Chapter I

It was Friday, the day he always came, if (so she safeguarded it) he was to come at all. They had left it that way in the beginning, that it should be open to him to come or not to come. They had not even settled that it should be Fridays, but it always was, the week-end being the only time when he could get away; the only time, he had explained to Agatha Verrall, when getting away excited no remark. He had to, or he would have broken down. Agatha called it getting away from “things;” but she knew that there was only one thing, his wife Bella.

To be wedded to a mass of furious and malignant nerves (which was all that poor Bella was now) simply meant destruction to a man like Rodney Lanyon. Rodney’s own nerves were not as strong as they had been, after ten years of Bella’s. It had been understood for long enough (understood even by Bella) that if he couldn’t have his week-ends he was done for; he couldn’t possibly have stood the torment and the strain of her.

Of course she didn’t know he spent the greater part of them with Agatha Verrall. It was not to be desired that she should know. Her obtuseness helped them. Even in her younger and saner days she had failed, persistently, to realize any profound and poignant thing that touched him; so by the mercy of heaven she had never realized Agatha Verrall. She used to say she had never seen anything _in_ Agatha, which amounted, as he once told her, to not seeing Agatha at all. Still less could she have compassed any vision of the tie—the extraordinary, intangible, immaterial tie that held them.

Sometimes, at the last moment, his escape to Agatha would prove impossible; so they had left it further that he was to send her no forewarning; he was to come when and as he could. He could always get a room in the village inn or at the farm near by, and in Agatha’s house he would find his place ready for him, the place which had become his refuge, his place of peace.

There was no need to prepare her. She was never not prepared. It was as if by her preparedness, by the absence of preliminaries, of adjustments and arrangements, he was always there, lodged in the innermost chamber. She had set herself apart; she had swept herself bare and scoured herself clean for him. Clean she had to be; clean from the desire that he should come; clean, above all, from the thought, the knowledge she now had, that she could make him come.

For if she had given herself up to _that_....

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, till she found it infallible.

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 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 south-west, 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 farm-house 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.

In response to his sigh she asked suddenly: “How’s Bella?”

His face lighted wonderfully. “It’s extraordinary,” he said; “she’s better. Miles better. In fact, if it wasn’t tempting Providence, I should say she was well. She’s been, for the last week anyhow, a perfect angel.”

His amazed, uncomprehending look gave her the clue to what had happened. It was another instance of the astounding and mysterious way it worked. She must have got at Bella somehow in getting at him. She saw now no end to the possibilities of the thing. There wasn’t anything so wonderful in making him what, after all, he was; but if she, Bella, had been, even for a week, a perfect angel, it had made her what she was not and never had been.

His next utterance came to her with no irrelevance.

“You’ve been found out.”

For a moment she wondered, had he guessed it then, her secret? He had never known anything about it, and it was not likely that he should know now. He was indeed very far from knowing when he could think that it was seeing her that did it.

There was, of course, the other secret, the fact that he did see her; but she had never allowed that it _was_ a secret, or that it need be, although they guarded it so carefully. Anybody, except Bella, who wouldn’t understand it, was welcome to know that he came to see her. He must mean that.

“Found out?” she repeated.

“If you haven’t been, you will be.”

“You mean,” she said, “Sarratt End has been found out?”

“If you put it that way. I saw the Powells at the station.” (She breathed freely.)

“They told me they’d taken rooms at some farm here.”

“Which farm?”

He didn’t remember.

“Was it Woodman’s Farm?” she asked. And he said, “Yes, that was the name they’d told him. Whereabouts was it?”

“Don’t you know,” she said. “That’s the name of _your_ farm.”

He had not known it, and was visibly annoyed at knowing it now. And Agatha herself felt some dismay. If it had been any other place but Woodman’s Farm—it stared at them; it watched them; it knew all their goings out and their comings in; it knew Rodney; not that that had mattered in the least, but the Powells, when they came, would know too.

She tried to look as if that didn’t matter either, while they faced each other in a silence, a curious, unfamiliar discomposure.

She recovered first. “After all,” she said, “why shouldn’t they?”

“Well—I thought you weren’t going to tell people.”

Her face mounted a sudden flame, a signal of resentment. She had always resented the imputation of secrecy in their relations. And now it was as if he were dragging forward the thought that she perpetually put away from her.

“Tell about what?” she asked, coldly.

“About Sarratt End. I thought we’d agreed to keep it for ourselves.”

“I haven’t told everybody. But I did tell Milly Powell.”

“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.”

“Good God.” As he stared in dismay at what he judged to be her unspeakable indiscretion, the thought rushed in on her straight from him, the naked, terrible thought, that there _should_ be anything they had to hide, they had to be alone for. She saw at the same time how defenceless he was before it; he couldn’t keep it back; he couldn’t put it away from him. It was always with him, a danger watching on his threshold.

“Then” (he made her face it with him) “we’re done for.”

“No, no,” she cried; “how could you think that? It was another thing. Something 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?”

He wasn’t sure whether Agatha understood, whether she realized the danger.

“About you and me,” he said.

“Ah, my dear, I’ve kept _you_ secret. She doesn’t know we know each other. And if she did—”

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

She had always met him, and would always have to meet him, with the idea that there was nothing in it; for, if she once admitted that there was anything, then they _were_ done for. She couldn’t (how could she?) let him keep on coming with that thought in him, acknowledged by them both.

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, couldn’t perhaps always do for himself; she could keep that dreadful possibility in him under; she could, in fact, make their communion all that she 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.”

“Oh, _I’m_ safe, my dear,” she answered.

“You were. And you would be still, if these Powells hadn’t found you out.”

He meditated.

“What do you suppose _they’ve_ come for?” he asked.

“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.”

“It isn’t—?” He paused.

“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.”

“You’re not supposed to know. And you wouldn’t, unless you _did_ know. And please—you don’t; you don’t know anything.”

He smiled. “No. You haven’t told me, have you?”

“I only told you because you never tell things, and because—”

“Because?” He waited, smiling.

“Because I wanted you to see he doesn’t count.”

“Well—but _she’s_ all right, I take it?”

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.

“She’ll wonder, won’t she?” he expounded.

“About us? Not she. She’s too much wrapped up in him to notice anyone.”

“And he?”

“Oh, my dear—he’s too much wrapped up in _it_.” 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.”