The Flaw in the Crystal Part 5

That was the blessedness of her att.i.tude to Harding Powell. It was pa.s.sionless, 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 that 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 gra.s.s 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 br.i.m.m.i.n.g, so shining, so alive could be so still; still as marsh water, flat to the flat land.

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 her 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 gra.s.s, 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sented, "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, 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 will 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 agonised 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 att.i.tude required.