Before the whole minute was up she moved sharply, as if startled, but went on looking.
Something now was travelling perpetually across the face of the flint, from right to left, that resembled smoke. It was a kind of white vapour, now thick, now thin. Its form was ever-changing. Its drift across the flint was quite slow; and the smoke seemed to be in the flint, not on its surface. …
Next, after she had become more familiar with it, the tiny field of vision seemed mystically to have grown magnified, till she could fancy that she was peering down at an animated black night sky, over the face of which clouds were sailing. And sometimes this whole imaginable sky was filled by the mass of cloud-forms, while at other times they parted fantastically, in the manner of true clouds, to reveal deep rifts of blackness. And at still other times all was black sky, containing no more than a wisp here and there of nebulous vapour.
Of course it was less like the image of an overhead sky than the reflection of one, say, in the quiet illusory depths of some leaf-blackened roadside pool; but dwarfed in the process as well, as if an invisible reducing lens were in between. Yet unmistakably it remained a night sky; the blackness was not of the medium, or not alone of it. Surely what she had been beginning to imagine a glittering aberration of her sight could really be nothing else than infinitesimal star-points shining forth!...
A large foreign object came rudely between her eyes and their magic spectrum. She realised that it was Hugh's hand. He was standing over her again, proposing to take back his little hemisphere—stupidly she heard his words.
"Better not spend too much time on it, Helga. You may get fascinated."
"And then?" Her unwonted note of exasperation surprised herself. She made no appeal for longer time, however, and without protest saw him restore the flint to its box.
"You are the last person I should wish to see in the grip of the abnormal," was his simply-uttered reply to her question. She was unable to resolve what significance there might be in it, but was still patient, while her momentary anger had vanished, for she knew that she must now hear more—that he was of his own free will about to tell her more.
"Are you in such a grip, Hugh?" she asked, with a quiet simplicity equal to his.
He faced her from his chair.
"I hadn't meant to confess that I am, but I suppose the fact will appear of itself from the rest of my explanation. An honest man can't turn thief without practical justification, and still remain normal, Helga. Well then, not to mince words, I stole this thing you have just seen. And why have I stolen it? Because it won't allow me to give it back to the thieves immediately before me in time. So that's what you too have to fear—that it won't let you give it up. But then there may be the devil to pay! And that is why I cut short your experimenting."
"But in that case it is very odd."
"Would to God I could find it in my heart to tell you half the oddness of it, Helga! It's fast leading me to believe that the universe as a whole is very odd."
Chapter V
LUCIUS CORNELIUS SULLA
"And now that I've disclosed my right position, you may change your mind and not choose to associate yourself in any shape or form with an unclean transaction."
A look of sharp inquiry translated his suggestion to a question, but Helga neither availed herself of the offered loop-hole nor hastened to assure him of her magnanimity. For quite a time she held her peace, while trying to make clear to herself the meaning of the curious new swell of her feelings, which nevertheless could not only have begun to work within her that night. It was the culmination of a week's growing recognition of Hugh's strangeness of mood and manner. Something morbid, perhaps tragical, was advancing upon him—she definitely had the intuition of fate, and events yet to come. She earnestly wished to help him to fight his trouble, but had the further instinct that he would decline her assistance. She was especially anxious not to appear or be inquisitive; she must judge the whole from the part that he would elect to confess to her. She did not feel that it was to be anything vulgar, such as the fear of a criminal attack by those men he had robbed. His soul shone out to her as mournful, steadfast, remote. She had no idea what part that queer stone she had just had in her hand was playing in his concealed distress, nor how far its weirdness was influencing her own low fever of spirit, sitting here at past midnight with a man whose existence she had practically forgotten, whose thoughts were of death; and suddenly she determined to put the interrogation that she ought to have addressed to him before. And so, not having answered his inquiry, which perhaps she had received only as a form of self-condemnatory apology, she said:
"Hugh, that appearance in the pebble—what causes it? And what is the pebble itself?"
"Is your consent so conditional, Helga? Are you beginning already to see difficulties and problems? I was hoping that as a woman, and my cousin, you would have the simple loyalty. As for the phenomenon, no one has ever expounded it to me, so I can't to you. The flint's tradition I merely know as having reference to the ancient worship of the 'Great Mother'."
"Then it is a sacred stone?"
"So I've understood. It has evidently been lodged for an incalculable number of years in a certain Lama monastery in Tibet, which is where that pair of fellows found it. But that would have nothing to do with the earlier tradition. The Lamas don't go in for goddess worship. It must have been reverenced by them on account of its mystical virtues."
"Where originally did it come from?"
"I wasn't told. Perhaps Asia Minor. Cybele was one of the many names of the 'Great Mother' in various lands, and her cult was rampant in Phrygia and all over the Near East. Other names were Rhea, mother of Zeus, in Greece, and Ops in Rome."
"But how was the stone associated with that worship?"
"I wasn't told," repeated Drapier.
"Why are you really so loath to give it up, Hugh?"
"Its examination leads one on and on. One always seems to be on the verge of an important discovery."
"Which never arrives, however?"
"It hasn't arrived yet for me."
"You believe it occult?"
"Yes, I do and must."
"Perhaps it is."
She thought awhile; then began again:
"These men looted it from the monastery?"
"I had better give you the story. I met them about the middle of May last, well inside Tibet, about twenty marches off the frontier passes, as they were going further into the country and I was coming out of it, towards Leh. They gave their names as Arsinal and Saltfleet. The meeting was purely a chance one. I had heard of Saltfleet as a Himalayan climber, but not of the other, and had never before clapped eyes on either of them. So we joined camps for one night only, and had a grand pow-wow over roast yak, biscuit and souchong. It was our first and last acquaintance. Next morning we went on our respective ways."
"At that meeting, I suppose, they announced to you their intention or design of stealing the sacred stone. Or how was it?"
"Yes, they said they were going after it. It seems that Arsinal is a specialising student of the Cybele cult, and had tracked the flint, or its reported existence, down to the monastery we are talking about. Saltfleet, I gathered, was helping him by his expert knowledge of the land and its commissariat problems."
"You are to show me their photograph?"
"Yes, soon. Well, they had perhaps a matter of eighty miles further to go to their destination. I left them to it. At three marches from the Ladak frontier—that is, at some time quite early in June—I was overtaken by a native runner from the pair. He reported that the Sahibs and their round dozen of followers were defending themselves, when he left them, against a mob of Tibetans, incited thereto by their sacerdotals; that there was no immediate risk of anything worse than an undignified and evil-smelling arrest, but that the older Sahib (which should be Arsinal) had given him food for ten days, and sent him off by another way under cover of darkness, with orders to follow and find the red-haired Englishman, and give him 'th
is token.' I grasped the situation easily enough, knew that they weren't wanting fighting help, but a confederate, and so, having scribbled off a note—'Your news duly received'—which could compromise nobody, and sent it back by the Ladaki, I went on climbing peaceably out of the land."
"Would they have got that note?"
"He seemed a trusty fellow."
"Do you know if they are released yet?"
"Yes, they are. My agent has cabled me that the two were back in Srinagar, the Kashmir capital, as early as July 10th."
"Then what is your guess, Hugh? That they are so eager for the restitution of their prize that they will follow you all the way to England for it?"
"I've no doubt about it; since they went to the far greater pains of a very hard penetration of a forbidden country, to secure it in the first place. And Arsinal can't be that kind of man at all, he was distinctly of the delicate sedentary type."
"How soon could they be home?"
"They'll lose no time, Helga. On the day that fellow was sent off after me I calculate I was ten marches on from where we had parted. They might be nearly as much the other way; or say, eighteen days in all from me. Add anything up to a week for their confinement after the scuffle, and you get a probable three weeks for the interval between us at the frontier. Well, at Srinagar they were just two weeks after me. I passed through a fortnight previously. You mayn't appreciate what that week's difference implies in Tibet, but if the figure is accurate it means they must have killed the cattle. And I haven't the smallest doubt they'll do the equivalent of killing cattle all the way to the Thames docks and London."
"Could they trace you down here?"
"I had to leave my address at the hotel in town, for my correspondence to be forwarded."
"When is the earliest they could come?"
"I haven't studied the shipping. They might turn up at any moment."
"Hugh, what is to happen?"
"God knows! A row, certainly."
"You will refuse to give it up to them?"
"Yes."
"In the consciousness that this is pure madness and weakness, my dear?"
"Yes; in spite of every sane and moral consideration, I shall stick to it, Helga. That's a final rigid decision, not to be reasoned for or against, and you are not to try to dissuade me."
She did not try, but was silent. And Drapier, stealing a surreptitious glance at her face, was struck by its set sternness, showing how unpleasantly she was regarding his business. All her habitual unconscious little affectations of a charming woman seemed suddenly to have become swept away by this new intense seriousness of her naked spirit. It had the incidental effect of making her ten times more beautiful to him. And the house continued like a tomb for quietness, while the rain pattered against the panes. Helga herself, however, was meditating how, even when the whole great world slept, as now, like some gigantic weary monster, its blood still pulsed incessantly through its arteries, and this blood was time. Every clock-tick through the night was bringing every sleeper in the land an instant nearer to tragedy and death. There was no such thing as a pause from life. Fate worked on always, and they were the wise persons who, like herself and Hugh, sat up to steel themselves against its approach. It was the death of each at last that rendered it a tragedy. Not to feel the constant terrifying advance of death upon one, was to miss the true nature of existence; but it was time that brought it on. A clock, such as that faintly ticking on the mantelpiece, was the grisliest symbol of one's end. …
"Moreover," added Drapier a minute later, "I'm no authority in the ethics of a case like this, but it seems to me that a distinction is drawable. A thief, stealing from other thieves, has surely no right, even in honour, to restore the thing stolen to them; his duty must be to restore it to the proper owner."
"To the monastery. But you are not proposing to do that, and you have asked me to give it back to the—thieves."
"Very true. I was being jesuitical. I mustn't lie as well as steal, Helga; tempting and easy though it may be at the meeting to come. They must at all events be confronted by the flat truth. Well, I'll show you their likeness..."
"I want to see it. But, Hugh—what will the international consequences be of this robbery? Surely a complaint will be lodged?"
"That may well be; but whether the 'pinching' of a twopenny relic is a big enough affair for the Viceroy's dossier is another thing. I can't hear any questions being asked in Parliament about that. What the Tibetans may be able to do is make a fuss about the infringement of their treaty with us. I don't at all imagine that Messrs. Arsinal and Saltfleet had taken the necessary trouble to furnish themselves with a permit to enter the country. However, any such storm will descend upon their own heads only. I can't be convicted of co-operation on the bare word of a Ladaki. You certainly, under any circumstances, can't come to harm."
He found the unmounted print, and having barely glanced at it to refresh his memory, at once reached forward to pass it to Helga. She frowned as she mused down over it.
"Saltfleet, I suppose, is the taller of the two?"
"Yes, Arsinal is the baldish one."
The photograph, a happily-secured, excellently-printed quarter-plate snap (slightly crumpled, however, from its long lodgement in in Drapier's flexible case) showed the two posed men, both seemingly in young middle life, standing side-by-side, smiling, and facing the camera. They wore what looked like goatskin short coats, with riding-breeches, puttees and huge fur gauntlets.
"I took it the morning we broke camp. Temperature, if I recall rightly, 22 Fahrenheit, with a bitter searching wind. … Does Saltfleet, the bigger chap, convey anything to you?—remind you of any known historical character? It's most unlikely. But have you ever visited the galleries of Rome?"
Helga quietly returned a negative answer. In fact, she had been abroad but little. Her husband had not cared for foreigners, while after his death she had mostly been chained to this one spot.
She continued regarding the photograph in her hand, as the illustration of Hugh's explanatory next words.
"In one of them is, or was, the presumed bust of Lucius Cornelius Sulla, the notorious Roman dictator—so maligned as he always has been. The handsomest type of military consular; every bone of his face patrician. Powerful neck, stern features, sunken cheeks, coarse, haughty, rather brutal lips, wide forehead, pride and daring written all over him. Evidently a tall, big, strong man. Now then, Helga, if the subscription of that exhibit read 'Saltfleet' instead of 'Sulla', I assure you in sober truth the likeness would be just as good. You don't see it of course in the grinning picture you're looking at; you would need the introduction to the man in the flesh. But then it's most astonishing."
"If I remember my Plutarch, surely Sulla was an absolute fiend?"
"He may have made him out to be, but I fancy it was Mommsen who exploded that conception of his character. He was, a very unique and tremendous individual living in a peculiarly savage time, who, I don't say worked his way up, or hewed his way up, but almost yawned his way up from the extreme bottom of his noble class to unlimited sovereignty over the lives and fortunes of millions. To get the scale of such a man you have to contemplate his horde of bloody-minded, energetic, ambitious contemporaries, in what was probably the bloodiest, fiercest and corruptest chapter of the world's whole history.
"He won all his battles—by sheer ferocious determination, without pretence of finesse. He ruined all his personal enemies; except Sertorius, whom he couldn't get at. He made his name a byword of terror to the nations of the East, who were generally so uppish—as they are still, and eternally will be, let the pump-politicians note the fact! He grasped a position in the huge chaotic Roman Republic that had to be created by his own imagination—that is, he made himself, in a very dignified letter to the Senate, the first uncrowned Emperor, as Julius Caesar was the second, and Octavius only the first in name.
"And when no more heights remained to be scaled, when there was absolutely nothing else at home or abroad tha
t he could conceive as worth the doing, then of his own free choice and being still in the height of his faculties he threw up everything, to step back and down into private citizenship. Is that the biography of a fiend, Helga?"
She still gazed at the print, held at arm's length, but now it was in a wide-eyed kind of magnetic dreaming.
"It's difficult to think of any actual man before us as being essentially bloodthirsty. You've detected a resemblance, but of course the differences must be much greater. He climbs mountains?"
"Yes, he has quite a big name for Himalayan ascents."
"Wouldn't that be an anomalous taste in a man having human passions and the political sense? How could he be a Sulla?" She seemed unable to withdraw her eyes from the snapshot. "Though he truly has a sort of imperious look—and personally I think I should prefer to shun an open breach with him. Tell me, Hugh—was it one of your motives in coming down here, to keep out of his way?"
"I trust I'm not a coward."
"Forgive me. I do believe you could hold your own against most men, but this one frightens me. What is his first name?"
"Henry. Henry Saltfleet, and Stephen Arsinal."
She turned to Arsinal in the print nearly with an effort, and her tone seemed to alter.
"How did he impress you?"
"Why, Helga, he is undoubtedly a man of very fine sensibility, and exceptional brain-power and education. In his quieter way he may be as masterful as the other; but the other is the more obviously striking."
"The affair is his, and so he has the voice?"
"Presumably. But Saltfleet appears entirely to have identified himself. There should be a pretty complete understanding between them."
Helga saw that Arsinal was shorter than his friend by half a head, and still seemed in no degree undersized. He looked spare, erect, and forty or so, his head being thrown back as in the exhaustion of mental effort, while the eyes were meditative and deep in their orbits. Accordingly, the conceded smile on his lips showed unnatural and masklike. Both he and Saltfleet were clean-shaved.
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