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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
-almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
-re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
-with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
-
-
-Title: The Turn of the Screw
-
-Author: Henry James
-
-Posting Date: July 12, 2008 [EBook #209]
-Release Date: February, 1995
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: ASCII
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TURN OF THE SCREW ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by Judith Boss
-
-
-
-
-
-THE TURN OF THE SCREW
-
-by Henry James
-
-
-[The text is take from the first American appearance of this book.]
-
-
-
-
-
-THE TURN OF THE SCREW
-
-
-The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but
-except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve
-in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no
-comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case
-he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child. The case, I
-may mention, was that of an apparition in just such an old house as had
-gathered us for the occasion--an appearance, of a dreadful kind, to a
-little boy sleeping in the room with his mother and waking her up in the
-terror of it; waking her not to dissipate his dread and soothe him to
-sleep again, but to encounter also, herself, before she had succeeded
-in doing so, the same sight that had shaken him. It was this observation
-that drew from Douglas--not immediately, but later in the evening--a
-reply that had the interesting consequence to which I call attention.
-Someone else told a story not particularly effective, which I saw he was
-not following. This I took for a sign that he had himself something to
-produce and that we should only have to wait. We waited in fact till two
-nights later; but that same evening, before we scattered, he brought out
-what was in his mind.
-
-"I quite agree--in regard to Griffin's ghost, or whatever it was--that
-its appearing first to the little boy, at so tender an age, adds a
-particular touch. But it's not the first occurrence of its charming
-kind that I know to have involved a child. If the child gives the effect
-another turn of the screw, what do you say to TWO children--?"
-
-"We say, of course," somebody exclaimed, "that they give two turns! Also
-that we want to hear about them."
-
-I can see Douglas there before the fire, to which he had got up to
-present his back, looking down at his interlocutor with his hands in
-his pockets. "Nobody but me, till now, has ever heard. It's quite too
-horrible." This, naturally, was declared by several voices to give the
-thing the utmost price, and our friend, with quiet art, prepared his
-triumph by turning his eyes over the rest of us and going on: "It's
-beyond everything. Nothing at all that I know touches it."
-
-"For sheer terror?" I remember asking.
-
-He seemed to say it was not so simple as that; to be really at a loss
-how to qualify it. He passed his hand over his eyes, made a little
-wincing grimace. "For dreadful--dreadfulness!"
-
-"Oh, how delicious!" cried one of the women.
-
-He took no notice of her; he looked at me, but as if, instead of me,
-he saw what he spoke of. "For general uncanny ugliness and horror and
-pain."
-
-"Well then," I said, "just sit right down and begin."
-
-He turned round to the fire, gave a kick to a log, watched it an
-instant. Then as he faced us again: "I can't begin. I shall have to send
-to town." There was a unanimous groan at this, and much reproach; after
-which, in his preoccupied way, he explained. "The story's written. It's
-in a locked drawer--it has not been out for years. I could write to my
-man and enclose the key; he could send down the packet as he finds it."
-It was to me in particular that he appeared to propound this--appeared
-almost to appeal for aid not to hesitate. He had broken a thickness
-of ice, the formation of many a winter; had had his reasons for a long
-silence. The others resented postponement, but it was just his scruples
-that charmed me. I adjured him to write by the first post and to agree
-with us for an early hearing; then I asked him if the experience in
-question had been his own. To this his answer was prompt. "Oh, thank
-God, no!"
-
-"And is the record yours? You took the thing down?"
-
-"Nothing but the impression. I took that HERE"--he tapped his heart.
-"I've never lost it."
-
-"Then your manuscript--?"
-
-"Is in old, faded ink, and in the most beautiful hand." He hung fire
-again. "A woman's. She has been dead these twenty years. She sent me the
-pages in question before she died." They were all listening now, and
-of course there was somebody to be arch, or at any rate to draw the
-inference. But if he put the inference by without a smile it was also
-without irritation. "She was a most charming person, but she was ten
-years older than I. She was my sister's governess," he quietly said.
-"She was the most agreeable woman I've ever known in her position;
-she would have been worthy of any whatever. It was long ago, and this
-episode was long before. I was at Trinity, and I found her at home on
-my coming down the second summer. I was much there that year--it was a
-beautiful one; and we had, in her off-hours, some strolls and talks in
-the garden--talks in which she struck me as awfully clever and nice. Oh
-yes; don't grin: I liked her extremely and am glad to this day to think
-she liked me, too. If she hadn't she wouldn't have told me. She had
-never told anyone. It wasn't simply that she said so, but that I knew
-she hadn't. I was sure; I could see. You'll easily judge why when you
-hear."
-
-"Because the thing had been such a scare?"
-
-He continued to fix me. "You'll easily judge," he repeated: "YOU will."
-
-I fixed him, too. "I see. She was in love."
-
-He laughed for the first time. "You ARE acute. Yes, she was in love.
-That is, she had been. That came out--she couldn't tell her story
-without its coming out. I saw it, and she saw I saw it; but neither of
-us spoke of it. I remember the time and the place--the corner of the
-lawn, the shade of the great beeches and the long, hot summer afternoon.
-It wasn't a scene for a shudder; but oh--!" He quitted the fire and
-dropped back into his chair.
-
-"You'll receive the packet Thursday morning?" I inquired.
-
-"Probably not till the second post."
-
-"Well then; after dinner--"
-
-"You'll all meet me here?" He looked us round again. "Isn't anybody
-going?" It was almost the tone of hope.
-
-"Everybody will stay!"
-
-"_I_ will"--and "_I_ will!" cried the ladies whose departure had been
-fixed. Mrs. Griffin, however, expressed the need for a little more
-light. "Who was it she was in love with?"
-
-"The story will tell," I took upon myself to reply.
-
-"Oh, I can't wait for the story!"
-
-"The story WON'T tell," said Douglas; "not in any literal, vulgar way."
-
-"More's the pity, then. That's the only way I ever understand."
-
-"Won't YOU tell, Douglas?" somebody else inquired.
-
-He sprang to his feet again. "Yes--tomorrow. Now I must go to bed.
-Good night." And quickly catching up a candlestick, he left us slightly
-bewildered. From our end of the great brown hall we heard his step on
-the stair; whereupon Mrs. Griffin spoke. "Well, if I don't know who she
-was in love with, I know who HE was."
-
-"She was ten years older," said her husband.
-
-"Raison de plus--at that age! But it's rather nice, his long reticence."
-
-"Forty years!" Griffin put in.
-
-"With this outbreak at last."
-
-"The outbreak," I returned, "will make a tremendous occasion of Thursday
-night;" and everyone so agreed with me that, in the light of it, we lost
-all attention for everything else. The last story, however incomplete
-and like the mere opening of a serial, had been told; we handshook and
-"candlestuck," as somebody said, and went to bed.
-
-I knew the next day that a letter containing the key had, by the first
-post, gone off to his London apartments; but in spite of--or perhaps
-just on account of--the eventual diffusion of this knowledge we quite
-let him alone till after dinner, till such an hour of the evening, in
-fact, as might best accord with the kind of emotion on which our hopes
-were fixed. Then he became as communicative as we could desire and
-indeed gave us his best reason for being so. We had it from him again
-before the fire in the hall, as we had had our mild wonders of the
-previous night. It appeared that the narrative he had promised to read
-us really required for a proper intelligence a few words of prologue.
-Let me say here distinctly, to have done with it, that this narrative,
-from an exact transcript of my own made much later, is what I shall
-presently give. Poor Douglas, before his death--when it was in
-sight--committed to me the manuscript that reached him on the third of
-these days and that, on the same spot, with immense effect, he began
-to read to our hushed little circle on the night of the fourth. The
-departing ladies who had said they would stay didn't, of course, thank
-heaven, stay: they departed, in consequence of arrangements made, in a
-rage of curiosity, as they professed, produced by the touches with
-which he had already worked us up. But that only made his little final
-auditory more compact and select, kept it, round the hearth, subject to
-a common thrill.
-
-The first of these touches conveyed that the written statement took up
-the tale at a point after it had, in a manner, begun. The fact to be in
-possession of was therefore that his old friend, the youngest of several
-daughters of a poor country parson, had, at the age of twenty, on taking
-service for the first time in the schoolroom, come up to London, in
-trepidation, to answer in person an advertisement that had already
-placed her in brief correspondence with the advertiser. This person
-proved, on her presenting herself, for judgment, at a house in Harley
-Street, that impressed her as vast and imposing--this prospective patron
-proved a gentleman, a bachelor in the prime of life, such a figure as
-had never risen, save in a dream or an old novel, before a fluttered,
-anxious girl out of a Hampshire vicarage. One could easily fix his type;
-it never, happily, dies out. He was handsome and bold and pleasant,
-offhand and gay and kind. He struck her, inevitably, as gallant and
-splendid, but what took her most of all and gave her the courage she
-afterward showed was that he put the whole thing to her as a kind of
-favor, an obligation he should gratefully incur. She conceived him
-as rich, but as fearfully extravagant--saw him all in a glow of high
-fashion, of good looks, of expensive habits, of charming ways with
-women. He had for his own town residence a big house filled with the
-spoils of travel and the trophies of the chase; but it was to his
-country home, an old family place in Essex, that he wished her
-immediately to proceed.
-
-He had been left, by the death of their parents in India, guardian to
-a small nephew and a small niece, children of a younger, a military
-brother, whom he had lost two years before. These children were, by the
-strangest of chances for a man in his position--a lone man without the
-right sort of experience or a grain of patience--very heavily on his
-hands. It had all been a great worry and, on his own part doubtless, a
-series of blunders, but he immensely pitied the poor chicks and had done
-all he could; had in particular sent them down to his other house, the
-proper place for them being of course the country, and kept them there,
-from the first, with the best people he could find to look after them,
-parting even with his own servants to wait on them and going down
-himself, whenever he might, to see how they were doing. The awkward
-thing was that they had practically no other relations and that his
-own affairs took up all his time. He had put them in possession of Bly,
-which was healthy and secure, and had placed at the head of their little
-establishment--but below stairs only--an excellent woman, Mrs. Grose,
-whom he was sure his visitor would like and who had formerly been maid
-to his mother. She was now housekeeper and was also acting for the time
-as superintendent to the little girl, of whom, without children of her
-own, she was, by good luck, extremely fond. There were plenty of people
-to help, but of course the young lady who should go down as governess
-would be in supreme authority. She would also have, in holidays, to look
-after the small boy, who had been for a term at school--young as he was
-to be sent, but what else could be done?--and who, as the holidays were
-about to begin, would be back from one day to the other. There had
-been for the two children at first a young lady whom they had had the
-misfortune to lose. She had done for them quite beautifully--she was a
-most respectable person--till her death, the great awkwardness of which
-had, precisely, left no alternative but the school for little Miles.
-Mrs. Grose, since then, in the way of manners and things, had done as
-she could for Flora; and there were, further, a cook, a housemaid, a
-dairywoman, an old pony, an old groom, and an old gardener, all likewise
-thoroughly respectable.
-
-So far had Douglas presented his picture when someone put a question.
-"And what did the former governess die of?--of so much respectability?"
-
-Our friend's answer was prompt. "That will come out. I don't
-anticipate."
-
-"Excuse me--I thought that was just what you ARE doing."
-
-"In her successor's place," I suggested, "I should have wished to learn
-if the office brought with it--"
-
-"Necessary danger to life?" Douglas completed my thought. "She did wish
-to learn, and she did learn. You shall hear tomorrow what she learned.
-Meanwhile, of course, the prospect struck her as slightly grim. She was
-young, untried, nervous: it was a vision of serious duties and little
-company, of really great loneliness. She hesitated--took a couple of
-days to consult and consider. But the salary offered much exceeded
-her modest measure, and on a second interview she faced the music, she
-engaged." And Douglas, with this, made a pause that, for the benefit of
-the company, moved me to throw in--
-
-"The moral of which was of course the seduction exercised by the
-splendid young man. She succumbed to it."
-
-He got up and, as he had done the night before, went to the fire, gave
-a stir to a log with his foot, then stood a moment with his back to us.
-"She saw him only twice."
-
-"Yes, but that's just the beauty of her passion."
-
-A little to my surprise, on this, Douglas turned round to me. "It WAS
-the beauty of it. There were others," he went on, "who hadn't succumbed.
-He told her frankly all his difficulty--that for several applicants the
-conditions had been prohibitive. They were, somehow, simply afraid. It
-sounded dull--it sounded strange; and all the more so because of his
-main condition."
-
-"Which was--?"
-
-"That she should never trouble him--but never, never: neither appeal
-nor complain nor write about anything; only meet all questions herself,
-receive all moneys from his solicitor, take the whole thing over and let
-him alone. She promised to do this, and she mentioned to me that when,
-for a moment, disburdened, delighted, he held her hand, thanking her for
-the sacrifice, she already felt rewarded."
-
-"But was that all her reward?" one of the ladies asked.
-
-"She never saw him again."
-
-"Oh!" said the lady; which, as our friend immediately left us again, was
-the only other word of importance contributed to the subject till, the
-next night, by the corner of the hearth, in the best chair, he opened
-the faded red cover of a thin old-fashioned gilt-edged album. The whole
-thing took indeed more nights than one, but on the first occasion the
-same lady put another question. "What is your title?"
-
-"I haven't one."
-
-"Oh, _I_ have!" I said. But Douglas, without heeding me, had begun to
-read with a fine clearness that was like a rendering to the ear of the
-beauty of his author's hand.
-
-
-
-
-I
-
-
-I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a
-little seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong. After rising, in town,
-to meet his appeal, I had at all events a couple of very bad days--found
-myself doubtful again, felt indeed sure I had made a mistake. In this
-state of mind I spent the long hours of bumping, swinging coach that
-carried me to the stopping place at which I was to be met by a vehicle
-from the house. This convenience, I was told, had been ordered, and
-I found, toward the close of the June afternoon, a commodious fly in
-waiting for me. Driving at that hour, on a lovely day, through a country
-to which the summer sweetness seemed to offer me a friendly welcome, my
-fortitude mounted afresh and, as we turned into the avenue, encountered
-a reprieve that was probably but a proof of the point to which it had
-sunk. I suppose I had expected, or had dreaded, something so melancholy
-that what greeted me was a good surprise. I remember as a most pleasant
-impression the broad, clear front, its open windows and fresh curtains
-and the pair of maids looking out; I remember the lawn and the bright
-flowers and the crunch of my wheels on the gravel and the clustered
-treetops over which the rooks circled and cawed in the golden sky. The
-scene had a greatness that made it a different affair from my own scant
-home, and there immediately appeared at the door, with a little girl in
-her hand, a civil person who dropped me as decent a curtsy as if I had
-been the mistress or a distinguished visitor. I had received in Harley
-Street a narrower notion of the place, and that, as I recalled it, made
-me think the proprietor still more of a gentleman, suggested that what I
-was to enjoy might be something beyond his promise.
-
-I had no drop again till the next day, for I was carried triumphantly
-through the following hours by my introduction to the younger of my
-pupils. The little girl who accompanied Mrs. Grose appeared to me on the
-spot a creature so charming as to make it a great fortune to have to
-do with her. She was the most beautiful child I had ever seen, and I
-afterward wondered that my employer had not told me more of her. I slept
-little that night--I was too much excited; and this astonished me, too,
-I recollect, remained with me, adding to my sense of the liberality with
-which I was treated. The large, impressive room, one of the best in
-the house, the great state bed, as I almost felt it, the full, figured
-draperies, the long glasses in which, for the first time, I could see
-myself from head to foot, all struck me--like the extraordinary charm of
-my small charge--as so many things thrown in. It was thrown in as
-well, from the first moment, that I should get on with Mrs. Grose in
-a relation over which, on my way, in the coach, I fear I had rather
-brooded. The only thing indeed that in this early outlook might have
-made me shrink again was the clear circumstance of her being so glad
-to see me. I perceived within half an hour that she was so glad--stout,
-simple, plain, clean, wholesome woman--as to be positively on her guard
-against showing it too much. I wondered even then a little why she
-should wish not to show it, and that, with reflection, with suspicion,
-might of course have made me uneasy.
-
-But it was a comfort that there could be no uneasiness in a connection
-with anything so beatific as the radiant image of my little girl, the
-vision of whose angelic beauty had probably more than anything else to
-do with the restlessness that, before morning, made me several times
-rise and wander about my room to take in the whole picture and prospect;
-to watch, from my open window, the faint summer dawn, to look at such
-portions of the rest of the house as I could catch, and to listen,
-while, in the fading dusk, the first birds began to twitter, for the
-possible recurrence of a sound or two, less natural and not without,
-but within, that I had fancied I heard. There had been a moment when I
-believed I recognized, faint and far, the cry of a child; there had been
-another when I found myself just consciously starting as at the passage,
-before my door, of a light footstep. But these fancies were not marked
-enough not to be thrown off, and it is only in the light, or the gloom,
-I should rather say, of other and subsequent matters that they now come
-back to me. To watch, teach, "form" little Flora would too evidently
-be the making of a happy and useful life. It had been agreed between us
-downstairs that after this first occasion I should have her as a matter
-of course at night, her small white bed being already arranged, to that
-end, in my room. What I had undertaken was the whole care of her, and
-she had remained, just this last time, with Mrs. Grose only as an effect
-of our consideration for my inevitable strangeness and her natural
-timidity. In spite of this timidity--which the child herself, in the
-oddest way in the world, had been perfectly frank and brave about,
-allowing it, without a sign of uncomfortable consciousness, with the
-deep, sweet serenity indeed of one of Raphael's holy infants, to be
-discussed, to be imputed to her, and to determine us--I feel quite sure
-she would presently like me. It was part of what I already liked Mrs.
-Grose herself for, the pleasure I could see her feel in my admiration
-and wonder as I sat at supper with four tall candles and with my pupil,
-in a high chair and a bib, brightly facing me, between them, over bread
-and milk. There were naturally things that in Flora's presence could
-pass between us only as prodigious and gratified looks, obscure and
-roundabout allusions.
-
-"And the little boy--does he look like her? Is he too so very
-remarkable?"
-
-One wouldn't flatter a child. "Oh, miss, MOST remarkable. If you think
-well of this one!"--and she stood there with a plate in her hand,
-beaming at our companion, who looked from one of us to the other with
-placid heavenly eyes that contained nothing to check us.
-
-"Yes; if I do--?"
-
-"You WILL be carried away by the little gentleman!"
-
-"Well, that, I think, is what I came for--to be carried away. I'm
-afraid, however," I remember feeling the impulse to add, "I'm rather
-easily carried away. I was carried away in London!"
-
-I can still see Mrs. Grose's broad face as she took this in. "In Harley
-Street?"
-
-"In Harley Street."
-
-"Well, miss, you're not the first--and you won't be the last."
-
-"Oh, I've no pretension," I could laugh, "to being the only one. My
-other pupil, at any rate, as I understand, comes back tomorrow?"
-
-"Not tomorrow--Friday, miss. He arrives, as you did, by the coach, under
-care of the guard, and is to be met by the same carriage."
-
-I forthwith expressed that the proper as well as the pleasant and
-friendly thing would be therefore that on the arrival of the public
-conveyance I should be in waiting for him with his little sister; an
-idea in which Mrs. Grose concurred so heartily that I somehow took
-her manner as a kind of comforting pledge--never falsified, thank
-heaven!--that we should on every question be quite at one. Oh, she was
-glad I was there!
-
-What I felt the next day was, I suppose, nothing that could be fairly
-called a reaction from the cheer of my arrival; it was probably at the
-most only a slight oppression produced by a fuller measure of the
-scale, as I walked round them, gazed up at them, took them in, of my new
-circumstances. They had, as it were, an extent and mass for which I had
-not been prepared and in the presence of which I found myself, freshly,
-a little scared as well as a little proud. Lessons, in this agitation,
-certainly suffered some delay; I reflected that my first duty was, by
-the gentlest arts I could contrive, to win the child into the sense of
-knowing me. I spent the day with her out-of-doors; I arranged with her,
-to her great satisfaction, that it should be she, she only, who might
-show me the place. She showed it step by step and room by room and
-secret by secret, with droll, delightful, childish talk about it and
-with the result, in half an hour, of our becoming immense friends.
-Young as she was, I was struck, throughout our little tour, with
-her confidence and courage with the way, in empty chambers and dull
-corridors, on crooked staircases that made me pause and even on the
-summit of an old machicolated square tower that made me dizzy, her
-morning music, her disposition to tell me so many more things than she
-asked, rang out and led me on. I have not seen Bly since the day I left
-it, and I daresay that to my older and more informed eyes it would now
-appear sufficiently contracted. But as my little conductress, with her
-hair of gold and her frock of blue, danced before me round corners and
-pattered down passages, I had the view of a castle of romance inhabited
-by a rosy sprite, such a place as would somehow, for diversion of the
-young idea, take all color out of storybooks and fairytales. Wasn't it
-just a storybook over which I had fallen adoze and adream? No; it was a
-big, ugly, antique, but convenient house, embodying a few features of
-a building still older, half-replaced and half-utilized, in which I had
-the fancy of our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers in a
-great drifting ship. Well, I was, strangely, at the helm!
-
-
-
-
-II
-
-
-This came home to me when, two days later, I drove over with Flora to
-meet, as Mrs. Grose said, the little gentleman; and all the more for
-an incident that, presenting itself the second evening, had deeply
-disconcerted me. The first day had been, on the whole, as I have
-expressed, reassuring; but I was to see it wind up in keen apprehension.
-The postbag, that evening--it came late--contained a letter for me,
-which, however, in the hand of my employer, I found to be composed but
-of a few words enclosing another, addressed to himself, with a seal
-still unbroken. "This, I recognize, is from the headmaster, and the
-headmaster's an awful bore. Read him, please; deal with him; but mind
-you don't report. Not a word. I'm off!" I broke the seal with a great
-effort--so great a one that I was a long time coming to it; took the
-unopened missive at last up to my room and only attacked it just before
-going to bed. I had better have let it wait till morning, for it gave me
-a second sleepless night. With no counsel to take, the next day, I
-was full of distress; and it finally got so the better of me that I
-determined to open myself at least to Mrs. Grose.
-
-"What does it mean? The child's dismissed his school."
-
-She gave me a look that I remarked at the moment; then, visibly, with a
-quick blankness, seemed to try to take it back. "But aren't they all--?"
-
-"Sent home--yes. But only for the holidays. Miles may never go back at
-all."
-
-Consciously, under my attention, she reddened. "They won't take him?"
-
-"They absolutely decline."
-
-At this she raised her eyes, which she had turned from me; I saw them
-fill with good tears. "What has he done?"
-
-I hesitated; then I judged best simply to hand her my letter--which,
-however, had the effect of making her, without taking it, simply put her
-hands behind her. She shook her head sadly. "Such things are not for me,
-miss."
-
-My counselor couldn't read! I winced at my mistake, which I attenuated
-as I could, and opened my letter again to repeat it to her; then,
-faltering in the act and folding it up once more, I put it back in my
-pocket. "Is he really BAD?"
-
-The tears were still in her eyes. "Do the gentlemen say so?"
-
-"They go into no particulars. They simply express their regret that it
-should be impossible to keep him. That can have only one meaning."
-Mrs. Grose listened with dumb emotion; she forbore to ask me what
-this meaning might be; so that, presently, to put the thing with some
-coherence and with the mere aid of her presence to my own mind, I went
-on: "That he's an injury to the others."
-
-At this, with one of the quick turns of simple folk, she suddenly flamed
-up. "Master Miles! HIM an injury?"
-
-There was such a flood of good faith in it that, though I had not yet
-seen the child, my very fears made me jump to the absurdity of the idea.
-I found myself, to meet my friend the better, offering it, on the spot,
-sarcastically. "To his poor little innocent mates!"
-
-"It's too dreadful," cried Mrs. Grose, "to say such cruel things! Why,
-he's scarce ten years old."
-
-"Yes, yes; it would be incredible."
-
-She was evidently grateful for such a profession. "See him, miss, first.
-THEN believe it!" I felt forthwith a new impatience to see him; it was
-the beginning of a curiosity that, for all the next hours, was to deepen
-almost to pain. Mrs. Grose was aware, I could judge, of what she had
-produced in me, and she followed it up with assurance. "You might as
-well believe it of the little lady. Bless her," she added the next
-moment--"LOOK at her!"
-
-I turned and saw that Flora, whom, ten minutes before, I had established
-in the schoolroom with a sheet of white paper, a pencil, and a copy of
-nice "round o's," now presented herself to view at the open door.
-She expressed in her little way an extraordinary detachment from
-disagreeable duties, looking to me, however, with a great childish
-light that seemed to offer it as a mere result of the affection she had
-conceived for my person, which had rendered necessary that she should
-follow me. I needed nothing more than this to feel the full force of
-Mrs. Grose's comparison, and, catching my pupil in my arms, covered her
-with kisses in which there was a sob of atonement.
-
-Nonetheless, the rest of the day I watched for further occasion to
-approach my colleague, especially as, toward evening, I began to fancy
-she rather sought to avoid me. I overtook her, I remember, on the
-staircase; we went down together, and at the bottom I detained her,
-holding her there with a hand on her arm. "I take what you said to me at
-noon as a declaration that YOU'VE never known him to be bad."
-
-She threw back her head; she had clearly, by this time, and very
-honestly, adopted an attitude. "Oh, never known him--I don't pretend
-THAT!"
-
-I was upset again. "Then you HAVE known him--?"
-
-"Yes indeed, miss, thank God!"
-
-On reflection I accepted this. "You mean that a boy who never is--?"
-
-"Is no boy for ME!"
-
-I held her tighter. "You like them with the spirit to be naughty?" Then,
-keeping pace with her answer, "So do I!" I eagerly brought out. "But not
-to the degree to contaminate--"
-
-"To contaminate?"--my big word left her at a loss. I explained it. "To
-corrupt."
-
-She stared, taking my meaning in; but it produced in her an odd laugh.
-"Are you afraid he'll corrupt YOU?" She put the question with such a
-fine bold humor that, with a laugh, a little silly doubtless, to match
-her own, I gave way for the time to the apprehension of ridicule.
-
-But the next day, as the hour for my drive approached, I cropped up in
-another place. "What was the lady who was here before?"
-
-"The last governess? She was also young and pretty--almost as young and
-almost as pretty, miss, even as you."
-
-"Ah, then, I hope her youth and her beauty helped her!" I recollect
-throwing off. "He seems to like us young and pretty!"
-
-"Oh, he DID," Mrs. Grose assented: "it was the way he liked everyone!"
-She had no sooner spoken indeed than she caught herself up. "I mean
-that's HIS way--the master's."
-
-I was struck. "But of whom did you speak first?"
-
-She looked blank, but she colored. "Why, of HIM."
-
-"Of the master?"
-
-"Of who else?"
-
-There was so obviously no one else that the next moment I had lost my
-impression of her having accidentally said more than she meant; and I
-merely asked what I wanted to know. "Did SHE see anything in the boy--?"
-
-"That wasn't right? She never told me."
-
-I had a scruple, but I overcame it. "Was she careful--particular?"
-
-Mrs. Grose appeared to try to be conscientious. "About some
-things--yes."
-
-"But not about all?"
-
-Again she considered. "Well, miss--she's gone. I won't tell tales."
-
-"I quite understand your feeling," I hastened to reply; but I thought
-it, after an instant, not opposed to this concession to pursue: "Did she
-die here?"
-
-"No--she went off."
-
-I don't know what there was in this brevity of Mrs. Grose's that struck
-me as ambiguous. "Went off to die?" Mrs. Grose looked straight out of
-the window, but I felt that, hypothetically, I had a right to know what
-young persons engaged for Bly were expected to do. "She was taken ill,
-you mean, and went home?"
-
-"She was not taken ill, so far as appeared, in this house. She left it,
-at the end of the year, to go home, as she said, for a short holiday,
-to which the time she had put in had certainly given her a right. We
-had then a young woman--a nursemaid who had stayed on and who was a good
-girl and clever; and SHE took the children altogether for the interval.
-But our young lady never came back, and at the very moment I was
-expecting her I heard from the master that she was dead."
-
-I turned this over. "But of what?"
-
-"He never told me! But please, miss," said Mrs. Grose, "I must get to my
-work."
-
-
-
-
-III
-
-
-Her thus turning her back on me was fortunately not, for my just
-preoccupations, a snub that could check the growth of our mutual esteem.
-We met, after I had brought home little Miles, more intimately than ever
-on the ground of my stupefaction, my general emotion: so monstrous was I
-then ready to pronounce it that such a child as had now been revealed to
-me should be under an interdict. I was a little late on the scene, and
-I felt, as he stood wistfully looking out for me before the door of the
-inn at which the coach had put him down, that I had seen him, on the
-instant, without and within, in the great glow of freshness, the same
-positive fragrance of purity, in which I had, from the first moment,
-seen his little sister. He was incredibly beautiful, and Mrs. Grose had
-put her finger on it: everything but a sort of passion of tenderness for
-him was swept away by his presence. What I then and there took him to
-my heart for was something divine that I have never found to the same
-degree in any child--his indescribable little air of knowing nothing in
-the world but love. It would have been impossible to carry a bad name
-with a greater sweetness of innocence, and by the time I had got back to
-Bly with him I remained merely bewildered--so far, that is, as I was not
-outraged--by the sense of the horrible letter locked up in my room, in
-a drawer. As soon as I could compass a private word with Mrs. Grose I
-declared to her that it was grotesque.
-
-She promptly understood me. "You mean the cruel charge--?"
-
-"It doesn't live an instant. My dear woman, LOOK at him!"
-
-She smiled at my pretention to have discovered his charm. "I assure
-you, miss, I do nothing else! What will you say, then?" she immediately
-added.
-
-"In answer to the letter?" I had made up my mind. "Nothing."
-
-"And to his uncle?"
-
-I was incisive. "Nothing."
-
-"And to the boy himself?"
-
-I was wonderful. "Nothing."
-
-She gave with her apron a great wipe to her mouth. "Then I'll stand by
-you. We'll see it out."
-
-"We'll see it out!" I ardently echoed, giving her my hand to make it a
-vow.
-
-She held me there a moment, then whisked up her apron again with her
-detached hand. "Would you mind, miss, if I used the freedom--"
-
-"To kiss me? No!" I took the good creature in my arms and, after we had
-embraced like sisters, felt still more fortified and indignant.
-
-This, at all events, was for the time: a time so full that, as I recall
-the way it went, it reminds me of all the art I now need to make it a
-little distinct. What I look back at with amazement is the situation I
-accepted. I had undertaken, with my companion, to see it out, and I was
-under a charm, apparently, that could smooth away the extent and the
-far and difficult connections of such an effort. I was lifted aloft on a
-great wave of infatuation and pity. I found it simple, in my ignorance,
-my confusion, and perhaps my conceit, to assume that I could deal with
-a boy whose education for the world was all on the point of beginning.
-I am unable even to remember at this day what proposal I framed for the
-end of his holidays and the resumption of his studies. Lessons with me,
-indeed, that charming summer, we all had a theory that he was to have;
-but I now feel that, for weeks, the lessons must have been rather my
-own. I learned something--at first, certainly--that had not been one
-of the teachings of my small, smothered life; learned to be amused, and
-even amusing, and not to think for the morrow. It was the first time, in
-a manner, that I had known space and air and freedom, all the music
-of summer and all the mystery of nature. And then there was
-consideration--and consideration was sweet. Oh, it was a trap--not
-designed, but deep--to my imagination, to my delicacy, perhaps to my
-vanity; to whatever, in me, was most excitable. The best way to picture
-it all is to say that I was off my guard. They gave me so little
-trouble--they were of a gentleness so extraordinary. I used to
-speculate--but even this with a dim disconnectedness--as to how the
-rough future (for all futures are rough!) would handle them and might
-bruise them. They had the bloom of health and happiness; and yet, as
-if I had been in charge of a pair of little grandees, of princes of the
-blood, for whom everything, to be right, would have to be enclosed and
-protected, the only form that, in my fancy, the afteryears could take
-for them was that of a romantic, a really royal extension of the garden
-and the park. It may be, of course, above all, that what suddenly broke
-into this gives the previous time a charm of stillness--that hush in
-which something gathers or crouches. The change was actually like the
-spring of a beast.
-
-In the first weeks the days were long; they often, at their finest,
-gave me what I used to call my own hour, the hour when, for my pupils,
-teatime and bedtime having come and gone, I had, before my final
-retirement, a small interval alone. Much as I liked my companions, this
-hour was the thing in the day I liked most; and I liked it best of all
-when, as the light faded--or rather, I should say, the day lingered and
-the last calls of the last birds sounded, in a flushed sky, from the
-old trees--I could take a turn into the grounds and enjoy, almost with
-a sense of property that amused and flattered me, the beauty and dignity
-of the place. It was a pleasure at these moments to feel myself
-tranquil and justified; doubtless, perhaps, also to reflect that by my
-discretion, my quiet good sense and general high propriety, I was giving
-pleasure--if he ever thought of it!--to the person to whose pressure
-I had responded. What I was doing was what he had earnestly hoped and
-directly asked of me, and that I COULD, after all, do it proved even a
-greater joy than I had expected. I daresay I fancied myself, in short,
-a remarkable young woman and took comfort in the faith that this would
-more publicly appear. Well, I needed to be remarkable to offer a front
-to the remarkable things that presently gave their first sign.
-
-It was plump, one afternoon, in the middle of my very hour: the children
-were tucked away, and I had come out for my stroll. One of the thoughts
-that, as I don't in the least shrink now from noting, used to be with me
-in these wanderings was that it would be as charming as a charming story
-suddenly to meet someone. Someone would appear there at the turn of a
-path and would stand before me and smile and approve. I didn't ask more
-than that--I only asked that he should KNOW; and the only way to be sure
-he knew would be to see it, and the kind light of it, in his handsome
-face. That was exactly present to me--by which I mean the face
-was--when, on the first of these occasions, at the end of a long June
-day, I stopped short on emerging from one of the plantations and coming
-into view of the house. What arrested me on the spot--and with a shock
-much greater than any vision had allowed for--was the sense that my
-imagination had, in a flash, turned real. He did stand there!--but high
-up, beyond the lawn and at the very top of the tower to which, on that
-first morning, little Flora had conducted me. This tower was one of
-a pair--square, incongruous, crenelated structures--that were
-distinguished, for some reason, though I could see little difference,
-as the new and the old. They flanked opposite ends of the house and were
-probably architectural absurdities, redeemed in a measure indeed by
-not being wholly disengaged nor of a height too pretentious, dating, in
-their gingerbread antiquity, from a romantic revival that was already a
-respectable past. I admired them, had fancies about them, for we could
-all profit in a degree, especially when they loomed through the dusk,
-by the grandeur of their actual battlements; yet it was not at such an
-elevation that the figure I had so often invoked seemed most in place.
-
-It produced in me, this figure, in the clear twilight, I remember, two
-distinct gasps of emotion, which were, sharply, the shock of my first
-and that of my second surprise. My second was a violent perception of
-the mistake of my first: the man who met my eyes was not the person
-I had precipitately supposed. There came to me thus a bewilderment of
-vision of which, after these years, there is no living view that I can
-hope to give. An unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted object
-of fear to a young woman privately bred; and the figure that faced me
-was--a few more seconds assured me--as little anyone else I knew as
-it was the image that had been in my mind. I had not seen it in
-Harley Street--I had not seen it anywhere. The place, moreover, in the
-strangest way in the world, had, on the instant, and by the very fact of
-its appearance, become a solitude. To me at least, making my statement
-here with a deliberation with which I have never made it, the whole
-feeling of the moment returns. It was as if, while I took in--what I did
-take in--all the rest of the scene had been stricken with death. I can
-hear again, as I write, the intense hush in which the sounds of evening
-dropped. The rooks stopped cawing in the golden sky, and the friendly
-hour lost, for the minute, all its voice. But there was no other change
-in nature, unless indeed it were a change that I saw with a stranger
-sharpness. The gold was still in the sky, the clearness in the air,
-and the man who looked at me over the battlements was as definite as a
-picture in a frame. That's how I thought, with extraordinary quickness,
-of each person that he might have been and that he was not. We were
-confronted across our distance quite long enough for me to ask myself
-with intensity who then he was and to feel, as an effect of my inability
-to say, a wonder that in a few instants more became intense.
-
-The great question, or one of these, is, afterward, I know, with regard
-to certain matters, the question of how long they have lasted. Well,
-this matter of mine, think what you will of it, lasted while I caught at
-a dozen possibilities, none of which made a difference for the better,
-that I could see, in there having been in the house--and for how long,
-above all?--a person of whom I was in ignorance. It lasted while I
-just bridled a little with the sense that my office demanded that there
-should be no such ignorance and no such person. It lasted while this
-visitant, at all events--and there was a touch of the strange freedom,
-as I remember, in the sign of familiarity of his wearing no hat--seemed
-to fix me, from his position, with just the question, just the scrutiny
-through the fading light, that his own presence provoked. We were too
-far apart to call to each other, but there was a moment at which, at
-shorter range, some challenge between us, breaking the hush, would have
-been the right result of our straight mutual stare. He was in one of the
-angles, the one away from the house, very erect, as it struck me, and
-with both hands on the ledge. So I saw him as I see the letters I
-form on this page; then, exactly, after a minute, as if to add to the
-spectacle, he slowly changed his place--passed, looking at me hard
-all the while, to the opposite corner of the platform. Yes, I had the
-sharpest sense that during this transit he never took his eyes from me,
-and I can see at this moment the way his hand, as he went, passed from
-one of the crenelations to the next. He stopped at the other corner, but
-less long, and even as he turned away still markedly fixed me. He turned
-away; that was all I knew.
-
-
-
-
-IV
-
-
-It was not that I didn't wait, on this occasion, for more, for I was
-rooted as deeply as I was shaken. Was there a "secret" at Bly--a mystery
-of Udolpho or an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected
-confinement? I can't say how long I turned it over, or how long, in
-a confusion of curiosity and dread, I remained where I had had my
-collision; I only recall that when I re-entered the house darkness had
-quite closed in. Agitation, in the interval, certainly had held me and
-driven me, for I must, in circling about the place, have walked three
-miles; but I was to be, later on, so much more overwhelmed that this
-mere dawn of alarm was a comparatively human chill. The most singular
-part of it, in fact--singular as the rest had been--was the part I
-became, in the hall, aware of in meeting Mrs. Grose. This picture comes
-back to me in the general train--the impression, as I received it on my
-return, of the wide white panelled space, bright in the lamplight and
-with its portraits and red carpet, and of the good surprised look of
-my friend, which immediately told me she had missed me. It came to
-me straightway, under her contact, that, with plain heartiness, mere
-relieved anxiety at my appearance, she knew nothing whatever that could
-bear upon the incident I had there ready for her. I had not suspected
-in advance that her comfortable face would pull me up, and I somehow
-measured the importance of what I had seen by my thus finding myself
-hesitate to mention it. Scarce anything in the whole history seems to
-me so odd as this fact that my real beginning of fear was one, as I
-may say, with the instinct of sparing my companion. On the spot,
-accordingly, in the pleasant hall and with her eyes on me, I, for
-a reason that I couldn't then have phrased, achieved an inward
-resolution--offered a vague pretext for my lateness and, with the plea
-of the beauty of the night and of the heavy dew and wet feet, went as
-soon as possible to my room.
-
-Here it was another affair; here, for many days after, it was a queer
-affair enough. There were hours, from day to day--or at least there were
-moments, snatched even from clear duties--when I had to shut myself up
-to think. It was not so much yet that I was more nervous than I could
-bear to be as that I was remarkably afraid of becoming so; for the truth
-I had now to turn over was, simply and clearly, the truth that I could
-arrive at no account whatever of the visitor with whom I had been so
-inexplicably and yet, as it seemed to me, so intimately concerned. It
-took little time to see that I could sound without forms of inquiry
-and without exciting remark any domestic complications. The shock I had
-suffered must have sharpened all my senses; I felt sure, at the end of
-three days and as the result of mere closer attention, that I had not
-been practiced upon by the servants nor made the object of any "game."
-Of whatever it was that I knew, nothing was known around me. There was
-but one sane inference: someone had taken a liberty rather gross. That
-was what, repeatedly, I dipped into my room and locked the door to say
-to myself. We had been, collectively, subject to an intrusion; some
-unscrupulous traveler, curious in old houses, had made his way in
-unobserved, enjoyed the prospect from the best point of view, and then
-stolen out as he came. If he had given me such a bold hard stare, that
-was but a part of his indiscretion. The good thing, after all, was that
-we should surely see no more of him.
-
-This was not so good a thing, I admit, as not to leave me to judge that
-what, essentially, made nothing else much signify was simply my charming
-work. My charming work was just my life with Miles and Flora, and
-through nothing could I so like it as through feeling that I could throw
-myself into it in trouble. The attraction of my small charges was a
-constant joy, leading me to wonder afresh at the vanity of my original
-fears, the distaste I had begun by entertaining for the probable gray
-prose of my office. There was to be no gray prose, it appeared, and no
-long grind; so how could work not be charming that presented itself as
-daily beauty? It was all the romance of the nursery and the poetry of
-the schoolroom. I don't mean by this, of course, that we studied
-only fiction and verse; I mean I can express no otherwise the sort
-of interest my companions inspired. How can I describe that except by
-saying that instead of growing used to them--and it's a marvel for a
-governess: I call the sisterhood to witness!--I made constant fresh
-discoveries. There was one direction, assuredly, in which these
-discoveries stopped: deep obscurity continued to cover the region of the
-boy's conduct at school. It had been promptly given me, I have noted,
-to face that mystery without a pang. Perhaps even it would be nearer the
-truth to say that--without a word--he himself had cleared it up. He had
-made the whole charge absurd. My conclusion bloomed there with the
-real rose flush of his innocence: he was only too fine and fair for the
-little horrid, unclean school world, and he had paid a price for it. I
-reflected acutely that the sense of such differences, such superiorities
-of quality, always, on the part of the majority--which could include
-even stupid, sordid headmasters--turn infallibly to the vindictive.
-
-Both the children had a gentleness (it was their only fault, and it
-never made Miles a muff) that kept them--how shall I express it?--almost
-impersonal and certainly quite unpunishable. They were like the cherubs
-of the anecdote, who had--morally, at any rate--nothing to whack! I
-remember feeling with Miles in especial as if he had had, as it were, no
-history. We expect of a small child a scant one, but there was in
-this beautiful little boy something extraordinarily sensitive, yet
-extraordinarily happy, that, more than in any creature of his age I have
-seen, struck me as beginning anew each day. He had never for a second
-suffered. I took this as a direct disproof of his having really been
-chastised. If he had been wicked he would have "caught" it, and I should
-have caught it by the rebound--I should have found the trace. I found
-nothing at all, and he was therefore an angel. He never spoke of his
-school, never mentioned a comrade or a master; and I, for my part, was
-quite too much disgusted to allude to them. Of course I was under the
-spell, and the wonderful part is that, even at the time, I perfectly
-knew I was. But I gave myself up to it; it was an antidote to any
-pain, and I had more pains than one. I was in receipt in these days of
-disturbing letters from home, where things were not going well. But with
-my children, what things in the world mattered? That was the question
-I used to put to my scrappy retirements. I was dazzled by their
-loveliness.
-
-There was a Sunday--to get on--when it rained with such force and for so
-many hours that there could be no procession to church; in consequence
-of which, as the day declined, I had arranged with Mrs. Grose that,
-should the evening show improvement, we would attend together the late
-service. The rain happily stopped, and I prepared for our walk, which,
-through the park and by the good road to the village, would be a matter
-of twenty minutes. Coming downstairs to meet my colleague in the hall,
-I remembered a pair of gloves that had required three stitches and that
-had received them--with a publicity perhaps not edifying--while I sat
-with the children at their tea, served on Sundays, by exception, in that
-cold, clean temple of mahogany and brass, the "grown-up" dining room.
-The gloves had been dropped there, and I turned in to recover them.
-The day was gray enough, but the afternoon light still lingered, and it
-enabled me, on crossing the threshold, not only to recognize, on a chair
-near the wide window, then closed, the articles I wanted, but to become
-aware of a person on the other side of the window and looking straight
-in. One step into the room had sufficed; my vision was instantaneous;
-it was all there. The person looking straight in was the person who had
-already appeared to me. He appeared thus again with I won't say
-greater distinctness, for that was impossible, but with a nearness that
-represented a forward stride in our intercourse and made me, as I met
-him, catch my breath and turn cold. He was the same--he was the same,
-and seen, this time, as he had been seen before, from the waist up, the
-window, though the dining room was on the ground floor, not going down
-to the terrace on which he stood. His face was close to the glass,
-yet the effect of this better view was, strangely, only to show me how
-intense the former had been. He remained but a few seconds--long enough
-to convince me he also saw and recognized; but it was as if I had been
-looking at him for years and had known him always. Something, however,
-happened this time that had not happened before; his stare into my face,
-through the glass and across the room, was as deep and hard as then, but
-it quitted me for a moment during which I could still watch it, see it
-fix successively several other things. On the spot there came to me the
-added shock of a certitude that it was not for me he had come there. He
-had come for someone else.
-
-The flash of this knowledge--for it was knowledge in the midst of
-dread--produced in me the most extraordinary effect, started as I stood
-there, a sudden vibration of duty and courage. I say courage because
-I was beyond all doubt already far gone. I bounded straight out of the
-door again, reached that of the house, got, in an instant, upon the
-drive, and, passing along the terrace as fast as I could rush, turned
-a corner and came full in sight. But it was in sight of nothing now--my
-visitor had vanished. I stopped, I almost dropped, with the real relief
-of this; but I took in the whole scene--I gave him time to reappear. I
-call it time, but how long was it? I can't speak to the purpose today
-of the duration of these things. That kind of measure must have left me:
-they couldn't have lasted as they actually appeared to me to last. The
-terrace and the whole place, the lawn and the garden beyond it, all I
-could see of the park, were empty with a great emptiness. There were
-shrubberies and big trees, but I remember the clear assurance I felt
-that none of them concealed him. He was there or was not there: not
-there if I didn't see him. I got hold of this; then, instinctively,
-instead of returning as I had come, went to the window. It was
-confusedly present to me that I ought to place myself where he had
-stood. I did so; I applied my face to the pane and looked, as he had
-looked, into the room. As if, at this moment, to show me exactly what
-his range had been, Mrs. Grose, as I had done for himself just before,
-came in from the hall. With this I had the full image of a repetition of
-what had already occurred. She saw me as I had seen my own visitant; she
-pulled up short as I had done; I gave her something of the shock that
-I had received. She turned white, and this made me ask myself if I had
-blanched as much. She stared, in short, and retreated on just MY lines,
-and I knew she had then passed out and come round to me and that I
-should presently meet her. I remained where I was, and while I waited
-I thought of more things than one. But there's only one I take space to
-mention. I wondered why SHE should be scared.
-
-
-
-
-V
-
-
-Oh, she let me know as soon as, round the corner of the house, she
-loomed again into view. "What in the name of goodness is the matter--?"
-She was now flushed and out of breath.
-
-I said nothing till she came quite near. "With me?" I must have made a
-wonderful face. "Do I show it?"
-
-"You're as white as a sheet. You look awful."
-
-I considered; I could meet on this, without scruple, any innocence. My
-need to respect the bloom of Mrs. Grose's had dropped, without a rustle,
-from my shoulders, and if I wavered for the instant it was not with what
-I kept back. I put out my hand to her and she took it; I held her hard
-a little, liking to feel her close to me. There was a kind of support in
-the shy heave of her surprise. "You came for me for church, of course,
-but I can't go."
-
-"Has anything happened?"
-
-"Yes. You must know now. Did I look very queer?"
-
-"Through this window? Dreadful!"
-
-"Well," I said, "I've been frightened." Mrs. Grose's eyes expressed
-plainly that SHE had no wish to be, yet also that she knew too well her
-place not to be ready to share with me any marked inconvenience. Oh,
-it was quite settled that she MUST share! "Just what you saw from the
-dining room a minute ago was the effect of that. What _I_ saw--just
-before--was much worse."
-
-Her hand tightened. "What was it?"
-
-"An extraordinary man. Looking in."
-
-"What extraordinary man?"
-
-"I haven't the least idea."
-
-Mrs. Grose gazed round us in vain. "Then where is he gone?"
-
-"I know still less."
-
-"Have you seen him before?"
-
-"Yes--once. On the old tower."
-
-She could only look at me harder. "Do you mean he's a stranger?"
-
-"Oh, very much!"
-
-"Yet you didn't tell me?"
-
-"No--for reasons. But now that you've guessed--"
-
-Mrs. Grose's round eyes encountered this charge. "Ah, I haven't
-guessed!" she said very simply. "How can I if YOU don't imagine?"
-
-"I don't in the very least."
-
-"You've seen him nowhere but on the tower?"
-
-"And on this spot just now."
-
-Mrs. Grose looked round again. "What was he doing on the tower?"
-
-"Only standing there and looking down at me."
-
-She thought a minute. "Was he a gentleman?"
-
-I found I had no need to think. "No." She gazed in deeper wonder. "No."
-
-"Then nobody about the place? Nobody from the village?"
-
-"Nobody--nobody. I didn't tell you, but I made sure."
-
-She breathed a vague relief: this was, oddly, so much to the good. It
-only went indeed a little way. "But if he isn't a gentleman--"
-
-"What IS he? He's a horror."
-
-"A horror?"
-
-"He's--God help me if I know WHAT he is!"
-
-Mrs. Grose looked round once more; she fixed her eyes on the duskier
-distance, then, pulling herself together, turned to me with abrupt
-inconsequence. "It's time we should be at church."
-
-"Oh, I'm not fit for church!"
-
-"Won't it do you good?"
-
-"It won't do THEM--! I nodded at the house.
-
-"The children?"
-
-"I can't leave them now."
-
-"You're afraid--?"
-
-I spoke boldly. "I'm afraid of HIM."
-
-Mrs. Grose's large face showed me, at this, for the first time, the
-faraway faint glimmer of a consciousness more acute: I somehow made out
-in it the delayed dawn of an idea I myself had not given her and that
-was as yet quite obscure to me. It comes back to me that I thought
-instantly of this as something I could get from her; and I felt it to be
-connected with the desire she presently showed to know more. "When was
-it--on the tower?"
-
-"About the middle of the month. At this same hour."
-
-"Almost at dark," said Mrs. Grose.
-
-"Oh, no, not nearly. I saw him as I see you."
-
-"Then how did he get in?"
-
-"And how did he get out?" I laughed. "I had no opportunity to ask him!
-This evening, you see," I pursued, "he has not been able to get in."
-
-"He only peeps?"
-
-"I hope it will be confined to that!" She had now let go my hand; she
-turned away a little. I waited an instant; then I brought out: "Go to
-church. Goodbye. I must watch."
-
-Slowly she faced me again. "Do you fear for them?"
-
-We met in another long look. "Don't YOU?" Instead of answering she came
-nearer to the window and, for a minute, applied her face to the glass.
-"You see how he could see," I meanwhile went on.
-
-She didn't move. "How long was he here?"
-
-"Till I came out. I came to meet him."
-
-Mrs. Grose at last turned round, and there was still more in her face.
-"_I_ couldn't have come out."
-
-"Neither could I!" I laughed again. "But I did come. I have my duty."
-
-"So have I mine," she replied; after which she added: "What is he like?"
-
-"I've been dying to tell you. But he's like nobody."
-
-"Nobody?" she echoed.
-
-"He has no hat." Then seeing in her face that she already, in this, with
-a deeper dismay, found a touch of picture, I quickly added stroke to
-stroke. "He has red hair, very red, close-curling, and a pale face, long
-in shape, with straight, good features and little, rather queer whiskers
-that are as red as his hair. His eyebrows are, somehow, darker; they
-look particularly arched and as if they might move a good deal. His eyes
-are sharp, strange--awfully; but I only know clearly that they're rather
-small and very fixed. His mouth's wide, and his lips are thin, and
-except for his little whiskers he's quite clean-shaven. He gives me a
-sort of sense of looking like an actor."
-
-"An actor!" It was impossible to resemble one less, at least, than Mrs.
-Grose at that moment.
-
-"I've never seen one, but so I suppose them. He's tall, active, erect,"
-I continued, "but never--no, never!--a gentleman."
-
-My companion's face had blanched as I went on; her round eyes started
-and her mild mouth gaped. "A gentleman?" she gasped, confounded,
-stupefied: "a gentleman HE?"
-
-"You know him then?"
-
-She visibly tried to hold herself. "But he IS handsome?"
-
-I saw the way to help her. "Remarkably!"
-
-"And dressed--?"
-
-"In somebody's clothes." "They're smart, but they're not his own."
-
-She broke into a breathless affirmative groan: "They're the master's!"
-
-I caught it up. "You DO know him?"
-
-She faltered but a second. "Quint!" she cried.
-
-"Quint?"
-
-"Peter Quint--his own man, his valet, when he was here!"
-
-"When the master was?"
-
-Gaping still, but meeting me, she pieced it all together. "He never wore
-his hat, but he did wear--well, there were waistcoats missed. They were
-both here--last year. Then the master went, and Quint was alone."
-
-I followed, but halting a little. "Alone?"
-
-"Alone with US." Then, as from a deeper depth, "In charge," she added.
-
-"And what became of him?"
-
-She hung fire so long that I was still more mystified. "He went, too,"
-she brought out at last.
-
-"Went where?"
-
-Her expression, at this, became extraordinary. "God knows where! He
-died."
-
-"Died?" I almost shrieked.
-
-She seemed fairly to square herself, plant herself more firmly to utter
-the wonder of it. "Yes. Mr. Quint is dead."
-
-
-
-
-VI
-
-
-It took of course more than that particular passage to place us together
-in presence of what we had now to live with as we could--my dreadful
-liability to impressions of the order so vividly exemplified, and my
-companion's knowledge, henceforth--a knowledge half consternation and
-half compassion--of that liability. There had been, this evening, after
-the revelation left me, for an hour, so prostrate--there had been, for
-either of us, no attendance on any service but a little service of tears
-and vows, of prayers and promises, a climax to the series of mutual
-challenges and pledges that had straightway ensued on our retreating
-together to the schoolroom and shutting ourselves up there to have
-everything out. The result of our having everything out was simply to
-reduce our situation to the last rigor of its elements. She herself had
-seen nothing, not the shadow of a shadow, and nobody in the house but
-the governess was in the governess's plight; yet she accepted without
-directly impugning my sanity the truth as I gave it to her, and ended by
-showing me, on this ground, an awestricken tenderness, an expression
-of the sense of my more than questionable privilege, of which the very
-breath has remained with me as that of the sweetest of human charities.
-
-What was settled between us, accordingly, that night, was that we
-thought we might bear things together; and I was not even sure that,
-in spite of her exemption, it was she who had the best of the burden. I
-knew at this hour, I think, as well as I knew later, what I was capable
-of meeting to shelter my pupils; but it took me some time to be wholly
-sure of what my honest ally was prepared for to keep terms with so
-compromising a contract. I was queer company enough--quite as queer as
-the company I received; but as I trace over what we went through I see
-how much common ground we must have found in the one idea that, by good
-fortune, COULD steady us. It was the idea, the second movement, that led
-me straight out, as I may say, of the inner chamber of my dread. I could
-take the air in the court, at least, and there Mrs. Grose could join me.
-Perfectly can I recall now the particular way strength came to me before
-we separated for the night. We had gone over and over every feature of
-what I had seen.
-
-"He was looking for someone else, you say--someone who was not you?"
-
-"He was looking for little Miles." A portentous clearness now possessed
-me. "THAT'S whom he was looking for."
-
-"But how do you know?"
-
-"I know, I know, I know!" My exaltation grew. "And YOU know, my dear!"
-
-She didn't deny this, but I required, I felt, not even so much telling
-as that. She resumed in a moment, at any rate: "What if HE should see
-him?"
-
-"Little Miles? That's what he wants!"
-
-She looked immensely scared again. "The child?"
-
-"Heaven forbid! The man. He wants to appear to THEM." That he might was
-an awful conception, and yet, somehow, I could keep it at bay; which,
-moreover, as we lingered there, was what I succeeded in practically
-proving. I had an absolute certainty that I should see again what I
-had already seen, but something within me said that by offering myself
-bravely as the sole subject of such experience, by accepting, by
-inviting, by surmounting it all, I should serve as an expiatory victim
-and guard the tranquility of my companions. The children, in especial,
-I should thus fence about and absolutely save. I recall one of the last
-things I said that night to Mrs. Grose.
-
-"It does strike me that my pupils have never mentioned--"
-
-She looked at me hard as I musingly pulled up. "His having been here and
-the time they were with him?"
-
-"The time they were with him, and his name, his presence, his history,
-in any way."
-
-"Oh, the little lady doesn't remember. She never heard or knew."
-
-"The circumstances of his death?" I thought with some intensity.
-"Perhaps not. But Miles would remember--Miles would know."
-
-"Ah, don't try him!" broke from Mrs. Grose.
-
-I returned her the look she had given me. "Don't be afraid." I continued
-to think. "It IS rather odd."
-
-"That he has never spoken of him?"
-
-"Never by the least allusion. And you tell me they were 'great
-friends'?"
-
-"Oh, it wasn't HIM!" Mrs. Grose with emphasis declared. "It was Quint's
-own fancy. To play with him, I mean--to spoil him." She paused a moment;
-then she added: "Quint was much too free."
-
-This gave me, straight from my vision of his face--SUCH a face!--a
-sudden sickness of disgust. "Too free with MY boy?"
-
-"Too free with everyone!"
-
-I forbore, for the moment, to analyze this description further than by
-the reflection that a part of it applied to several of the members of
-the household, of the half-dozen maids and men who were still of our
-small colony. But there was everything, for our apprehension, in the
-lucky fact that no discomfortable legend, no perturbation of scullions,
-had ever, within anyone's memory attached to the kind old place. It had
-neither bad name nor ill fame, and Mrs. Grose, most apparently, only
-desired to cling to me and to quake in silence. I even put her, the very
-last thing of all, to the test. It was when, at midnight, she had her
-hand on the schoolroom door to take leave. "I have it from you then--for
-it's of great importance--that he was definitely and admittedly bad?"
-
-"Oh, not admittedly. _I_ knew it--but the master didn't."
-
-"And you never told him?"
-
-"Well, he didn't like tale-bearing--he hated complaints. He was terribly
-short with anything of that kind, and if people were all right to HIM--"
-
-"He wouldn't be bothered with more?" This squared well enough with my
-impressions of him: he was not a trouble-loving gentleman, nor so very
-particular perhaps about some of the company HE kept. All the same, I
-pressed my interlocutress. "I promise you _I_ would have told!"
-
-She felt my discrimination. "I daresay I was wrong. But, really, I was
-afraid."
-
-"Afraid of what?"
-
-"Of things that man could do. Quint was so clever--he was so deep."
-
-I took this in still more than, probably, I showed. "You weren't afraid
-of anything else? Not of his effect--?"
-
-"His effect?" she repeated with a face of anguish and waiting while I
-faltered.
-
-"On innocent little precious lives. They were in your charge."
-
-"No, they were not in mine!" she roundly and distressfully returned.
-"The master believed in him and placed him here because he was supposed
-not to be well and the country air so good for him. So he had everything
-to say. Yes"--she let me have it--"even about THEM."
-
-"Them--that creature?" I had to smother a kind of howl. "And you could
-bear it!"
-
-"No. I couldn't--and I can't now!" And the poor woman burst into tears.
-
-A rigid control, from the next day, was, as I have said, to follow them;
-yet how often and how passionately, for a week, we came back together
-to the subject! Much as we had discussed it that Sunday night, I was, in
-the immediate later hours in especial--for it may be imagined whether I
-slept--still haunted with the shadow of something she had not told me.
-I myself had kept back nothing, but there was a word Mrs. Grose had kept
-back. I was sure, moreover, by morning, that this was not from a failure
-of frankness, but because on every side there were fears. It seems to me
-indeed, in retrospect, that by the time the morrow's sun was high I had
-restlessly read into the fact before us almost all the meaning they were
-to receive from subsequent and more cruel occurrences. What they gave me
-above all was just the sinister figure of the living man--the dead one
-would keep awhile!--and of the months he had continuously passed at Bly,
-which, added up, made a formidable stretch. The limit of this evil time
-had arrived only when, on the dawn of a winter's morning, Peter Quint
-was found, by a laborer going to early work, stone dead on the road
-from the village: a catastrophe explained--superficially at least--by a
-visible wound to his head; such a wound as might have been produced--and
-as, on the final evidence, HAD been--by a fatal slip, in the dark and
-after leaving the public house, on the steepish icy slope, a wrong
-path altogether, at the bottom of which he lay. The icy slope, the turn
-mistaken at night and in liquor, accounted for much--practically, in
-the end and after the inquest and boundless chatter, for everything; but
-there had been matters in his life--strange passages and perils, secret
-disorders, vices more than suspected--that would have accounted for a
-good deal more.
-
-I scarce know how to put my story into words that shall be a credible
-picture of my state of mind; but I was in these days literally able to
-find a joy in the extraordinary flight of heroism the occasion demanded
-of me. I now saw that I had been asked for a service admirable and
-difficult; and there would be a greatness in letting it be seen--oh, in
-the right quarter!--that I could succeed where many another girl might
-have failed. It was an immense help to me--I confess I rather applaud
-myself as I look back!--that I saw my service so strongly and so simply.
-I was there to protect and defend the little creatures in the world the
-most bereaved and the most lovable, the appeal of whose helplessness had
-suddenly become only too explicit, a deep, constant ache of one's own
-committed heart. We were cut off, really, together; we were united in
-our danger. They had nothing but me, and I--well, I had THEM. It was
-in short a magnificent chance. This chance presented itself to me in an
-image richly material. I was a screen--I was to stand before them. The
-more I saw, the less they would. I began to watch them in a stifled
-suspense, a disguised excitement that might well, had it continued too
-long, have turned to something like madness. What saved me, as I now
-see, was that it turned to something else altogether. It didn't last as
-suspense--it was superseded by horrible proofs. Proofs, I say, yes--from
-the moment I really took hold.
-
-This moment dated from an afternoon hour that I happened to spend in the
-grounds with the younger of my pupils alone. We had left Miles indoors,
-on the red cushion of a deep window seat; he had wished to finish a
-book, and I had been glad to encourage a purpose so laudable in a young
-man whose only defect was an occasional excess of the restless. His
-sister, on the contrary, had been alert to come out, and I strolled with
-her half an hour, seeking the shade, for the sun was still high and the
-day exceptionally warm. I was aware afresh, with her, as we went, of
-how, like her brother, she contrived--it was the charming thing in both
-children--to let me alone without appearing to drop me and to accompany
-me without appearing to surround. They were never importunate and yet
-never listless. My attention to them all really went to seeing them
-amuse themselves immensely without me: this was a spectacle they seemed
-actively to prepare and that engaged me as an active admirer. I walked
-in a world of their invention--they had no occasion whatever to draw
-upon mine; so that my time was taken only with being, for them, some
-remarkable person or thing that the game of the moment required and that
-was merely, thanks to my superior, my exalted stamp, a happy and highly
-distinguished sinecure. I forget what I was on the present occasion;
-I only remember that I was something very important and very quiet and
-that Flora was playing very hard. We were on the edge of the lake, and,
-as we had lately begun geography, the lake was the Sea of Azof.
-
-Suddenly, in these circumstances, I became aware that, on the other
-side of the Sea of Azof, we had an interested spectator. The way this
-knowledge gathered in me was the strangest thing in the world--the
-strangest, that is, except the very much stranger in which it quickly
-merged itself. I had sat down with a piece of work--for I was something
-or other that could sit--on the old stone bench which overlooked the
-pond; and in this position I began to take in with certitude, and yet
-without direct vision, the presence, at a distance, of a third person.
-The old trees, the thick shrubbery, made a great and pleasant shade, but
-it was all suffused with the brightness of the hot, still hour. There
-was no ambiguity in anything; none whatever, at least, in the conviction
-I from one moment to another found myself forming as to what I should
-see straight before me and across the lake as a consequence of raising
-my eyes. They were attached at this juncture to the stitching in which I
-was engaged, and I can feel once more the spasm of my effort not to move
-them till I should so have steadied myself as to be able to make up my
-mind what to do. There was an alien object in view--a figure whose right
-of presence I instantly, passionately questioned. I recollect counting
-over perfectly the possibilities, reminding myself that nothing was more
-natural, for instance, then the appearance of one of the men about the
-place, or even of a messenger, a postman, or a tradesman's boy, from the
-village. That reminder had as little effect on my practical certitude
-as I was conscious--still even without looking--of its having upon the
-character and attitude of our visitor. Nothing was more natural than
-that these things should be the other things that they absolutely were
-not.
-
-Of the positive identity of the apparition I would assure myself as
-soon as the small clock of my courage should have ticked out the right
-second; meanwhile, with an effort that was already sharp enough, I
-transferred my eyes straight to little Flora, who, at the moment, was
-about ten yards away. My heart had stood still for an instant with the
-wonder and terror of the question whether she too would see; and I
-held my breath while I waited for what a cry from her, what some sudden
-innocent sign either of interest or of alarm, would tell me. I waited,
-but nothing came; then, in the first place--and there is something
-more dire in this, I feel, than in anything I have to relate--I was
-determined by a sense that, within a minute, all sounds from her had
-previously dropped; and, in the second, by the circumstance that, also
-within the minute, she had, in her play, turned her back to the water.
-This was her attitude when I at last looked at her--looked with the
-confirmed conviction that we were still, together, under direct personal
-notice. She had picked up a small flat piece of wood, which happened to
-have in it a little hole that had evidently suggested to her the idea
-of sticking in another fragment that might figure as a mast and make
-the thing a boat. This second morsel, as I watched her, she was
-very markedly and intently attempting to tighten in its place. My
-apprehension of what she was doing sustained me so that after some
-seconds I felt I was ready for more. Then I again shifted my eyes--I
-faced what I had to face.
-
-
-
-
-VII
-
-
-I got hold of Mrs. Grose as soon after this as I could; and I can give
-no intelligible account of how I fought out the interval. Yet I still
-hear myself cry as I fairly threw myself into her arms: "They KNOW--it's
-too monstrous: they know, they know!"
-
-"And what on earth--?" I felt her incredulity as she held me.
-
-"Why, all that WE know--and heaven knows what else besides!" Then, as
-she released me, I made it out to her, made it out perhaps only now with
-full coherency even to myself. "Two hours ago, in the garden"--I could
-scarce articulate--"Flora SAW!"
-
-Mrs. Grose took it as she might have taken a blow in the stomach. "She
-has told you?" she panted.
-
-"Not a word--that's the horror. She kept it to herself! The child of
-eight, THAT child!" Unutterable still, for me, was the stupefaction of
-it.
-
-Mrs. Grose, of course, could only gape the wider. "Then how do you
-know?"
-
-"I was there--I saw with my eyes: saw that she was perfectly aware."
-
-"Do you mean aware of HIM?"
-
-"No--of HER." I was conscious as I spoke that I looked prodigious
-things, for I got the slow reflection of them in my companion's face.
-"Another person--this time; but a figure of quite as unmistakable horror
-and evil: a woman in black, pale and dreadful--with such an air also,
-and such a face!--on the other side of the lake. I was there with the
-child--quiet for the hour; and in the midst of it she came."
-
-"Came how--from where?"
-
-"From where they come from! She just appeared and stood there--but not
-so near."
-
-"And without coming nearer?"
-
-"Oh, for the effect and the feeling, she might have been as close as
-you!"
-
-My friend, with an odd impulse, fell back a step. "Was she someone
-you've never seen?"
-
-"Yes. But someone the child has. Someone YOU have." Then, to show how I
-had thought it all out: "My predecessor--the one who died."
-
-"Miss Jessel?"
-
-"Miss Jessel. You don't believe me?" I pressed.
-
-She turned right and left in her distress. "How can you be sure?"
-
-This drew from me, in the state of my nerves, a flash of impatience.
-"Then ask Flora--SHE'S sure!" But I had no sooner spoken than I caught
-myself up. "No, for God's sake, DON'T! She'll say she isn't--she'll
-lie!"
-
-Mrs. Grose was not too bewildered instinctively to protest. "Ah, how CAN
-you?"
-
-"Because I'm clear. Flora doesn't want me to know."
-
-"It's only then to spare you."
-
-"No, no--there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see
-in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don't know what I
-DON'T see--what I DON'T fear!"
-
-Mrs. Grose tried to keep up with me. "You mean you're afraid of seeing
-her again?"
-
-"Oh, no; that's nothing--now!" Then I explained. "It's of NOT seeing
-her."
-
-But my companion only looked wan. "I don't understand you."
-
-"Why, it's that the child may keep it up--and that the child assuredly
-WILL--without my knowing it."
-
-At the image of this possibility Mrs. Grose for a moment collapsed, yet
-presently to pull herself together again, as if from the positive force
-of the sense of what, should we yield an inch, there would really be to
-give way to. "Dear, dear--we must keep our heads! And after all, if she
-doesn't mind it--!" She even tried a grim joke. "Perhaps she likes it!"
-
-"Likes SUCH things--a scrap of an infant!"
-
-"Isn't it just a proof of her blessed innocence?" my friend bravely
-inquired.
-
-She brought me, for the instant, almost round. "Oh, we must clutch at
-THAT--we must cling to it! If it isn't a proof of what you say, it's a
-proof of--God knows what! For the woman's a horror of horrors."
-
-Mrs. Grose, at this, fixed her eyes a minute on the ground; then at last
-raising them, "Tell me how you know," she said.
-
-"Then you admit it's what she was?" I cried.
-
-"Tell me how you know," my friend simply repeated.
-
-"Know? By seeing her! By the way she looked."
-
-"At you, do you mean--so wickedly?"
-
-"Dear me, no--I could have borne that. She gave me never a glance. She
-only fixed the child."
-
-Mrs. Grose tried to see it. "Fixed her?"
-
-"Ah, with such awful eyes!"
-
-She stared at mine as if they might really have resembled them. "Do you
-mean of dislike?"
-
-"God help us, no. Of something much worse."
-
-"Worse than dislike?--this left her indeed at a loss.
-
-"With a determination--indescribable. With a kind of fury of intention."
-
-I made her turn pale. "Intention?"
-
-"To get hold of her." Mrs. Grose--her eyes just lingering on mine--gave
-a shudder and walked to the window; and while she stood there looking
-out I completed my statement. "THAT'S what Flora knows."
-
-After a little she turned round. "The person was in black, you say?"
-
-"In mourning--rather poor, almost shabby. But--yes--with extraordinary
-beauty." I now recognized to what I had at last, stroke by stroke,
-brought the victim of my confidence, for she quite visibly weighed
-this. "Oh, handsome--very, very," I insisted; "wonderfully handsome. But
-infamous."
-
-She slowly came back to me. "Miss Jessel--WAS infamous." She once more
-took my hand in both her own, holding it as tight as if to fortify me
-against the increase of alarm I might draw from this disclosure. "They
-were both infamous," she finally said.
-
-So, for a little, we faced it once more together; and I found absolutely
-a degree of help in seeing it now so straight. "I appreciate," I said,
-"the great decency of your not having hitherto spoken; but the time has
-certainly come to give me the whole thing." She appeared to assent to
-this, but still only in silence; seeing which I went on: "I must have it
-now. Of what did she die? Come, there was something between them."
-
-"There was everything."
-
-"In spite of the difference--?"
-
-"Oh, of their rank, their condition"--she brought it woefully out. "SHE
-was a lady."
-
-I turned it over; I again saw. "Yes--she was a lady."
-
-"And he so dreadfully below," said Mrs. Grose.
-
-I felt that I doubtless needn't press too hard, in such company, on the
-place of a servant in the scale; but there was nothing to prevent an
-acceptance of my companion's own measure of my predecessor's abasement.
-There was a way to deal with that, and I dealt; the more readily for
-my full vision--on the evidence--of our employer's late clever,
-good-looking "own" man; impudent, assured, spoiled, depraved. "The
-fellow was a hound."
-
-Mrs. Grose considered as if it were perhaps a little a case for a sense
-of shades. "I've never seen one like him. He did what he wished."
-
-"With HER?"
-
-"With them all."
-
-It was as if now in my friend's own eyes Miss Jessel had again appeared.
-I seemed at any rate, for an instant, to see their evocation of her
-as distinctly as I had seen her by the pond; and I brought out with
-decision: "It must have been also what SHE wished!"
-
-Mrs. Grose's face signified that it had been indeed, but she said at the
-same time: "Poor woman--she paid for it!"
-
-"Then you do know what she died of?" I asked.
-
-"No--I know nothing. I wanted not to know; I was glad enough I didn't;
-and I thanked heaven she was well out of this!"
-
-"Yet you had, then, your idea--"
-
-"Of her real reason for leaving? Oh, yes--as to that. She couldn't have
-stayed. Fancy it here--for a governess! And afterward I imagined--and I
-still imagine. And what I imagine is dreadful."
-
-"Not so dreadful as what _I_ do," I replied; on which I must have shown
-her--as I was indeed but too conscious--a front of miserable defeat. It
-brought out again all her compassion for me, and at the renewed touch of
-her kindness my power to resist broke down. I burst, as I had, the other
-time, made her burst, into tears; she took me to her motherly breast,
-and my lamentation overflowed. "I don't do it!" I sobbed in despair; "I
-don't save or shield them! It's far worse than I dreamed--they're lost!"
-
-
-
-
-VIII
-
-
-What I had said to Mrs. Grose was true enough: there were in the matter
-I had put before her depths and possibilities that I lacked resolution
-to sound; so that when we met once more in the wonder of it we were of a
-common mind about the duty of resistance to extravagant fancies. We were
-to keep our heads if we should keep nothing else--difficult indeed as
-that might be in the face of what, in our prodigious experience, was
-least to be questioned. Late that night, while the house slept, we had
-another talk in my room, when she went all the way with me as to its
-being beyond doubt that I had seen exactly what I had seen. To hold her
-perfectly in the pinch of that, I found I had only to ask her how, if
-I had "made it up," I came to be able to give, of each of the persons
-appearing to me, a picture disclosing, to the last detail, their
-special marks--a portrait on the exhibition of which she had instantly
-recognized and named them. She wished of course--small blame to her!--to
-sink the whole subject; and I was quick to assure her that my own
-interest in it had now violently taken the form of a search for the way
-to escape from it. I encountered her on the ground of a probability that
-with recurrence--for recurrence we took for granted--I should get
-used to my danger, distinctly professing that my personal exposure had
-suddenly become the least of my discomforts. It was my new suspicion
-that was intolerable; and yet even to this complication the later hours
-of the day had brought a little ease.
-
-On leaving her, after my first outbreak, I had of course returned to my
-pupils, associating the right remedy for my dismay with that sense of
-their charm which I had already found to be a thing I could positively
-cultivate and which had never failed me yet. I had simply, in other
-words, plunged afresh into Flora's special society and there become
-aware--it was almost a luxury!--that she could put her little conscious
-hand straight upon the spot that ached. She had looked at me in sweet
-speculation and then had accused me to my face of having "cried." I had
-supposed I had brushed away the ugly signs: but I could literally--for
-the time, at all events--rejoice, under this fathomless charity, that
-they had not entirely disappeared. To gaze into the depths of blue of
-the child's eyes and pronounce their loveliness a trick of premature
-cunning was to be guilty of a cynicism in preference to which I
-naturally preferred to abjure my judgment and, so far as might be, my
-agitation. I couldn't abjure for merely wanting to, but I could repeat
-to Mrs. Grose--as I did there, over and over, in the small hours--that
-with their voices in the air, their pressure on one's heart, and their
-fragrant faces against one's cheek, everything fell to the ground but
-their incapacity and their beauty. It was a pity that, somehow, to
-settle this once for all, I had equally to re-enumerate the signs of
-subtlety that, in the afternoon, by the lake had made a miracle of my
-show of self-possession. It was a pity to be obliged to reinvestigate
-the certitude of the moment itself and repeat how it had come to me as
-a revelation that the inconceivable communion I then surprised was a
-matter, for either party, of habit. It was a pity that I should have had
-to quaver out again the reasons for my not having, in my delusion,
-so much as questioned that the little girl saw our visitant even as I
-actually saw Mrs. Grose herself, and that she wanted, by just so much as
-she did thus see, to make me suppose she didn't, and at the same time,
-without showing anything, arrive at a guess as to whether I myself did!
-It was a pity that I needed once more to describe the portentous little
-activity by which she sought to divert my attention--the perceptible
-increase of movement, the greater intensity of play, the singing, the
-gabbling of nonsense, and the invitation to romp.
-
-Yet if I had not indulged, to prove there was nothing in it, in this
-review, I should have missed the two or three dim elements of comfort
-that still remained to me. I should not for instance have been able to
-asseverate to my friend that I was certain--which was so much to the
-good--that _I_ at least had not betrayed myself. I should not have been
-prompted, by stress of need, by desperation of mind--I scarce know what
-to call it--to invoke such further aid to intelligence as might spring
-from pushing my colleague fairly to the wall. She had told me, bit by
-bit, under pressure, a great deal; but a small shifty spot on the wrong
-side of it all still sometimes brushed my brow like the wing of a bat;
-and I remember how on this occasion--for the sleeping house and the
-concentration alike of our danger and our watch seemed to help--I felt
-the importance of giving the last jerk to the curtain. "I don't
-believe anything so horrible," I recollect saying; "no, let us put it
-definitely, my dear, that I don't. But if I did, you know, there's
-a thing I should require now, just without sparing you the least bit
-more--oh, not a scrap, come!--to get out of you. What was it you had in
-mind when, in our distress, before Miles came back, over the letter from
-his school, you said, under my insistence, that you didn't pretend for
-him that he had not literally EVER been 'bad'? He has NOT literally
-'ever,' in these weeks that I myself have lived with him and so closely
-watched him; he has been an imperturbable little prodigy of delightful,
-lovable goodness. Therefore you might perfectly have made the claim for
-him if you had not, as it happened, seen an exception to take. What was
-your exception, and to what passage in your personal observation of him
-did you refer?"
-
-It was a dreadfully austere inquiry, but levity was not our note, and,
-at any rate, before the gray dawn admonished us to separate I had got
-my answer. What my friend had had in mind proved to be immensely to the
-purpose. It was neither more nor less than the circumstance that for
-a period of several months Quint and the boy had been perpetually
-together. It was in fact the very appropriate truth that she had
-ventured to criticize the propriety, to hint at the incongruity, of
-so close an alliance, and even to go so far on the subject as a frank
-overture to Miss Jessel. Miss Jessel had, with a most strange manner,
-requested her to mind her business, and the good woman had, on this,
-directly approached little Miles. What she had said to him, since I
-pressed, was that SHE liked to see young gentlemen not forget their
-station.
-
-I pressed again, of course, at this. "You reminded him that Quint was
-only a base menial?"
-
-"As you might say! And it was his answer, for one thing, that was bad."
-
-"And for another thing?" I waited. "He repeated your words to Quint?"
-
-"No, not that. It's just what he WOULDN'T!" she could still impress upon
-me. "I was sure, at any rate," she added, "that he didn't. But he denied
-certain occasions."
-
-"What occasions?"
-
-"When they had been about together quite as if Quint were his tutor--and
-a very grand one--and Miss Jessel only for the little lady. When he had
-gone off with the fellow, I mean, and spent hours with him."
-
-"He then prevaricated about it--he said he hadn't?" Her assent was clear
-enough to cause me to add in a moment: "I see. He lied."
-
-"Oh!" Mrs. Grose mumbled. This was a suggestion that it didn't matter;
-which indeed she backed up by a further remark. "You see, after all,
-Miss Jessel didn't mind. She didn't forbid him."
-
-I considered. "Did he put that to you as a justification?"
-
-At this she dropped again. "No, he never spoke of it."
-
-"Never mentioned her in connection with Quint?"
-
-She saw, visibly flushing, where I was coming out. "Well, he didn't show
-anything. He denied," she repeated; "he denied."
-
-Lord, how I pressed her now! "So that you could see he knew what was
-between the two wretches?"
-
-"I don't know--I don't know!" the poor woman groaned.
-
-"You do know, you dear thing," I replied; "only you haven't my dreadful
-boldness of mind, and you keep back, out of timidity and modesty and
-delicacy, even the impression that, in the past, when you had, without
-my aid, to flounder about in silence, most of all made you miserable.
-But I shall get it out of you yet! There was something in the boy that
-suggested to you," I continued, "that he covered and concealed their
-relation."
-
-"Oh, he couldn't prevent--"
-
-"Your learning the truth? I daresay! But, heavens," I fell, with
-vehemence, athinking, "what it shows that they must, to that extent,
-have succeeded in making of him!"
-
-"Ah, nothing that's not nice NOW!" Mrs. Grose lugubriously pleaded.
-
-"I don't wonder you looked queer," I persisted, "when I mentioned to you
-the letter from his school!"
-
-"I doubt if I looked as queer as you!" she retorted with homely force.
-"And if he was so bad then as that comes to, how is he such an angel
-now?"
-
-"Yes, indeed--and if he was a fiend at school! How, how, how? Well,"
-I said in my torment, "you must put it to me again, but I shall not be
-able to tell you for some days. Only, put it to me again!" I cried in a
-way that made my friend stare. "There are directions in which I must
-not for the present let myself go." Meanwhile I returned to her first
-example--the one to which she had just previously referred--of the boy's
-happy capacity for an occasional slip. "If Quint--on your remonstrance
-at the time you speak of--was a base menial, one of the things Miles
-said to you, I find myself guessing, was that you were another." Again
-her admission was so adequate that I continued: "And you forgave him
-that?"
-
-"Wouldn't YOU?"
-
-"Oh, yes!" And we exchanged there, in the stillness, a sound of the
-oddest amusement. Then I went on: "At all events, while he was with the
-man--"
-
-"Miss Flora was with the woman. It suited them all!"
-
-It suited me, too, I felt, only too well; by which I mean that it suited
-exactly the particularly deadly view I was in the very act of forbidding
-myself to entertain. But I so far succeeded in checking the expression
-of this view that I will throw, just here, no further light on it than
-may be offered by the mention of my final observation to Mrs. Grose.
-"His having lied and been impudent are, I confess, less engaging
-specimens than I had hoped to have from you of the outbreak in him of
-the little natural man. Still," I mused, "They must do, for they make me
-feel more than ever that I must watch."
-
-It made me blush, the next minute, to see in my friend's face how much
-more unreservedly she had forgiven him than her anecdote struck me as
-presenting to my own tenderness an occasion for doing. This came out
-when, at the schoolroom door, she quitted me. "Surely you don't accuse
-HIM--"
-
-"Of carrying on an intercourse that he conceals from me? Ah, remember
-that, until further evidence, I now accuse nobody." Then, before
-shutting her out to go, by another passage, to her own place, "I must
-just wait," I wound up.
-
-
-
-
-IX
-
-
-I waited and waited, and the days, as they elapsed, took something from
-my consternation. A very few of them, in fact, passing, in constant
-sight of my pupils, without a fresh incident, sufficed to give to
-grievous fancies and even to odious memories a kind of brush of the
-sponge. I have spoken of the surrender to their extraordinary childish
-grace as a thing I could actively cultivate, and it may be imagined if
-I neglected now to address myself to this source for whatever it
-would yield. Stranger than I can express, certainly, was the effort to
-struggle against my new lights; it would doubtless have been, however,
-a greater tension still had it not been so frequently successful. I
-used to wonder how my little charges could help guessing that I thought
-strange things about them; and the circumstances that these things only
-made them more interesting was not by itself a direct aid to keeping
-them in the dark. I trembled lest they should see that they WERE so
-immensely more interesting. Putting things at the worst, at all events,
-as in meditation I so often did, any clouding of their innocence could
-only be--blameless and foredoomed as they were--a reason the more for
-taking risks. There were moments when, by an irresistible impulse, I
-found myself catching them up and pressing them to my heart. As soon as
-I had done so I used to say to myself: "What will they think of that?
-Doesn't it betray too much?" It would have been easy to get into a sad,
-wild tangle about how much I might betray; but the real account, I feel,
-of the hours of peace that I could still enjoy was that the immediate
-charm of my companions was a beguilement still effective even under the
-shadow of the possibility that it was studied. For if it occurred to me
-that I might occasionally excite suspicion by the little outbreaks of my
-sharper passion for them, so too I remember wondering if I mightn't see
-a queerness in the traceable increase of their own demonstrations.
-
-They were at this period extravagantly and preternaturally fond of me;
-which, after all, I could reflect, was no more than a graceful response
-in children perpetually bowed over and hugged. The homage of which they
-were so lavish succeeded, in truth, for my nerves, quite as well as if
-I never appeared to myself, as I may say, literally to catch them at a
-purpose in it. They had never, I think, wanted to do so many things for
-their poor protectress; I mean--though they got their lessons better and
-better, which was naturally what would please her most--in the way of
-diverting, entertaining, surprising her; reading her passages, telling
-her stories, acting her charades, pouncing out at her, in disguises, as
-animals and historical characters, and above all astonishing her by the
-"pieces" they had secretly got by heart and could interminably recite. I
-should never get to the bottom--were I to let myself go even now--of the
-prodigious private commentary, all under still more private correction,
-with which, in these days, I overscored their full hours. They had shown
-me from the first a facility for everything, a general faculty which,
-taking a fresh start, achieved remarkable flights. They got their little
-tasks as if they loved them, and indulged, from the mere exuberance of
-the gift, in the most unimposed little miracles of memory. They not
-only popped out at me as tigers and as Romans, but as Shakespeareans,
-astronomers, and navigators. This was so singularly the case that it had
-presumably much to do with the fact as to which, at the present day,
-I am at a loss for a different explanation: I allude to my unnatural
-composure on the subject of another school for Miles. What I remember
-is that I was content not, for the time, to open the question, and that
-contentment must have sprung from the sense of his perpetually striking
-show of cleverness. He was too clever for a bad governess, for a
-parson's daughter, to spoil; and the strangest if not the brightest
-thread in the pensive embroidery I just spoke of was the impression I
-might have got, if I had dared to work it out, that he was under some
-influence operating in his small intellectual life as a tremendous
-incitement.
-
-If it was easy to reflect, however, that such a boy could postpone
-school, it was at least as marked that for such a boy to have been
-"kicked out" by a schoolmaster was a mystification without end. Let me
-add that in their company now--and I was careful almost never to be out
-of it--I could follow no scent very far. We lived in a cloud of music
-and love and success and private theatricals. The musical sense in each
-of the children was of the quickest, but the elder in especial had a
-marvelous knack of catching and repeating. The schoolroom piano
-broke into all gruesome fancies; and when that failed there were
-confabulations in corners, with a sequel of one of them going out in
-the highest spirits in order to "come in" as something new. I had had
-brothers myself, and it was no revelation to me that little girls could
-be slavish idolaters of little boys. What surpassed everything was that
-there was a little boy in the world who could have for the inferior age,
-sex, and intelligence so fine a consideration. They were extraordinarily
-at one, and to say that they never either quarreled or complained is
-to make the note of praise coarse for their quality of sweetness.
-Sometimes, indeed, when I dropped into coarseness, I perhaps came across
-traces of little understandings between them by which one of them should
-keep me occupied while the other slipped away. There is a naive side,
-I suppose, in all diplomacy; but if my pupils practiced upon me, it was
-surely with the minimum of grossness. It was all in the other quarter
-that, after a lull, the grossness broke out.
-
-I find that I really hang back; but I must take my plunge. In going on
-with the record of what was hideous at Bly, I not only challenge the
-most liberal faith--for which I little care; but--and this is another
-matter--I renew what I myself suffered, I again push my way through it
-to the end. There came suddenly an hour after which, as I look back, the
-affair seems to me to have been all pure suffering; but I have at least
-reached the heart of it, and the straightest road out is doubtless to
-advance. One evening--with nothing to lead up or to prepare it--I felt
-the cold touch of the impression that had breathed on me the night of
-my arrival and which, much lighter then, as I have mentioned, I should
-probably have made little of in memory had my subsequent sojourn been
-less agitated. I had not gone to bed; I sat reading by a couple of
-candles. There was a roomful of old books at Bly--last-century fiction,
-some of it, which, to the extent of a distinctly deprecated renown,
-but never to so much as that of a stray specimen, had reached the
-sequestered home and appealed to the unavowed curiosity of my youth. I
-remember that the book I had in my hand was Fielding's Amelia; also that
-I was wholly awake. I recall further both a general conviction that it
-was horribly late and a particular objection to looking at my watch. I
-figure, finally, that the white curtain draping, in the fashion of those
-days, the head of Flora's little bed, shrouded, as I had assured myself
-long before, the perfection of childish rest. I recollect in short that,
-though I was deeply interested in my author, I found myself, at the turn
-of a page and with his spell all scattered, looking straight up from
-him and hard at the door of my room. There was a moment during which
-I listened, reminded of the faint sense I had had, the first night, of
-there being something undefinably astir in the house, and noted the soft
-breath of the open casement just move the half-drawn blind. Then, with
-all the marks of a deliberation that must have seemed magnificent had
-there been anyone to admire it, I laid down my book, rose to my feet,
-and, taking a candle, went straight out of the room and, from the
-passage, on which my light made little impression, noiselessly closed
-and locked the door.
-
-I can say now neither what determined nor what guided me, but I went
-straight along the lobby, holding my candle high, till I came within
-sight of the tall window that presided over the great turn of the
-staircase. At this point I precipitately found myself aware of three
-things. They were practically simultaneous, yet they had flashes of
-succession. My candle, under a bold flourish, went out, and I perceived,
-by the uncovered window, that the yielding dusk of earliest morning
-rendered it unnecessary. Without it, the next instant, I saw that there
-was someone on the stair. I speak of sequences, but I required no lapse
-of seconds to stiffen myself for a third encounter with Quint. The
-apparition had reached the landing halfway up and was therefore on the
-spot nearest the window, where at sight of me, it stopped short and
-fixed me exactly as it had fixed me from the tower and from the garden.
-He knew me as well as I knew him; and so, in the cold, faint twilight,
-with a glimmer in the high glass and another on the polish of the
-oak stair below, we faced each other in our common intensity. He was
-absolutely, on this occasion, a living, detestable, dangerous presence.
-But that was not the wonder of wonders; I reserve this distinction for
-quite another circumstance: the circumstance that dread had unmistakably
-quitted me and that there was nothing in me there that didn't meet and
-measure him.
-
-I had plenty of anguish after that extraordinary moment, but I had,
-thank God, no terror. And he knew I had not--I found myself at the end
-of an instant magnificently aware of this. I felt, in a fierce rigor of
-confidence, that if I stood my ground a minute I should cease--for
-the time, at least--to have him to reckon with; and during the minute,
-accordingly, the thing was as human and hideous as a real interview:
-hideous just because it WAS human, as human as to have met alone, in
-the small hours, in a sleeping house, some enemy, some adventurer,
-some criminal. It was the dead silence of our long gaze at such close
-quarters that gave the whole horror, huge as it was, its only note of
-the unnatural. If I had met a murderer in such a place and at such an
-hour, we still at least would have spoken. Something would have passed,
-in life, between us; if nothing had passed, one of us would have moved.
-The moment was so prolonged that it would have taken but little more to
-make me doubt if even _I_ were in life. I can't express what followed it
-save by saying that the silence itself--which was indeed in a manner
-an attestation of my strength--became the element into which I saw the
-figure disappear; in which I definitely saw it turn as I might have
-seen the low wretch to which it had once belonged turn on receipt of an
-order, and pass, with my eyes on the villainous back that no hunch could
-have more disfigured, straight down the staircase and into the darkness
-in which the next bend was lost.
-
-
-
-
-X
-
-
-I remained awhile at the top of the stair, but with the effect presently
-of understanding that when my visitor had gone, he had gone: then I
-returned to my room. The foremost thing I saw there by the light of the
-candle I had left burning was that Flora's little bed was empty; and on
-this I caught my breath with all the terror that, five minutes before,
-I had been able to resist. I dashed at the place in which I had left her
-lying and over which (for the small silk counterpane and the sheets were
-disarranged) the white curtains had been deceivingly pulled forward;
-then my step, to my unutterable relief, produced an answering sound: I
-perceived an agitation of the window blind, and the child, ducking down,
-emerged rosily from the other side of it. She stood there in so much of
-her candor and so little of her nightgown, with her pink bare feet and
-the golden glow of her curls. She looked intensely grave, and I had
-never had such a sense of losing an advantage acquired (the thrill
-of which had just been so prodigious) as on my consciousness that
-she addressed me with a reproach. "You naughty: where HAVE you
-been?"--instead of challenging her own irregularity I found myself
-arraigned and explaining. She herself explained, for that matter, with
-the loveliest, eagerest simplicity. She had known suddenly, as she lay
-there, that I was out of the room, and had jumped up to see what had
-become of me. I had dropped, with the joy of her reappearance, back
-into my chair--feeling then, and then only, a little faint; and she had
-pattered straight over to me, thrown herself upon my knee, given herself
-to be held with the flame of the candle full in the wonderful little
-face that was still flushed with sleep. I remember closing my eyes an
-instant, yieldingly, consciously, as before the excess of something
-beautiful that shone out of the blue of her own. "You were looking for
-me out of the window?" I said. "You thought I might be walking in the
-grounds?"
-
-"Well, you know, I thought someone was"--she never blanched as she
-smiled out that at me.
-
-Oh, how I looked at her now! "And did you see anyone?"
-
-"Ah, NO!" she returned, almost with the full privilege of childish
-inconsequence, resentfully, though with a long sweetness in her little
-drawl of the negative.
-
-At that moment, in the state of my nerves, I absolutely believed she
-lied; and if I once more closed my eyes it was before the dazzle of the
-three or four possible ways in which I might take this up. One of these,
-for a moment, tempted me with such singular intensity that, to withstand
-it, I must have gripped my little girl with a spasm that, wonderfully,
-she submitted to without a cry or a sign of fright. Why not break out
-at her on the spot and have it all over?--give it to her straight in her
-lovely little lighted face? "You see, you see, you KNOW that you do and
-that you already quite suspect I believe it; therefore, why not frankly
-confess it to me, so that we may at least live with it together and
-learn perhaps, in the strangeness of our fate, where we are and what
-it means?" This solicitation dropped, alas, as it came: if I could
-immediately have succumbed to it I might have spared myself--well,
-you'll see what. Instead of succumbing I sprang again to my feet,
-looked at her bed, and took a helpless middle way. "Why did you pull the
-curtain over the place to make me think you were still there?"
-
-Flora luminously considered; after which, with her little divine smile:
-"Because I don't like to frighten you!"
-
-"But if I had, by your idea, gone out--?"
-
-She absolutely declined to be puzzled; she turned her eyes to the flame
-of the candle as if the question were as irrelevant, or at any rate as
-impersonal, as Mrs. Marcet or nine-times-nine. "Oh, but you know," she
-quite adequately answered, "that you might come back, you dear, and that
-you HAVE!" And after a little, when she had got into bed, I had, for a
-long time, by almost sitting on her to hold her hand, to prove that I
-recognized the pertinence of my return.
-
-You may imagine the general complexion, from that moment, of my nights.
-I repeatedly sat up till I didn't know when; I selected moments when my
-roommate unmistakably slept, and, stealing out, took noiseless turns in
-the passage and even pushed as far as to where I had last met Quint. But
-I never met him there again; and I may as well say at once that I on no
-other occasion saw him in the house. I just missed, on the staircase,
-on the other hand, a different adventure. Looking down it from the top I
-once recognized the presence of a woman seated on one of the lower steps
-with her back presented to me, her body half-bowed and her head, in an
-attitude of woe, in her hands. I had been there but an instant, however,
-when she vanished without looking round at me. I knew, nonetheless,
-exactly what dreadful face she had to show; and I wondered whether, if
-instead of being above I had been below, I should have had, for going
-up, the same nerve I had lately shown Quint. Well, there continued to
-be plenty of chance for nerve. On the eleventh night after my latest
-encounter with that gentleman--they were all numbered now--I had an
-alarm that perilously skirted it and that indeed, from the particular
-quality of its unexpectedness, proved quite my sharpest shock. It was
-precisely the first night during this series that, weary with watching,
-I had felt that I might again without laxity lay myself down at my
-old hour. I slept immediately and, as I afterward knew, till about one
-o'clock; but when I woke it was to sit straight up, as completely roused
-as if a hand had shook me. I had left a light burning, but it was now
-out, and I felt an instant certainty that Flora had extinguished it.
-This brought me to my feet and straight, in the darkness, to her bed,
-which I found she had left. A glance at the window enlightened me
-further, and the striking of a match completed the picture.
-
-The child had again got up--this time blowing out the taper, and had
-again, for some purpose of observation or response, squeezed in behind
-the blind and was peering out into the night. That she now saw--as she
-had not, I had satisfied myself, the previous time--was proved to me by
-the fact that she was disturbed neither by my reillumination nor by the
-haste I made to get into slippers and into a wrap. Hidden, protected,
-absorbed, she evidently rested on the sill--the casement opened
-forward--and gave herself up. There was a great still moon to help her,
-and this fact had counted in my quick decision. She was face to face
-with the apparition we had met at the lake, and could now communicate
-with it as she had not then been able to do. What I, on my side, had to
-care for was, without disturbing her, to reach, from the corridor, some
-other window in the same quarter. I got to the door without her hearing
-me; I got out of it, closed it, and listened, from the other side, for
-some sound from her. While I stood in the passage I had my eyes on her
-brother's door, which was but ten steps off and which, indescribably,
-produced in me a renewal of the strange impulse that I lately spoke
-of as my temptation. What if I should go straight in and march to HIS
-window?--what if, by risking to his boyish bewilderment a revelation of
-my motive, I should throw across the rest of the mystery the long halter
-of my boldness?
-
-This thought held me sufficiently to make me cross to his threshold and
-pause again. I preternaturally listened; I figured to myself what might
-portentously be; I wondered if his bed were also empty and he too were
-secretly at watch. It was a deep, soundless minute, at the end of which
-my impulse failed. He was quiet; he might be innocent; the risk was
-hideous; I turned away. There was a figure in the grounds--a figure
-prowling for a sight, the visitor with whom Flora was engaged; but it
-was not the visitor most concerned with my boy. I hesitated afresh, but
-on other grounds and only for a few seconds; then I had made my choice.
-There were empty rooms at Bly, and it was only a question of choosing
-the right one. The right one suddenly presented itself to me as the
-lower one--though high above the gardens--in the solid corner of the
-house that I have spoken of as the old tower. This was a large, square
-chamber, arranged with some state as a bedroom, the extravagant size of
-which made it so inconvenient that it had not for years, though kept by
-Mrs. Grose in exemplary order, been occupied. I had often admired it and
-I knew my way about in it; I had only, after just faltering at the first
-chill gloom of its disuse, to pass across it and unbolt as quietly as I
-could one of the shutters. Achieving this transit, I uncovered the
-glass without a sound and, applying my face to the pane, was able, the
-darkness without being much less than within, to see that I commanded
-the right direction. Then I saw something more. The moon made the
-night extraordinarily penetrable and showed me on the lawn a person,
-diminished by distance, who stood there motionless and as if fascinated,
-looking up to where I had appeared--looking, that is, not so much
-straight at me as at something that was apparently above me. There was
-clearly another person above me--there was a person on the tower; but
-the presence on the lawn was not in the least what I had conceived and
-had confidently hurried to meet. The presence on the lawn--I felt sick
-as I made it out--was poor little Miles himself.
-
-
-
-
-XI
-
-
-It was not till late next day that I spoke to Mrs. Grose; the rigor with
-which I kept my pupils in sight making it often difficult to meet
-her privately, and the more as we each felt the importance of not
-provoking--on the part of the servants quite as much as on that of the
-children--any suspicion of a secret flurry or that of a discussion of
-mysteries. I drew a great security in this particular from her mere
-smooth aspect. There was nothing in her fresh face to pass on to others
-my horrible confidences. She believed me, I was sure, absolutely: if she
-hadn't I don't know what would have become of me, for I couldn't have
-borne the business alone. But she was a magnificent monument to the
-blessing of a want of imagination, and if she could see in our little
-charges nothing but their beauty and amiability, their happiness and
-cleverness, she had no direct communication with the sources of my
-trouble. If they had been at all visibly blighted or battered, she would
-doubtless have grown, on tracing it back, haggard enough to match them;
-as matters stood, however, I could feel her, when she surveyed them,
-with her large white arms folded and the habit of serenity in all her
-look, thank the Lord's mercy that if they were ruined the pieces would
-still serve. Flights of fancy gave place, in her mind, to a steady
-fireside glow, and I had already begun to perceive how, with the
-development of the conviction that--as time went on without a public
-accident--our young things could, after all, look out for themselves,
-she addressed her greatest solicitude to the sad case presented by their
-instructress. That, for myself, was a sound simplification: I could
-engage that, to the world, my face should tell no tales, but it would
-have been, in the conditions, an immense added strain to find myself
-anxious about hers.
-
-At the hour I now speak of she had joined me, under pressure, on the
-terrace, where, with the lapse of the season, the afternoon sun was now
-agreeable; and we sat there together while, before us, at a distance,
-but within call if we wished, the children strolled to and fro in one
-of their most manageable moods. They moved slowly, in unison, below us,
-over the lawn, the boy, as they went, reading aloud from a storybook and
-passing his arm round his sister to keep her quite in touch. Mrs. Grose
-watched them with positive placidity; then I caught the suppressed
-intellectual creak with which she conscientiously turned to take from me
-a view of the back of the tapestry. I had made her a receptacle of
-lurid things, but there was an odd recognition of my superiority--my
-accomplishments and my function--in her patience under my pain. She
-offered her mind to my disclosures as, had I wished to mix a witch's
-broth and proposed it with assurance, she would have held out a large
-clean saucepan. This had become thoroughly her attitude by the time
-that, in my recital of the events of the night, I reached the point of
-what Miles had said to me when, after seeing him, at such a monstrous
-hour, almost on the very spot where he happened now to be, I had gone
-down to bring him in; choosing then, at the window, with a concentrated
-need of not alarming the house, rather that method than a signal more
-resonant. I had left her meanwhile in little doubt of my small hope of
-representing with success even to her actual sympathy my sense of the
-real splendor of the little inspiration with which, after I had got him
-into the house, the boy met my final articulate challenge. As soon as I
-appeared in the moonlight on the terrace, he had come to me as straight
-as possible; on which I had taken his hand without a word and led him,
-through the dark spaces, up the staircase where Quint had so hungrily
-hovered for him, along the lobby where I had listened and trembled, and
-so to his forsaken room.
-
-Not a sound, on the way, had passed between us, and I had wondered--oh,
-HOW I had wondered!--if he were groping about in his little mind for
-something plausible and not too grotesque. It would tax his invention,
-certainly, and I felt, this time, over his real embarrassment, a curious
-thrill of triumph. It was a sharp trap for the inscrutable! He couldn't
-play any longer at innocence; so how the deuce would he get out of it?
-There beat in me indeed, with the passionate throb of this question an
-equal dumb appeal as to how the deuce _I_ should. I was confronted at
-last, as never yet, with all the risk attached even now to sounding my
-own horrid note. I remember in fact that as we pushed into his little
-chamber, where the bed had not been slept in at all and the window,
-uncovered to the moonlight, made the place so clear that there was no
-need of striking a match--I remember how I suddenly dropped, sank upon
-the edge of the bed from the force of the idea that he must know how he
-really, as they say, "had" me. He could do what he liked, with all his
-cleverness to help him, so long as I should continue to defer to the
-old tradition of the criminality of those caretakers of the young who
-minister to superstitions and fears. He "had" me indeed, and in a cleft
-stick; for who would ever absolve me, who would consent that I should go
-unhung, if, by the faintest tremor of an overture, I were the first to
-introduce into our perfect intercourse an element so dire? No, no: it
-was useless to attempt to convey to Mrs. Grose, just as it is scarcely
-less so to attempt to suggest here, how, in our short, stiff brush in
-the dark, he fairly shook me with admiration. I was of course thoroughly
-kind and merciful; never, never yet had I placed on his little shoulders
-hands of such tenderness as those with which, while I rested against the
-bed, I held him there well under fire. I had no alternative but, in form
-at least, to put it to him.
-
-"You must tell me now--and all the truth. What did you go out for? What
-were you doing there?"
-
-I can still see his wonderful smile, the whites of his beautiful eyes,
-and the uncovering of his little teeth shine to me in the dusk. "If I
-tell you why, will you understand?" My heart, at this, leaped into my
-mouth. WOULD he tell me why? I found no sound on my lips to press it,
-and I was aware of replying only with a vague, repeated, grimacing nod.
-He was gentleness itself, and while I wagged my head at him he stood
-there more than ever a little fairy prince. It was his brightness indeed
-that gave me a respite. Would it be so great if he were really going to
-tell me? "Well," he said at last, "just exactly in order that you should
-do this."
-
-"Do what?"
-
-"Think me--for a change--BAD!" I shall never forget the sweetness and
-gaiety with which he brought out the word, nor how, on top of it, he
-bent forward and kissed me. It was practically the end of everything.
-I met his kiss and I had to make, while I folded him for a minute in my
-arms, the most stupendous effort not to cry. He had given exactly the
-account of himself that permitted least of my going behind it, and it
-was only with the effect of confirming my acceptance of it that, as I
-presently glanced about the room, I could say--
-
-"Then you didn't undress at all?"
-
-He fairly glittered in the gloom. "Not at all. I sat up and read."
-
-"And when did you go down?"
-
-"At midnight. When I'm bad I AM bad!"
-
-"I see, I see--it's charming. But how could you be sure I would know
-it?"
-
-"Oh, I arranged that with Flora." His answers rang out with a readiness!
-"She was to get up and look out."
-
-"Which is what she did do." It was I who fell into the trap!
-
-"So she disturbed you, and, to see what she was looking at, you also
-looked--you saw."
-
-"While you," I concurred, "caught your death in the night air!"
-
-He literally bloomed so from this exploit that he could afford radiantly
-to assent. "How otherwise should I have been bad enough?" he asked.
-Then, after another embrace, the incident and our interview closed on my
-recognition of all the reserves of goodness that, for his joke, he had
-been able to draw upon.
-
-
-
-
-XII
-
-
-The particular impression I had received proved in the morning light,
-I repeat, not quite successfully presentable to Mrs. Grose, though I
-reinforced it with the mention of still another remark that he had made
-before we separated. "It all lies in half a dozen words," I said to her,
-"words that really settle the matter. 'Think, you know, what I MIGHT
-do!' He threw that off to show me how good he is. He knows down to
-the ground what he 'might' do. That's what he gave them a taste of at
-school."
-
-"Lord, you do change!" cried my friend.
-
-"I don't change--I simply make it out. The four, depend upon it,
-perpetually meet. If on either of these last nights you had been with
-either child, you would clearly have understood. The more I've watched
-and waited the more I've felt that if there were nothing else to make it
-sure it would be made so by the systematic silence of each. NEVER, by a
-slip of the tongue, have they so much as alluded to either of their old
-friends, any more than Miles has alluded to his expulsion. Oh, yes,
-we may sit here and look at them, and they may show off to us there to
-their fill; but even while they pretend to be lost in their fairytale
-they're steeped in their vision of the dead restored. He's not reading
-to her," I declared; "they're talking of THEM--they're talking horrors!
-I go on, I know, as if I were crazy; and it's a wonder I'm not. What
-I've seen would have made YOU so; but it has only made me more lucid,
-made me get hold of still other things."
-
-My lucidity must have seemed awful, but the charming creatures who were
-victims of it, passing and repassing in their interlocked sweetness,
-gave my colleague something to hold on by; and I felt how tight she held
-as, without stirring in the breath of my passion, she covered them still
-with her eyes. "Of what other things have you got hold?"
-
-"Why, of the very things that have delighted, fascinated, and yet, at
-bottom, as I now so strangely see, mystified and troubled me. Their more
-than earthly beauty, their absolutely unnatural goodness. It's a game,"
-I went on; "it's a policy and a fraud!"
-
-"On the part of little darlings--?"
-
-"As yet mere lovely babies? Yes, mad as that seems!" The very act of
-bringing it out really helped me to trace it--follow it all up and piece
-it all together. "They haven't been good--they've only been absent. It
-has been easy to live with them, because they're simply leading a
-life of their own. They're not mine--they're not ours. They're his and
-they're hers!"
-
-"Quint's and that woman's?"
-
-"Quint's and that woman's. They want to get to them."
-
-Oh, how, at this, poor Mrs. Grose appeared to study them! "But for
-what?"
-
-"For the love of all the evil that, in those dreadful days, the pair put
-into them. And to ply them with that evil still, to keep up the work of
-demons, is what brings the others back."
-
-"Laws!" said my friend under her breath. The exclamation was homely, but
-it revealed a real acceptance of my further proof of what, in the bad
-time--for there had been a worse even than this!--must have occurred.
-There could have been no such justification for me as the plain assent
-of her experience to whatever depth of depravity I found credible in
-our brace of scoundrels. It was in obvious submission of memory that she
-brought out after a moment: "They WERE rascals! But what can they now
-do?" she pursued.
-
-"Do?" I echoed so loud that Miles and Flora, as they passed at their
-distance, paused an instant in their walk and looked at us. "Don't
-they do enough?" I demanded in a lower tone, while the children, having
-smiled and nodded and kissed hands to us, resumed their exhibition. We
-were held by it a minute; then I answered: "They can destroy them!" At
-this my companion did turn, but the inquiry she launched was a silent
-one, the effect of which was to make me more explicit. "They don't know,
-as yet, quite how--but they're trying hard. They're seen only across,
-as it were, and beyond--in strange places and on high places, the top of
-towers, the roof of houses, the outside of windows, the further edge
-of pools; but there's a deep design, on either side, to shorten the
-distance and overcome the obstacle; and the success of the tempters is
-only a question of time. They've only to keep to their suggestions of
-danger."
-
-"For the children to come?"
-
-"And perish in the attempt!" Mrs. Grose slowly got up, and I
-scrupulously added: "Unless, of course, we can prevent!"
-
-Standing there before me while I kept my seat, she visibly turned things
-over. "Their uncle must do the preventing. He must take them away."
-
-"And who's to make him?"
-
-She had been scanning the distance, but she now dropped on me a foolish
-face. "You, miss."
-
-"By writing to him that his house is poisoned and his little nephew and
-niece mad?"
-
-"But if they ARE, miss?"
-
-"And if I am myself, you mean? That's charming news to be sent him by a
-governess whose prime undertaking was to give him no worry."
-
-Mrs. Grose considered, following the children again. "Yes, he do hate
-worry. That was the great reason--"
-
-"Why those fiends took him in so long? No doubt, though his indifference
-must have been awful. As I'm not a fiend, at any rate, I shouldn't take
-him in."
-
-My companion, after an instant and for all answer, sat down again and
-grasped my arm. "Make him at any rate come to you."
-
-I stared. "To ME?" I had a sudden fear of what she might do. "'Him'?"
-
-"He ought to BE here--he ought to help."
-
-I quickly rose, and I think I must have shown her a queerer face than
-ever yet. "You see me asking him for a visit?" No, with her eyes on
-my face she evidently couldn't. Instead of it even--as a woman reads
-another--she could see what I myself saw: his derision, his amusement,
-his contempt for the breakdown of my resignation at being left alone and
-for the fine machinery I had set in motion to attract his attention to
-my slighted charms. She didn't know--no one knew--how proud I had been
-to serve him and to stick to our terms; yet she nonetheless took the
-measure, I think, of the warning I now gave her. "If you should so lose
-your head as to appeal to him for me--"
-
-She was really frightened. "Yes, miss?"
-
-"I would leave, on the spot, both him and you."
-
-
-
-
-XIII
-
-
-It was all very well to join them, but speaking to them proved quite as
-much as ever an effort beyond my strength--offered, in close quarters,
-difficulties as insurmountable as before. This situation continued a
-month, and with new aggravations and particular notes, the note above
-all, sharper and sharper, of the small ironic consciousness on the part
-of my pupils. It was not, I am as sure today as I was sure then, my mere
-infernal imagination: it was absolutely traceable that they were aware
-of my predicament and that this strange relation made, in a manner, for
-a long time, the air in which we moved. I don't mean that they had their
-tongues in their cheeks or did anything vulgar, for that was not one
-of their dangers: I do mean, on the other hand, that the element of the
-unnamed and untouched became, between us, greater than any other, and
-that so much avoidance could not have been so successfully effected
-without a great deal of tacit arrangement. It was as if, at moments, we
-were perpetually coming into sight of subjects before which we must stop
-short, turning suddenly out of alleys that we perceived to be blind,
-closing with a little bang that made us look at each other--for, like
-all bangs, it was something louder than we had intended--the doors we
-had indiscreetly opened. All roads lead to Rome, and there were times
-when it might have struck us that almost every branch of study or
-subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground. Forbidden ground was
-the question of the return of the dead in general and of whatever, in
-especial, might survive, in memory, of the friends little children had
-lost. There were days when I could have sworn that one of them had, with
-a small invisible nudge, said to the other: "She thinks she'll do it
-this time--but she WON'T!" To "do it" would have been to indulge for
-instance--and for once in a way--in some direct reference to the lady
-who had prepared them for my discipline. They had a delightful endless
-appetite for passages in my own history, to which I had again and
-again treated them; they were in possession of everything that had
-ever happened to me, had had, with every circumstance the story of my
-smallest adventures and of those of my brothers and sisters and of the
-cat and the dog at home, as well as many particulars of the eccentric
-nature of my father, of the furniture and arrangement of our house, and
-of the conversation of the old women of our village. There were things
-enough, taking one with another, to chatter about, if one went very fast
-and knew by instinct when to go round. They pulled with an art of their
-own the strings of my invention and my memory; and nothing else perhaps,
-when I thought of such occasions afterward, gave me so the suspicion
-of being watched from under cover. It was in any case over MY life, MY
-past, and MY friends alone that we could take anything like our ease--a
-state of affairs that led them sometimes without the least pertinence
-to break out into sociable reminders. I was invited--with no visible
-connection--to repeat afresh Goody Gosling's celebrated mot or to
-confirm the details already supplied as to the cleverness of the
-vicarage pony.
-
-It was partly at such junctures as these and partly at quite different
-ones that, with the turn my matters had now taken, my predicament, as I
-have called it, grew most sensible. The fact that the days passed for
-me without another encounter ought, it would have appeared, to have done
-something toward soothing my nerves. Since the light brush, that second
-night on the upper landing, of the presence of a woman at the foot of
-the stair, I had seen nothing, whether in or out of the house, that one
-had better not have seen. There was many a corner round which I expected
-to come upon Quint, and many a situation that, in a merely sinister way,
-would have favored the appearance of Miss Jessel. The summer had turned,
-the summer had gone; the autumn had dropped upon Bly and had blown out
-half our lights. The place, with its gray sky and withered garlands,
-its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was like a theater after
-the performance--all strewn with crumpled playbills. There were exactly
-states of the air, conditions of sound and of stillness, unspeakable
-impressions of the KIND of ministering moment, that brought back to me,
-long enough to catch it, the feeling of the medium in which, that June
-evening out of doors, I had had my first sight of Quint, and in which,
-too, at those other instants, I had, after seeing him through the
-window, looked for him in vain in the circle of shrubbery. I recognized
-the signs, the portents--I recognized the moment, the spot. But they
-remained unaccompanied and empty, and I continued unmolested; if
-unmolested one could call a young woman whose sensibility had, in the
-most extraordinary fashion, not declined but deepened. I had said in my
-talk with Mrs. Grose on that horrid scene of Flora's by the lake--and
-had perplexed her by so saying--that it would from that moment distress
-me much more to lose my power than to keep it. I had then expressed what
-was vividly in my mind: the truth that, whether the children really
-saw or not--since, that is, it was not yet definitely proved--I greatly
-preferred, as a safeguard, the fullness of my own exposure. I was ready
-to know the very worst that was to be known. What I had then had an ugly
-glimpse of was that my eyes might be sealed just while theirs were
-most opened. Well, my eyes WERE sealed, it appeared, at present--a
-consummation for which it seemed blasphemous not to thank God. There
-was, alas, a difficulty about that: I would have thanked him with all
-my soul had I not had in a proportionate measure this conviction of the
-secret of my pupils.
-
-How can I retrace today the strange steps of my obsession? There were
-times of our being together when I would have been ready to swear that,
-literally, in my presence, but with my direct sense of it closed, they
-had visitors who were known and were welcome. Then it was that, had I
-not been deterred by the very chance that such an injury might prove
-greater than the injury to be averted, my exultation would have broken
-out. "They're here, they're here, you little wretches," I would have
-cried, "and you can't deny it now!" The little wretches denied it with
-all the added volume of their sociability and their tenderness, in just
-the crystal depths of which--like the flash of a fish in a stream--the
-mockery of their advantage peeped up. The shock, in truth, had sunk into
-me still deeper than I knew on the night when, looking out to see either
-Quint or Miss Jessel under the stars, I had beheld the boy over
-whose rest I watched and who had immediately brought in with him--had
-straightway, there, turned it on me--the lovely upward look with which,
-from the battlements above me, the hideous apparition of Quint had
-played. If it was a question of a scare, my discovery on this occasion
-had scared me more than any other, and it was in the condition of nerves
-produced by it that I made my actual inductions. They harassed me so
-that sometimes, at odd moments, I shut myself up audibly to rehearse--it
-was at once a fantastic relief and a renewed despair--the manner in
-which I might come to the point. I approached it from one side and the
-other while, in my room, I flung myself about, but I always broke down
-in the monstrous utterance of names. As they died away on my lips, I
-said to myself that I should indeed help them to represent something
-infamous, if, by pronouncing them, I should violate as rare a little
-case of instinctive delicacy as any schoolroom, probably, had ever
-known. When I said to myself: "THEY have the manners to be silent, and
-you, trusted as you are, the baseness to speak!" I felt myself crimson
-and I covered my face with my hands. After these secret scenes I
-chattered more than ever, going on volubly enough till one of our
-prodigious, palpable hushes occurred--I can call them nothing else--the
-strange, dizzy lift or swim (I try for terms!) into a stillness, a pause
-of all life, that had nothing to do with the more or less noise that at
-the moment we might be engaged in making and that I could hear through
-any deepened exhilaration or quickened recitation or louder strum of the
-piano. Then it was that the others, the outsiders, were there. Though
-they were not angels, they "passed," as the French say, causing me,
-while they stayed, to tremble with the fear of their addressing to their
-younger victims some yet more infernal message or more vivid image than
-they had thought good enough for myself.
-
-What it was most impossible to get rid of was the cruel idea that,
-whatever I had seen, Miles and Flora saw MORE--things terrible and
-unguessable and that sprang from dreadful passages of intercourse in the
-past. Such things naturally left on the surface, for the time, a chill
-which we vociferously denied that we felt; and we had, all three, with
-repetition, got into such splendid training that we went, each time,
-almost automatically, to mark the close of the incident, through the
-very same movements. It was striking of the children, at all events,
-to kiss me inveterately with a kind of wild irrelevance and never to
-fail--one or the other--of the precious question that had helped us
-through many a peril. "When do you think he WILL come? Don't you think
-we OUGHT to write?"--there was nothing like that inquiry, we found by
-experience, for carrying off an awkwardness. "He" of course was their
-uncle in Harley Street; and we lived in much profusion of theory that he
-might at any moment arrive to mingle in our circle. It was impossible to
-have given less encouragement than he had done to such a doctrine, but
-if we had not had the doctrine to fall back upon we should have
-deprived each other of some of our finest exhibitions. He never wrote to
-them--that may have been selfish, but it was a part of the flattery of
-his trust of me; for the way in which a man pays his highest tribute to
-a woman is apt to be but by the more festal celebration of one of the
-sacred laws of his comfort; and I held that I carried out the spirit of
-the pledge given not to appeal to him when I let my charges understand
-that their own letters were but charming literary exercises. They were
-too beautiful to be posted; I kept them myself; I have them all to this
-hour. This was a rule indeed which only added to the satiric effect of
-my being plied with the supposition that he might at any moment be among
-us. It was exactly as if my charges knew how almost more awkward than
-anything else that might be for me. There appears to me, moreover, as
-I look back, no note in all this more extraordinary than the mere fact
-that, in spite of my tension and of their triumph, I never lost patience
-with them. Adorable they must in truth have been, I now reflect, that I
-didn't in these days hate them! Would exasperation, however, if relief
-had longer been postponed, finally have betrayed me? It little matters,
-for relief arrived. I call it relief, though it was only the relief that
-a snap brings to a strain or the burst of a thunderstorm to a day of
-suffocation. It was at least change, and it came with a rush.
-
-
-
-
-XIV
-
-
-Walking to church a certain Sunday morning, I had little Miles at my
-side and his sister, in advance of us and at Mrs. Grose's, well in
-sight. It was a crisp, clear day, the first of its order for some time;
-the night had brought a touch of frost, and the autumn air, bright
-and sharp, made the church bells almost gay. It was an odd accident of
-thought that I should have happened at such a moment to be particularly
-and very gratefully struck with the obedience of my little charges. Why
-did they never resent my inexorable, my perpetual society? Something or
-other had brought nearer home to me that I had all but pinned the boy to
-my shawl and that, in the way our companions were marshaled before me,
-I might have appeared to provide against some danger of rebellion. I
-was like a gaoler with an eye to possible surprises and escapes. But all
-this belonged--I mean their magnificent little surrender--just to the
-special array of the facts that were most abysmal. Turned out for Sunday
-by his uncle's tailor, who had had a free hand and a notion of
-pretty waistcoats and of his grand little air, Miles's whole title to
-independence, the rights of his sex and situation, were so stamped upon
-him that if he had suddenly struck for freedom I should have had nothing
-to say. I was by the strangest of chances wondering how I should meet
-him when the revolution unmistakably occurred. I call it a revolution
-because I now see how, with the word he spoke, the curtain rose on the
-last act of my dreadful drama, and the catastrophe was precipitated.
-"Look here, my dear, you know," he charmingly said, "when in the world,
-please, am I going back to school?"
-
-Transcribed here the speech sounds harmless enough, particularly
-as uttered in the sweet, high, casual pipe with which, at all
-interlocutors, but above all at his eternal governess, he threw off
-intonations as if he were tossing roses. There was something in
-them that always made one "catch," and I caught, at any rate, now so
-effectually that I stopped as short as if one of the trees of the
-park had fallen across the road. There was something new, on the spot,
-between us, and he was perfectly aware that I recognized it, though,
-to enable me to do so, he had no need to look a whit less candid and
-charming than usual. I could feel in him how he already, from my at
-first finding nothing to reply, perceived the advantage he had gained. I
-was so slow to find anything that he had plenty of time, after a minute,
-to continue with his suggestive but inconclusive smile: "You know, my
-dear, that for a fellow to be with a lady ALWAYS--!" His "my dear" was
-constantly on his lips for me, and nothing could have expressed more the
-exact shade of the sentiment with which I desired to inspire my pupils
-than its fond familiarity. It was so respectfully easy.
-
-But, oh, how I felt that at present I must pick my own phrases! I
-remember that, to gain time, I tried to laugh, and I seemed to see in
-the beautiful face with which he watched me how ugly and queer I looked.
-"And always with the same lady?" I returned.
-
-He neither blanched nor winked. The whole thing was virtually out
-between us. "Ah, of course, she's a jolly, 'perfect' lady; but, after
-all, I'm a fellow, don't you see? that's--well, getting on."
-
-I lingered there with him an instant ever so kindly. "Yes, you're
-getting on." Oh, but I felt helpless!
-
-I have kept to this day the heartbreaking little idea of how he seemed
-to know that and to play with it. "And you can't say I've not been
-awfully good, can you?"
-
-I laid my hand on his shoulder, for, though I felt how much better it
-would have been to walk on, I was not yet quite able. "No, I can't say
-that, Miles."
-
-"Except just that one night, you know--!"
-
-"That one night?" I couldn't look as straight as he.
-
-"Why, when I went down--went out of the house."
-
-"Oh, yes. But I forget what you did it for."
-
-"You forget?"--he spoke with the sweet extravagance of childish
-reproach. "Why, it was to show you I could!"
-
-"Oh, yes, you could."
-
-"And I can again."
-
-I felt that I might, perhaps, after all, succeed in keeping my wits
-about me. "Certainly. But you won't."
-
-"No, not THAT again. It was nothing."
-
-"It was nothing," I said. "But we must go on."
-
-He resumed our walk with me, passing his hand into my arm. "Then when AM
-I going back?"
-
-I wore, in turning it over, my most responsible air. "Were you very
-happy at school?"
-
-He just considered. "Oh, I'm happy enough anywhere!"
-
-"Well, then," I quavered, "if you're just as happy here--!"
-
-"Ah, but that isn't everything! Of course YOU know a lot--"
-
-"But you hint that you know almost as much?" I risked as he paused.
-
-"Not half I want to!" Miles honestly professed. "But it isn't so much
-that."
-
-"What is it, then?"
-
-"Well--I want to see more life."
-
-"I see; I see." We had arrived within sight of the church and of various
-persons, including several of the household of Bly, on their way to it
-and clustered about the door to see us go in. I quickened our step;
-I wanted to get there before the question between us opened up much
-further; I reflected hungrily that, for more than an hour, he would have
-to be silent; and I thought with envy of the comparative dusk of the pew
-and of the almost spiritual help of the hassock on which I might bend
-my knees. I seemed literally to be running a race with some confusion
-to which he was about to reduce me, but I felt that he had got in first
-when, before we had even entered the churchyard, he threw out--
-
-"I want my own sort!"
-
-It literally made me bound forward. "There are not many of your own
-sort, Miles!" I laughed. "Unless perhaps dear little Flora!"
-
-"You really compare me to a baby girl?"
-
-This found me singularly weak. "Don't you, then, LOVE our sweet Flora?"
-
-"If I didn't--and you, too; if I didn't--!" he repeated as if retreating
-for a jump, yet leaving his thought so unfinished that, after we had
-come into the gate, another stop, which he imposed on me by the pressure
-of his arm, had become inevitable. Mrs. Grose and Flora had passed into
-the church, the other worshippers had followed, and we were, for the
-minute, alone among the old, thick graves. We had paused, on the path
-from the gate, by a low, oblong, tablelike tomb.
-
-"Yes, if you didn't--?"
-
-He looked, while I waited, at the graves. "Well, you know what!" But
-he didn't move, and he presently produced something that made me drop
-straight down on the stone slab, as if suddenly to rest. "Does my uncle
-think what YOU think?"
-
-I markedly rested. "How do you know what I think?"
-
-"Ah, well, of course I don't; for it strikes me you never tell me. But I
-mean does HE know?"
-
-"Know what, Miles?"
-
-"Why, the way I'm going on."
-
-I perceived quickly enough that I could make, to this inquiry, no answer
-that would not involve something of a sacrifice of my employer. Yet it
-appeared to me that we were all, at Bly, sufficiently sacrificed to make
-that venial. "I don't think your uncle much cares."
-
-Miles, on this, stood looking at me. "Then don't you think he can be
-made to?"
-
-"In what way?"
-
-"Why, by his coming down."
-
-"But who'll get him to come down?"
-
-"_I_ will!" the boy said with extraordinary brightness and emphasis. He
-gave me another look charged with that expression and then marched off
-alone into church.
-
-
-
-
-XV
-
-
-The business was practically settled from the moment I never followed
-him. It was a pitiful surrender to agitation, but my being aware of this
-had somehow no power to restore me. I only sat there on my tomb and read
-into what my little friend had said to me the fullness of its meaning;
-by the time I had grasped the whole of which I had also embraced, for
-absence, the pretext that I was ashamed to offer my pupils and the rest
-of the congregation such an example of delay. What I said to myself
-above all was that Miles had got something out of me and that the proof
-of it, for him, would be just this awkward collapse. He had got out
-of me that there was something I was much afraid of and that he should
-probably be able to make use of my fear to gain, for his own purpose,
-more freedom. My fear was of having to deal with the intolerable
-question of the grounds of his dismissal from school, for that was
-really but the question of the horrors gathered behind. That his uncle
-should arrive to treat with me of these things was a solution that,
-strictly speaking, I ought now to have desired to bring on; but I
-could so little face the ugliness and the pain of it that I simply
-procrastinated and lived from hand to mouth. The boy, to my deep
-discomposure, was immensely in the right, was in a position to say
-to me: "Either you clear up with my guardian the mystery of this
-interruption of my studies, or you cease to expect me to lead with you
-a life that's so unnatural for a boy." What was so unnatural for the
-particular boy I was concerned with was this sudden revelation of a
-consciousness and a plan.
-
-That was what really overcame me, what prevented my going in. I walked
-round the church, hesitating, hovering; I reflected that I had already,
-with him, hurt myself beyond repair. Therefore I could patch up nothing,
-and it was too extreme an effort to squeeze beside him into the pew: he
-would be so much more sure than ever to pass his arm into mine and make
-me sit there for an hour in close, silent contact with his commentary
-on our talk. For the first minute since his arrival I wanted to get away
-from him. As I paused beneath the high east window and listened to the
-sounds of worship, I was taken with an impulse that might master me,
-I felt, completely should I give it the least encouragement. I might
-easily put an end to my predicament by getting away altogether. Here
-was my chance; there was no one to stop me; I could give the whole thing
-up--turn my back and retreat. It was only a question of hurrying again,
-for a few preparations, to the house which the attendance at church of
-so many of the servants would practically have left unoccupied. No one,
-in short, could blame me if I should just drive desperately off. What
-was it to get away if I got away only till dinner? That would be in
-a couple of hours, at the end of which--I had the acute prevision--my
-little pupils would play at innocent wonder about my nonappearance in
-their train.
-
-"What DID you do, you naughty, bad thing? Why in the world, to worry us
-so--and take our thoughts off, too, don't you know?--did you desert us
-at the very door?" I couldn't meet such questions nor, as they asked
-them, their false little lovely eyes; yet it was all so exactly what I
-should have to meet that, as the prospect grew sharp to me, I at last
-let myself go.
-
-I got, so far as the immediate moment was concerned, away; I came
-straight out of the churchyard and, thinking hard, retraced my steps
-through the park. It seemed to me that by the time I reached the house
-I had made up my mind I would fly. The Sunday stillness both of the
-approaches and of the interior, in which I met no one, fairly excited
-me with a sense of opportunity. Were I to get off quickly, this way, I
-should get off without a scene, without a word. My quickness would have
-to be remarkable, however, and the question of a conveyance was the
-great one to settle. Tormented, in the hall, with difficulties
-and obstacles, I remember sinking down at the foot of the
-staircase--suddenly collapsing there on the lowest step and then, with a
-revulsion, recalling that it was exactly where more than a month before,
-in the darkness of night and just so bowed with evil things, I had
-seen the specter of the most horrible of women. At this I was able
-to straighten myself; I went the rest of the way up; I made, in my
-bewilderment, for the schoolroom, where there were objects belonging to
-me that I should have to take. But I opened the door to find again, in a
-flash, my eyes unsealed. In the presence of what I saw I reeled straight
-back upon my resistance.
-
-Seated at my own table in clear noonday light I saw a person whom,
-without my previous experience, I should have taken at the first blush
-for some housemaid who might have stayed at home to look after the place
-and who, availing herself of rare relief from observation and of the
-schoolroom table and my pens, ink, and paper, had applied herself to the
-considerable effort of a letter to her sweetheart. There was an effort
-in the way that, while her arms rested on the table, her hands with
-evident weariness supported her head; but at the moment I took this in
-I had already become aware that, in spite of my entrance, her attitude
-strangely persisted. Then it was--with the very act of its announcing
-itself--that her identity flared up in a change of posture. She rose,
-not as if she had heard me, but with an indescribable grand melancholy
-of indifference and detachment, and, within a dozen feet of me, stood
-there as my vile predecessor. Dishonored and tragic, she was all before
-me; but even as I fixed and, for memory, secured it, the awful image
-passed away. Dark as midnight in her black dress, her haggard beauty and
-her unutterable woe, she had looked at me long enough to appear to say
-that her right to sit at my table was as good as mine to sit at hers.
-While these instants lasted, indeed, I had the extraordinary chill of
-feeling that it was I who was the intruder. It was as a wild protest
-against it that, actually addressing her--"You terrible, miserable
-woman!"--I heard myself break into a sound that, by the open door, rang
-through the long passage and the empty house. She looked at me as if
-she heard me, but I had recovered myself and cleared the air. There was
-nothing in the room the next minute but the sunshine and a sense that I
-must stay.
-
-
-
-
-XVI
-
-
-I had so perfectly expected that the return of my pupils would be marked
-by a demonstration that I was freshly upset at having to take into
-account that they were dumb about my absence. Instead of gaily
-denouncing and caressing me, they made no allusion to my having failed
-them, and I was left, for the time, on perceiving that she too said
-nothing, to study Mrs. Grose's odd face. I did this to such purpose that
-I made sure they had in some way bribed her to silence; a silence that,
-however, I would engage to break down on the first private opportunity.
-This opportunity came before tea: I secured five minutes with her in the
-housekeeper's room, where, in the twilight, amid a smell of lately baked
-bread, but with the place all swept and garnished, I found her sitting
-in pained placidity before the fire. So I see her still, so I see her
-best: facing the flame from her straight chair in the dusky, shining
-room, a large clean image of the "put away"--of drawers closed and
-locked and rest without a remedy.
-
-"Oh, yes, they asked me to say nothing; and to please them--so long as
-they were there--of course I promised. But what had happened to you?"
-
-"I only went with you for the walk," I said. "I had then to come back to
-meet a friend."
-
-She showed her surprise. "A friend--YOU?"
-
-"Oh, yes, I have a couple!" I laughed. "But did the children give you a
-reason?"
-
-"For not alluding to your leaving us? Yes; they said you would like it
-better. Do you like it better?"
-
-My face had made her rueful. "No, I like it worse!" But after an instant
-I added: "Did they say why I should like it better?"
-
-"No; Master Miles only said, 'We must do nothing but what she likes!'"
-
-"I wish indeed he would. And what did Flora say?"
-
-"Miss Flora was too sweet. She said, 'Oh, of course, of course!'--and I
-said the same."
-
-I thought a moment. "You were too sweet, too--I can hear you all. But
-nonetheless, between Miles and me, it's now all out."
-
-"All out?" My companion stared. "But what, miss?"
-
-"Everything. It doesn't matter. I've made up my mind. I came home, my
-dear," I went on, "for a talk with Miss Jessel."
-
-I had by this time formed the habit of having Mrs. Grose literally well
-in hand in advance of my sounding that note; so that even now, as
-she bravely blinked under the signal of my word, I could keep her
-comparatively firm. "A talk! Do you mean she spoke?"
-
-"It came to that. I found her, on my return, in the schoolroom."
-
-"And what did she say?" I can hear the good woman still, and the candor
-of her stupefaction.
-
-"That she suffers the torments--!"
-
-It was this, of a truth, that made her, as she filled out my picture,
-gape. "Do you mean," she faltered, "--of the lost?"
-
-"Of the lost. Of the damned. And that's why, to share them-" I faltered
-myself with the horror of it.
-
-But my companion, with less imagination, kept me up. "To share them--?"
-
-"She wants Flora." Mrs. Grose might, as I gave it to her, fairly have
-fallen away from me had I not been prepared. I still held her there, to
-show I was. "As I've told you, however, it doesn't matter."
-
-"Because you've made up your mind? But to what?"
-
-"To everything."
-
-"And what do you call 'everything'?"
-
-"Why, sending for their uncle."
-
-"Oh, miss, in pity do," my friend broke out. "ah, but I will, I WILL! I
-see it's the only way. What's 'out,' as I told you, with Miles is that
-if he thinks I'm afraid to--and has ideas of what he gains by that--he
-shall see he's mistaken. Yes, yes; his uncle shall have it here from me
-on the spot (and before the boy himself, if necessary) that if I'm to be
-reproached with having done nothing again about more school--"
-
-"Yes, miss--" my companion pressed me.
-
-"Well, there's that awful reason."
-
-There were now clearly so many of these for my poor colleague that she
-was excusable for being vague. "But--a--which?"
-
-"Why, the letter from his old place."
-
-"You'll show it to the master?"
-
-"I ought to have done so on the instant."
-
-"Oh, no!" said Mrs. Grose with decision.
-
-"I'll put it before him," I went on inexorably, "that I can't undertake
-to work the question on behalf of a child who has been expelled--"
-
-"For we've never in the least known what!" Mrs. Grose declared.
-
-"For wickedness. For what else--when he's so clever and beautiful and
-perfect? Is he stupid? Is he untidy? Is he infirm? Is he ill-natured?
-He's exquisite--so it can be only THAT; and that would open up the whole
-thing. After all," I said, "it's their uncle's fault. If he left here
-such people--!"
-
-"He didn't really in the least know them. The fault's mine." She had
-turned quite pale.
-
-"Well, you shan't suffer," I answered.
-
-"The children shan't!" she emphatically returned.
-
-I was silent awhile; we looked at each other. "Then what am I to tell
-him?"
-
-"You needn't tell him anything. _I_'ll tell him."
-
-I measured this. "Do you mean you'll write--?" Remembering she couldn't,
-I caught myself up. "How do you communicate?"
-
-"I tell the bailiff. HE writes."
-
-"And should you like him to write our story?"
-
-My question had a sarcastic force that I had not fully intended, and
-it made her, after a moment, inconsequently break down. The tears were
-again in her eyes. "Ah, miss, YOU write!"
-
-"Well--tonight," I at last answered; and on this we separated.
-
-
-
-
-XVII
-
-
-I went so far, in the evening, as to make a beginning. The weather had
-changed back, a great wind was abroad, and beneath the lamp, in my room,
-with Flora at peace beside me, I sat for a long time before a blank
-sheet of paper and listened to the lash of the rain and the batter of
-the gusts. Finally I went out, taking a candle; I crossed the passage
-and listened a minute at Miles's door. What, under my endless obsession,
-I had been impelled to listen for was some betrayal of his not being at
-rest, and I presently caught one, but not in the form I had expected.
-His voice tinkled out. "I say, you there--come in." It was a gaiety in
-the gloom!
-
-I went in with my light and found him, in bed, very wide awake, but very
-much at his ease. "Well, what are YOU up to?" he asked with a grace of
-sociability in which it occurred to me that Mrs. Grose, had she been
-present, might have looked in vain for proof that anything was "out."
-
-I stood over him with my candle. "How did you know I was there?"
-
-"Why, of course I heard you. Did you fancy you made no noise? You're
-like a troop of cavalry!" he beautifully laughed.
-
-"Then you weren't asleep?"
-
-"Not much! I lie awake and think."
-
-I had put my candle, designedly, a short way off, and then, as he held
-out his friendly old hand to me, had sat down on the edge of his bed.
-"What is it," I asked, "that you think of?"
-
-"What in the world, my dear, but YOU?"
-
-"Ah, the pride I take in your appreciation doesn't insist on that! I had
-so far rather you slept."
-
-"Well, I think also, you know, of this queer business of ours."
-
-I marked the coolness of his firm little hand. "Of what queer business,
-Miles?"
-
-"Why, the way you bring me up. And all the rest!"
-
-I fairly held my breath a minute, and even from my glimmering taper
-there was light enough to show how he smiled up at me from his pillow.
-"What do you mean by all the rest?"
-
-"Oh, you know, you know!"
-
-I could say nothing for a minute, though I felt, as I held his hand and
-our eyes continued to meet, that my silence had all the air of admitting
-his charge and that nothing in the whole world of reality was perhaps at
-that moment so fabulous as our actual relation. "Certainly you shall go
-back to school," I said, "if it be that that troubles you. But not to
-the old place--we must find another, a better. How could I know it did
-trouble you, this question, when you never told me so, never spoke of it
-at all?" His clear, listening face, framed in its smooth whiteness, made
-him for the minute as appealing as some wistful patient in a children's
-hospital; and I would have given, as the resemblance came to me, all I
-possessed on earth really to be the nurse or the sister of charity who
-might have helped to cure him. Well, even as it was, I perhaps might
-help! "Do you know you've never said a word to me about your school--I
-mean the old one; never mentioned it in any way?"
-
-He seemed to wonder; he smiled with the same loveliness. But he clearly
-gained time; he waited, he called for guidance. "Haven't I?" It wasn't
-for ME to help him--it was for the thing I had met!
-
-Something in his tone and the expression of his face, as I got this from
-him, set my heart aching with such a pang as it had never yet known;
-so unutterably touching was it to see his little brain puzzled and his
-little resources taxed to play, under the spell laid on him, a part
-of innocence and consistency. "No, never--from the hour you came back.
-You've never mentioned to me one of your masters, one of your comrades,
-nor the least little thing that ever happened to you at school. Never,
-little Miles--no, never--have you given me an inkling of anything that
-MAY have happened there. Therefore you can fancy how much I'm in the
-dark. Until you came out, that way, this morning, you had, since the
-first hour I saw you, scarce even made a reference to anything in your
-previous life. You seemed so perfectly to accept the present." It was
-extraordinary how my absolute conviction of his secret precocity (or
-whatever I might call the poison of an influence that I dared but half
-to phrase) made him, in spite of the faint breath of his inward trouble,
-appear as accessible as an older person--imposed him almost as an
-intellectual equal. "I thought you wanted to go on as you are."
-
-It struck me that at this he just faintly colored. He gave, at any rate,
-like a convalescent slightly fatigued, a languid shake of his head. "I
-don't--I don't. I want to get away."
-
-"You're tired of Bly?"
-
-"Oh, no, I like Bly."
-
-"Well, then--?"
-
-"Oh, YOU know what a boy wants!"
-
-I felt that I didn't know so well as Miles, and I took temporary refuge.
-"You want to go to your uncle?"
-
-Again, at this, with his sweet ironic face, he made a movement on the
-pillow. "Ah, you can't get off with that!"
-
-I was silent a little, and it was I, now, I think, who changed color.
-"My dear, I don't want to get off!"
-
-"You can't, even if you do. You can't, you can't!"--he lay beautifully
-staring. "My uncle must come down, and you must completely settle
-things."
-
-"If we do," I returned with some spirit, "you may be sure it will be to
-take you quite away."
-
-"Well, don't you understand that that's exactly what I'm working for?
-You'll have to tell him--about the way you've let it all drop: you'll
-have to tell him a tremendous lot!"
-
-The exultation with which he uttered this helped me somehow, for the
-instant, to meet him rather more. "And how much will YOU, Miles, have to
-tell him? There are things he'll ask you!"
-
-He turned it over. "Very likely. But what things?"
-
-"The things you've never told me. To make up his mind what to do with
-you. He can't send you back--"
-
-"Oh, I don't want to go back!" he broke in. "I want a new field."
-
-He said it with admirable serenity, with positive unimpeachable
-gaiety; and doubtless it was that very note that most evoked for me the
-poignancy, the unnatural childish tragedy, of his probable reappearance
-at the end of three months with all this bravado and still more
-dishonor. It overwhelmed me now that I should never be able to bear
-that, and it made me let myself go. I threw myself upon him and in the
-tenderness of my pity I embraced him. "Dear little Miles, dear little
-Miles--!"
-
-My face was close to his, and he let me kiss him, simply taking it with
-indulgent good humor. "Well, old lady?"
-
-"Is there nothing--nothing at all that you want to tell me?"
-
-He turned off a little, facing round toward the wall and holding up his
-hand to look at as one had seen sick children look. "I've told you--I
-told you this morning."
-
-Oh, I was sorry for him! "That you just want me not to worry you?"
-
-He looked round at me now, as if in recognition of my understanding him;
-then ever so gently, "To let me alone," he replied.
-
-There was even a singular little dignity in it, something that made me
-release him, yet, when I had slowly risen, linger beside him. God knows
-I never wished to harass him, but I felt that merely, at this, to turn
-my back on him was to abandon or, to put it more truly, to lose him.
-"I've just begun a letter to your uncle," I said.
-
-"Well, then, finish it!"
-
-I waited a minute. "What happened before?"
-
-He gazed up at me again. "Before what?"
-
-"Before you came back. And before you went away."
-
-For some time he was silent, but he continued to meet my eyes. "What
-happened?"
-
-It made me, the sound of the words, in which it seemed to me that
-I caught for the very first time a small faint quaver of consenting
-consciousness--it made me drop on my knees beside the bed and seize
-once more the chance of possessing him. "Dear little Miles, dear little
-Miles, if you KNEW how I want to help you! It's only that, it's nothing
-but that, and I'd rather die than give you a pain or do you a wrong--I'd
-rather die than hurt a hair of you. Dear little Miles"--oh, I brought it
-out now even if I SHOULD go too far--"I just want you to help me to save
-you!" But I knew in a moment after this that I had gone too far. The
-answer to my appeal was instantaneous, but it came in the form of an
-extraordinary blast and chill, a gust of frozen air, and a shake of the
-room as great as if, in the wild wind, the casement had crashed in. The
-boy gave a loud, high shriek, which, lost in the rest of the shock of
-sound, might have seemed, indistinctly, though I was so close to him,
-a note either of jubilation or of terror. I jumped to my feet again and
-was conscious of darkness. So for a moment we remained, while I stared
-about me and saw that the drawn curtains were unstirred and the window
-tight. "Why, the candle's out!" I then cried.
-
-"It was I who blew it, dear!" said Miles.
-
-
-
-
-XVIII
-
-
-The next day, after lessons, Mrs. Grose found a moment to say to me
-quietly: "Have you written, miss?"
-
-"Yes--I've written." But I didn't add--for the hour--that my letter,
-sealed and directed, was still in my pocket. There would be time enough
-to send it before the messenger should go to the village. Meanwhile
-there had been, on the part of my pupils, no more brilliant, more
-exemplary morning. It was exactly as if they had both had at heart to
-gloss over any recent little friction. They performed the dizziest feats
-of arithmetic, soaring quite out of MY feeble range, and perpetrated,
-in higher spirits than ever, geographical and historical jokes. It was
-conspicuous of course in Miles in particular that he appeared to wish to
-show how easily he could let me down. This child, to my memory, really
-lives in a setting of beauty and misery that no words can translate;
-there was a distinction all his own in every impulse he revealed; never
-was a small natural creature, to the uninitiated eye all frankness and
-freedom, a more ingenious, a more extraordinary little gentleman. I had
-perpetually to guard against the wonder of contemplation into which my
-initiated view betrayed me; to check the irrelevant gaze and discouraged
-sigh in which I constantly both attacked and renounced the enigma of
-what such a little gentleman could have done that deserved a penalty.
-Say that, by the dark prodigy I knew, the imagination of all evil HAD
-been opened up to him: all the justice within me ached for the proof
-that it could ever have flowered into an act.
-
-He had never, at any rate, been such a little gentleman as when, after
-our early dinner on this dreadful day, he came round to me and asked if
-I shouldn't like him, for half an hour, to play to me. David playing
-to Saul could never have shown a finer sense of the occasion. It was
-literally a charming exhibition of tact, of magnanimity, and quite
-tantamount to his saying outright: "The true knights we love to read
-about never push an advantage too far. I know what you mean now: you
-mean that--to be let alone yourself and not followed up--you'll cease to
-worry and spy upon me, won't keep me so close to you, will let me go
-and come. Well, I 'come,' you see--but I don't go! There'll be plenty of
-time for that. I do really delight in your society, and I only want to
-show you that I contended for a principle." It may be imagined whether I
-resisted this appeal or failed to accompany him again, hand in hand, to
-the schoolroom. He sat down at the old piano and played as he had never
-played; and if there are those who think he had better have been kicking
-a football I can only say that I wholly agree with them. For at the
-end of a time that under his influence I had quite ceased to measure, I
-started up with a strange sense of having literally slept at my post. It
-was after luncheon, and by the schoolroom fire, and yet I hadn't
-really, in the least, slept: I had only done something much worse--I had
-forgotten. Where, all this time, was Flora? When I put the question to
-Miles, he played on a minute before answering and then could only say:
-"Why, my dear, how do _I_ know?"--breaking moreover into a happy laugh
-which, immediately after, as if it were a vocal accompaniment, he
-prolonged into incoherent, extravagant song.
-
-I went straight to my room, but his sister was not there; then, before
-going downstairs, I looked into several others. As she was nowhere
-about she would surely be with Mrs. Grose, whom, in the comfort of that
-theory, I accordingly proceeded in quest of. I found her where I had
-found her the evening before, but she met my quick challenge with blank,
-scared ignorance. She had only supposed that, after the repast, I had
-carried off both the children; as to which she was quite in her right,
-for it was the very first time I had allowed the little girl out of my
-sight without some special provision. Of course now indeed she might be
-with the maids, so that the immediate thing was to look for her without
-an air of alarm. This we promptly arranged between us; but when, ten
-minutes later and in pursuance of our arrangement, we met in the hall,
-it was only to report on either side that after guarded inquiries we
-had altogether failed to trace her. For a minute there, apart from
-observation, we exchanged mute alarms, and I could feel with what high
-interest my friend returned me all those I had from the first given her.
-
-"She'll be above," she presently said--"in one of the rooms you haven't
-searched."
-
-"No; she's at a distance." I had made up my mind. "She has gone out."
-
-Mrs. Grose stared. "Without a hat?"
-
-I naturally also looked volumes. "Isn't that woman always without one?"
-
-"She's with HER?"
-
-"She's with HER!" I declared. "We must find them."
-
-My hand was on my friend's arm, but she failed for the moment,
-confronted with such an account of the matter, to respond to my
-pressure. She communed, on the contrary, on the spot, with her
-uneasiness. "And where's Master Miles?"
-
-"Oh, HE'S with Quint. They're in the schoolroom."
-
-"Lord, miss!" My view, I was myself aware--and therefore I suppose my
-tone--had never yet reached so calm an assurance.
-
-"The trick's played," I went on; "they've successfully worked their
-plan. He found the most divine little way to keep me quiet while she
-went off."
-
-"'Divine'?" Mrs. Grose bewilderedly echoed.
-
-"Infernal, then!" I almost cheerfully rejoined. "He has provided for
-himself as well. But come!"
-
-She had helplessly gloomed at the upper regions. "You leave him--?"
-
-"So long with Quint? Yes--I don't mind that now."
-
-She always ended, at these moments, by getting possession of my hand,
-and in this manner she could at present still stay me. But after gasping
-an instant at my sudden resignation, "Because of your letter?" she
-eagerly brought out.
-
-I quickly, by way of answer, felt for my letter, drew it forth, held it
-up, and then, freeing myself, went and laid it on the great hall table.
-"Luke will take it," I said as I came back. I reached the house door and
-opened it; I was already on the steps.
-
-My companion still demurred: the storm of the night and the early
-morning had dropped, but the afternoon was damp and gray. I came down to
-the drive while she stood in the doorway. "You go with nothing on?"
-
-"What do I care when the child has nothing? I can't wait to dress," I
-cried, "and if you must do so, I leave you. Try meanwhile, yourself,
-upstairs."
-
-"With THEM?" Oh, on this, the poor woman promptly joined me!
-
-
-
-
-XIX
-
-
-We went straight to the lake, as it was called at Bly, and I daresay
-rightly called, though I reflect that it may in fact have been a sheet
-of water less remarkable than it appeared to my untraveled eyes. My
-acquaintance with sheets of water was small, and the pool of Bly, at all
-events on the few occasions of my consenting, under the protection of
-my pupils, to affront its surface in the old flat-bottomed boat moored
-there for our use, had impressed me both with its extent and its
-agitation. The usual place of embarkation was half a mile from the
-house, but I had an intimate conviction that, wherever Flora might
-be, she was not near home. She had not given me the slip for any small
-adventure, and, since the day of the very great one that I had shared
-with her by the pond, I had been aware, in our walks, of the quarter to
-which she most inclined. This was why I had now given to Mrs. Grose's
-steps so marked a direction--a direction that made her, when she
-perceived it, oppose a resistance that showed me she was freshly
-mystified. "You're going to the water, Miss?--you think she's IN--?"
-
-"She may be, though the depth is, I believe, nowhere very great. But
-what I judge most likely is that she's on the spot from which, the other
-day, we saw together what I told you."
-
-"When she pretended not to see--?"
-
-"With that astounding self-possession? I've always been sure she wanted
-to go back alone. And now her brother has managed it for her."
-
-Mrs. Grose still stood where she had stopped. "You suppose they really
-TALK of them?"
-
-"I could meet this with a confidence! They say things that, if we heard
-them, would simply appall us."
-
-"And if she IS there--"
-
-"Yes?"
-
-"Then Miss Jessel is?"
-
-"Beyond a doubt. You shall see."
-
-"Oh, thank you!" my friend cried, planted so firm that, taking it in, I
-went straight on without her. By the time I reached the pool, however,
-she was close behind me, and I knew that, whatever, to her apprehension,
-might befall me, the exposure of my society struck her as her least
-danger. She exhaled a moan of relief as we at last came in sight of the
-greater part of the water without a sight of the child. There was no
-trace of Flora on that nearer side of the bank where my observation of
-her had been most startling, and none on the opposite edge, where, save
-for a margin of some twenty yards, a thick copse came down to the water.
-The pond, oblong in shape, had a width so scant compared to its length
-that, with its ends out of view, it might have been taken for a scant
-river. We looked at the empty expanse, and then I felt the suggestion
-of my friend's eyes. I knew what she meant and I replied with a negative
-headshake.
-
-"No, no; wait! She has taken the boat."
-
-My companion stared at the vacant mooring place and then again across
-the lake. "Then where is it?"
-
-"Our not seeing it is the strongest of proofs. She has used it to go
-over, and then has managed to hide it."
-
-"All alone--that child?"
-
-"She's not alone, and at such times she's not a child: she's an old,
-old woman." I scanned all the visible shore while Mrs. Grose took again,
-into the queer element I offered her, one of her plunges of submission;
-then I pointed out that the boat might perfectly be in a small refuge
-formed by one of the recesses of the pool, an indentation masked, for
-the hither side, by a projection of the bank and by a clump of trees
-growing close to the water.
-
-"But if the boat's there, where on earth's SHE?" my colleague anxiously
-asked.
-
-"That's exactly what we must learn." And I started to walk further.
-
-"By going all the way round?"
-
-"Certainly, far as it is. It will take us but ten minutes, but it's
-far enough to have made the child prefer not to walk. She went straight
-over."
-
-"Laws!" cried my friend again; the chain of my logic was ever too
-much for her. It dragged her at my heels even now, and when we had got
-halfway round--a devious, tiresome process, on ground much broken and by
-a path choked with overgrowth--I paused to give her breath. I sustained
-her with a grateful arm, assuring her that she might hugely help me; and
-this started us afresh, so that in the course of but few minutes more we
-reached a point from which we found the boat to be where I had supposed
-it. It had been intentionally left as much as possible out of sight and
-was tied to one of the stakes of a fence that came, just there, down to
-the brink and that had been an assistance to disembarking. I recognized,
-as I looked at the pair of short, thick oars, quite safely drawn up, the
-prodigious character of the feat for a little girl; but I had lived, by
-this time, too long among wonders and had panted to too many livelier
-measures. There was a gate in the fence, through which we passed, and
-that brought us, after a trifling interval, more into the open. Then,
-"There she is!" we both exclaimed at once.
-
-Flora, a short way off, stood before us on the grass and smiled as if
-her performance was now complete. The next thing she did, however, was
-to stoop straight down and pluck--quite as if it were all she was there
-for--a big, ugly spray of withered fern. I instantly became sure she
-had just come out of the copse. She waited for us, not herself taking a
-step, and I was conscious of the rare solemnity with which we presently
-approached her. She smiled and smiled, and we met; but it was all done
-in a silence by this time flagrantly ominous. Mrs. Grose was the first
-to break the spell: she threw herself on her knees and, drawing the
-child to her breast, clasped in a long embrace the little tender,
-yielding body. While this dumb convulsion lasted I could only watch
-it--which I did the more intently when I saw Flora's face peep at me
-over our companion's shoulder. It was serious now--the flicker had left
-it; but it strengthened the pang with which I at that moment envied Mrs.
-Grose the simplicity of HER relation. Still, all this while, nothing
-more passed between us save that Flora had let her foolish fern again
-drop to the ground. What she and I had virtually said to each other was
-that pretexts were useless now. When Mrs. Grose finally got up she kept
-the child's hand, so that the two were still before me; and the singular
-reticence of our communion was even more marked in the frank look she
-launched me. "I'll be hanged," it said, "if _I_'ll speak!"
-
-It was Flora who, gazing all over me in candid wonder, was the first.
-She was struck with our bareheaded aspect. "Why, where are your things?"
-
-"Where yours are, my dear!" I promptly returned.
-
-She had already got back her gaiety, and appeared to take this as an
-answer quite sufficient. "And where's Miles?" she went on.
-
-There was something in the small valor of it that quite finished me:
-these three words from her were, in a flash like the glitter of a drawn
-blade, the jostle of the cup that my hand, for weeks and weeks, had
-held high and full to the brim that now, even before speaking, I felt
-overflow in a deluge. "I'll tell you if you'll tell ME--" I heard myself
-say, then heard the tremor in which it broke.
-
-"Well, what?"
-
-Mrs. Grose's suspense blazed at me, but it was too late now, and I
-brought the thing out handsomely. "Where, my pet, is Miss Jessel?"
-
-
-
-
-XX
-
-
-Just as in the churchyard with Miles, the whole thing was upon us. Much
-as I had made of the fact that this name had never once, between us,
-been sounded, the quick, smitten glare with which the child's face now
-received it fairly likened my breach of the silence to the smash of a
-pane of glass. It added to the interposing cry, as if to stay the blow,
-that Mrs. Grose, at the same instant, uttered over my violence--the
-shriek of a creature scared, or rather wounded, which, in turn, within a
-few seconds, was completed by a gasp of my own. I seized my colleague's
-arm. "She's there, she's there!"
-
-Miss Jessel stood before us on the opposite bank exactly as she had
-stood the other time, and I remember, strangely, as the first feeling
-now produced in me, my thrill of joy at having brought on a proof. She
-was there, and I was justified; she was there, and I was neither cruel
-nor mad. She was there for poor scared Mrs. Grose, but she was there
-most for Flora; and no moment of my monstrous time was perhaps so
-extraordinary as that in which I consciously threw out to her--with
-the sense that, pale and ravenous demon as she was, she would catch and
-understand it--an inarticulate message of gratitude. She rose erect on
-the spot my friend and I had lately quitted, and there was not, in all
-the long reach of her desire, an inch of her evil that fell short. This
-first vividness of vision and emotion were things of a few seconds,
-during which Mrs. Grose's dazed blink across to where I pointed struck
-me as a sovereign sign that she too at last saw, just as it carried my
-own eyes precipitately to the child. The revelation then of the manner
-in which Flora was affected startled me, in truth, far more than it
-would have done to find her also merely agitated, for direct dismay
-was of course not what I had expected. Prepared and on her guard as our
-pursuit had actually made her, she would repress every betrayal; and I
-was therefore shaken, on the spot, by my first glimpse of the particular
-one for which I had not allowed. To see her, without a convulsion of
-her small pink face, not even feign to glance in the direction of the
-prodigy I announced, but only, instead of that, turn at ME an expression
-of hard, still gravity, an expression absolutely new and unprecedented
-and that appeared to read and accuse and judge me--this was a stroke
-that somehow converted the little girl herself into the very presence
-that could make me quail. I quailed even though my certitude that
-she thoroughly saw was never greater than at that instant, and in the
-immediate need to defend myself I called it passionately to witness.
-"She's there, you little unhappy thing--there, there, THERE, and you see
-her as well as you see me!" I had said shortly before to Mrs. Grose
-that she was not at these times a child, but an old, old woman, and that
-description of her could not have been more strikingly confirmed than in
-the way in which, for all answer to this, she simply showed me, without
-a concession, an admission, of her eyes, a countenance of deeper and
-deeper, of indeed suddenly quite fixed, reprobation. I was by this
-time--if I can put the whole thing at all together--more appalled at
-what I may properly call her manner than at anything else, though it was
-simultaneously with this that I became aware of having Mrs. Grose
-also, and very formidably, to reckon with. My elder companion, the next
-moment, at any rate, blotted out everything but her own flushed face and
-her loud, shocked protest, a burst of high disapproval. "What a dreadful
-turn, to be sure, miss! Where on earth do you see anything?"
-
-I could only grasp her more quickly yet, for even while she spoke the
-hideous plain presence stood undimmed and undaunted. It had already
-lasted a minute, and it lasted while I continued, seizing my colleague,
-quite thrusting her at it and presenting her to it, to insist with my
-pointing hand. "You don't see her exactly as WE see?--you mean to say
-you don't now--NOW? She's as big as a blazing fire! Only look, dearest
-woman, LOOK--!" She looked, even as I did, and gave me, with her deep
-groan of negation, repulsion, compassion--the mixture with her pity of
-her relief at her exemption--a sense, touching to me even then, that she
-would have backed me up if she could. I might well have needed that, for
-with this hard blow of the proof that her eyes were hopelessly sealed
-I felt my own situation horribly crumble, I felt--I saw--my livid
-predecessor press, from her position, on my defeat, and I was conscious,
-more than all, of what I should have from this instant to deal with in
-the astounding little attitude of Flora. Into this attitude Mrs. Grose
-immediately and violently entered, breaking, even while there pierced
-through my sense of ruin a prodigious private triumph, into breathless
-reassurance.
-
-"She isn't there, little lady, and nobody's there--and you never see
-nothing, my sweet! How can poor Miss Jessel--when poor Miss Jessel's
-dead and buried? WE know, don't we, love?"--and she appealed, blundering
-in, to the child. "It's all a mere mistake and a worry and a joke--and
-we'll go home as fast as we can!"
-
-Our companion, on this, had responded with a strange, quick primness of
-propriety, and they were again, with Mrs. Grose on her feet, united, as
-it were, in pained opposition to me. Flora continued to fix me with
-her small mask of reprobation, and even at that minute I prayed God to
-forgive me for seeming to see that, as she stood there holding tight
-to our friend's dress, her incomparable childish beauty had suddenly
-failed, had quite vanished. I've said it already--she was literally,
-she was hideously, hard; she had turned common and almost ugly. "I don't
-know what you mean. I see nobody. I see nothing. I never HAVE. I think
-you're cruel. I don't like you!" Then, after this deliverance, which
-might have been that of a vulgarly pert little girl in the street, she
-hugged Mrs. Grose more closely and buried in her skirts the dreadful
-little face. In this position she produced an almost furious wail. "Take
-me away, take me away--oh, take me away from HER!"
-
-"From ME?" I panted.
-
-"From you--from you!" she cried.
-
-Even Mrs. Grose looked across at me dismayed, while I had nothing to
-do but communicate again with the figure that, on the opposite bank,
-without a movement, as rigidly still as if catching, beyond the
-interval, our voices, was as vividly there for my disaster as it was not
-there for my service. The wretched child had spoken exactly as if she
-had got from some outside source each of her stabbing little words, and
-I could therefore, in the full despair of all I had to accept, but sadly
-shake my head at her. "If I had ever doubted, all my doubt would at
-present have gone. I've been living with the miserable truth, and now
-it has only too much closed round me. Of course I've lost you: I've
-interfered, and you've seen--under HER dictation"--with which I faced,
-over the pool again, our infernal witness--"the easy and perfect way to
-meet it. I've done my best, but I've lost you. Goodbye." For Mrs.
-Grose I had an imperative, an almost frantic "Go, go!" before which, in
-infinite distress, but mutely possessed of the little girl and clearly
-convinced, in spite of her blindness, that something awful had occurred
-and some collapse engulfed us, she retreated, by the way we had come, as
-fast as she could move.
-
-Of what first happened when I was left alone I had no subsequent memory.
-I only knew that at the end of, I suppose, a quarter of an hour, an
-odorous dampness and roughness, chilling and piercing my trouble, had
-made me understand that I must have thrown myself, on my face, on the
-ground and given way to a wildness of grief. I must have lain there long
-and cried and sobbed, for when I raised my head the day was almost done.
-I got up and looked a moment, through the twilight, at the gray pool and
-its blank, haunted edge, and then I took, back to the house, my dreary
-and difficult course. When I reached the gate in the fence the boat,
-to my surprise, was gone, so that I had a fresh reflection to make on
-Flora's extraordinary command of the situation. She passed that night,
-by the most tacit, and I should add, were not the word so grotesque a
-false note, the happiest of arrangements, with Mrs. Grose. I saw
-neither of them on my return, but, on the other hand, as by an ambiguous
-compensation, I saw a great deal of Miles. I saw--I can use no other
-phrase--so much of him that it was as if it were more than it had ever
-been. No evening I had passed at Bly had the portentous quality of
-this one; in spite of which--and in spite also of the deeper depths of
-consternation that had opened beneath my feet--there was literally, in
-the ebbing actual, an extraordinarily sweet sadness. On reaching the
-house I had never so much as looked for the boy; I had simply gone
-straight to my room to change what I was wearing and to take in, at
-a glance, much material testimony to Flora's rupture. Her little
-belongings had all been removed. When later, by the schoolroom fire, I
-was served with tea by the usual maid, I indulged, on the article of my
-other pupil, in no inquiry whatever. He had his freedom now--he might
-have it to the end! Well, he did have it; and it consisted--in part at
-least--of his coming in at about eight o'clock and sitting down with me
-in silence. On the removal of the tea things I had blown out the candles
-and drawn my chair closer: I was conscious of a mortal coldness and felt
-as if I should never again be warm. So, when he appeared, I was sitting
-in the glow with my thoughts. He paused a moment by the door as if to
-look at me; then--as if to share them--came to the other side of the
-hearth and sank into a chair. We sat there in absolute stillness; yet he
-wanted, I felt, to be with me.
-
-
-
-
-XXI
-
-
-Before a new day, in my room, had fully broken, my eyes opened to Mrs.
-Grose, who had come to my bedside with worse news. Flora was so markedly
-feverish that an illness was perhaps at hand; she had passed a night of
-extreme unrest, a night agitated above all by fears that had for their
-subject not in the least her former, but wholly her present, governess.
-It was not against the possible re-entrance of Miss Jessel on the scene
-that she protested--it was conspicuously and passionately against mine.
-I was promptly on my feet of course, and with an immense deal to ask;
-the more that my friend had discernibly now girded her loins to meet me
-once more. This I felt as soon as I had put to her the question of
-her sense of the child's sincerity as against my own. "She persists in
-denying to you that she saw, or has ever seen, anything?"
-
-My visitor's trouble, truly, was great. "Ah, miss, it isn't a matter
-on which I can push her! Yet it isn't either, I must say, as if I much
-needed to. It has made her, every inch of her, quite old."
-
-"Oh, I see her perfectly from here. She resents, for all the world like
-some high little personage, the imputation on her truthfulness and,
-as it were, her respectability. 'Miss Jessel indeed--SHE!' Ah, she's
-'respectable,' the chit! The impression she gave me there yesterday was,
-I assure you, the very strangest of all; it was quite beyond any of the
-others. I DID put my foot in it! She'll never speak to me again."
-
-Hideous and obscure as it all was, it held Mrs. Grose briefly silent;
-then she granted my point with a frankness which, I made sure, had more
-behind it. "I think indeed, miss, she never will. She do have a grand
-manner about it!"
-
-"And that manner"--I summed it up--"is practically what's the matter
-with her now!"
-
-Oh, that manner, I could see in my visitor's face, and not a little else
-besides! "She asks me every three minutes if I think you're coming in."
-
-"I see--I see." I, too, on my side, had so much more than worked it
-out. "Has she said to you since yesterday--except to repudiate her
-familiarity with anything so dreadful--a single other word about Miss
-Jessel?"
-
-"Not one, miss. And of course you know," my friend added, "I took it
-from her, by the lake, that, just then and there at least, there WAS
-nobody."
-
-"Rather! and, naturally, you take it from her still."
-
-"I don't contradict her. What else can I do?"
-
-"Nothing in the world! You've the cleverest little person to deal with.
-They've made them--their two friends, I mean--still cleverer even than
-nature did; for it was wondrous material to play on! Flora has now her
-grievance, and she'll work it to the end."
-
-"Yes, miss; but to WHAT end?"
-
-"Why, that of dealing with me to her uncle. She'll make me out to him
-the lowest creature--!"
-
-I winced at the fair show of the scene in Mrs. Grose's face; she looked
-for a minute as if she sharply saw them together. "And him who thinks so
-well of you!"
-
-"He has an odd way--it comes over me now," I laughed,"--of proving it!
-But that doesn't matter. What Flora wants, of course, is to get rid of
-me."
-
-My companion bravely concurred. "Never again to so much as look at you."
-
-"So that what you've come to me now for," I asked, "is to speed me on my
-way?" Before she had time to reply, however, I had her in check. "I've a
-better idea--the result of my reflections. My going WOULD seem the right
-thing, and on Sunday I was terribly near it. Yet that won't do. It's YOU
-who must go. You must take Flora."
-
-My visitor, at this, did speculate. "But where in the world--?"
-
-"Away from here. Away from THEM. Away, even most of all, now, from me.
-Straight to her uncle."
-
-"Only to tell on you--?"
-
-"No, not 'only'! To leave me, in addition, with my remedy."
-
-She was still vague. "And what IS your remedy?"
-
-"Your loyalty, to begin with. And then Miles's."
-
-She looked at me hard. "Do you think he--?"
-
-"Won't, if he has the chance, turn on me? Yes, I venture still to think
-it. At all events, I want to try. Get off with his sister as soon as
-possible and leave me with him alone." I was amazed, myself, at the
-spirit I had still in reserve, and therefore perhaps a trifle the more
-disconcerted at the way in which, in spite of this fine example of it,
-she hesitated. "There's one thing, of course," I went on: "they mustn't,
-before she goes, see each other for three seconds." Then it came over me
-that, in spite of Flora's presumable sequestration from the instant of
-her return from the pool, it might already be too late. "Do you mean," I
-anxiously asked, "that they HAVE met?"
-
-At this she quite flushed. "Ah, miss, I'm not such a fool as that! If
-I've been obliged to leave her three or four times, it has been each
-time with one of the maids, and at present, though she's alone, she's
-locked in safe. And yet--and yet!" There were too many things.
-
-"And yet what?"
-
-"Well, are you so sure of the little gentleman?"
-
-"I'm not sure of anything but YOU. But I have, since last evening, a new
-hope. I think he wants to give me an opening. I do believe that--poor
-little exquisite wretch!--he wants to speak. Last evening, in the
-firelight and the silence, he sat with me for two hours as if it were
-just coming."
-
-Mrs. Grose looked hard, through the window, at the gray, gathering day.
-"And did it come?"
-
-"No, though I waited and waited, I confess it didn't, and it was without
-a breach of the silence or so much as a faint allusion to his sister's
-condition and absence that we at last kissed for good night. All the
-same," I continued, "I can't, if her uncle sees her, consent to his
-seeing her brother without my having given the boy--and most of all
-because things have got so bad--a little more time."
-
-My friend appeared on this ground more reluctant than I could quite
-understand. "What do you mean by more time?"
-
-"Well, a day or two--really to bring it out. He'll then be on MY
-side--of which you see the importance. If nothing comes, I shall only
-fail, and you will, at the worst, have helped me by doing, on your
-arrival in town, whatever you may have found possible." So I put it
-before her, but she continued for a little so inscrutably embarrassed
-that I came again to her aid. "Unless, indeed," I wound up, "you really
-want NOT to go."
-
-I could see it, in her face, at last clear itself; she put out her hand
-to me as a pledge. "I'll go--I'll go. I'll go this morning."
-
-I wanted to be very just. "If you SHOULD wish still to wait, I would
-engage she shouldn't see me."
-
-"No, no: it's the place itself. She must leave it." She held me a moment
-with heavy eyes, then brought out the rest. "Your idea's the right one.
-I myself, miss--"
-
-"Well?"
-
-"I can't stay."
-
-The look she gave me with it made me jump at possibilities. "You mean
-that, since yesterday, you HAVE seen--?"
-
-She shook her head with dignity. "I've HEARD--!"
-
-"Heard?"
-
-"From that child--horrors! There!" she sighed with tragic relief. "On my
-honor, miss, she says things--!" But at this evocation she broke down;
-she dropped, with a sudden sob, upon my sofa and, as I had seen her do
-before, gave way to all the grief of it.
-
-It was quite in another manner that I, for my part, let myself go. "Oh,
-thank God!"
-
-She sprang up again at this, drying her eyes with a groan. "'Thank
-God'?"
-
-"It so justifies me!"
-
-"It does that, miss!"
-
-I couldn't have desired more emphasis, but I just hesitated. "She's so
-horrible?"
-
-I saw my colleague scarce knew how to put it. "Really shocking."
-
-"And about me?"
-
-"About you, miss--since you must have it. It's beyond everything, for a
-young lady; and I can't think wherever she must have picked up--"
-
-"The appalling language she applied to me? I can, then!" I broke in with
-a laugh that was doubtless significant enough.
-
-It only, in truth, left my friend still more grave. "Well, perhaps I
-ought to also--since I've heard some of it before! Yet I can't bear it,"
-the poor woman went on while, with the same movement, she glanced, on my
-dressing table, at the face of my watch. "But I must go back."
-
-I kept her, however. "Ah, if you can't bear it--!"
-
-"How can I stop with her, you mean? Why, just FOR that: to get her away.
-Far from this," she pursued, "far from THEM-"
-
-"She may be different? She may be free?" I seized her almost with joy.
-"Then, in spite of yesterday, you BELIEVE--"
-
-"In such doings?" Her simple description of them required, in the light
-of her expression, to be carried no further, and she gave me the whole
-thing as she had never done. "I believe."
-
-Yes, it was a joy, and we were still shoulder to shoulder: if I might
-continue sure of that I should care but little what else happened. My
-support in the presence of disaster would be the same as it had been
-in my early need of confidence, and if my friend would answer for my
-honesty, I would answer for all the rest. On the point of taking leave
-of her, nonetheless, I was to some extent embarrassed. "There's one
-thing, of course--it occurs to me--to remember. My letter, giving the
-alarm, will have reached town before you."
-
-I now perceived still more how she had been beating about the bush and
-how weary at last it had made her. "Your letter won't have got there.
-Your letter never went."
-
-"What then became of it?"
-
-"Goodness knows! Master Miles--"
-
-"Do you mean HE took it?" I gasped.
-
-She hung fire, but she overcame her reluctance. "I mean that I saw
-yesterday, when I came back with Miss Flora, that it wasn't where you
-had put it. Later in the evening I had the chance to question Luke, and
-he declared that he had neither noticed nor touched it." We could only
-exchange, on this, one of our deeper mutual soundings, and it was Mrs.
-Grose who first brought up the plumb with an almost elated "You see!"
-
-"Yes, I see that if Miles took it instead he probably will have read it
-and destroyed it."
-
-"And don't you see anything else?"
-
-I faced her a moment with a sad smile. "It strikes me that by this time
-your eyes are open even wider than mine."
-
-They proved to be so indeed, but she could still blush, almost, to show
-it. "I make out now what he must have done at school." And she gave, in
-her simple sharpness, an almost droll disillusioned nod. "He stole!"
-
-I turned it over--I tried to be more judicial. "Well--perhaps."
-
-She looked as if she found me unexpectedly calm. "He stole LETTERS!"
-
-She couldn't know my reasons for a calmness after all pretty shallow; so
-I showed them off as I might. "I hope then it was to more purpose than
-in this case! The note, at any rate, that I put on the table yesterday,"
-I pursued, "will have given him so scant an advantage--for it contained
-only the bare demand for an interview--that he is already much ashamed
-of having gone so far for so little, and that what he had on his mind
-last evening was precisely the need of confession." I seemed to myself,
-for the instant, to have mastered it, to see it all. "Leave us, leave
-us"--I was already, at the door, hurrying her off. "I'll get it out of
-him. He'll meet me--he'll confess. If he confesses, he's saved. And if
-he's saved--"
-
-"Then YOU are?" The dear woman kissed me on this, and I took her
-farewell. "I'll save you without him!" she cried as she went.
-
-
-
-
-XXII
-
-
-Yet it was when she had got off--and I missed her on the spot--that the
-great pinch really came. If I had counted on what it would give me to
-find myself alone with Miles, I speedily perceived, at least, that it
-would give me a measure. No hour of my stay in fact was so assailed
-with apprehensions as that of my coming down to learn that the carriage
-containing Mrs. Grose and my younger pupil had already rolled out of the
-gates. Now I WAS, I said to myself, face to face with the elements, and
-for much of the rest of the day, while I fought my weakness, I could
-consider that I had been supremely rash. It was a tighter place still
-than I had yet turned round in; all the more that, for the first time,
-I could see in the aspect of others a confused reflection of the crisis.
-What had happened naturally caused them all to stare; there was too
-little of the explained, throw out whatever we might, in the suddenness
-of my colleague's act. The maids and the men looked blank; the effect
-of which on my nerves was an aggravation until I saw the necessity of
-making it a positive aid. It was precisely, in short, by just clutching
-the helm that I avoided total wreck; and I dare say that, to bear up
-at all, I became, that morning, very grand and very dry. I welcomed the
-consciousness that I was charged with much to do, and I caused it to be
-known as well that, left thus to myself, I was quite remarkably firm. I
-wandered with that manner, for the next hour or two, all over the place
-and looked, I have no doubt, as if I were ready for any onset. So, for
-the benefit of whom it might concern, I paraded with a sick heart.
-
-The person it appeared least to concern proved to be, till dinner,
-little Miles himself. My perambulations had given me, meanwhile, no
-glimpse of him, but they had tended to make more public the change
-taking place in our relation as a consequence of his having at the
-piano, the day before, kept me, in Flora's interest, so beguiled and
-befooled. The stamp of publicity had of course been fully given by her
-confinement and departure, and the change itself was now ushered in
-by our nonobservance of the regular custom of the schoolroom. He had
-already disappeared when, on my way down, I pushed open his door, and
-I learned below that he had breakfasted--in the presence of a couple of
-the maids--with Mrs. Grose and his sister. He had then gone out, as he
-said, for a stroll; than which nothing, I reflected, could better have
-expressed his frank view of the abrupt transformation of my office. What
-he would not permit this office to consist of was yet to be settled:
-there was a queer relief, at all events--I mean for myself in
-especial--in the renouncement of one pretension. If so much had sprung
-to the surface, I scarce put it too strongly in saying that what had
-perhaps sprung highest was the absurdity of our prolonging the fiction
-that I had anything more to teach him. It sufficiently stuck out that,
-by tacit little tricks in which even more than myself he carried out the
-care for my dignity, I had had to appeal to him to let me off straining
-to meet him on the ground of his true capacity. He had at any rate
-his freedom now; I was never to touch it again; as I had amply shown,
-moreover, when, on his joining me in the schoolroom the previous night,
-I had uttered, on the subject of the interval just concluded, neither
-challenge nor hint. I had too much, from this moment, my other ideas.
-Yet when he at last arrived, the difficulty of applying them, the
-accumulations of my problem, were brought straight home to me by the
-beautiful little presence on which what had occurred had as yet, for the
-eye, dropped neither stain nor shadow.
-
-To mark, for the house, the high state I cultivated I decreed that my
-meals with the boy should be served, as we called it, downstairs; so
-that I had been awaiting him in the ponderous pomp of the room outside
-of the window of which I had had from Mrs. Grose, that first scared
-Sunday, my flash of something it would scarce have done to call light.
-Here at present I felt afresh--for I had felt it again and again--how my
-equilibrium depended on the success of my rigid will, the will to shut
-my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what I had to deal with
-was, revoltingly, against nature. I could only get on at all by taking
-"nature" into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous
-ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but
-demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw
-of ordinary human virtue. No attempt, nonetheless, could well require
-more tact than just this attempt to supply, one's self, ALL the nature.
-How could I put even a little of that article into a suppression of
-reference to what had occurred? How, on the other hand, could I make
-reference without a new plunge into the hideous obscure? Well, a sort
-of answer, after a time, had come to me, and it was so far confirmed as
-that I was met, incontestably, by the quickened vision of what was rare
-in my little companion. It was indeed as if he had found even now--as he
-had so often found at lessons--still some other delicate way to ease me
-off. Wasn't there light in the fact which, as we shared our solitude,
-broke out with a specious glitter it had never yet quite worn?--the fact
-that (opportunity aiding, precious opportunity which had now come) it
-would be preposterous, with a child so endowed, to forego the help one
-might wrest from absolute intelligence? What had his intelligence been
-given him for but to save him? Mightn't one, to reach his mind, risk the
-stretch of an angular arm over his character? It was as if, when we were
-face to face in the dining room, he had literally shown me the way.
-The roast mutton was on the table, and I had dispensed with attendance.
-Miles, before he sat down, stood a moment with his hands in his pockets
-and looked at the joint, on which he seemed on the point of passing some
-humorous judgment. But what he presently produced was: "I say, my dear,
-is she really very awfully ill?"
-
-"Little Flora? Not so bad but that she'll presently be better. London
-will set her up. Bly had ceased to agree with her. Come here and take
-your mutton."
-
-He alertly obeyed me, carried the plate carefully to his seat, and,
-when he was established, went on. "Did Bly disagree with her so terribly
-suddenly?"
-
-"Not so suddenly as you might think. One had seen it coming on."
-
-"Then why didn't you get her off before?"
-
-"Before what?"
-
-"Before she became too ill to travel."
-
-I found myself prompt. "She's NOT too ill to travel: she only might
-have become so if she had stayed. This was just the moment to seize. The
-journey will dissipate the influence"--oh, I was grand!--"and carry it
-off."
-
-"I see, I see"--Miles, for that matter, was grand, too. He settled to
-his repast with the charming little "table manner" that, from the day of
-his arrival, had relieved me of all grossness of admonition. Whatever
-he had been driven from school for, it was not for ugly feeding. He
-was irreproachable, as always, today; but he was unmistakably more
-conscious. He was discernibly trying to take for granted more things
-than he found, without assistance, quite easy; and he dropped into
-peaceful silence while he felt his situation. Our meal was of the
-briefest--mine a vain pretense, and I had the things immediately
-removed. While this was done Miles stood again with his hands in his
-little pockets and his back to me--stood and looked out of the wide
-window through which, that other day, I had seen what pulled me up. We
-continued silent while the maid was with us--as silent, it whimsically
-occurred to me, as some young couple who, on their wedding journey, at
-the inn, feel shy in the presence of the waiter. He turned round only
-when the waiter had left us. "Well--so we're alone!"
-
-
-
-
-XXIII
-
-
-"Oh, more or less." I fancy my smile was pale. "Not absolutely. We
-shouldn't like that!" I went on.
-
-"No--I suppose we shouldn't. Of course we have the others."
-
-"We have the others--we have indeed the others," I concurred.
-
-"Yet even though we have them," he returned, still with his hands in
-his pockets and planted there in front of me, "they don't much count, do
-they?"
-
-I made the best of it, but I felt wan. "It depends on what you call
-'much'!"
-
-"Yes"--with all accommodation--"everything depends!" On this, however,
-he faced to the window again and presently reached it with his vague,
-restless, cogitating step. He remained there awhile, with his forehead
-against the glass, in contemplation of the stupid shrubs I knew and the
-dull things of November. I had always my hypocrisy of "work," behind
-which, now, I gained the sofa. Steadying myself with it there as I had
-repeatedly done at those moments of torment that I have described as the
-moments of my knowing the children to be given to something from which
-I was barred, I sufficiently obeyed my habit of being prepared for the
-worst. But an extraordinary impression dropped on me as I extracted a
-meaning from the boy's embarrassed back--none other than the impression
-that I was not barred now. This inference grew in a few minutes to sharp
-intensity and seemed bound up with the direct perception that it was
-positively HE who was. The frames and squares of the great window were a
-kind of image, for him, of a kind of failure. I felt that I saw him, at
-any rate, shut in or shut out. He was admirable, but not comfortable: I
-took it in with a throb of hope. Wasn't he looking, through the haunted
-pane, for something he couldn't see?--and wasn't it the first time in
-the whole business that he had known such a lapse? The first, the very
-first: I found it a splendid portent. It made him anxious, though he
-watched himself; he had been anxious all day and, even while in his
-usual sweet little manner he sat at table, had needed all his small
-strange genius to give it a gloss. When he at last turned round to meet
-me, it was almost as if this genius had succumbed. "Well, I think I'm
-glad Bly agrees with ME!"
-
-"You would certainly seem to have seen, these twenty-four hours, a good
-deal more of it than for some time before. I hope," I went on bravely,
-"that you've been enjoying yourself."
-
-"Oh, yes, I've been ever so far; all round about--miles and miles away.
-I've never been so free."
-
-He had really a manner of his own, and I could only try to keep up with
-him. "Well, do you like it?"
-
-He stood there smiling; then at last he put into two words--"Do
-YOU?"--more discrimination than I had ever heard two words contain.
-Before I had time to deal with that, however, he continued as if with
-the sense that this was an impertinence to be softened. "Nothing could
-be more charming than the way you take it, for of course if we're alone
-together now it's you that are alone most. But I hope," he threw in,
-"you don't particularly mind!"
-
-"Having to do with you?" I asked. "My dear child, how can I help
-minding? Though I've renounced all claim to your company--you're so
-beyond me--I at least greatly enjoy it. What else should I stay on for?"
-
-He looked at me more directly, and the expression of his face, graver
-now, struck me as the most beautiful I had ever found in it. "You stay
-on just for THAT?"
-
-"Certainly. I stay on as your friend and from the tremendous interest
-I take in you till something can be done for you that may be more worth
-your while. That needn't surprise you." My voice trembled so that I felt
-it impossible to suppress the shake. "Don't you remember how I told you,
-when I came and sat on your bed the night of the storm, that there was
-nothing in the world I wouldn't do for you?"
-
-"Yes, yes!" He, on his side, more and more visibly nervous, had a tone
-to master; but he was so much more successful than I that, laughing out
-through his gravity, he could pretend we were pleasantly jesting. "Only
-that, I think, was to get me to do something for YOU!"
-
-"It was partly to get you to do something," I conceded. "But, you know,
-you didn't do it."
-
-"Oh, yes," he said with the brightest superficial eagerness, "you wanted
-me to tell you something."
-
-"That's it. Out, straight out. What you have on your mind, you know."
-
-"Ah, then, is THAT what you've stayed over for?"
-
-He spoke with a gaiety through which I could still catch the finest
-little quiver of resentful passion; but I can't begin to express the
-effect upon me of an implication of surrender even so faint. It was as
-if what I had yearned for had come at last only to astonish me. "Well,
-yes--I may as well make a clean breast of it, it was precisely for
-that."
-
-He waited so long that I supposed it for the purpose of repudiating the
-assumption on which my action had been founded; but what he finally said
-was: "Do you mean now--here?"
-
-"There couldn't be a better place or time." He looked round him
-uneasily, and I had the rare--oh, the queer!--impression of the very
-first symptom I had seen in him of the approach of immediate fear.
-It was as if he were suddenly afraid of me--which struck me indeed as
-perhaps the best thing to make him. Yet in the very pang of the effort
-I felt it vain to try sternness, and I heard myself the next instant so
-gentle as to be almost grotesque. "You want so to go out again?"
-
-"Awfully!" He smiled at me heroically, and the touching little bravery
-of it was enhanced by his actually flushing with pain. He had picked up
-his hat, which he had brought in, and stood twirling it in a way that
-gave me, even as I was just nearly reaching port, a perverse horror of
-what I was doing. To do it in ANY way was an act of violence, for what
-did it consist of but the obtrusion of the idea of grossness and guilt
-on a small helpless creature who had been for me a revelation of the
-possibilities of beautiful intercourse? Wasn't it base to create for a
-being so exquisite a mere alien awkwardness? I suppose I now read into
-our situation a clearness it couldn't have had at the time, for I seem
-to see our poor eyes already lighted with some spark of a prevision
-of the anguish that was to come. So we circled about, with terrors and
-scruples, like fighters not daring to close. But it was for each other
-we feared! That kept us a little longer suspended and unbruised. "I'll
-tell you everything," Miles said--"I mean I'll tell you anything you
-like. You'll stay on with me, and we shall both be all right, and I WILL
-tell you--I WILL. But not now."
-
-"Why not now?"
-
-My insistence turned him from me and kept him once more at his window
-in a silence during which, between us, you might have heard a pin drop.
-Then he was before me again with the air of a person for whom, outside,
-someone who had frankly to be reckoned with was waiting. "I have to see
-Luke."
-
-I had not yet reduced him to quite so vulgar a lie, and I felt
-proportionately ashamed. But, horrible as it was, his lies made up my
-truth. I achieved thoughtfully a few loops of my knitting. "Well, then,
-go to Luke, and I'll wait for what you promise. Only, in return for
-that, satisfy, before you leave me, one very much smaller request."
-
-He looked as if he felt he had succeeded enough to be able still a
-little to bargain. "Very much smaller--?"
-
-"Yes, a mere fraction of the whole. Tell me"--oh, my work preoccupied
-me, and I was offhand!--"if, yesterday afternoon, from the table in the
-hall, you took, you know, my letter."
-
-
-
-
-XXIV
-
-
-My sense of how he received this suffered for a minute from something
-that I can describe only as a fierce split of my attention--a stroke
-that at first, as I sprang straight up, reduced me to the mere blind
-movement of getting hold of him, drawing him close, and, while I just
-fell for support against the nearest piece of furniture, instinctively
-keeping him with his back to the window. The appearance was full upon us
-that I had already had to deal with here: Peter Quint had come into view
-like a sentinel before a prison. The next thing I saw was that, from
-outside, he had reached the window, and then I knew that, close to the
-glass and glaring in through it, he offered once more to the room his
-white face of damnation. It represents but grossly what took place
-within me at the sight to say that on the second my decision was made;
-yet I believe that no woman so overwhelmed ever in so short a time
-recovered her grasp of the ACT. It came to me in the very horror of the
-immediate presence that the act would be, seeing and facing what I saw
-and faced, to keep the boy himself unaware. The inspiration--I can
-call it by no other name--was that I felt how voluntarily, how
-transcendently, I MIGHT. It was like fighting with a demon for a
-human soul, and when I had fairly so appraised it I saw how the human
-soul--held out, in the tremor of my hands, at arm's length--had a
-perfect dew of sweat on a lovely childish forehead. The face that was
-close to mine was as white as the face against the glass, and out of it
-presently came a sound, not low nor weak, but as if from much further
-away, that I drank like a waft of fragrance.
-
-"Yes--I took it."
-
-At this, with a moan of joy, I enfolded, I drew him close; and while
-I held him to my breast, where I could feel in the sudden fever of his
-little body the tremendous pulse of his little heart, I kept my eyes on
-the thing at the window and saw it move and shift its posture. I have
-likened it to a sentinel, but its slow wheel, for a moment, was rather
-the prowl of a baffled beast. My present quickened courage, however, was
-such that, not too much to let it through, I had to shade, as it were,
-my flame. Meanwhile the glare of the face was again at the window, the
-scoundrel fixed as if to watch and wait. It was the very confidence that
-I might now defy him, as well as the positive certitude, by this time,
-of the child's unconsciousness, that made me go on. "What did you take
-it for?"
-
-"To see what you said about me."
-
-"You opened the letter?"
-
-"I opened it."
-
-My eyes were now, as I held him off a little again, on Miles's own face,
-in which the collapse of mockery showed me how complete was the ravage
-of uneasiness. What was prodigious was that at last, by my success, his
-sense was sealed and his communication stopped: he knew that he was in
-presence, but knew not of what, and knew still less that I also was and
-that I did know. And what did this strain of trouble matter when my eyes
-went back to the window only to see that the air was clear again and--by
-my personal triumph--the influence quenched? There was nothing there. I
-felt that the cause was mine and that I should surely get ALL. "And you
-found nothing!"--I let my elation out.
-
-He gave the most mournful, thoughtful little headshake. "Nothing."
-
-"Nothing, nothing!" I almost shouted in my joy.
-
-"Nothing, nothing," he sadly repeated.
-
-I kissed his forehead; it was drenched. "So what have you done with it?"
-
-"I've burned it."
-
-"Burned it?" It was now or never. "Is that what you did at school?"
-
-Oh, what this brought up! "At school?"
-
-"Did you take letters?--or other things?"
-
-"Other things?" He appeared now to be thinking of something far off and
-that reached him only through the pressure of his anxiety. Yet it did
-reach him. "Did I STEAL?"
-
-I felt myself redden to the roots of my hair as well as wonder if it
-were more strange to put to a gentleman such a question or to see him
-take it with allowances that gave the very distance of his fall in the
-world. "Was it for that you mightn't go back?"
-
-The only thing he felt was rather a dreary little surprise. "Did you
-know I mightn't go back?"
-
-"I know everything."
-
-He gave me at this the longest and strangest look. "Everything?"
-
-"Everything. Therefore DID you--?" But I couldn't say it again.
-
-Miles could, very simply. "No. I didn't steal."
-
-My face must have shown him I believed him utterly; yet my hands--but it
-was for pure tenderness--shook him as if to ask him why, if it was all
-for nothing, he had condemned me to months of torment. "What then did
-you do?"
-
-He looked in vague pain all round the top of the room and drew his
-breath, two or three times over, as if with difficulty. He might have
-been standing at the bottom of the sea and raising his eyes to some
-faint green twilight. "Well--I said things."
-
-"Only that?"
-
-"They thought it was enough!"
-
-"To turn you out for?"
-
-Never, truly, had a person "turned out" shown so little to explain it
-as this little person! He appeared to weigh my question, but in a manner
-quite detached and almost helpless. "Well, I suppose I oughtn't."
-
-"But to whom did you say them?"
-
-He evidently tried to remember, but it dropped--he had lost it. "I don't
-know!"
-
-He almost smiled at me in the desolation of his surrender, which was
-indeed practically, by this time, so complete that I ought to have left
-it there. But I was infatuated--I was blind with victory, though even
-then the very effect that was to have brought him so much nearer was
-already that of added separation. "Was it to everyone?" I asked.
-
-"No; it was only to--" But he gave a sick little headshake. "I don't
-remember their names."
-
-"Were they then so many?"
-
-"No--only a few. Those I liked."
-
-Those he liked? I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker
-obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity
-the appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent. It was for the
-instant confounding and bottomless, for if he WERE innocent, what then
-on earth was _I_? Paralyzed, while it lasted, by the mere brush of the
-question, I let him go a little, so that, with a deep-drawn sigh, he
-turned away from me again; which, as he faced toward the clear window,
-I suffered, feeling that I had nothing now there to keep him from. "And
-did they repeat what you said?" I went on after a moment.
-
-He was soon at some distance from me, still breathing hard and again
-with the air, though now without anger for it, of being confined against
-his will. Once more, as he had done before, he looked up at the dim
-day as if, of what had hitherto sustained him, nothing was left but an
-unspeakable anxiety. "Oh, yes," he nevertheless replied--"they must have
-repeated them. To those THEY liked," he added.
-
-There was, somehow, less of it than I had expected; but I turned it
-over. "And these things came round--?"
-
-"To the masters? Oh, yes!" he answered very simply. "But I didn't know
-they'd tell."
-
-"The masters? They didn't--they've never told. That's why I ask you."
-
-He turned to me again his little beautiful fevered face. "Yes, it was
-too bad."
-
-"Too bad?"
-
-"What I suppose I sometimes said. To write home."
-
-I can't name the exquisite pathos of the contradiction given to such
-a speech by such a speaker; I only know that the next instant I heard
-myself throw off with homely force: "Stuff and nonsense!" But the next
-after that I must have sounded stern enough. "What WERE these things?"
-
-My sternness was all for his judge, his executioner; yet it made him
-avert himself again, and that movement made ME, with a single bound and
-an irrepressible cry, spring straight upon him. For there again, against
-the glass, as if to blight his confession and stay his answer, was the
-hideous author of our woe--the white face of damnation. I felt a sick
-swim at the drop of my victory and all the return of my battle, so that
-the wildness of my veritable leap only served as a great betrayal. I
-saw him, from the midst of my act, meet it with a divination, and on the
-perception that even now he only guessed, and that the window was still
-to his own eyes free, I let the impulse flame up to convert the climax
-of his dismay into the very proof of his liberation. "No more, no
-more, no more!" I shrieked, as I tried to press him against me, to my
-visitant.
-
-"Is she HERE?" Miles panted as he caught with his sealed eyes the
-direction of my words. Then as his strange "she" staggered me and, with
-a gasp, I echoed it, "Miss Jessel, Miss Jessel!" he with a sudden fury
-gave me back.
-
-I seized, stupefied, his supposition--some sequel to what we had done to
-Flora, but this made me only want to show him that it was better still
-than that. "It's not Miss Jessel! But it's at the window--straight
-before us. It's THERE--the coward horror, there for the last time!"
-
-At this, after a second in which his head made the movement of a baffled
-dog's on a scent and then gave a frantic little shake for air and light,
-he was at me in a white rage, bewildered, glaring vainly over the place
-and missing wholly, though it now, to my sense, filled the room like the
-taste of poison, the wide, overwhelming presence. "It's HE?"
-
-I was so determined to have all my proof that I flashed into ice to
-challenge him. "Whom do you mean by 'he'?"
-
-"Peter Quint--you devil!" His face gave again, round the room, its
-convulsed supplication. "WHERE?"
-
-They are in my ears still, his supreme surrender of the name and his
-tribute to my devotion. "What does he matter now, my own?--what will he
-EVER matter? _I_ have you," I launched at the beast, "but he has lost
-you forever!" Then, for the demonstration of my work, "There, THERE!" I
-said to Miles.
-
-But he had already jerked straight round, stared, glared again, and
-seen but the quiet day. With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he
-uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp with
-which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall.
-I caught him, yes, I held him--it may be imagined with what a passion;
-but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that
-I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart,
-dispossessed, had stopped.
-
-
-
-
-
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