X
X
X
The three nights passed as before, but with an increasing struggle and fear.
She knew, she knew what was happening. It was as if the walls of personality were wearing thin, and through them she felt him trying to get at her.
She put the thought from her. It was absurd. It was insane. Such things could not be. It was not in any region of such happenings that she held him, but in the place of peace, the charmed circle, the flawless crystal sphere.
Still the thought persisted; and still, in spite of it, she held him, she would not let him go. By her honour and by her love for Milly she was bound to hold him, even though she knew how terribly, how implacably he prevailed.
She was aware now that the persistence of his image on the blackness was only a sign to her of his being there in his substance; in his supreme innermost essence. It had obviously no relation to his bodily appearance, since she had not seen him for three days. It tended more and more to vanish, to give place to the shapeless, nameless, all-pervading presence. And her fear of him became pervading, nameless and shapeless too.
Somehow it was always behind her now, it followed her from room to room of her house; it drove her out of doors. It seemed to her that she went before it with quick, uncertain feet and a fluttering heart, aimless and tormented as a leaf driven by a vague light wind. Sometimes it sent her up the field towards the wood; sometimes it would compel her to go a little way towards the Farm; and then it was as if it took her by the shoulders and turned her back again towards her house.
On the fourth day (which was Tuesday of the Powells’ last week) she determined to fight this fear. She could not defy it to the extent of going on to the Farm where she might see Harding, but certainly she would not suffer it to turn her from her hill-top. It was there that she had always gone as the night fell, calling home her thoughts to sleep; and it was there, seven weeks ago, that the moon, the golden-white and holy moon, had led her to the consecration of her gift. She had returned softly, seven weeks ago, carrying carefully her gift, as a fragile, flawless crystal. Since then how recklessly she had held it! To what jars and risks she had exposed the exquisite and sacred thing!
She waited for her hour between sunset and twilight. It was perfect, following a perfect day. Above the wood the sky had a violet lucidity, purer than the day; below it, the pale brown earth wore a violet haze, and over that a web of green, woven of the sparse, thin blades of the young wheat. There were two ways up the hill; one over her own bridge across the river, that led her to the steep, straight path through the wood; one over the Farm bridge by the slanting path up the field. She chose the wood.
She paused on the bridge, and looked down the valley. She saw the farm-house standing in the stillness that was its own secret and the hour’s. A strange, pale lamplight, lit too soon, showed in the windows of the room she knew. The Powells would be sitting there at their supper.
She went on and came to the gate of the wood. It swung open on its hinges, a sign to her that some time or other Harding Powell had passed there. She paused and looked about her. Presently she saw Harding Powell coming down the wood-path.
He stopped. He had not yet seen her. He was looking up to the arch of the beech-trees, where the green light still came through. She could see by his attitude of quiet contemplation the sane and happy creature that he was. He was sane, she knew. And yet, no; she could not really see him as sane. It was her sanity, not his own, that he walked in. Or else what she saw was the empty shell of him.Hewas in her. Hitherto it had been in the darkness that she had felt him most, and her fear of him had been chiefly fear of the invisible Harding, and of what he might do there in the darkness. Now her fear, which had become almost hatred, was transferred to his person. In the flesh, as in the spirit, he was pursuing her.
He had seen her now. He was making straight for her. And she turned and ran round the eastern bend of the hill (a yard or so to the left of her) and hid from him. From where she crouched at the edge of the wood she saw him descend the lower slope to the river; by standing up and advancing a little she could see him follow the river path on the nearer side and cross by the Farm bridge.
She was sure of all that. She was sure that it did not take her more than twelve or fifteen minutes (for she had gone that way a hundred times) to get back to the gate, to walk up the little wood, to cut through it by a track in the undergrowth, and turn round the further and western end of it. Thence she could either take the long path that slanted across the field to the Farm bridge or keep to the upper ground along a trail in the grass skirting the wood, and so reach home by the short, straight path and her own bridge.
She decided on the short, straight path as leading her farther from the farm-house, where there could be no doubt that Harding Powell was now. At the point she had reached, the jutting corner of the wood hid from her the downward slope of the hill, and the flat land at its foot.
As she turned the corner of the wood, she was brought suddenly in sight of the valley. A hot wave swept over her brain, so strong that she staggered as it passed. It was followed by a strange sensation of physical sickness, that passed also. It was then as if what went through her had charged her nerves of sight to a pitch of insane and horrible sensibility. The green of the grass, and of the young corn, the very colour of life, was violent and frightful. Not only was it abominable in itself, it was a thing to be shuddered at, because of some still more abominable significance it had.
Agatha had known once, standing where she stood now, an exaltation of sense that was ecstasy; when every leaf and every blade of grass shone with a divine translucence; when every nerve in her thrilled, and her whole being rang with the joy which is immanent in the life of things.
What she experienced now (if she could have given any account of it) was exaltation at the other end of the scale. It was horror and fear unspeakable. Horror and fear immanent in the life of things. She saw the world in a loathsome transparency; she saw it with the eye of a soul in which no sense of the divine had ever been, of a soul that denied the supernatural. It had been Harding Powell’s soul, and it had become hers.
Furiously, implacably, he was getting at her.
Out of the wood and the hedges that bordered it there came sounds that were horrible, because she knew them to be inaudible to any ear less charged with insanity; small sounds of movement, of strange shiverings, swarmings, crepitations; sounds of incessant, infinitely subtle urging, of agony and recoil. Sounds they were of the invisible things unborn, driven towards birth; sounds of the worm unborn, of things that creep and writhe towards dissolution. She knew what she heard and saw. She heard the stirring of the corruption that Life was; the young blades of corn were frightful to her, for in them was the push, the passion of the evil which was Life; the trees, as they stretched out their arms and threatened her, were frightful with the terror which was Life. Down there, in that gross green hot-bed, the earth teemed with the abomination; and the river, livid, white, a monstrous thing, crawled, dragging with it the very slime.
All this she perceived in a flash, when she had turned the corner. It sank into stillness and grew dim; she was aware of it only as the scene, the region in which one thing, her terror, moved and hunted her. Among sounds of the rustling of leaves, and the soft crush of grass, and the whirring of little wings in fright, she heard it go; it went on the other side of the hedge, a little way behind her as she skirted the wood. She stood still to let it pass her, and she felt that it passed, and that it stopped and waited. A terrified bird flew out of the hedge, no further than a fledgling’s flight in front of her. And in that place it flew from she saw Harding Powell.
He was crouching under the hedge as she had crouched when she had hidden from him. His face was horrible, but not more horrible than the Terror that had gone behind her; and she heard herself crying out to him: “Harding! Harding!” appealing to him against the implacable, unseen Pursuer.
He had risen (she saw him rise), but as she called his name he became insubstantial, and she saw a Thing, a nameless, unnameable, shapeless Thing, proceeding from him. A brown, blurred Thing, transparent as dusk is, that drifted on the air. It was torn and tormented, a fragment parted and flung off from some immense and as yet invisible cloud of horror. It drifted from her; it dissolved like smoke on the hillside; and the Thing that had born and begotten it pursued her.
She bowed under it, and turned from the edge of the wood, the horrible place it had been born in; she ran before it, headlong down the field, trampling the young corn under her feet. As she ran she heard a voice in the valley, a voice of amazement and entreaty, calling to her in a sort of song.
“What—are—you—running for—Aggy—Aggy?”
It was Milly’s voice that called.
Then as she came, still headlong, to the river, she heard Harding’s voice saying something, she did not know what. She couldn’t stop to listen to him, or to consider how he came to be there in the valley, when a minute ago she had seen him by the edge of the wood, up on the very top of the hill.
He was on the bridge—the Farm bridge—now. He held out his hand to steady her as she came on over the swinging plank.
She knew that he had led her to the other side, and that he was standing there, still saying something, and that she answered.
“Have you no pity on me? Can’t you let me go?” And then she broke from him and ran.
XI
XI
XI
She was awake all that night. Harding Powell and the horror begotten of him had no pity; he would not let her go. Her gift, her secret, was powerless now against the pursuer.
She had a light burning in her room till morning, for she was afraid of sleep. Those unlit roads down which, if she slept, the Thing would surely hunt her, were ten times more terrible than the white-washed, familiar room where it merely watched and waited.
In the morning she found a letter on her breakfast-table, which she said Mrs. Powell had left late last evening, after Agatha had gone to bed. Milly wrote: “Dearest Agatha,— Of course I understand. But are wenevergoing to see you again? What was the matter with you last night? You terrified poor Harding.— Yours ever, M. P.”
Without knowing why, Agatha tore the letter into bits and burned them in the flame of a candle. She watched them burn.
“Of course,” she said to herself, “that isn’t sane of me.”
And when she had gone round her house and shut all the doors and locked them, and drawn down the blinds in every closed window, and found herself cowering over her fireless hearth, shuddering with fear, she knew that, whether she were mad or not, there was madness in her. She knew that her face in the glass (she had the courage to look at it) was the face of an insane terror let loose.
That she did know it, that there were moments—flashes—in which she could contemplate her state and recognize it for what it was, showed that there was still a trace of sanity in her. It was not her own madness that possessed her. It was, or rather, it had been, Harding Powell’s; she had taken it from him. That was what it meant—to take away madness.
There could be no doubt as to what had happened, nor as to the way of its happening. The danger of it, utterly unforeseen, was part of the very operation of the gift. In the process of getting at Harding to heal him she had had to destroy, not only the barriers of flesh and blood, but those innermost walls of personality that divide and protect, mercifully, one spirit from another. With the first thinning of the walls Harding’s insanity had leaked through to her, with the first breach it had broken in. It had been transferred to her complete with all its details, with its very gestures, in all the phases that it ran through; Harding’s premonitory fears and tremblings; Harding’s exalted sensibility; Harding’s abominable vision of the world, that vision from which the resplendent divinity had perished; Harding’s flight before the pursuing Terror. She was sitting now as Harding had sat when she found him crouching over the hearth in that horrible room with the drawn blinds. It seemed to her that to have a madness of your own would not be so very horrible. It would be, after all, your own. It could not possibly be one-half so horrible as this, to have somebody else’s madness put into you.
The one thing by which she knew herself was the desire that no longer ran underground, but emerged and appeared before her, lit by her lucid flashes, naked and unshamed.
She still knew her own. And there was something in her still that was greater than the thing that inhabited her, the pursuer, the pursued, who had rushed into her as his refuge, his sanctuary; and that was her fear of him and of what he might do there. If her doors stood open to him, they stood open to Bella and to Rodney Lanyon too. What else had she been trying for, if it were not to break down in all three of them the barriers of flesh and blood, and to transmit the Power? In the unthinkable sacrament to which she called them they had all three partaken. And since the holy thing could suffer her to be thus permeated, saturated with Harding Powell, was it to be supposed that she could keep him to herself, that she would not pass him on to Rodney Lanyon?
It was not, after all, incredible. If he could get at her, of course he could get, through her, at Rodney.
That was the Terror of terrors, and it was her own. That it could subsist together with that alien horror, that it remained supreme beside it, proved that there was still some tract in her where the invader had not yet penetrated. In her love for Rodney and her fear for him she entrenched herself against the destroyer. There at least she knew herself impregnable.
It was in such a luminous flash that she saw the thing still in her own hands, and resolved that it should cease.
She would have to break her word to Milly. She would have to let Harding go, to loosen deliberately his hold on her and cut him off. It could be done. She had held him through her gift, and it would be still possible, through the gift, to let him go. Of course she knew it would be hard.
Itwashard. It was terrible; for he clung. She had not counted on his clinging. It was as if, in their undivided substance, he had had knowledge of her purpose and had prepared himself to fight it. He hung on desperately; he refused to yield an inch of the ground he had taken from her. He was no longer a passive thing in that world where she had brought him. And he had certain advantages. He had possessed her for three nights and for three days. She had made herself porous to him; and her sleep had always been his opportunity.
It took her three nights and three days to cast him out. In the first night she struggled with him. She lay with all her senses hushed, and brought the divine darkness round her, but in the darkness she was aware that she struggled. She could build up the walls between them, but she knew that as fast as she built them he tore at them and pulled them down.
She bore herself humbly towards the Power that permitted him. She conceived of it as holiness—estranged and offended; she pleaded with it. She could no longer trust her knowledge of its working, but she tried to come to terms with it. She offered herself as a propitiation, as a substitute for Rodney Lanyon, if there was no other way by which he might be saved.
Apparently, that was not the way it worked. Harding seemed to gain. But, as he kept her awake all night, he had no chance to establish himself, as he would otherwise have done, in her sleep. The odds between her and her adversary were even.
The second nightshegained. She felt that she had built up her walls again; that she had cut Harding off. With spiritual pain, with the tearing of the bonds of compassion, with a supreme agony of rupture, he parted from her.
Possibly the Power was neutral; for in the dawn after the second night she slept. That sleep left her uncertain of the event. There was no telling into what unguarded depths it might have carried her. She knew that she had been free of her adversary before she slept, but the chances were that he had got at her in her sleep. Since the Power held the balance even between her and the invader, it would no doubt permit him to enter by any loophole that he could seize.
On the third night, as it were in the last watch, she surrendered, but not to Harding Powell.
She could not say how it came to her; she was lying in her bed with her eyes shut and her arms held apart from her body, diminishing all contacts, stripping for her long slide into the cleansing darkness, when she found herself recalling some forgotten, yet inalienable knowledge that she had. Something said to her: “Do you not remember? There is no striving and no crying in the world which you would enter. There is no more appeasing where peaceis. You cannot make your own terms with the high and holy Power. It is not enough to give yourself for Rodney Lanyon, for he is more to you than you are yourself. Besides, any substitution of self for self would be useless, for there is no more self there. That is why the Power cannot work that way. But if it should require you, here on this side the threshold, to give him up, to give up your desire of him, what then? Would you loose your hold on him and let him go?”
“Would you?” the voice insisted.
She heard herself answer from the pure threshold of the darkness: “I would.”
Sleep came on her there; a divine sleep from beyond the threshold; sacred, inviolate sleep.
It was the seal upon the bond.
XII
XII
XII
She woke on Friday morning to a vivid and indestructible certainty of escape.
But there had been a condition attached to her deliverance; and it was borne in on her that instead of waiting for the Power to force its terms on her, she would do well to be beforehand with it. Friday was Rodney’s day, and this time she knew that he would come. His coming, of course, was nothing, but he had told her plainly that he would not go. She must, therefore, wire to him not to come.
In order to do this she had to get up early and walk about a mile to the nearest village. She took the shortest way, which was by the Farm bridge, and up the slanting path to the far end of the wood. She knew vaguely that once, as she turned the corner of the wood, there had been horrors, and that the divine beauty of green pastures and still waters had appeared to her as a valley of the shadow of evil, but she had no more memory of what she had seen than of a foul dream, three nights dead. She went at first uplifted in the joy of her deliverance, drawing into her the light and fragrance of the young morning. Then she remembered Harding Powell. She had noticed as she passed the Farm-house that the blinds were drawn again in all the windows. That was because Harding and Milly were gone. She thought of Harding, of Milly, with an immense tenderness and compassion, but also with lucidity, with sanity. They had gone—yesterday—and she had not seen them. That could not be helped. She had done all that was possible. She could not have seen them as long as the least taint of Harding’s malady remained with her. And how could she have faced Milly after having broken her word to her?
Not that she regretted even that, the breaking of her word, so sane was she. She could conceive that, if it had not been for Rodney Lanyon, she might have had the courage to have gone on. She might have considered that she was bound to save Harding, even at the price of her own sanity, since therewasher word to Milly. But it might be questioned whether by holding on to him she would have kept it, whether she really could have saved him that way. She was no more than a vehicle, a crystal vessel for the inscrutable and secret Power, and in destroying her utterly, Harding would have destroyed himself. You could not transmit the Power through a broken crystal—why, not even through one that had a flaw.
There had been a flaw somewhere; so much was certain. And as she searched now for the flaw, with her luminous sanity, she found it in her fear. She knew, she had always known, the danger of taking fear, and the thought of fear with her into that world where to think was to will, and to will was to create. But for the rest, she had tried to make herself clear as crystal. And what could she do more than give up Rodney?
As she set her face towards the village, she was sustained by a sacred ardour, a sacrificial exaltation. But as she turned homewards across the solitary fields, she realized the sadness, the desolation of the thing she had accomplished. He would not come. Her message would reach him two hours before the starting of the train he always came by.
Across the village she saw her white house shining, and the windows of his room (her study, which was always his room when he came); its lattices were flung open as if it welcomed him.
Something had happened there.
Her maid was standing by the garden gate, looking for her. As she approached, the girl came over the field to meet her. She had an air of warning her, of preparing her for something.
It was Mrs. Powell, the maid said. She had come again. She was in there, waiting for Miss Agatha. She wouldn’t go away; she had gone straight in. She was in an awful state. The maid thought it was something to do with Mr. Powell.
They had not gone, then.
“If I were you, miss,” the maid was saying, “I wouldn’t see her.”
“Of course I shall see her.”
She went at once into the room where Rodney might have been, where Milly was. Milly rose from the corner where she sat averted.
“Agatha,” she said, “I had to come.”
Agatha kissed the white, suppliant face that Milly lifted. “I thought,” she said, “you’d gone—yesterday.”
“We couldn’t go. He—he’s ill again.”
“Ill?”
“Yes. Didn’t you see the blinds down as you passed?”
“I thought it was because you’d gone.”
“It’s because thatthing’scome back again.”
“When did it come, Milly?”
“It’s been coming for three days.”
Agatha drew in her breath with a pang. It was just three days since she began to let him go.
Milly went on. “And now he won’t come out of the house. He says he’s being hunted. He’s afraid of being seen, being found. He’s in there—in that room. He made me lock him in.”
They stared at each other and at the horror that their faces took and gave back each to each.
“Oh, Aggy—” Milly cried it out in her anguish.
“Youwillhelp him?”
“I can’t.” Agatha heard her voice go dry in her throat.
“Youcan’t?”
Agatha shook her head.
“You mean you haven’t, then?”
“I haven’t. I couldn’t.”
“But you told me—you told me you were giving yourself up to it. You said that was why you couldn’t see us.”
“Itwaswhy. Do sit down, Milly.”
They sat down, still staring at each other. Agatha faced the window, so that the light ravaged her.
Milly went on. “That was why I left you alone. I thought you were going on. You said you wouldn’t let him go; you promised me you’d keep on—”
“I did keep on, till—”
But Milly had only paused to hold down a sob. Her voice broke out again, clear, harsh, accusing.
“What were you doing all that time?”
“Of course,” said Agatha, “you’re bound to think I let you down.”
“What am I to think?”
“Milly—I asked you not to think it was me.”
“Of course I knew it was the Power, not you. But you had hold of it. You did something. Something that other people can’t do. You did it for one night, and that night he was well. You kept on for six weeks, and he was well all that time. You leave off for three days—I know when you left off—and he’s ill again. And then you tell me it isn’t you. Itisyou; and if it’s you, you can’t give him up. You can’t stand by, Aggy, and refuse to help him. You know what it was. How can you bear to let him suffer? How can you?”
“I can, because I must.”
“And why must you?”
Milly raised her head more in defiance than in supplication.
“Because—I told you—I might give out. Well—Ihavegiven out.”
“You told me the Power can’t give out—that you’ve only got to hold on to it—that it’s no effort. I’m only asking you, Aggy, to hold on.”
“You don’t know what you’re asking.”
“I’m asking you only to do what you have done, to give five minutes in the day to him. You said it was enough. Only five minutes. It isn’t much to ask.”
Agatha sighed.
“What difference could it make to you—five minutes?”
“You don’t understand,” said Agatha.
“I do. I don’t ask you to see him, or to bother with him; only to go on as you were doing.”
“You don’t understand. It isn’t possible to explain it. I can’t go on.”
“I see. You’re tired, Aggy. Well—not now, not to-day. But later, when you’re rested, won’t you?”
“Oh, Milly, dear Milly, if I could—”
“You can. You will. I know you will—”
“No. You must understand it. Never again. Never again.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
There was a long silence. At last Milly’s voice crept through, strained and thin, feebly argumentative, the voice of a thing defeated and yet unconvinced.
“I don’t understand you, Agatha. You say it isn’t you; you say you’re only a connecting link; that you do nothing; that the Power that does it is inexhaustible; that there’s nothing it can’t do, nothing it won’t do for us, and yet you go and cut yourself off from it—deliberately, from the thing you believe to be divine.”
“I haven’t cut myself off from it.”
“You’ve cut Harding off,” said Milly. “If you refuse to hold him.”
“That wouldn’t cut him off—from It. But, Milly, holding him was bad; it wasn’t safe.”
“It saved him.”
“All the same, Milly, it wasn’t safe. The thing itself isn’t.”
“The Power? The divine thing?”
“Yes. It’s divine and it’s—it’s terrible. It does terrible things to us.”
“How could it? If it’s divine, wouldn’t it be compassionate? Do you suppose it’s less compassionate than—youare? Why, Agatha, when it’s goodness and purity itself—?”
“Goodness and purity are terrible. We don’t understand it. It’s got its own laws. What you call prayer’s all right—it would be safe, I mean—I suppose it might get answered anyway, however we fell short. Butthis—this is different. It’s the highest, Milly; and if you rush in and make for the highest, can’t you see, oh, can’t youseehow it might break you? Can’t you see what it requires ofyou? Absolute purity. I told you, Milly. You have to be crystal to it—crystal without a flaw.”
“And—if there were a flaw?”
“The whole thing, don’t you see, would break down; it would be no good. In fact, it would be awfully dangerous.”
“To whom?”
“To you—to them, the people you’re helping. You make a connection; you smash down all the walls so that you—you get through to each other; and supposing there was something wrong withyou, and it doesn’t work any longer (the Power, I mean), don’t you see you might do harm where you were trying to help?”
“But—Agatha—there was nothing wrong with you.”
“How do I know? Can anybody be sure there’s nothing wrong with them?”
“You think,” said Milly, “there was a flaw somewhere?”
“There must have been—somewhere—”
“What was it? Can’t you find out? Can’t you think? Think.”
“Sometimes—I’ve thought it may have been my fear.”
“Fear?”
“Yes, it’s the worst thing. Don’t you remember, I told you not to be afraid?”
“But, Agatha, you werenotafraid.”
“I was—afterwards. I got frightened.”
“You? And you toldmenot to be afraid,” said Milly.
“I had to tell you.”
“And I wasn’t afraid—afterwards. I believed in you. He believed in you.”
“You shouldn’t have. You shouldn’t. That was just it.”
“That was it? I suppose you’ll say next it was I who frightened you?”
As they faced each other there, Agatha, with the terrible, the almost supernatural lucidity she had, saw what was making Milly say that. Milly had been frightened; she felt that she had probably communicated her fright; she knew that was dangerous, and she knew that if it had done harm to Harding, she, and not Agatha, would be responsible. And because she couldn’t face her responsibility, she was trying to fasten upon Agatha some other fault than fear.
“No, Milly, I don’t say you frightened me; it was my own fear.”
“What was there foryouto be afraid of?”
Agatha was silent. That was what she must never tell her, not even to make her understand. She did not know what Milly was trying to think of her; Milly might think what she liked; but she should never know what her terror had been and her danger.
Agatha’s silence helped Milly.
“Nothing,” she said, “will make me believe it was your fear that did it. That would never have made you give Harding up. Besides, you were not afraid at first, though you may have been afterwards.”
“Afterwards?”
It was her own word, but it had as yet no significance for her.
“After—whatever it was you gave him up for. You gave him up for something.”
“I did not. I never gave him up until I was afraid.”
“You gave It up. You wouldn’t have done that if there had not been something. Something that stood between.”
“If,” said Agatha, “you could only tell me what it was.”
“I can’t tell you. I don’t know what came to you. I only know that if I’d had a gift like that, I would not have given it up for anything. I wouldn’t have let anything come between. I’d have kept myself—”
“I did keep myself—for it. I couldn’t keep myself entirely for Harding; there were other things, other people. I couldn’t give them up for Harding or for anybody.”
“Are you quite sure you kept yourself what you were, Aggy?”
“WhatwasI?”
“My dear—you were absolutely pure. You saidthatwas the condition.”
“Yes. And, don’t you see, whoisabsolutely? If you thought I was, you didn’t know me.”
As she spoke she heard the sharp click of the latch as the garden gate fell to; she had her back to the window so that she saw nothing, but she heard footsteps that she knew, resolute and energetic footsteps that hurried to their end. She felt the red blood surge into her face, and saw that Milly’s face was white with another passion, and that Milly’s eyes were fixed on the figure of the man who came up the garden path. And without looking at her Milly answered:
“I don’t know now; but I think I see, my dear——” In Milly’s pause the door-bell rang violently. Milly rose and let her have it. “What the flaw in the crystal was.”
XIII
XIII
XIII
Rodney entered the room, and it was then that Milly looked at her. Milly’s face was no longer the face of passion, but of sadness and reproach, almost of recovered incredulity. It questioned rather than accused her. It said unmistakably, “You gave him up forthat?”
Agatha’s voice recalled her. “Milly, I think you know Mr. Lanyon.”
Rodney, in acknowledging Milly’s presence, did not look at her. He saw nothing there but Agatha’s face, which showed him at last the expression that to his eyes had always been latent in it, the look of the tragic, hidden soul of terror that he had divined in her. He saw her at last as he had known he should some day see her. Terror was no longer there, but it had possessed her; it had passed through her and destroyed that other look she had from her lifted mouth and hair, the look of a thing borne on wings. Now, with her wings beaten, with her white face and haggard eyes, he saw her as a flying thing tracked down and trampled under the feet of the pursuer. He saw it in one flash as he stood there holding Milly’s hand.
Milly’s face had no significance for him. He didn’t see it. When at last he looked at her his eyes questioned her; they demanded an account from her of what he saw.
For Agatha, Milly’s face, prepared as it was for leave-taking, remained charged with meaning; it refused to divest itself of reproach and of the incredulity that challenged her. Agatha rose to it.
“You’re not going, Milly, just because he’s come? You needn’t.”
Millywasgoing.
He rose to it also.
If Mrs. Powellwouldgo like that—in that distressing way—she must at least let him walk back with her. Agatha wouldn’t mind. He hadn’t seen Mrs. Powell for ages.
He had risen to such a height that Milly was bewildered by him. She let him walk back with her to the Farm and a little way beyond it. Agatha said good-bye to Milly at the garden gate and watched them go. Then she went up into her own room.
He was gone so long that she thought he was never coming back again. She didn’t want him to come back just yet, but she knew she was not afraid to see him. It didn’t occur to her to wonder why, in spite of her message, he had come, nor why he had come by an earlier train than usual; she supposed he must have started before her message could have reached him. All that, his coming or his not coming, mattered so little now.
For now the whole marvellous thing was clear to her. She knew the secret of the gift. She saw luminously, almost transparently, the way it worked. Milly had shown her. Milly knew; Milly had seen; she had put her finger on the flaw.
It was not fear; Milly had been right there too. Until the moment when Harding Powell had begun to get at her Agatha had never known what fear felt like. It was the strain of mortality in her love for Rodney; the hidden thing, unforeseen and unacknowledged, working its work in the darkness. It had been there all the time, undermining her secret, sacred places. It had made the first breach through which the fear that was notherfear had entered. She could tell the very moment when it happened.
She had blamed poor little Milly; but it was the flaw, the flaw that had given their deadly point to Milly’s interference and Harding’s importunity. But for the flaw they could not have penetrated her profound serenity. Her gift might have been trusted to dispose of them.
For before that moment the gift had worked indubitably; it had never missed once. She looked back on its wonders; on the healing of herself; the first healing of Rodney and Harding Powell; the healing of Bella. It had worked with a peculiar rhythm of its own, and always in a strict, a measurable proportion to the purity of her intention. To Harding’s case she had brought nothing but innocent love and clean compassion; to Bella’s nothing but a selfless and beneficent desire to help. And because in Bella’s case at least she had been flawless, of the three, Bella’s was the only cure that had lasted. It had most marvellously endured. And because of the flaw in her she had left Harding worse than she had found him. No wonder that poor Milly had reproached her.
It mattered nothing that Milly’s reproaches went too far, that in Milly’s eyes she stood suspected of material sin (anything short of the tangible had never been enough for Milly); it mattered nothing that (though Milly mightn’t believe it) she had sinned only in her thought; for Agatha, who knew, that was enough; more than enough; it counted more.
For thought went wider and deeper than any deed; it was of the very order of the Powers intangible wherewith she had worked. Why, thoughts unborn and shapeless, that run under the threshold and hide there, counted more in that world where It, the Unuttered, the Hidden and the Secret, reigned.
She knew now that her surrender of last night had been the ultimate deliverance. She was not afraid any more to meet Rodney; for she had been made pure from desire; she was safeguarded for ever.
He had been gone about an hour when she heard him at the gate again and in the room below.
She went down to him. He came forward to meet her as she entered; he closed the door behind them; but her eyes held them apart.
“Did you not get my wire?” she said.
“Yes. I got it.”
“Then why—?”
“Why did I come? Because I knew what was happening. I wasn’t going to leave you here for Powell to terrify you out of your life.”
“Surely—you thought they’d gone?”
“I knew they hadn’t or you wouldn’t have wired.”
“But I would. I’d have wired in any case.”
“To put me off?”
“To—put—you—off.”
“Why?”
He questioned without divination or forewarning. The veil of flesh was as yet over his eyes, so that he could not see.
“Because I didn’t mean that you should come, that you should ever come again, Rodney.”
He smiled.
“So you went back on me, did you?”
“If you call it going back.”
She longed for him to see.
“That was only because you were frightened,” he said. He turned from her and paced the room uneasily, as if he saw. Presently he drew up by the hearth and stood there for a moment, puzzling it out; and she thought he had seen.
He hadn’t. He faced her with a smile again.
“But it was no good, dear, was it? As if I wouldn’t know what it meant. You wouldn’t have done it if you hadn’t been ill. You lost your nerve. No wonder, with those Powells preying on you, body and soul, for weeks.”
“No, Rodney, no. I didn’twantyou to come back. And I think—now—it would be better if you didn’t stay.”
It seemed to her now that perhaps he had seen and was fighting what he saw.
“I’m not going to stay,” he said, “I am going—in another hour—to take Powell away somewhere.”
He took it up where she had made him leave it. “Then, Agatha, I shall come back again. I shall come back—let me see—on Sunday.”
She swept that aside.
“Where are you going to take him?”
“To a man I know who’ll look after him.”
“Oh, Rodney, it’ll break Milly’s heart.”
She had come, in her agitation, to where he stood. She sat on the couch by the corner of the hearth, and he looked down at her there.
“No,” he said, “it won’t. It’ll give him a chance to get all right. I’ve convinced her it’s the only thing to do. He can’t be left here for you to look after.”
“Did she tell you?”
“She wouldn’t have told me a thing if I hadn’t made her. I dragged it out of her, bit by bit.”
“Rodney, that was cruel of you.”
“Was it? I don’t care. I’d have done it if she’d bled.”
“What did she tell you?”
“Pretty nearly everything, I imagine. Quite enough for me to see what, between them, they’ve been doing to you.”
“Did she tell youhow he got well?”
He did not answer all at once. It was as if he drew back before the question, alien and disturbed, shirking the discerned, yet unintelligible issue.
“Did she tell you, Rodney?” Agatha repeated.
“Well, yes. Shetoldme.”
He seemed to be making, reluctantly, some admission. He sat down beside her, and his movement had the air of ending the discussion. But he did not look at her.
“What do you make of it?” she said.
This time he winced visibly.
“I don’t make anything. If it happened—if it happened likethat, Agatha—”
“It did happen.”
“Well, I admit it was uncommonly queer.”
He left it there and reverted to his theme.
“But it’s no wonder—if you sat down to that for six weeks—it’s no wonder you got scared. It’s inconceivable to me how that woman could have let you in for him. She knew what he was.”
“She didn’t know what I was doing till it was done.”
“She’d no business to let you go on with it when she did know.”
“Ah, but she knew—then—it was all right.”
“All right?”
“Absolutely right. Rodney—” She called to him as if she would compel him to see it as it was. “I did no more for him than I did for you and Bella.”
He started. “Bella?” he repeated.
He stared at her. He had seen something.
“You wondered how she got all right, didn’t you?”
He said nothing.
“That was how.”
And still he did not speak. He sat there, leaning forward, staring now at his own clasped hands. He looked as if he bowed himself before the irrefutable.
“And there was you, too, before that.”
“I know,” he said then; “I can understandthat. But—why Bella?”
“Because Bella was the only way.”
She had not followed his thoughts, nor he hers.
“The only way?” he said.
“To work it. To keep the thing pure. I had to be certain of my motive, and I knew that if I could give Bella back to you that would prove—to me, I mean—that it was pure.”
“But Bella,” he said softly—“Bella. Powell I can understand—and me.”
It was clear that he could get over all the rest. But he could not get over Bella. Bella’s case convinced him. Bella’s case could not be explained away—or set aside. Before Bella’s case he was baffled, utterly defeated. He faced it with a certain awe.
“You were right, after all, about Bella,” he said at last. “And so was I. She didn’t care for me, as I told you. But she does care now.”
She knew it.
“That was what I was trying for,” she said. “That was what I meant.”
“You meant it?”
“It was the only way. That’s why I didn’t want you to come back.”
He sat silent, taking that in.
“Don’t you see now how it works? You have to be pure crystal. That’s why I didn’t want you to come back.”
Obscurely, through the veil of flesh, he saw.
“And I am never to come back?” he said.
“You will not need to come.”
“You mean you won’t want me?”
“No. I shall not want you. Because, when I did want you, it broke down.”
He smiled.
“I see. When you want me, it breaks down.”
He rallied for a moment. He made his one last pitiful stand against the supernatural thing that was conquering him.
He had risen to go.
“And whenIwant to come, when I long for you, what then?”
“Yourlonging will make no difference.”
She smiled also, as if she foresaw how it would work, and that soon, very soon, he would cease to long for her.
His hand was on the door. He smiled back at her.
“I don’t want to shake your faith in it,” he said.
“You can’t shake my faith in It.”
“Still—it breaks down. It breaks down,” he cried.
“Never. You don’t understand,” she said. “It was the flaw in the crystal.”
Soon, very soon he would know it. Already he had shown submission.
She had no doubt of the working of the Power. Bella remained as a sign that it had once been, and that, given the flawless crystal, it should be again.