Devil's Tor (56 page)

Helga was silent for a few moments; then said:

"The signs are for your having been distressed on Devil's Tor this morning; but of that you have spoken not a word. Mr. Saltfleet wants you to meet the other—why?"

"I forget, mother. I forget whether he even did want it. You couldn't guess the last indifference of both of us up there. I'd our stone with me, and when he informed me of your agreement, I offered it to him there and then, and he refused it."

"It isn’t good."

"He gave a reason; but his true reason was his high-mindedness."

Her girl's obvious trust in the man intensified the pang for Helga. It was as if she were presenting her innocence to a knife. That Saltfleet, in scorn of her forbidding, should deliberately seek out the child to molest her, was the more atrocious that he had not known her above a day. That he should know where to find her, added the terror as of an uncanny sixth sense in him, for the service of all his evil designs. What he wanted, that this gift of diabolical logical intuition would always procure for him. But that also the cynicism should be his to refuse to take from Ingrid, on some excuse she wouldn't repeat, it was doubtless so unintended for acceptance—to refuse to take from her the object, to arrange for the getting of which was his sole justification for being up there on the Tor with her at all, while contriving, as by a few bold strokes of art, to persuade her that he was being moved only by a reciprocating generosity not less than her own, but his right secret motive being the furtherance of this unlikely and difficult intimacy... such a feature of the morning's work seemed nearly the most fiendlike of all to Helga; for it spoke of his ice-cold scientific preliminary dissection of her daughter's nature, with the resulting manipulative skill in its weaknesses.

And, to the painful throbbing of her heart, she felt that should her ghastly suppressed instinct concerning poor Hugh's tragedy ever elude her insufficient control and rise to the surface of emotional acknowledgment during these frightful hours, the two impossible abominations centring in that man come like an omen into their district—they must unite... and show her the full horror of crime, as she had never seen it before—crime itself, the abstraction in measureless extent, the reality in life-intensity, loathsomeness, insanity, cruelty, and sordidness. For the two, being united in a single monster, would create another dimension for crime. The flawed soul would perhaps no longer be shown as following the line of his flaw, and so even to be compassionated by the merciful; but would appear as drawing his colour and life from a sustaining element, the great primordial sea of crime, existing before all the worlds—a fantasy and delirium to the sane mind—the ocean of metamorphosis. … She denied it again, and now it was faintly adumbrated to her sick mind that she was viewing but the exterior of Saltfleet and of his activities of a day, from an angle that necessarily gave falseness and subjectivity. Even this base pursuit of a confiding child, that she could alone dare to bring to thought, might be not from sin, but fate; an apparently evil thing, which, being as yet unexplainable, she was applying to its closest superficial resemblances in her experience of the world. … Had she been there, invisible, with them on the hill, she would have known from his words; she could have judged; but Ingrid's innocence was to repeat nothing essential. …

Ingrid: she
could
not so far be consciously within his gravitation. Reserved of heart she was, proud of temper beneath her domestic obedience; femininely romantic of the imagination she had never been; while always the affair was but that day old. Yet if it were no more than the first unwilled sliding towards an edge... for
repelled
she plainly was not; and his eyes were strong, with the deepest brutal fires underlying their cold chaining, such eyes as could not appear but once or twice in a thousand years... the jutting up, too, of those archaic savage rocks through his composed princeliness of modern manner... too well might her child be already lingering in fancy to discover what kind of man he truly was. Overstrung to breaking she should be, on his account, or on account of all these circumstances of which he was an integrant part. Her yesterday's concealment of that arranged meeting with his associate, her rapid changes of mind, this present emotional exhaustion of body and brain, with her fugitive retreat to loneliness, her unkind avoidance of Peter... some crisis was upon her; and
him
only, of strangers, she had seen. Nor still had she explained her particular upset of the morning, the tokens of which upon her were so manifest.

Yes, within twenty-four hours she was ceasing to be her girl, and changing to some more ancient ancestral self, such as she, her mother, might never understand; but its externals—this new alien nature's—could scarcely be more than hard shell for a seed infinitely rich and tender, unable as yet to face the world's mocks, sneers and violations... she meant, such hints beneath Ingrid's apathy as these faint stirrings, like the half seen, half imagined troubling from below the surface of a drowsing lake: of haughtiness, sibylline vision, foreignness, power... they were not new, however, but very old, very intrinsic in her opening, wondering soul. …

Nevertheless, it was the slumbering of just such an other soul and nature that had always baffled the friendly understanding of her daughter's acquaintances; being like a problem set for their intuition. Something quietly dominant colouring her milder dignity had secluded and ennobled her since such things were possible to her years, causing her to be respected by the feared, feared by the amorous and flattering. It had shone steadily through her universal self-effacement and willingness to be thought nothing. It was not
only
an uninsisted-upon haughty background of power, but that should be nearly the least significant and the outermost of its connections with the world. Helga conceived the true central shining to be some vestige of a type forgotten before the appearance on earth of the first historians; existing, perhaps, in an age when the foundations of the grand religions were ready to be laid. … It now seemed to her that very little of this new wonder of her daughter's nature could ever have been unknown to her. Only, a stimulus of fear was all at once bringing it to her door, and she could not escape its recognition. …

So Saltfleet might be no seducer, but Ingrid, as blindly tentative as he, might be equally drifting towards him; and the opportunities, as always, were created by the destiny of such a mutual involuntary approach. She obeyed an instinct. Being a girl, however, unused to the defiance of her antecedents, now again she was shrinking back upon her conscience. Then the reaction could be temporary only. For the instincts dictated the joys, as roots the leaves and flowers and both inevitably must come again. …

She could reply at last, and yet her own words, both during and after utterance, displeased her as being false, and in the spirit of falsity. It was that she had no courage but desperately to grasp the wreckage of their old life. The insight was with her that it was somehow gone, that life; and still she must be this dastard and fool, with the child she had borne.

"Highmindedness! ... It is a queer term to use. And surely you could never have remarked it in him unless he had wished you to—but that is just the sort of proof Peter will hate of the springing up of an improper intimacy. … It seems to display your offer of the stone and his refusal of it as a contest in sacrifice—and so each apparently has wanted to stand up to the other in a certain favourable light. … But I fear all the simplicity has been on your side, since, evidently, he was manoeuvring for new meetings. Had he accepted your invitation, the loss would have been his."

"Of him I know you have the worst opinion," said Ingrid.

"I am warning you. He arrived yesterday, and already you have seen and talked to him three times. If I don't forbid it, you are to see him again. Steadily throughout you are exploring each other's reserves, until it threatens to become an association. Well, do you want this association, Ingrid?"

"He will go to-morrow."

"I hope he may."

"Two out of those three talks I couldn't help, and it is for you to decide about another meeting."

"It is more for Peter. … But I fancy he won't care to give them both sides of the bargain, as they seem to be demanding. And
his
vexation should carry weight with you.
Him
you cannot accuse of having a determined prejudice."

"His instinct against Mr. Saltfleet is the same. It isn't hidden from me. … Only, there is the awful distinction between your two antipathies: Peter's must be purely personal... metaphysical—of the type... while unspeakable nightmares are in
your
mind, mother. …"

"I did not put them there. … But he cannot have had the madness to—"

Ingrid cut short her words.

"Neither do you have the madness! Such an abomination must be kept out of discussion, for decency's sake. I am glancing at
it
merely to contrast Peter's sanity of aversion. … And how could he—your mental victim, nothing else—how could he forget his pride to notice such an unspoken wicked slander? But—I said it before—he sees you declining his further acquaintance... and so it is assuredly not
his
interests you are considering; but his friend goes with him. He doesn't choose that Mr. Arsinal shall suffer a deprivation because
he
has had the unluck to become monstrous to you. Therefore, he proposed a thing to me, which I consented to: and Hugh's stone has been temporarily left up there on Devil's Tor."

She added, while her mother fastened her with a curious humourless little smile:

"He was afraid—on Mr. Arsinal's account, not his own—that you might mark your displeasure for this morning's business by confiscating it... denying it to them, after all."

"It is to wait there for—what?"

"Until I shall have met Mr. Arsinal."

"And meanwhile they risk nothing, for presumably they can retrieve it at any time for themselves?"

"Since you are to let them have it without conditions, it cannot at all matter to you if they do."

"No; but I see little highmindedness in a refusal to accept as a gift what can always be taken as a prize of fortune."

"Because you cannot imagine his manner or the trend of our conversation, mother. I was not cheated. … Rather take another view of it. …"

Her mother eyed her, and her smile had faded. Ingrid went on:

"Something infallibly must come of this depositing—
something.
But the depositing itself has been brought about by Mr. Saltfleet’s perception of your hostility... and you are hostile because of a terrible misconception of the possibilities of his character—some grotesque horror of him in you. Then the next course of events that will follow upon the stone's depositing and recovery, will have demanded your bad fancies as a necessary link in the chain. … A
link,
not a first cause; for the fancies could not have come out of the air. … And so I want to urge on you that the single events of this week may very seldom be standing for themselves; their meaning has usually been in something else to take place. Perhaps I express myself obscurely, but do you understand me?"

"Are you not inventing a psychic drama, my dear?"

"I almost wish it were invention... and yet I don't know. …"

"One tragedy and a number of strangenesses have happened all together, but that is very far from showing that there is a real connection."

Helga knew, however, that a drama was in progress, and that she was playing and to play a part in it. For all her revulsions, intuitions, unnameable fears, consequent soul-searchings and activities, were that part. And if, as Ingrid declared, such motions could become intelligible only in the light of events still to come, then of what rational avail was it to fight the preternatural tide, trying frantically to ignore and restore? ...

Just as a violin, magically animated to conscious feeling, might be nothing but jarred by the vibrations set in motion by the drawing of the bow across its strings, knowing not the least suspicion of the music for the ears of human listeners, so
her
consciousness was being jarred and a progressing music might be elsewhere, the jarring representing but a mechanical sub-action having no sort of spiritual relation to that beauty hidden from her. …

So mystical it was. How could she not hope that she was being thus deceived by her plain understanding of experience, that was without the wings with which to rise to such a visionary vault? Ingrid, it might be, was upon the flight. … But the inept challenging of her conventional mind persisted, while the girl seemed less to attend to her mother's voice than to observe her eyes for these profounder dreams.

"A drama so truly weird to impossibility, for instance, Ingrid—it could be allowed only on the condition that not one of its scenes should prove superfluous... excrescent. But here you insist that a vast deal of machinery has been used to get poor Hugh's stone secreted on the top of Devil's Tor. Well, with or without my permission, these persons will certainly remove it for themselves, and wouldn't it have been just the same if they had honestly closed with my offer this morning? Any... shrinking of mine, from the contact of one of them, will have given them another walk, no more."

"Who can say that, mother? ... For you were right: I
was
distressed up there. I came straight home from the distress, and this last of it showing in me still ..." She broke off, to shrug. … "I only wish to suggest to your imagination that whoever fetches down the stone will have to go to the Tor for it."

She could not confide her ultimate secret, yet was painfully moved to prepare her mother for the swift, sudden calamity that now she no longer doubted was to overwhelm herself at least. … She thought, besides, to go towards liberating her mother's mind from its oppressions concerning a guiltless man. For the purpose, though half-unknowingly, she had throughout been adding so many rectifying touches to his portrait. Now she would risk expostulation and ignorant alarm in relating the fact—the bare fact without defiling particulars, she could no further—of his vision, and hers. It would show him with austerer preoccupations, inconsistent with ogrish crime... and might afford her mother, too, so intense a glimpse of the Tor's power and miracle, that she would realise at last how it was the centre of everything, in this muttering and already murderous storm... whose emblem had been that other physical storm, when she and Hugh had witnessed the destruction. Its breathlessness, as from the pressure of an incubus, was even now translated to horror in her mother's heart. Thus she might be brought to see that the horror was for service; as a self-subsisting thing, false. …