The Flaw in the Crystal Part 3

The little woman had risen, as she said, "to go to him." She stood there, visibly hesitating. She couldn't bring him. He wouldn't come.

Would Agatha go with her and see him?

Agatha went.

As they approached the Farm she saw to her amazement that the door was shut and the blinds, the ugly, ochreish yellow blinds, were down in all the nine windows of the front, the windows of the Powell's rooms. The house was like a house of the dead.

"Do you get the sun on this side?" she said; and as she said it she realised the stupidity of her question; for the nine windows looked to the east, and the sun, wheeling down the west, had been in their faces as they came.

Milly answered mechanically, "No, we don't get any sun." She added with an irrelevance that was only apparent, "I've had to take all four rooms to keep other people out."

"They never come," said Agatha.

"No," said Milly, "but if they did----!"

The front door was locked. Milly had the key. When they had entered, Agatha saw her turn it in the lock again, slowly and without a sound.

All the doors were shut in the pa.s.sage, and it was dark there. Milly opened a door on the left at the foot of the steep stairs.

"He will be in here," she said.

The large room was lit with a thick ochreish light through the squares of its drawn blinds. It ran the whole width of the house and had a third window looking west where the yellow light prevailed. A horrible light it was. It cast thin, turbid, brown shadows on the walls.

Harding Powell was sitting between the drawn blinds, alone in the black hollow of the chimney place. He crouched in his chair and his bowed back was towards them as they stood there on the threshold.

"Harding," said Milly, "Agatha has come to see you."

He turned in his chair and rose as they entered.

His chin was sunk on his chest, and the first thing Agatha noticed was the difficult, slow, forward-thrusting movement with which he lifted it.

His eyes seemed to come up last of all from the depths to meet her. With a peculiar foreign courtesy he bowed his head again over her hand as he held it.

He apologised for the darkness in which they found him. Harding Powell's manners had always been perfect, and it struck Agatha as strange and pathetic that his malady should have left untouched the incomparable quality he had.

Milly went to the windows and drew the blinds up. The light revealed him in his exquisite perfection, his small fragile finish. He was fifty or thereabouts, but slight as a boy, and nervous, and dark as Englishmen are dark; jaw and chin shaven; his mouth hidden by the straight droop of his moustache. From the eyes downwards the outlines of his face and features were of an extreme regularity and a fineness undestroyed by the work of the strained nerves on the sallow, delicate texture. But his eyes, dark like an animal's, were the eyes of a terrified thing, a thing hunted and on the watch, a thing that listened continually for the soft feet of the hunter. Above these eyes his brows were twisted, were tortured with his terror.

He turned to his wife.

"Did you lock the door, dear?" he said.

"I did. But you know, Harding, we needn't--here."

He s.h.i.+vered slightly and began to walk up and down before the hearth-place. When he had his back to Milly, Milly followed him with her eyes of anguish; when he turned and faced her, she met him with her white smile.

Presently he spoke again. He wondered whether they would object to his drawing the blinds down. He was afraid he would have to. Otherwise, he said, _he would be seen_.

Milly laid her hand on the arm that he stretched towards the window.

"Darling," she said, "you've forgotten. You can't possibly be seen--here. It's just the one place--isn't it, Agatha?--where you can't be." Her eyes signalled to Agatha to support her. (Not but what she had perfect confidence in the plan.)

It was, Agatha a.s.sented. "And Agatha knows," said Milly.

He s.h.i.+vered again. He had turned to Agatha.

"Forgive me if I suggest that you cannot really know. Heaven forbid that you _should_ know."

Milly, intent on her "plan," persisted.

"But, dearest, you said yourself it was. The one place."

"_I_ said that? When did I say it?"

"Yesterday."

"Yesterday? I daresay. But I didn't sleep last night. It wouldn't let me."

"Very few people do sleep," said Agatha, "for the first time in a strange place."

"The place isn't strange. That's what I complain of. That's what keeps me awake. No place ever will be strange when It's there. And It was there last night."

"Darling----" Milly murmured.

"You know what I mean," he said. "The Thing that keeps me awake. Of course if I'd slept last night I'd have known it wasn't there. But when I didn't sleep----"

He left it to them to draw the only possible conclusion.

They dropped the subject. They turned to other things and talked a little while, sitting with him in his room with the drawn blinds. From time to time when they appealed to him, he gave an urbane a.s.sent, a murmur, a suave motion of his hand. When the light went, they lit a lamp. Agatha stayed and dined with them, that being the best thing she could do.

At nine o'clock she rose and said good-night to Harding Powell. He smiled a drawn smile.

"Ah--if I could sleep----" he said.

"That's the worst of it--his not sleeping," said Milly at the gate.

"He will sleep. He will sleep," said Agatha.

Milly sighed. She knew he wouldn't.

The plan, she said, was no good after all. It wouldn't work.

CHAPTER THREE

How could it? There was nothing behind it. All Milly's plans had been like that; they fell to dust; they _were_ dust. They had been always that pitiful, desperate stirring of the dust to hide the terror, the futile throwing of the dust in the poor thing's eyes. As if he couldn't see through it. As if, with the supernatural lucidity, the invincible cunning of the insane, he didn't see through anything and provide for it. It was really only his indestructible urbanity, persisting through the wreck of him, that bore, tolerantly, temperately, with Milly and her plans. Without it he might be dangerous. With it, as long as it lasted, little Milly, plan as she would, was safe.

But they couldn't count on its lasting. Agatha had realised that from the moment when she had seen him draw down the blind again after his wife had drawn it up. That was the maddest thing he had done yet. She had shuddered at it as at an act of violence. It outraged, cruelly, his exquisite quality. It was so unlike him.