Read Ebook: The Flaw in the Crystal by Sinclair May

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Ebook has 671 lines and 24325 words, and 14 pages

"My dear girl, that wasn't very clever of you."

"I told her not to tell. She knows what I want to be alone for."

"Then" , "we're done for."

"No, no," she cried. "How could you think that? It was another thing. Something that I'm trying to do."

"You told her," he insisted. "What did you tell her?"

"That I'm doing it. That I'm here for my health. She understands it that way."

He smiled as if he were satisfied, knowing her so well. And still his thought, his terrible naked thought, was there. It was looking at her straight out of his eyes.

"Are you sure she understands?" he said.

"Yes. Absolutely."

He hesitated, and then put it differently.

"Are you sure she doesn't understand? That she hasn't an inkling?"

"About you and me," he said.

She finished it with a wonderful look, a look of unblinking yet vaguely, pitifully uncandid candour.

That was where she came in and where her secret, her gift, would work now more beneficently than ever. The beauty of it was that it would make them safe, absolutely safe. She had only got to apply it to that thought of his and the thought would not exist. Since she could get at him, she could do for him what he, poor dear, could not perhaps always do for himself; she could keep that dreadful possibility in him under; she could in fact, make their communion all that she most wanted it to be.

"I don't like it," he said, miserably. "I don't like it."

A little line of worry was coming in his face again.

The door opened and a maid began to go in and out, laying the table for their meal. He watched the door close on her and said, "Won't that woman wonder what I come for?"

"She can see what you come for." She smiled. "Why are you spoiling it with thinking things?"

"It's for you I think them. I don't mind. It doesn't matter so much for me. But I want you to be safe."

"You were. And you would be still, if these Powells hadn't found you out."

He meditated.

"They've come, I imagine, for his health."

"What? To a god-forsaken place like this?"

"They know what it's done for me. So they think, poor darlings, perhaps it may do something--even yet--for him."

"What's the matter with him?"

"Something dreadful. And they say--incurable."

"I can't tell you what it is. It isn't anything you'd think it was. It isn't anything bodily."

"I never knew it."

He smiled. "No. You haven't told me, have you?"

"Because?" He waited, smiling.

"Because I wanted you to see he doesn't count."

At first she failed to grasp his implication that if, owing to his affliction, Harding Powell didn't count, Milly, his young wife did. Her faculties of observation and of inference would, he took it, be unimpaired.

"About us? Not she. She's too much wrapped up in him to notice anyone."

"And he?"

Another anxiety then came to him.

"I say, you know, he isn't dangerous, is he?"

She laughed.

"Dangerous? Oh dear me, no! A lamb."

She kept on saying to herself, Why shouldn't they come? What difference did it make?

Up till now she had not admitted that anything could make a difference, that anything could touch, could alter by a shade the safe, the intangible, the unique relation between her and Rodney. It was proof against anything that anybody could think. And the Powells were not given to thinking things. Agatha's own mind had been a crystal without a flaw, in its clearness, its sincerity.

It had to be to ensure the blessed working of the gift; as again, it was by the blessed working of the gift that she had kept it so. She could only think of that, the secret, the gift, the inexpressible thing, as itself a flawless crystal, a charmed circle; or rather, as a sphere that held all the charmed circles that you draw round things to keep them safe, to keep them holy.

She had drawn her circle round Rodney Lanyon and herself. Nobody could break it. They were supernaturally safe.

And yet the presence of the Powells had made a difference. She was forced to own that, though she remained untouched, it had made a difference in him. It was as if, in the agitation produced by them, he had brushed aside some veil and had let her see something that up till now her crystal vision had refused to see, something that was more than a lurking possibility. She discovered in him a desire, an intention that up till now he had concealed from her. It had left its hiding place; it rose on terrifying wings and fluttered before her, troubling her. She was reminded that, though there were no lurking possibilities in her, with him it might be different. For him the tie between them might come to mean something that it had never meant and could not mean for her, something that she had refused not only to see but to foresee and provide for.

She was aware of a certain relief when Monday came and he had left her without any further unveilings and revealings. She was even glad when, about the middle of the week, the Powells came with a cart-load of luggage and settled at the Farm. She said to herself that they would take her mind off him. They had a way of seizing on her and holding her attention to the exclusion of all other objects.

She could hardly not have been seized and held by a case so pitiful, so desperate as theirs. How pitiful and desperate it had become she learned almost at once from the face of her friend, the little pale-eyed wife, whose small, flat, flower-like features were washed out and worn fine by watchings and listenings on the border, on the threshold.

Yes, he was worse. He had had to give up his business . It wasn't any longer, Milly Powell intimated, a question of borders and of thresholds. They had passed all that. He had gone clean over; he was in the dreadful interior; and she, the resolute and vigilant little woman, had no longer any power to get him out. She was at the end of her tether.

Agatha did indeed.

And so she had hidden him here.

Agatha took in her friend's high courage as she looked at the eyes where fright barely fluttered under the poised suspense. She approved of the plan. It appealed to her by its sheer audacity. She murmured that, if there were anything that she could do, Milly had only to come to her.

Agatha said that was the line she did take. She wasn't going to let herself think, and Milly mustn't think--not for a moment--that he wasn't, that there was anything to be afraid of.

Persistent, invincible affirmation was part of her method, her secret.

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