Devil's Tor (54 page)

His coarse jetty hair was as a mane on his shoulders, while his mournful exasperated face, that was beardless, might by day have been lemon-hued. He was oldish. His sunk cheeks, with the deep-graved lines between nose and mouth, and others crossing the width of his forehead, served to single him out from the rest present. Arsinal guessed that he was that tribe's chief. His mightier chest and limbs, and his quicker alertness, declared how that was possible; and perhaps it was he who had been awaited.

His shifty eyes fell upon the ravener as it was in the act of retreating with its booty. With an astonishing swiftness of resolution and agility, he sprang forward after it in a wild flying leap, to strike at the back of the beast's neck with the short stone-tipped spear in his hand, using both wrists to give the stab additional ferocity. The pard, that was as tall as an ass, faced round with a frightful snarl, but even so would not drop the prey. The man, flashing out the spear from that first wound, jabbed with it repeatedly in intensest savagery at the disgusting visage, all streaming blood from its jaws. Then, with rage and agony, the leopard relinquished the arm at last, to hurl itself at its torturer.

The spear timber snapped near the head, and the weapon was useless. The man dodged, turned short after the brute from behind, and seized its upper and lower jaws with his two hands. There was a sharp sickening wrench, then the leopard collapsed, writhing, with a wail like that of a lost soul. But snatching a new spear from a follower, the victor never ceased stabbing and restabbing the jowl of the senseless beast until it was an indistinguishable pulp of blood and matter.

He staggered back to straightness, or what could pass for it, then stood with rising and falling breast, glaring around at the details of the scene. It was not permitted that he should see Arsinal. The woman who had shrieked was still bending over her mutilated one, silently watching the blood well from his shoulder, like wine from a stopperless bottle. The chief came across to regard the prostrate man gloomily for well-nigh a minute. At last he raised the borrowed spear. Its point descended hard and swift upon the upturned back, reaching through all to the ground. To Arsinal, however, that unreal murder of a phantom, after its sudden horror, could stand out as an act of savage mercy. …

Fouled with gore from head to foot, the chief impatiently cast away the spear, to move straight upon the mystic pillar of light, while those nearest him cowered aside to make space. For a great time he viewed this spectacle too in silence, and it was clear that his reasoning brain worked more laboriously than his active. Yet, in the end, it seemed that he would have taken a tentative step forward in the decision to approach still closer to the misty column, with its nucleus of white brilliance; his lifted foot, however, appeared to lose its instinct of planting, so that his body became wrenched, and he stumbled and over-balanced himself, tumbling to earth in a heap—it was difficult to see how it had happened. The gradually thickening moon of followers fell back. Faces were set in consternation and wonder, while the chief still made no effort to rise, though entirely sensible. The torrent drowned all human articulation.

And those other shapes of both sexes kept issuing from the night, paying their preliminary toll of amazement from the outskirts of the scene before timidly and clumsily stealing forward to take refuge with their assembled kind and extend the semicircle's horn nearest the mountain. The whole circle was never completed, doubtless because the facing of the fire's glow interfered with the vision of that pillar of paler light. As they came up singly, each creature gazed with furtive intentness at those forsaken bloody dead ones, that told their own tragedy, but none paused long before proceeding to the final spectacle unparalleled by any memory within their primitive skulls. Among the last of all came one, half girl, half woman, slighter, more graceful and younger-looking than the others of her sex, though still of uncouth type. The contrast Arsinal could not pursue, for her next actions gave him different thoughts.

With but a glance of shock and recognition at the lying dead, and an anguished silent parting of her lips, she had already hastened forward to the chief's helpless form. He looked up towards her as she came. She bent her strength to lift him to his feet, and afterwards supported him standing; whereupon it was confirmed that he had been temporarily paralysed, but not hurt. When the fire for a moment lit both their faces, there was such a resemblance, that she might well be his daughter. They exchanged silent lip-speech, he, apparently, slowly and sullenly, she excitedly. He pointed in turn to the mountain, the leopard's carcase, the dead man, and the pillar of faint silver. Finally, he shook himself free of her, while she, in staring in a wonderstruck way at the thing in their midst, no longer attempted to hold him. The uproar of the waters stopped every barbarous sound that might be their language.

No more than three long paces separated her from the column, and with a shuffling suddenness she stepped them. She stooped low, lifted easily and harmlessly from the ground the spherical source of the brightness, then, rising again, examined what was in her hand. The perpendicular misty shaft remained where it had been, save that its lower end now rested on earth; so the two phenomena were truly not parts. And almost instantly the shaft grew to be defined into the apparition of a miraculously tall, moon-fleshed, draped woman, who was like an inner ghost within a scene already spectral. …

Arsinal re-collected his wits, to study the effect of this latest phantom upon those witnesses, but not one of all their awed and painfully labouring faces that he could discern showed signs of awareness of the transition. Their eyes seemed always to be upon what the girl held. Accordingly, the new hallucination could not be for them, but the second-sight required for its beholding was not yet prepared in their still animal brains.

Alone, the girl displayed the extreme agitation of such a vision, such a knowledge, for, throwing down her knob of light in terror, she cast herself after it prone upon the ground with arms outstretched before that strange spirit, as if worshipping her. …

The two men came together. Saltfleet was grim, and Arsinal pale. A space of silence passed, when Arsinal said quietly:

"We have both
seen,
I think."

The other assented by a collected but curiously moved look.

"You as little as myself will care to speak of it at once," Arsinal proceeded. "Such prodigies and portents are not for speech. Perhaps afterwards—long afterwards—we may tell each other. Now I only wish to say, for a purpose: I have just been translated to a very ancient time, Saltfleet, and have been witnessing events, by night. Has your experience been of that kind?"

"No."

"Has yours, then, been the direct overtaking, and mine the derived?"

"From your outline, yes."

"Then it is singular. Yet it was necessary that I should have seen what I did. … And I hazarded in advance that the actual contact should be immaterial; nevertheless there must be a law, and what is that law? ... Need your
direct
have been of more importance than my
derived?
Might not it be like an unfolding, demanding distance—a longer road? ..."

"No. A stroke needs no unfolding."

"You have been stricken, in a way that I have not?"

"Yes," answered Saltfleet. "I am altered."

"But in another sense than after your morning's adventure on this hill?"

"I could still find myself active and plan-making after that. Now..." He shrugged, and turned aside.

"Now you regard yourself as fated, Saltfleet?"

"Fated—yes."

"In what degree? To what end?"

"Not to any end of mine. … Drapier might have known about it too. I would talk to him if he were alive—but you ..."

"I am still to experience this knowledge. How can I attain it quickly?"

"Probably not by premeditation. If you are to gain it, you will gain it."

"What of Miss Fleming?"

"What I know, she must know."

A pause followed.

"I am rather physically distressed from this shock," said Arsinal, "yet, if it were to do any good, I would not hesitate to repeat the experiment at once, elsewhere on the hill. Would you be prepared to join me, Saltfleet?"

"No, I'd rather not."

"Why?"

"I have seen nearly enough for one day."

"Perhaps you are right. But we are not to part company?"

"We will keep together till to-morrow."

"You may be the man, after all," Arsinal pondered slowly, "yet definitely that has been the very last thing in my mind."

Mingling with and augmented by his supernatural excitement, his perturbation on account of the secondary character of his entrancement found all the less resistance in his will, so that he feared to disclose more of it than was proper. During another silence, he felt the urgent need to move—to walk—to get away. He suggested to Saltfleet that before returning home they should mount to the Tor's top, that he might be shown the site of the tomb, and then, in descending again by the directer route, Drapier's death-place. This, accordingly, they did.

Towards three o'clock of that afternoon, in the inconspicuous slow creeping to brightness of Helga's still sunless room, she sat facing her daughter, constantly scanning her with eyes that held perplexity, and something else besides, very difficult to define. It was neither submission to a fact, nor a sense of loss, nor the calm foreknowledge of an inevitable evil happening, but a union of the shades of all three, none of them as yet in substance. The whole indescribable expression gave her face a fine mysteriousness that, in this sought conversation, was like a very fitting thing. But Ingrid only once or twice resented her mother's gaze with a quick ascertaining glance, while always she leant back exhausted, frequently suffering her heavy lids to droop, above cheeks as white as paper. A window was open, letting in the soft sweetness of the day.

Peter was not there. Depressed and thoughtful from his vain long waiting for Ingrid's return, he had at last gone home at past midday, and was not yet back. Then, an hour after his vanishing, she had appeared, limping from her overtasked ankle and with a drawn face set fast in the stoical endurance of weariness and her spirit's shock; and, upon her mother's hastening out to her from the lunch table, she had declined the meal, announcing her intention to pass straight upstairs to her room to lie down, but as some brief explanation of her long absence was unavoidable, she had, before turning her back, also informed her mother that she had been on Devil's Tor, where she had been joined by Mr. Saltfleet, with whom she had spoken. … Helga, stunned, had said little to that, but had begged the girl to see her in her own room in another hour, to discuss an urgent related matter. …

For the rest of her silent meal with old Colborne, and afterwards, she could not make up her mind if Saltfleet had
sought
her daughter on the Tor or if it had been a chance encounter. But then she came to comprehend that it made no difference; for what alone mattered was that their meeting there should have had this distressing effect on the child. As the hour of waiting drew to a close, however, Helga's sternness of determination to end it all began, she knew not how, to crack and give place to what in her heart had the similitude to golden sunshine. The question shaped itself from all sides for her, just like the gathering of an inspiration: whether love, truly to serve, must not get inside the soul of the one to be served?—whether from the safe platform of sense and rectitude, the arms of even a very great love could stretch as
far
as perversity? ...

Because, supposing such a blind enchanting of her daughter as Peter felt, the roots of the morbid fascination must still be so young and weak, so unrecognised by Ingrid herself, that they should be easily detachable; but was it to detach them to stop the manifestation, leaving the instinct intact? Surely, the reverse method should be the wiser; that of bringing on the crisis, in order that it might pass almost before being realised, and never recur. The way of courage and love. For if Ingrid had this nature, later in life
she
might not be there to guide her through her dark valley, while now the audacity of a single day might purchase immunity for ever. And the perfect love could have an audacity that without it must seem and be quite reckless; for the character of perfect love was miraculous, the whole of heaven was behind one's feeble stroke, and in a thousand stories the Devil had recoiled before the sign of the cross. … And so it might be the wisest, as it would be the most daring, to bring them together, that Ingrid might become visibly aware of this sucking depth of her soul, that incautiously adventured threatened at some time to bring her to disaster; but to-day its blackness would be lighted for her by the love of a mother. …

The sun went in from her spirit, and the mood was lost, yet she remembered it, wondering. She wondered how she could have been so gripped by a silly impulse that suddenly was declaring itself worthless. Very clear was it to her, with the passing of her folly, that the one sensible way to stop an infatuation, developed or incipient, was to forbid its opportunities. Ingrid's further meetings with these adventurers being refused, and they sent off to-morrow with their prizes, no more mischief could be done. But Peter's must be supposed to be the hyperbolic language of a boy living essentially amongst images and distortions.

Thus she thought to have dismissed the mental episode for the aberration of a moment... when increasingly it impressed her how the emotion had not seemed to be hers at all, but rather a suggestion from outside—an inflaming of her softer nature... as though some unseen presence in the room had whispered words in her ear in the spirit of seducing. She was in that room, her own, expecting Ingrid. … And next, while shrugging at such a superstition, she conceived more soberly that the emotion it concerned might be belonging to the whole lowering sky and electric flashings of intuition and occult correspondence, that all the week had represented the house's atmosphere. So it would be connected with everything; and had a purpose and meaning, if the rest had.