‘Why shouldn’t you and I and Jim go up to Long Kern and watch them go down?’ he said, anxious to indemnify Jim as far as possible for the disappointment which his mother had inflicted. As soon as Gundred understood the proposition she gasped. This seemed almost too heavy a trial for her to bear. Then she suddenly understood that this was the sanctifying sacrifice that Heaven demanded of her. She must stand by and watch the fulfilment of her prayers so as to make the intervention of Heaven complete and holy. She signified her assent.
‘But we must be back in time for lunch, dear,’ she conditioned, living her dual life as ever, one-half of her personality dwelling perpetually in dining-rooms and drawing-rooms, while the other soared into the high domains of religious frenzy. Then, breakfast being over, she rose and went her way mechanically upon her household duties, pending the awful consummation of her destiny, at which she was so soon to assist.
At the appointed time she was ready for the start. The others were waiting for her in the hall, and they proceeded silently up towards the hills. Jim was too excited to talk much; a scheme that demanded all his attention was budding in his brain; Gundred, by now, was moving in a remote world far above earthly speech, in communion with the invisible. Ivor himself vaguely discerned some strange exaltation beneath the restraint of Gundred’s mood, and was reluctant to intrude his conversation. And Kingston himself was so sick and tired of his long struggle to achieve the impossible recognition that he had not the heart nor the temper to say much to the perverse human individuality that intervened so bitterly between him and the eternal memory it contained. So they surmounted the long ridges of limestone, and came out at last upon the stretches of moor above that undulated gently upward towards the steep skirt of the Simonstone. The air that morning was clean and pure, filled with a white light and a bracing virility of tone; much rain had fallen in the last two days, and the atmosphere was moist and brilliant in colouring; great snowy ranges of cloud went sailing gloriously across the wet azure of Heaven, and the great mountain above towered high overhead in soft masses of brown and purplish green, while before them the moorland rolled away in waves of rust-coloured velvet, to where it suddenly ceased, in a sharp line that seemed the rim of the world, beneath which, far below, lay the broad valley and the plain-lands. The surface of the fell had folds and dimples and crests, but in the huge monotony of the expanse it appeared a waved sea of colour. Down the little gullies ran here and there a stream, riotous after the rains of over-night; here and there in the levels lay a small peat-pool that glittered like a forgotten silver shield among the sedges. And then they came at last to a deeper, steeper cañon, which soon broke off in a blind hollow, ringed in by precipitous banks of heather. And here it was that the stream which filled the channel disappeared. Long Kern was impressive in its very unimpressiveness. It was but a short and narrow slit between two masses of flat white limestone, and across the orifice a fallen boulder made a bridge. Hardly two yards intervened between the one lip and the other. And in that space yawned a solid shaft of black night. Sheer down and down fell the water that filled the chasm, three hundred feet and more, to the rayless labyrinth of caverns that made the heart of the mountain. Coming suddenly across this rift in the moorland one would at first have thought it nothing, a drop, perhaps of a fathom or so. It was terribly inconspicuous and prosaic. Then, stepping along the rocky bridge that crossed it, one might be struck with a suggestion of its possibilities, and, throwing a rock into the darkness, might hear, after a long pause, the crashing rumble of its impact far below, as it bounded and dashed from ledge to ledge and side to side of the gulf, till it sent faintly up to the listener’s ear its last remote thunderous echoes from the black lake three hundred feet below, where the dim roar reverberated along the walls and ramifications of the cavern.
On the brink the party paused. Ordinarily the place was lonely and desolate, but to-day there were signs of occupation and activities. Beams were stretched across the narrow gulf, and coils of rope were lying ready. The Rovers were scattered about, making their preparations for the descent. They were a club of professional men from the neighbouring large manufacturing towns, who amused themselves by exploring the recesses of the caves that honeycombed the Simonstone. On many previous occasions Kingston had made their efforts easier. And to-day, for the exploration of Long Kern, he had given them indispensable help by having the rain-swollen stream dammed off. The bed of the river was now nearly dry, and the water diverted into another channel. Otherwise, as Jim had said, the descent would have been impossible. The Rovers were very grateful, accordingly, for this spirited collaboration, and gave the Darnleys a warm welcome. To all four they extended an offer to make the descent, and when it appeared that Ivor Restormel was the only one who would accept their invitation, they showed a little disappointment. With Jim especially they pled to accompany them, tantalizing him cruelly, and were only made to desist at last by the unequivocal firmness of Lady Gundred’s hostility towards the proposal. And so they set about the last preparations. Gaily talking and laughing among themselves, they proceeded to the fastening of ropes and the final arrangements for the descent.
Suddenly Gundred could bear the ordeal no longer. The matter-of-fact, innocent cheerfulness of it all was too much for her, with her terrible secret foreknowledge. She knew that Heaven had doomed every one of those happy people, so as to make sure of Ivor Restormel. Of course, he alone might fall, or strangle, or have a stone dropped on his head. But, on the whole, it was far more likely, far more in accordance with Scriptural precedent, that guilty and innocent should all perish together. So much the worse for the innocent! Her mystic exaltation did not go the length of protesting against their fatal plan at the eleventh hour, but it was not quite firm and faithful enough to bear the grim spectacle unmoved. She turned hastily and moved away up the empty bed of the stream, leaving Jim and her husband to watch the descent. From the bend in the river-bed she turned to take a last look at her enemy. He was still chattering and smiling with his friends, adapting the rope, adjusting satchels and packages. Kingston was saying something at which they both laughed. Then Gundred, very sick and heavy at heart, in spite of her sense of sacred ecstasy, turned the corner and was out of sight of the pothole.
Kingston eyed the narrow gulf of darkness with unspoken dread. Now, at the last moment, he disliked Ivor’s determination to share the descent. He hated the idea of watching the boy disappear into that night below. It seemed too symbolic of that eternal night into which the restored memory must one day pass again. And yet, the granting of his own importunate desire, what had it brought him except the bitterness of a yet fiercer, more insatiable desire? For a while he would even be glad to have rest from his tormenting, baffling intimacy with the secret thing that could never hear the cry of his voice. Let the boy go down, then, into the darkness, carrying with him that wonderful mystical thing that he enshrined. Kingston’s fingers were raw and bleeding, his whole soul broken and agonized with long fruitless plucking and battering at the locked doors of that shrine. Let it go, then, for half an hour, and leave him at peace. As it had returned to him once before, out of the greater darkness of the grave, so, in the course of a few moments, it would come back to light again from the darkness of the pit, and all his torments would be renewed, growing ever keener and fiercer towards the dim end that he dared not try to foresee. The knowledge of doom was black and heavy upon him as he watched the boy preparing for his disappearance, and, in the concentration of his bitter mood, he hardly heard the voice of Jim, now once more raised in eager pleading to be allowed the joy of the descent.
Gundred meanwhile was wandering on in a stupor, not thinking, not daring to think. The whole of life seemed to her to be hanging in suspense. The next half-hour was to vindicate her righteousness and make dreadfully manifest the majesty of Heaven. Her brain oscillated in coma, and she was no longer conscious of any pain or any feeling at all. Everything passed from her mind except the actual physical pleasure of the moment, the keen freshness of the air, the lovely colours of life, the myriad little voices that haunted the world. Then suddenly they were all merged in one vehement, rushing murmur. She looked down. She had arrived at the dam that diverted the stream.
A bank of turf and stones had been built, and against its barrier the brown water surged and ravened angrily, in a froth of white bubbles and spume, eager to take its old way down into the pothole and the caverns below. Disappointed, however, of its hope, it must needs go foaming and scolding along an unaccustomed course, over green grasses, drenched and streaming in its current, and down a slope of rush and sedge. Soothed unconsciously by its hum, Gundred sat down and idly watched the raging swirl of the water. It was well that the stream had been thus firmly held back and diverted, for a huge mass of water it was that made it so turbulent. After two days’ rain on the Simonstone, all the waters of the mountain were in flood, and the Long Kern should naturally have been filled with a roaring spate. Suddenly Gundred’s human consciousness was vaguely aware of an alteration. Something seemed to be shifting, the noise of the fretted torrent changing its note. Then she saw a filament of water percolating. As she watched, it widened. The dam was not strong enough to bear the surging wrath behind it. The dam was breaking; Gundred awoke with a violent start. She rose and turned impulsively towards the pothole—on the point of running, of shrieking a warning, of doing something helpful or human. Then, in an instant, she understood that she could do nothing—understood what it was that Heaven had achieved for her. Her prayer had been answered. She must give thanks, and stand aside.
Firmly, decidedly, with head carried high, and the fanatic’s mad light in her eyes, Gundred turned away from the stream and walked swiftly home across the moor. What came after was the work of Heaven. Heaven must take full responsibility. Heaven had broken the dam; Heaven might easily have ordained that the descent should not yet have commenced. Gundred had done nothing. Heaven had done it all. She could only go quietly home and trust in the wise mercies of Providence. In an hour or so she would hear what had happened.
But, though she did not know it, the strain on her endurance was fearfully heavy. She found her mind perpetually wandering back to the Long Kern, wondering in an agony whether the explorers had already embarked on their adventure when that roaring volume of brown water had swept thunderously down upon them—wondering whereabouts in that perilous chasm it had caught them, what it must feel like to be so suddenly, so fearfully battered out of life, and swept away into the abysses of the Underworld. Her brain was a sickening chaos. Fire and water, fire and water; the two great moments of her life had come to her through fire and water. Through the roaring waters of that broken dam she vaguely remembered the roaring fires of Brakelond. Isabel—Isabel—in a way, had given her life for Gundred; and Gundred?—Gundred, after many years, had, in a way, stood by and watched the taking of other lives. Dimly, instinctively, she could not refrain from comparing the two catastrophes, from feeling a blind, illogical sense that they stood in some mystic relation to each other. And so, alone, she came at last to Ivescar.