Devil's Tor

by David Lindsay

  He seized upon her accident to try to rid himself at a blow of the sense of personal inferiority in her presence that had quietly settled upon him.

  "It seems to have been a pretty mad affair!" he opined, through a cloud of cigarette smoke. "I hope it doesn't mean you are laid up?"

  "No, I can get about the house."

  "I shall begin to believe you need someone to look after you. Who is this cousin of yours who treats girls in such a prehistoric style?"

  Ingrid had not yet referred to a tomb, and was impressed by the coincidence of his adjective. Was it another omen and presage? She knew that something was advancing upon her. … Or was it merely the sick seizing by her mind of any word that could be twisted? Yes, it was just a meaningless coincidence.

  "It was Devil's Tor that treated us both in prehistoric style. The stack, being blown down, has opened what we think a Stone Age staircase to below. Hugh should be on his way back from there again at this minute. He has gone to investigate. … I am sorry, Peter. It's Hugh Drapier, and by choice of career, he is a great Central Asian traveller."

  "And may be showing off to smaller mortals, as I see it! Has he been staying with you long? You never mentioned him in your last."

  "He's been here a week."

  "How very nice for you," returned Peter, without enthusiasm. He flicked away the stub of his cigarette. He had better fix up that talk for later, and be off. … "It's notable, though, that none of you has ever named his name before in my presence; whereas in general, these family shining lights are rather insisted upon. Why the reticence?"

  "He is hardly ever in England, and we had almost forgotten his existence."

  He met her eye. "Well, I must get along to breakfast. But I may see you during the day? You have nothing on?"

  "Won't you lunch with us, Peter?"

  "I have to settle in. I'll look in to tea, if I may."

  Now she was sure that he was purposely being cold. And because they had parted warm friends, and his occasional letters to her since had been cheerful and spontaneous, it could only signify that he had suddenly bad news to communicate, and was feeling ashamed of it. But why need he feel ashamed to hurt her in this way? It was to make her greedy and appropriative, which was unworthy of him. She had never wished to retain him against his will. She could not copy his manner, and so still answered him with the ancient calm simplicity that, unknown to herself, he always aesthetically admired more than the most vivacious or coolly cynical address of other women.

  "We shall be alone. You won't mind meeting Hugh, will you? In spite of your insinuations, Peter, he is really the modestest man in the world in speaking of his own achievements. He is red-haired, and hardly good-looking, but very pondering. His father was Scotch."

  "I want to see you actually alone, Ingrid... say, an hour before tea. Can that be managed?"

  Again he was looking at her, but this time with a quick, nearly professional glance, as if to ascertain independently of her answer how his words were received. He caught the downbent gaze—stern, startled, troubled, inquiring, all together. Then he realised that she could only be attaching one meaning to his proposition, and yet, just because she was a woman, must feign ignorance. So already he had blundered badly.

  Ingrid, however, believed that out of the courtesy of his nature he wished to acquaint her in this delicate way with his intention of closing the studio and their friendship. She honoured him for the considerateness; a blunter and more selfish man would probably have wanted to get it over at once, but so far-reaching a decision—for her, she knew not for him—at least deserved a special interview. She replied:

  "Yes, I can be ready for you at three o'clock, if it is important."

  "I think it important. There are some things I want to say that may very much concern both of us, but it isn't quite simple. So will you just not worry about it till then?"

  "I must worry a little, I suppose. But I do know you wouldn't put such a formal request to me without a good reason, so I must bear any suspense."

  "It's something that has been engaging me a good bit lately. I expect I've said too much or too little, and you are going to worry. May I speak more freely, by way of prelude only?"

  "Surely we know each other by now, Peter!"

  "I hope so. I hope so. … Then I am to have it out with you on the subject of our future relations—or would you say emphatically at once that there is to be no development of the present?"

  Ingrid's face took on a tinge of added colour, but her voice remained as steady as before, though it was lower.

  "Should we discuss this here, Peter?"

  "I'm only trying to sketch out a reassurance for you, to tide you over the morning. It has to do with our future relations, but won't necessarily amount to the iniquity of a proposal."

  "I ask only one question," said Ingrid. "Are you going away from us? The rest doesn't matter."

  "But that matters?"

  "I want you not to go away."

  "Is that all you want?"

  "Please, Peter! ..."

  "Forgive me—I know it isn't permissible till this afternoon. Well then, no; I've no present intention of giving up the cottage. I should be very sorry permanently to turn my back on purity, sincerity and unstimulated happiness. Almost the only thing to induce me to it would be the direct command from you."

  "Nothing else matters," repeated Ingrid, while she felt that sudden relief arising from the removal of her long fears; and yet it was leaving some curious doubt and darkness behind. Perhaps it was that his words announced that their old was to give place to a new, and the moment for a new relation was inopportune. She hoped he would not to-day ask her to marry him. She could not prevent his doing so. … They had shared so many things, and were certainly the nearest of all to each other. There would be the fewest terrors for a girl in such a marriage. But yesterday that spirit had altered something in her life for her, and she needed time for the settling down in her soul of this strangeness.

  Even five minutes ago, it seemed to her, her thoughts had been different. Then she had been welcoming his sanity, but now he was in danger of exclusion. Indeed, it was not what he had to say to her, but what she must not confess to him, that signified. A marriage—two as one; and a great sacredness—one alone, a second forbidden. The states were as irreconcilable as odd and even. … If he asked her, he would innocently be bringing a great mystification on himself, for she would have to postpone her answer, but she had never up to now tried to conceal her regard for him. He would even have the right to accuse her of dishonesty. But he had just said he was not to ask her, but only to speak of their future relations. What that could mean, she did not know. Perhaps he was to state a hypothetical case—if something or other happened, would she marry him? It would certainly make the postponing answer easier to frame. …

  Peter queerly thanked her for her tranquillity of patience, then went off, leaving her looking after his first steps towards the gate. When, however, she turned round into the room, her mother was standing in the doorway. Could she have overheard their talk? She feared she had, and that she was to be questioned about her heart.

  "It was Peter, mother."

  Helga came into the room.

  "I know. You are pleased, aren't you? I happened to be passing, and heard voices, but at first I thought it was Hugh, and then I recognised the drawl—forgive me!—and was in good time to catch his fixing up that meeting for this afternoon. Do you wish to speak of it or not, my dear?"

  "I think I'd rather not. But don't go for a minute, mother. There was something I wanted to ask you. Hasn't there been an earthquake?"

  "Yes, it broke some things in the kitchen."

  "I hope nothing has happened to Hugh on the Tor."

  Her mother regarded her curiously.

  "That isn't one of your intuitions?"

  "I don't know. … That's what I wanted to ask you. How is it I never have any with regard to Peter? He is surely a man one might have intuitions about? I can never s
eem to see or guess what he is to say, do, or think. I believed he was contemplating the giving up of his studio, but he says not."

  "I could nearly have told you that," replied Helga, smiling. "And I suppose the reason he is so unexpected is that he is a genius. The surprises of genius are the one thing unfated. For all that, do you love him well enough to marry him?"

  Now that the question had come, Ingrid found that it gave her no displeasure. Her calm sincere eyes met her mother's calm affectionate ones.

  "Yes, I am sure I love him, but I would like a quite long time for self-examination. Did you overhear everything?"

  "Not everything, but enough. You are probably in doubt what this afternoon's private interview stands for. Yet it is not in the least difficult. He considers you a high order of supernatural being, and would like to lay down his arms at your feet, but fears his own unworthiness. I am only joking a very little, my dear. Have you forgotten his picture of you?"

  "What other destiny than marriage could I have, mother?"

  "There are no more Pythonesses of Delphi. You were too slow in coming into the world."

  "But how would you take it, mother?"

  "I should never disapprove of Peter," returned Helga. "And the money side of it, of course, you would hate to say or hear anything about; but still, if he is not a rich man, you will get enough hereafter."

  She kissed her daughter, and left the room, while Ingrid remained standing in its centre, an upright pillar endowed with a half-consciousness that was all thoughts endeavouring to shape themselves from feelings, and feelings equally endeavouring to find a vent in thoughts; but the feelings were many, and buried, and discordant, so that the thoughts were as worthless as vanishing.

  While passing Ingrid’s open door on her return to her room from the kitchen below, Helga had been momentarily terrified by the sound of a man's voice talking to her daughter from outside the house, through the window. She thought it was Hugh come back; and his box was still on her dressing-table. Then both the familiar assurance of the voice and her daughter's special manner of responding, had quieted her as quickly again; she now understood it was Peter, on his way up home from the station—he often thus left word at the house in the early morning.

  The alarm was enough, however. Hugh really was nearly due back, and she had no longer time nor inclination to risk that re-examination. So she had proceeded to her room, and, without so much as lifting the lid of the box again—since she knew that she had taken nothing out of it, and who should have tampered with it during her short absence?—had carried it off to Hugh's, where she had redeposited it in its old drawer. She was glad the sin had been prevented. It would have been a sin, though a very small one—not because logic said so, but because throughout she had been feeling so apprehensive and uncomfortable about it.

  Afterwards she had gone back to Ingrid's room, to hear her account of Peter. It was then that she had heard his own account of himself, if a proposed meeting with a young girl to discuss relations meant what it should. She told herself in justification, that no mother could have acted differently, a daughter's happiness being at stake.

  She still did not understand her own wishes or feelings in the matter. Distinctly it could not be called a surprise for anyone; almost it was an expected thing. Peter, besides, was a nice boy, a dear boy, with so many lovable qualities. Morally and physically he should be as sound as a bell, his one vice being over-smoking. For a supposed genius, he was wonderfully amenable and sane; and appeared to be personally popular everywhere. These were the things that counted. Ingrid would come into money by-and-by. … Could there be anything in poor Hugh's death-presentiment? It was odd that these thoughts of death and marriage should be going on in the world simultaneously all the time.

  How extraordinarily proud, troubled and beautiful Ingrid had looked this morning! Helga had even forgotten to ask about her injury. Was this altogether Peter's doing? She had an uneasy inspiration that such a mood and beauty must be above his head. A grimmer, grander man would deserve them more. Her mind flew to Saltfleet's photograph—but heaven help the child if ever she were to marry a Saltfleet! Peter was sound, small, domestic and good, like a sweet apple. … He would be angry with her for that description of his character, but she must show her practical benevolence by throwing her weight into his scale. His cynicism would get worn off in married life. He could not love and live with Ingrid, and be cynical.

  Chapter IX

  THE GLORY

  Seated at the Whitestone breakfast table, Ingrid and her mother each in her different way expected Hugh's report. His presence at her right hand was renewing Helga's seriousness from that late talk last night. She saw that he was dumb and grave. She feared that, whatever he might have succeeded in discovering on Devil’s Tor, an excursion to a tomb must be affecting him painfully in his present morbid state. This condition of his must be handled with the utmost care and sympathetic tact. Ingrid was the more directly anxious. She was sure—she saw it in his every look, movement and constraint—that he had penetrated to the burial chamber itself. And it concerned only her; her mother and grand-uncle were outside the affair, and Hugh was her impersonal messenger. She knew that anything he told them now would have to be expanded and made significant in their later private discussion. Meanwhile Uncle Magnus must be apprised of the introductory circumstances, for he had been told nothing.

  She outlined for him their last evening's adventure on the Tor, and he grunted his comprehension. His attitude would follow when he had determined it. Only mother and daughter already understood that any scene in which Hugh Drapier had a part was necessarily so far damned for the head of the house, who, from the very first hours of his nephew's stay, had conceived a sort of malignant antipathy to him, the social disguises of which were an ignoring silence and the curtest exchange of general talk. For instance, the rough banter he reserved particularly for Peter, he could no more have directed to Hugh than he could have fallen on his neck.

  But the true origin of this aversion none was ever to know save old Colborne himself. Hugh's father, the "accursed Scotchman"—fiery-haired, bald, tattooed with freckles, and all bones, like the son—had upon a time, during his wooing of Thore, Magnus's favourite younger sister, the uncouthness to refuse him a considerable service, that would have cost him little and was easily within his influence; and to insult him, into the bargain, by his manner of refusal. And Magnus upon the spot had vowed never to have further dealings with the man, or connection with him, or knowledge of him even—a determination ever after tolerably closely adhered to. Consequently, now after forty years, for the double of that happily-laid ghost to turn up unexpectedly in the person of the son, affected him as disagreeably as if the mellowing veil of intervening time had been torn rudely away, revealing the past again in all its uglinesses, crudities and vulgarities.

  He was short, compact, thick-necked, with a clever energetic brown face full of wrinkles and generally much gashed in shaving clean. He reminded one of Schopenhauer's portrait as an old man. Like Schopenhauer, as well, he had attained the art of combining a high idealism and intellect with a practical selfish cunning that was hard beyond the common; and of doing it sincerely. That part of his father's wealth that had come to him, he had kept, and doubled. Accordingly his genius was misanthropic. He contended with men on their own ground, and reviewed them on his.

  His bald dome of an imaginative thinker, with the bright, shrewd, unfriendly black eyes, caved by bristling brows, suggested that dangerous overseeing of the villainies and infirmities of mankind; and he had never married; and had written books that few had read and none had liked. The business of making money, which he regarded as inferior and an employment suitable to inferior minds only, he had afterwards turned out to be very good at. It gave him secret pleasure to prove thus that the same persons who possessed no brains to understand his philosophy with, were of very little account in anything. It was a sort of demonstration of the worth of his writings.

  The women o
f his household knew his signs. The soft, quiet voices and ways of both pleased him well. Of Helga's judgment, tact and managing capacity, he had a very high opinion, though she had to read it between the lines. He had never once regretted having protected her. But if he could be fond of anyone, it was Ingrid. Sometimes it nearly came to an association between them. She realised, and he knew she realised, the essential dark grandeur and dignity of this lonely setting of his to death, and he loved her for not expressing the understanding in any of the fashions naturally adopted by women. He did not fear death, but had never advanced as far as the wisdom which can accept the pity of others without shame.

  She had also interested herself in his system of thought, and occasionally he caught her reading in his chief work, on Racial Derivations. That might be a piece of hypocrisy in others, but this child had pride. And so he rarely teased her, and if he should, would always spare her pride. The unmistakable signs of her lineage further defended her—the long noble beauty of her mouth, the uninsultable abstraction of her northern eyes.

  Now, having paved the way with him, she turned at last to Hugh across the table, who at the first word looked up, yet dully, with none of the animation of an adventure to relate. He had scarcely touched his food.

  "Are you to tell us what happened, Hugh?—or would you rather leave it till afterwards?"

  "No, you can hear now. The stairs continued down, and I got to the bottom, and into a cave having a stone table for the reception of the dead, but nothing else—only another small pedestal for the death-food. There were no remains, or treasure. I had an accident, and smashed my torch down there, having to grope my way out in the dark. … It proved lucky, for if I'd stopped underground only a few minutes longer, I must have been trapped. I was hardly out, when an earthquake wrecked the stairs."

  Helga glanced at her daughter.

  "Then that was ours. What time was it, Hugh?"