"Who?"
"Arsinal here. … Arsinal, I beg you to do one of these two things... or there are three. Either keep away from to-morrow's settlement and let me deputise for you; or let me receive the property from Mrs. Fleming's hands, and I will pass it to you afterwards; or, if you must be present and take it yourself, at least give your word of honour now that you will refrain from joining it to the other while on the hill—anyway, so long as Miss Fleming is within range; and the range, we know, is considerable. In courtesy, I include her mother; of course they will be together. When they shall be out of range, then you may fly to your experiment as fast as may be. … The delay, if it is only one, won't be inordinate. If it is also a balk—that, I fear, must be your own private chastening. …"
"The two stones, supposed to be fragments, will naturally tempt a fitting." Peter musingly examined the cigarette between his fingers. "And as each is strong-natured in itself, the united product may be even dangerous to handle. That is feasible. Yet a few points occur to me. Why is Mr. Arsinal imagined to be rash enough to wish to expose outsiders—and women—to a first trial of unknown forces? And, the whole supposition being rather far-fetched, why are you stressing it? ... Also, why is Miss Fleming being singled out as the one with most to fear from such a trial? ... Or is this all an oblique resumption of some directer discussion gone before?"
Arsinal looked ill, and was clenching and unclenching his hand repeatedly. Giving no time to his associate to answer the other's questions, he broke in quickly, though quietly:
"So now it has arrived at a public attack, Saltfleet! Yet, in our after-lunch talk together, didn't I offer not to meet, not to know, Miss Fleming?"
"Truth to tell, you did."
"Then was the talk for nothing? In silencing you, was I merely driving back malice into its hole?"
"Hardly malice. Our terms have always been too equal for that. An idea was nearer inception a few hours ago, and proportionally weaker. This assembly, that wasn't on the table then, has put stature and vigour into it. … It is not prepossessing, Arsinal!"
"The conceit is as fantastic as disloyal. What! I must submit ignominiously to be excluded or bound, when my honesty will be admitted? The logic is strange."
"Put that way; which I say is a wrong and crooked way. For you are professing an aim, a single aim, and your honesty depends on the truth of the profession. If you have some further aim that you wish to remain concealed, then you are so far dishonest—not for the concealment, to which you have the ordinary human right, but for the profession of a thing untrue. … Efface yourself at to-morrow's settlement, and we shall know you are sincere in wanting Drapier's stone and no more. But decline all my choices, wrap yourself in this cloak of darkness, and what can I suspect but something... degenerate underneath! ..."
Arsinal got up. Peter, not to be left sitting alone, joined the two on the floor, flicking ash from his cigarette and keeping his eyes down.
"That is a word the applicability of which I shall later have to ask you to explain, Saltfleet. I don't know if you have an intention in angering me before Mr. Copping, but, supposing you have, it is now sufficiently done and I would beg you not to go on treading the border of past confidences. … What I must think is that, having hitherto been content to confine yourself to helping me in all this pursuit, now all at once something in it is personally interesting you; and you wish to procure for yourself independence of action. So you insult me, in order to obtain your release: but the witness of a stranger will render the insult sharper, besides preventing the friendly return to understanding. … I won't indulge in the cynicism, that such an attack on me before a third may have been in your thoughts since that last unsatisfactory patching-up. … Neither will I have the primitive vindictiveness to suggest to Mr. Copping just what may be interesting you since yesterday in this business. But, taking leave altogether to ignore your interposition, Saltfleet, the covert threat in which I shall know how to despise ... here is my answer to Mrs. Fleming! The affair is mine, not Mr. Saltfleet's. We are to be considered dissociated: he desires it, and I am not unwilling. Therefore I ask you, Mr. Copping to instruct her, and her daughter also, that he is no longer authorised to act for me or represent my views. … There is your own attitude, and I am sorry to have to refuse it, but my interests are vital. Mr. Saltfleet's alarm you yourself have styled 'far-fetched'—it is its nearly weakest description... your own fears for Miss Fleming can hardly materialise in a gathering of four or five on a definite business; yet you will also observe to her mother that I am by no means requiring her attendance; I shall take her consent to the transaction as given. … With these preliminaries, and in simple acceptance of Mrs. Fleming's arrangements, I shall be on Devil's Tor tomorrow evening, at nine, to receive the property."
Peter shrugged, and was silent. Saltfleet, who had been standing very erect on his feet, looking half-haughtily away, listening, after an appreciable pause turned abruptly upon his old colleague.
"I am content. Nor is it necessary to inquire how, if Miss Fleming isn't to be there and I am to be excluded, you are to get your stone after all. For you are not an imbecile, Arsinal... and so perhaps you have a better knowledge that Miss Fleming will be there. …"
"The spot can be charted."
"Let it be. However, whether or no, I shall be there too, since I can't get to learn beforehand if she has stayed away. You claim no right to the private possession of the hill for your purposes?"
"What I can't understand and you haven't answered me," said Peter, addressing Saltfleet, "is why this tremendous solicitude of yours is on Miss Fleming's account alone."
"She is the younger and more influenceable of the two women to be exposed."
"Nothing else?"
"Ask Arsinal."
Peter turned in silent interrogation to the man named. A faint frowning struggle crossed his face, before he said:
"The verbal riposte would be easy. But what Saltfleet means is different. I don't wish to fence.
He refers to an ancient prediction, in which he has no faith, and I..."
"And you... ?" Saltfleet spoke.
"I have no grounds for applying it to a young woman I have never met; and am not so applying it. Please say no more of it, Mr. Copping."
The artist returned to Saltfleet. "You will be up, then. But tell me specifically what you are to do, in a party apparently not desiring your company."
"I shall be there to watch all; and, if needful, to take measures."
"Preventive measures?"
"You know the ultimate of arguments, Mr. Copping."
"And this is your message to Mrs. Fleming, that you want conveyed?"
"If you please."
"Certainly it may have the desired effect; and I thank you. … So, before clinching the arrangement, I shall need to go back for new directions, Mr. Arsinal."
"Permit me to come with you to the house... now."
Peter regarded him. Arsinal's face was paler than ever, but he had stilled its commotion, to a new calmness that seemed even unforced: it was a delicate repose almost, as if a remote inaccessible will far within was being unconcerned with his physical frame and its possible insultings and mischances. For an instant the artist became an artist again, in pondering the case of this strange beauty of quietness and resolution in a man who, nevertheless, by his eyes, might be crazy. … But once more he dropped his gaze, to shake his head and refuse him.
"You'd better not. Everyone there isn't initiated."
"Yet you go primed against me. Refined women are to be alarmed by this hint of reckless unprincipled men, fallen out on a point and probably to come to blows before them. Were Mrs. Fleming to envisage me, I fancy her alarm would change to a smile! ... I could also perhaps persuade her that Mr. Saltfleet's true and ostensible motives for presenting himself on the Tor uninvited are different—that the true motive may have more of insolence, but certainly carries nothing that tact cannot deal with. And surely, it is an extravagant picture... of a couple of m
ature men of culture, not unknown in the world, engaged in a physical scuffle over a point of remote superstition! Neither can you have failed to note, Mr. Copping, that it is always within his power to stop the whole settlement, with its alleged dangers, by anticipating it in the manner you have suggested. But he is 'a party to a trust', so cannot see his way to do that. The principle, no doubt, is sound, but what must we think of a peril to a lady, that is after all of less account than her imaginary disappointment or other emotion in a transaction which has already seen her indifference?"
"The first of this idea of picking up the stone was his, as a matter of fact," said Peter, glancing interrogatively at Saltfleet. The latter returned:
"But never as a practical proposal. I found it odd that Mrs. Fleming wasn't offering us the thing in the directest way."
"I believe you are right: I apologise. Then the rest of your argument, Mr. Arsinal... ?"
"I wish you to convince Mrs. Fleming that the attendance of herself and her daughter on the hill to-morrow is most unlikely to be followed up by any unpleasantness whatsoever. If I don't put it stronger, it is because, as a scientific precisian, I am accustomed to find the exactest words the most forcible. Mr. Saltfleet, I think, has wanted to break with me, and so has insulted me. But over and above that, he must be wishing to wreck this final settlement to-morrow. It goes against some private plan he has laid down for himself. … It is a little more than hypothesis, unfortunately: the facts in support are too many. For he it is, Mr. Copping, who ever since yesterday, before my arrival, has sought occasions with Miss Fleming. I won't offend you by conceiving her manner of response: he may have succeeded in interesting and exciting her in this occult business, or she may at last be principally repelled by the persistency of his intrusions. To retain her, he has nearly from the first made use of my technical knowledge of some of the matters which may be supposed to impinge on her own intellectual, and even emotional, preoccupations. He has constantly urged upon us both the advantage, the necessity, of a meeting between us, to discuss the territory on either side of such a common border. Thereby, her release from us and our affairs has been from hour to hour put off. …
"On her account, too, it is—I shall say it openly—that he will neither prevent to-morrow's assembly on Devil's Tor by an action that will necessarily stop all further acquaintance, nor permit, if he can help it, that assembly, which equally is to bring everything to a short end... but he will spin out, and he will spin out! ... I, the man of dark design, I have expressed my willingness indifferently to either course. … And then, must I speak besides of his rejection for both of us of the offer brought this morning? It was a good offer, and for the emphasis of its condition he had but himself to thank... so good an offer, that even he dared not return it directly on your hands; but first must superfluously qualify it, and then altogether outrage its terms. …
"And similarly, this second offer, that you yourself find only too just and generous on the part of a lady who might well have sent us to the devil, after our bad treatment of her... he means to outrage it as well. It seems that he proposes to do so by putting fear into Mrs. Fleming's heart: the fear of a scene of violence, the fear of an experiment that is not in the programme, only I will not be coerced in a case that is no one else's but mine. … Assure her therefore, Mr. Copping, that there will be no assault made by the far stronger of two men in the presence of a delicate-minded girl, who could never wish to have the continued acquaintance of such a pugilist and brigand. Assure her also that so far am I from intending her daughter that grotesquely-conceived occult or biochemical mischief, that I am even prepared not to see her—you shall blindfold me with my own handkerchief before her arrival. The proffer is not more ridiculous than the fear to be allayed by it. … I trust to your honesty not to pass on Mr. Saltfleet's baseless suggestion in order to procure the withdrawing of an arrangement you dislike, omitting to pass on these just as emphatic and much more reasoned considerations of mine. But a personal interview with Mrs. Fleming this evening would be the best."
Saltfleet smiled sourly.
"So many words, Mr. Copping, and still not that one little undertaking which would have obviated them all!" But Peter's attending stare was unsympathetic.
"I shall report everything, gentlemen. Altogether, the affair isn't growing more agreeable as one sees into it. Of course, the feature I strongly resent is this intolerable bandying of Miss Fleming's name. Neither is the one of you privileged by a chance or stolen meeting or so, to seek to constitute himself her protector at another meeting she will attend under the conduct of her own people; nor is the other of you doing anything but insulting her by that laboured suggestion that she is being pursued for her acquaintance by a man she as good as doesn't know. I am the youngest and probably the least travelled in this room, and yet I must surmise that you, gentlemen, have acquired less than I of the world's discretion. That, as it happens, I am to marry Miss Fleming, is not the point. A Lady isn't to be so freely appropriated by strangers."
"For any excess, I apologise," said Saltfleet. "... However, you should be rather confounding the human and super-human elements of the case, Mr. Copping. Let Arsinal make his own excuses: I don't wish her acquaintance, and that is enough said of that. I would see her well through a peculiar occasion if I could. You are shying somewhat suddenly; just now, I remember an appeal on her behalf!"
"To stop the meeting; not to rule it."
"And you thanked me for proposing to rule it too."
"If it were to stop it."
"I ask no better."
Peter lit a new cigarette, and for a time said no more. Then, while they all uneasily stood still within that small circle of the floor, looking different ways, he announced:
"Very well! I'll be off, to see if I can get the consent of Mrs. Fleming and her daughter to your fetching away the stone as soon as you like, so forestalling that meeting. You both wish it?"
Saltfleet assented.
"And you, Mr. Arsinal?"
"I've said so. For the stone I must have, at all hazards, but if a particular meeting of persons can be stopped, it is very evidently not fated."
"Fated! ..." repeated Peter after him, in a musing undertone.
It was the last word of their talk, but none moved, and they remained standing there. It seemed as if, now that the Tor gathering was refused and this other simpler, less dramatic settlement substituted, the neglected supernatural in the case were starting to work again, like an unborn thing, within the recesses of them all. Peter, finding, nearly in amazement, that he alone had achieved the decision, giving it its permanent shape, was to doubt, with a doubt sinking to dismay, if objective horrors after all could be so easily penned; if destiny could be bent back without the worse disaster of irresistibility at last for the vain delay. He pictured, as it were in one complexity of image, Drapier lying in an open shell in a dark room, and those grey ghostly mourners dancing along a ledge, and the stack of great rocks in the act of being hurled headlong over the Tor's side in a grisly storm, and Ingrid and Saltfleet standing face-to-face, pale, eyeing each other peculiarly... and other things... and to all this, his own feeble, querulous, "No—no!"... So a creative artist might feel, who had cheapened his soul in the name of safety, turning his eyes from a vision of life coming in the form of madness. …
But Saltfleet was recalling for one time more those metamorphosing spirit-eyes of the afternoon, and knew inside himself the beginning of a sense of abashment for his cowardice in the face of a great adventure, as for his betrayal of the higher unaffected dauntlessness of a noble girl. … While Arsinal already seemed to become aware of his impurity of haste, greed, circumspection, that had shown him impotent in this short miraculous day of failure and twofold triumph. For once he had thought to have lost the flint, then, in a swoop, had swept down upon its brother and it; yet because his soul had somehow parted from its faith, these events had been merely luck for him, and more luck he had feared to risk, and so would possess that original a
nd still-unsecured of the twin stones certainly. But had it not been luck for him, had it been unseen design and contrivance, the mighty tide-wave might yet have been advancing, not ceased. … As a contemptuous alms from these underlings and strangers, the stone might be given him this very day. It could not be the same, but something would have gone out of a transaction made safe and vulgar. … The retribution of the high—it should entail, perhaps, the slow climbing back to worth, during years. …
A noise sounded outside the room, and Peter, who alone might realise its strangeness at that hour, moved after another moment to the door, looking puzzled, and even alarmed.
Chapter XXVII
INTERVENTION
Ingrid, white-faced, dressed all in black, frowning from her indecision, stood there on the tiny landing, one gloved hand still suspended towards the door latch that evidently, after doubt, she had been about to depress. As well as the immediate vision of Peter, her eye, in its instantaneous exploration of what it could take in of the room through the gap, saw enough of its standing occupants to know who they were. With dismay she realised what she had come to and was interrupting; yet the suspicion must have been the cause of her hesitation while the room was still ominously shut against her, if in silence. But Peter, thinking that that quick probable ascertaining of the identity of his visitors would be followed by a prompt retreat, put back his hand to close the door; and now they were alone and face-to-face.
"Mother sent me. She is rather anxious at your being so long gone. They were out?—and you left word that they were to come on here?"
Devil's Tor Page 47
