The Turn of the Screw

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The superhero figures for the whole familyTurn of the Screw

by Henry James

Contents

THE TURN OF THE SCREW

The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except theobvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, astrange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebodyhappened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitationhad fallen on a child. The case, I may mention, was that of an apparition injust 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 andwaking her up in the terror of it; waking her not to dissipate his dread andsoothe him to sleep again, but to encounter also, herself, before she hadsucceeded in doing so, the same sight that had shaken him. It was thisobservation that drew from Douglas—not immediately, but later in theevening—a reply that had the interesting consequence to which I callattention. Someone else told a story not particularly effective, which I saw hewas not following. This I took for a sign that he had himself something toproduce and that we should only have to wait. We waited in fact till two nightslater; but that same evening, before we scattered, he brought out what was inhis mind.

“I quite agree—in regard to Griffin’s ghost, or whatever itwas—that its appearing first to the little boy, at so tender an age, addsa particular touch. But it’s not the first occurrence of its charmingkind that I know to have involved a child. If the child gives the effectanother turn of the screw, what do you say to twochildren—?”

“We say, of course,” somebody exclaimed, “that they give twoturns! Also that we want to hear about them.”

I can see Douglas there before the fire, to which he had got up to present hisback, looking down at his interlocutor with his hands in his pockets.“Nobody but me, till now, has ever heard. It’s quite toohorrible.” This, naturally, was declared by several voices to give thething the utmost price, and our friend, with quiet art, prepared his triumph byturning his eyes over the rest of us and going on: “It’s beyondeverything. 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 toqualify 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 sawwhat he spoke of. “For general uncanny ugliness and horror andpain.”

“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. Thenas he faced us again: “I can’t begin. I shall have to send totown.” There was a unanimous groan at this, and much reproach; afterwhich, in his preoccupied way, he explained. “The story’s written.It’s in a locked drawer—it has not been out for years. I couldwrite to my man and enclose the key; he could send down the packet as he findsit.” It was to me in particular that he appeared to propoundthis—appeared almost to appeal for aid not to hesitate. He had broken athickness of ice, the formation of many a winter; had had his reasons for along silence. The others resented postponement, but it was just his scruplesthat charmed me. I adjured him to write by the first post and to agree with usfor an early hearing; then I asked him if the experience in question had beenhis 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”—hetapped his heart. “I’ve never lost it.”

“Then your manuscript—?”

“Is in old, faded ink, and in the most beautiful hand.” He hungfire again. “A woman’s. She has been dead these twenty years. Shesent me the pages in question before she died.” They were all listeningnow, and of course there was somebody to be arch, or at any rate to draw theinference. But if he put the inference by without a smile it was also withoutirritation. “She was a most charming person, but she was ten years olderthan I. She was my sister’s governess,” he quietly said. “Shewas the most agreeable woman I’ve ever known in her position; she wouldhave been worthy of any whatever. It was long ago, and this episode was longbefore. I was at Trinity, and I found her at home on my coming down the secondsummer. I was much there that year—it was a beautiful one; and we had, inher off-hours, some strolls and talks in the garden—talks in which shestruck me as awfully clever and nice. Oh yes; don’t grin: I liked herextremely and am glad to this day to think she liked me, too. If shehadn’t she wouldn’t have told me. She had never told anyone. Itwasn’t simply that she said so, but that I knew she hadn’t. I wassure; 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:“youwill.”

I fixed him, too. “I see. She was in love.”

He laughed for the first time. “You areacute. Yes, she was inlove. That is, she had been. That came out—she couldn’t tell herstory without its coming out. I saw it, and she saw I saw it; but neither of usspoke 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. Itwasn’t a scene for a shudder; but oh—!” He quitted the fireand 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!”

“Iwill”—and “Iwill!” cried theladies whose departure had been fixed. Mrs. Griffin, however, expressed theneed 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’ttell,” said Douglas; “not inany literal, vulgar way.”

“More’s the pity, then. That’s the only way I everunderstand.”

“Won’t youtell, 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 slightlybewildered. From our end of the great brown hall we heard his step on thestair; whereupon Mrs. Griffin spoke. “Well, if I don’t know who shewas in love with, I know who hewas.”

“She was ten years older,” said her husband.

“Raison de plus—at that age! But it’s rather nice, hislong reticence.”

“Forty years!” Griffin put in.

“With this outbreak at last.”

“The outbreak,” I returned, “will make a tremendous occasionof Thursday night;” and everyone so agreed with me that, in the light ofit, we lost all attention for everything else. The last story, howeverincomplete and like the mere opening of a serial, had been told; we handshookand “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 onaccount of—the eventual diffusion of this knowledge we quite let himalone till after dinner, till such an hour of the evening, in fact, as mightbest accord with the kind of emotion on which our hopes were fixed. Then hebecame as communicative as we could desire and indeed gave us his best reasonfor being so. We had it from him again before the fire in the hall, as we hadhad our mild wonders of the previous night. It appeared that the narrative hehad promised to read us really required for a proper intelligence a few wordsof prologue. Let me say here distinctly, to have done with it, that thisnarrative, from an exact transcript of my own made much later, is what I shallpresently give. Poor Douglas, before his death—when it was insight—committed to me the manuscript that reached him on the third ofthese days and that, on the same spot, with immense effect, he began to read toour hushed little circle on the night of the fourth. The departing ladies whohad said they would stay didn’t, of course, thank heaven, stay: theydeparted, in consequence of arrangements made, in a rage of curiosity, as theyprofessed, produced by the touches with which he had already worked us up. Butthat 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 taleat a point after it had, in a manner, begun. The fact to be in possession ofwas therefore that his old friend, the youngest of several daughters of a poorcountry parson, had, at the age of twenty, on taking service for the first timein the schoolroom, come up to London, in trepidation, to answer in person anadvertisement that had already placed her in brief correspondence with theadvertiser. This person proved, on her presenting herself, for judgment, at ahouse in Harley Street, that impressed her as vast and imposing—thisprospective patron proved a gentleman, a bachelor in the prime of life, such afigure 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; itnever, happily, dies out. He was handsome and bold and pleasant, off-hand andgay and kind. He struck her, inevitably, as gallant and splendid, but what tookher most of all and gave her the courage she afterward showed was that he putthe whole thing to her as a kind of favor, an obligation he should gratefullyincur. She conceived him as rich, but as fearfully extravagant—saw himall in a glow of high fashion, of good looks, of expensive habits, of charmingways with women. He had for his own town residence a big house filled with thespoils 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 smallnephew and a small niece, children of a younger, a military brother, whom hehad lost two years before. These children were, by the strangest of chances fora man in his position—a lone man without the right sort of experience ora grain of patience—very heavily on his hands. It had all been a greatworry and, on his own part doubtless, a series of blunders, but he immenselypitied the poor chicks and had done all he could; had in particular sent themdown 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 lookafter them, parting even with his own servants to wait on them and going downhimself, whenever he might, to see how they were doing. The awkward thing wasthat they had practically no other relations and that his own affairs took upall his time. He had put them in possession of Bly, which was healthy andsecure, and had placed at the head of their little establishment—butbelow stairs only—an excellent woman, Mrs. Grose, whom he was sure hisvisitor would like and who had formerly been maid to his mother. She was nowhousekeeper and was also acting for the time as superintendent to the littlegirl, of whom, without children of her own, she was, by good luck, extremelyfond. There were plenty of people to help, but of course the young lady whoshould 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 atschool—young as he was to be sent, but what else could be done?—andwho, as the holidays were about to begin, would be back from one day to theother. There had been for the two children at first a young lady whom they hadhad the misfortune to lose. She had done for them quite beautifully—shewas a most respectable person—till her death, the great awkwardness ofwhich 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 forFlora; 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 muchrespectability?”

Our friend’s answer was prompt. “That will come out. I don’tanticipate.”

“Excuse me—I thought that was just what you aredoing.”

“In her successor’s place,” I suggested, “I should havewished 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 whatshe learned. Meanwhile, of course, the prospect struck her as slightly grim.She was young, untried, nervous: it was a vision of serious duties and littlecompany, of really great loneliness. She hesitated—took a couple of daysto consult and consider. But the salary offered much exceeded her modestmeasure, and on a second interview she faced the music, she engaged.” AndDouglas, with this, made a pause that, for the benefit of the company, moved meto throw in—

“The moral of which was of course the seduction exercised by the splendidyoung man. She succumbed to it.”

He got up and, as he had done the night before, went to the fire, gave a stirto a log with his foot, then stood a moment with his back to us. “She sawhim only twice.”

“Yes, but that’s just the beauty of her passion.”

A little to my surprise, on this, Douglas turned round to me. “Itwasthe beauty of it. There were others,” he went on, “whohadn’t succumbed. He told her frankly all his difficulty—that forseveral applicants the conditions had been prohibitive. They were, somehow,simply afraid. It sounded dull—it sounded strange; and all the more sobecause of his main condition.”

“Which was—?”

“That she should never trouble him—but never, never: neither appealnor complain nor write about anything; only meet all questions herself, receiveall moneys from his solicitor, take the whole thing over and let him alone. Shepromised to do this, and she mentioned to me that when, for a moment,disburdened, delighted, he held her hand, thanking her for the sacrifice, shealready 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 usagain, 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 thefaded red cover of a thin old-fashioned gilt-edged album. The whole thing tookindeed more nights than one, but on the first occasion the same lady putanother question. “What is your title?”

“I haven’t one.”

“Oh, Ihave!” I said. But Douglas, without heeding me, hadbegun to read with a fine clearness that was like a rendering to the ear of thebeauty of his author’s hand.

I

I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a littleseesaw of the right throbs and the wrong. After rising, in town, to meet hisappeal, I had at all events a couple of very bad days—found myselfdoubtful again, felt indeed sure I had made a mistake. In this state of mind Ispent the long hours of bumping, swinging coach that carried me to the stoppingplace at which I was to be met by a vehicle from the house. This convenience, Iwas told, had been ordered, and I found, toward the close of the Juneafternoon, a commodious fly in waiting for me. Driving at that hour, on alovely day, through a country to which the summer sweetness seemed to offer mea friendly welcome, my fortitude mounted afresh and, as we turned into theavenue, encountered a reprieve that was probably but a proof of the point towhich it had sunk. I suppose I had expected, or had dreaded, something somelancholy that what greeted me was a good surprise. I remember as a mostpleasant impression the broad, clear front, its open windows and fresh curtainsand the pair of maids looking out; I remember the lawn and the bright flowersand the crunch of my wheels on the gravel and the clustered treetops over whichthe rooks circled and cawed in the golden sky. The scene had a greatness thatmade it a different affair from my own scant home, and there immediatelyappeared at the door, with a little girl in her hand, a civil person whodropped me as decent a curtsy as if I had been the mistress or a distinguishedvisitor. I had received in Harley Street a narrower notion of the place, andthat, 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 throughthe following hours by my introduction to the younger of my pupils. The littlegirl who accompanied Mrs. Grose appeared to me on the spot a creature socharming as to make it a great fortune to have to do with her. She was the mostbeautiful child I had ever seen, and I afterward wondered that my employer hadnot told me more of her. I slept little that night—I was too muchexcited; and this astonished me too, I recollect, remained with me, adding tomy sense of the liberality with which I was treated. The large, impressiveroom, 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, Icould see myself from head to foot, all struck me—like the extraordinarycharm of my small charge—as so many things thrown in. It was thrown in aswell, from the first moment, that I should get on with Mrs. Grose in a relationover which, on my way, in the coach, I fear I had rather brooded. The onlything indeed that in this early outlook might have made me shrink again was theclear circumstance of her being so glad to see me. I perceived within half anhour that she was so glad—stout, simple, plain, clean, wholesomewoman—as to be positively on her guard against showing it too much. Iwondered even then a little why she should wish not to show it, and that, withreflection, with suspicion, might of course have made me uneasy.

But it was a comfort that there could be no uneasiness in a connection withanything so beatific as the radiant image of my little girl, the vision ofwhose angelic beauty had probably more than anything else to do with therestlessness that, before morning, made me several times rise and wander aboutmy room to take in the whole picture and prospect; to watch, from my openwindow, the faint summer dawn, to look at such portions of the rest of thehouse as I could catch, and to listen, while, in the fading dusk, the firstbirds began to twitter, for the possible recurrence of a sound or two, lessnatural and not without, but within, that I had fancied I heard. There had beena moment when I believed I recognized, faint and far, the cry of a child; therehad been another when I found myself just consciously starting as at thepassage, before my door, of a light footstep. But these fancies were not markedenough not to be thrown off, and it is only in the light, or the gloom, Ishould rather say, of other and subsequent matters that they now come back tome. To watch, teach, “form” little Flora would too evidently be themaking of a happy and useful life. It had been agreed between us downstairsthat after this first occasion I should have her as a matter of course atnight, 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, justthis last time, with Mrs. Grose only as an effect of our consideration for myinevitable strangeness and her natural timidity. In spite of thistimidity—which the child herself, in the oddest way in the world, hadbeen perfectly frank and brave about, allowing it, without a sign ofuncomfortable consciousness, with the deep, sweet serenity indeed of one ofRaphael’s holy infants, to be discussed, to be imputed to her, and todetermine us—I feel quite sure she would presently like me. It was partof what I already liked Mrs. Grose herself for, the pleasure I could see herfeel in my admiration and wonder as I sat at supper with four tall candles andwith 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 presencecould pass between us only as prodigious and gratified looks, obscure androundabout allusions.

“And the little boy—does he look like her? Is he too so veryremarkable?”

One wouldn’t flatter a child. “Oh, miss, mostremarkable. Ifyou think well of this one!”—and she stood there with a plate inher hand, beaming at our companion, who looked from one of us to the other withplacid heavenly eyes that contained nothing to check us.

“Yes; if I do—?”

“You willbe 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 inLondon!”

I can still see Mrs. Grose’s broad face as she took this in. “InHarley Street?”

“In Harley Street.”

“Well, miss, you’re not the first—and you won’t be thelast.”

“Oh, I’ve no pretension,” I could laugh, “to being theonly one. My other pupil, at any rate, as I understand, comes backtomorrow?”

“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 friendlything would be therefore that on the arrival of the public conveyance I shouldbe in waiting for him with his little sister; an idea in which Mrs. Groseconcurred so heartily that I somehow took her manner as a kind of comfortingpledge—never falsified, thank heaven!—that we should on everyquestion 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 areaction from the cheer of my arrival; it was probably at the most only aslight oppression produced by a fuller measure of the scale, as I walked roundthem, gazed up at them, took them in, of my new circumstances. They had, as itwere, an extent and mass for which I had not been prepared and in the presenceof 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 myfirst duty was, by the gentlest arts I could contrive, to win the child intothe sense of knowing me. I spent the day with her out-of-doors; I arranged withher, to her great satisfaction, that it should be she, she only, who might showme 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 anhour, of our becoming immense friends. Young as she was, I was struck,throughout our little tour, with her confidence and courage with the way, inempty chambers and dull corridors, on crooked staircases that made me pause andeven on the summit of an old machicolated square tower that made me dizzy, hermorning 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 Idaresay that to my older and more informed eyes it would now appearsufficiently contracted. But as my little conductress, with her hair of goldand her frock of blue, danced before me round corners and pattered downpassages, 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 colorout of storybooks and fairytales. Wasn’t it just a storybook over which Ihad fallen adoze and adream? No; it was a big, ugly, antique, but convenienthouse, embodying a few features of a building still older, half-replaced andhalf-utilized, in which I had the fancy of our being almost as lost as ahandful of passengers in a great drifting ship. Well, I was, strangely, at thehelm!

II

This came home to me when, two days later, I drove over with Flora to meet, asMrs. Grose said, the little gentleman; and all the more for an incident that,presenting itself the second evening, had deeply disconcerted me. The first dayhad been, on the whole, as I have expressed, reassuring; but I was to see itwind up in keen apprehension. The postbag, that evening—it camelate—contained a letter for me, which, however, in the hand of myemployer, I found to be composed but of a few words enclosing another,addressed to himself, with a seal still unbroken. “This, I recognize, isfrom 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’moff!” I broke the seal with a great effort—so great a one that Iwas a long time coming to it; took the unopened missive at last up to my roomand only attacked it just before going to bed. I had better have let it waittill 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 methat 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 quickblankness, seemed to try to take it back. “But aren’t theyall—?”

“Sent home—yes. But only for the holidays. Miles may never go backat all.”

Consciously, under my attention, she reddened. “They won’t takehim?”

“They absolutely decline.”

At this she raised her eyes, which she had turned from me; I saw them fill withgood 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 handsbehind 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 asI could, and opened my letter again to repeat it to her; then, faltering in theact and folding it up once more, I put it back in my pocket. “Is hereally bad?”

The tears were still in her eyes. “Do the gentlemen say so?”

“They go into no particulars. They simply express their regret that itshould 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 mightbe; so that, presently, to put the thing with some coherence and with the mereaid of her presence to my own mind, I went on: “That he’s an injuryto the others.”

At this, with one of the quick turns of simple folk, she suddenly flamed up.“Master Miles! himan injury?”

There was such a flood of good faith in it that, though I had not yet seen thechild, 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 suchcruel 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.Thenbelieve it!” I felt forthwith a new impatience to see him; itwas the beginning of a curiosity that, for all the next hours, was to deepenalmost to pain. Mrs. Grose was aware, I could judge, of what she had producedin me, and she followed it up with assurance. “You might as well believeit of the little lady. Bless her,” she added the nextmoment—“lookat her!”

I turned and saw that Flora, whom, ten minutes before, I had established in theschoolroom 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 disagreeableduties, looking to me, however, with a great childish light that seemed tooffer 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 morethan 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 sobof atonement.

Nonetheless, the rest of the day I watched for further occasion to approach mycolleague, especially as, toward evening, I began to fancy she rather sought toavoid 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 thatyou’venever 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 pretendthat!”

I was upset again. “Then you haveknown him—?”

“Yes indeed, miss, thank God!”

On reflection I accepted this. “You mean that a boy who neveris—?”

“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 broughtout. “But not to the degree to contaminate—”

“To contaminate?”—my big word left her at a loss. I explainedit. “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 thequestion with such a fine bold humor that, with a laugh, a little sillydoubtless, to match her own, I gave way for the time to the apprehension ofridicule.

But the next day, as the hour for my drive approached, I cropped up in anotherplace. “What was the lady who was here before?”

“The last governess? She was also young and pretty—almost as youngand almost as pretty, miss, even as you.”

“Ah, then, I hope her youth and her beauty helped her!” I recollectthrowing off. “He seems to like us young and pretty!”

“Oh, he did,” Mrs. Grose assented: “it was the way heliked everyone!” She had no sooner spoken indeed than she caught herselfup. “I mean that’s hisway—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 myimpression of her having accidentally said more than she meant; and I merelyasked what I wanted to know. “Did shesee anything in theboy—?”

“That wasn’t right? She never told me.”

I had a scruple, but I overcame it. “Was shecareful—particular?”

Mrs. Grose appeared to try to be conscientious. “About somethings—yes.”

“But not about all?”

Again she considered. “Well, miss—she’s gone. I won’ttell tales.”

“I quite understand your feeling,” I hastened to reply; but Ithought 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 thatstruck me as ambiguous. “Went off to die?” Mrs. Grose lookedstraight out of the window, but I felt that, hypothetically, I had a right toknow what young persons engaged for Bly were expected to do. “She wastaken 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 whichthe time she had put in had certainly given her a right. We had then a youngwoman—a nursemaid who had stayed on and who was a good girl and clever;and shetook the children altogether for the interval. But our younglady never came back, and at the very moment I was expecting her I heard fromthe master that she was dead.”

I turned this over. “But of what?”

“He never told me! But please, miss,” said Mrs. Grose, “Imust get to my work.”

III

Her thus turning her back on me was fortunately not, for my justpreoccupations, a snub that could check the growth of our mutual esteem. Wemet, after I had brought home little Miles, more intimately than ever on theground of my stupefaction, my general emotion: so monstrous was I then ready topronounce it that such a child as had now been revealed to me should be underan interdict. I was a little late on the scene, and I felt, as he stoodwistfully looking out for me before the door of the inn at which the coach hadput him down, that I had seen him, on the instant, without and within, in thegreat 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, andMrs. Grose had put her finger on it: everything but a sort of passion oftenderness for him was swept away by his presence. What I then and there tookhim to my heart for was something divine that I have never found to the samedegree in any child—his indescribable little air of knowing nothing inthe world but love. It would have been impossible to carry a bad name with agreater sweetness of innocence, and by the time I had got back to Bly with himI remained merely bewildered—so far, that is, as I was notoutraged—by the sense of the horrible letter locked up in my room, in adrawer. As soon as I could compass a private word with Mrs. Grose I declared toher that it was grotesque.

She promptly understood me. “You mean the cruel charge—?”

“It doesn’t live an instant. My dear woman, lookathim!”

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 standby you. We’ll see it out.”

“We’ll see it out!” I ardently echoed, giving her my hand tomake it a vow.

She held me there a moment, then whisked up her apron again with her detachedhand. “Would you mind, miss, if I used the freedom—”

“To kiss me? No!” I took the good creature in my arms and, after wehad 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 wayit 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 hadundertaken, with my companion, to see it out, and I was under a charm,apparently, that could smooth away the extent and the far and difficultconnections of such an effort. I was lifted aloft on a great wave ofinfatuation and pity. I found it simple, in my ignorance, my confusion, andperhaps my conceit, to assume that I could deal with a boy whose education forthe world was all on the point of beginning. I am unable even to remember atthis day what proposal I framed for the end of his holidays and the resumptionof his studies. Lessons with me, indeed, that charming summer, we all had atheory that he was to have; but I now feel that, for weeks, the lessons musthave been rather my own. I learned something—at first,certainly—that had not been one of the teachings of my small, smotheredlife; 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 wasconsideration—and consideration was sweet. Oh, it was a trap—notdesigned, but deep—to my imagination, to my delicacy, perhaps to myvanity; to whatever, in me, was most excitable. The best way to picture it allis to say that I was off my guard. They gave me so little trouble—theywere of a gentleness so extraordinary. I used to speculate—but even thiswith a dim disconnectedness—as to how the rough future (for all futuresare rough!) would handle them and might bruise them. They had the bloom ofhealth and happiness; and yet, as if I had been in charge of a pair of littlegrandees, of princes of the blood, for whom everything, to be right, would haveto be enclosed and protected, the only form that, in my fancy, the afteryearscould take for them was that of a romantic, a really royal extension of thegarden and the park. It may be, of course, above all, that what suddenly brokeinto this gives the previous time a charm of stillness—that hush in whichsomething gathers or crouches. The change was actually like the spring of abeast.

In the first weeks the days were long; they often, at their finest, gave mewhat I used to call my own hour, the hour when, for my pupils, teatime andbedtime having come and gone, I had, before my final retirement, a smallinterval alone. Much as I liked my companions, this hour was the thing in theday I liked most; and I liked it best of all when, as the light faded—orrather, I should say, the day lingered and the last calls of the last birdssounded, in a flushed sky, from the old trees—I could take a turn intothe grounds and enjoy, almost with a sense of property that amused andflattered me, the beauty and dignity of the place. It was a pleasure at thesemoments to feel myself tranquil and justified; doubtless, perhaps, also toreflect 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 towhose pressure I had responded. What I was doing was what he had earnestlyhoped and directly asked of me, and that I could, after all, do itproved even a greater joy than I had expected. I daresay I fancied myself, inshort, a remarkable young woman and took comfort in the faith that this wouldmore publicly appear. Well, I needed to be remarkable to offer a front to theremarkable things that presently gave their first sign.

It was plump, one afternoon, in the middle of my very hour: the children weretucked away, and I had come out for my stroll. One of the thoughts that, as Idon’t in the least shrink now from noting, used to be with me in thesewanderings was that it would be as charming as a charming story suddenly tomeet someone. Someone would appear there at the turn of a path and would standbefore me and smile and approve. I didn’t ask more than that—I onlyasked that he should know;and the only way to be sure he knew would beto see it, and the kind light of it, in his handsome face. That was exactlypresent to me—by which I mean the face was—when, on the first ofthese occasions, at the end of a long June day, I stopped short on emergingfrom one of the plantations and coming into view of the house. What arrested meon the spot—and with a shock much greater than any vision had allowedfor—was the sense that my imagination had, in a flash, turned real. Hedid stand there!—but high up, beyond the lawn and at the very top of thetower to which, on that first morning, little Flora had conducted me. Thistower was one of a pair—square, incongruous, crenelatedstructures—that were distinguished, for some reason, though I could seelittle difference, as the new and the old. They flanked opposite ends of thehouse and were probably architectural absurdities, redeemed in a measure indeedby not being wholly disengaged nor of a height too pretentious, dating, intheir gingerbread antiquity, from a romantic revival that was already arespectable past. I admired them, had fancies about them, for we could allprofit in a degree, especially when they loomed through the dusk, by thegrandeur of their actual battlements; yet it was not at such an elevation thatthe figure I had so often invoked seemed most in place.

It produced in me, this figure, in the clear twilight, I remember, two distinctgasps of emotion, which were, sharply, the shock of my first and that of mysecond 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. Therecame to me thus a bewilderment of vision of which, after these years, there isno living view that I can hope to give. An unknown man in a lonely place is apermitted object of fear to a young woman privately bred; and the figure thatfaced me was—a few more seconds assured me—as little anyone else Iknew as it was the image that had been in my mind. I had not seen it in HarleyStreet—I had not seen it anywhere. The place, moreover, in the strangestway 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 deliberationwith which I have never made it, the whole feeling of the moment returns. Itwas as if, while I took in—what I did take in—all the rest of thescene had been stricken with death. I can hear again, as I write, the intensehush in which the sounds of evening dropped. The rooks stopped cawing in thegolden sky, and the friendly hour lost, for the minute, all its voice. Butthere was no other change in nature, unless indeed it were a change that I sawwith a stranger sharpness. The gold was still in the sky, the clearness in theair, and the man who looked at me over the battlements was as definite as apicture 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 confrontedacross our distance quite long enough for me to ask myself with intensity whothen he was and to feel, as an effect of my inability to say, a wonder that ina few instants more became intense.

The great question, or one of these, is, afterward, I know, with regard tocertain matters, the question of how long they have lasted. Well, this matterof mine, think what you will of it, lasted while I caught at a dozenpossibilities, none of which made a difference for the better, that I couldsee, in there having been in the house—and for how long, aboveall?—a person of whom I was in ignorance. It lasted while I just bridleda little with the sense that my office demanded that there should be no suchignorance and no such person. It lasted while this visitant, at allevents—and there was a touch of the strange freedom, as I remember, inthe sign of familiarity of his wearing no hat—seemed to fix me, from hisposition, 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 mutualstare. He was in one of the angles, the one away from the house, very erect, asit struck me, and with both hands on the ledge. So I saw him as I see theletters I form on this page; then, exactly, after a minute, as if to add to thespectacle, he slowly changed his place—passed, looking at me hard all thewhile, to the opposite corner of the platform. Yes, I had the sharpest sensethat during this transit he never took his eyes from me, and I can see at thismoment the way his hand, as he went, passed from one of the crenelations to thenext. He stopped at the other corner, but less long, and even as he turned awaystill 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 wasrooted as deeply as I was shaken. Was there a “secret” atBly—a mystery of Udolpho or an insane, an unmentionable relative kept inunsuspected confinement? I can’t say how long I turned it over, or howlong, in a confusion of curiosity and dread, I remained where I had had mycollision; I only recall that when I re-entered the house darkness had quiteclosed in. Agitation, in the interval, certainly had held me and driven me, forI 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 acomparatively human chill. The most singular part of it, in fact—singularas the rest had been—was the part I became, in the hall, aware of inmeeting Mrs. Grose. This picture comes back to me in the generaltrain—the impression, as I received it on my return, of the wide whitepanelled 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 hadmissed me. It came to me straightway, under her contact, that, with plainheartiness, mere relieved anxiety at my appearance, she knew nothing whateverthat could bear upon the incident I had there ready for her. I had notsuspected in advance that her comfortable face would pull me up, and I somehowmeasured the importance of what I had seen by my thus finding myself hesitateto mention it. Scarce anything in the whole history seems to me so odd as thisfact that my real beginning of fear was one, as I may say, with the instinct ofsparing my companion. On the spot, accordingly, in the pleasant hall and withher eyes on me, I, for a reason that I couldn’t then have phrased,achieved an inward resolution—offered a vague pretext for my latenessand, with the plea of the beauty of the night and of the heavy dew and wetfeet, went as soon as possible to my room.

Here it was another affair; here, for many days after, it was a queer affairenough. 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. Itwas not so much yet that I was more nervous than I could bear to be as that Iwas 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 thevisitor with whom I had been so inexplicably and yet, as it seemed to me, sointimately concerned. It took little time to see that I could sound withoutforms of inquiry and without exciting remark any domestic complications. Theshock I had suffered must have sharpened all my senses; I felt sure, at the endof three days and as the result of mere closer attention, that I had not beenpracticed 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 onesane 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 hadbeen, collectively, subject to an intrusion; some unscrupulous traveler,curious in old houses, had made his way in unobserved, enjoyed the prospectfrom the best point of view, and then stolen out as he came. If he had given mesuch a bold hard stare, that was but a part of his indiscretion. The goodthing, 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. Mycharming work was just my life with Miles and Flora, and through nothing couldI 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 wonderafresh at the vanity of my original fears, the distaste I had begun byentertaining for the probable gray prose of my office. There was to be no grayprose, it appeared, and no long grind; so how could work not be charming thatpresented itself as daily beauty? It was all the romance of the nursery and thepoetry of the schoolroom. I don’t mean by this, of course, that westudied only fiction and verse; I mean I can express no otherwise the sort ofinterest my companions inspired. How can I describe that except by saying thatinstead 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: deepobscurity 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 apang. Perhaps even it would be nearer the truth to say that—without aword—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 wasonly too fine and fair for the little horrid, unclean school-world, and he hadpaid a price for it. I reflected acutely that the sense of such differences,such superiorities of quality, always, on the part of the majority—whichcould include even stupid, sordid headmasters—turn infallibly to thevindictive.

Both the children had a gentleness (it was their only fault, and it never madeMiles a muff) that kept them—how shall I express it?—almostimpersonal and certainly quite unpunishable. They were like the cherubs of theanecdote, who had—morally, at any rate—nothing to whack! I rememberfeeling with Miles in especial as if he had had, as it were, no history. Weexpect of a small child a scant one, but there was in this beautiful little boysomething extraordinarily sensitive, yet extraordinarily happy, that, more thanin 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 hishaving really been chastised. If he had been wicked he would have“caught” it, and I should have caught it by the rebound—Ishould have found the trace. I found nothing at all, and he was therefore anangel. He never spoke of his school, never mentioned a comrade or a master; andI, for my part, was quite too much disgusted to allude to them. Of course I wasunder the spell, and the wonderful part is that, even at the time, I perfectlyknew I was. But I gave myself up to it; it was an antidote to any pain, and Ihad more pains than one. I was in receipt in these days of disturbing lettersfrom home, where things were not going well. But with my children, what thingsin the world mattered? That was the question I used to put to my scrappyretirements. I was dazzled by their loveliness.

There was a Sunday—to get on—when it rained with such force and forso many hours that there could be no procession to church; in consequence ofwhich, as the day declined, I had arranged with Mrs. Grose that, should theevening show improvement, we would attend together the late service. The rainhappily stopped, and I prepared for our walk, which, through the park and bythe good road to the village, would be a matter of twenty minutes. Comingdownstairs to meet my colleague in the hall, I remembered a pair of gloves thathad required three stitches and that had received them—with a publicityperhaps not edifying—while I sat with the children at their tea, servedon Sundays, by exception, in that cold, clean temple of mahogany and brass, the“grown-up” dining room. The gloves had been dropped there, and Iturned in to recover them. The day was gray enough, but the afternoon lightstill lingered, and it enabled me, on crossing the threshold, not only torecognize, 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 lookingstraight 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 alreadyappeared to me. He appeared thus again with I won’t say greaterdistinctness, for that was impossible, but with a nearness that represented aforward stride in our intercourse and made me, as I met him, catch my breathand turn cold. He was the same—he was the same, and seen, this time, ashe had been seen before, from the waist up, the window, though the dining roomwas on the ground floor, not going down to the terrace on which he stood. Hisface 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 fewseconds—long enough to convince me he also saw and recognized; but it wasas 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 myface, through the glass and across the room, was as deep and hard as then, butit quitted me for a moment during which I could still watch it, see it fixsuccessively several other things. On the spot there came to me the added shockof a certitude that it was not for me he had come there. He had come forsomeone else.

The flash of this knowledge—for it was knowledge in the midst ofdread—produced in me the most extraordinary effect, started as I stoodthere, a sudden vibration of duty and courage. I say courage because I wasbeyond 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, passingalong the terrace as fast as I could rush, turned a corner and came full insight. But it was in sight of nothing now—my visitor had vanished. Istopped, I almost dropped, with the real relief of this; but I took in thewhole scene—I gave him time to reappear. I call it time, but how long wasit? 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 theyactually appeared to me to last. The terrace and the whole place, the lawn andthe garden beyond it, all I could see of the park, were empty with a greatemptiness. There were shrubberies and big trees, but I remember the clearassurance I felt that none of them concealed him. He was there or was notthere: 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 wasconfusedly present to me that I ought to place myself where he had stood. I didso; 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 hadthe full image of a repetition of what had already occurred. She saw me as Ihad seen my own visitant; she pulled up short as I had done; I gave hersomething of the shock that I had received. She turned white, and this made meask myself if I had blanched as much. She stared, in short, and retreated onjust mylines, and I knew she had then passed out and come round to meand that I should presently meet her. I remained where I was, and while Iwaited I thought of more things than one. But there’s only one I takespace to mention. I wondered why sheshould be scared.

V

Oh, she let me know as soon as, round the corner of the house, she loomed againinto view. “What in the name of goodness is the matter—?” Shewas now flushed and out of breath.

I said nothing till she came quite near. “With me?” I must havemade 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 torespect the bloom of Mrs. Grose’s had dropped, without a rustle, from myshoulders, and if I wavered for the instant it was not with what I kept back. Iput out my hand to her and she took it; I held her hard a little, liking tofeel her close to me. There was a kind of support in the shy heave of hersurprise. “You came for me for church, of course, but I can’tgo.”

“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 shehad no wish to be, yetalso that she knew too well her place not to be ready to share with me anymarked inconvenience. Oh, it was quite settled that she mustshare!“Just what you saw from the dining room a minute ago was the effect ofthat. What Isaw—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 astranger?”

“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, Ihaven’t guessed!” she said very simply. “How can I ifyoudon’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 wentindeed a little way. “But if he isn’t a gentleman—”

“What ishe? He’s a horror.”

“A horror?”

“He’s—God help me if I know whathe 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, thefaraway faint glimmer of a consciousness more acute: I somehow made out in itthe delayed dawn of an idea I myself had not given her and that was as yetquite obscure to me. It comes back to me that I thought instantly of this assomething I could get from her; and I felt it to be connected with the desireshe presently showed to know more. “When was it—on thetower?”

“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 toask him! This evening, you see,” I pursued, “he has not been ableto 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 tochurch. Goodbye. I must watch.”

Slowly she faced me again. “Do you fear for them?”

We met in another long look. “Don’t you?” Instead ofanswering she came nearer to the window and, for a minute, applied her face tothe 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.“Icouldn’t have come out.”

“Neither could I!” I laughed again. “But I did come. I havemy duty.”

“So have I mine,” she replied; after which she added: “Whatis 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 tostroke. “He has red hair, very red, close-curling, and a pale face, longin shape, with straight, good features and little, rather queer whiskers thatare as red as his hair. His eyebrows are, somehow, darker; they lookparticularly 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 smalland very fixed. His mouth’s wide, and his lips are thin, and except forhis little whiskers he’s quite clean-shaven. He gives me a sort of senseof looking like an actor.”

“An actor!” It was impossible to resemble one less, at least, thanMrs. 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!—agentleman.”

My companion’s face had blanched as I went on; her round eyes started andher mild mouth gaped. “A gentleman?” she gasped, confounded,stupefied: “a gentleman he?”

“You know him then?”

She visibly tried to hold herself. “But he ishandsome?”

I saw the way to help her. “Remarkably!”

“And dressed—?”

“In somebody’s clothes.” “They’re smart, butthey’re not his own.”

She broke into a breathless affirmative groan: “They’re themaster’s!”

I caught it up. “You doknow 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 worehis hat, but he did wear—well, there were waistcoats missed. They wereboth 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, “Incharge,” 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! Hedied.”

“Died?” I almost shrieked.

She seemed fairly to square herself, plant herself more firmly to utter thewonder of it. “Yes. Mr. Quint is dead.”

VI

It took of course more than that particular passage to place us together inpresence of what we had now to live with as we could—my dreadfulliability to impressions of the order so vividly exemplified, and mycompanion’s knowledge, henceforth—a knowledge half consternationand 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 tearsand vows, of prayers and promises, a climax to the series of mutual challengesand pledges that had straightway ensued on our retreating together to theschoolroom and shutting ourselves up there to have everything out. The resultof our having everything out was simply to reduce our situation to the lastrigor of its elements. She herself had seen nothing, not the shadow of ashadow, and nobody in the house but the governess was in the governess’splight; yet she accepted without directly impugning my sanity the truth as Igave it to her, and ended by showing me, on this ground, an awestrickentenderness, 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 humancharities.

What was settled between us, accordingly, that night, was that we thought wemight bear things together; and I was not even sure that, in spite of herexemption, it was she who had the best of the burden. I knew at this hour, Ithink, as well as I knew later, what I was capable of meeting to shelter mypupils; but it took me some time to be wholly sure of what my honest ally wasprepared for to keep terms with so compromising a contract. I was queer companyenough—quite as queer as the company I received; but as I trace over whatwe went through I see how much common ground we must have found in the one ideathat, by good fortune, couldsteady us. It was the idea, the secondmovement, that led me straight out, as I may say, of the inner chamber of mydread. I could take the air in the court, at least, and there Mrs. Grose couldjoin me. Perfectly can I recall now the particular way strength came to mebefore we separated for the night. We had gone over and over every feature ofwhat I had seen.

“He was looking for someone else, you say—someone who was notyou?”

“He was looking for little Miles.” A portentous clearness nowpossessed me. “That’swhom he was looking for.”

“But how do you know?”

“I know, I know, I know!” My exaltation grew. “And youknow, my dear!”

She didn’t deny this, but I required, I felt, not even so much telling asthat. She resumed in a moment, at any rate: “What if heshould seehim?”

“Little Miles? That’s what he wants!”

She looked immensely scared again. “The child?”

“Heaven forbid! The man. He wants to appear to them.” Thathe 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 practicallyproving. I had an absolute certainty that I should see again what I had alreadyseen, but something within me said that by offering myself bravely as the solesubject of such experience, by accepting, by inviting, by surmounting it all, Ishould serve as an expiatory victim and guard the tranquility of my companions.The children, in especial, I should thus fence about and absolutely save. Irecall 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 andthe time they were with him?”

“The time they were with him, and his name, his presence, his history, inany way.”

“Oh, the little lady doesn’t remember. She never heard orknew.”

“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 israther odd.”

“That he has never spoken of him?”

“Never by the least allusion. And you tell me they were ‘greatfriends’?”

“Oh, it wasn’t him!” Mrs. Grose with emphasisdeclared. “It was Quint’s own fancy. To play with him, Imean—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—suchaface!—a sudden sickness of disgust. “Too free with myboy?”

“Too free with everyone!”

I forbore, for the moment, to analyze this description further than by thereflection that a part of it applied to several of the members of thehousehold, 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 nodiscomfortable legend, no perturbation of scullions, had ever, withinanyone’s memory attached to the kind old place. It had neither bad namenor ill fame, and Mrs. Grose, most apparently, only desired to cling to me andto 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 takeleave. “I have it from you then—for it’s of greatimportance—that he was definitely and admittedly bad?”

“Oh, not admittedly. Iknew it—but the masterdidn’t.”

“And you never told him?”

“Well, he didn’t like tale-bearing—he hated complaints. Hewas terribly short with anything of that kind, and if people were all right tohim—”

“He wouldn’t be bothered with more?” This squared well enoughwith my impressions of him: he was not a trouble-loving gentleman, nor so veryparticular perhaps about some of the company hekept. All the same, Ipressed my interlocutress. “I promise you Iwould have told!”

She felt my discrimination. “I daresay I was wrong. But, really, I wasafraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“Of things that man could do. Quint was so clever—he was sodeep.”

I took this in still more than, probably, I showed. “You weren’tafraid of anything else? Not of his effect—?”

“His effect?” she repeated with a face of anguish and waiting whileI faltered.

“On innocent little precious lives. They were in your charge.”

“No, they were not in mine!” she roundly and distressfullyreturned. “The master believed in him and placed him here because he wassupposed not to be well and the country air so good for him. So he hadeverything to say. Yes”—she let me have it—“even aboutthem.”

“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 poorwoman burst into tears.

A rigid control, from the next day, was, as I have said, to follow them; yethow often and how passionately, for a week, we came back together to thesubject! Much as we had discussed it that Sunday night, I was, in the immediatelater hours in especial—for it may be imagined whether Islept—still haunted with the shadow of something she had not told me. Imyself had kept back nothing, but there was a word Mrs. Grose had kept back. Iwas 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, inretrospect, that by the time the morrow’s sun was high I had restlesslyread into the facts before us almost all the meaning they were to receive fromsubsequent and more cruel occurrences. What they gave me above all was just thesinister figure of the living man—the dead one would keepawhile!—and of the months he had continuously passed at Bly, which, addedup, made a formidable stretch. The limit of this evil time had arrived onlywhen, on the dawn of a winter’s morning, Peter Quint was found, by alaborer going to early work, stone dead on the road from the village: acatastrophe explained—superficially at least—by a visible wound tohis head; such a wound as might have been produced—and as, on the finalevidence, hadbeen—by a fatal slip, in the dark and after leavingthe public house, on the steepish icy slope, a wrong path altogether, at thebottom of which he lay. The icy slope, the turn mistaken at night and inliquor, accounted for much—practically, in the end and after the inquestand boundless chatter, for everything; but there had been matters in hislife—strange passages and perils, secret disorders, vices more thansuspected—that would have accounted for a good deal more.

I scarce know how to put my story into words that shall be a credible pictureof my state of mind; but I was in these days literally able to find a joy inthe extraordinary flight of heroism the occasion demanded of me. I now saw thatI had been asked for a service admirable and difficult; and there would be agreatness in letting it be seen—oh, in the right quarter!—that Icould succeed where many another girl might have failed. It was an immense helpto me—I confess I rather applaud myself as I look back!—that I sawmy service so strongly and so simply. I was there to protect and defend thelittle creatures in the world the most bereaved and the most lovable, theappeal 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, andI—well, I had them. It was in short a magnificent chance. Thischance presented itself to me in an image richly material. I was ascreen—I was to stand before them. The more I saw, the less they would. Ibegan to watch them in a stifled suspense, a disguised excitement that mightwell, had it continued too long, have turned to something like madness. Whatsaved me, as I now see, was that it turned to something else altogether. Itdidn’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 thegrounds with the younger of my pupils alone. We had left Miles indoors, on thered cushion of a deep window seat; he had wished to finish a book, and I hadbeen glad to encourage a purpose so laudable in a young man whose only defectwas an occasional excess of the restless. His sister, on the contrary, had beenalert to come out, and I strolled with her half an hour, seeking the shade, forthe sun was still high and the day exceptionally warm. I was aware afresh, withher, as we went, of how, like her brother, she contrived—it was thecharming thing in both children—to let me alone without appearing to dropme and to accompany me without appearing to surround. They were neverimportunate and yet never listless. My attention to them all really went toseeing them amuse themselves immensely without me: this was a spectacle theyseemed actively to prepare and that engaged me as an active admirer. I walkedin a world of their invention—they had no occasion whatever to draw uponmine; so that my time was taken only with being, for them, some remarkableperson or thing that the game of the moment required and that was merely,thanks to my superior, my exalted stamp, a happy and highly distinguishedsinecure. I forget what I was on the present occasion; I only remember that Iwas something very important and very quiet and that Flora was playing veryhard. 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 theSea of Azof, we had an interested spectator. The way this knowledge gathered inme was the strangest thing in the world—the strangest, that is, exceptthe very much stranger in which it quickly merged itself. I had sat down with apiece of work—for I was something or other that could sit—on theold stone bench which overlooked the pond; and in this position I began to takein 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 andpleasant shade, but it was all suffused with the brightness of the hot, stillhour. There was no ambiguity in anything; none whatever, at least, in theconviction I from one moment to another found myself forming as to what Ishould see straight before me and across the lake as a consequence of raisingmy eyes. They were attached at this juncture to the stitching in which I wasengaged, and I can feel once more the spasm of my effort not to move them tillI 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 Iinstantly, passionately questioned. I recollect counting over perfectly thepossibilities, reminding myself that nothing was more natural, for instance,than 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 aslittle effect on my practical certitude as I was conscious—still evenwithout looking—of its having upon the character and attitude of ourvisitor. Nothing was more natural than that these things should be the otherthings that they absolutely were not.

Of the positive identity of the apparition I would assure myself as soon as thesmall 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 tolittle Flora, who, at the moment, was about ten yards away. My heart had stoodstill for an instant with the wonder and terror of the question whether she toowould see; and I held my breath while I waited for what a cry from her, whatsome sudden innocent sign either of interest or of alarm, would tell me. Iwaited, but nothing came; then, in the first place—and there is somethingmore dire in this, I feel, than in anything I have to relate—I wasdetermined by a sense that, within a minute, all sounds from her had previouslydropped; 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 whenI at last looked at her—looked with the confirmed conviction that we werestill, together, under direct personal notice. She had picked up a small flatpiece of wood, which happened to have in it a little hole that had evidentlysuggested to her the idea of sticking in another fragment that might figure asa mast and make the thing a boat. This second morsel, as I watched her, she wasvery markedly and intently attempting to tighten in its place. My apprehensionof what she was doing sustained me so that after some seconds I felt I wasready 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 nointelligible account of how I fought out the interval. Yet I still hear myselfcry as I fairly threw myself into her arms: “Theyknow—it’s too monstrous: they know, they know!”

“And what on earth—?” I felt her incredulity as she held me.

“Why, all that weknow—and heaven knows what elsebesides!” Then, as she released me, I made it out to her, made it outperhaps only now with full coherency even to myself. “Two hours ago, inthe garden”—I could scarce articulate—“Florasaw!”

Mrs. Grose took it as she might have taken a blow in the stomach. “Shehas told you?” she panted.

“Not a word—that’s the horror. She kept it to herself! Thechild of eight, thatchild!” Unutterable still, for me, was thestupefaction of it.

Mrs. Grose, of course, could only gape the wider. “Then how do youknow?”

“I was there—I saw with my eyes: saw that she was perfectlyaware.”

“Do you mean aware of him?”

“No—of her.” I was conscious as I spoke that I lookedprodigious things, for I got the slow reflection of them in mycompanion’s face. “Another person—this time; but a figure ofquite as unmistakable horror and evil: a woman in black, pale anddreadful—with such an air also, and such a face!—on the other sideof the lake. I was there with the child—quiet for the hour; and in themidst of it she came.”

“Came how—from where?”

“From where they come from! She just appeared and stood there—butnot so near.”

“And without coming nearer?”

“Oh, for the effect and the feeling, she might have been as close asyou!”

My friend, with an odd impulse, fell back a step. “Was she someoneyou’ve never seen?”

“Yes. But someone the child has. Someone youhave.” Then, toshow how I had thought it all out: “My predecessor—the one whodied.”

“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’ssure!” But I had no soonerspoken than I caught myself up. “No, for God’s sake,don’t!She’ll say she isn’t—she’lllie!”

Mrs. Grose was not too bewildered instinctively to protest. “Ah, howcanyou?”

“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 Isee in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don’t know what Idon’tsee—what I don’tfear!”

Mrs. Grose tried to keep up with me. “You mean you’re afraid ofseeing her again?”

“Oh, no; that’s nothing—now!” Then I explained.“It’s of notseeing 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 childassuredly will—without my knowing it.”

At the image of this possibility Mrs. Grose for a moment collapsed, yetpresently to pull herself together again, as if from the positive force of thesense 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 shedoesn’t mind it—!” She even tried a grim joke. “Perhapsshe likes it!”

“Likes suchthings—a scrap of an infant!”

“Isn’t it just a proof of her blessed innocence?” my friendbravely inquired.

She brought me, for the instant, almost round. “Oh, we must clutch atthat—we must cling to it! If it isn’t a proof of what yousay, it’s a proof of—God knows what! For the woman’s a horrorof horrors.”

Mrs. Grose, at this, fixed her eyes a minute on the ground; then at lastraising 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 youmean 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 ofintention.”

I made her turn pale. “Intention?”

“To get hold of her.” Mrs. Grose—her eyes just lingering onmine—gave a shudder and walked to the window; and while she stood therelooking out I completed my statement. “That’swhat Floraknows.”

After a little she turned round. “The person was in black, yousay?”

“In mourning—rather poor, almost shabby. But—yes—withextraordinary beauty.” I now recognized to what I had at last, stroke bystroke, brought the victim of my confidence, for she quite visibly weighedthis. “Oh, handsome—very, very,” I insisted;“wonderfully handsome. But infamous.”

She slowly came back to me. “Miss Jessel—wasinfamous.” She once more took my hand in both her own, holding it astight as if to fortify me against the increase of alarm I might draw from thisdisclosure. “They were both infamous,” she finally said.

So, for a little, we faced it once more together; and I found absolutely adegree of help in seeing it now so straight. “I appreciate,” Isaid, “the great decency of your not having hitherto spoken; but the timehas certainly come to give me the whole thing.” She appeared to assent tothis, but still only in silence; seeing which I went on: “I must have itnow. 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 woefullyout. “Shewas 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 theplace of a servant in the scale; but there was nothing to prevent an acceptanceof my companion’s own measure of my predecessor’s abasement. Therewas a way to deal with that, and I dealt; the more readily for my fullvision—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 ofshades. “I’ve never seen one like him. He did what hewished.”

“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 asdistinctly as I had seen her by the pond; and I brought out with decision:“It must have been also what shewished!”

Mrs. Grose’s face signified that it had been indeed, but she said at thesame 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 Ididn’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. Shecouldn’t have stayed. Fancy it here—for a governess! And afterwardI imagined—and I still imagine. And what I imagine is dreadful.”

“Not so dreadful as what Ido,” I replied; on which I musthave shown her—as I was indeed but too conscious—a front ofmiserable defeat. It brought out again all her compassion for me, and at therenewed 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 indespair; “I don’t save or shield them! It’s far worse than Idreamed—they’re lost!”

VIII

What I had said to Mrs. Grose was true enough: there were in the matter I hadput before her depths and possibilities that I lacked resolution to sound; sothat when we met once more in the wonder of it we were of a common mind aboutthe duty of resistance to extravagant fancies. We were to keep our heads if weshould keep nothing else—difficult indeed as that might be in the face ofwhat, in our prodigious experience, was least to be questioned. Late thatnight, while the house slept, we had another talk in my room, when she went allthe way with me as to its being beyond doubt that I had seen exactly what I hadseen. To hold her perfectly in the pinch of that, I found I had only to ask herhow, if I had “made it up,” I came to be able to give, of each ofthe persons appearing to me, a picture disclosing, to the last detail, theirspecial marks—a portrait on the exhibition of which she had instantlyrecognized and named them. She wished of course—small blame toher!—to sink the whole subject; and I was quick to assure her that my owninterest in it had now violently taken the form of a search for the way toescape from it. I encountered her on the ground of a probability that withrecurrence—for recurrence we took for granted—I should get used tomy danger, distinctly professing that my personal exposure had suddenly becomethe least of my discomforts. It was my new suspicion that was intolerable; andyet even to this complication the later hours of the day had brought a littleease.

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 whichI had already found to be a thing I could positively cultivate and which hadnever failed me yet. I had simply, in other words, plunged afresh intoFlora’s special society and there become aware—it was almost aluxury!—that she could put her little conscious hand straight upon thespot that ached. She had looked at me in sweet speculation and then had accusedme to my face of having “cried.” I had supposed I had brushed awaythe ugly signs: but I could literally—for the time, at allevents—rejoice, under this fathomless charity, that they had not entirelydisappeared. To gaze into the depths of blue of the child’s eyes andpronounce their loveliness a trick of premature cunning was to be guilty of acynicism in preference to which I naturally preferred to abjure my judgmentand, so far as might be, my agitation. I couldn’t abjure for merelywanting to, but I could repeat to Mrs. Grose—as I did there, over andover, in the small hours—that with their voices in the air, theirpressure on one’s heart, and their fragrant faces against one’scheek, everything fell to the ground but their incapacity and their beauty. Itwas a pity that, somehow, to settle this once for all, I had equally tore-enumerate the signs of subtlety that, in the afternoon, by the lake had madea miracle of my show of self-possession. It was a pity to be obliged toreinvestigate the certitude of the moment itself and repeat how it had come tome as a revelation that the inconceivable communion I then surprised was amatter, for either party, of habit. It was a pity that I should have had toquaver out again the reasons for my not having, in my delusion, so much asquestioned 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, tomake me suppose she didn’t, and at the same time, without showinganything, arrive at a guess as to whether I myself did! It was a pity that Ineeded once more to describe the portentous little activity by which she soughtto divert my attention—the perceptible increase of movement, the greaterintensity of play, the singing, the gabbling of nonsense, and the invitation toromp.

Yet if I had not indulged, to prove there was nothing in it, in this review, Ishould have missed the two or three dim elements of comfort that still remainedto me. I should not for instance have been able to asseverate to my friend thatI was certain—which was so much to the good—that Iat leasthad not betrayed myself. I should not have been prompted, by stress of need, bydesperation of mind—I scarce know what to call it—to invoke suchfurther aid to intelligence as might spring from pushing my colleague fairly tothe wall. She had told me, bit by bit, under pressure, a great deal; but asmall shifty spot on the wrong side of it all still sometimes brushed my browlike the wing of a bat; and I remember how on this occasion—for thesleeping house and the concentration alike of our danger and our watch seemedto 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 youthe least bit more—oh, not a scrap, come!—to get out of you. Whatwas it you had in mind when, in our distress, before Miles came back, over theletter from his school, you said, under my insistence, that you didn’tpretend for him that he had not literally everbeen ‘bad’?He has notliterally ‘ever,’ in these weeks that I myselfhave lived with him and so closely watched him; he has been an imperturbablelittle prodigy of delightful, lovable goodness. Therefore you might perfectlyhave made the claim for him if you had not, as it happened, seen an exceptionto take. What was your exception, and to what passage in your personalobservation of him did you refer?”

It was a dreadfully austere inquiry, but levity was not our note, and, at anyrate, before the gray dawn admonished us to separate I had got my answer. Whatmy friend had had in mind proved to be immensely to the purpose. It was neithermore nor less than the circumstance that for a period of several months Quintand the boy had been perpetually together. It was in fact the very appropriatetruth that she had ventured to criticize the propriety, to hint at theincongruity, of so close an alliance, and even to go so far on the subject as afrank 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, directlyapproached little Miles. What she had said to him, since I pressed, was thatsheliked to see young gentlemen not forget their station.

I pressed again, of course, at this. “You reminded him that Quint wasonly a base menial?”

“As you might say! And it was his answer, for one thing, that wasbad.”

“And for another thing?” I waited. “He repeated your words toQuint?”

“No, not that. It’s just what he wouldn’t!” shecould 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 histutor—and a very grand one—and Miss Jessel only for the littlelady. When he had gone off with the fellow, I mean, and spent hours withhim.”

“He then prevaricated about it—he said he hadn’t?” Herassent was clear enough to cause me to add in a moment: “I see. Helied.”

“Oh!” Mrs. Grose mumbled. This was a suggestion that itdidn’t matter; which indeed she backed up by a further remark. “Yousee, after all, Miss Jessel didn’t mind. She didn’t forbidhim.”

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’tshow anything. He denied,” she repeated; “he denied.”

Lord, how I pressed her now! “So that you could see he knew what wasbetween the two wretches?”

“I don’t know—I don’t know!” the poor womangroaned.

“You do know, you dear thing,” I replied; “only youhaven’t my dreadful boldness of mind, and you keep back, out of timidityand 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 thatsuggested to you,” I continued, “that he covered and concealedtheir relation.”

“Oh, he couldn’t prevent—”

“Your learning the truth? I daresay! But, heavens,” I fell, withvehemence, athinking, “what it shows that they must, to that extent, havesucceeded in making of him!”

“Ah, nothing that’s not nice now!” Mrs. Groselugubriously pleaded.

“I don’t wonder you looked queer,” I persisted, “when Imentioned to you the letter from his school!”

“I doubt if I looked as queer as you!” she retorted with homelyforce. “And if he was so bad then as that comes to, how is he such anangel 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 Ishall not be able to tell you for some days. Only, put it to me again!” Icried in a way that made my friend stare. “There are directions in whichI must not for the present let myself go.” Meanwhile I returned to herfirst example—the one to which she had just previously referred—ofthe boy’s happy capacity for an occasional slip. “If Quint—onyour remonstrance at the time you speak of—was a base menial, one of thethings Miles said to you, I find myself guessing, was that you wereanother.” 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 theoddest amusement. Then I went on: “At all events, while he was with theman—”

“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 suitedexactly the particularly deadly view I was in the very act of forbidding myselfto entertain. But I so far succeeded in checking the expression of this viewthat I will throw, just here, no further light on it than may be offered by themention of my final observation to Mrs. Grose. “His having lied and beenimpudent are, I confess, less engaging specimens than I had hoped to have fromyou 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 mustwatch.”

It made me blush, the next minute, to see in my friend’s face how muchmore unreservedly she had forgiven him than her anecdote struck me aspresenting to my own tenderness an occasion for doing. This came out when, atthe schoolroom door, she quitted me. “Surely you don’t accusehim—”

“Of carrying on an intercourse that he conceals from me? Ah, rememberthat, until further evidence, I now accuse nobody.” Then, before shuttingher out to go, by another passage, to her own place, “I must justwait,” I wound up.

IX

I waited and waited, and the days, as they elapsed, took something from myconsternation. A very few of them, in fact, passing, in constant sight of mypupils, without a fresh incident, sufficed to give to grievous fancies and evento odious memories a kind of brush of the sponge. I have spoken of thesurrender to their extraordinary childish grace as a thing I could activelycultivate, and it may be imagined if I neglected now to address myself to thissource for whatever it would yield. Stranger than I can express, certainly, wasthe effort to struggle against my new lights; it would doubtless have been,however, a greater tension still had it not been so frequently successful. Iused to wonder how my little charges could help guessing that I thought strangethings about them; and the circumstances that these things only made them moreinteresting was not by itself a direct aid to keeping them in the dark. Itrembled lest they should see that they wereso immensely moreinteresting. Putting things at the worst, at all events, as in meditation I sooften did, any clouding of their innocence could only be—blameless andforedoomed as they were—a reason the more for taking risks. There weremoments when, by an irresistible impulse, I found myself catching them up andpressing 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 mightbetray; but the real account, I feel, of the hours of peace that I could stillenjoy was that the immediate charm of my companions was a beguilement stilleffective even under the shadow of the possibility that it was studied. For ifit occurred to me that I might occasionally excite suspicion by the littleoutbreaks of my sharper passion for them, so too I remember wondering if Imightn’t see a queerness in the traceable increase of their owndemonstrations.

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 childrenperpetually bowed over and hugged. The homage of which they were so lavishsucceeded, in truth, for my nerves, quite as well as if I never appeared tomyself, as I may say, literally to catch them at a purpose in it. They hadnever, I think, wanted to do so many things for their poor protectress; Imean—though they got their lessons better and better, which was naturallywhat 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, andabove all astonishing her by the “pieces” they had secretly got byheart and could interminably recite. I should never get to thebottom—were I to let myself go even now—of the prodigious privatecommentary, 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 foreverything, a general faculty which, taking a fresh start, achieved remarkableflights. They got their little tasks as if they loved them, and indulged, fromthe mere exuberance of the gift, in the most unimposed little miracles ofmemory. They not only popped out at me as tigers and as Romans, but asShakespeareans, astronomers, and navigators. This was so singularly the casethat it had presumably much to do with the fact as to which, at the presentday, I am at a loss for a different explanation: I allude to my unnaturalcomposure on the subject of another school for Miles. What I remember is that Iwas content not, for the time, to open the question, and that contentment musthave sprung from the sense of his perpetually striking show of cleverness. Hewas 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 justspoke 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 atremendous incitement.

If it was easy to reflect, however, that such a boy could postpone school, itwas at least as marked that for such a boy to have been “kickedout” by a schoolmaster was a mystification without end. Let me add thatin their company now—and I was careful almost never to be out ofit—I could follow no scent very far. We lived in a cloud of music andlove and success and private theatricals. The musical sense in each of thechildren was of the quickest, but the elder in especial had a marvelous knackof catching and repeating. The schoolroom piano broke into all gruesomefancies; and when that failed there were confabulations in corners, with asequel of one of them going out in the highest spirits in order to “comein” as something new. I had had brothers myself, and it was no revelationto me that little girls could be slavish idolaters of little boys. Whatsurpassed everything was that there was a little boy in the world who couldhave for the inferior age, sex, and intelligence so fine a consideration. Theywere extraordinarily at one, and to say that they never either quarreled orcomplained is to make the note of praise coarse for their quality of sweetness.Sometimes, indeed, when I dropped into coarseness, I perhaps came across tracesof little understandings between them by which one of them should keep meoccupied while the other slipped away. There is a naïfside, I suppose,in all diplomacy; but if my pupils practiced upon me, it was surely with theminimum of grossness. It was all in the other quarter that, after a lull, thegrossness broke out.

I find that I really hang back; but I must take my plunge. In going on with therecord of what was hideous at Bly, I not only challenge the most liberalfaith—for which I little care; but—and this is anothermatter—I renew what I myself suffered, I again push my way through it tothe end. There came suddenly an hour after which, as I look back, the affairseems to me to have been all pure suffering; but I have at least reached theheart of it, and the straightest road out is doubtless to advance. Oneevening—with nothing to lead up or to prepare it—I felt the coldtouch of the impression that had breathed on me the night of my arrival andwhich, much lighter then, as I have mentioned, I should probably have madelittle of in memory had my subsequent sojourn been less agitated. I had notgone to bed; I sat reading by a couple of candles. There was a roomful of oldbooks at Bly—last-century fiction, some of it, which, to the extent of adistinctly 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 myyouth. I remember that the book I had in my hand was Fielding’sAmelia; also that I was wholly awake. I recall further both a generalconviction that it was horribly late and a particular objection to looking atmy watch. I figure, finally, that the white curtain draping, in the fashion ofthose days, the head of Flora’s little bed, shrouded, as I had assuredmyself 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 apage and with his spell all scattered, looking straight up from him and hard atthe door of my room. There was a moment during which I listened, reminded ofthe faint sense I had had, the first night, of there being somethingundefinably astir in the house, and noted the soft breath of the open casementjust move the half-drawn blind. Then, with all the marks of a deliberation thatmust have seemed magnificent had there been anyone to admire it, I laid down mybook, 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 closedand locked the door.

I can say now neither what determined nor what guided me, but I went straightalong the lobby, holding my candle high, till I came within sight of the tallwindow that presided over the great turn of the staircase. At this point Iprecipitately found myself aware of three things. They were practicallysimultaneous, yet they had flashes of succession. My candle, under a boldflourish, went out, and I perceived, by the uncovered window, that the yieldingdusk 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 requiredno lapse of seconds to stiffen myself for a third encounter with Quint. Theapparition had reached the landing halfway up and was therefore on the spotnearest the window, where at sight of me, it stopped short and fixed me exactlyas it had fixed me from the tower and from the garden. He knew me as well as Iknew him; and so, in the cold, faint twilight, with a glimmer in the high glassand another on the polish of the oak stair below, we faced each other in ourcommon intensity. He was absolutely, on this occasion, a living, detestable,dangerous presence. But that was not the wonder of wonders; I reserve thisdistinction for quite another circumstance: the circumstance that dread hadunmistakably quitted me and that there was nothing in me there thatdidn’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 instantmagnificently aware of this. I felt, in a fierce rigor of confidence, that if Istood my ground a minute I should cease—for the time, at least—tohave him to reckon with; and during the minute, accordingly, the thing was ashuman and hideous as a real interview: hideous just because it washuman, 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 longgaze at such close quarters that gave the whole horror, huge as it was, itsonly note of the unnatural. If I had met a murderer in such a place and at suchan hour, we still at least would have spoken. Something would have passed, inlife, between us; if nothing had passed, one of us would have moved. The momentwas so prolonged that it would have taken but little more to make me doubt ifeven Iwere in life. I can’t express what followed it save bysaying that the silence itself—which was indeed in a manner anattestation of my strength—became the element into which I saw the figuredisappear; in which I definitely saw it turn as I might have seen the lowwretch 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 waslost.

X

I remained awhile at the top of the stair, but with the effect presently ofunderstanding that when my visitor had gone, he had gone: then I returned to myroom. The foremost thing I saw there by the light of the candle I had leftburning was that Flora’s little bed was empty; and on this I caught mybreath with all the terror that, five minutes before, I had been able toresist. I dashed at the place in which I had left her lying and over which (forthe small silk counterpane and the sheets were disarranged) the white curtainshad been deceivingly pulled forward; then my step, to my unutterable relief,produced an answering sound: I perceived an agitation of the window blind, andthe child, ducking down, emerged rosily from the other side of it. She stoodthere in so much of her candor and so little of her nightgown, with her pinkbare feet and the golden glow of her curls. She looked intensely grave, and Ihad never had such a sense of losing an advantage acquired (the thrill of whichhad just been so prodigious) as on my consciousness that she addressed me witha reproach. “You naughty: where haveyoubeen?”—instead of challenging her own irregularity I found myselfarraigned and explaining. She herself explained, for that matter, with theloveliest, eagerest simplicity. She had known suddenly, as she lay there, thatI was out of the room, and had jumped up to see what had become of me. I haddropped, with the joy of her reappearance, back into my chair—feelingthen, 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 thecandle full in the wonderful little face that was still flushed with sleep. Iremember closing my eyes an instant, yieldingly, consciously, as before theexcess of something beautiful that shone out of the blue of her own. “Youwere looking for me out of the window?” I said. “You thought Imight be walking in the grounds?”

“Well, you know, I thought someone was”—she never blanched asshe 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 ofchildish inconsequence, resentfully, though with a long sweetness in her littledrawl of the negative.

At that moment, in the state of my nerves, I absolutely believed she lied; andif I once more closed my eyes it was before the dazzle of the three or fourpossible 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 havegripped my little girl with a spasm that, wonderfully, she submitted to withouta cry or a sign of fright. Why not break out at her on the spot and have it allover?—give it to her straight in her lovely little lighted face?“You see, you see, you knowthat you do and that you already quitesuspect I believe it; therefore, why not frankly confess it to me, so that wemay at least live with it together and learn perhaps, in the strangeness of ourfate, 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 sparedmyself—well, you’ll see what. Instead of succumbing I sprang againto my feet, looked at her bed, and took a helpless middle way. “Why didyou pull the curtain over the place to make me think you were stillthere?”

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 thecandle as if the question were as irrelevant, or at any rate as impersonal, asMrs. Marcet or nine-times-nine. “Oh, but you know,” she quiteadequately answered, “that you might come back, you dear, and that youhave!” And after a little, when she had got into bed, I had, for along time, by almost sitting on her to hold her hand, to prove that Irecognized the pertinence of my return.

You may imagine the general complexion, from that moment, of my nights. Irepeatedly sat up till I didn’t know when; I selected moments when myroommate unmistakably slept, and, stealing out, took noiseless turns in thepassage and even pushed as far as to where I had last met Quint. But I nevermet him there again; and I may as well say at once that I on no other occasionsaw him in the house. I just missed, on the staircase, on the other hand, adifferent adventure. Looking down it from the top I once recognized thepresence of a woman seated on one of the lower steps with her back presented tome, her body half-bowed and her head, in an attitude of woe, in her hands. Ihad been there but an instant, however, when she vanished without looking roundat me. I knew, nonetheless, exactly what dreadful face she had to show; and Iwondered whether, if instead of being above I had been below, I should havehad, for going up, the same nerve I had lately shown Quint. Well, therecontinued to be plenty of chance for nerve. On the eleventh night after mylatest encounter with that gentleman—they were all numbered now—Ihad an alarm that perilously skirted it and that indeed, from the particularquality of its unexpectedness, proved quite my sharpest shock. It was preciselythe first night during this series that, weary with watching, I had felt that Imight again without laxity lay myself down at my old hour. I slept immediatelyand, as I afterward knew, till about one o’clock; but when I woke it wasto sit straight up, as completely roused as if a hand had shook me. I had lefta light burning, but it was now out, and I felt an instant certainty that Florahad 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 mefurther, and the striking of a match completed the picture.

The child had again got up—this time blowing out the taper, and hadagain, for some purpose of observation or response, squeezed in behind theblind and was peering out into the night. That she now saw—as she hadnot, I had satisfied myself, the previous time—was proved to me by thefact that she was disturbed neither by my reillumination nor by the haste Imade to get into slippers and into a wrap. Hidden, protected, absorbed, sheevidently rested on the sill—the casement opened forward—and gaveherself up. There was a great still moon to help her, and this fact had countedin my quick decision. She was face to face with the apparition we had met atthe lake, and could now communicate with it as she had not then been able todo. 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 doorwithout her hearing me; I got out of it, closed it, and listened, from theother side, for some sound from her. While I stood in the passage I had my eyeson her brother’s door, which was but ten steps off and which,indescribably, produced in me a renewal of the strange impulse that I latelyspoke of as my temptation. What if I should go straight in and march tohiswindow?—what if, by risking to his boyish bewilderment arevelation of my motive, I should throw across the rest of the mystery the longhalter of my boldness?

This thought held me sufficiently to make me cross to his threshold and pauseagain. I preternaturally listened; I figured to myself what might portentouslybe; I wondered if his bed were also empty and he too were secretly at watch. Itwas a deep, soundless minute, at the end of which my impulse failed. He wasquiet; he might be innocent; the risk was hideous; I turned away. There was afigure in the grounds—a figure prowling for a sight, the visitor withwhom 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 hadmade my choice. There were empty rooms at Bly, and it was only a question ofchoosing the right one. The right one suddenly presented itself to me as thelower one—though high above the gardens—in the solid corner of thehouse 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 soinconvenient that it had not for years, though kept by Mrs. Grose in exemplaryorder, been occupied. I had often admired it and I knew my way about in it; Ihad only, after just faltering at the first chill gloom of its disuse, to passacross it and unbolt as quietly as I could one of the shutters. Achieving thistransit, I uncovered the glass without a sound and, applying my face to thepane, was able, the darkness without being much less than within, to see that Icommanded the right direction. Then I saw something more. The moon made thenight extraordinarily penetrable and showed me on the lawn a person, diminishedby distance, who stood there motionless and as if fascinated, looking up towhere I had appeared—looking, that is, not so much straight at me as atsomething that was apparently above me. There was clearly another person aboveme—there was a person on the tower; but the presence on the lawn was notin the least what I had conceived and had confidently hurried to meet. Thepresence on the lawn—I felt sick as I made it out—was poor littleMiles himself.

XI

It was not till late next day that I spoke to Mrs. Grose; the rigor with whichI kept my pupils in sight making it often difficult to meet her privately, andthe more as we each felt the importance of not provoking—on the part ofthe servants quite as much as on that of the children—any suspicion of asecret flurry or that of a discussion of mysteries. I drew a great security inthis particular from her mere smooth aspect. There was nothing in her freshface 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 ofme, for I couldn’t have borne the business alone. But she was amagnificent monument to the blessing of a want of imagination, and if she couldsee in our little charges nothing but their beauty and amiability, theirhappiness and cleverness, she had no direct communication with the sources ofmy trouble. If they had been at all visibly blighted or battered, she woulddoubtless have grown, on tracing it back, haggard enough to match them; asmatters stood, however, I could feel her, when she surveyed them, with herlarge white arms folded and the habit of serenity in all her look, thank theLord’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 hadalready begun to perceive how, with the development of the convictionthat—as time went on without a public accident—our young thingscould, after all, look out for themselves, she addressed her greatestsolicitude to the sad case presented by their instructress. That, for myself,was a sound simplification: I could engage that, to the world, my face shouldtell no tales, but it would have been, in the conditions, an immense addedstrain 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; andwe sat there together while, before us, at a distance, but within call if wewished, 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 herquite in touch. Mrs. Grose watched them with positive placidity; then I caughtthe suppressed intellectual creak with which she conscientiously turned to takefrom me a view of the back of the tapestry. I had made her a receptacle oflurid things, but there was an odd recognition of my superiority—myaccomplishments and my function—in her patience under my pain. Sheoffered her mind to my disclosures as, had I wished to mix a witch’sbroth and proposed it with assurance, she would have held out a large cleansaucepan. This had become thoroughly her attitude by the time that, in myrecital of the events of the night, I reached the point of what Miles had saidto me when, after seeing him, at such a monstrous hour, almost on the very spotwhere he happened now to be, I had gone down to bring him in; choosing then, atthe window, with a concentrated need of not alarming the house, rather thatmethod than a signal more resonant. I had left her meanwhile in little doubt ofmy small hope of representing with success even to her actual sympathy my senseof the real splendor of the little inspiration with which, after I had got himinto the house, the boy met my final articulate challenge. As soon as Iappeared in the moonlight on the terrace, he had come to me as straight aspossible; on which I had taken his hand without a word and led him, through thedark 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,howI had wondered!—if he were groping about in his little mindfor something plausible and not too grotesque. It would tax his invention,certainly, and I felt, this time, over his real embarrassment, a curious thrillof triumph. It was a sharp trap for the inscrutable! He couldn’t play anylonger at innocence; so how the deuce would he get out of it? There beat in meindeed, with the passionate throb of this question an equal dumb appeal as tohow the deuce Ishould. I was confronted at last, as never yet, with allthe risk attached even now to sounding my own horrid note. I remember in factthat as we pushed into his little chamber, where the bed had not been slept inat all and the window, uncovered to the moonlight, made the place so clear thatthere 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 howhe really, as they say, “had” me. He could do what he liked, withall his cleverness to help him, so long as I should continue to defer to theold tradition of the criminality of those caretakers of the young who ministerto superstitions and fears. He “had” me indeed, and in a cleftstick; for who would ever absolve me, who would consent that I should gounhung, if, by the faintest tremor of an overture, I were the first tointroduce into our perfect intercourse an element so dire? No, no: it wasuseless to attempt to convey to Mrs. Grose, just as it is scarcely less so toattempt to suggest here, how, in our short, stiff brush in the dark, he fairlyshook 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 asthose with which, while I rested against the bed, I held him there well underfire. 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 theuncovering of his little teeth shine to me in the dusk. “If I tell youwhy, will you understand?” My heart, at this, leaped into my mouth.Wouldhe tell me why? I found no sound on my lips to press it, and I wasaware of replying only with a vague, repeated, grimacing nod. He was gentlenessitself, and while I wagged my head at him he stood there more than ever alittle fairy prince. It was his brightness indeed that gave me a respite. Wouldit be so great if he were really going to tell me? “Well,” he saidat last, “just exactly in order that you should do this.”

“Do what?”

“Think me—for a change—bad!” I shall neverforget the sweetness and gaiety with which he brought out the word, nor how, ontop of it, he bent forward and kissed me. It was practically the end ofeverything. I met his kiss and I had to make, while I folded him for a minutein my arms, the most stupendous effort not to cry. He had given exactly theaccount of himself that permitted least of my going behind it, and it was onlywith the effect of confirming my acceptance of it that, as I presently glancedabout 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 ambad!”

“I see, I see—it’s charming. But how could you be sure Iwould know it?”

“Oh, I arranged that with Flora.” His answers rang out with areadiness! “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 alsolooked—you saw.”

“While you,” I concurred, “caught your death in the nightair!”

He literally bloomed so from this exploit that he could afford radiantly toassent. “How otherwise should I have been bad enough?” he asked.Then, after another embrace, the incident and our interview closed on myrecognition of all the reserves of goodness that, for his joke, he had beenable 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 withthe mention of still another remark that he had made before we separated.“It all lies in half a dozen words,” I said to her, “wordsthat really settle the matter. ‘Think, you know, what I mightdo!’ He threw that off to show me how good he is. He knows down to theground what he ‘might’ do. That’s what he gave them a tasteof at school.”

“Lord, you do change!” cried my friend.

“I don’t change—I simply make it out. The four, depend uponit, perpetually meet. If on either of these last nights you had been witheither child, you would clearly have understood. The more I’ve watchedand waited the more I’ve felt that if there were nothing else to make itsure it would be made so by the systematic silence of each. Never, by aslip of the tongue, have they so much as alluded to either of their oldfriends, any more than Miles has alluded to his expulsion. Oh, yes, we may sithere and look at them, and they may show off to us there to their fill; buteven while they pretend to be lost in their fairytale they’re steeped intheir vision of the dead restored. He’s not reading to her,” Ideclared; “they’re talking of them—they’retalking horrors! I go on, I know, as if I were crazy; and it’s a wonderI’m not. What I’ve seen would have made youso; but it hasonly made me more lucid, made me get hold of still other things.”

My lucidity must have seemed awful, but the charming creatures who were victimsof it, passing and repassing in their interlocked sweetness, gave my colleaguesomething to hold on by; and I felt how tight she held as, without stirring inthe breath of my passion, she covered them still with her eyes. “Of whatother things have you got hold?”

“Why, of the very things that have delighted, fascinated, and yet, atbottom, as I now so strangely see, mystified and troubled me. Their more thanearthly 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 actof bringing it out really helped me to trace it—follow it all up andpiece it all together. “They haven’t been good—they’veonly been absent. It has been easy to live with them, because they’resimply leading a life of their own. They’re not mine—they’renot 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 forwhat?”

“For the love of all the evil that, in those dreadful days, the pair putinto 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 washomely, but it revealed a real acceptance of my further proof of what, in thebad time—for there had been a worse even than this!—must haveoccurred. There could have been no such justification for me as the plainassent of her experience to whatever depth of depravity I found credible in ourbrace of scoundrels. It was in obvious submission of memory that she broughtout after a moment: “They wererascals! But what can they nowdo?” she pursued.

“Do?” I echoed so loud that Miles and Flora, as they passed attheir distance, paused an instant in their walk and looked at us.“Don’t they do enough?” I demanded in a lower tone, while thechildren, having smiled and nodded and kissed hands to us, resumed theirexhibition. We were held by it a minute; then I answered: “They candestroy them!” At this my companion did turn, but the inquiry shelaunched 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 tryinghard. They’re seen only across, as it were, and beyond—in strangeplaces and on high places, the top of towers, the roof of houses, the outsideof windows, the further edge of pools; but there’s a deep design, oneither side, to shorten the distance and overcome the obstacle; and the successof the tempters is only a question of time. They’ve only to keep to theirsuggestions of danger.”

“For the children to come?”

“And perish in the attempt!” Mrs. Grose slowly got up, and Iscrupulously 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 andniece mad?”

“But if they are, miss?”

“And if I am myself, you mean? That’s charming news to be sent himby a governess whose prime undertaking was to give him no worry.”

Mrs. Grose considered, following the children again. “Yes, he do hateworry. That was the great reason—”

“Why those fiends took him in so long? No doubt, though his indifferencemust have been awful. As I’m not a fiend, at any rate, I shouldn’ttake him in.”

My companion, after an instant and for all answer, sat down again and graspedmy 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 behere—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 faceshe evidently couldn’t. Instead of it even—as a woman readsanother—she could see what I myself saw: his derision, his amusement, hiscontempt for the breakdown of my resignation at being left alone and for thefine machinery I had set in motion to attract his attention to my slightedcharms. She didn’t know—no one knew—how proud I had been toserve him and to stick to our terms; yet she nonetheless took the measure, Ithink, of the warning I now gave her. “If you should so lose your head asto 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 asever an effort beyond my strength—offered, in close quarters,difficulties as insurmountable as before. This situation continued a month, andwith new aggravations and particular notes, the note above all, sharper andsharper, of the small ironic consciousness on the part of my pupils. It wasnot, I am as sure today as I was sure then, my mere infernal imagination: itwas absolutely traceable that they were aware of my predicament and that thisstrange 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 anythingvulgar, 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 thanany other, and that so much avoidance could not have been so successfullyeffected 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 stopshort, turning suddenly out of alleys that we perceived to be blind, closingwith 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 hadindiscreetly opened. All roads lead to Rome, and there were times when it mighthave struck us that almost every branch of study or subject of conversationskirted forbidden ground. Forbidden ground was the question of the return ofthe dead in general and of whatever, in especial, might survive, in memory, ofthe friends little children had lost. There were days when I could have swornthat one of them had, with a small invisible nudge, said to the other:“She thinks she’ll do it this time—but shewon’t!” To “do it” would have been to indulgefor instance—and for once in a way—in some direct reference to thelady who had prepared them for my discipline. They had a delightful endlessappetite for passages in my own history, to which I had again and again treatedthem; they were in possession of everything that had ever happened to me, hadhad, with every circumstance the story of my smallest adventures and of thoseof my brothers and sisters and of the cat and the dog at home, as well as manyparticulars of the eccentric nature of my father, of the furniture andarrangement of our house, and of the conversation of the old women of ourvillage. 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 withan art of their own the strings of my invention and my memory; and nothing elseperhaps, when I thought of such occasions afterward, gave me so the suspicionof being watched from under cover. It was in any case over mylife,mypast, and myfriends alone that we could take anything likeour ease—a state of affairs that led them sometimes without the leastpertinence to break out into sociable reminders. I was invited—with novisible connection—to repeat afresh Goody Gosling’s celebratedmotor to confirm the details already supplied as to the cleverness ofthe vicarage pony.

It was partly at such junctures as these and partly at quite different onesthat, with the turn my matters had now taken, my predicament, as I have calledit, grew most sensible. The fact that the days passed for me without anotherencounter ought, it would have appeared, to have done something toward soothingmy nerves. Since the light brush, that second night on the upper landing, ofthe presence of a woman at the foot of the stair, I had seen nothing, whetherin or out of the house, that one had better not have seen. There was many acorner round which I expected to come upon Quint, and many a situation that, ina merely sinister way, would have favored the appearance of Miss Jessel. Thesummer had turned, the summer had gone; the autumn had dropped upon Bly and hadblown 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 theperformance—all strewn with crumpled playbills. There were exactly statesof the air, conditions of sound and of stillness, unspeakable impressions ofthe kindof ministering moment, that brought back to me, long enough tocatch it, the feeling of the medium in which, that June evening out of doors, Ihad had my first sight of Quint, and in which, too, at those other instants, Ihad, after seeing him through the window, looked for him in vain in the circleof shrubbery. I recognized the signs, the portents—I recognized themoment, the spot. But they remained unaccompanied and empty, and I continuedunmolested; if unmolested one could call a young woman whose sensibility had,in the most extraordinary fashion, not declined but deepened. I had said in mytalk with Mrs. Grose on that horrid scene of Flora’s by thelake—and had perplexed her by so saying—that it would from thatmoment distress me much more to lose my power than to keep it. I had thenexpressed what was vividly in my mind: the truth that, whether the childrenreally saw or not—since, that is, it was not yet definitelyproved—I greatly preferred, as a safeguard, the fullness of my ownexposure. I was ready to know the very worst that was to be known. What I hadthen had an ugly glimpse of was that my eyes might be sealed just while theirswere most opened. Well, my eyes weresealed, it appeared, atpresent—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 mysoul had I not had in a proportionate measure this conviction of the secret ofmy pupils.

How can I retrace today the strange steps of my obsession? There were times ofour being together when I would have been ready to swear that, literally, in mypresence, but with my direct sense of it closed, they had visitors who wereknown and were welcome. Then it was that, had I not been deterred by the verychance that such an injury might prove greater than the injury to be averted,my exultation would have broken out. “They’re here, they’rehere, you little wretches,” I would have cried, “and youcan’t deny it now!” The little wretches denied it with all theadded volume of their sociability and their tenderness, in just the crystaldepths of which—like the flash of a fish in a stream—the mockery oftheir advantage peeped up. The shock, in truth, had sunk into me still deeperthan I knew on the night when, looking out to see either Quint or Miss Jesselunder the stars, I had beheld the boy over whose rest I watched and who hadimmediately brought in with him—had straightway, there, turned it onme—the lovely upward look with which, from the battlements above me, thehideous apparition of Quint had played. If it was a question of a scare, mydiscovery on this occasion had scared me more than any other, and it was in thecondition of nerves produced by it that I made my actual inductions. Theyharassed me so that sometimes, at odd moments, I shut myself up audibly torehearse—it was at once a fantastic relief and a reneweddespair—the manner in which I might come to the point. I approached itfrom one side and the other while, in my room, I flung myself about, but Ialways broke down in the monstrous utterance of names. As they died away on mylips, I said to myself that I should indeed help them to represent somethinginfamous, if, by pronouncing them, I should violate as rare a little case ofinstinctive delicacy as any schoolroom, probably, had ever known. When I saidto myself: “Theyhave the manners to be silent, and you, trustedas you are, the baseness to speak!” I felt myself crimson and I coveredmy face with my hands. After these secret scenes I chattered more than ever,going on volubly enough till one of our prodigious, palpable hushesoccurred—I can call them nothing else—the strange, dizzy lift orswim (I try for terms!) into a stillness, a pause of all life, that had nothingto do with the more or less noise that at the moment we might be engaged inmaking and that I could hear through any deepened exhilaration or quickenedrecitation or louder strum of the piano. Then it was that the others, theoutsiders, were there. Though they were not angels, they “passed,”as the French say, causing me, while they stayed, to tremble with the fear oftheir addressing to their younger victims some yet more infernal message ormore 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 Ihad seen, Miles and Flora saw more—things terrible and unguessableand that sprang from dreadful passages of intercourse in the past. Such thingsnaturally left on the surface, for the time, a chill which we vociferouslydenied that we felt; and we had, all three, with repetition, got into suchsplendid training that we went, each time, almost automatically, to mark theclose of the incident, through the very same movements. It was striking of thechildren, at all events, to kiss me inveterately with a kind of wildirrelevance and never to fail—one or the other—of the preciousquestion that had helped us through many a peril. “When do you think hewillcome? Don’t you think we oughttowrite?”—there was nothing like that inquiry, we found byexperience, for carrying off an awkwardness. “He” of course wastheir uncle in Harley Street; and we lived in much profusion of theory that hemight at any moment arrive to mingle in our circle. It was impossible to havegiven less encouragement than he had done to such a doctrine, but if we had nothad the doctrine to fall back upon we should have deprived each other of someof our finest exhibitions. He never wrote to them—that may have beenselfish, but it was a part of the flattery of his trust of me; for the way inwhich a man pays his highest tribute to a woman is apt to be but by the morefestal celebration of one of the sacred laws of his comfort; and I held that Icarried out the spirit of the pledge given not to appeal to him when I let mycharges 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 tothis hour. This was a rule indeed which only added to the satiric effect of mybeing plied with the supposition that he might at any moment be among us. Itwas exactly as if my charges knew how almost more awkward than anything elsethat might be for me. There appears to me, moreover, as I look back, no note inall this more extraordinary than the mere fact that, in spite of my tension andof their triumph, I never lost patience with them. Adorable they must in truthhave been, I now reflect, that I didn’t in these days hate them! Wouldexasperation, however, if relief had longer been postponed, finally havebetrayed me? It little matters, for relief arrived. I call it relief, though itwas only the relief that a snap brings to a strain or the burst of athunderstorm to a day of suffocation. It was at least change, and it came witha rush.

XIV

Walking to church a certain Sunday morning, I had little Miles at my side andhis sister, in advance of us and at Mrs. Grose’s, well in sight. It was acrisp, clear day, the first of its order for some time; the night had brought atouch of frost, and the autumn air, bright and sharp, made the church bellsalmost gay. It was an odd accident of thought that I should have happened atsuch a moment to be particularly and very gratefully struck with the obedienceof my little charges. Why did they never resent my inexorable, my perpetualsociety? Something or other had brought nearer home to me that I had all butpinned the boy to my shawl and that, in the way our companions were marshaledbefore me, I might have appeared to provide against some danger of rebellion. Iwas like a gaoler with an eye to possible surprises and escapes. But all thisbelonged—I mean their magnificent little surrender—just to thespecial array of the facts that were most abysmal. Turned out for Sunday by hisuncle’s tailor, who had had a free hand and a notion of pretty waistcoatsand of his grand little air, Miles’s whole title to independence, therights of his sex and situation, were so stamped upon him that if he hadsuddenly struck for freedom I should have had nothing to say. I was by thestrangest of chances wondering how I should meet him when the revolutionunmistakably occurred. I call it a revolution because I now see how, with theword he spoke, the curtain rose on the last act of my dreadful drama, and thecatastrophe was precipitated. “Look here, my dear, you know,” hecharmingly said, “when in the world, please, am I going back toschool?”

Transcribed here the speech sounds harmless enough, particularly as uttered inthe sweet, high, casual pipe with which, at all interlocutors, but above all athis eternal governess, he threw off intonations as if he were tossing roses.There was something in them that always made one “catch,” and Icaught, at any rate, now so effectually that I stopped as short as if one ofthe trees of the park had fallen across the road. There was something new, onthe 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 charmingthan usual. I could feel in him how he already, from my at first findingnothing to reply, perceived the advantage he had gained. I was so slow to findanything that he had plenty of time, after a minute, to continue with hissuggestive but inconclusive smile: “You know, my dear, that for a fellowto be with a lady always—!” His “my dear” wasconstantly on his lips for me, and nothing could have expressed more the exactshade of the sentiment with which I desired to inspire my pupils than its fondfamiliarity. It was so respectfully easy.

But, oh, how I felt that at present I must pick my own phrases! I rememberthat, to gain time, I tried to laugh, and I seemed to see in the beautiful facewith which he watched me how ugly and queer I looked. “And always withthe 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’regetting on.” Oh, but I felt helpless!

I have kept to this day the heartbreaking little idea of how he seemed to knowthat and to play with it. “And you can’t say I’ve not beenawfully good, can you?”

I laid my hand on his shoulder, for, though I felt how much better it wouldhave been to walk on, I was not yet quite able. “No, I can’t saythat, 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 ofchildish 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 thatagain. 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 whenamI going back?”

I wore, in turning it over, my most responsible air. “Were you very happyat school?”

He just considered. “Oh, I’m happy enough anywhere!”

“Well, then,” I quavered, “if you’re just as happyhere—!”

“Ah, but that isn’t everything! Of course youknow alot—”

“But you hint that you know almost as much?” I risked as he paused.

“Not half I want to!” Miles honestly professed. “But itisn’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 ofvarious persons, including several of the household of Bly, on their way to itand clustered about the door to see us go in. I quickened our step; I wanted toget there before the question between us opened up much further; I reflectedhungrily that, for more than an hour, he would have to be silent; and I thoughtwith envy of the comparative dusk of the pew and of the almost spiritual helpof the hassock on which I might bend my knees. I seemed literally to be runninga race with some confusion to which he was about to reduce me, but I felt thathe had got in first when, before we had even entered the churchyard, he threwout—

“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, loveoursweet 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 unfinishedthat, after we had come into the gate, another stop, which he imposed on me bythe pressure of his arm, had become inevitable. Mrs. Grose and Flora had passedinto the church, the other worshippers had followed, and we were, for theminute, alone among the old, thick graves. We had paused, on the path from thegate, 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 dropstraight down on the stone slab, as if suddenly to rest. “Does my unclethink what youthink?”

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 heknow?”

“Know what, Miles?”

“Why, the way I’m going on.”

I perceived quickly enough that I could make, to this inquiry, no answer thatwould not involve something of a sacrifice of my employer. Yet it appeared tome 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 canbe made to?”

“In what way?”

“Why, by his coming down.”

“But who’ll get him to come down?”

“Iwill!” the boy said with extraordinary brightness andemphasis. He gave me another look charged with that expression and then marchedoff alone into church.

XV

The business was practically settled from the moment I never followed him. Itwas a pitiful surrender to agitation, but my being aware of this had somehow nopower to restore me. I only sat there on my tomb and read into what my littlefriend had said to me the fullness of its meaning; by the time I had graspedthe whole of which I had also embraced, for absence, the pretext that I wasashamed to offer my pupils and the rest of the congregation such an example ofdelay. What I said to myself above all was that Miles had got something out ofme and that the proof of it, for him, would be just this awkward collapse. Hehad got out of me that there was something I was much afraid of and that heshould 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 ofthe grounds of his dismissal from school, for that was really but the questionof the horrors gathered behind. That his uncle should arrive to treat with meof these things was a solution that, strictly speaking, I ought now to havedesired to bring on; but I could so little face the ugliness and the pain of itthat I simply procrastinated and lived from hand to mouth. The boy, to my deepdiscomposure, 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 ofmy studies, or you cease to expect me to lead with you a life that’s sounnatural for a boy.” What was so unnatural for the particular boy I wasconcerned with was this sudden revelation of a consciousness and a plan.

That was what really overcame me, what prevented my going in. I walked roundthe church, hesitating, hovering; I reflected that I had already, with him,hurt myself beyond repair. Therefore I could patch up nothing, and it was tooextreme an effort to squeeze beside him into the pew: he would be so much moresure than ever to pass his arm into mine and make me sit there for an hour inclose, silent contact with his commentary on our talk. For the first minutesince his arrival I wanted to get away from him. As I paused beneath the higheast window and listened to the sounds of worship, I was taken with an impulsethat might master me, I felt, completely should I give it the leastencouragement. I might easily put an end to my predicament by getting awayaltogether. Here was my chance; there was no one to stop me; I could give thewhole thing up—turn my back and retreat. It was only a question ofhurrying again, for a few preparations, to the house which the attendance atchurch of so many of the servants would practically have left unoccupied. Noone, in short, could blame me if I should just drive desperately off. What wasit to get away if I got away only till dinner? That would be in a couple ofhours, at the end of which—I had the acute prevision—my littlepupils would play at innocent wonder about my nonappearance in their train.

“What didyou do, you naughty, bad thing? Why in the world, toworry us so—and take our thoughts off, too, don’t youknow?—did you desert us at the very door?” I couldn’t meetsuch questions nor, as they asked them, their false little lovely eyes; yet itwas all so exactly what I should have to meet that, as the prospect grew sharpto me, I at last let myself go.

I got, so far as the immediate moment was concerned, away; I came straight outof the churchyard and, thinking hard, retraced my steps through the park. Itseemed to me that by the time I reached the house I had made up my mind I wouldfly. The Sunday stillness both of the approaches and of the interior, in whichI met no one, fairly excited me with a sense of opportunity. Were I to get offquickly, this way, I should get off without a scene, without a word. Myquickness would have to be remarkable, however, and the question of aconveyance was the great one to settle. Tormented, in the hall, withdifficulties and obstacles, I remember sinking down at the foot of thestaircase—suddenly collapsing there on the lowest step and then, with arevulsion, recalling that it was exactly where more than a month before, in thedarkness of night and just so bowed with evil things, I had seen the specter ofthe most horrible of women. At this I was able to straighten myself; I went therest of the way up; I made, in my bewilderment, for the schoolroom, where therewere objects belonging to me that I should have to take. But I opened the doorto find again, in a flash, my eyes unsealed. In the presence of what I saw Ireeled straight back upon my resistance.

Seated at my own table in clear noonday light I saw a person whom, without myprevious experience, I should have taken at the first blush for some housemaidwho might have stayed at home to look after the place and who, availing herselfof 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 hersweetheart. There was an effort in the way that, while her arms rested on thetable, her hands with evident weariness supported her head; but at the moment Itook this in I had already become aware that, in spite of my entrance, herattitude strangely persisted. Then it was—with the very act of itsannouncing itself—that her identity flared up in a change of posture. Sherose, not as if she had heard me, but with an indescribable grand melancholy ofindifference and detachment, and, within a dozen feet of me, stood there as myvile predecessor. Dishonored and tragic, she was all before me; but even as Ifixed and, for memory, secured it, the awful image passed away. Dark asmidnight in her black dress, her haggard beauty and her unutterable woe, shehad looked at me long enough to appear to say that her right to sit at my tablewas as good as mine to sit at hers. While these instants lasted, indeed, I hadthe extraordinary chill of feeling that it was I who was the intruder. It wasas a wild protest against it that, actually addressing her—“Youterrible, miserable woman!”—I heard myself break into a sound that,by the open door, rang through the long passage and the empty house. She lookedat me as if she heard me, but I had recovered myself and cleared the air. Therewas nothing in the room the next minute but the sunshine and a sense that Imust stay.

XVI

I had so perfectly expected that the return of my pupils would be marked by ademonstration that I was freshly upset at having to take into account that theywere dumb about my absence. Instead of gaily denouncing and caressing me, theymade no allusion to my having failed them, and I was left, for the time, onperceiving that she too said nothing, to study Mrs. Grose’s odd face. Idid this to such purpose that I made sure they had in some way bribed her tosilence; a silence that, however, I would engage to break down on the firstprivate opportunity. This opportunity came before tea: I secured five minuteswith her in the housekeeper’s room, where, in the twilight, amid a smellof lately baked bread, but with the place all swept and garnished, I found hersitting in pained placidity before the fire. So I see her still, so I see herbest: facing the flame from her straight chair in the dusky, shining room, alarge clean image of the “put away”—of drawers closed andlocked and rest without a remedy.

“Oh, yes, they asked me to say nothing; and to please them—so longas they were there—of course I promised. But what had happened toyou?”

“I only went with you for the walk,” I said. “I had then tocome back to meet a friend.”

She showed her surprise. “A friend—you?”

“Oh, yes, I have a couple!” I laughed. “But did the childrengive you a reason?”

“For not alluding to your leaving us? Yes; they said you would like itbetter. Do you like it better?”

My face had made her rueful. “No, I like it worse!” But after aninstant I added: “Did they say why I should like it better?”

“No; Master Miles only said, ‘We must do nothing but what shelikes!’”

“I wish indeed he would. And what did Flora say?”

“Miss Flora was too sweet. She said, ‘Oh, of course, ofcourse!’—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 camehome, 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 handin advance of my sounding that note; so that even now, as she bravely blinkedunder the signal of my word, I could keep her comparatively firm. “Atalk! 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 thecandor 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 sharethem—” I faltered myself with the horror of it.

But my companion, with less imagination, kept me up. “To sharethem—?”

“She wants Flora.” Mrs. Grose might, as I gave it to her, fairlyhave fallen away from me had I not been prepared. I still held her there, toshow I was. “As I’ve told you, however, it doesn’tmatter.”

“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—andhas 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 boyhimself, if necessary) that if I’m to be reproached with having donenothing 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 wasexcusable 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 Ican’t undertake to work the question on behalf of a child who has beenexpelled—”

“For we’ve never in the least known what!” Mrs. Grosedeclared.

“For wickedness. For what else—when he’s so clever andbeautiful and perfect? Is he stupid? Is he untidy? Is he infirm? Is heill-natured? He’s exquisite—so it can be only that; and thatwould open up the whole thing. After all,” I said, “it’stheir uncle’s fault. If he left here such people—!”

“He didn’t really in the least know them. The fault’smine.” 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 tellhim?”

“You needn’t tell him anything. I’lltell him.”

I measured this. “Do you mean you’ll write—?”Remembering she couldn’t, I caught myself up. “How do youcommunicate?”

“I tell the bailiff. Hewrites.”

“And should you like him to write our story?”

My question had a sarcastic force that I had not fully intended, and it madeher, after a moment, inconsequently break down. The tears were again in hereyes. “Ah, miss, youwrite!”

“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 changedback, a great wind was abroad, and beneath the lamp, in my room, with Flora atpeace beside me, I sat for a long time before a blank sheet of paper andlistened to the lash of the rain and the batter of the gusts. Finally I wentout, taking a candle; I crossed the passage and listened a minute atMiles’s door. What, under my endless obsession, I had been impelled tolisten for was some betrayal of his not being at rest, and I presently caughtone, 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 muchat his ease. “Well, what are youup to?” he asked with agrace of sociability in which it occurred to me that Mrs. Grose, had she beenpresent, 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 hisfriendly old hand to me, had sat down on the edge of his bed. “What isit,” 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 waslight enough to show how he smiled up at me from his pillow. “What do youmean 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 oureyes continued to meet, that my silence had all the air of admitting his chargeand that nothing in the whole world of reality was perhaps at that moment sofabulous as our actual relation. “Certainly you shall go back toschool,” I said, “if it be that that troubles you. But not to theold place—we must find another, a better. How could I know it did troubleyou, 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 theminute as appealing as some wistful patient in a children’s hospital; andI would have given, as the resemblance came to me, all I possessed on earthreally to be the nurse or the sister of charity who might have helped to curehim. Well, even as it was, I perhaps might help! “Do you knowyou’ve never said a word to me about your school—I mean the oldone; never mentioned it in any way?”

He seemed to wonder; he smiled with the same loveliness. But he clearly gainedtime; he waited, he called for guidance. “Haven’t I?” Itwasn’t for meto 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 unutterablytouching was it to see his little brain puzzled and his little resources taxedto play, under the spell laid on him, a part of innocence and consistency.“No, never—from the hour you came back. You’ve nevermentioned to me one of your masters, one of your comrades, nor the least littlething that ever happened to you at school. Never, little Miles—no,never—have you given me an inkling of anything that mayhavehappened there. Therefore you can fancy how much I’m in the dark. Untilyou 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 soperfectly to accept the present.” It was extraordinary how my absoluteconviction of his secret precocity (or whatever I might call the poison of aninfluence that I dared but half to phrase) made him, in spite of the faintbreath of his inward trouble, appear as accessible as an olderperson—imposed him almost as an intellectual equal. “I thought youwanted to go on as you are.”

It struck me that at this he just faintly colored. He gave, at any rate, like aconvalescent slightly fatigued, a languid shake of his head. “Idon’t—I don’t. I want to get away.”

“You’re tired of Bly?”

“Oh, no, I like Bly.”

“Well, then—?”

“Oh, youknow 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. “Mydear, I don’t want to get off!”

“You can’t, even if you do. You can’t, youcan’t!”—he lay beautifully staring. “My uncle must comedown, and you must completely settle things.”

“If we do,” I returned with some spirit, “you may be sure itwill be to take you quite away.”

“Well, don’t you understand that that’s exactly whatI’m working for? You’ll have to tell him—about the wayyou’ve let it all drop: you’ll have to tell him a tremendouslot!”

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 totell 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 dowith you. He can’t send you back—”

“Oh, I don’t want to go back!” he broke in. “I want anew field.”

He said it with admirable serenity, with positive unimpeachable gaiety; anddoubtless it was that very note that most evoked for me the poignancy, theunnatural childish tragedy, of his probable reappearance at the end of threemonths with all this bravado and still more dishonor. It overwhelmed me nowthat I should never be able to bear that, and it made me let myself go. I threwmyself upon him and in the tenderness of my pity I embraced him. “Dearlittle Miles, dear little Miles—!”

My face was close to his, and he let me kiss him, simply taking it withindulgent 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 tolook at as one had seen sick children look. “I’ve told you—Itold 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; thenever so gently, “To let me alone,” he replied.

There was even a singular little dignity in it, something that made me releasehim, yet, when I had slowly risen, linger beside him. God knows I never wishedto harass him, but I felt that merely, at this, to turn my back on him was toabandon or, to put it more truly, to lose him. “I’ve just begun aletter 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. “Whathappened?”

It made me, the sound of the words, in which it seemed to me that I caught forthe very first time a small faint quaver of consenting consciousness—itmade me drop on my knees beside the bed and seize once more the chance ofpossessing him. “Dear little Miles, dear little Miles, if you knewhow I want to help you! It’s only that, it’s nothing but that, andI’d rather die than give you a pain or do you a wrong—I’drather die than hurt a hair of you. Dear little Miles”—oh, Ibrought it out now even if I shouldgo too far—“I just wantyou to help me to save you!” But I knew in a moment after this that I hadgone too far. The answer to my appeal was instantaneous, but it came in theform of an extraordinary blast and chill, a gust of frozen air, and a shake ofthe room as great as if, in the wild wind, the casement had crashed in. The boygave a loud, high shriek, which, lost in the rest of the shock of sound, mighthave seemed, indistinctly, though I was so close to him, a note either ofjubilation or of terror. I jumped to my feet again and was conscious ofdarkness. So for a moment we remained, while I stared about me and saw that thedrawn curtains were unstirred and the window tight. “Why, thecandle’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—forthe 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 thevillage. 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 togloss over any recent little friction. They performed the dizziest feats ofarithmetic, soaring quite out of myfeeble range, and perpetrated, inhigher spirits than ever, geographical and historical jokes. It was conspicuousof course in Miles in particular that he appeared to wish to show how easily hecould let me down. This child, to my memory, really lives in a setting ofbeauty and misery that no words can translate; there was a distinction all hisown in every impulse he revealed; never was a small natural creature, to theuninitiated eye all frankness and freedom, a more ingenious, a moreextraordinary little gentleman. I had perpetually to guard against the wonderof contemplation into which my initiated view betrayed me; to check theirrelevant gaze and discouraged sigh in which I constantly both attacked andrenounced the enigma of what such a little gentleman could have done thatdeserved a penalty. Say that, by the dark prodigy I knew, the imagination ofall evil hadbeen opened up to him: all the justice within me ached forthe proof that it could ever have flowered into an act.

He had never, at any rate, been such a little gentleman as when, after ourearly dinner on this dreadful day, he came round to me and asked if Ishouldn’t like him, for half an hour, to play to me. David playing toSaul could never have shown a finer sense of the occasion. It was literally acharming exhibition of tact, of magnanimity, and quite tantamount to his sayingoutright: “The true knights we love to read about never push an advantagetoo far. I know what you mean now: you mean that—to be let alone yourselfand 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 beplenty of time for that. I do really delight in your society, and I only wantto show you that I contended for a principle.” It may be imagined whetherI resisted this appeal or failed to accompany him again, hand in hand, to theschoolroom. He sat down at the old piano and played as he had never played; andif there are those who think he had better have been kicking a football I canonly say that I wholly agree with them. For at the end of a time that under hisinfluence I had quite ceased to measure, I started up with a strange sense ofhaving literally slept at my post. It was after luncheon, and by the schoolroomfire, and yet I hadn’t really, in the least, slept: I had only donesomething 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 andthen could only say: “Why, my dear, how do Iknow?”—breaking moreover into a happy laugh which, immediatelyafter, 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 goingdownstairs, I looked into several others. As she was nowhere about she wouldsurely be with Mrs. Grose, whom, in the comfort of that theory, I accordinglyproceeded 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 onlysupposed that, after the repast, I had carried off both the children; as towhich she was quite in her right, for it was the very first time I had allowedthe little girl out of my sight without some special provision. Of course nowindeed she might be with the maids, so that the immediate thing was to look forher 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, itwas only to report on either side that after guarded inquiries we hadaltogether failed to trace her. For a minute there, apart from observation, weexchanged mute alarms, and I could feel with what high interest my friendreturned me all those I had from the first given her.

“She’ll be above,” she presently said—“in one ofthe rooms you haven’t searched.”

“No; she’s at a distance.” I had made up my mind. “Shehas gone out.”

Mrs. Grose stared. “Without a hat?”

I naturally also looked volumes. “Isn’t that woman always withoutone?”

“She’s with her?”

“She’s with her!” I declared. “We must findthem.”

My hand was on my friend’s arm, but she failed for the moment, confrontedwith such an account of the matter, to respond to my pressure. She communed, onthe contrary, on the spot, with her uneasiness. “And where’s MasterMiles?”

“Oh, he’swith Quint. They’re in theschoolroom.”

“Lord, miss!” My view, I was myself aware—and therefore Isuppose my tone—had never yet reached so calm an assurance.

“The trick’s played,” I went on; “they’vesuccessfully worked their plan. He found the most divine little way to keep mequiet while she went off.”

“‘Divine’?” Mrs. Grose bewilderedly echoed.

“Infernal, then!” I almost cheerfully rejoined. “He hasprovided for himself as well. But come!”

She had helplessly gloomed at the upper regions. “You leavehim—?”

“So long with Quint? Yes—I don’t mind that now.”

She always ended, at these moments, by getting possession of my hand, and inthis manner she could at present still stay me. But after gasping an instant atmy sudden resignation, “Because of your letter?” she eagerlybrought out.

I quickly, by way of answer, felt for my letter, drew it forth, held it up, andthen, freeing myself, went and laid it on the great hall table. “Lukewill take it,” I said as I came back. I reached the house door and openedit; I was already on the steps.

My companion still demurred: the storm of the night and the early morning haddropped, but the afternoon was damp and gray. I came down to the drive whileshe stood in the doorway. “You go with nothing on?”

“What do I care when the child has nothing? I can’t wait todress,” I cried, “and if you must do so, I leave you. Trymeanwhile, 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 rightlycalled, though I reflect that it may in fact have been a sheet of water lessremarkable than it appeared to my untraveled eyes. My acquaintance with sheetsof water was small, and the pool of Bly, at all events on the few occasions ofmy consenting, under the protection of my pupils, to affront its surface in theold flat-bottomed boat moored there for our use, had impressed me both with itsextent and its agitation. The usual place of embarkation was half a mile fromthe house, but I had an intimate conviction that, wherever Flora might be, shewas 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, Ihad been aware, in our walks, of the quarter to which she most inclined. Thiswas why I had now given to Mrs. Grose’s steps so marked adirection—a direction that made her, when she perceived it, oppose aresistance that showed me she was freshly mystified. “You’re goingto the water, Miss?—you think she’s in—?”

“She may be, though the depth is, I believe, nowhere very great. But whatI 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 shewanted to go back alone. And now her brother has managed it for her.”

Mrs. Grose still stood where she had stopped. “You suppose they reallytalkof them?”

I could meet this with a confidence! “They say things that, if we heardthem, would simply appall us.”

“And if she isthere—”

“Yes?”

“Then Miss Jessel is?”

“Beyond a doubt. You shall see.”

“Oh, thank you!” my friend cried, planted so firm that, taking itin, 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, mightbefall me, the exposure of my society struck her as her least danger. Sheexhaled a moan of relief as we at last came in sight of the greater part of thewater without a sight of the child. There was no trace of Flora on that nearerside of the bank where my observation of her had been most startling, and noneon the opposite edge, where, save for a margin of some twenty yards, a thickcopse came down to the water. The pond, oblong in shape, had a width so scantcompared to its length that, with its ends out of view, it might have beentaken for a scant river. We looked at the empty expanse, and then I felt thesuggestion of my friend’s eyes. I knew what she meant and I replied witha 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 goover, 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 whileMrs. Grose took again, into the queer element I offered her, one of her plungesof submission; then I pointed out that the boat might perfectly be in a smallrefuge formed by one of the recesses of the pool, an indentation masked, forthe hither side, by a projection of the bank and by a clump of trees growingclose 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 walkfurther.

“By going all the way round?”

“Certainly, far as it is. It will take us but ten minutes, but it’sfar enough to have made the child prefer not to walk. She went straightover.”

“Laws!” cried my friend again; the chain of my logic was ever toomuch for her. It dragged her at my heels even now, and when we had got halfwayround—a devious, tiresome process, on ground much broken and by a pathchoked with overgrowth—I paused to give her breath. I sustained her witha grateful arm, assuring her that she might hugely help me; and this started usafresh, so that in the course of but few minutes more we reached a point fromwhich we found the boat to be where I had supposed it. It had beenintentionally left as much as possible out of sight and was tied to one of thestakes of a fence that came, just there, down to the brink and that had been anassistance 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 alittle girl; but I had lived, by this time, too long among wonders and hadpanted to too many livelier measures. There was a gate in the fence, throughwhich we passed, and that brought us, after a trifling interval, more into theopen. Then, “There she is!” we both exclaimed at once.

Flora, a short way off, stood before us on the grass and smiled as if herperformance was now complete. The next thing she did, however, was to stoopstraight down and pluck—quite as if it were all she was there for—abig, ugly spray of withered fern. I instantly became sure she had just come outof the copse. She waited for us, not herself taking a step, and I was consciousof the rare solemnity with which we presently approached her. She smiled andsmiled, and we met; but it was all done in a silence by this time flagrantlyominous. Mrs. Grose was the first to break the spell: she threw herself on herknees and, drawing the child to her breast, clasped in a long embrace thelittle tender, yielding body. While this dumb convulsion lasted I could onlywatch it—which I did the more intently when I saw Flora’s face peepat me over our companion’s shoulder. It was serious now—the flickerhad left it; but it strengthened the pang with which I at that moment enviedMrs. Grose the simplicity of herrelation. Still, all this while,nothing more passed between us save that Flora had let her foolish fern againdrop to the ground. What she and I had virtually said to each other was thatpretexts were useless now. When Mrs. Grose finally got up she kept thechild’s hand, so that the two were still before me; and the singularreticence of our communion was even more marked in the frank look she launchedme. “I’ll be hanged,” it said, “if I’llspeak!”

It was Flora who, gazing all over me in candid wonder, was the first. She wasstruck 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 answerquite sufficient. “And where’s Miles?” she went on.

There was something in the small valor of it that quite finished me: thesethree words from her were, in a flash like the glitter of a drawn blade, thejostle of the cup that my hand, for weeks and weeks, had held high and full tothe brim that now, even before speaking, I felt overflow in a deluge.“I’ll tell you if you’ll tell me—” I heardmyself 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 Ibrought 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 Ihad 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 itfairly likened my breach of the silence to the smash of a pane of glass. Itadded to the interposing cry, as if to stay the blow, that Mrs. Grose, at thesame instant, uttered over my violence—the shriek of a creature scared,or rather wounded, which, in turn, within a few seconds, was completed by agasp 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 theother 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 wasjustified; she was there, and I was neither cruel nor mad. She was there forpoor scared Mrs. Grose, but she was there most for Flora; and no moment of mymonstrous time was perhaps so extraordinary as that in which I consciouslythrew 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 wasnot, 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, duringwhich Mrs. Grose’s dazed blink across to where I pointed struck me as asovereign sign that she too at last saw, just as it carried my own eyesprecipitately to the child. The revelation then of the manner in which Florawas affected startled me, in truth, far more than it would have done to findher also merely agitated, for direct dismay was of course not what I hadexpected. Prepared and on her guard as our pursuit had actually made her, shewould repress every betrayal; and I was therefore shaken, on the spot, by myfirst 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 thedirection of the prodigy I announced, but only, instead of that, turn atmean expression of hard, still gravity, an expression absolutely newand unprecedented and that appeared to read and accuse and judge me—thiswas a stroke that somehow converted the little girl herself into the verypresence that could make me quail. I quailed even though my certitude that shethoroughly saw was never greater than at that instant, and in the immediateneed to defend myself I called it passionately to witness. “She’sthere, you little unhappy thing—there, there, there, and you seeher as well as you see me!” I had said shortly before to Mrs. Grose thatshe was not at these times a child, but an old, old woman, and that descriptionof 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, anadmission, of her eyes, a countenance of deeper and deeper, of indeed suddenlyquite fixed, reprobation. I was by this time—if I can put the whole thingat all together—more appalled at what I may properly call her manner thanat anything else, though it was simultaneously with this that I became aware ofhaving Mrs. Grose also, and very formidably, to reckon with. My eldercompanion, the next moment, at any rate, blotted out everything but her ownflushed face and her loud, shocked protest, a burst of high disapproval.“What a dreadful turn, to be sure, miss! Where on earth do you seeanything?”

I could only grasp her more quickly yet, for even while she spoke the hideousplain presence stood undimmed and undaunted. It had already lasted a minute,and it lasted while I continued, seizing my colleague, quite thrusting her atit and presenting her to it, to insist with my pointing hand. “Youdon’t see her exactly as wesee?—you mean to say youdon’t now—now?She’s as big as a blazing fire! Onlylook, dearest woman, look—!” She looked, even as I did, andgave me, with her deep groan of negation, repulsion, compassion—themixture with her pity of her relief at her exemption—a sense, touching tome even then, that she would have backed me up if she could. I might well haveneeded that, for with this hard blow of the proof that her eyes were hopelesslysealed I felt my own situation horribly crumble, I felt—I saw—mylivid 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 theastounding little attitude of Flora. Into this attitude Mrs. Grose immediatelyand violently entered, breaking, even while there pierced through my sense ofruin a prodigious private triumph, into breathless reassurance.

“She isn’t there, little lady, and nobody’s there—andyou never see nothing, my sweet! How can poor Miss Jessel—when poor MissJessel’s dead and buried? Weknow, don’t we,love?”—and she appealed, blundering in, to the child.“It’s all a mere mistake and a worry and a joke—andwe’ll go home as fast as we can!”

Our companion, on this, had responded with a strange, quick primness ofpropriety, and they were again, with Mrs. Grose on her feet, united, as itwere, in pained opposition to me. Flora continued to fix me with her small maskof reprobation, and even at that minute I prayed God to forgive me for seemingto see that, as she stood there holding tight to our friend’s dress, herincomparable 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. Idon’t like you!” Then, after this deliverance, which might havebeen that of a vulgarly pert little girl in the street, she hugged Mrs. Grosemore closely and buried in her skirts the dreadful little face. In thisposition she produced an almost furious wail. “Take me away, take meaway—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 butcommunicate again with the figure that, on the opposite bank, without amovement, as rigidly still as if catching, beyond the interval, our voices, wasas vividly there for my disaster as it was not there for my service. Thewretched child had spoken exactly as if she had got from some outside sourceeach of her stabbing little words, and I could therefore, in the full despairof all I had to accept, but sadly shake my head at her. “If I had everdoubted, all my doubt would at present have gone. I’ve been living withthe miserable truth, and now it has only too much closed round me. Of courseI’ve lost you: I’ve interfered, and you’ve seen—underherdictation”—with which I faced, over the pool again, ourinfernal witness—“the easy and perfect way to meet it. I’vedone my best, but I’ve lost you. Goodbye.” For Mrs. Grose I had animperative, an almost frantic “Go, go!” before which, in infinitedistress, but mutely possessed of the little girl and clearly convinced, inspite of her blindness, that something awful had occurred and some collapseengulfed 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 onlyknew that at the end of, I suppose, a quarter of an hour, an odorous dampnessand roughness, chilling and piercing my trouble, had made me understand that Imust have thrown myself, on my face, on the ground and given way to a wildnessof grief. I must have lain there long and cried and sobbed, for when I raisedmy head the day was almost done. I got up and looked a moment, through thetwilight, at the gray pool and its blank, haunted edge, and then I took, backto the house, my dreary and difficult course. When I reached the gate in thefence the boat, to my surprise, was gone, so that I had a fresh reflection tomake on Flora’s extraordinary command of the situation. She passed thatnight, by the most tacit, and I should add, were not the word so grotesque afalse note, the happiest of arrangements, with Mrs. Grose. I saw neither ofthem on my return, but, on the other hand, as by an ambiguous compensation, Isaw a great deal of Miles. I saw—I can use no other phrase—so muchof him that it was as if it were more than it had ever been. No evening I hadpassed at Bly had the portentous quality of this one; in spite ofwhich—and in spite also of the deeper depths of consternation that hadopened beneath my feet—there was literally, in the ebbing actual, anextraordinarily sweet sadness. On reaching the house I had never so much aslooked for the boy; I had simply gone straight to my room to change what I waswearing and to take in, at a glance, much material testimony to Flora’srupture. Her little belongings had all been removed. When later, by theschoolroom fire, I was served with tea by the usual maid, I indulged, on thearticle of my other pupil, in no inquiry whatever. He had his freedomnow—he might have it to the end! Well, he did have it; and itconsisted—in part at least—of his coming in at about eighto’clock and sitting down with me in silence. On the removal of the teathings I had blown out the candles and drawn my chair closer: I was consciousof a mortal coldness and felt as if I should never again be warm. So, when heappeared, I was sitting in the glow with my thoughts. He paused a moment by thedoor as if to look at me; then—as if to share them—came to theother side of the hearth and sank into a chair. We sat there in absolutestillness; 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 thatan illness was perhaps at hand; she had passed a night of extreme unrest, anight agitated above all by fears that had for their subject not in the leasther former, but wholly her present, governess. It was not against the possiblere-entrance of Miss Jessel on the scene that she protested—it wasconspicuously and passionately against mine. I was promptly on my feet ofcourse, and with an immense deal to ask; the more that my friend haddiscernibly now girded her loins to meet me once more. This I felt as soon as Ihad put to her the question of her sense of the child’s sincerity asagainst my own. “She persists in denying to you that she saw, or has everseen, anything?”

My visitor’s trouble, truly, was great. “Ah, miss, it isn’t amatter on which I can push her! Yet it isn’t either, I must say, as if Imuch 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 likesome 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 methere yesterday was, I assure you, the very strangest of all; it was quitebeyond any of the others. I didput my foot in it! She’ll neverspeak to me again.”

Hideous and obscure as it all was, it held Mrs. Grose briefly silent; then shegranted 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 aboutit!”

“And that manner”—I summed it up—“is practicallywhat’s the matter with her now!”

Oh, that manner, I could see in my visitor’s face, and not a little elsebesides! “She asks me every three minutes if I think you’re comingin.”

“I see—I see.” I, too, on my side, had so much more thanworked it out. “Has she said to you since yesterday—except torepudiate her familiarity with anything so dreadful—a single other wordabout Miss Jessel?”

“Not one, miss. And of course you know,” my friend added, “Itook it from her, by the lake, that, just then and there at least, therewasnobody.”

“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 dealwith. They’ve made them—their two friends, I mean—stillcleverer even than nature did; for it was wondrous material to play on! Florahas now her grievance, and she’ll work it to the end.”

“Yes, miss; but to whatend?”

“Why, that of dealing with me to her uncle. She’ll make me out tohim the lowest creature—!”

I winced at the fair show of the scene in Mrs. Grose’s face; she lookedfor a minute as if she sharply saw them together. “And him who thinks sowell 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 atyou.”

“So that what you’ve come to me now for,” I asked, “isto speed me on my way?” Before she had time to reply, however, I had herin check. “I’ve a better idea—the result of my reflections.My going wouldseem the right thing, and on Sunday I was terribly nearit. Yet that won’t do. It’s youwho must go. You must takeFlora.”

My visitor, at this, did speculate. “But where in theworld—?”

“Away from here. Away from them. Away, even most of all, now, fromme. Straight to her uncle.”

“Only to tell on you—?”

“No, not ‘only’! To leave me, in addition, with myremedy.”

She was still vague. “And what isyour 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 tothink it. At all events, I want to try. Get off with his sister as soon aspossible and leave me with him alone.” I was amazed, myself, at thespirit I had still in reserve, and therefore perhaps a trifle the moredisconcerted at the way in which, in spite of this fine example of it, shehesitated. “There’s one thing, of course,” I went on:“they mustn’t, before she goes, see each other for threeseconds.” Then it came over me that, in spite of Flora’s presumablesequestration from the instant of her return from the pool, it might already betoo late. “Do you mean,” I anxiously asked, “that theyhavemet?”

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 eachtime with one of the maids, and at present, though she’s alone,she’s locked in safe. And yet—and yet!” There were too manythings.

“And yet what?”

“Well, are you so sure of the little gentleman?”

“I’m not sure of anything but you. But I have, since lastevening, a new hope. I think he wants to give me an opening. I do believethat—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 werejust 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 waswithout a breach of the silence or so much as a faint allusion to hissister’s condition and absence that we at last kissed for good night. Allthe same,” I continued, “I can’t, if her uncle sees her,consent to his seeing her brother without my having given the boy—andmost 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 onmyside—of which you see the importance. If nothing comes, I shallonly fail, and you will, at the worst, have helped me by doing, on your arrivalin 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 toher aid. “Unless, indeed,” I wound up, “you really wantnotto go.”

I could see it, in her face, at last clear itself; she put out her hand to meas a pledge. “I’ll go—I’ll go. I’ll go thismorning.”

I wanted to be very just. “If you shouldwish still to wait, Iwould engage she shouldn’t see me.”

“No, no: it’s the place itself. She must leave it.” She heldme a moment with heavy eyes, then brought out the rest. “Youridea’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 meanthat, since yesterday, you haveseen—?”

She shook her head with dignity. “I’ve heard—!”

“Heard?”

“From that child—horrors! There!” she sighed with tragicrelief. “On my honor, miss, she says things—!” But at thisevocation she broke down; she dropped, with a sudden sob, upon my sofa and, asI 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. “‘ThankGod’?”

“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 beyondeverything, for a young lady; and I can’t think wherever she must havepicked up—”

“The appalling language she applied to me? I can, then!” I broke inwith a laugh that was doubtless significant enough.

It only, in truth, left my friend still more grave. “Well, perhaps Iought to also—since I’ve heard some of it before! Yet I can’tbear it,” the poor woman went on while, with the same movement, sheglanced, on my dressing table, at the face of my watch. “But I must goback.”

I kept her, however. “Ah, if you can’t bear it—!”

“How can I stop with her, you mean? Why, just forthat: to get heraway. Far from this,” she pursued, “far fromthem—”

“She may be different? She may be free?” I seized her almost withjoy. “Then, in spite of yesterday, you believe—”

“In such doings?” Her simple description of them required, in thelight of her expression, to be carried no further, and she gave me the wholething as she had never done. “I believe.”

Yes, it was a joy, and we were still shoulder to shoulder: if I might continuesure of that I should care but little what else happened. My support in thepresence of disaster would be the same as it had been in my early need ofconfidence, and if my friend would answer for my honesty, I would answer forall the rest. On the point of taking leave of her, nonetheless, I was to someextent embarrassed. “There’s one thing, of course—it occursto me—to remember. My letter, giving the alarm, will have reached townbefore you.”

I now perceived still more how she had been beating about the bush and howweary 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 hetook it?” I gasped.

She hung fire, but she overcame her reluctance. “I mean that I sawyesterday, when I came back with Miss Flora, that it wasn’t where you hadput it. Later in the evening I had the chance to question Luke, and he declaredthat he had neither noticed nor touched it.” We could only exchange, onthis, one of our deeper mutual soundings, and it was Mrs. Grose who firstbrought up the plumb with an almost elated “You see!”

“Yes, I see that if Miles took it instead he probably will have read itand destroyed it.”

“And don’t you see anything else?”

I faced her a moment with a sad smile. “It strikes me that by this timeyour 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, inher simple sharpness, an almost droll disillusioned nod. “Hestole!”

I turned it over—I tried to be more judicial.“Well—perhaps.”

She looked as if she found me unexpectedly calm. “He stoleletters!”

She couldn’t know my reasons for a calmness after all pretty shallow; soI showed them off as I might. “I hope then it was to more purpose than inthis case! The note, at any rate, that I put on the table yesterday,” Ipursued, “will have given him so scant an advantage—for itcontained only the bare demand for an interview—that he is already muchashamed of having gone so far for so little, and that what he had on his mindlast evening was precisely the need of confession.” I seemed to myself,for the instant, to have mastered it, to see it all. “Leave us, leaveus”—I was already, at the door, hurrying her off. “I’llget it out of him. He’ll meet me—he’ll confess. If heconfesses, he’s saved. And if he’s saved—”

“Then youare?” The dear woman kissed me on this, and I tookher farewell. “I’ll save you without him!” she cried as shewent.

XXII

Yet it was when she had got off—and I missed her on the spot—thatthe great pinch really came. If I had counted on what it would give me to findmyself alone with Miles, I speedily perceived, at least, that it would give mea measure. No hour of my stay in fact was so assailed with apprehensions asthat of my coming down to learn that the carriage containing Mrs. Grose and myyounger pupil had already rolled out of the gates. Now I was, I said tomyself, 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. Itwas 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 reflectionof the crisis. What had happened naturally caused them all to stare; there wastoo little of the explained, throw out whatever we might, in the suddenness ofmy colleague’s act. The maids and the men looked blank; the effect ofwhich on my nerves was an aggravation until I saw the necessity of making it apositive aid. It was precisely, in short, by just clutching the helm that Iavoided total wreck; and I dare say that, to bear up at all, I became, thatmorning, very grand and very dry. I welcomed the consciousness that I wascharged with much to do, and I caused it to be known as well that, left thus tomyself, I was quite remarkably firm. I wandered with that manner, for the nexthour or two, all over the place and looked, I have no doubt, as if I were readyfor any onset. So, for the benefit of whom it might concern, I paraded with asick heart.

The person it appeared least to concern proved to be, till dinner, little Mileshimself. My perambulations had given me, meanwhile, no glimpse of him, but theyhad tended to make more public the change taking place in our relation as aconsequence of his having at the piano, the day before, kept me, inFlora’s interest, so beguiled and befooled. The stamp of publicity had ofcourse been fully given by her confinement and departure, and the change itselfwas now ushered in by our nonobservance of the regular custom of theschoolroom. He had already disappeared when, on my way down, I pushed open hisdoor, and I learned below that he had breakfasted—in the presence of acouple 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 haveexpressed his frank view of the abrupt transformation of my office. What hewould not permit this office to consist of was yet to be settled: there was aqueer relief, at all events—I mean for myself in especial—in therenouncement of one pretension. If so much had sprung to the surface, I scarceput it too strongly in saying that what had perhaps sprung highest was theabsurdity 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 thanmyself he carried out the care for my dignity, I had had to appeal to him tolet me off straining to meet him on the ground of his true capacity. He had atany 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 haduttered, on the subject of the interval just concluded, neither challenge norhint. I had too much, from this moment, my other ideas. Yet when he at lastarrived, the difficulty of applying them, the accumulations of my problem, werebrought straight home to me by the beautiful little presence on which what hadoccurred 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 mealswith the boy should be served, as we called it, downstairs; so that I had beenawaiting him in the ponderous pomp of the room outside of the window of which Ihad had from Mrs. Grose, that first scared Sunday, my flash of something itwould scarce have done to call light. Here at present I felt afresh—for Ihad felt it again and again—how my equilibrium depended on the success ofmy rigid will, the will to shut my eyes as tight as possible to the truth thatwhat I had to deal with was, revoltingly, against nature. I could only get onat all by taking “nature” into my confidence and my account, bytreating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, andunpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn ofthe screw of ordinary human virtue. No attempt, nonetheless, could well requiremore tact than just this attempt to supply, one’s self, allthenature. How could I put even a little of that article into a suppression ofreference to what had occurred? How, on the other hand, could I make referencewithout a new plunge into the hideous obscure? Well, a sort of answer, after atime, 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 atlessons—still some other delicate way to ease me off. Wasn’t therelight in the fact which, as we shared our solitude, broke out with a speciousglitter it had never yet quite worn?—the fact that (opportunity aiding,precious opportunity which had now come) it would be preposterous, with a childso endowed, to forego the help one might wrest from absolute intelligence? Whathad his intelligence been given him for but to save him? Mightn’t one, toreach his mind, risk the stretch of an angular arm over his character? It wasas if, when we were face to face in the dining room, he had literally shown methe way. The roast mutton was on the table, and I had dispensed withattendance. Miles, before he sat down, stood a moment with his hands in hispockets and looked at the joint, on which he seemed on the point of passingsome humorous judgment. But what he presently produced was: “I say, mydear, 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 takeyour mutton.”

He alertly obeyed me, carried the plate carefully to his seat, and, when he wasestablished, went on. “Did Bly disagree with her so terriblysuddenly?”

“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 nottoo ill to travel: sheonly might have become so if she had stayed. This was just the moment to seize.The journey will dissipate the influence”—oh, I wasgrand!—“and carry it off.”

“I see, I see”—Miles, for that matter, was grand, too. Hesettled 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. Hewas 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 hefelt 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 againwith his hands in his little pockets and his back to me—stood and lookedout of the wide window through which, that other day, I had seen what pulled meup. We continued silent while the maid was with us—as silent, itwhimsically 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 whenthe waiter had left us. “Well—so we’re alone!”

XXIII

“Oh, more or less.” I fancy my smile was pale. “Notabsolutely. We shouldn’t like that!” I went on.

“No—I suppose we shouldn’t. Of course we have theothers.”

“We have the others—we have indeed the others,” I concurred.

“Yet even though we have them,” he returned, still with his handsin his pockets and planted there in front of me, “they don’t muchcount, do they?”

I made the best of it, but I felt wan. “It depends on what you call‘much’!”

“Yes”—with all accommodation—“everythingdepends!” On this, however, he faced to the window again and presentlyreached it with his vague, restless, cogitating step. He remained there awhile,with his forehead against the glass, in contemplation of the stupid shrubs Iknew and the dull things of November. I had always my hypocrisy of“work,” behind which, now, I gained the sofa. Steadying myself withit there as I had repeatedly done at those moments of torment that I havedescribed as the moments of my knowing the children to be given to somethingfrom which I was barred, I sufficiently obeyed my habit of being prepared forthe worst. But an extraordinary impression dropped on me as I extracted ameaning from the boy’s embarrassed back—none other than theimpression that I was not barred now. This inference grew in a few minutes tosharp intensity and seemed bound up with the direct perception that it waspositively hewho was. The frames and squares of the great window were a kindof 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 athrob of hope. Wasn’t he looking, through the haunted pane, for somethinghe couldn’t see?—and wasn’t it the first time in the wholebusiness that he had known such a lapse? The first, the very first: I found ita splendid portent. It made him anxious, though he watched himself; he had beenanxious all day and, even while in his usual sweet little manner he sat attable, had needed all his small strange genius to give it a gloss. When he atlast 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 gooddeal 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 andmiles 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—“Doyou?”—more discrimination than I had ever heard two wordscontain. Before I had time to deal with that, however, he continued as if withthe sense that this was an impertinence to be softened. “Nothing could bemore charming than the way you take it, for of course if we’re alonetogether now it’s you that are alone most. But I hope,” he threwin, “you don’t particularly mind!”

“Having to do with you?” I asked. “My dear child, how can Ihelp minding? Though I’ve renounced all claim to yourcompany—you’re so beyond me—I at least greatly enjoy it. Whatelse 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 justfor that?”

“Certainly. I stay on as your friend and from the tremendous interest Itake in you till something can be done for you that may be more worth yourwhile. That needn’t surprise you.” My voice trembled so that I feltit impossible to suppress the shake. “Don’t you remember how I toldyou, when I came and sat on your bed the night of the storm, that there wasnothing in the world I wouldn’t do for you?”

“Yes, yes!” He, on his side, more and more visibly nervous, had atone to master; but he was so much more successful than I that, laughing outthrough his gravity, he could pretend we were pleasantly jesting. “Onlythat, 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, youknow.”

“Ah, then, is thatwhat you’ve stayed over for?”

He spoke with a gaiety through which I could still catch the finest littlequiver of resentful passion; but I can’t begin to express the effect uponme of an implication of surrender even so faint. It was as if what I hadyearned for had come at last only to astonish me. “Well, yes—I mayas 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 theassumption 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 roundhim uneasily, and I had the rare—oh, the queer!—impression of thevery first symptom I had seen in him of the approach of immediate fear. It wasas if he were suddenly afraid of me—which struck me indeed as perhaps thebest thing to make him. Yet in the very pang of the effort I felt it vain totry sternness, and I heard myself the next instant so gentle as to be almostgrotesque. “You want so to go out again?”

“Awfully!” He smiled at me heroically, and the touching littlebravery of it was enhanced by his actually flushing with pain. He had picked uphis 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 anyway was an act of violence, for what did it consist ofbut the obtrusion of the idea of grossness and guilt on a small helplesscreature who had been for me a revelation of the possibilities of beautifulintercourse? Wasn’t it base to create for a being so exquisite a merealien awkwardness? I suppose I now read into our situation a clearness itcouldn’t have had at the time, for I seem to see our poor eyes alreadylighted with some spark of a prevision of the anguish that was to come. So wecircled 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 andunbruised. “I’ll tell you everything,” Milessaid—“I mean I’ll tell you anything you like. You’llstay on with me, and we shall both be all right, and I willtellyou—I will. But not now.”

“Why not now?”

My insistence turned him from me and kept him once more at his window in asilence during which, between us, you might have heard a pin drop. Then he wasbefore me again with the air of a person for whom, outside, someone who hadfrankly 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 proportionatelyashamed. But, horrible as it was, his lies made up my truth. I achievedthoughtfully a few loops of my knitting. “Well, then, go to Luke, andI’ll wait for what you promise. Only, in return for that, satisfy, beforeyou leave me, one very much smaller request.”

He looked as if he felt he had succeeded enough to be able still a little tobargain. “Very much smaller—?”

“Yes, a mere fraction of the whole. Tell me”—oh, my workpreoccupied me, and I was offhand!—“if, yesterday afternoon, fromthe 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 Ican describe only as a fierce split of my attention—a stroke that atfirst, as I sprang straight up, reduced me to the mere blind movement ofgetting hold of him, drawing him close, and, while I just fell for supportagainst the nearest piece of furniture, instinctively keeping him with his backto the window. The appearance was full upon us that I had already had to dealwith here: Peter Quint had come into view like a sentinel before a prison. Thenext thing I saw was that, from outside, he had reached the window, and then Iknew that, close to the glass and glaring in through it, he offered once moreto the room his white face of damnation. It represents but grossly what tookplace 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 recoveredher grasp of the act. It came to me in the very horror of the immediatepresence that the act would be, seeing and facing what I saw and faced, to keepthe boy himself unaware. The inspiration—I can call it by no othername—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 soappraised it I saw how the human soul—held out, in the tremor of myhands, at arm’s length—had a perfect dew of sweat on a lovelychildish forehead. The face that was close to mine was as white as the faceagainst the glass, and out of it presently came a sound, not low nor weak, butas 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 himto my breast, where I could feel in the sudden fever of his little body thetremendous pulse of his little heart, I kept my eyes on the thing at the windowand saw it move and shift its posture. I have likened it to a sentinel, but itsslow wheel, for a moment, was rather the prowl of a baffled beast. My presentquickened courage, however, was such that, not too much to let it through, Ihad to shade, as it were, my flame. Meanwhile the glare of the face was againat the window, the scoundrel fixed as if to watch and wait. It was the veryconfidence that I might now defy him, as well as the positive certitude, bythis 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 ofuneasiness. What was prodigious was that at last, by my success, his sense wassealed and his communication stopped: he knew that he was in presence, but knewnot of what, and knew still less that I also was and that I did know. And whatdid this strain of trouble matter when my eyes went back to the window only tosee that the air was clear again and—by my personal triumph—theinfluence quenched? There was nothing there. I felt that the cause was mine andthat I should surely get all. “And you foundnothing!”—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 withit?”

“I’ve burned it.”

“Burned it?” It was now or never. “Is that what you did atschool?”

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 offand that reached him only through the pressure of his anxiety. Yet it did reachhim. “Did I steal?”

I felt myself redden to the roots of my hair as well as wonder if it were morestrange to put to a gentleman such a question or to see him take it withallowances that gave the very distance of his fall in the world. “Was itfor that you mightn’t go back?”

The only thing he felt was rather a dreary little surprise. “Did you knowI mightn’t go back?”

“I know everything.”

He gave me at this the longest and strangest look. “Everything?”

“Everything. Therefore didyou—?” But I couldn’tsay 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 itwas for pure tenderness—shook him as if to ask him why, if it was all fornothing, he had condemned me to months of torment. “What then did youdo?”

He looked in vague pain all round the top of the room and drew his breath, twoor three times over, as if with difficulty. He might have been standing at thebottom 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 explainit as this little person! He appeared to weigh my question, but in a mannerquite detached and almost helpless. “Well, I suppose Ioughtn’t.”

“But to whom did you say them?”

He evidently tried to remember, but it dropped—he had lost it. “Idon’t know!”

He almost smiled at me in the desolation of his surrender, which was indeedpractically, by this time, so complete that I ought to have left it there. ButI was infatuated—I was blind with victory, though even then the veryeffect that was to have brought him so much nearer was already that of addedseparation. “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 darkerobscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity theappalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent. It was for the instantconfounding and bottomless, for if he wereinnocent, what then on earthwas I?Paralyzed, while it lasted, by the mere brush of the question, Ilet him go a little, so that, with a deep-drawn sigh, he turned away from meagain; which, as he faced toward the clear window, I suffered, feeling that Ihad nothing now there to keep him from. “And did they repeat what yousaid?” I went on after a moment.

He was soon at some distance from me, still breathing hard and again with theair, though now without anger for it, of being confined against his will. Oncemore, as he had done before, he looked up at the dim day as if, of what hadhitherto sustained him, nothing was left but an unspeakable anxiety. “Oh,yes,” he nevertheless replied—“they must have repeated them.To those theyliked,” 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 Ididn’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 toobad.”

“Too bad?”

“What I suppose I sometimes said. To write home.”

I can’t name the exquisite pathos of the contradiction given to such aspeech by such a speaker; I only know that the next instant I heard myselfthrow off with homely force: “Stuff and nonsense!” But the nextafter that I must have sounded stern enough. “What werethesethings?”

My sternness was all for his judge, his executioner; yet it made him averthimself again, and that movement made me, with a single bound and anirrepressible cry, spring straight upon him. For there again, against theglass, as if to blight his confession and stay his answer, was the hideousauthor of our woe—the white face of damnation. I felt a sick swim at thedrop of my victory and all the return of my battle, so that the wildness of myveritable leap only served as a great betrayal. I saw him, from the midst of myact, meet it with a divination, and on the perception that even now he onlyguessed, and that the window was still to his own eyes free, I let the impulseflame up to convert the climax of his dismay into the very proof of hisliberation. “No more, no more, no more!” I shrieked, as I tried topress him against me, to my visitant.

“Is she here?” Miles panted as he caught with his sealedeyes the direction of my words. Then as his strange “she” staggeredme and, with a gasp, I echoed it, “Miss Jessel, Miss Jessel!” hewith a sudden fury gave me back.

I seized, stupefied, his supposition—some sequel to what we had done toFlora, but this made me only want to show him that it was better still thanthat. “It’s not Miss Jessel! But it’s at thewindow—straight before us. It’s there—the cowardhorror, there for the last time!”

At this, after a second in which his head made the movement of a baffleddog’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 andmissing wholly, though it now, to my sense, filled the room like the taste ofpoison, the wide, overwhelming presence. “It’s he?”

I was so determined to have all my proof that I flashed into ice to challengehim. “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 tomy devotion. “What does he matter now, my own?—what will heevermatter? Ihave you,” I launched at the beast,“but he has lost you forever!” Then, for the demonstration of mywork, “There, there!” I said to Miles.

But he had already jerked straight round, stared, glared again, and seen butthe quiet day. With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he uttered the cryof a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp with which I recovered himmight have been that of catching him in his fall. I caught him, yes, I heldhim—it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute Ibegan to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day,and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.

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