“My dear, that’s all that keeps me going. I’ve got to make him feel that
he’s protected.”
“He _is_ protected,” said Agatha.
Already she was drawing her charmed circle round him.
“As long as I hold out. If I give in he’s done for.”
“You mustn’t think it. You mustn’t say it!”
“But—I know it. Oh, my dear! I’m all he’s got.”
At that she looked for a moment as if she might break down. She said the
terrible part of it was that they were left so much alone. People were
beginning to shrink from him, to be afraid of him.
“You know,” said Agatha, “I’m not. You must bring him to see me.”
The little woman had risen, as she said, “to go to him.” She stood
there, visibly hesitating. She couldn’t bring him. He wouldn’t come.
Would Agatha go with her and see him?
Agatha went.
As they approached the farm, she saw to her amazement that the door was
shut and the blinds, the ugly, ochreish yellow blinds, were down in all
the nine windows of the front, the windows of the Powells’ rooms. The
house was like a house of the dead.
“Do you get the sun on this side?” she said; and as she said it she
realized the stupidity of her question; for the nine windows looked to
the east, and the sun, wheeling down the west, had been in their faces
as they came.
Milly answered mechanically, “No, we don’t get any sun.” She added with
an irrelevance that was only apparent, “I’ve had to take all four rooms
to keep other people out.”
“They never come,” said Agatha.
“No,” said Milly, “but if they did—”
The front door was locked. Milly had the key. When they had entered
Agatha saw her turn it in the lock again, slowly and without a sound.
All the doors were shut in the passage, and it was dark there. Milly
opened a door on the left at the foot of the steep stairs.
“He will be in here,” she said.
[Illustration: Milly opened the door on the left ...]
The large room was lit with a thick ochreish light through the squares
of its drawn blinds. It ran the whole width of the house and had a third
window looking west where the yellow light prevailed. A horrible light
it was. It cast thin, turbid, brown shadows on the walls.
Harding Powell was sitting between the drawn blinds, alone in the black
hollow of the chimney place. He crouched in his chair, and his bowed
back was towards them as they stood there on the threshold.
“Harding,” said Milly, “Agatha has come to see you.”
He turned in his chair and rose as they entered.
His chin was sunk on his chest, and the first thing Agatha noticed was
the difficult, slow, forward-thrusting movement with which he lifted it.
His eyes seemed to come up last of all from the depths to meet her. With
a peculiar foreign courtesy he bowed his head again over her hand as he
held it.
He apologized for the darkness in which they found him. Harding Powell’s
manners had always been perfect, and it struck Agatha as strange and
pathetic that his malady should have left untouched the incomparable
quality he had.
Milly went to the windows and drew the blinds up. The light revealed him
in his exquisite perfection, his small fragile finish. He was fifty or
thereabouts, but slight as a boy, and nervous, and dark as Englishmen
are dark; jaw and chin shaven; his mouth hidden by the straight droop of
his moustache. From the eyes downwards the outlines of his face and
features were of an extreme regularity and a fineness undestroyed by the
work of the strained nerves on the sallow, delicate texture. But his
eyes, dark like an animal’s, were the eyes of a terrified thing, a thing
hunted and on the watch, a thing that listened continually for the soft
feet of the hunter. Above these eyes his brows were twisted, were
tortured with his terror.
He turned to his wife.
“Did you lock the door, dear?” he said.
“I did. But you know, Harding, we needn’t—here.”
He shivered slightly and began to walk up and down before the
hearthplace. When he had his back to Milly, Milly followed him with her
eyes of anguish; when he turned and faced her, she met him with her
white smile.
Presently he spoke again. He wondered whether they would object to his
drawing the blinds down. He was afraid he would have to. Otherwise, he
said, _he would be seen_.
Milly laid her hand on the arm that he stretched towards the window.
“Darling,” she said, “you’ve forgotten. You can’t possibly be seen—here.
It’s just the one place—isn’t it, Agatha?—where you can’t be.” Her eyes
signalled to Agatha to support her. (Not but what she had perfect
confidence in the plan.)
It was, Agatha assented. “And Agatha knows,” said Milly.
He shivered again. He had turned to Agatha.
“Forgive me if I suggest that you cannot really know. Heaven forbid that
you _should_ know.”
Milly, intent on her “plan,” persisted.
“But, dearest, you said yourself it was. The one place.”
“I said that? When did I say it?”
“Yesterday.”
“Yesterday? I daresay. But I didn’t sleep last night. It wouldn’t let
me.”
“Very few people do sleep,” said Agatha, “for the first time in a
strange place.”
“The place isn’t strange. That’s what I complain of. That’s what keeps
me awake. No place ever will be strange when It’s there. And it was
there last night.”
[Illustration: “No place ever will be strange when It’s there.”]
“Darling—” Milly murmured.
“You know what I mean,” he said. “The Thing that keeps me awake. Of
course if I’d slept last night I’d have known it wasn’t there. But when
I didn’t sleep—”
He left it to them to draw the only possible conclusion.
They dropped the subject. They turned to other things and talked a
little while, sitting with him in his room with the drawn blinds. From
time to time when they appealed to him he gave an urbane assent, a
murmur, a suave motion of his hand. When the light went they lit a lamp.
Agatha stayed and dined with them, that being the best thing she could
do.
At nine o’clock she rose and said good-night to Harding Powell. He
smiled a drawn smile.
“Ah—if I could sleep—,” he said.
“That’s the worst of it—his not sleeping,” said Milly at the gate.
“He will sleep. He will sleep,” said Agatha.
Milly sighed. She knew he wouldn’t.
The plan, she said, was no good after all. It wouldn’t work.