"Hugh, there's something tragical about this evening's work, that is all I know. I think it will be imprudent in you to undertake any exploration to-morrow morning in the spirit of sightseeing. I don't think the pile was struck down for anything like that. I'd rather you left it."
"Somebody will go down," he repeated, "and I'm as appropriate as the next man. I've no responsibilities, and my job's done. Strained nerves apart, it's only a trip down a hole."
She saw that he was quietly obstinate to make the essay. "Then have you an electric torch?" she inquired.
"Yes, I brought one down."
They reached the open road none too soon, for by then, though it should still have been daylight, the low clouds and now continuous downpour made all so dark that they could scarcely see before them, but the moor was full of traps. Ingrid weighed more and more heavily on her cousin's arm. She was fagged, soaked, miserable; she longed to be home. After the most protracted silence of all the evening, she violently shook off her apathy, to demand:
"I've told you far too many of my fancies, Hugh, while you have told me far too few of yours. You were so very thoughtful, looking at that ruin. Won't you confess what you were thinking?"
Drapier considered his response.
"The idea took me how the earth must have appeared untold æons back, when still untenanted by even the lowest form of animated slime, but was composed exclusively of basalt continents, fishless seas, an unbreathable gassy air, and innumerable horrific active volcanoes spouting flames, lava and chemical ashes incessantly—and suchlike. It was an unforced and uninvited picture, that I have since been wondering at. … Another followed, as spontaneous. I imagined a vast clock of Time without beginning or end, and not circular but straight, the minute hand of which before my very eyes had just jerked viciously across another of its marked spaces, each space somehow representing ten thousand years. And it struck me how eternity was made up of an infinite line of such single minutes of ten thousand years; and how each contained the appearance and disappearance of empires, nations, even races.
"I was reminded of the time when, as a very small boy indeed, I was carried wrapped-up from one house to another at night-time, and shown the sky of glittering stars overhead. My mother, I remember, told me that there was no end to their number, but that one could go on counting them for ever. And the impossibility of grasping such a stupendous conception made a metaphysical impression upon me then that has remained ever since. Well, on the Tor I obtained the same thrill, only for time instead of space.
"I conclude that these two involuntary pictures, both having to do with ancientness, were in some manner imposed on me by an inherent antique character of the height. I think that that forcible bursting open of its interior may have released certain elements. You, I believe, may understand me better than most people. All hills and mountains are ancient. One hears of 'the everlasting hills', and 'the eternal snows'; which are popularly supposed to be figures of poetry, but in fact the adjective represents a much more real and positive thing. We can't climb a few thousand feet without feeling the sense of enormous age; and actually the hills are survivals of a former state of the earth. The plains and valleys are a paste of cemented disintegrated particles, but the heights sticking up out of them—particularly if their rocks are igneous—are what they always have been since towards the laying down of the first foundations of the globe."
"You mentioned the release of certain elements, Hugh."
"I think that there may be the slow accumulation through the ages of a chemico-physical secretion, our invisible contact with the fine emanations from which may produce in us the mental atmosphere of an awful antiquity. I've experienced it on a hundred eminences; and since things, to be recognised, must be named, I have wished to give such a secretion the name of 'eld'. … However, either your Devil's Tor must possess the substance in double or triple measure, or else, as I say, the sudden exposure to the outer air of the contents of its interior has given my receptive answering faculty the augmented dose."
He added in a lower and different voice: "I am inclined to believe, though, that the Tor is in itself highly magnetic, both in a very intensified degree and in a very peculiar manner. I could hardly explain the reason for my faith, but it seems to me that it might even be attractive from a great distance."
But Ingrid was inquiring of herself whether this hypothetical 'eld' of Hugh's could at all account for her vision. She dismissed the notion. A mere stimulus could not have created anything half so wonderful. That stimulus might be valid for Hugh's own dreamings.
And in the new silence that ensued, her cramped fancies continued to cling to his case, from the sheer inability of her will to rouse itself to a change of subject. It dawned upon her that he must be a devitalised man. 'His job was done'—those were his own words. He was so young still, yet seemed to be entirely without plans, and regarded himself as too far advanced in life for marriage. Then his manner: always low-pitched, taciturn, brooding, reserved. He couldn't be ill in body; just the reverse, he struck her as an amalgam of red iron blood and tireless muscle. But there must be some spiritual blight on him. …
What was he to discuss with her mother? It was not to be financial business—not financial business—but business of another kind, or he would not have come down to them. Perhaps he wanted to provide for their looking after his affairs, in case anything should happen to him. Yes, that must be the simple and innocent solution. He was contemplating the making of a will, and wished Uncle Magnus or her mother to act as executor.
Well, a man might make a will. Still, he had no known dependents, so why was he suddenly so providing for the contingency of his death? ... Death! Was he imagining that he might die soon? Was that the depression, taciturnity and abstraction of his manner? He might have the presentiment. She, so full of intuitions as she was, was clearly not entitled to jeer at the intuitions of others. He might be feeling the foretaste of death within him. And at the thought the contact of his bony arm afflicted her for a single instant as though it were that of a skeleton, escorting her to her own prepared grave. She shook off the absurdity. …
And she dreaded this adventure of his next morning. Was that in connection with his premonition of death? If he were to be killed up there, the feelings of both of them would thus have proved true. Yet how could she tell him so? Very rightly he would deem such a picking of his soul an insolence, and she would only have added anger to his obstinacy. His now determined, dour silence was giving her no opening. She was so tired that she felt she must drop.
It was nearly eleven when the crunch of their steps on the gravel brought the girl's mother to the front-door for at least the fourth time that evening. She was as worried as possible. She knew where they had been going to, knew that they must have been caught on the open moor in the storm, and black night had descended long after they were due to return, still without a sign of them. The rest of the establishment were in bed. She detained her cousin, as he was slipping past her to go upstairs to his room.
"Won't you come down again, Hugh? I suppose you have some excuses to offer for this sort of conduct, and I'd like to know all about it. Get into dry things, and find your way to my room. There's a fire there."
She spoke with smiling reproach, but he knew that he could never be afraid of Helga.
"Thanks! I will."
And so he departed through the hall, leaving Ingrid to her mother.
Chapter IV
THE HEMISPHERE
Whitestone was a long, low, white dwelling of two storeys, standing alone on a high-up part of the southern moor. More than a century old, its austerely simple stone front, interrupted by a porch having Tuscan pillars, was long since made charming to the eye by a careless profusion of climbing Gloire de Dijon roses and jasmine. A shorter wing in keeping, though later in date, flanked the west of the house, overlooking on that side the long downwards-sloping lawn that steepened at its foot to the valley separating the estate from the moors beyond. These were the m
oors stretching presently to the north of Devil's Tor.
The house's east peeped over a privet hedge at the lane that was its approach from north and south. Its south front faced an imposing sweep of main lawn, level and better kept than the other, behind which were flower-beds and dense shrubberies; with the fields at the rear of all. The utilitarian back of the house looked out on to a protective clump of ash and sycamore trees, that were very leafy and beautiful in the summer.
Ultimately the moors were all around the house, and slanted mostly down from it, but, standing as it did on a cultivable plateau, there were a good many crop-fields first on the south and east. Belhill village to the south-east began about half a mile away, the advanced cottages of which were the house's nearest neighbours. The lane passing Whitestone joined a quarter of a mile on the east-and-west highroad that proceeded through the village. The lane itself then continued downhill towards the Devil's Tor moors.
The house contained a few large handsome living-rooms on the front ground floor, some extra smaller rooms on the ground floor of the wing, and a number of bedrooms, also smaller and slightly old-fashioned, on the upper floor of both the front and the wing. These bedrooms possessed lovely near or distant moorland views; from the windows of those of the front a gleam was sometimes obtainable of the far-off silver Channel. All the rooms had a notable fragrance as of combined lavender and moor air. None of the house's residents used tobacco, while Helga Fleming possessed in wonderful degree that kind of womanly sensitiveness which cannot endure the least suspicion of domestic uncleanness. For her, that scent of lavender was no sweet disguise, but a symbol of feminine law and order.
She had very capably ruled the household for her uncle during the past fourteen years, having taken charge shortly after the death of her husband, in the days immediately preceding the war. Magnus Colborne himself had bought the freehold of the estate twenty-five years since, through the agency of Copping senior, the then thriving Tavistock estate auctioneer, now dead. The negotiation had started the later close personal intimacy between the two men, based partly on a parity of age and fortune, partly on a common overlapping of intellectual tastes, and partly on the requisitions of their ensuing business partnership, the ultimate and unforeseen fruit of which was the securing of the liberty of the upper moorland domicile to Peter, the younger of Copping's sons, the artist-tenant of the village studio whom Ingrid had (perhaps so superfluously) named to her cousin as the one man with whom she was not to be mentally coupled. Peter was mostly in London, but once or twice a year at least he was in the habit of spending some weeks at Belhill; and then he would always be in and out of the house of these great good friends of his. At Whitestone he found many desirable things; tactful sympathy, intellectual interest, appreciation, stimulation, music, and spiritual splendour; but not all in the same person. He cared not to seem to force his visits to Dartmoor, yet to the pondering mind of Helga things were surely drawing rapidly to a head.
Drapier, even after a week's stay in the house, hardly knew which, of two or three lower rooms at its wing end, her private den was. But artificial light came shining through the crack of a door ajar at the end of the passage, so there he turned in; and found his assumption correct. Helga, indeed, was temporarily out of the room—no doubt she was still with Ingrid upstairs. A lighted lamp, however, stood on the table, the fire had been newly stoked, chairs were drawn up on either side of the hearth. He wondered if these deliberate preparations meant that she was to challenge him about the real purpose of his visit. Well, he was anticipating the challenge. Beside the lamp on the table he set, as a preliminary, the small tin box that he had brought down with him from his room.
For a minute longer he remained gazing incuriously about the room. The window curtains were drawn, and in the dead quiet of the house the periodic spattering of rain against the panes spoke of a night going from bad to worse. This femininely-appointed little chamber was nothing to him; in spirit he was scarcely there. He came to a stand before an oil-painting—a girl's likeness—hanging by the door. It had subconsciously drawn his eye on first entering, and now he saw that the portrait was Ingrid's.
She was younger than now; perhaps seventeen or eighteen. And her lovely yellow hair was long and undressed, flowing over her shoulders, while she also appeared to be in some sort of Eastern fancy costume. A long dark-red cloak hid most of a simple yet foreign-looking blue dress reaching to her feet, as she stood in the doorway of a hut, gazing out at the night; a raised hand on the lintel. A yellow beam from a lamp not shown illuminated her profile. The hut was otherwise dark; and outside it was blacker still, except for the last long faint line of what must have been a red sunset, underneath the silver finger-nail of a moon.
Drapier mused upon the picture, finding it as beautiful as oddly-conceived. Though the clue was wanting to the puzzle, it was anyway evident that whoever had painted the work must have seen fairly deeply into the possibilities of Ingrid's character. The face was set in an expression almost too old for it. It was calm, displeased, troubled, expectant; all at once. She was waiting for somebody or something.
Helga came in while he was yet looking at it.
"It's Ingrid as the girl Madonna in her father's home, before the arrival of her supernatural destiny. I more or less keep it here to avoid the trouble of explaining this to visitors. Peter Copping, a friend of ours, did it. He may be down before you go. He is a great admirer of Ingrid's genius, and possibly understands her better than any of us."
"She mentioned him. You say, her genius; what is her genius?"
Helga's smile seemed sad, as she gently led her cousin from his stand before the painting to the remoter of the chairs by the fire. She herself dropped into the other.
"I have to confess to being a little jealous of her, Hugh, and that's why these unkind things sometimes escape me. You see, I never enjoyed such adulations when I was a girl. No one ever predicted a mystical career for me. I was just a simple young woman, who was rather lucky to have secured a good husband. The luck, however, was not to be!"
"There of course you don't do yourself justice, for you were always the young queen of your set. However, I do agree that your daughter may be something exceptional in the way of girls—and very proud of the fact you should feel, Helga. But what is her true bent?"
"She is very unlikely to do anything great or outstanding of herself, but she may be a source of inspiration to some man of parts. I hope she may be. She is the last hope of the Colbornes, at all events; for somehow one hardly identifies you, my dear."
She rose again, with a brighter smile. "But I am being frightfully inhospitable. What will you take?"
"Nothing at all, thanks."
"I know you are teetotal, but medicinally?"
"Really no, thanks. I am not in the ranks of the fanatics, but I've so often had to go long spells without either alcohol or tobacco, that now the resumption of the double-habit appears not worth while."
So Helga sat down again. She had not failed to notice the japanned box. Ingrid, also, had mentioned to her upstairs that Hugh was proposing a chat with her, probably on business, but not financial business. She knew that this box must be in connection with it. She was well trained to patience and civility, however, and would say nothing before he was ready. There was no fear of their tête-à-tête being interrupted.
He glanced more than once across at her, and thought how in spite of this long passage of years she was still the old Helga. He remembered that she must be forty-three or four; but her peculiar fascination for him had never been in her features or contours, but in that intimate tranquil searching of her green-hazel eyes, which was at once like a cool hand resting upon him and a mild electric stimulation of all his soul. Given a longer and more serene leisure, he might even still be in love with her, as when he had been a gawky boy, all red hair, freckles and joints, and she an already grown-up young reigning beauty of that vanished Sydenham society, consorting with responsible men on equal terms. Truly the spell had begun to
work again, he realised, only now the antidote was within his blood, and the entire surrender was happily no longer possible.
She had taken good care of her looks, too, and in her highly becoming evening frock of black and gold was remaining a most attractive woman, to be reckoned with. He supposed she must be vain. Possibly all women were—though he was unsure about Ingrid, who gave him the impression of caring nothing for dress and the artificialities of the toilet. Helga's aesthetically-arranged, stylish brown hair, with its golden lights, distinctly spoke of vanity: her hands also were white, and he imagined that her gown should be from an expensive shop. Yet all this was not a crime; while her calm, languid, intelligent features continued as thin and as lovely as ever. He could not escape from the idea that the vague constant shadow of a great disappointment was hanging over her life. Her smiles were so often melancholy, and into the searching of her eyes there seemed to have crept something wistful. Then she was as tall as her daughter, and still quite slender, which physical type and contradiction of her years likewise permitted the faint note of tragedy.
He conceived that repression over a long period had done its work. For the sake of this home and the expected after-reward for her sacrifice, she had buried herself and her daughter in a halfdead house in the depths of the country, to tend a crabbed old misanthrope, who doubtless ruled out every sort of society; and the effect upon a cultured, lively mind, yearning for its proper atmosphere, must be immense. Her sudden reduction to a state of comparative poverty upon the hapless death of her husband Dick must also have shocked her tremendously; while now he recalled that her unfortunate mother's last illness a few years earlier had been of a particularly distressing nature. He could not even wonder that, with her high personal attractions, she had never married a second time. Uncle Magnus was reputedly so well-off that the temptation would need to have been very great. Now, however, she was probably suffering for her good sense and long views. In fact, a woman of her age, feeling all the time that romance is slipping faster and faster out of her existence, must be depressed (he ruminated) as often as she allowed her thoughts to take a flight from the things of every day.
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