The Flaw in the Crystal Part 12

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.

It _was_ hard. 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 pa.s.sive 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 subst.i.tute 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 night _she_ gained. 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 compa.s.sion, 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 peace _is_. 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 subst.i.tution 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.

CHAPTER TWELVE

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 had 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 pa.s.sed 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 compa.s.sion, 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 there _was_ her 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 realised 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 pa.s.sed?"

"I thought it was because you'd gone."

"It's because that _thing_'s come 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. "You _will_ help him?"

"I can't." Agatha heard her voice go dry in her throat.

"You _can't_?"

Agatha shook her head.

"You mean you haven't, then?"

"I haven't. I couldn't."