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 for _that_?”
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.”
Milly _was_ going.
He rose to it also.
If Mrs. Powell _would_ go 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 not
_her_ fear 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’t _want_ you 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 you _how 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. She _told_ me.”
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 like _that_,
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 understand _that_. 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 when _I_ want to come, when I long for you, what then?”
“_Your_ longing 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.