Murchison's guess had been correct, Ursula Brangwyn had been tempted out by the fine spring day, and the opportunity Astley had foreseen came to pass. Unaware of the treacherous spy-hole created by Monks, she believed the very existence of the cottage high up on the flanks of Snowdon, invisible from any road, to be unknown to friend or enemy, and, unsuspecting, had set out in the glorious air and sunshine over a high path used only by shepherds when moving their flocks from one mountain pasture to another. It was the only way out from the little valley in which the farm lay, unless one were to go down a steep and rock-bound track that led in half a mile or so to the main motor road over the passes, upon which no pedestrian would set foot if he had the choice. The task before anyone spying upon the movements of Ursula Brangwyn was simplicity itself, provided he knew the rudiments of rock-climbing; he had only to make his way up an easy chimney within stone-throw of the hotel on the neck of the pass, and nothing but a grass slope lay between him and the sheep-path leading to the high pastures.
The path made its way up a steep couloir and came out on to the top of a ridge, one flank of which fell away in precipices to the pass, and the other sloped steeply to the south, with a far-off glimpse of the sea. The air was like champagne and the sky like a sapphire. The faint barking of a dog came from high up the slopes to the great peak, and moving dots of white showed that sheep that had strayed too high during the night were being rounded up and brought down to safer pastures. It was a task the dogs attended to unsupervised each morning.
The girl paused, leaning on her stick, to watch the wonderful working of Welsh sheepdogs. Two dogs were at work, a biggish grey beast, who at close quarters was wall-eyed, and a little black bitch with a white waistcoat, who was famous all over Wales and had a row of cups engraved with her name on the mantelpiece in the farmhouse. There was no question as to which was the master-mind of the two; the wall-eyed gentleman did as he was bid.
The sheep, unflurried and obedient to the familiar dogs, were being worked steadily down the slopes towards the path, and Ursula could see Gwennie's white waistcoat flashing as she galloped in and out among the boulders, turning like a polo pony on the proverbial sixpence. So absorbed was she in watching the organized strategy of the two canine experts that she did not hear a footstep approaching over the short mountain turf, and it was not until a voice almost in her ear said, ‘Good morning, Ursula,’ that she swung round with a violent start to find Fouldes at her elbow, his climbing boots and the coil of light rope on his arm indicating the way he had got to her.
‘Are you pleased to see me?’ he enquired.
Ursula took a firm grip on herself. She must not panic, and at all costs she must avoid sliding off into that queer, passive, dream-like state that Fouldes knew so well how to produce in her.
‘I cannot honestly say that I am very pleased to see you,’ she said, as steadily as she could, for his presence, as always, shook her self-control. ‘I think it would be very much better that we should see no more of each other, and let there be the clean cut that has a chance to heal.’
‘I think otherwise, Ursula. I think it very much better that we should see something of each other, and then the breach that is between us will have a chance to heal.’
‘It cannot heal, Frank, now that you have thrown in your lot with Astley.’
‘You shouldn't believe all you hear, Ursula. I assure you that it gets twisted out of all recognition by the time the Sunday papers have done with it.’
‘Alick confirms most of it, Frank.’
‘Two of a trade never agree. You can hardly expect Alick to love Hugo after he has bagged his best pupils.’
‘It's no use arguing, Frank. You know my decision. It would be much better for both of us if you would accept it as final and leave me alone.’
‘I am not going to leave you alone, Ursula. You belong to me, and I am going to have you. What is all this tomfoolery about that hulking secretary of Alick's? Where in the world did he pick the chap up? He looks like an out-of-work bruiser who has been sleeping under hedges. What is he supposed to be? Chucker-out to Alick, or lounge-lizard to you? I don't admire your taste if it's the latter, Ursula.’
‘What he is supposed to be is no business of yours; nor of mine, either.’
‘Then, dear lady, why get so pink about it?’
Ursula turned on him furiously. ‘I don't know what you are trying to insinuate, but it is abominably insulting.’
Then if you don't know what it is, what makes you think it is insulting? I seem to be touching a tender spot, my dear. Are you and Alick trying to replace me with the bruiser?’
‘I refuse to discuss the matter.’
‘Then Hugo is right, and that is the game. My God, Ursula, what a game! And with that tramp? I can hardly believe it of you. How can you do it? Where's your sense of decency? If you won't have me, at least have something that's clean and tidy.’
‘I don't want anything further to do with you!’ Ursula was choking with wrath, for Fouldes had come pretty near to expressing her own opinions where the unfortunate Murchison was concerned.
‘Ursula, you can't do this thing. It is too revolting. The fellow is only fit to carry a sandwich-board. What can Alick be thinking of? Has he taken leave of his senses? How can you pair off with a man like that? And you of all people, Ursula. The thing's impossible on every plane. Don't be foolish, child; if Alick is prepared to let you in for a thing like that, surely even you must see that you can't trust him blindly.’
‘I - I won't discuss the matter with you.’
‘Yes, you will. Come here, Ursula. Look me in the eyes. No, don't turn away, look at me. Yes, you've got to.’
‘I - I won't!’ cried Ursula, fuming her head aside, but feeling as if her feet were rooted to the ground.
‘Yes, you will. You've got to look at me. You can't help yourself, and you know it. Ursula, look at me. Ursula, look at me. Ursula look at me -’
‘I won't! I won't!’ Ursula's voice rose in a high scream.
Sounds carry far in the thin mountain air, and canine ears are sharp. She saw the dogs on the high slopes stop and turn their heads. The spell was broken. With a supreme effort Ursula pulled her feet out of the vice that seemed to hold them, and turned and ran for her life down the steep mountain path, Fouldes after her. In a dozen strides he had overtaken her, and throwing his arms round her, held her helpless. She screamed shrilly, struggling desperately against the grey shadows that were closing in upon her from behind, bringing with them an overwhelming desire to sleep. It was this sinking into oblivion she was struggling and screaming against much more than the force the man was using on her, and which she hardly felt. She had no hope that anyone would hear or any help would come. There was no one nearer than the summit of Snowdon. She screamed and sueamed, and struggled like a mad thing because it was the best way of defeating the terrible, creeping inertia that was stealing over her, rising from her feet, so that they were rooted to the ground; rising to her waist; rising to her breast. When it reached her eyes she knew she would be unconscious, and would obey Fouldes like an automaton, and he could have his will of her.
Her screams redoubled as she felt the creeping paralysis rising and rising like a tide. She was rigid now to her shoulders, like an Egyptian mummy in its bandages. Only her head and her screaming mouth were free, and the tide was still rising. On the high slopes the dogs too appeared paralysed, not knowing what to make of the scene being enacted below them. Then some waft of the hill-wind blew up the slopes, and Gwennie caught a familiar taint, and like an arrow from the bow she was off at full gallop, stretched out literally ventre á terre, her beautiful white waistcoat in the dust that flew up behind her on the wind-dried slopes, ears blown back by the wind of her speed and plumed tail streaming behind like a banner. One of these struggling humans belonged to her! She ran up Fouldes’ back as if it had been a bank, and caught him by the back of his neck in her powerful jaws. It was only the woollen muffler he wore that saved him from having his spine broken, and her long white fangs were unpleasantly near his jugular.
He dropped Ursula perforce, and, reaching over his shoulders, caught the dog by her forepaws and dragged her from her hold, her snapping jaws catching his wrist as she slipped, and inflicting a nasty wound. He kicked her in the belly with his heavy nailed boots, and she rolled over, howling. But in a moment she was up again and flew at him like a hairy fury, her eyes glaring with savagery.
He had dropped his stick to have his hands free to catch hold of Ursula, and he dared not stoop to recover it lest the infuriated dog should get him by the throat, so he confined himself to trying to kick her in the face with his nailed boots as she circled round him, snarling like a fiend. If the other dog had deserted the sheep and joined in the fight Fouldes would have been in a bad way, for sheepdog are not only powerful for their size, but amazingly quick. But Wall-eye was too well trained to do that. It was an understood thing that only one dog left the herd at a time, the other remaining to hold them together and keep them from scattering and wasting all the work that had gone before; so he stuck to his job, only relieving his feelings by strangulated yelps of excitement as he watched the glorious scrap going on below him. He had been thrashed too often in the days of his youth for leaving the sheep to join in a fight to dare to budge.
Gwennie was circling round Fouldes, trying to get behind him again, but as he had merely to turn on his heels in order to face her she could not manage it. If he had been content to do this he could have worn her out, but the cruel streak in his nature got the upper hand, and as she ventured in too close he drove at her face with the sole of his nailed boot. Ursula shrieked as she saw the nails go straight at Gwennie's beautiful brown eyes. But the dog was too quick for him - she ran in under the boot and toppled him over like a ninepin, and then settled down to worry him. Luckily for him, what she got hold of was a large mouthful of the seat of his baggy plus fours, which so delighted her that she gnawed it, and worried it, entirely ignoring his vulnerable face and throat, until it came away in her paws, and she stood back panting, with half a yard of Harris tweed hanging from her mouth. She cast one look of utter scorn at the prostrate man, and then, with a jerk of her head at Ursula to indicate that she should follow, trotted quietly down the path towards the farm, looking round every few yards to see that her charge was doing as she was bidden. Ursula, more dead than alive, tottered after her, and fell into the protecting arms of Mrs Davies in the farmyard, while Gwennie stood by, gently waving her plumy tail and bearing her trophy with pride.
‘Surely to goodness, now, it iss the seat of a gentleman's trousers!’ exclaimed the scandalized Mrs Davies. Thanks be to God it iss not hiss throat! Ach now, Miss Ursula bach, come you within, and I will make you some good tea, with a drop of Mr. Davies’ whisky in it, indeed. Then you shall tell me what it iss all about, whateffer.’
The good Welsh-woman bustled the girl into the kitchen of the farmhouse, took the great black kettle from its hook over the primitive stove, and poured fresh water and a scatter of tea-leaves into the brown earthenware teapot perpetually stewing on the hob, and drew off the ferocious tea-soup that rejoices the heart of the Welsh. Into this she poured a liberal lacing of Mr. Davies’ private supply of whisky, which he, being a deacon, kept for the sick sheep. This potent concoction, which has saved the life of many a shepherd on a wild winter night, she gave to the shuddering girl, and stood back with satisfaction to watch the colour come back to her blanched cheeks and her trembling cease. Gwennie, too, administered such consolation as was in her power by laying the seat of Foulde's trousers gently at her feet; a most touching tribute, for Gwennie valued that trophy highly.
Mrs Davies knew that Ursula had been the victim of a disastrous love affair, and had come away to the secluded cottage to avoid the attentions of an undesirable lover, and it did not need any explanation to tell her quick Welsh wits what had happened. She urged upon the girl the desirability of coming down to the farm instead of remaining alone at the cottage, since the cause of all the trouble was evidently in the neighbourhood and bent upon more trouble, and that of a highly unpleasant nature, for Gwennie was not a dog that would have attacked unprovoked. She could see from the girl's reddened and abraded wrists that considerable violence had been used with her, and that but for Gwennie there might have been more serious damage.
But nothing would persuade Ursula to remain at the farm. She dreaded Mrs Davies’ perpetually clacking tongue, and longed for nothing so much as silence and solitude. The dogs, she knew, would give ample warning and protection in the unlikely event of the approach of Fouldes. So the two women walked up the gully to the cottage, and Mrs Davies, after piling up the fire with logs, wisely left the shaken girl alone to the company and protection of Gwennie, who refused to leave her.
Ursula felt deadly cold with the after-effect of the shock she had received, and she drew a three-legged stool close up to the bonfire Mrs Davies had set going, and stared with unseeing eyes at the flames climbing from log to log. Gwennie lay at her feet, watching her with anxious eyes, fully aware of her distress. Sheepdogs are not bred for their looks, but for their brains, and generation after generation only the cleverest workers have been allowed to reproduce their kind; the result is that they represent the professional classes of the canine world, and can do everything, including talk quite fluently to those who understand their language. That they understand the spoken word, and not the mere tone of the voice, is proven by the fact that a dog accustomed to be worked in Welsh cannot be worked in English. Mrs Davies could leave a dazed and hysterical girl in the care of Gwennie with perfect confidence that she would be fetched if anything went amiss.
It had never occurred to Ursula that anything more than her dignity had been in danger from Fouldes’ violence; the thing she most dreaded was his sinister influence over her. To call it hypnotic merely classified, but did not explain it. It was the enemy within the gates that she dreaded, the unregenerate side to her own nature, that Fouldes had learnt to play upon so cleverly, her developed mediumship making her highly suggestible and an easy victim to his machinations. And, although she knew all this, and knew exactly how she was being worked upon, it did not make her any the less susceptible. No one could appreciate better than she could how cleverly Fouldes had found the weak spots in her armour in appealing to her fastidiousness and snobbery by emphasizing the uncouthness and shabbiness of poor Murchison. Unworthy as she knew it was to point a finger at the shabbiness of an unemployed ex-soldier, she could not help looking where the finger pointed. And yet she knew that all her future welfare depended upon her being able to see in Murchison what her brother saw in him. She had implicit confidence in her brother, and was sure that if he saw big things in Murchison they must be there; but she herself found it impossible to lose sight of the stained and threadbare clothing and the untended hands.
The afternoon's experience had given her a warning that her security was very precarious, and that Astley's grip would close on her if she were not very careful. If she yielded to the attraction that Frank Fouldes still had for the baser side of her nature, she knew only too clearly that she would be following a dangerous witch-light, and that in a few steps she would feel the suck of the slough about her feet, and she would be drawn down and down, and sucked in, till she came within reach of Astley and the slime of ancient and forgotten abominations closed over her head. For Astley was a student of curious literature, and things that never enter the modern imagination were known to him; such things as are hinted at in the Latin notes to Gibbon's ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’; the things, in fact, that brought ancient Rome to her ruin. Astley did editorial work for a publishing house whose printing-press was in Constantinople and its distributors in Brussels and Buenos Aires. Ursula had seen some of its productions, and they were illustrated, and she was under no illusions as to the part for which she was cast. And yet Fouldes had a fascination for her, and Astley's terrible house had a fascination for her. It was as if these were two sides to her - the extreme fastidiousness that gave her her appreciation of the fine nuances of the most sophisticated culture and that made her make of life an art; and another side, a side that made her kin to the Maenads that followed Dionysus and tore fawns to pieces in their mystical frenzy; and, even baser, the woman who crept out of the mediaeval walled towns by night to go to the witches’ sabbath and ‘kiss the buttocks of the goat.’
This side of her horrified her; and yet, denied it, life seemed savourless. Love and marriage, if it meant no more than housekeeping and child-bearing, had no attraction for her after she had realized the possibilities revealed to her by Fouldes. She was puffed in every direction as if caught in a cyclone. Fouldes was her true mate, and yet she knew that mating with him meant unspeakable degradation and an early death. Murchison, pressed on her by her brother as her only hope of salvation, was distasteful to her by his roughness and boring to her by his savourless normality. But behind Fouldes loomed Astley, slug-like in his fleshy foulness; and to go to Frank meant to come into the hands of this high-priest of evil.
The moment she was in the presence of Fouldes she was conscious of the broad streak of cruelty that lay in his nature, side by side with his almost feminine charm. She knew that nothing would satisfy his love for her but complete domination; his love, under the tuition of Astley, had become like the coils of an anaconda, that would first crush her into helplessness and then cover her with slime and swallow her.
But, although she realized all this, the moment she looked into his face after she had been away from him for a while she thought only of his fascination, and that his love could call forth aspects of her nature and give her a completeness of fulfilment that she would not find in the love of a better man. There were times when she thought that to burn with fulness of life in a fierce flame was a greater good than long life and peace; when she was sorely tempted to throw off all restraints and give herself to Fouldes utterly. But then the shapeless, vulture shadow of Astley would loom over him, and she would remember that there were horrors not to be faced.
Her brother had assured her, pledging his unrivalled knowledge of strange sciences to back his word, that if she would consent to mate with Murchison she would not be disappointed. She thought of Murchison as he had lain asleep in a heap in the corner of the seat in the roof-garden, and wondered by what alchemical process her brother proposed to transmute that leaden metal into fine gold. He was dull and he was rough, and both her dual selves revolted against him. Fouldes loved subtleties and sophistication, and he burnt like a flame. How could she take the one, having known the other?
Murchison was not like Fouldes; there was no ease of relationship with him. To contact him was like walking into a cliff in the dark. Frank had been possessed of a rare gift of imagination, and had excelled in those finer arts of life that make the companionship of a cultured man so agreeable to an intellectual woman. He had a marked feminine side to his nature, just as there was a streak of the masculine in herself, or so she liked to think. But Murchison was all male, and the pure maleness of him jarred on the streak of the male in her; whereas Frank, with his twosided temperament, had been able to give place to the positive side of her nature. Frank drew her by his sympathy, whereas Murchison made her want to fight him.
But that afternoon had been a shock to her. She had realized with horror how strong was the baser side of her nature; how eagerly she desired to steal forth to the witches’ coven and embrace the goat-god. But she had also realized as never before the extent of the demoralization that had taken place in Fouldes. There was a blanched pallor about him which she suspected to be due to drugs, and a curious goat-like, in human expression in his eyes: and when Gwennie attacked him he had been like a wild animal. Face to face with him, her disillusionment was complete; how it was that his power over her kept renewing itself was a mystery to her.
She made up her mind that at the next opportunity she would go into matters fully with Murchison; give him her views, and ask for his, and if they could come to a satisfactory understanding she would make up her mind to go ahead with the experiment her brother pressed on her so urgently. It simplified things considerably that there were no personal reactions between herself and Murchison, and so she could speak to him man to man, as it were. It was somewhat galling to her feminine pride to realize this; nothing could be more certain than that she had not made a conquest in that quarter; Murchison would do what he could to help her in order to please her brother, to whom she knew he was devoted; but here was no knight-errant rescuing damsels in distress. He would hunt dragons as part of his day's work, but the damsel, once rescued, would be shoved in the nearest nunnery.
She ought to take what Murchison was willing to give in the spirit in which it was offered, and be grateful to him for his kindness. People did blood transfusions for perfect strangers in hospitals. Why should she not let Murchison do what was needful for her, provided he were willing? And she gathered that he was. She would be a fool to die for want of a blood transfusion because she did not feel able to make a personal friend of the donor. She knew that, according to her brother's theory, the establishment of a magnetic flow between them would create a very strong bond; that, in the words of Scripture, her desire would be towards him and he would rule over her, a state of affairs she could not possibly envisage.
But she questioned the truth of this, despite her respect for her brother's knowledge of the strange arts they were working in. If Murchison had really desired her, he might have been able to hold her, once the magnetic circuit were formed. But as he so obviously did not want her, and was only willing to do her a kindness, she doubted if anything except a bond that was little more than electric would be formed between them, which a few days’ absence would serve to break.