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diff --git a/old/tturn10.txt b/old/tturn10.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 1fbd41a..0000000 --- a/old/tturn10.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,5087 +0,0 @@ -*****The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Turn of the Screw***** - -Please take a look at the important information in this header. -We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an -electronic path open for the next readers. Do not remove this. - - -**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts** - -**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971** - -*These Etexts Prepared By Hundreds of Volunteers and Donations* - -Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and -further information is included below. 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FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END* - - - - - -The text is from the first American appearance in book form. - - -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. - - - - -End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Turn of the Screw - - |