IV

She went still more gently and with half-shut eyes through her

illuminated house. She turned the lights out in her room and undressed

herself in the darkness. She laid herself on the bed with straight lax

limbs, with arms held apart a little from her body, with eyelids shut

lightly on her eyes; all fleshly contacts were diminished.

It was now as if her being drank at every pore the swimming darkness; as

if the rhythm of her heart and of her breath had ceased in the pulse of

its invasion. She sank in it and was covered with wave upon wave of

darkness. She sank and was upheld; she dissolved and was gathered

together again, a flawless crystal. She was herself the heart of the

charmed circle, poised in the ultimate unspeakable stillness, beyond

death, beyond birth, beyond the movement, the vehemence, the agitations

of the world. She drew Harding Powell into it and held him there.

To draw him to any purpose she had first to loosen and destroy the

fleshly, sinister image of him that, for the moment of evocation, hung

like a picture on the darkness. In a moment the fleshly image receded,

it sank back into the darkness. His name, Harding Powell, was now the

only earthly sign of him that she suffered to appear. In the third

moment his name was blotted out. And then it was as if she drew him by

intangible, supersensible threads; she touched, with no sense of peril,

his innermost essence; the walls of flesh were down between them; she

had got at him.

And having got at him she held him, a bloodless spirit, a bodiless

essence, in the fount of healing. She said to herself, “He will sleep

now. He will sleep. He will sleep.” And as she slid into her own sleep

she held and drew him with her.

He would sleep; he would be all right as long as _she_ slept. Her sleep,

she had discovered, did more than carry on the amazing act of communion

and redemption. It clinched it. It was the seal on the bond.

Early the next morning she went over to the Farm. The blinds were up;

the doors and windows were flung open. Milly met her at the garden gate.

She stopped her and walked a little way with her across the field. “It’s

worked,” she said. “It’s worked after all, like magic.” For a moment

Agatha wondered whether Milly had guessed anything; whether she divined

the Secret and had brought him there for that, and had refused to

acknowledge it before she knew.

“What has?” she asked.

“The plan. The place. He slept last night. Ten hours straight on end. I

know, for I stayed awake and watched him. And this morning—oh, my dear,

if you could see him! He’s all right. He’s all right.”

“And you think,” said Agatha, “it’s the place?”

Milly knew nothing, guessed, divined nothing.

“Why, what else can it be?” she said.

“What does _he_ think?”

“He doesn’t think. He can’t account for it. He says himself it’s

miraculous.”

“Perhaps,” said Agatha, “it is.”

They were silent a moment over the wonder of it.

“I can’t get over it,” said Milly presently. “It’s so odd that it should

make all that difference. I could understand it if it had worked that

way at first. But it didn’t. Think of him yesterday. And yet—if it isn’t

the place, what is it? What is it?”

Agatha did not answer. She wasn’t going to tell Milly what it was. If

she did, Milly wouldn’t believe her, and Milly’s unbelief might work

against it. It might prove, for all she knew, an inimical, disastrous

power.

“Come and see for yourself.” Milly spoke as if it had been Agatha who

doubted.

They turned again towards the house. Powell had come out and was in the

garden, leaning on the gate. They could see how right he was by the mere

fact of his being there, presenting himself like that to the vivid

light.

He opened the gate for them, raising his hat and smiling as they came.

His face witnessed to the wonder worked on him. The colour showed clean,

purged of his taint. His eyes were candid and pure under brows smoothed

by sleep.

As they went in he stood for a moment in the open doorway and looked at

the view, admiring the river and the green valley and the bare upland

fields under the wood. He had always had (it was part of his rare

quality) a prodigious capacity for admiration.

“My God,” he said, “how beautiful the world is!”

He looked at Milly. “And all that isn’t a patch on my wife.”

He looked at her with tenderness and admiration, and the look was the

flower, the perfection of his sanity.

Milly drew in her breath with a little sound like a sob. Her joy was so

great that it was almost unbearable.

Then he looked at Agatha and admired the green gown she wore. “You don’t

know,” he said, “how exquisitely right you are.”

She smiled. She knew how exquisitely right _he_ was.

V

Night after night, she continued and without an effort. It was as easy

as drawing your breath; it was indeed the breath you drew. She found

that she had no longer to devote hours to Harding Powell, any more than

she gave hours to Rodney; she could do his business in moments, in

points of inappreciable time. It was as if from night to night the times

swung together and made one enduring timeless time. For the process

belonged to a region that was not of times or time.

She wasn’t afraid, then, of not giving enough time to it, but she _was_

afraid of omitting it altogether. She knew that every intermission would

be followed by a relapse, and Harding’s state did not admit of any

relapses.

Of course, if time _had_ counted, if the thing was measurable, she would

have been afraid of losing hold of Rodney Lanyon. She held him now by a

single slender thread, and the thread was Bella. She “worked” it

regularly now through Bella. He was bound to be all right as long as

Bella was; for his possibilities of suffering were thus cut off at their

source. Besides, it was the only way to preserve the purity of her

intention, the flawlessness of the crystal.

That was the blessedness of her attitude to Harding Powell. It was

passionless, impersonal. She wanted nothing of Harding Powell except to

help him, and to help Milly, dear little Milly. And never before had she

been given so complete, so overwhelming a sense of having helped. It was

nothing—unless it was a safeguard against vanity—that they didn’t know

it, that they persisted in thinking it was Milly’s plan that worked. Not

that that altogether accounted for it to Harding Powell. He said so at

last to Agatha.

They were returning, he and she, by the edge of the wood at the top of

the steep field after a long walk. He had asked her to go with him—it

was her country—for a good stretch, further than Milly’s little feet

could carry her. They stood a moment up there and looked around them.

April was coming on, but the ploughed land at their feet was still bare;

the earth waited. On that side of the valley she was delicately

unfruitful, spent with rearing the fine, thin beauty of the woods. But,

down below, the valley ran over with young grass and poured it to the

river in wave after wave, till the last surge of green rounded over the

water’s edge. Rain had fallen in the night, and the river had risen; it

rested there, poised. It was wonderful how a thing so brimming, so

shining, so alive could be so still; still as marsh water, flat to the

flat land.

[Illustration: ... he stood for a moment in the open doorway ...]

At that moment, in a flash that came like a shifting of her eyes, the

world she looked at suffered a change.

And yet it did not change. All the appearances of things, their colours,

the movement and the stillness remained as if constant in their rhythm

and their scale; but they were heightened, intensified; they were

carried to a pitch that would have been vehement, vibrant, but that the

stillness as well as the movement was intense. She was not dazzled by it

or confused in any way. Her senses were exalted, adjusted to the pitch.

She would have said now that the earth at her feet had become

insubstantial, but that she knew, in a flash, that what she saw was the

very substance of the visible world; live and subtle as flame; solid as

crystal and as clean. It was the same world, flat field for flat field

and hill for hill; but radiant, vibrant, and, as it were, infinitely

transparent.

Agatha in her moment saw that the whole world brimmed and shone and was

alive with the joy that was its life, joy that flowed flood-high and yet

was still. In every leaf, in every blade of grass, this life was

manifest as a strange, a divine translucence. She was about to point it

out to the man at her side when she remembered that he had eyes for the

beauty of the earth, but no sense of its secret and supernatural light.

Harding Powell denied, he always had denied, the supernatural. And when

she turned to him her vision had passed from her.

They must have another tramp some day, he said. He wanted to see more of

this wonderful place. And then he spoke of his recovery.

“It’s all very well,” he said, “but I can’t account for it. Milly says

it’s the place.”

“It _is_ a wonderful place,” said Agatha.

“Not so wonderful as all that. You saw how I was the day after we came.

Well—it can’t be the place altogether.”

“I rather hope it isn’t,” Agatha said.

“Do you? What do you think it is, then?”

“I think it’s something in you.”

“Of course, of course. But what started it? That’s what I want to know.

Something’s happened. Something queer and spontaneous and unaccountable.

It’s—it’s uncanny. For, you know, I oughtn’t to feel like this. I got

bad news this morning.”

“Bad news?”

“Yes. My sister’s little girl is very ill. They think it’s meningitis.

They’re in awful trouble. And I—I’m feeling like this.”

“Don’t let it distress you.”

“It doesn’t distress me. It only puzzles me. That’s the odd thing. Of

course, I’m sorry, and I’m anxious and all that; but I _feel_ so well.”

“You _are_ well. Don’t be morbid.”

“I haven’t told my wife yet. About the child, I mean. I simply daren’t.

It’ll frighten her. She won’t know how I’ll take it, and she’ll think

it’ll make me go all queer again.”

He paused and turned to her.

“I say, if she _did_ know how I’m taking it, she’d think _that_ awfully

queer, wouldn’t she?” He paused.

“The worst of it is,” he said, “I’ve got to tell her.”

“Will you leave it to me?” Agatha said. “I think I can make it all

right.”

“How?” he queried.

“Never mind how. I can.”

“Well,” he assented, “there’s hardly anything you can’t do.”

That was how she came to tell Milly.

She made up her mind to tell her that evening as they sat alone in

Agatha’s house. “Harding,” Milly said, “was happy over there with his

books; just as he used to be, only more so.” So much more so that she

was a little disturbed about it. She was afraid it wouldn’t last. And

again she said it was the place, the wonderful place.

“If you want it to last,” Agatha said, “don’t go on thinking it’s the

place.”

“Why shouldn’t it be? I feel that he’s safe here. He’s out of it. Things

can’t reach him.”

“Bad news reached him to-day.”

“Aggy—what?” Milly whispered in her fright.

“His sister is very anxious about her little girl.”

“What’s wrong?”

Agatha repeated what she had heard from Harding Powell.

“Oh—” Milly was dumb for an instant while she thought of her

sister-in-law. Then she cried aloud:

“If the child dies, it’ll make him ill again?”

“No, Milly, it won’t.”

“It will, I tell you. It’s always been that sort of thing that does it.”

“And supposing there was something that keeps it off?”

“What is there? What is there?”

“I believe there’s something. Would you mind awfully if it wasn’t the

place?”

“What do you mean, Agatha?” (There was a faint resentment in Milly’s

agonized tone.)

It was then that Agatha told her. She made it out for her as far as she

had made it out at all, with the diffidence that a decent attitude

required.

Milly raised doubts which subsided in a kind of awe when Agatha faced

her with the evidence of dates.

“You remember, Milly, the night when he slept?”

“I do remember. He said himself it was miraculous.” She meditated.

“And so you think it’s that?” she said presently.

“I do indeed. If I dared leave off (I daren’t) you’d see for yourself.”

“What do you think you’ve got hold of?”

“I don’t know yet.”

There was a long, deep silence which Milly broke.

“What do you _do_?” she said.

“I don’t do anything. It isn’t me.”

“I see,” said Milly. “I’ve prayed. You didn’t think I hadn’t?”

“It’s not that—not anything _you_ mean by it. And yet it is; only it’s

more, much more. I can’t explain it. I only know it isn’t me.”

She was beginning to feel vaguely uncomfortable about having told her.

“And, Milly, you mustn’t tell him. Promise me you won’t tell him.”

“No, I won’t tell him.”

“Because, you see, he’d think it was all rot.”

“He would,” said Milly. “It’s the sort of thing he does think rot.”

“And that might prevent its working.”

Milly smiled faintly. “I haven’t the ghost of an idea what ‘it’ is. But

whatever it is, can you go on doing it?”

“Yes, I think so. You see, it depends rather—”

“It depends on what?”

“Oh, on a lot of things—on your sincerity; on your—your purity. It

depends so much on _that_ that it frightens you, lest, perhaps, you

mightn’t, after all, be so very pure.”

Milly smiled again a little differently. “Darling, if that’s all, I’m

not frightened. Only—supposing—supposing you gave out? You might, you

know.”

“_I_ might. But It couldn’t. You mustn’t think it’s me, Milly. Because

if anything happened to me, if I did give out, don’t you see how it

would let him down? It’s as bad as thinking it’s the place.”

“Does it matter what it is—or who it is,” said Milly passionately; “as

long as—” Her tears came and stopped her.

Agatha divined the source of Milly’s passion.

“Then you don’t mind, Milly? You’ll let me go on?” Milly rose; she

turned abruptly, holding her head high, so that she might not spill her

tears.

Agatha went with her over the grey field towards the farm. They paused

at the gate. Milly spoke.

“Are you sure?” she said.

“Certain.”

“And you won’t let go?” Her eyes shone towards her friend’s in the

twilight. “You _will_ go on?”

“_You_ must go on.”

“Ah—how?”

“Believing that he’ll be all right.”

“Oh, Aggy, he was devoted to Winny. And if the child dies—”