But she never had; never since the knowledge came to her; since she
discovered, wonderfully, by a divine accident, that at any moment she
could make him--that she had whatever it was, the power, the uncanny,
unaccountable Gift.
She was beginning to see more and more how it worked; how inevitably,
how infallibly it worked. She was even a little afraid of it, of what it
might come to mean. It _did_ mean that without his knowledge, separated
as they were and had to be, she could always get at him.
And supposing it came to mean that she could get at him to make him do
things? Why, the bare idea of it was horrible.
Nothing could well have been _more_ horrible to Agatha. It was the
secret and the essence of their remarkable relation that she had never
tried to get at him; whereas Bella _had_, calamitously; and still more
calamitously, because of the peculiar magic that there was (there must
have been) in her, Bella had succeeded. To have tried to get at him
would have been, for Agatha, the last treachery, the last indecency;
while for Rodney it would have been the destruction of her charm. She
was the way of escape for him from Bella; but she had always left her
door, even the innermost door, wide open; so that where shelter and
protection faced him there faced him also the way of departure, the way
of escape from _her_.
And if her thought could get at him and fasten on him and shut him in
there----
It could, she knew; but it need not. She was really all right. Restraint
had been the essence and the secret of the charm she had, and it was
also the secret and the essence of her gift. Why, she had brought it to
so fine a point that she could shut out, and by shutting out destroy any
feeling, any thought that did violence to any other. She could shut them
all out, if it came to that, and make the whole place empty. So that, if
this knowledge of her power did violence, she had only to close her door
on it.
She closed it now on the bare thought of his coming; on the little
innocent hope she had that he would come. By an ultimate refinement and
subtlety of honour she refused to let even expectation cling to him.
But though it was dreadful to "work" her gift that way, to make him do
things, there was another way in which she did work it, lawfully,
sacredly, incorruptibly--the way it first came to her. She had worked it
twenty times (without his knowledge, for how he would have scoffed at
her!) to make him well.
Before it had come to her, he had been, ever since she knew him, more or
less ill, more or less tormented by the nerves that were wedded so
indissolubly to Bella's. He was always, it seemed to her terror, on the
verge. And she could say to herself, "Look at him _now_!"
His abrupt, incredible recovery had been the first open manifestation of
the way it worked. Not that she had tried it on him first. Before she
dared do that once she had proved it on herself twenty times. She had
proved it up to the hilt.
But to ensure continuous results it had to be a continuous process; and
in order to give herself up to it, to him (to his pitiful case), she had
lately, as her friends said, "cut herself completely off." She had gone
down into Buckinghamshire and taken a small solitary house at Sarratt
End in the valley of the Chess, three miles from the nearest station.
She had shut herself up in a world half a mile long, one straight hill
to the north, one to the south, two strips of flat pasture, the river
and the white farm-road between. A world closed east and west by the
turn the valley takes there between the hills, and barred by a gate at
each end of the farm-road. A land of pure curves, of delicate colours,
delicate shadows; all winter through a land of grey woods and sallow
fields, of ploughed hillsides pale with the white strain of the chalk.
In April (it was April now) a land shining with silver and with green.
And the ways out of it led into lanes; it had neither sight nor hearing
of the high roads beyond.
There were only two houses in that half-mile of valley, Agatha's house
and Woodman's Farm.
Agatha's house, white as a cutting in the chalk downs, looked southwest,
up the valley and across it, to where a slender beech wood went lightly
up the hill and then stretched out in a straight line along the top,
with the bare fawn-coloured flank of the ploughed land below. The
farmhouse looked east towards Agatha's house across a field; a red-brick
house--dull, dark red with the grey bloom of weather on it--flat-faced
and flat-eyed, two windows on each side of the door and a row of five
above, all nine staring at the small white house across the field. The
narrow, flat farm-road linked the two.
Except Rodney when his inn was full, nobody ever came to Woodman's Farm;
and Agatha's house, set down inside its east gate, shared its isolation,
its immunity. Two villages, unseen, unheard, served her, not a mile
away. It was impossible to be more sheltered, more protected and more
utterly cut off. And only fifteen miles, as the crow flies, between this
solitude and London, so that it was easy for Rodney Lanyon to come down.
At two o'clock, the hour when he must come if he were coming, she began
to listen for the click of the latch at the garden gate. She had agreed
with herself that at the last moment expectancy could do no harm; it
couldn't influence him; for either he had taken the twelve-thirty train
at Marylebone or he had not (Agatha was so far reasonable); so at the
last moment she permitted herself that dangerous and terrible joy.
When the click came and his footsteps after it, she admitted further
(now when it could do no harm) that she had had foreknowledge of him;
she had been aware all the time that he would come. And she wondered,
as she always wondered at his coming, whether really she would find him
well, or whether this time it had incredibly miscarried. And her almost
unbearable joy became suspense, became vehement desire to see him and
gather from his face whether this time also it had worked.
"How are you? How have you been?" was her question when he stood before
her in her white room, holding her hand for an instant.
"Tremendously fit," he answered; "ever since I last saw you."
"Oh--seeing me----" It was as if she wanted him to know that seeing her
made no difference.
She looked at him and received her certainty. She saw him clear-eyed and
young, younger than he was, his clean, bronzed face set, as it used to
be, in a firmness that obliterated the lines, the little agonized
lines, that had made her heart ache.
"It always does me good," he said, "to see you."
"And to see you--you know what it does to me."
He thought he knew as he caught back his breath and looked at her,
taking in again her fine whiteness, and her tenderness, her purity of
line, and the secret of her eyes whose colour (if they had colour) he
was never sure about; taking in all of her, from her adorable feet to
her hair, vividly dark, that sprang from the white parting like--was it
like waves or wings?
What had once touched and moved him unspeakably in Agatha's face was the
capacity it had, latent in its tragic lines, for expressing terror.
Terror was what he most dreaded for her, what he had most tried to keep
her from, to keep out of her face. And latterly he had not found it; or
rather he had not found the unborn, lurking spirit of it there. It had
gone, that little tragic droop in Agatha's face. The corners of her eyes
and of her beautiful mouth were lifted; as if by--he could find no other
word for the thing he meant but wings. She had a look which, if it were
not of joy, was of something more vivid and positive than peace.
He put it down to their increased and undisturbed communion made
possible by her retirement to Sarratt End. Yet as he looked at her he
sighed again.