Project Gutenberg Australia

The Turn of the Screw
Henry James




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.



THE END


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