Or should she wait until time should have softened these hard contrasts and brought that whole soul to communication in the poetry of perspective remembrance? It was impossible. For there were things to know, and things to be settled, at once; besides which, Ingrid's return to her normal manner must be signalised—by what? So heavy a mood could not pass without a consequence. It might take the form of a reactive loathing of the contact that had had such power to desolate her; but, more probably, her rising from this depth must mean new vigour, new life. Precisely in the transition her instinct towards a strange passion might know its next wave of unearthly joy and irresponsible hardihood. … She could not tell. Like Peter, now she felt she knew her girl no longer.
Yet had that other queer heavenly influx of love endured, it was just such a renewal of life that she would have dared to want. For love spoke not to cowardice or the heart's retirement to old peace; but to its high tides. And the brave exchange would have illuminated all the case for them both; whereas merely to persuade her child to her duty might succeed in its immediate end, but because they would have talked upon a plane of prudence and coldness it must be an alienating conversation, and the sacrifice without horror, from decency, custom, lassitude alone, must unconsciously introduce to Ingrid's existence a new character of disillusion and renunciation, insidiously destroying her youth. …
Then Ingrid, scarcely looking at her mother, stopped her hesitations by quietly telling what had not yet been told. She said that Mr. Saltfleet had followed her to Devil's Tor by intention. He could not have known, and had not known, that she was to be there, but he had learnt that she was out, and had guessed that her uneasiness might be drawing her to see the hill again.
As Helga heard her, the new fact so little startled her, that she was sure she had expected nothing else throughout. And it was a corollary for her understanding, how his trouble taken on a doubtful chance represented the measure of his earnestness to meet her daughter once more, as the calculation itself should represent the measure of his mental energy. … So that now their earlier arrangement of the day was cancelled, and all choices were again open to her. The perfidy could not anger her, for it was too serious, too dynamic. Neither was she permitted to stand amazed before any brutality or insolence of such a person; but what seized the rule of her pale silence of many unquiet thoughts came to be her groping after some reasonable motive in him for so flying at a girl unknown to him only yesterday, whose pure sphere was grazing his terrible one on but the infinitesimal point of an accident. For Ingrid, at least thank God!—had had no part in shaping this encounter beforehand... unless her demeanour lied. … No, she could be keeping nothing back of that; and Peter's canker of an ancient monstrous instinct within her, how could the ugliness so soon, indeed, have acquired a corporeal form, requiring to be served by deceits? Then Saltfleet's was all the sin... and yet, again, she could not conceive him sensual. …
A feeble gleam of afternoon sun threw some lines of the window-frame on a circumscribed patch of the opposite wall, and Helga, glancing at the contrast, remarked it. She meditated how, in the properest sense, every joy in life was like the slow-moving sunlight on a prison wall, half a warmth and blessedness, but half a defining of one's bars. Then since the true joy, the full blazing of the sun, was outside the prison, and this only its travelling mockery for those who should never quit these walls except by way of a coffin, what a pathetic madness it was to lament the inevitable passage and final disappearance of the gleams as though they presented a retainable good! ... the long peace of years of their family was to crumble at last, and the storm come. When it had hewed and slashed among them to satiety, for some—those that were left—would begin a new peace slowly accumulating sweetness... and that, too, must be broken, to the music of weeping and execration: and such was life. The moving of pale sunlight along prison walls! ...
She returned to Ingrid, to comment slowly, without effort controlling her manner to a cleareyed, rather beautiful immobility that was not the proper garment of her perturbed soul, yet allowed enough of its bewilderment and foreboding to peep through to preclude a charge of art, while the ground of calmness was her remoteness from indignation or quick dismay:
"This action of his was singular, however. Since you spoke together, didn't he give you the news of his friend's arrival, and my offer to them? It was on the particular condition that they were to let you alone."
"Either he couldn't have promised that yet, or he had the right to recall the bargain, so far having had nothing from you."
"But Peter saw him and his friend, when they professed to be quite agreeable to what I proposed; with the small additional proviso that your consent in writing should be obtained, for the salving of Mr. Saltfleet's conscience. … Now I am to suppose that they were only keeping me amused, knowing that the arrangement would fail on just that point? It was Mr. Saltfleet's way of rebuking my interference in a business he has come to regard as yours?"
Ingrid said nothing, and her mother proceeded:
"It's so impossible, on this insolent—or at least mysterious—challenge, to understand any longer what really they want. I hope you're to tell me. For if it were no more than Hugh's duplicate treasure, that you hold, surely one means of procuring it is as good as another to them? ... I can't even resent this affront until I learn what it means. If it is only the stone, they may still have that. And perhaps the mistake I made was in insisting on a condition, that that man has been finding offensive to you—in a spirit of chivalry not less offensive to me. So you needn't write... in fact, I imagine this personal meeting was instead... but Peter shall see them again, and hand them the stone without conditions. Perhaps I insulted you by that demand. Of course, you will pass me your word not to go out of doors until they are safely away to-morrow."
"He wants me to meet Mr. Arsinal. So far as I know, he is neither being chivalrous, nor taking up any attitude towards yourself."
"Isn't it an attitude to flout my offer?"
"No, he is too caught by realities to think of attitudes. He does see that you may take it in the human way and withdraw the offer out of pique, refusing them the stone altogether. He could not be expected to fathom the essential good nature of a woman who has chosen suddenly to cease his acquaintance. So that contingency, certainly, he has provided for; but it is still scarcely an attitude."
"Then you had better tell me what passed between you, in your own manner."
Ingrid dropped her lashes, frowned, and was quiet. She looked up again to say:
"But you have something to tell me, too. Why have you been in such an inordinate hurry over this transaction, mother? Wasn't it Peter who suggested the use being made of my absence?"
A slight colour stole into her mother's face.
"He is not to deny it. He's very seriously concerned about you, Ingrid, and his whole care is to get these men dismissed without an instant's unnecessary delay. Don't censure Peter."
"You two had a long talk?"
"You enabled it. He came to see you with the news of Mr. Arsinal's arrival; but you were out."
"And every accident is helping! ... Yet at the inn last evening he agreed to the principle of a meeting between Mr. Arsinal and me."
"You haven't seen that man as well?" inquired Helga quickly.
"No, I have said I am to meet him."
"To discuss what? And why was it hidden from me yesterday, when you came back?"
"You would have forbidden it."
"But you are telling me now."
"Because now I am willing that you should forbid it. If Peter has faced about, so have I. … And I shall obey your will in the matter. … But the discussion yesterday was to have been about the moral ownership of Hugh's two stones. They are occult, you know; and to the right person, very precious. Mr. Arsinal, however, claims to be the principal on the other side."
"As you are not, on this side, Ingrid."
"No. But it was a case of information, and you would have arrived at a judgment on the
wrong points."
"You cannot say that, my dear. I did not talk to Hugh about our one of them, at least, for nothing."
"I am saying only what was in my mind yesterday. Now you and Peter have decided the destination of both, to which I agree, and that practical part of the business is closed. If I still met Mr. Arsinal, it would be simply to exchange wisdom for wisdom. Only, it is futile. Something, not at all a joke, is coming on some of us in this house and district, and no doubt the best wisdom for Mr. Arsinal, as well as me, will be not to try to calculate the incalculable. Otherwise, our meeting could still be at Peter's—at half-past five this afternoon. I've to send word. If you dislike the idea, I will cancel it."
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 ac
cepted 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."
Devil's Tor Page 43
