that is our aspect, and, strip us of our petty achievements in life, that broadly is what we are. One of these persons, esteeming himself the principal, has in mind for the occasion an experiment with twin occult stones, each of which, singly, is dangerously endowed; God knows what the two together will be able to effect. This principal adventurer likewise needs for the experiment a man and a woman, for the stars in their courses, we will say, have told him so, and he may not disbelieve them, under penalty of disbelieving all his chosen career. … All these constituents, therefore, are assembled, and the potion is ready to be mixed. …Were she your own daughter, Arsinal, and were that godless adventurer and experimenter to be a total stranger to you, would you consent the encounter?"

"But you have brought things together which don’t belong. When I do get the stones, they must be fitted, and as we don’t yet know that they
will
fit, this will naturally constitute an experiment, apart from any special result. I have not, however, said that they are to be fitted here. In the light of your story, the great magnet of Devil’s Tor itself has begun to impress my imagination as the proper setting for this joining of the two half-liths. Neither have I proposed the attendance of Miss Fleming for the occasion. That has been
your
suggestion. If, as well, I must refer to those ancient predictions, the bringing together of a man and a woman is not stated as a contingent possibility, but as a certainty; thus, if I do believe the prophecy, I must believe it so. Therefore, I need not take thought or action, but the thing will positively happen of itself. … I have forgotten what other arguments were in my head. But, by way of conclusion, let me invite you to answer this. You assert that your gross violation of confidence was in order to protect the girl. Wouldn't she have been still more certainly protected by your acceptance of the mother's offer, with its consequence of the annulling of this acquaintance altogether?"

"Yes; but that was impossible."

"Why so?"

"Because it was not to be. The fate of this business is to throw you together; and I know it, and she knows it, and you also know it. Had you not had such a sense, when young Copping called on us, you would positively not have stood by to see your plans wrecked. I am sorry to say it, but you are lying and lying, Arsinal, and
that
is why I am protecting her."

Arsinal's eyes shot fire, as he rose, only to sit down again. Yet he would not speak before his voice was controlled.

"It follows that, in your opinion, I am a dangerous madman?" he then quietly demanded.

"You are just such a madman as Peter. But he too, at a certain critical moment, had an eye on two worlds."

The other gave him an odd, sharp look, but afterwards sank into a prolonged silence, which became troubled. Last of all, he said, even more quietly than before:

"Yet I am not denying any Christ in repudiating your charge, born of enmity. It is
your
conduct, Saltfleet, which is under censure. Since quarrel we must, let us do so like rational men. I shall detail as calmly as may be the grounds of complaint I have against you; then, in hearing your defence, I shall understand at last where and when the rot has started.

"Since two nights ago, you have opposed me so persistently, that it can no longer be stupidity or accident. At your first coming here, instead of conciliating Drapier's relation, that Mrs. Fleming, who always bore the possibility of being very useful to us, you seem almost to have gone out of your way to fill her with suspicion and alarm. Later, you quite unnecessarily disclosed to more than one that you had taken a thing from Drapier's dead hand where you found him lying. To-day you have rejected—and it is the height of jesuitism to misconstrue my surprised assent at the moment as a sympathetic agreement... that same Mrs. Fleming's quite adequate offer, the best she or anyone could have made me; for the sake, obviously, of continuing your meetings with her daughter. However advantageous and agreeable these meetings may be to yourself, I cannot see that my participation in them is to be of extraordinary service to
me,
and yet it must be if my other loss is to be paid for. In the meantime you have babbled my secrets to the girl, presumably in order to keep her romantic interest alive. On Devil's Tor this morning, you might easily have exacted from her sworn promises and safeguards; instead of which, she is to refer all to her mother still. …

"Were you my servant, Saltfleet, I would dismiss you out of hand for such an unrelieved chain of perverse disservice. To cover all, you are pretending a ridiculous risk to the girl, which exists nowhere but in your dishonest imagination. You have broken faith to me, lied to me, deceived me, insulted me, both to my face and behind my back; and in no one instance have you advanced my interests as a loyal and upright friend should. What more can I say?"

"Finish!"

"I have finished. Why have you treated me so? Have I in anything changed towards you?"

Saltfleet grimaced.

"So I must put up a defence, and we are to stop here for ever! Well, shall it be sentimental or practical?—of the heart and conscience, or of facts? I prefer the latter. … I will take your charges one by one. Mrs. Fleming—unless I had been in the room sufficiently long to scare her, the daughter would not have come in, to tell me Drapier was on the Tor. There I found him killed, and took the flint. That was one service to you. It would have been thrown out and lost till the Day of Judgment.

"Secondly, supposing I had kept quiet about that theft, you certainly might have got both stones, but then you would never have learnt the place of origin of the one I took, for that arose out of the whole conversation in this room with Miss Fleming. You would never have come to know Devil's Tor as an essential factor; and this afternoon's trial, for instance, could not have been meditated. Here is a second service. … The turning down of the mother's offer, besides, directly took me to the Tor this morning, to see what I did. But for it, you would still never have guessed the full significance of the connection. … In addition and incidentally, I, your enemy and ill-wisher, have given you the spectacle inside the stone itself, the one in your pocket. I have given you my last night's phantom.

"Now I offer—indeed, force on you—the acquaintance of a very singular, psychically-gifted woman, who certainly knows more of all these matters than all the rest together. Are you to suppose that, for the first time, nothing is to come of
that?
It is the whole trend, that something unexpected and wonderful will come of it.

"But if you inquire the inward nature and meaning of such a looking-glass service of mine—moving one way and arriving always mysteriously the other—why, the simplest answer, it seems, will be to call it supernatural at once. … Let us postulate an active fate in the case, and let us see how such a fate must work. The flint is to be recovered from Drapier's hand by me, therefore I must go up to Devil's Tor. Only one person knows that Drapier is there, therefore
she
must send me up. I shall not see her, to be sent up, unless I stop in her mother's room till a certain moment, and therefore my talk with the mother is otherwise superfluously prolonged. It will not be prolonged by me, nor by her unless something in my manner succeeds in impressing her, so I adopt a foolish and unlikely attitude. But I shall not adopt this attitude unless I am inwardly persuaded that it is the best and necessary. What silent monitor so persuades me? You may call it instinct, or you may call it intuition, but the fact is that it is to deal with outward things, not in any way for my own service, and therefore comes to me from without—though certainly
via
my deeper self.

"And so with all the rest. It is where you and I differ, Arsinal. Your subterranean self is never, with your permission, to derive its lights and fires from the
without,
never from the
abroad,
but only from the
down,
and
down,
and
down.
Then this self, as well as its infinite reservoir, can still remain your own property. But once the under-surface feeding channel proves to be, not a private pipe-line to the infinite, but something more in the nature of a pervious sponge or marsh, open to contributions from all sides, at all depths, then, if we still want a soul of our own, doubtless we must look for it elsewhere. I find no good reason to suppose that at
any
depth we cease to be members of a whole corporate system. It appears to me—I have studied it a good deal—that there is precisely one method of dissociating oneself from the system and being a single soul, and that is by sincerely declining to be concerned. The world is from God and I am from God, therefore the world and I are brothers, but if I can scorn my own creation, and all that springs out of it, then my principle of scorning is
before
God, since it judges and may not be judged, except by its peers, who are nowhere in God's world. …

"Because you are acquisitive and I am philosophical, we have never truly met, Arsinal. It seems an odd thing to say, having reference to our known characters and outward tendencies, and people would not understand the remark. But it probably explains our diverging at last—rather suddenly. A sign-post has presented itself round a corner of our joint road, pointing you one way, me another. Personal heat, under the circumstances, seems absurd; let those fall to high words and blows who fundamentally want the same things. You desire to appropriate this business of the flints and Devil's Tor, whereas I, seeing that I am in life and a created being—shamefully enough, perhaps, according to some of the philosophies... I am content that it shall use me, if it will; but also I am determined that your greater activity shall not rob or hurt third persons. I end on the note of warning."

He moved towards the door, intending to wash his hands, but Arsinal stopped him.

"Stay, Saltfleet! I haven't interrupted you, and now must just reply. … I have to say this. Let us both forget a great part of what has just passed. In any case we are now very soon to go out of each other's lives, so that, to borrow from music, the last few bars ought to return to the friendship of the whole thematic character. … Indeed, I was in danger of overlooking how excellently your very mistakes down here have served me. Fault upon fault you have piled, and added the semblance of treachery—I now say, its semblance only. Each time something utterly unlooked-for of good has come of it. I decline your philosophical challenge and refrain from harking back, but let us rather resort to the Englishman's traditional substitute for lengthy explanations, recollecting still that some person within us has met, approved and admired his fellow in the other, however antipodal in other respects we may have turned out to be. … "