Kingston forced himself to speak. ‘Ivescar is just over the hill,’ he said. ‘We shall be there as soon as you. It will be a short cut—up one side of the Simonstone, and down the other. Are you ready, Isabel?’
Yes, Isabel had finished tucking up her skirt. It was a skirt as inadequate for visiting as for mountaineering. And now she had bunched it up on one side to give her legs full play, and its effect was not only incongruous, but lumpy and lopsided. However, for such matters Isabel cared nothing. She was ready. Without another word, Kingston turned aside and opened a gate. Together they passed through into the field bordering the road, on their way to the copse above, that sloped up to the limestone cliff, and so led on to the heights overhead. Gundred watched them go. A faint, a very faint ripple of doubt trembled across the calm waters of her self-complacency. She had the strangest, the most ridiculous, the most unheard-of feeling that in some way she had not been at the height of the situation. In some way, she had a dim instinct of having failed. As the carriage drove on, she suddenly found herself feeling a little lonely, a little cold.
Kingston and Isabel wrestled their way to the cliff’s top, and found themselves on a flat floor of scar limestone that led straight away to the long, swift slope of the mountain. As if arranged by mortal hands, the blocks of white stone made a regular pavement, like the wrecked foundation of some Cyclopean temple. Between each block was a deep, dark rift, where ferns and lilies of the valley, and strange flowers with white plumy spires flourished in the shelter where no wind could ruffle them. Together the wanderers crossed the level, leaping and balancing lightly from rock to rock. Then heather and sedge began to break the even surface of the paving, and soon usurped its place altogether. Thence, to the summit, was nothing but moor and whortleberry, steep slopes of shale and grit. Kingston and Isabel addressed themselves resolutely to the ascent. Steep and arduous as it was, they had neither time for breath nor talking. They climbed strenuously, silently, taking pride in each step that proved their mastery over the earth by lifting them steadily higher, foot by foot, on the flank of the mountain that had seemed at first too vast to be conquered by any movements of so infinitesimal a creature as man. Slowly but certainly they found themselves advancing up the stark ladder of tussock and poised boulder. Each stone that they dislodged rolled crashing into farther depths, and at last they found themselves moving into the cold shadow of the clouds that evening seemed to be drawing down upon the summit. The crown of the mountain was now beyond their sight, cut off by the fierce angle of the slope; but they could see that the upper air was still aglow with sunlight round it, though the volumes of dark vapour seemed to be growing and darkening. Suddenly the acclivity took a swifter line, then paused for a moment from its labours. Surmounting it, they found that the ground lay for a few yards in a gentler curve, and there beyond, straight above them, was the summit, glorious and crimsoned. A last eager voiceless effort, and they had attained it. Around them whistled and hurtled a sharp wind, and before stretched away the round level plain of the hill’s crown.
It was with a sigh of relief that the climbers rested and faced round to see the extent of their conquest. The whole world far beneath them was misty, ardent, gorgeous in the glamour of evening. Kingston and Isabel made their way to the ruins of the old cairn that had sent northward the news of many centuries. Among the scattered, rough-hewn boulders they settled themselves for an interval of repose in achievement. Behind them rose the ruined wall of the beacon tower that had talked, in its day, of Queen Jane and Queen Mary, of the Armada’s coming, and the passing of the Tudors. Before them, unrolled at their feet like a map, two thousand feet below, was all the splendour of the earth, phantasmal and glorified—tiny towns, and the worm-like track of great rivers, the minute tessellation of meadows, and the dim velvet of wide forests. The whole air, before them and beneath, was a-tremble with motes of gold. Gold filled and pervaded the atmosphere, confounding detail in a haze of glitter, and softening the great dazzling stretches of the western sea into an imperial harmony with the golden heaven and the golden earth.
Kingston Darnley looked out across the glowing mystery beneath him. Rest, profound and eternal, seemed to be enveloping him. In reality, the very foundations of his nature were stirred and stirring. Insensibly, through the heat and worry of the foregoing days, his life had been growing ripe for a great upheaval. Slowly the tormenting desires, the incessant, unacknowledged hunger, the uneasy, restless, emotional uncertainty, the strenuous nourishment of artificial feelings, had all combined to bring his restless unhappiness to a head. Through unacknowledged storm and secret stress he had come at last to that deceptive calm which precedes the breaking up of the soul’s settled weather—the discharge of the soul’s accumulated electricity in a devastating nerve-cyclone. To-day his endurance of himself and his own forced contentment had touched its limit. Gundred had given him the last least touch that was needed to destroy the perilous equilibrium of his mood. Unconsciously he was waiting, in a breathless interval of suspense, for the crash of thunder that was to precipitate the crisis, and clear the air of all its unhealthy restraints.
Suddenly as he lay there, with Isabel silent and watchful at his side, the glory of the world shivered coldly and vanished. A black shadow swooped over the mountain-top, and soon only the uttermost distance retained the glimmer of gold. Down, down upon the old cairn sank, like the portcullis of a fairy castle, a heavy curtain of darkness, shutting out all that was left of the gleaming distance. The cloud was upon them. And, as their gaze was fixed on the gloom descending from above, no less abruptly, no less silently, in grey coils and whirling streamers the mist curled up at them from beneath, rippling and foaming over the rim of the mountain, as a devouring wave sweeps round an islet and over its crown. In an instant the world was blotted out by the white darkness. Uniform, monotonous, it obliterated everything. Only the old cairn and a few yards of ground around it could now be seen. Kingston and Isabel were cut off from the earth, set alone as Deucalion and Pyrrha in a new sphere, one solid point amid a vast ocean of chaos....
‘So much for the glory of life,’ said Isabel.
Kingston rose. ‘I don’t like this,’ he replied. ‘It will be the very mischief to get down again. Come and help me find a way.’
Together they moved away from the old cairn into the mist. As they went it widened before them, revealing a few dim feet of distance, then closed in again behind. Through the drifting pearly gloom objects were strangely magnified, made mysterious, portentous; rocks became monsters looming through the darkness, the level crown of the mountain, shifting fantasy of vapour. The ground beneath their feet seemed to swirl and shift with the movement of the fog, and, now that shape and colour had vanished from the world, an enormous crushing silence dominated the air. Faint and melting before their eyes stretched away the few visible yards of the flat soil, covered with short sedges, and, among the loose piles of grit, with a thick growth of little mountain-sorrel, whose brilliant reds and yellows had been levelled by the blank twilight into a sombre note, as of stale blood spilled out among the stones. Then, beyond, the solid earth wavered away into a phantom, revealing here and there a rock or a patch of grass, uncertainly, evanescently, as a faint, half-guessed shape, as the mist lightened or lowered.
So they wandered carefully on across the plane of the summit, till suddenly, ahead of them, grim and mysterious, rose a long grey barrier fading to right and left in the profundities of darkness. It was the old boundary wall of the summit, built by Celtic kings in the lost ages when the hill-top was the last great British outpost in the north. Humped, shapeless, an indistinguishable mound of stone, the old wall remained intact, running round the plateau in a solid ring, unbroken except at the point where the beacon tower stood. Knowing that outside its precinct cliffs and pitfalls awaited the unwary, Kingston and Isabel turned, and set themselves to follow it on its circuit, hoping to find an outlet or a path. At one point they came on a small stone chamber built into its bulk, but no sign of gateway or track could they discover. Now they were crossing a bare part of the summit, a wilderness of rocky wreckage. Here and there, at short intervals, great rings and semicircles of half-buried stone could be divined in the level of the soil, foundation-lines to show where the huts and palaces of the Celtic kings had stood. Now they were but dim ridges, grown with dwarf sedge and sorrel, through which roughly burst the gritstone bones of their fabric. Adventurous climbers of the mountain had had their fun of the rocks that former occupants had made their houses and defence. Often the flat, hewn blocks had been lugged from their places by modern hands, to be arranged in some riddle or motto. One ambitious tourist had perpetrated a great design. Kingston and Isabel came suddenly upon it. It stretched bravely across the earth, a device of big boulders, carefully arranged. ‘I love you,’ it said to them, in its audacious, solid letters. ‘I’ and ‘you’ at either end of the legend faded away into the white obscurity beyond, and at their feet lay ‘love,’ obtrusive, unconquerable, built of sound stones so square and firm as to defy the enmities of time and weather.