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The Two Magics: The Turn of the Screw, Covering End

by Henry James · English · Gutenberg #42486 · 447,200 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Two Magics: The Turn of the Screw, Covering End

Author: Henry James


        
Release date: April 9, 2013 [eBook #42486]
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Language: English

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Produced by Jana Srna and the Online Distributed
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produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive/American Libraries.)






  [ Transcriber’s Notes:

    Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully
    as possible. Some corrections of spelling and punctuation have been
    made. They are listed at the end of the text.

    Italic text has been marked with _underscores_.
    Bold text has been marked with =equals signs=.
  ]




  THE TWO MAGICS

  THE TURN OF THE SCREW

  COVERING END

  BY
  HENRY JAMES

  AUTHOR OF “DAISY MILLER,” “THE EUROPEANS”
  ETC., ETC.

  New York
  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
  LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
  1898

  All rights reserved


  Copyright, 1898,
  By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

  Norwood Press
  J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith
  Norwood Mass. U.S.A.




THE TURN OF THE SCREW


The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but
except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas eve
in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no
comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case
he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child. The case,
I may mention, was that of an apparition in just such an old house as
had gathered us for the occasion--an appearance, of a dreadful kind,
to a little boy sleeping in the room with his mother and waking her up
in the terror of it; waking her not to dissipate his dread and soothe
him to sleep again, but to encounter also, herself, before she had
succeeded in doing so, the same sight that had shaken him. It was this
observation that drew from Douglas--not immediately, but later in the
evening--a reply that had the interesting consequence to which I call
attention. Someone else told a story not particularly effective, which
I saw he was not following. This I took for a sign that he had himself
something to produce and that we should only have to wait. We waited in
fact till two nights later; but that same evening, before we scattered,
he brought out what was in his mind.

“I quite agree--in regard to Griffin’s ghost, or whatever it
was--that its appearing first to the little boy, at so tender an age,
adds a particular touch. But it’s not the first occurrence of its
charming kind that I know to have involved a child. If the child
gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to _two_
children----?”

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

I can see Douglas there before the fire, to which he had got up to
present his back, looking down at his interlocutor with his hands
in his pockets. “Nobody but me, till now, has ever heard. It’s
quite too horrible.” This, naturally, was declared by several voices
to give the thing the utmost price, and our friend, with quiet art,
prepared his triumph by turning his eyes over the rest of us and going
on: “It’s beyond everything. Nothing at all that I know touches
it.”

“For sheer terror?” I remember asking.

He seemed to say it was not so simple as that; to be really at a loss
how to qualify it. He passed his hand over his eyes, made a little
wincing grimace. “For dreadful--dreadfulness!”

“Oh, how delicious!” cried one of the women.

He took no notice of her; he looked at me, but as if, instead of me,
he saw what he spoke of. “For general uncanny ugliness and horror and
pain.”

“Well then,” I said, “just sit right down and begin.”

He turned round to the fire, gave a kick to a log, watched it an
instant. Then as he faced us again: “I can’t begin. I shall have
to send to town.” There was a unanimous groan at this, and much
reproach; after which, in his preoccupied way, he explained. “The
story’s written. It’s in a locked drawer--it has not been out for
years. I could write to my man and enclose the key; he could send
down the packet as he finds it.” It was to me in particular that
he appeared to propound this--appeared almost to appeal for aid not
to hesitate. He had broken a thickness of ice, the formation of many
a winter; had had his reasons for a long silence. The others resented
postponement, but it was just his scruples that charmed me. I adjured
him to write by the first post and to agree with us for an early
hearing; then I asked him if the experience in question had been his
own. To this his answer was prompt. “Oh, thank God, no!”

“And is the record yours? You took the thing down?”

“Nothing but the impression. I took that _here_”--he tapped his
heart. “I’ve never lost it.”

“Then your manuscript----?”

“Is in old, faded ink, and in the most beautiful hand.” He hung
fire again. “A woman’s. She has been dead these twenty years. She
sent me the pages in question before she died.” They were all
listening now, and of course there was somebody to be arch, or at any
rate to draw the inference. But if he put the inference by without
a smile it was also without irritation. “She was a most charming
person, but she was ten years older than I. She was my sister’s
governess,” he quietly said. “She was the most agreeable woman
I’ve ever known in her position; she would have been worthy of any
whatever. It was long ago, and this episode was long before. I was at
Trinity, and I found her at home on my coming down the second summer. I
was much there that year--it was a beautiful one; and we had, in her
off-hours, some strolls and talks in the garden--talks in which she
struck me as awfully clever and nice. Oh yes; don’t grin: I liked
her extremely and am glad to this day to think she liked me too. If
she hadn’t she wouldn’t have told me. She had never told anyone. It
wasn’t simply that she said so, but that I knew she hadn’t. I was
sure; I could see. You’ll easily judge why when you hear.”

“Because the thing had been such a scare?”

He continued to fix me. “You’ll easily judge,” he repeated:
“_you_ will.”

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

He laughed for the first time. “You _are_ acute. Yes, she was in
love. That is, she had been. That came out--she couldn’t tell her
story without its coming out. I saw it, and she saw I saw it; but
neither of us spoke of it. I remember the time and the place--the
corner of the lawn, the shade of the great beeches and the long, hot
summer afternoon. It wasn’t a scene for a shudder; but oh----!” He
quitted the fire and dropped back into his chair.

“You’ll receive the packet Thursday morning?” I inquired.

“Probably not till the second post.”

“Well then; after dinner----”

“You’ll all meet me here?” He looked us round again. “Isn’t
anybody going?” It was almost the tone of hope.

“Everybody will stay!”

“_I_ will--and _I_ will!” cried the ladies whose departure had
been fixed. Mrs. Griffin, however, expressed the need for a little more
light. “Who was it she was in love with?”

“The story will tell,” I took upon myself to reply.

“Oh, I can’t wait for the story!”

“The story _won’t_ tell,” said Douglas; “not in any literal,
vulgar way.”

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

“Won’t _you_ tell, Douglas?” somebody else inquired.

He sprang to his feet again. “Yes--tomorrow. Now I must go to
bed. Good-night.” And quickly catching up a candlestick, he left us
slightly bewildered. From our end of the great brown hall we heard his
step on the stair; whereupon Mrs. Griffin spoke. “Well, if I don’t
know who she was in love with, I know who _he_ was.”

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

“_Raison de plus_--at that age! But it’s rather nice, his long
reticence.”

“Forty years!” Griffin put in.

“With this outbreak at last.”

“The outbreak,” I returned, “will make a tremendous occasion of
Thursday night;” and everyone so agreed with me that, in the light of
it, we lost all attention for everything else. The last story, however
incomplete and like the mere opening of a serial, had been told; we
handshook and “candlestuck,” as somebody said, and went to bed.

I knew the next day that a letter containing the key had, by the first
post, gone off to his London apartments; but in spite of--or perhaps
just on account of--the eventual diffusion of this knowledge we quite
let him alone till after dinner, till such an hour of the evening,
in fact, as might best accord with the kind of emotion on which our
hopes were fixed. Then he became as communicative as we could desire
and indeed gave us his best reason for being so. We had it from him
again before the fire in the hall, as we had had our mild wonders of
the previous night. It appeared that the narrative he had promised
to read us really required for a proper intelligence a few words of
prologue. Let me say here distinctly, to have done with it, that this
narrative, from an exact transcript of my own made much later, is what
I shall presently give. Poor Douglas, before his death--when it was in
sight--committed to me the manuscript that reached him on the third of
these days and that, on the same spot, with immense effect, he began
to read to our hushed little circle on the night of the fourth. The
departing ladies who had said they would stay didn’t, of course,
thank heaven, stay: they departed, in consequence of arrangements made,
in a rage of curiosity, as they professed, produced by the touches with
which he had already worked us up. But that only made his little final
auditory more compact and select, kept it, round the hearth, subject to
a common thrill.

The first of these touches conveyed that the written statement took
up the tale at a point after it had, in a manner, begun. The fact to
be in possession of was therefore that his old friend, the youngest of
several daughters of a poor country parson, had, at the age of twenty,
on taking service for the first time in the schoolroom, come up to
London, in trepidation, to answer in person an advertisement that had
already placed her in brief correspondence with the advertiser. This
person proved, on her presenting herself, for judgment, at a house
in Harley Street, that impressed her as vast and imposing--this
prospective patron proved a gentleman, a bachelor in the prime of life,
such a figure as had never risen, save in a dream or an old novel,
before a fluttered, anxious girl out of a Hampshire vicarage. One could
easily fix his type; it never, happily, dies out. He was handsome
and bold and pleasant, off-hand and gay and kind. He struck her,
inevitably, as gallant and splendid, but what took her most of all and
gave her the courage she afterwards showed was that he put the whole
thing to her as a kind of favour, an obligation he should gratefully
incur. She conceived him as rich, but as fearfully extravagant--saw him
all in a glow of high fashion, of good looks, of expensive habits, of
charming ways with women. He had for his own town residence a big house
filled with the spoils of travel and the trophies of the chase; but it
was to his country home, an old family place in Essex, that he wished
her immediately to proceed.

He had been left, by the death of their parents in India, guardian to
a small nephew and a small niece, children of a younger, a military
brother, whom he had lost two years before. These children were,
by the strangest of chances for a man in his position,--a lone man
without the right sort of experience or a grain of patience,--very
heavily on his hands. It had all been a great worry and, on his own
part doubtless, a series of blunders, but he immensely pitied the poor
chicks and had done all he could; had in particular sent them down to
his other house, the proper place for them being of course the country,
and kept them there, from the first, with the best people he could
find to look after them, parting even with his own servants to wait
on them and going down himself, whenever he might, to see how they
were doing. The awkward thing was that they had practically no other
relations and that his own affairs took up all his time. He had put
them in possession of Bly, which was healthy and secure, and had placed
at the head of their little establishment--but below stairs only--an
excellent woman, Mrs. Grose, whom he was sure his visitor would like
and who had formerly been maid to his mother. She was now housekeeper
and was also acting for the time as superintendent to the little girl,
of whom, without children of her own, she was, by good luck, extremely
fond. There were plenty of people to help, but of course the young
lady who should go down as governess would be in supreme authority. She
would also have, in holidays, to look after the small boy, who had been
for a term at school--young as he was to be sent, but what else could
be done?--and who, as the holidays were about to begin, would be back
from one day to the other. There had been for the two children at first
a young lady whom they had had the misfortune to lose. She had done
for them quite beautifully--she was a most respectable person--till
her death, the great awkwardness of which had, precisely, left no
alternative but the school for little Miles. Mrs. Grose, since then,
in the way of manners and things, had done as she could for Flora; and
there were, further, a cook, a housemaid, a dairywoman, an old pony,
an old groom, and an old gardener, all likewise thoroughly respectable.

So far had Douglas presented his picture when someone put a
question. “And what did the former governess die of?--of so much
respectability?”

Our friend’s answer was prompt. “That will come out. I don’t
anticipate.”

“Excuse me--I thought that was just what you _are_ doing.”

“In her successor’s place,” I suggested, “I should have wished
to learn if the office brought with it----”

“Necessary danger to life?” Douglas completed my thought. “She
did wish to learn, and she did learn. You shall hear tomorrow
what she learnt. Meanwhile, of course, the prospect struck her as
slightly grim. She was young, untried, nervous: it was a vision of
serious duties and little company, of really great loneliness. She
hesitated--took a couple of days to consult and consider. But the
salary offered much exceeded her modest measure, and on a second
interview she faced the music, she engaged.” And Douglas, with this,
made a pause that, for the benefit of the company, moved me to throw
in--

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

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

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

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

“Which was----?”

“That she should never trouble him--but never, never: neither appeal
nor complain nor write about anything; only meet all questions herself,
receive all moneys from his solicitor, take the whole thing over and
let him alone. She promised to do this, and she mentioned to me that
when, for a moment, disburdened, delighted, he held her hand, thanking
her for the sacrifice, she already felt rewarded.”

“But was that all her reward?” one of the ladies asked.

“She never saw him again.”

“Oh!” said the lady; which, as our friend immediately left us
again, was the only other word of importance contributed to the subject
till, the next night, by the corner of the hearth, in the best chair,
he opened the faded red cover of a thin old-fashioned gilt-edged
album. The whole thing took indeed more nights than one, but on the
first occasion the same lady put another question. “What is your
title?”

“I haven’t one.”

“Oh, _I_ have!” I said. But Douglas, without heeding me, had begun
to read with a fine clearness that was like a rendering to the ear of
the beauty of his author’s hand.


I

I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops,
a little see-saw of the right throbs and the wrong. After rising,
in town, to meet his appeal, I had at all events a couple of very
bad days--found myself doubtful again, felt indeed sure I had made
a mistake. In this state of mind I spent the long hours of bumping,
swinging coach that carried me to the stopping-place at which I was
to be met by a vehicle from the house. This convenience, I was told,
had been ordered, and I found, toward the close of the June afternoon,
a commodious fly in waiting for me. Driving at that hour, on a lovely
day, through a country to which the summer sweetness seemed to offer me
a friendly welcome, my fortitude mounted afresh and, as we turned into
the avenue, encountered a reprieve that was probably but a proof of the
point to which it had sunk. I suppose I had expected, or had dreaded,
something so melancholy that what greeted me was a good surprise. I
remember as a most pleasant impression the broad, clear front, its
open windows and fresh curtains and the pair of maids looking out;
I remember the lawn and the bright flowers and the crunch of my wheels
on the gravel and the clustered treetops over which the rooks circled
and cawed in the golden sky. The scene had a greatness that made it a
different affair from my own scant home, and there immediately appeared
at the door, with a little girl in her hand, a civil person who dropped
me as decent a curtsey as if I had been the mistress or a distinguished
visitor. I had received in Harley Street a narrower notion of the
place, and that, as I recalled it, made me think the proprietor still
more of a gentleman, suggested that what I was to enjoy might be
something beyond his promise.

I had no drop again till the next day, for I was carried triumphantly
through the following hours by my introduction to the younger of my
pupils. The little girl who accompanied Mrs. Grose appeared to me on
the spot a creature so charming as to make it a great fortune to have
to do with her. She was the most beautiful child I had ever seen,
and I afterwards wondered that my employer had not told me more of
her. I slept little that night--I was too much excited; and this
astonished me too, I recollect, remained with me, adding to my sense
of the liberality with which I was treated. The large, impressive room,
one of the best in the house, the great state bed, as I almost felt it,
the full, figured draperies, the long glasses in which, for the first
time, I could see myself from head to foot, all struck me--like the
extraordinary charm of my small charge--as so many things thrown in. It
was thrown in as well, from the first moment, that I should get on with
Mrs. Grose in a relation over which, on my way, in the coach, I fear
I had rather brooded. The only thing indeed that in this early outlook
might have made me shrink again was the clear circumstance of her being
so glad to see me. I perceived within half an hour that she was so
glad--stout, simple, plain, clean, wholesome woman--as to be positively
on her guard against showing it too much. I wondered even then a little
why she should wish not to show it, and that, with reflection, with
suspicion, might of course have made me uneasy.

But it was a comfort that there could be no uneasiness in a connection
with anything so beatific as the radiant image of my little girl,
the vision of whose angelic beauty had probably more than anything
else to do with the restlessness that, before morning, made me several
times rise and wander about my room to take in the whole picture and
prospect; to watch, from my open window, the faint summer dawn, to look
at such portions of the rest of the house as I could catch, and to
listen, while, in the fading dusk, the first birds began to twitter,
for the possible recurrence of a sound or two, less natural and not
without, but within, that I had fancied I heard. There had been a
moment when I believed I recognised, faint and far, the cry of a child;
there had been another when I found myself just consciously starting as
at the passage, before my door, of a light footstep. But these fancies
were not marked enough not to be thrown off, and it is only in the
light, or the gloom, I should rather say, of other and subsequent
matters that they now come back to me. To watch, teach, “form”
little Flora would too evidently be the making of a happy and useful
life. It had been agreed between us downstairs that after this first
occasion I should have her as a matter of course at night, her small
white bed being already arranged, to that end, in my room. What I had
undertaken was the whole care of her, and she had remained, just this
last time, with Mrs. Grose only as an effect of our consideration for
my inevitable strangeness and her natural timidity. In spite of this
timidity--which the child herself, in the oddest way in the world,
had been perfectly frank and brave about, allowing it, without a sign
of uncomfortable consciousness, with the deep, sweet serenity indeed
of one of Raphael’s holy infants, to be discussed, to be imputed to
her and to determine us--I felt quite sure she would presently like
me. It was part of what I already liked Mrs. Grose herself for, the
pleasure I could see her feel in my admiration and wonder as I sat at
supper with four tall candles and with my pupil, in a high chair and a
bib, brightly facing me, between them, over bread and milk. There were
naturally things that in Flora’s presence could pass between us only
as prodigious and gratified looks, obscure and roundabout allusions.

“And the little boy--does he look like her? Is he too so very
remarkable?”

One wouldn’t flatter a child. “Oh, Miss, _most_ remarkable. If you
think well of this one!”--and she stood there with a plate in her
hand, beaming at our companion, who looked from one of us to the other
with placid heavenly eyes that contained nothing to check us.

“Yes; if I do----?”

“You _will_ be carried away by the little gentleman!”

“Well, that, I think, is what I came for--to be carried away. I’m
afraid, however,” I remember feeling the impulse to add, “I’m
rather easily carried away. I was carried away in London!”

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

“In Harley Street.”

“Well, Miss, you’re not the first--and you won’t be the last.”

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

“Not tomorrow--Friday, Miss. He arrives, as you did, by the coach,
under care of the guard, and is to be met by the same carriage.”

I forthwith expressed that the proper as well as the pleasant and
friendly thing would be therefore that on the arrival of the public
conveyance I should be in waiting for him with his little sister; an
idea in which Mrs. Grose concurred so heartily that I somehow took
her manner as a kind of comforting pledge--never falsified, thank
heaven!--that we should on every question be quite at one. Oh, she was
glad I was there!

What I felt the next day was, I suppose, nothing that could be fairly
called a reaction from the cheer of my arrival; it was probably at
the most only a slight oppression produced by a fuller measure of
the scale, as I walked round them, gazed up at them, took them in,
of my new circumstances. They had, as it were, an extent and mass for
which I had not been prepared and in the presence of which I found
myself, freshly, a little scared as well as a little proud. Lessons,
in this agitation, certainly suffered some delay; I reflected that
my first duty was, by the gentlest arts I could contrive, to win the
child into the sense of knowing me. I spent the day with her out of
doors; I arranged with her, to her great satisfaction, that it should
be she, she only, who might show me the place. She showed it step by
step and room by room and secret by secret, with droll, delightful,
childish talk about it and with the result, in half an hour, of our
becoming immense friends. Young as she was, I was struck, throughout
our little tour, with her confidence and courage with the way, in
empty chambers and dull corridors, on crooked staircases that made
me pause and even on the summit of an old machicolated square tower
that made me dizzy, her morning music, her disposition to tell me so
many more things than she asked, rang out and led me on. I have not
seen Bly since the day I left it, and I dare say that to my older and
more informed eyes it would now appear sufficiently contracted. But as
my little conductress, with her hair of gold and her frock of blue,
danced before me round corners and pattered down passages, I had the
view of a castle of romance inhabited by a rosy sprite, such a place as
would somehow, for diversion of the young idea, take all colour out of
storybooks and fairy-tales. Wasn’t it just a storybook over which
I had fallen a-doze and a-dream? No; it was a big, ugly, antique,
but convenient house, embodying a few features of a building still
older, half replaced and half utilised, in which I had the fancy of
our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers in a great drifting
ship. Well, I was, strangely, at the helm!


II

This came home to me when, two days later, I drove over with Flora
to meet, as Mrs. Grose said, the little gentleman; and all the
more for an incident that, presenting itself the second evening,
had deeply disconcerted me. The first day had been, on the whole,
as I have expressed, reassuring; but I was to see it wind up in keen
apprehension. The postbag, that evening,--it came late,--contained a
letter for me, which, however, in the hand of my employer, I found
to be composed but of a few words enclosing another, addressed to
himself, with a seal still unbroken. “This, I recognise, is from the
head-master, and the head-master’s an awful bore. Read him, please;
deal with him; but mind you don’t report. Not a word. I’m off!”
I broke the seal with a great effort--so great a one that I was a long
time coming to it; took the unopened missive at last up to my room
and only attacked it just before going to bed. I had better have let
it wait till morning, for it gave me a second sleepless night. With no
counsel to take, the next day, I was full of distress; and it finally
got so the better of me that I determined to open myself at least to
Mrs. Grose.

“What does it mean? The child’s dismissed his school.”

She gave me a look that I remarked at the moment; then, visibly, with
a quick blankness, seemed to try to take it back. “But aren’t they
all----?”

“Sent home--yes. But only for the holidays. Miles may never go back
at all.”

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

“They absolutely decline.”

At this she raised her eyes, which she had turned from me; I saw them
fill with good tears. “What has he done?”

I hesitated; then I judged best simply to hand her my letter--which,
however, had the effect of making her, without taking it, simply put
her hands behind her. She shook her head sadly. “Such things are not
for me, Miss.”

My counsellor couldn’t read! I winced at my mistake, which I
attenuated as I could, and opened my letter again to repeat it to her;
then, faltering in the act and folding it up once more, I put it back
in my pocket. “Is he really _bad_?”

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

“They go into no particulars. They simply express their regret that
it should be impossible to keep him. That can have only one meaning.”
Mrs. Grose listened with dumb emotion; she forbore to ask me what
this meaning might be; so that, presently, to put the thing with some
coherence and with the mere aid of her presence to my own mind, I went
on: “That he’s an injury to the others.”

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

There was such a flood of good faith in it that, though I had not yet
seen the child, my very fears made me jump to the absurdity of the
idea. I found myself, to meet my friend the better, offering it, on the
spot, sarcastically. “To his poor little innocent mates!”

“It’s too dreadful,” cried Mrs. Grose, “to say such cruel
things! Why, he’s scarce ten years old.”

“Yes, yes; it would be incredible.”

She was evidently grateful for such a profession. “See him, Miss,
first. _Then_ believe it!” I felt forthwith a new impatience to
see him; it was the beginning of a curiosity that, for all the next
hours, was to deepen almost to pain. Mrs. Grose was aware, I could
judge, of what she had produced in me, and she followed it up with
assurance. “You might as well believe it of the little lady. Bless
her,” she added the next moment--“_look_ at her!”

I turned and saw that Flora, whom, ten minutes before, I had
established in the schoolroom with a sheet of white paper, a pencil,
and a copy of nice “round O’s,” now presented herself to view
at the open door. She expressed in her little way an extraordinary
detachment from disagreeable duties, looking to me, however, with a
great childish light that seemed to offer it as a mere result of the
affection she had conceived for my person, which had rendered necessary
that she should follow me. I needed nothing more than this to feel the
full force of Mrs. Grose’s comparison, and, catching my pupil in my
arms, covered her with kisses in which there was a sob of atonement.

None the less, the rest of the day, I watched for further occasion
to approach my colleague, especially as, toward evening, I began to
fancy she rather sought to avoid me. I overtook her, I remember, on
the staircase; we went down together, and at the bottom I detained her,
holding her there with a hand on her arm. “I take what you said to me
at noon as a declaration that _you’ve_ never known him to be bad.”

She threw back her head; she had clearly, by this time, and very
honestly, adopted an attitude. “Oh, never known him--I don’t
pretend _that_!”

I was upset again. “Then you _have_ known him----?”

“Yes indeed, Miss, thank God!”

On reflection I accepted this. “You mean that a boy who never
is----?”

“Is no boy for _me_!”

I held her tighter. “You like them with the spirit to be naughty?”
Then, keeping pace with her answer, “So do I!” I eagerly brought
out. “But not to the degree to contaminate----”

“To contaminate?”--my big word left her at a loss. I explained
it. “To corrupt.”

She stared, taking my meaning in; but it produced in her an odd
laugh. “Are you afraid he’ll corrupt _you_?” She put the
question with such a fine bold humour that, with a laugh, a little
silly doubtless, to match her own, I gave way for the time to the
apprehension of ridicule.

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

“The last governess? She was also young and pretty--almost as young
and almost as pretty, Miss, even as you.”

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

“Oh, he _did_,” Mrs. Grose assented: “it was the way he liked
everyone!” She had no sooner spoken indeed than she caught herself
up. “I mean that’s _his_ way--the master’s.”

I was struck. “But of whom did you speak first?”

She looked blank, but she coloured. “Why, of _him_.”

“Of the master?”

“Of who else?”

There was so obviously no one else that the next moment I had lost my
impression of her having accidentally said more than she meant; and I
merely asked what I wanted to know. “Did _she_ see anything in the
boy----?”

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

I had a scruple, but I overcame it. “Was she careful--particular?”

Mrs. Grose appeared to try to be conscientious. “About some
things--yes.”

“But not about all?”

Again she considered. “Well, Miss--she’s gone. I won’t tell
tales.”

“I quite understand your feeling,” I hastened to reply; but I
thought it, after an instant, not opposed to this concession to pursue:
“Did she die here?”

“No--she went off.”

I don’t know what there was in this brevity of Mrs. Grose’s that
struck me as ambiguous. “Went off to die?” Mrs. Grose looked
straight out of the window, but I felt that, hypothetically, I had
a right to know what young persons engaged for Bly were expected to
do. “She was taken ill, you mean, and went home?”

“She was not taken ill, so far as appeared, in this house. She
left it, at the end of the year, to go home, as she said, for a short
holiday, to which the time she had put in had certainly given her a
right. We had then a young woman--a nursemaid who had stayed on and
who was a good girl and clever; and _she_ took the children altogether
for the interval. But our young lady never came back, and at the
very moment I was expecting her I heard from the master that she was
dead.”

I turned this over. “But of what?”

“He never told me! But please, Miss,” said Mrs. Grose, “I must
get to my work.”


III

Her thus turning her back on me was fortunately not, for my just
preoccupations, a snub that could check the growth of our mutual
esteem. We met, after I had brought home little Miles, more intimately
than ever on the ground of my stupefaction, my general emotion: so
monstrous was I then ready to pronounce it that such a child as had
now been revealed to me should be under an interdict. I was a little
late on the scene, and I felt, as he stood wistfully looking out for me
before the door of the inn at which the coach had put him down, that I
had seen him, on the instant, without and within, in the great glow of
freshness, the same positive fragrance of purity, in which I had, from
the first moment, seen his little sister. He was incredibly beautiful,
and Mrs. Grose had put her finger on it: everything but a sort of
passion of tenderness for him was swept away by his presence. What
I then and there took him to my heart for was something divine that
I have never found to the same degree in any child--his indescribable
little air of knowing nothing in the world but love. It would have been
impossible to carry a bad name with a greater sweetness of innocence,
and by the time I had got back to Bly with him I remained merely
bewildered--so far, that is, as I was not outraged--by the sense of the
horrible letter locked up in my room, in a drawer. As soon as I could
compass a private word with Mrs. Grose I declared to her that it was
grotesque.

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

“It doesn’t live an instant. My dear woman, _look_ at him!”

She smiled at my pretension to have discovered his charm. “I
assure you, Miss, I do nothing else! What will you say, then?” she
immediately added.

“In answer to the letter?” I had made up my mind. “Nothing.”

“And to his uncle?”

I was incisive. “Nothing.”

“And to the boy himself?”

I was wonderful. “Nothing.”

She gave with her apron a great wipe to her mouth. “Then I’ll stand
by you. We’ll see it out.”

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

She held me there a moment, then whisked up her apron again with her
detached hand. “Would you mind, Miss, if I used the freedom----”

“To kiss me? No!” I took the good creature in my arms and, after we
had embraced like sisters, felt still more fortified and indignant.

This, at all events, was for the time: a time so full that, as I
recall the way it went, it reminds me of all the art I now need to
make it a little distinct. What I look back at with amazement is the
situation I accepted. I had undertaken, with my companion, to see it
out, and I was under a charm, apparently, that could smooth away the
extent and the far and difficult connections of such an effort. I
was lifted aloft on a great wave of infatuation and pity. I found
it simple, in my ignorance, my confusion, and perhaps my conceit,
to assume that I could deal with a boy whose education for the world
was all on the point of beginning. I am unable even to remember at
this day what proposal I framed for the end of his holidays and the
resumption of his studies. Lessons with me, indeed, that charming
summer, we all had a theory that he was to have; but I now feel
that, for weeks, the lessons must have been rather my own. I learnt
something--at first certainly--that had not been one of the teachings
of my small, smothered life; learnt to be amused, and even amusing,
and not to think for the morrow. It was the first time, in a manner,
that I had known space and air and freedom, all the music of summer
and all the mystery of nature. And then there was consideration--and
consideration was sweet. Oh, it was a trap--not designed, but deep--to
my imagination, to my delicacy, perhaps to my vanity; to whatever,
in me, was most excitable. The best way to picture it all is to say
that I was off my guard. They gave me so little trouble--they were of
a gentleness so extraordinary. I used to speculate--but even this with
a dim disconnectedness--as to how the rough future (for all futures are
rough!) would handle them and might bruise them. They had the bloom of
health and happiness; and yet, as if I had been in charge of a pair
of little grandees, of princes of the blood, for whom everything,
to be right, would have to be enclosed and protected, the only form
that, in my fancy, the after-years could take for them was that of a
romantic, a really royal extension of the garden and the park. It may
be, of course, above all, that what suddenly broke into this gives
the previous time a charm of stillness--that hush in which something
gathers or crouches. The change was actually like the spring of a
beast.

In the first weeks the days were long; they often, at their finest,
gave me what I used to call my own hour, the hour when, for my pupils,
tea-time and bed-time having come and gone, I had, before my final
retirement, a small interval alone. Much as I liked my companions,
this hour was the thing in the day I liked most; and I liked it best
of all when, as the light faded--or rather, I should say, the day
lingered and the last calls of the last birds sounded, in a flushed
sky, from the old trees--I could take a turn into the grounds and
enjoy, almost with a sense of property that amused and flattered me,
the beauty and dignity of the place. It was a pleasure at these moments
to feel myself tranquil and justified; doubtless, perhaps, also to
reflect that by my discretion, my quiet good sense and general high
propriety, I was giving pleasure--if he ever thought of it!--to the
person to whose pressure I had responded. What I was doing was what he
had earnestly hoped and directly asked of me, and that I _could_, after
all, do it proved even a greater joy than I had expected. I dare say
I fancied myself, in short, a remarkable young woman and took comfort
in the faith that this would more publicly appear. Well, I needed to
be remarkable to offer a front to the remarkable things that presently
gave their first sign.

It was plump, one afternoon, in the middle of my very hour: the
children were tucked away and I had come out for my stroll. One of the
thoughts that, as I don’t in the least shrink now from noting, used
to be with me in these wanderings was that it would be as charming
as a charming story suddenly to meet someone. Someone would appear
there at the turn of a path and would stand before me and smile and
approve. I didn’t ask more than that--I only asked that he should
_know_; and the only way to be sure he knew would be to see it, and
the kind light of it, in his handsome face. That was exactly present
to me--by which I mean the face was--when, on the first of these
occasions, at the end of a long June day, I stopped short on emerging
from one of the plantations and coming into view of the house. What
arrested me on the spot--and with a shock much greater than any vision
had allowed for--was the sense that my imagination had, in a flash,
turned real. He did stand there!--but high up, beyond the lawn and at
the very top of the tower to which, on that first morning, little Flora
had conducted me. This tower was one of a pair--square, incongruous,
crenelated structures--that were distinguished, for some reason, though
I could see little difference, as the new and the old. They flanked
opposite ends of the house and were probably architectural absurdities,
redeemed in a measure indeed by not being wholly disengaged nor of a
height too pretentious, dating, in their gingerbread antiquity, from a
romantic revival that was already a respectable past. I admired them,
had fancies about them, for we could all profit in a degree, especially
when they loomed through the dusk, by the grandeur of their actual
battlements; yet it was not at such an elevation that the figure I had
so often invoked seemed most in place.

It produced in me, this figure, in the clear twilight, I remember, two
distinct gasps of emotion, which were, sharply, the shock of my first
and that of my second surprise. My second was a violent perception of
the mistake of my first: the man who met my eyes was not the person
I had precipitately supposed. There came to me thus a bewilderment
of vision of which, after these years, there is no living view that
I can hope to give. An unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted
object of fear to a young woman privately bred; and the figure that
faced me was--a few more seconds assured me--as little anyone else I
knew as it was the image that had been in my mind. I had not seen it
in Harley Street--I had not seen it anywhere. The place, moreover, in
the strangest way in the world, had, on the instant, and by the very
fact of its appearance, become a solitude. To me at least, making my
statement here with a deliberation with which I have never made it,
the whole feeling of the moment returns. It was as if, while I took
in--what I did take in--all the rest of the scene had been stricken
with death. I can hear again, as I write, the intense hush in which the
sounds of evening dropped. The rooks stopped cawing in the golden sky
and the friendly hour lost, for the minute, all its voice. But there
was no other change in nature, unless indeed it were a change that
I saw with a stranger sharpness. The gold was still in the sky, the
clearness in the air, and the man who looked at me over the battlements
was as definite as a picture in a frame. That’s how I thought,
with extraordinary quickness, of each person that he might have been
and that he was not. We were confronted across our distance quite long
enough for me to ask myself with intensity who then he was and to feel,
as an effect of my inability to say, a wonder that in a few instants
more became intense.

The great question, or one of these, is, afterwards, I know,
with regard to certain matters, the question of how long they
have lasted. Well, this matter of mine, think what you will of it,
lasted while I caught at a dozen possibilities, none of which made
a difference for the better, that I could see, in there having been
in the house--and for how long, above all?--a person of whom I was in
ignorance. It lasted while I just bridled a little with the sense that
my office demanded that there should be no such ignorance and no such
person. It lasted while this visitant, at all events,--and there was a
touch of the strange freedom, as I remember, in the sign of familiarity
of his wearing no hat,--seemed to fix me, from his position, with just
the question, just the scrutiny through the fading light, that his own
presence provoked. We were too far apart to call to each other, but
there was a moment at which, at shorter range, some challenge between
us, breaking the hush, would have been the right result of our straight
mutual stare. He was in one of the angles, the one away from the house,
very erect, as it struck me, and with both hands on the ledge. So
I saw him as I see the letters I form on this page; then, exactly,
after a minute, as if to add to the spectacle, he slowly changed
his place--passed, looking at me hard all the while, to the opposite
corner of the platform. Yes, I had the sharpest sense that during this
transit he never took his eyes from me, and I can see at this moment
the way his hand, as he went, passed from one of the crenelations to
the next. He stopped at the other corner, but less long, and even as
he turned away still markedly fixed me. He turned away; that was all
I knew.


IV

It was not that I didn’t wait, on this occasion, for more, for I was
rooted as deeply as I was shaken. Was there a “secret” at Bly--a
mystery of Udolpho or an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in
unsuspected confinement? I can’t say how long I turned it over,
or how long, in a confusion of curiosity and dread, I remained where
I had had my collision; I only recall that when I re-entered the house
darkness had quite closed in. Agitation, in the interval, certainly had
held me and driven me, for I must, in circling about the place, have
walked three miles; but I was to be, later on, so much more overwhelmed
that this mere dawn of alarm was a comparatively human chill. The
most singular part of it in fact--singular as the rest had been--was
the part I became, in the hall, aware of in meeting Mrs. Grose. This
picture comes back to me in the general train--the impression, as I
received it on my return, of the wide white panelled space, bright in
the lamplight and with its portraits and red carpet, and of the good
surprised look of my friend, which immediately told me she had missed
me. It came to me straightway, under her contact, that, with plain
heartiness, mere relieved anxiety at my appearance, she knew nothing
whatever that could bear upon the incident I had there ready for her. I
had not suspected in advance that her comfortable face would pull me
up, and I somehow measured the importance of what I had seen by my thus
finding myself hesitate to mention it. Scarce anything in the whole
history seems to me so odd as this fact that my real beginning of fear
was one, as I may say, with the instinct of sparing my companion. On
the spot, accordingly, in the pleasant hall and with her eyes on me,
I, for a reason that I couldn’t then have phrased, achieved an inward
revolution--offered a vague pretext for my lateness and, with the plea
of the beauty of the night and of the heavy dew and wet feet, went as
soon as possible to my room.

Here it was another affair; here, for many days after, it was a queer
affair enough. There were hours, from day to day,--or at least there
were moments, snatched even from clear duties,--when I had to shut
myself up to think. It was not so much yet that I was more nervous than
I could bear to be as that I was remarkably afraid of becoming so; for
the truth I had now to turn over was, simply and clearly, the truth
that I could arrive at no account whatever of the visitor with whom
I had been so inexplicably and yet, as it seemed to me, so intimately
concerned. It took little time to see that I could sound without forms
of inquiry and without exciting remark any domestic complication. The
shock I had suffered must have sharpened all my senses; I felt sure, at
the end of three days and as the result of mere closer attention, that
I had not been practised upon by the servants nor made the object of
any “game.” Of whatever it was that I knew nothing was known around
me. There was but one sane inference: someone had taken a liberty
rather gross. That was what, repeatedly, I dipped into my room and
locked the door to say to myself. We had been, collectively, subject to
an intrusion; some unscrupulous traveller, curious in old houses, had
made his way in unobserved, enjoyed the prospect from the best point of
view, and then stolen out as he came. If he had given me such a bold
hard stare, that was but a part of his indiscretion. The good thing,
after all, was that we should surely see no more of him.

This was not so good a thing, I admit, as not to leave me to judge
that what, essentially, made nothing else much signify was simply my
charming work. My charming work was just my life with Miles and Flora,
and through nothing could I so like it as through feeling that I could
throw myself into it in trouble. The attraction of my small charges
was a constant joy, leading me to wonder afresh at the vanity of my
original fears, the distaste I had begun by entertaining for the
probable grey prose of my office. There was to be no grey prose,
it appeared, and no long grind; so how could work not be charming
that presented itself as daily beauty? It was all the romance of the
nursery and the poetry of the schoolroom. I don’t mean by this, of
course, that we studied only fiction and verse; I mean I can express
no otherwise the sort of interest my companions inspired. How can
I describe that except by saying that instead of growing used to
them--and it’s a marvel for a governess: I call the sisterhood to
witness!--I made constant fresh discoveries. There was one direction,
assuredly, in which these discoveries stopped: deep obscurity continued
to cover the region of the boy’s conduct at school. It had been
promptly given me, I have noted, to face that mystery without a
pang. Perhaps even it would be nearer the truth to say that--without
a word--he himself had cleared it up. He had made the whole charge
absurd. My conclusion bloomed there with the real rose-flush of his
innocence: he was only too fine and fair for the little horrid, unclean
school-world, and he had paid a price for it. I reflected acutely that
the sense of such differences, such superiorities of quality, always,
on the part of the majority--which could include even stupid, sordid
head-masters--turns infallibly to the vindictive.

Both the children had a gentleness (it was their only fault, and
it never made Miles a muff) that kept them--how shall I express
it?--almost impersonal and certainly quite unpunishable. They were like
the cherubs of the anecdote, who had--morally, at any rate--nothing to
whack! I remember feeling with Miles in especial as if he had had, as
it were, no history. We expect of a small child a scant one, but there
was in this beautiful little boy something extraordinarily sensitive,
yet extraordinarily happy, that, more than in any creature of his age
I have seen, struck me as beginning anew each day. He had never for a
second suffered. I took this as a direct disproof of his having really
been chastised. If he had been wicked he would have “caught” it,
and I should have caught it by the rebound--I should have found the
trace. I found nothing at all, and he was therefore an angel. He never
spoke of his school, never mentioned a comrade or a master; and I, for
my part, was quite too much disgusted to allude to them. Of course I
was under the spell, and the wonderful part is that, even at the time,
I perfectly knew I was. But I gave myself up to it; it was an antidote
to any pain, and I had more pains than one. I was in receipt in these
days of disturbing letters from home, where things were not going
well. But with my children, what things in the world mattered? That was
the question I used to put to my scrappy retirements. I was dazzled by
their loveliness.

There was a Sunday--to get on--when it rained with such force and
for so many hours that there could be no procession to church;
in consequence of which, as the day declined, I had arranged with
Mrs. Grose that, should the evening show improvement, we would attend
together the late service. The rain happily stopped, and I prepared
for our walk, which, through the park and by the good road to the
village, would be a matter of twenty minutes. Coming downstairs to
meet my colleague in the hall, I remembered a pair of gloves that had
required three stitches and that had received them--with a publicity
perhaps not edifying--while I sat with the children at their tea,
served on Sundays, by exception, in that cold, clean temple of mahogany
and brass, the “grown-up” dining-room. The gloves had been dropped
there, and I turned in to recover them. The day was grey enough, but
the afternoon light still lingered, and it enabled me, on crossing
the threshold, not only to recognise, on a chair near the wide window,
then closed, the articles I wanted, but to become aware of a person on
the other side of the window and looking straight in. One step into the
room had sufficed; my vision was instantaneous; it was all there. The
person looking straight in was the person who had already appeared to
me. He appeared thus again with I won’t say greater distinctness,
for that was impossible, but with a nearness that represented a forward
stride in our intercourse and made me, as I met him, catch my breath
and turn cold. He was the same--he was the same, and seen, this time,
as he had been seen before, from the waist up, the window, though the
dining-room was on the ground-floor, not going down to the terrace
on which he stood. His face was close to the glass, yet the effect of
this better view was, strangely, only to show me how intense the former
had been. He remained but a few seconds--long enough to convince me
he also saw and recognised; but it was as if I had been looking at him
for years and had known him always. Something, however, happened this
time that had not happened before; his stare into my face, through
the glass and across the room, was as deep and hard as then, but it
quitted me for a moment during which I could still watch it, see it
fix successively several other things. On the spot there came to me the
added shock of a certitude that it was not for me he had come there. He
had come for someone else.

The flash of this knowledge--for it was knowledge in the midst of
dread--produced in me the most extraordinary effect, started, as I
stood there, a sudden vibration of duty and courage. I say courage
because I was beyond all doubt already far gone. I bounded straight
out of the door again, reached that of the house, got, in an instant,
upon the drive, and, passing along the terrace as fast as I could rush,
turned a corner and came full in sight. But it was in sight of nothing
now--my visitor had vanished. I stopped, I almost dropped, with the
real relief of this; but I took in the whole scene--I gave him time
to reappear. I call it time, but how long was it? I can’t speak
to the purpose today of the duration of these things. That kind of
measure must have left me: they couldn’t have lasted as they actually
appeared to me to last. The terrace and the whole place, the lawn and
the garden beyond it, all I could see of the park, were empty with a
great emptiness. There were shrubberies and big trees, but I remember
the clear assurance I felt that none of them concealed him. He was
there or was not there: not there if I didn’t see him. I got hold of
this; then, instinctively, instead of returning as I had come, went
to the window. It was confusedly present to me that I ought to place
myself where he had stood. I did so; I applied my face to the pane
and looked, as he had looked, into the room. As if, at this moment, to
show me exactly what his range had been, Mrs. Grose, as I had done for
himself just before, came in from the hall. With this I had the full
image of a repetition of what had already occurred. She saw me as I
had seen my own visitant; she pulled up short as I had done; I gave her
something of the shock that I had received. She turned white, and this
made me ask myself if I had blanched as much. She stared, in short,
and retreated on just _my_ lines, and I knew she had then passed out
and come round to me and that I should presently meet her. I remained
where I was, and while I waited I thought of more things than one. But
there’s only one I take space to mention. I wondered why _she_ should
be scared.


V

Oh, she let me know as soon as, round the corner of the house,
she loomed again into view. “What in the name of goodness is the
matter----?” She was now flushed and out of breath.

I said nothing till she came quite near. “With me?” I must have
made a wonderful face. “Do I show it?”

“You’re as white as a sheet. You look awful.”

I considered; I could meet on this, without scruple, any innocence. My
need to respect the bloom of Mrs. Grose’s had dropped, without a
rustle, from my shoulders, and if I wavered for the instant it was not
with what I kept back. I put out my hand to her and she took it; I held
her hard a little, liking to feel her close to me. There was a kind
of support in the shy heave of her surprise. “You came for me for
church, of course, but I can’t go.”

“Has anything happened?”

“Yes. You must know now. Did I look very queer?”

“Through this window? Dreadful!”

“Well,” I said, “I’ve been frightened.” Mrs. Grose’s eyes
expressed plainly that _she_ had no wish to be, yet also that she
knew too well her place not to be ready to share with me any marked
inconvenience. Oh, it was quite settled that she _must_ share! “Just
what you saw from the dining-room a minute ago was the effect of
that. What _I_ saw--just before--was much worse.”

Her hand tightened. “What was it?”

“An extraordinary man. Looking in.”

“What extraordinary man?”

“I haven’t the least idea.”

Mrs. Grose gazed round us in vain. “Then where is he gone?”

“I know still less.”

“Have you seen him before?”

“Yes--once. On the old tower.”

She could only look at me harder. “Do you mean he’s a stranger?”

“Oh, very much!”

“Yet you didn’t tell me?”

“No--for reasons. But now that you’ve guessed----”

Mrs. Grose’s round eyes encountered this charge. “Ah, I haven’t
guessed!” she said very simply. “How can I if _you_ don’t
imagine?”

“I don’t in the very least.”

“You’ve seen him nowhere but on the tower?”

“And on this spot just now.”

Mrs. Grose looked round again. “What was he doing on the tower?”

“Only standing there and looking down at me.”

She thought a minute. “Was he a gentleman?”

I found I had no need to think. “No.” She gazed in deeper
wonder. “No.”

“Then nobody about the place? Nobody from the village?”

“Nobody--nobody. I didn’t tell you, but I made sure.”

She breathed a vague relief: this was, oddly, so much to the good. It
only went indeed a little way. “But if he isn’t a gentleman----”

“What _is_ he? He’s a horror.”

“A horror?”

“He’s--God help me if I know _what_ he is!”

Mrs. Grose looked round once more; she fixed her eyes on the duskier
distance, then, pulling herself together, turned to me with abrupt
inconsequence. “It’s time we should be at church.”

“Oh, I’m not fit for church!”

“Won’t it do you good?”

“It won’t do _them_----!” I nodded at the house.

“The children?”

“I can’t leave them now.”

“You’re afraid----?”

I spoke boldly. “I’m afraid of _him_.”

Mrs. Grose’s large face showed me, at this, for the first time, the
far-away faint glimmer of a consciousness more acute: I somehow made
out in it the delayed dawn of an idea I myself had not given her and
that was as yet quite obscure to me. It comes back to me that I thought
instantly of this as something I could get from her; and I felt it to
be connected with the desire she presently showed to know more. “When
was it--on the tower?”

“About the middle of the month. At this same hour.”

“Almost at dark,” said Mrs. Grose.

“Oh no, not nearly. I saw him as I see you.”

“Then how did he get in?”

“And how did he get out?” I laughed. “I had no opportunity to ask
him! This evening, you see,” I pursued, “he has not been able to
get in.”

“He only peeps?”

“I hope it will be confined to that!” She had now let go my hand;
she turned away a little. I waited an instant; then I brought out:
“Go to church. Good-bye. I must watch.”

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

We met in another long look. “Don’t _you_?” Instead of answering
she came nearer to the window and, for a minute, applied her face to
the glass. “You see how he could see,” I meanwhile went on.

She didn’t move. “How long was he here?”

“Till I came out. I came to meet him.”

Mrs. Grose at last turned round, and there was still more in her
face. “_I_ couldn’t have come out.”

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

“So have I mine,” she replied; after which she added: “What is
he like?”

“I’ve been dying to tell you. But he’s like nobody.”

“Nobody?” she echoed.

“He has no hat.” Then seeing in her face that she already, in
this, with a deeper dismay, found a touch of picture, I quickly added
stroke to stroke. “He has red hair, very red, close-curling, and
a pale face, long in shape, with straight, good features and little,
rather queer whiskers that are as red as his hair. His eyebrows are,
somehow, darker; they look particularly arched and as if they might
move a good deal. His eyes are sharp, strange--awfully; but I only know
clearly that they’re rather small and very fixed. His mouth’s wide,
and his lips are thin, and except for his little whiskers he’s quite
clean-shaven. He gives me a sort of sense of looking like an actor.”

“An actor!” It was impossible to resemble one less, at least, than
Mrs. Grose at that moment.

“I’ve never seen one, but so I suppose them. He’s tall, active,
erect,” I continued, “but never--no, never!--a gentleman.”

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

“You know him then?”

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

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

“And dressed----?”

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

She broke into a breathless affirmative groan. “They’re the
master’s!”

I caught it up. “You _do_ know him?”

She faltered but a second. “Quint!” she cried.

“Quint?”

“Peter Quint--his own man, his valet, when he was here!”

“When the master was?”

Gaping still, but meeting me, she pieced it all together. “He
never wore his hat, but he did wear--well, there were waistcoats
missed! They were both here--last year. Then the master went, and Quint
was alone.”

I followed, but halting a little. “Alone?”

“Alone with _us_.” Then, as from a deeper depth, “In charge,”
she added.

“And what became of him?”

She hung fire so long that I was still more mystified. “He went
too,” she brought out at last.

“Went where?”

Her expression, at this, became extraordinary. “God knows where! He
died.”

“Died?” I almost shrieked.

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


VI

It took of course more than that particular passage to place
us together in presence of what we had now to live with as we
could--my dreadful liability to impressions of the order so vividly
exemplified, and my companion’s knowledge, henceforth,--a knowledge
half consternation and half compassion,--of that liability. There had
been, this evening, after the revelation that left me, for an hour,
so prostrate--there had been, for either of us, no attendance on
any service but a little service of tears and vows, of prayers and
promises, a climax to the series of mutual challenges and pledges that
had straightway ensued on our retreating together to the schoolroom and
shutting ourselves up there to have everything out. The result of our
having everything out was simply to reduce our situation to the last
rigour of its elements. She herself had seen nothing, not the shadow
of a shadow, and nobody in the house but the governess was in the
governess’s plight; yet she accepted without directly impugning my
sanity the truth as I gave it to her, and ended by showing me, on this
ground, an awe-stricken tenderness, an expression of the sense of my
more than questionable privilege, of which the very breath has remained
with me as that of the sweetest of human charities.

What was settled between us, accordingly, that night, was that we
thought we might bear things together; and I was not even sure that,
in spite of her exemption, it was she who had the best of the burden. I
knew at this hour, I think, as well as I knew later what I was capable
of meeting to shelter my pupils; but it took me some time to be wholly
sure of what my honest ally was prepared for to keep terms with so
compromising a contract. I was queer company enough--quite as queer as
the company I received; but as I trace over what we went through I see
how much common ground we must have found in the one idea that, by good
fortune, _could_ steady us. It was the idea, the second movement, that
led me straight out, as I may say, of the inner chamber of my dread. I
could take the air in the court, at least, and there Mrs. Grose could
join me. Perfectly can I recall now the particular way strength came to
me before we separated for the night. We had gone over and over every
feature of what I had seen.

“He was looking for someone else, you say--someone who was not
you?”

“He was looking for little Miles.” A portentous clearness now
possessed me. “_That’s_ whom he was looking for.”

“But how do you know?”

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

She didn’t deny this, but I required, I felt, not even so much
telling as that. She resumed in a moment, at any rate: “What if _he_
should see him?”

“Little Miles? That’s what he wants!”

She looked immensely scared again. “The child?”

“Heaven forbid! The man. He wants to appear to _them_.” That he
might was an awful conception, and yet, somehow, I could keep it at
bay; which, moreover, as we lingered there, was what I succeeded in
practically proving. I had an absolute certainty that I should see
again what I had already seen, but something within me said that
by offering myself bravely as the sole subject of such experience,
by accepting, by inviting, by surmounting it all, I should serve as
an expiatory victim and guard the tranquillity of my companions. The
children, in especial, I should thus fence about and absolutely save. I
recall one of the last things I said that night to Mrs. Grose.

“It does strike me that my pupils have never mentioned----”

She looked at me hard as I musingly pulled up. “His having been here
and the time they were with him?”

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

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

“The circumstances of his death?” I thought with some intensity.
“Perhaps not. But Miles would remember--Miles would know.”

“Ah, don’t try him!” broke from Mrs. Grose.

I returned her the look she had given me. “Don’t be afraid.” I
continued to think. “It is rather odd.”

“That he has never spoken of him?”

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

“Oh, it wasn’t _him_!” Mrs. Grose with emphasis declared. “It
was Quint’s own fancy. To play with him, I mean--to spoil him.” She
paused a moment; then she added: “Quint was much too free.”

This gave me, straight from my vision of his face--_such_ a face!--a
sudden sickness of disgust. “Too free with _my_ boy?”

“Too free with everyone!”

I forbore, for the moment, to analyse this description further than by
the reflection that a part of it applied to several of the members of
the household, of the half-dozen maids and men who were still of our
small colony. But there was everything, for our apprehension, in the
lucky fact that no discomfortable legend, no perturbation of scullions,
had ever, within anyone’s memory, attached to the kind old place. It
had neither bad name nor ill fame, and Mrs. Grose, most apparently,
only desired to cling to me and to quake in silence. I even put her,
the very last thing of all, to the test. It was when, at midnight, she
had her hand on the schoolroom door to take leave. “I have it from
you then--for it’s of great importance--that he was definitely and
admittedly bad?”

“Oh, not admittedly. _I_ knew it--but the master didn’t.”

“And you never told him?”

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

“He wouldn’t be bothered with more?” This squared well enough
with my impression of him: he was not a trouble-loving gentleman, nor
so very particular perhaps about some of the company _he_ kept. All
the same, I pressed my interlocutress. “I promise you _I_ would have
told!”

She felt my discrimination. “I dare say I was wrong. But, really,
I was afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“Of things that man could do. Quint was so clever--he was so deep.”

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

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

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

“No, they were not in mine!” she roundly and distressfully
returned. “The master believed in him and placed him here because he
was supposed not to be well and the country air so good for him. So
he had everything to say. Yes”--she let me have it--“even about
_them_.”

“Them--that creature?” I had to smother a kind of howl. “And you
could bear it!”

“No. I couldn’t--and I can’t now!” And the poor woman burst
into tears.

A rigid control, from the next day, was, as I have said, to follow
them; yet how often and how passionately, for a week, we came back
together to the subject! Much as we had discussed it that Sunday night,
I was, in the immediate later hours in especial--for it may be imagined
whether I slept--still haunted with the shadow of something she had
not told me. I myself had kept back nothing, but there was a word
Mrs. Grose had kept back. I was sure, moreover, by morning, that this
was not from a failure of frankness, but because on every side there
were fears. It seems to me indeed, in retrospect, that by the time the
morrow’s sun was high I had restlessly read into the facts before us
almost all the meaning they were to receive from subsequent and more
cruel occurrences. What they gave me above all was just the sinister
figure of the living man--the dead one would keep awhile!--and of
the months he had continuously passed at Bly, which, added up, made
a formidable stretch. The limit of this evil time had arrived only
when, on the dawn of a winter’s morning, Peter Quint was found, by a
labourer going to early work, stone dead on the road from the village:
a catastrophe explained--superficially at least--by a visible wound
to his head; such a wound as might have been produced--and as, on the
final evidence, _had_ been--by a fatal slip, in the dark and after
leaving the public house, on the steepish icy slope, a wrong path
altogether, at the bottom of which he lay. The icy slope, the turn
mistaken at night and in liquor, accounted for much--practically, in
the end and after the inquest and boundless chatter, for everything;
but there had been matters in his life--strange passages and perils,
secret disorders, vices more than suspected--that would have accounted
for a good deal more.

I scarce know how to put my story into words that shall be a credible
picture of my state of mind; but I was in these days literally able to
find a joy in the extraordinary flight of heroism the occasion demanded
of me. I now saw that I had been asked for a service admirable and
difficult; and there would be a greatness in letting it be seen--oh,
in the right quarter!--that I could succeed where many another girl
might have failed. It was an immense help to me--I confess I rather
applaud myself as I look back!--that I saw my service so strongly and
so simply. I was there to protect and defend the little creatures in
the world the most bereaved and the most loveable, the appeal of whose
helplessness had suddenly become only too explicit, a deep, constant
ache of one’s own committed heart. We were cut off, really, together;
we were united in our danger. They had nothing but me, and I--well, I
had _them_. It was in short a magnificent chance. This chance presented
itself to me in an image richly material. I was a screen--I was to
stand before them. The more I saw, the less they would. I began
to watch them in a stifled suspense, a disguised excitement that
might well, had it continued too long, have turned to something like
madness. What saved me, as I now see, was that it turned to something
else altogether. It didn’t last as suspense--it was superseded by
horrible proofs. Proofs, I say, yes--from the moment I really took
hold.

This moment dated from an afternoon hour that I happened to spend in
the grounds with the younger of my pupils alone. We had left Miles
indoors, on the red cushion of a deep window-seat; he had wished to
finish a book, and I had been glad to encourage a purpose so laudable
in a young man whose only defect was an occasional excess of the
restless. His sister, on the contrary, had been alert to come out,
and I strolled with her half an hour, seeking the shade, for the sun
was still high and the day exceptionally warm. I was aware afresh, with
her, as we went, of how, like her brother, she contrived--it was the
charming thing in both children--to let me alone without appearing to
drop me and to accompany me without appearing to surround. They were
never importunate and yet never listless. My attention to them all
really went to seeing them amuse themselves immensely without me: this
was a spectacle they seemed actively to prepare and that engaged me as
an active admirer. I walked in a world of their invention--they had no
occasion whatever to draw upon mine; so that my time was taken only
with being, for them, some remarkable person or thing that the game
of the moment required and that was merely, thanks to my superior, my
exalted stamp, a happy and highly distinguished sinecure. I forget what
I was on the present occasion; I only remember that I was something
very important and very quiet and that Flora was playing very hard. We
were on the edge of the lake, and, as we had lately begun geography,
the lake was the Sea of Azof.

Suddenly, in these circumstances, I became aware that, on the other
side of the Sea of Azof, we had an interested spectator. The way this
knowledge gathered in me was the strangest thing in the world--the
strangest, that is, except the very much stranger in which it quickly
merged itself. I had sat down with a piece of work--for I was something
or other that could sit--on the old stone bench which overlooked the
pond; and in this position I began to take in with certitude, and
yet without direct vision, the presence, at a distance, of a third
person. The old trees, the thick shrubbery, made a great and pleasant
shade, but it was all suffused with the brightness of the hot, still
hour. There was no ambiguity in anything; none whatever, at least,
in the conviction I from one moment to another found myself forming
as to what I should see straight before me and across the lake as a
consequence of raising my eyes. They were attached at this juncture
to the stitching in which I was engaged, and I can feel once more the
spasm of my effort not to move them till I should so have steadied
myself as to be able to make up my mind what to do. There was an
alien object in view--a figure whose right of presence I instantly,
passionately questioned. I recollect counting over perfectly the
possibilities, reminding myself that nothing was more natural, for
instance, 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 as little effect on my practical certitude
as I was conscious--still even without looking--of its having upon the
character and attitude of our visitor. Nothing was more natural than
that these things should be the other things that they absolutely were
not.

Of the positive identity of the apparition I would assure myself
as soon as the small clock of my courage should have ticked out the
right second; meanwhile, with an effort that was already sharp enough,
I transferred my eyes straight to little Flora, who, at the moment,
was about ten yards away. My heart had stood still for an instant with
the wonder and terror of the question whether she too would see; and I
held my breath while I waited for what a cry from her, what some sudden
innocent sign either of interest or of alarm, would tell me. I waited,
but nothing came; then, in the first place--and there is something
more dire in this, I feel, than in anything I have to relate--I was
determined by a sense that, within a minute, all sounds from her had
previously dropped; and, in the second, by the circumstance that,
also within the minute, she had, in her play, turned her back to the
water. This was her attitude when I at last looked at her--looked with
the confirmed conviction that we were still, together, under direct
personal notice. She had picked up a small flat piece of wood, which
happened to have in it a little hole that had evidently suggested to
her the idea of sticking in another fragment that might figure as
a mast and make the thing a boat. This second morsel, as I watched
her, she was very markedly and intently attempting to tighten in
its place. My apprehension of what she was doing sustained me so that
after some seconds I felt I was ready for more. Then I again shifted my
eyes--I faced what I had to face.


VII

I got hold of Mrs. Grose as soon after this as I could; and I can
give no intelligible account of how I fought out the interval. Yet I
still hear myself cry as I fairly threw myself into her arms: “They
_know_--it’s too monstrous: they know, they know!”

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

“Why, all that _we_ know--and heaven knows what else besides!”
Then, as she released me, I made it out to her, made it out perhaps
only now with full coherency even to myself. “Two hours ago, in the
garden”--I could scarce articulate--“Flora _saw_!”

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

“Not a word--that’s the horror. She kept it to herself! The
child of eight, _that_ child!” Unutterable still, for me, was the
stupefaction of it.

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

“I was there--I saw with my eyes: saw that she was perfectly
aware.”

“Do you mean aware of _him_?”

“No--of _her_.” I was conscious as I spoke that I looked
prodigious things, for I got the slow reflection of them in my
companion’s face. “Another person--this time; but a figure of
quite as unmistakeable horror and evil: a woman in black, pale and
dreadful--with such an air also, and such a face!--on the other side
of the lake. I was there with the child--quiet for the hour; and in the
midst of it she came.”

“Came how--from where?”

“From where they come from! She just appeared and stood there--but
not so near.”

“And without coming nearer?”

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

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

“Yes. But someone the child has. Someone _you_ have.” Then, to show
how I had thought it all out: “My predecessor--the one who died.”

“Miss Jessel?”

“Miss Jessel. You don’t believe me?” I pressed.

She turned right and left in her distress. “How can you be sure?”

This drew from me, in the state of my nerves, a flash of
impatience. “Then ask Flora--_she’s_ sure!” But I had no
sooner spoken than I caught myself up. “No, for God’s sake,
_don’t_! She’ll say she isn’t--she’ll lie!”

Mrs. Grose was not too bewildered instinctively to protest. “Ah, how
_can_ you?”

“Because I’m clear. Flora doesn’t want me to know.”

“It’s only then to spare you.”

“No, no--there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more
I see in it, and the more I see in it the more I fear. I don’t know
what I _don’t_ see--what I _don’t_ fear!”

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

“Oh, no; that’s nothing--now!” Then I explained. “It’s of
_not_ seeing her.”

But my companion only looked wan. “I don’t understand you.”

“Why, it’s that the child may keep it up--and that the child
assuredly _will_--without my knowing it.”

At the image of this possibility Mrs. Grose for a moment collapsed, yet
presently to pull herself together again, as if from the positive force
of the sense of what, should we yield an inch, there would really be
to give way to. “Dear, dear--we must keep our heads! And after all,
if she doesn’t mind it----!” She even tried a grim joke. “Perhaps
she likes it!”

“Likes _such_ things--a scrap of an infant!”

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

She brought me, for the instant, almost round. “Oh, we must clutch
at _that_--we must cling to it! If it isn’t a proof of what you
say, it’s a proof of--God knows what! For the woman’s a horror of
horrors.”

Mrs. Grose, at this, fixed her eyes a minute on the ground; then at
last raising them, “Tell me how you know,” she said.

“Then you admit it’s what she was?” I cried.

“Tell me how you know,” my friend simply repeated.

“Know? By seeing her! By the way she looked.”

“At you, do you mean--so wickedly?”

“Dear me, no--I could have borne that. She gave me never a
glance. She only fixed the child.”

Mrs. Grose tried to see it. “Fixed her?”

“Ah, with such awful eyes!”

She stared at mine as if they might really have resembled them. “Do
you mean of dislike?”

“God help us, no. Of something much worse.”

“Worse than dislike?”--this left her indeed at a loss.

“With a determination--indescribable. With a kind of fury of
intention.”

I made her turn pale. “Intention?”

“To get hold of her.” Mrs. Grose--her eyes just lingering on
mine--gave a shudder and walked to the window; and while she stood
there looking out I completed my statement. “_That’s_ what Flora
knows.”

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

“In mourning--rather poor, almost shabby. But--yes--with
extraordinary beauty.” I now recognised to what I had at last,
stroke by stroke, brought the victim of my confidence, for she quite
visibly weighed this. “Oh, handsome--very, very,” I insisted;
“wonderfully handsome. But infamous.”

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

So, for a little, we faced it once more together; and I found
absolutely a degree of help in seeing it now so straight. “I
appreciate,” I said, “the great decency of your not having hitherto
spoken; but the time has certainly come to give me the whole thing.”
She appeared to assent to this, but still only in silence; seeing which
I went on: “I must have it now. Of what did she die? Come, there was
something between them.”

“There was everything.”

“In spite of the difference----?”

“Oh, of their rank, their condition”--she brought it woefully
out. “_She_ was a lady.”

I turned it over; I again saw. “Yes--she was a lady.”

“And he so dreadfully below,” said Mrs. Grose.

I felt that I doubtless needn’t press too hard, in such company, on
the place of a servant in the scale; but there was nothing to prevent
an acceptance of my companion’s own measure of my predecessor’s
abasement. There was a way to deal with that, and I dealt; the more
readily for my full vision--on the evidence--of our employer’s
late clever, good-looking “own” man; impudent, assured, spoiled,
depraved. “The fellow was a hound.”

Mrs. Grose considered as if it were perhaps a little a case for a sense
of shades. “I’ve never seen one like him. He did what he wished.”

“With _her_?”

“With them all.”

It was as if now in my friend’s own eyes Miss Jessel had again
appeared. I seemed at any rate, for an instant, to see their evocation
of her as distinctly as I had seen her by the pond; and I brought out
with decision: “It must have been also what _she_ wished!”

Mrs. Grose’s face signified that it had been indeed, but she said at
the same time: “Poor woman--she paid for it!”

“Then you do know what she died of?” I asked.

“No--I know nothing. I wanted not to know; I was glad enough I
didn’t; and I thanked heaven she was well out of this!”

“Yet you had, then, your idea----”

“Of her real reason for leaving? Oh, yes--as to that. She couldn’t
have stayed. Fancy it here--for a governess! And afterwards I
imagined--and I still imagine. And what I imagine is dreadful.”

“Not so dreadful as what _I_ do,” I replied; on which I must have
shown her--as I was indeed but too conscious--a front of miserable
defeat. It brought out again all her compassion for me, and at the
renewed touch of her kindness my power to resist broke down. I burst,
as I had, the other time, made her burst, into tears; she took me to
her motherly breast, and my lamentation overflowed. “I don’t do
it!” I sobbed in despair; “I don’t save or shield them! It’s
far worse than I dreamed--they’re lost!”


VIII

What I had said to Mrs. Grose was true enough: there were in the matter
I had put before her depths and possibilities that I lacked resolution
to sound; so that when we met once more in the wonder of it we were of
a common mind about the duty of resistance to extravagant fancies. We
were to keep our heads if we should keep nothing else--difficult indeed
as that might be in the face of what, in our prodigious experience,
was least to be questioned. Late that night, while the house slept,
we had another talk in my room, when she went all the way with me as to
its being beyond doubt that I had seen exactly what I had seen. To hold
her perfectly in the pinch of that, I found I had only to ask her how,
if I had “made it up,” I came to be able to give, of each of the
persons appearing to me, a picture disclosing, to the last detail,
their special marks--a portrait on the exhibition of which she had
instantly recognised and named them. She wished, of course,--small
blame to her!--to sink the whole subject; and I was quick to assure her
that my own interest in it had now violently taken the form of a search
for the way to escape from it. I encountered her on the ground of a
probability that with recurrence--for recurrence we took for granted--I
should get used to my danger, distinctly professing that my personal
exposure had suddenly become the least of my discomforts. It was my new
suspicion that was intolerable; and yet even to this complication the
later hours of the day had brought a little ease.

On leaving her, after my first outbreak, I had of course returned to my
pupils, associating the right remedy for my dismay with that sense of
their charm which I had already found to be a thing I could positively
cultivate and which had never failed me yet. I had simply, in other
words, plunged afresh into Flora’s special society and there become
aware--it was almost a luxury!--that she could put her little conscious
hand straight upon the spot that ached. She had looked at me in sweet
speculation and then had accused me to my face of having “cried.”
I had supposed I had brushed away the ugly signs: but I could
literally--for the time, at all events--rejoice, under this fathomless
charity, that they had not entirely disappeared. To gaze into the
depths of blue of the child’s eyes and pronounce their loveliness a
trick of premature cunning was to be guilty of a cynicism in preference
to which I naturally preferred to abjure my judgment and, so far as
might be, my agitation. I couldn’t abjure for merely wanting to,
but I could repeat to Mrs. Grose--as I did there, over and over, in
the small hours--that with their voices in the air, their pressure
on one’s heart and their fragrant faces against one’s cheek,
everything fell to the ground but their incapacity and their beauty. It
was a pity that, somehow, to settle this once for all, I had equally to
re-enumerate the signs of subtlety that, in the afternoon, by the lake,
had made a miracle of my show of self-possession. It was a pity to be
obliged to re-investigate the certitude of the moment itself and repeat
how it had come to me as a revelation that the inconceivable communion
I then surprised was a matter, for either party, of habit. It was a
pity that I should have had to quaver out again the reasons for my not
having, in my delusion, so much as questioned that the little girl saw
our visitant even as I actually saw Mrs. Grose herself, and that she
wanted, by just so much as she did thus see, to make me suppose she
didn’t, and at the same time, without showing anything, arrive at
a guess as to whether I myself did! It was a pity that I needed once
more to describe the portentous little activity by which she sought to
divert my attention--the perceptible increase of movement, the greater
intensity of play, the singing, the gabbling of nonsense, and the
invitation to romp.

Yet if I had not indulged, to prove there was nothing in it, in this
review, I should have missed the two or three dim elements of comfort
that still remained to me. I should not for instance have been able to
asseverate to my friend that I was certain--which was so much to the
good--that _I_ at least had not betrayed myself. I should not have
been prompted, by stress of need, by desperation of mind,--I scarce
know what to call it,--to invoke such further aid to intelligence
as might spring from pushing my colleague fairly to the wall. She
had told me, bit by bit, under pressure, a great deal; but a small
shifty spot on the wrong side of it all still sometimes brushed my
brow like the wing of a bat; and I remember how on this occasion--for
the sleeping house and the concentration alike of our danger and our
watch seemed to help--I felt the importance of giving the last jerk to
the curtain. “I don’t believe anything so horrible,” I recollect
saying; “no, let us put it definitely, my dear, that I don’t. But
if I did, you know, there’s a thing I should require now, just
without sparing you the least bit more--oh, not a scrap, come!--to get
out of you. What was it you had in mind when, in our distress, before
Miles came back, over the letter from his school, you said, under my
insistence, that you didn’t pretend for him that he had not literally
_ever_ been ‘bad’? He has _not_ literally ‘ever,’ in these
weeks that I myself have lived with him and so closely watched him;
he has been an imperturbable little prodigy of delightful, loveable
goodness. Therefore you might perfectly have made the claim for him if
you had not, as it happened, seen an exception to take. What was your
exception, and to what passage in your personal observation of him did
you refer?”

It was a dreadfully austere inquiry, but levity was not our note, and,
at any rate, before the grey dawn admonished us to separate I had got
my answer. What my friend had had in mind proved to be immensely to
the purpose. It was neither more nor less than the circumstance that
for a period of several months Quint and the boy had been perpetually
together. It was in fact the very appropriate truth that she had
ventured to criticise the propriety, to hint at the incongruity, of
so close an alliance, and even to go so far on the subject as a frank
overture to Miss Jessel. Miss Jessel had, with a most strange manner,
requested her to mind her business, and the good woman had, on this,
directly approached little Miles. What she had said to him, since I
pressed, was that _she_ liked to see young gentlemen not forget their
station.

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

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

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

“No, not that. It’s just what he _wouldn’t_!” she could still
impress upon me. “I was sure, at any rate,” she added, “that he
didn’t. But he denied certain occasions.”

“What occasions?”

“When they had been about together quite as if Quint were his
tutor--and a very grand one--and Miss Jessel only for the little
lady. When he had gone off with the fellow, I mean, and spent hours
with him.”

“He then prevaricated about it--he said he hadn’t?” Her assent
was clear enough to cause me to add in a moment: “I see. He lied.”

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

I considered. “Did he put that to you as a justification?”

At this she dropped again. “No, he never spoke of it.”

“Never mentioned her in connection with Quint?”

She saw, visibly flushing, where I was coming out. “Well, he didn’t
show anything. He denied,” she repeated; “he denied.”

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

“I don’t know--I don’t know!” the poor woman groaned.

“You do know, you dear thing,” I replied; “only you haven’t
my dreadful boldness of mind, and you keep back, out of timidity and
modesty and delicacy, even the impression that, in the past, when you
had, without my aid, to flounder about in silence, most of all made you
miserable. But I shall get it out of you yet! There was something in
the boy that suggested to you,” I continued, “that he covered and
concealed their relation.”

“Oh, he couldn’t prevent----”

“Your learning the truth? I dare say! But, heavens,” I fell, with
vehemence, a-thinking, “what it shows that they must, to that extent,
have succeeded in making of him!”

“Ah, nothing that’s not nice _now_!” Mrs. Grose lugubriously
pleaded.

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

“I doubt if I looked as queer as you!” she retorted with homely
force. “And if he was so bad then as that comes to, how is he such an
angel now?”

“Yes, indeed--and if he was a fiend at school! How, how,
how? Well,” I said in my torment, “you must put it to me again,
but I shall not be able to tell you for some days. Only, put it to me
again!” I cried in a way that made my friend stare. “There are
directions in which I must not for the present let myself go.”
Meanwhile I returned to her first example--the one to which she
had just previously referred--of the boy’s happy capacity for an
occasional slip. “If Quint--on your remonstrance at the time you
speak of--was a base menial, one of the things Miles said to you, I
find myself guessing, was that you were another.” Again her admission
was so adequate that I continued: “And you forgave him that?”

“Wouldn’t _you_?”

“Oh, yes!” And we exchanged there, in the stillness, a sound of the
oddest amusement. Then I went on: “At all events, while he was with
the man----”

“Miss Flora was with the woman. It suited them all!”

It suited me too, I felt, only too well; by which I mean that it
suited exactly the particularly deadly view I was in the very act of
forbidding myself to entertain. But I so far succeeded in checking the
expression of this view that I will throw, just here, no further light
on it than may be offered by the mention of my final observation to
Mrs. Grose. “His having lied and been impudent are, I confess, less
engaging specimens than I had hoped to have from you of the outbreak in
him of the little natural man. Still,” I mused, “they must do, for
they make me feel more than ever that I must watch.”

It made me blush, the next minute, to see in my friend’s face how
much more unreservedly she had forgiven him than her anecdote struck
me as presenting to my own tenderness an occasion for doing. This came
out when, at the schoolroom door, she quitted me. “Surely you don’t
accuse _him_----”

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


IX

I waited and waited, and the days, as they elapsed, took something from
my consternation. A very few of them, in fact, passing, in constant
sight of my pupils, without a fresh incident, sufficed to give to
grievous fancies and even to odious memories a kind of brush of the
sponge. I have spoken of the surrender to their extraordinary childish
grace as a thing I could actively cultivate, and it may be imagined
if I neglected now to address myself to this source for whatever it
would yield. Stranger than I can express, certainly, was the effort to
struggle against my new lights; it would doubtless have been, however,
a greater tension still had it not been so frequently successful. I
used to wonder how my little charges could help guessing that I thought
strange things about them; and the circumstance that these things only
made them more interesting was not by itself a direct aid to keeping
them in the dark. I trembled lest they should see that they _were_ so
immensely more interesting. Putting things at the worst, at all events,
as in meditation I so often did, any clouding of their innocence could
only be--blameless and foredoomed as they were--a reason the more for
taking risks. There were moments when, by an irresistible impulse,
I found myself catching them up and pressing them to my heart. As
soon as I had done so I used to say to myself: “What will they
think of that? Doesn’t it betray too much?” It would have been
easy to get into a sad, wild tangle about how much I might betray;
but the real account, I feel, of the hours of peace that I could still
enjoy was that the immediate charm of my companions was a beguilement
still effective even under the shadow of the possibility that it was
studied. For if it occurred to me that I might occasionally excite
suspicion by the little outbreaks of my sharper passion for them,
so too I remember wondering if I mightn’t see a queerness in the
traceable increase of their own demonstrations.

They were at this period extravagantly and preternaturally fond of
me; which, after all, I could reflect, was no more than a graceful
response in children perpetually bowed over and hugged. The homage of
which they were so lavish succeeded, in truth, for my nerves, quite
as well as if I never appeared to myself, as I may say, literally to
catch them at a purpose in it. They had never, I think, wanted to do so
many things for their poor protectress; I mean--though they got their
lessons better and better, which was naturally what would please her
most--in the way of diverting, entertaining, surprising her; reading
her passages, telling her stories, acting her charades, pouncing out
at her, in disguises, as animals and historical characters, and above
all astonishing her by the “pieces” they had secretly got by heart
and could interminably recite. I should never get to the bottom--were
I to let myself go even now--of the prodigious private commentary,
all under still more private correction, with which, in these days,
I overscored their full hours. They had shown me from the first
a facility for everything, a general faculty which, taking a fresh
start, achieved remarkable flights. They got their little tasks as if
they loved them, and indulged, from the mere exuberance of the gift,
in the most unimposed little miracles of memory. They not only popped
out at me as tigers and as Romans, but as Shakespeareans, astronomers,
and navigators. This was so singularly the case that it had presumably
much to do with the fact as to which, at the present day, I am at a
loss for a different explanation: I allude to my unnatural composure on
the subject of another school for Miles. What I remember is that I was
content not, for the time, to open the question, and that contentment
must have sprung from the sense of his perpetually striking show of
cleverness. He was too clever for a bad governess, for a parson’s
daughter, to spoil; and the strangest if not the brightest thread in
the pensive embroidery I just spoke of was the impression I might have
got, if I had dared to work it out, that he was under some influence
operating in his small intellectual life as a tremendous incitement.

If it was easy to reflect, however, that such a boy could postpone
school, it was at least as marked that for such a boy to have been
“kicked out” by a school-master was a mystification without
end. Let me add that in their company now--and I was careful almost
never to be out of it--I could follow no scent very far. We lived in
a cloud of music and love and success and private theatricals. The
musical sense in each of the children was of the quickest, but the
elder in especial had a marvellous knack of catching and repeating. The
schoolroom piano broke into all gruesome fancies; and when that
failed there were confabulations in corners, with a sequel of one of
them going out in the highest spirits in order to “come in” as
something new. I had had brothers myself, and it was no revelation to
me that little girls could be slavish idolaters of little boys. What
surpassed everything was that there was a little boy in the world
who could have for the inferior age, sex, and intelligence so fine
a consideration. They were extraordinarily at one, and to say that
they never either quarrelled or complained is to make the note of
praise coarse for their quality of sweetness. Sometimes, indeed,
when I dropped into coarseness, I perhaps came across traces of
little understandings between them by which one of them should keep
me occupied while the other slipped away. There is a _naïf_ side, I
suppose, in all diplomacy; but if my pupils practised upon me, it was
surely with the minimum of grossness. It was all in the other quarter
that, after a lull, the grossness broke out.

I find that I really hang back; but I must take my plunge. In going
on with the record of what was hideous at Bly, I not only challenge
the most liberal faith--for which I little care; but--and this is
another matter--I renew what I myself suffered, I again push my way
through it to the end. There came suddenly an hour after which, as
I look back, the affair seems to me to have been all pure suffering;
but I have at least reached the heart of it, and the straightest road
out is doubtless to advance. One evening--with nothing to lead up
or to prepare it--I felt the cold touch of the impression that had
breathed on me the night of my arrival and which, much lighter then,
as I have mentioned, I should probably have made little of in memory
had my subsequent sojourn been less agitated. I had not gone to bed;
I sat reading by a couple of candles. There was a roomful of old books
at Bly--last-century fiction, some of it, which, to the extent of a
distinctly deprecated renown, but never to so much as that of a stray
specimen, had reached the sequestered home and appealed to the unavowed
curiosity of my youth. I remember that the book I had in my hand was
Fielding’s _Amelia_; also that I was wholly awake. I recall further
both a general conviction that it was horribly late and a particular
objection to looking at my watch. I figure, finally, that the white
curtain draping, in the fashion of those days, the head of Flora’s
little bed, shrouded, as I had assured myself long before, the
perfection of childish rest. I recollect in short that, though I was
deeply interested in my author, I found myself, at the turn of a page
and with his spell all scattered, looking straight up from him and hard
at the door of my room. There was a moment during which I listened,
reminded of the faint sense I had had, the first night, of there being
something undefineably astir in the house, and noted the soft breath of
the open casement just move the half-drawn blind. Then, with all the
marks of a deliberation that must have seemed magnificent had there
been anyone to admire it, I laid down my book, rose to my feet, and,
taking a candle, went straight out of the room and, from the passage,
on which my light made little impression, noiselessly closed and locked
the door.

I can say now neither what determined nor what guided me, but I
went straight along the lobby, holding my candle high, till I came
within sight of the tall window that presided over the great turn
of the staircase. At this point I precipitately found myself aware
of three things. They were practically simultaneous, yet they had
flashes of succession. My candle, under a bold flourish, went out,
and I perceived, by the uncovered window, that the yielding dusk of
earliest morning rendered it unnecessary. Without it, the next instant,
I saw that there was someone on the stair. I speak of sequences, but I
required no lapse of seconds to stiffen myself for a third encounter
with Quint. The apparition had reached the landing half-way up and
was therefore on the spot nearest the window, where at sight of me,
it stopped short and fixed me exactly as it had fixed me from the tower
and from the garden. He knew me as well as I knew him; and so, in the
cold, faint twilight, with a glimmer in the high glass and another on
the polish of the oak stair below, we faced each other in our common
intensity. He was absolutely, on this occasion, a living, detestable,
dangerous presence. But that was not the wonder of wonders; I reserve
this distinction for quite another circumstance: the circumstance that
dread had unmistakeably quitted me and that there was nothing in me
there that didn’t meet and measure him.

I had plenty of anguish after that extraordinary moment, but I had,
thank God, no terror. And he knew I had not--I found myself at the end
of an instant magnificently aware of this. I felt, in a fierce rigour
of confidence, that if I stood my ground a minute I should cease--for
the time, at least--to have him to reckon with; and during the minute,
accordingly, the thing was as human and hideous as a real interview:
hideous just because it _was_ human, as human as to have met alone,
in the small hours, in a sleeping house, some enemy, some adventurer,
some criminal. It was the dead silence of our long gaze at such close
quarters that gave the whole horror, huge as it was, its only note of
the unnatural. If I had met a murderer in such a place and at such
an hour, we still at least would have spoken. Something would have
passed, in life, between us; if nothing had passed one of us would have
moved. The moment was so prolonged that it would have taken but little
more to make me doubt if even _I_ were in life. I can’t express what
followed it save by saying that the silence itself--which was indeed in
a manner an attestation of my strength--became the element into which I
saw the figure disappear; in which I definitely saw it turn as I might
have seen the low wretch to which it had once belonged turn on receipt
of an order, and pass, with my eyes on the villainous back that no
hunch could have more disfigured, straight down the staircase and into
the darkness in which the next bend was lost.


X

I remained awhile at the top of the stair, but with the effect
presently of understanding that when my visitor had gone, he had
gone: then I returned to my room. The foremost thing I saw there
by the light of the candle I had left burning was that Flora’s
little bed was empty; and on this I caught my breath with all the
terror that, five minutes before, I had been able to resist. I
dashed at the place in which I had left her lying and over which
(for the small silk counterpane and the sheets were disarranged)
the white curtains had been deceivingly pulled forward; then my step,
to my unutterable relief, produced an answering sound: I perceived an
agitation of the window-blind, and the child, ducking down, emerged
rosily from the other side of it. She stood there in so much of her
candour and so little of her nightgown, with her pink bare feet and
the golden glow of her curls. She looked intensely grave, and I had
never had such a sense of losing an advantage acquired (the thrill
of which had just been so prodigious) as on my consciousness that
she addressed me with a reproach. “You naughty: where _have_ you
been?”--instead of challenging her own irregularity I found myself
arraigned and explaining. She herself explained, for that matter, with
the loveliest, eagerest simplicity. She had known suddenly, as she lay
there, that I was out of the room, and had jumped up to see what had
become of me. I had dropped, with the joy of her reappearance, back
into my chair--feeling then, and then only, a little faint; and she
had pattered straight over to me, thrown herself upon my knee, given
herself to be held with the flame of the candle full in the wonderful
little face that was still flushed with sleep. I remember closing
my eyes an instant, yieldingly, consciously, as before the excess of
something beautiful that shone out of the blue of her own. “You were
looking for me out of the window?” I said. “You thought I might be
walking in the grounds?”

“Well, you know, I thought someone was”--she never blanched as she
smiled out that at me.

Oh, how I looked at her now! “And did you see anyone?”

“Ah, _no_!” she returned, almost with the full privilege of
childish inconsequence, resentfully, though with a long sweetness in
her little drawl of the negative.

At that moment, in the state of my nerves, I absolutely believed she
lied; and if I once more closed my eyes it was before the dazzle of
the three or four possible ways in which I might take this up. One
of these, for a moment, tempted me with such singular intensity that,
to withstand it, I must have gripped my little girl with a spasm that,
wonderfully, she submitted to without a cry or a sign of fright. Why
not break out at her on the spot and have it all over?--give it to her
straight in her lovely little lighted face? “You see, you see, you
_know_ that you do and that you already quite suspect I believe it;
therefore why not frankly confess it to me, so that we may at least
live with it together and learn perhaps, in the strangeness of our
fate, where we are and what it means?” This solicitation dropped,
alas, as it came: if I could immediately have succumbed to it I might
have spared myself----well you’ll see what. Instead of succumbing I
sprang again to my feet, looked at her bed, and took a helpless middle
way. “Why did you pull the curtain over the place to make me think
you were still there?”

Flora luminously considered; after which, with her little divine smile:
“Because I don’t like to frighten you!”

“But if I had, by your idea, gone out----?”

She absolutely declined to be puzzled; she turned her eyes to the flame
of the candle as if the question were as irrelevant, or at any rate as
impersonal, as Mrs. Marcet or nine-times-nine. “Oh, but you know,”
she quite adequately answered, “that you might come back, you dear,
and that you _have_!” And after a little, when she had got into bed,
I had, for a long time, by almost sitting on her to hold her hand, to
prove that I recognised the pertinence of my return.

You may imagine the general complexion, from that moment, of my
nights. I repeatedly sat up till I didn’t know when; I selected
moments when my room-mate unmistakeably slept, and, stealing out,
took noiseless turns in the passage and even pushed as far as to
where I had last met Quint. But I never met him there again; and I
may as well say at once that I on no other occasion saw him in the
house. I just missed, on the staircase, on the other hand, a different
adventure. Looking down it from the top I once recognised the presence
of a woman seated on one of the lower steps with her back presented to
me, her body half bowed and her head, in an attitude of woe, in her
hands. I had been there but an instant, however, when she vanished
without looking round at me. I knew, none the less, exactly what
dreadful face she had to show; and I wondered whether, if instead
of being above I had been below, I should have had, for going up,
the same nerve I had lately shown Quint. Well, there continued to
be plenty of chance for nerve. On the eleventh night after my latest
encounter with that gentleman--they were all numbered now--I had an
alarm that perilously skirted it and that indeed, from the particular
quality of its unexpectedness, proved quite my sharpest shock. It
was precisely the first night during this series that, weary with
watching, I had felt that I might again without laxity lay myself
down at my old hour. I slept immediately and, as I afterwards knew,
till about one o’clock; but when I woke it was to sit straight up,
as completely roused as if a hand had shook me. I had left a light
burning, but it was now out, and I felt an instant certainty that
Flora had extinguished it. This brought me to my feet and straight, in
the darkness, to her bed, which I found she had left. A glance at the
window enlightened me further, and the striking of a match completed
the picture.

The child had again got up--this time blowing out the taper, and had
again, for some purpose of observation or response, squeezed in behind
the blind and was peering out into the night. That she now saw--as
she had not, I had satisfied myself, the previous time--was proved to
me by the fact that she was disturbed neither by my re-illumination
nor by the haste I made to get into slippers and into a wrap. Hidden,
protected, absorbed, she evidently rested on the sill--the casement
opened forward--and gave herself up. There was a great still moon to
help her, and this fact had counted in my quick decision. She was
face to face with the apparition we had met at the lake, and could
now communicate with it as she had not then been able to do. What I,
on my side, had to care for was, without disturbing her, to reach, from
the corridor, some other window in the same quarter. I got to the door
without her hearing me; I got out of it, closed it and listened, from
the other side, for some sound from her. While I stood in the passage
I had my eyes on her brother’s door, which was but ten steps off and
which, indescribably, produced in me a renewal of the strange impulse
that I lately spoke of as my temptation. What if I should go straight
in and march to _his_ window?--what if, by risking to his boyish
bewilderment a revelation of my motive, I should throw across the rest
of the mystery the long halter of my boldness?

This thought held me sufficiently to make me cross to his threshold
and pause again. I preternaturally listened; I figured to myself what
might portentously be; I wondered if his bed were also empty and he
too were secretly at watch. It was a deep, soundless minute, at the
end of which my impulse failed. He was quiet; he might be innocent; the
risk was hideous; I turned away. There was a figure in the grounds--a
figure prowling for a sight, the visitor with whom Flora was engaged;
but it was not the visitor most concerned with my boy. I hesitated
afresh, but on other grounds and only a few seconds; then I had made
my choice. There were empty rooms at Bly, and it was only a question
of choosing the right one. The right one suddenly presented itself
to me as the lower one--though high above the gardens--in the solid
corner of the house that I have spoken of as the old tower. This was
a large, square chamber, arranged with some state as a bedroom, the
extravagant size of which made it so inconvenient that it had not for
years, though kept by Mrs. Grose in exemplary order, been occupied. I
had often admired it and I knew my way about in it; I had only, after
just faltering at the first chill gloom of its disuse, to pass across
it and unbolt as quietly as I could one of the shutters. Achieving
this transit, I uncovered the glass without a sound and, applying
my face to the pane, was able, the darkness without being much less
than within, to see that I commanded the right direction. Then I saw
something more. The moon made the night extraordinarily penetrable
and showed me on the lawn a person, diminished by distance, who stood
there motionless and as if fascinated, looking up to where I had
appeared--looking, that is, not so much straight at me as at something
that was apparently above me. There was clearly another person above
me--there was a person on the tower; but the presence on the lawn was
not in the least what I had conceived and had confidently hurried to
meet. The presence on the lawn--I felt sick as I made it out--was poor
little Miles himself.


XI

It was not till late next day that I spoke to Mrs. Grose; the rigour
with which I kept my pupils in sight making it often difficult to
meet her privately, and the more as we each felt the importance of
not provoking--on the part of the servants quite as much as on that
of the children--any suspicion of a secret flurry or of a discussion
of mysteries. I drew a great security in this particular from her mere
smooth aspect. There was nothing in her fresh face to pass on to others
my horrible confidences. She believed me, I was sure, absolutely:
if she hadn’t I don’t know what would have become of me, for I
couldn’t have borne the business alone. But she was a magnificent
monument to the blessing of a want of imagination, and if she could
see in our little charges nothing but their beauty and amiability,
their happiness and cleverness, she had no direct communication with
the sources of my trouble. If they had been at all visibly blighted or
battered, she would doubtless have grown, on tracing it back, haggard
enough to match them; as matters stood, however, I could feel her,
when she surveyed them, with her large white arms folded and the
habit of serenity in all her look, thank the Lord’s mercy that if
they were ruined the pieces would still serve. Flights of fancy gave
place, in her mind, to a steady fireside glow, and I had already begun
to perceive how, with the development of the conviction that--as time
went on without a public accident--our young things could, after all,
look out for themselves, she addressed her greatest solicitude to the
sad case presented by their instructress. That, for myself, was a sound
simplification: I could engage that, to the world, my face should tell
no tales, but it would have been, in the conditions, an immense added
strain to find myself anxious about hers.

At the hour I now speak of she had joined me, under pressure, on the
terrace, where, with the lapse of the season, the afternoon sun was now
agreeable; and we sat there together while, before us, at a distance,
but within call if we wished, the children strolled to and fro in
one of their most manageable moods. They moved slowly, in unison,
below us, over the lawn, the boy, as they went, reading aloud from a
storybook and passing his arm round his sister to keep her quite in
touch. Mrs. Grose watched them with positive placidity; then I caught
the suppressed intellectual creak with which she conscientiously turned
to take from me a view of the back of the tapestry. I had made her
a receptacle of lurid things, but there was an odd recognition of my
superiority--my accomplishments and my function--in her patience under
my pain. She offered her mind to my disclosures as, had I wished to mix
a witch’s broth and proposed it with assurance, she would have held
out a large clean saucepan. This had become thoroughly her attitude by
the time that, in my recital of the events of the night, I reached the
point of what Miles had said to me when, after seeing him, at such a
monstrous hour, almost on the very spot where he happened now to be,
I had gone down to bring him in; choosing then, at the window, with a
concentrated need of not alarming the house, rather that method than a
signal more resonant. I had left her meanwhile in little doubt of my
small hope of representing with success even to her actual sympathy
my sense of the real splendour of the little inspiration with which,
after I had got him into the house, the boy met my final articulate
challenge. As soon as I appeared in the moonlight on the terrace, he
had come to me as straight as possible; on which I had taken his hand
without a word and led him, through the dark spaces, up the staircase
where Quint had so hungrily hovered for him, along the lobby where I
had listened and trembled, and so to his forsaken room.

Not a sound, on the way, had passed between us, and I had wondered--oh,
_how_ I had wondered!--if he were groping about in his little mind for
something plausible and not too grotesque. It would tax his invention,
certainly, and I felt, this time, over his real embarrassment, a
curious thrill of triumph. It was a sharp trap for the inscrutable! He
couldn’t play any longer at innocence; so how the deuce would he get
out of it? There beat in me indeed, with the passionate throb of this
question, an equal dumb appeal as to how the deuce _I_ should. I was
confronted at last, as never yet, with all the risk attached even now
to sounding my own horrid note. I remember in fact that as we pushed
into his little chamber, where the bed had not been slept in at all
and the window, uncovered to the moonlight, made the place so clear
that there was no need of striking a match--I remember how I suddenly
dropped, sank upon the edge of the bed from the force of the idea that
he must know how he really, as they say, “had” me. He could do what
he liked, with all his cleverness to help him, so long as I should
continue to defer to the old tradition of the criminality of those
caretakers of the young who minister to superstitions and fears. He
“had” me indeed, and in a cleft stick; for who would ever absolve
me, who would consent that I should go unhung, if, by the faintest
tremor of an overture, I were the first to introduce into our perfect
intercourse an element so dire? No, no: it was useless to attempt to
convey to Mrs. Grose, just as it is scarcely less so to attempt to
suggest here, how, in our short, stiff brush in the dark, he fairly
shook me with admiration. I was of course thoroughly kind and merciful;
never, never yet had I placed on his little shoulders hands of such
tenderness as those with which, while I rested against the bed, I held
him there well under fire. I had no alternative but, in form at least,
to put it to him.

“You must tell me now--and all the truth. What did you go out
for? What were you doing there?”

I can still see his wonderful smile, the whites of his beautiful eyes,
and the uncovering of his little teeth shine to me in the dusk. “If
I tell you why, will you understand?” My heart, at this, leaped into
my mouth. _Would_ he tell me why? I found no sound on my lips to press
it, and I was aware of replying only with a vague, repeated, grimacing
nod. He was gentleness itself, and while I wagged my head at him he
stood there more than ever a little fairy prince. It was his brightness
indeed that gave me a respite. Would it be so great if he were really
going to tell me? “Well,” he said at last, “just exactly in order
that you should do this.”

“Do what?”

“Think me--for a change--_bad_!” I shall never forget the sweetness
and gaiety with which he brought out the word, nor how, on top of
it, he bent forward and kissed me. It was practically the end of
everything. I met his kiss and I had to make, while I folded him for a
minute in my arms, the most stupendous effort not to cry. He had given
exactly the account of himself that permitted least of my going behind
it, and it was only with the effect of confirming my acceptance of it
that, as I presently glanced about the room, I could say--

“Then you didn’t undress at all?”

He fairly glittered in the gloom. “Not at all. I sat up and read.”

“And when did you go down?”

“At midnight. When I’m bad I _am_ bad!”

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

“Oh, I arranged that with Flora.” His answers rang out with a
readiness! “She was to get up and look out.”

“Which is what she did do.” It was I who fell into the trap!

“So she disturbed you, and, to see what she was looking at, you also
looked--you saw.”

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

He literally bloomed so from this exploit that he could afford
radiantly to assent. “How otherwise should I have been bad enough?”
he asked. Then, after another embrace, the incident and our interview
closed on my recognition of all the reserves of goodness that, for his
joke, he had been able to draw upon.


XII

The particular impression I had received proved in the morning light,
I repeat, not quite successfully presentable to Mrs. Grose, though I
reinforced it with the mention of still another remark that he had made
before we separated. “It all lies in half-a-dozen words,” I said to
her, “words that really settle the matter. ‘Think, you know, what
I _might_ do!’ He threw that off to show me how good he is. He knows
down to the ground what he ‘might’ do. That’s what he gave them a
taste of at school.”

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

“I don’t change--I simply make it out. The four, depend upon it,
perpetually meet. If on either of these last nights you had been with
either child, you would clearly have understood. The more I’ve
watched and waited the more I’ve felt that if there were nothing
else to make it sure it would be made so by the systematic silence of
each. _Never_, by a slip of the tongue, have they so much as alluded
to either of their old friends, any more than Miles has alluded to
his expulsion. Oh yes, we may sit here and look at them, and they may
show off to us there to their fill; but even while they pretend to
be lost in their fairy-tale they’re steeped in their vision of the
dead restored. He’s not reading to her,” I declared; “they’re
talking of _them_--they’re talking horrors! I go on, I know, as if I
were crazy; and it’s a wonder I’m not. What I’ve seen would have
made _you_ so; but it has only made me more lucid, made me get hold of
still other things.”

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

“Why, of the very things that have delighted, fascinated, and yet,
at bottom, as I now so strangely see, mystified and troubled me. Their
more than earthly beauty, their absolutely unnatural goodness. It’s a
game,” I went on; “it’s a policy and a fraud!”

“On the part of little darlings----?”

“As yet mere lovely babies? Yes, mad as that seems!” The very act
of bringing it out really helped me to trace it--follow it all up and
piece it all together. “They haven’t been good--they’ve only
been absent. It has been easy to live with them, because they’re
simply leading a life of their own. They’re not mine--they’re not
ours. They’re his and they’re hers!”

“Quint’s and that woman’s?”

“Quint’s and that woman’s. They want to get to them.”

Oh, how, at this, poor Mrs. Grose appeared to study them! “But for
what?”

“For the love of all the evil that, in those dreadful days, the pair
put into them. And to ply them with that evil still, to keep up the
work of demons, is what brings the others back.”

“Laws!” said my friend under her breath. The exclamation was
homely, but it revealed a real acceptance of my further proof of what,
in the bad time--for there had been a worse even than this!--must have
occurred. There could have been no such justification for me as the
plain assent of her experience to whatever depth of depravity I found
credible in our brace of scoundrels. It was in obvious submission of
memory that she brought out after a moment: “They _were_ rascals! But
what can they now do?” she pursued.

“Do?” I echoed so loud that Miles and Flora, as they passed
at their distance, paused an instant in their walk and looked at
us. “Don’t they do enough?” I demanded in a lower tone, while
the children, having smiled and nodded and kissed hands to us, resumed
their exhibition. We were held by it a minute; then I answered: “They
can destroy them!” At this my companion did turn, but the inquiry
she launched was a silent one, the effect of which was to make me more
explicit. “They don’t know, as yet, quite how--but they’re trying
hard. They’re seen only across, as it were, and beyond--in strange
places and on high places, the top of towers, the roof of houses,
the outside of windows, the further edge of pools; but there’s a
deep design, on either side, to shorten the distance and overcome
the obstacle; and the success of the tempters is only a question of
time. They’ve only to keep to their suggestions of danger.”

“For the children to come?”

“And perish in the attempt!” Mrs. Grose slowly got up, and I
scrupulously added: “Unless, of course, we can prevent!”

Standing there before me while I kept my seat, she visibly turned
things over. “Their uncle must do the preventing. He must take them
away.”

“And who’s to make him?”

She had been scanning the distance, but she now dropped on me a foolish
face. “You, Miss.”

“By writing to him that his house is poisoned and his little nephew
and niece mad?”

“But if they _are_, Miss?”

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

Mrs. Grose considered, following the children again. “Yes, he do hate
worry. That was the great reason----”

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

My companion, after an instant and for all answer, sat down again and
grasped my arm. “Make him at any rate come to you.”

I stared. “To _me_?” I had a sudden fear of what she might
do. “‘Him’?”

“He ought to _be_ here--he ought to help.”

I quickly rose, and I think I must have shown her a queerer face than
ever yet. “You see me asking him for a visit?” No, with her eyes on
my face she evidently couldn’t. Instead of it even--as a woman reads
another--she could see what I myself saw: his derision, his amusement,
his contempt for the break-down of my resignation at being left alone
and for the fine machinery I had set in motion to attract his attention
to my slighted charms. She didn’t know--no one knew--how proud I had
been to serve him and to stick to our terms; yet she none the less took
the measure, I think, of the warning I now gave her. “If you should
so lose your head as to appeal to him for me----”

She was really frightened. “Yes, Miss?”

“I would leave, on the spot, both him and you.”


XIII

It was all very well to join them, but speaking to them proved quite as
much as ever an effort beyond my strength--offered, in close quarters,
difficulties as insurmountable as before. This situation continued a
month, and with new aggravations and particular notes, the note above
all, sharper and sharper, of the small ironic consciousness on the
part of my pupils. It was not, I am as sure today as I was sure then,
my mere infernal imagination: it was absolutely traceable that they
were aware of my predicament and that this strange relation made, in
a manner, for a long time, the air in which we moved. I don’t mean
that they had their tongues in their cheeks or did anything vulgar, for
that was not one of their dangers: I do mean, on the other hand, that
the element of the unnamed and untouched became, between us, greater
than any other, and that so much avoidance could not have been so
successfully effected without a great deal of tacit arrangement. It was
as if, at moments, we were perpetually coming into sight of subjects
before which we must stop short, turning suddenly out of alleys that
we perceived to be blind, closing with a little bang that made us look
at each other--for, like all bangs, it was something louder than we
had intended--the doors we had indiscreetly opened. All roads lead to
Rome, and there were times when it might have struck us that almost
every branch of study or subject of conversation skirted forbidden
ground. Forbidden ground was the question of the return of the dead in
general and of whatever, in especial, might survive, in memory, of the
friends little children had lost. There were days when I could have
sworn that one of them had, with a small invisible nudge, said to the
other: “She thinks she’ll do it this time--but she _won’t_!” To
“do it” would have been to indulge for instance--and for once in a
way--in some direct reference to the lady who had prepared them for my
discipline. They had a delightful endless appetite for passages in my
own history, to which I had again and again treated them; they were
in possession of everything that had ever happened to me, had had,
with every circumstance the story of my smallest adventures and of
those of my brothers and sisters and of the cat and the dog at home,
as well as many particulars of the eccentric nature of my father, of
the furniture and arrangement of our house, and of the conversation
of the old women of our village. There were things enough, taking
one with another, to chatter about, if one went very fast and knew
by instinct when to go round. They pulled with an art of their own
the strings of my invention and my memory; and nothing else perhaps,
when I thought of such occasions afterwards, gave me so the suspicion
of being watched from under cover. It was in any case over _my_ life,
_my_ past, and _my_ friends alone that we could take anything like
our ease--a state of affairs that led them sometimes without the least
pertinence to break out into sociable reminders. I was invited--with no
visible connection--to repeat afresh Goody Gosling’s celebrated _mot_
or to confirm the details already supplied as to the cleverness of the
vicarage pony.

It was partly at such junctures as these and partly at quite different
ones that, with the turn my matters had now taken, my predicament,
as I have called it, grew most sensible. The fact that the days passed
for me without another encounter ought, it would have appeared, to have
done something toward soothing my nerves. Since the light brush, that
second night on the upper landing, of the presence of a woman at the
foot of the stair, I had seen nothing, whether in or out of the house,
that one had better not have seen. There was many a corner round which
I expected to come upon Quint, and many a situation that, in a merely
sinister way, would have favoured the appearance of Miss Jessel. The
summer had turned, the summer had gone; the autumn had dropped upon
Bly and had blown out half our lights. The place, with its grey sky
and withered garlands, its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves,
was like a theatre after the performance--all strewn with crumpled
playbills. There were exactly states of the air, conditions of sound
and of stillness, unspeakable impressions of the _kind_ of ministering
moment, that brought back to me, long enough to catch it, the feeling
of the medium in which, that June evening out-of-doors, I had had my
first sight of Quint, and in which, too, at those other instants, I
had, after seeing him through the window, looked for him in vain in the
circle of shrubbery. I recognised the signs, the portents--I recognised
the moment, the spot. But they remained unaccompanied and empty, and I
continued unmolested; if unmolested one could call a young woman whose
sensibility had, in the most extraordinary fashion, not declined but
deepened. I had said in my talk with Mrs. Grose on that horrid scene
of Flora’s by the lake--and had perplexed her by so saying--that it
would from that moment distress me much more to lose my power than
to keep it. I had then expressed what was vividly in my mind: the
truth that, whether the children really saw or not--since, that is,
it was not yet definitely proved--I greatly preferred, as a safeguard,
the fulness of my own exposure. I was ready to know the very worst
that was to be known. What I had then had an ugly glimpse of was that
my eyes might be sealed just while theirs were most opened. Well, my
eyes _were_ sealed, it appeared, at present--a consummation for which
it seemed blasphemous not to thank God. There was, alas, a difficulty
about that: I would have thanked him with all my soul had I not had in
a proportionate measure this conviction of the secret of my pupils.

How can I retrace today the strange steps of my obsession? There were
times of our being together when I would have been ready to swear that,
literally, in my presence, but with my direct sense of it closed,
they had visitors who were known and were welcome. Then it was that,
had I not been deterred by the very chance that such an injury might
prove greater than the injury to be averted, my exultation would have
broken out. “They’re here, they’re here, you little wretches,”
I would have cried, “and you can’t deny it now!” The little
wretches denied it with all the added volume of their sociability
and their tenderness, in just the crystal depths of which--like the
flash of a fish in a stream--the mockery of their advantage peeped
up. The shock, in truth, had sunk into me still deeper than I knew on
the night when, looking out to see either Quint or Miss Jessel under
the stars, I had beheld the boy over whose rest I watched and who had
immediately brought in with him--had straightway, there, turned it on
me--the lovely upward look with which, from the battlements above me,
the hideous apparition of Quint had played. If it was a question of a
scare, my discovery on this occasion had scared me more than any other,
and it was in the condition of nerves produced by it that I made my
actual inductions. They harassed me so that sometimes, at odd moments,
I shut myself up audibly to rehearse--it was at once a fantastic relief
and a renewed despair--the manner in which I might come to the point. I
approached it from one side and the other while, in my room, I flung
myself about, but I always broke down in the monstrous utterance of
names. As they died away on my lips, I said to myself that I should
indeed help them to represent something infamous if, by pronouncing
them, I should violate as rare a little case of instinctive delicacy
as any schoolroom, probably, had ever known. When I said to myself:
“_They_ have the manners to be silent, and you, trusted as you are,
the baseness to speak!” I felt myself crimson and I covered my face
with my hands. After these secret scenes I chattered more than ever,
going on volubly enough till one of our prodigious, palpable hushes
occurred--I can call them nothing else--the strange, dizzy lift or
swim (I try for terms!) into a stillness, a pause of all life, that
had nothing to do with the more or less noise that at the moment we
might be engaged in making and that I could hear through any deepened
exhilaration or quickened recitation or louder strum of the piano. Then
it was that the others, the outsiders, were there. Though they were not
angels, they “passed,” as the French, say, causing me, while they
stayed, to tremble with the fear of their addressing to their younger
victims some yet more infernal message or more vivid image than they
had thought good enough for myself.

What it was most impossible to get rid of was the cruel idea that,
whatever I had seen, Miles and Flora saw _more_--things terrible and
unguessable and that sprang from dreadful passages of intercourse in
the past. Such things naturally left on the surface, for the time,
a chill which we vociferously denied that we felt; and we had, all
three, with repetition, got into such splendid training that we went,
each time, almost automatically, to mark the close of the incident,
through the very same movements. It was striking of the children, at
all events, to kiss me inveterately with a kind of wild irrelevance
and never to fail--one or the other--of the precious question that
had helped us through many a peril. “When do you think he _will_
come? Don’t you think we _ought_ to write?”--there was nothing
like that inquiry, we found by experience, for carrying off an
awkwardness. “He” of course was their uncle in Harley Street;
and we lived in much profusion of theory that he might at any moment
arrive to mingle in our circle. It was impossible to have given less
encouragement than he had done to such a doctrine, but if we had not
had the doctrine to fall back upon we should have deprived each other
of some of our finest exhibitions. He never wrote to them--that may
have been selfish, but it was a part of the flattery of his trust of
me; for the way in which a man pays his highest tribute to a woman
is apt to be but by the more festal celebration of one of the sacred
laws of his comfort; and I held that I carried out the spirit of the
pledge given not to appeal to him when I let my charges understand that
their own letters were but charming literary exercises. They were too
beautiful to be posted; I kept them myself; I have them all to this
hour. This was a rule indeed which only added to the satiric effect
of my being plied with the supposition that he might at any moment be
among us. It was exactly as if my charges knew how almost more awkward
than anything else that might be for me. There appears to me, moreover,
as I look back, no note in all this more extraordinary than the mere
fact that, in spite of my tension and of their triumph, I never lost
patience with them. Adorable they must in truth have been, I now
reflect, that I didn’t in these days hate them! Would exasperation,
however, if relief had longer been postponed, finally have betrayed
me? It little matters, for relief arrived. I call it relief, though it
was only the relief that a snap brings to a strain or the burst of a
thunderstorm to a day of suffocation. It was at least change, and it
came with a rush.


XIV

Walking to church a certain Sunday morning, I had little Miles at my
side and his sister, in advance of us and at Mrs. Grose’s, well in
sight. It was a crisp, clear day, the first of its order for some
time; the night had brought a touch of frost, and the autumn air,
bright and sharp, made the church-bells almost gay. It was an odd
accident of thought that I should have happened at such a moment to
be particularly and very gratefully struck with the obedience of my
little charges. Why did they never resent my inexorable, my perpetual
society? Something or other had brought nearer home to me that I had
all but pinned the boy to my shawl and that, in the way our companions
were marshalled before me, I might have appeared to provide against
some danger of rebellion. I was like a gaoler with an eye to possible
surprises and escapes. But all this belonged--I mean their magnificent
little surrender--just to the special array of the facts that were most
abysmal. Turned out for Sunday by his uncle’s tailor, who had had
a free hand and a notion of pretty waistcoats and of his grand little
air, Miles’s whole title to independence, the rights of his sex and
situation, were so stamped upon him that if he had suddenly struck
for freedom I should have had nothing to say. I was by the strangest
of chances wondering how I should meet him when the revolution
unmistakeably occurred. I call it a revolution because I now see how,
with the word he spoke, the curtain rose on the last act of my dreadful
drama and the catastrophe was precipitated. “Look here, my dear, you
know,” he charmingly said, “when in the world, please, am I going
back to school?”

Transcribed here the speech sounds harmless enough, particularly
as uttered in the sweet, high, casual pipe with which, at all
interlocutors, but above all at his eternal governess, he threw off
intonations as if he were tossing roses. There was something in them
that always made one “catch” and I caught, at any rate, now so
effectually that I stopped as short as if one of the trees of the
park had fallen across the road. There was something new, on the spot,
between us, and he was perfectly aware that I recognised it, though,
to enable me to do so, he had no need to look a whit less candid and
charming than usual. I could feel in him how he already, from my
at first finding nothing to reply, perceived the advantage he had
gained. I was so slow to find anything that he had plenty of time,
after a minute, to continue with his suggestive but inconclusive
smile: “You know, my dear, that for a fellow to be with a lady
_always_----!” His “my dear” was constantly on his lips for me,
and nothing could have expressed more the exact shade of the sentiment
with which I desired to inspire my pupils than its fond familiarity. It
was so respectfully easy.

But, oh, how I felt that at present I must pick my own phrases! I
remember that, to gain time, I tried to laugh, and I seemed to see
in the beautiful face with which he watched me how ugly and queer I
looked. “And always with the same lady?” I returned.

He neither blenched nor winked. The whole thing was virtually out
between us. “Ah, of course, she’s a jolly, ‘perfect’ lady; but,
after all, I’m a fellow, don’t you see? that’s--well, getting
on.”

I lingered there with him an instant ever so kindly. “Yes, you’re
getting on.” Oh, but I felt helpless!

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

I laid my hand on his shoulder, for, though I felt how much better it
would have been to walk on, I was not yet quite able. “No, I can’t
say that, Miles.”

“Except just that one night, you know----!”

“That one night?” I couldn’t look as straight as he.

“Why, when I went down--went out of the house.”

“Oh, yes. But I forget what you did it for.”

“You forget?”--he spoke with the sweet extravagance of childish
reproach. “Why, it was to show you I could!”

“Oh, yes, you could.”

“And I can again.”

I felt that I might, perhaps, after all, succeed in keeping my wits
about me. “Certainly. But you won’t.”

“No, not _that_ again. It was nothing.”

“It was nothing,” I said. “But we must go on.”

He resumed our walk with me, passing his hand into my arm. “Then when
_am_ I going back?”

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

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

“Well, then,” I quavered, “if you’re just as happy here----!”

“Ah, but that isn’t everything! Of course _you_ know a lot----”

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

“Not half I want to!” Miles honestly professed. “But it isn’t
so much that.”

“What is it, then?”

“Well--I want to see more life.”

“I see; I see.” We had arrived within sight of the church and of
various persons, including several of the household of Bly, on their
way to it and clustered about the door to see us go in. I quickened
our step; I wanted to get there before the question between us opened
up much further; I reflected hungrily that, for more than an hour, he
would have to be silent; and I thought with envy of the comparative
dusk of the pew and of the almost spiritual help of the hassock on
which I might bend my knees. I seemed literally to be running a race
with some confusion to which he was about to reduce me, but I felt that
he had got in first when, before we had even entered the churchyard,
he threw out--

“I want my own sort!”

It literally made me bound forward. “There are not many of your own
sort, Miles!” I laughed. “Unless perhaps dear little Flora!”

“You really compare me to a baby girl?”

This found me singularly weak. “Don’t you, then, _love_ our sweet
Flora?”

“If I didn’t--and you too; if I didn’t----!” he repeated as
if retreating for a jump, yet leaving his thought so unfinished that,
after we had come into the gate, another stop, which he imposed on me
by the pressure of his arm, had become inevitable. Mrs. Grose and Flora
had passed into the church, the other worshippers had followed, and we
were, for the minute, alone among the old, thick graves. We had paused,
on the path from the gate, by a low, oblong, tablelike tomb.

“Yes, if you didn’t----?”

He looked, while I waited, about at the graves. “Well, you know
what!” But he didn’t move, and he presently produced something
that made me drop straight down on the stone slab, as if suddenly to
rest. “Does my uncle think what _you_ think?”

I markedly rested. “How do you know what I think?”

“Ah, well, of course I don’t; for it strikes me you never tell
me. But I mean does _he_ know?”

“Know what, Miles?”

“Why, the way I’m going on.”

I perceived quickly enough that I could make, to this inquiry,
no answer that would not involve something of a sacrifice of my
employer. Yet it appeared to me that we were all, at Bly, sufficiently
sacrificed to make that venial. “I don’t think your uncle much
cares.”

Miles, on this, stood looking at me. “Then don’t you think he can
be made to?”

“In what way?”

“Why, by his coming down.”

“But who’ll get him to come down?”

“_I_ will!” the boy said with extraordinary brightness and
emphasis. He gave me another look charged with that expression and then
marched off alone into church.


XV

The business was practically settled from the moment I never followed
him. It was a pitiful surrender to agitation, but my being aware
of this had somehow no power to restore me. I only sat there on my
tomb and read into what my little friend had said to me the fulness
of its meaning; by the time I had grasped the whole of which I had
also embraced, for absence, the pretext that I was ashamed to offer my
pupils and the rest of the congregation such an example of delay. What
I said to myself above all was that Miles had got something out of
me and that the proof of it, for him, would be just this awkward
collapse. He had got out of me that there was something I was much
afraid of and that he should probably be able to make use of my fear
to gain, for his own purpose, more freedom. My fear was of having to
deal with the intolerable question of the grounds of his dismissal from
school, for that was really but the question of the horrors gathered
behind. That his uncle should arrive to treat with me of these things
was a solution that, strictly speaking, I ought now to have desired to
bring on; but I could so little face the ugliness and the pain of it
that I simply procrastinated and lived from hand to mouth. The boy, to
my deep discomposure, was immensely in the right, was in a position to
say to me: “Either you clear up with my guardian the mystery of this
interruption of my studies, or you cease to expect me to lead with you
a life that’s so unnatural for a boy.” What was so unnatural for
the particular boy I was concerned with was this sudden revelation of a
consciousness and a plan.

That was what really overcame me, what prevented my going in. I
walked round the church, hesitating, hovering; I reflected that I had
already, with him, hurt myself beyond repair. Therefore I could patch
up nothing, and it was too extreme an effort to squeeze beside him into
the pew: he would be so much more sure than ever to pass his arm into
mine and make me sit there for an hour in close, silent contact with
his commentary on our talk. For the first minute since his arrival I
wanted to get away from him. As I paused beneath the high east window
and listened to the sounds of worship, I was taken with an impulse
that might master me, I felt, completely should I give it the least
encouragement. I might easily put an end to my predicament by getting
away altogether. Here was my chance; there was no one to stop me; I
could give the whole thing up--turn my back and retreat. It was only a
question of hurrying again, for a few preparations, to the house which
the attendance at church of so many of the servants would practically
have left unoccupied. No one, in short, could blame me if I should just
drive desperately off. What was it to get away if I got away only till
dinner? That would be in a couple of hours, at the end of which--I had
the acute prevision--my little pupils would play at innocent wonder
about my non-appearance in their train.

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

I got, so far as the immediate moment was concerned, away; I came
straight out of the churchyard and, thinking hard, retraced my steps
through the park. It seemed to me that by the time I reached the
house I had made up my mind I would fly. The Sunday stillness both
of the approaches and of the interior, in which I met no one, fairly
excited me with a sense of opportunity. Were I to get off quickly,
this way, I should get off without a scene, without a word. My
quickness would have to be remarkable, however, and the question of a
conveyance was the great one to settle. Tormented, in the hall, with
difficulties and obstacles, I remember sinking down at the foot of
the staircase--suddenly collapsing there on the lowest step and then,
with a revulsion, recalling that it was exactly where more than a month
before, in the darkness of night and just so bowed with evil things,
I had seen the spectre of the most horrible of women. At this I was
able to straighten myself; I went the rest of the way up; I made, in
my bewilderment, for the schoolroom, where there were objects belonging
to me that I should have to take. But I opened the door to find again,
in a flash, my eyes unsealed. In the presence of what I saw I reeled
straight back upon my resistance.

Seated at my own table in clear noonday light I saw a person whom,
without my previous experience, I should have taken at the first
blush for some housemaid who might have stayed at home to look
after the place and who, availing herself of rare relief from
observation and of the schoolroom table and my pens, ink, and paper,
had applied herself to the considerable effort of a letter to her
sweetheart. There was an effort in the way that, while her arms rested
on the table, her hands with evident weariness supported her head;
but at the moment I took this in I had already become aware that,
in spite of my entrance, her attitude strangely persisted. Then it
was--with the very act of its announcing itself--that her identity
flared up in a change of posture. She rose, not as if she had heard
me, but with an indescribable grand melancholy of indifference and
detachment, and, within a dozen feet of me, stood there as my vile
predecessor. Dishonoured and tragic, she was all before me; but even as
I fixed and, for memory, secured it, the awful image passed away. Dark
as midnight in her black dress, her haggard beauty and her unutterable
woe, she had looked at me long enough to appear to say that her right
to sit at my table was as good as mine to sit at hers. While these
instants lasted indeed I had the extraordinary chill of a feeling that
it was I who was the intruder. It was as a wild protest against it
that, actually addressing her--“You terrible, miserable woman!”--I
heard myself break into a sound that, by the open door, rang through
the long passage and the empty house. She looked at me as if she heard
me, but I had recovered myself and cleared the air. There was nothing
in the room the next minute but the sunshine and a sense that I must
stay.


XVI

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

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

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

She showed her surprise. “A friend--_you_?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Miss Flora was too sweet. She said, ‘Oh, of course, of
course!’--and I said the same.”

I thought a moment. “You were too sweet too--I can hear you all. But
none the less, between Miles and me, it’s now all out.”

“All out?” My companion stared. “But what, Miss?”

“Everything. It doesn’t matter. I’ve made up my mind. I came
home, my dear,” I went on, “for a talk with Miss Jessel.”

I had by this time formed the habit of having Mrs. Grose literally
well in hand in advance of my sounding that note; so that even now,
as she bravely blinked under the signal of my word, I could keep her
comparatively firm. “A talk! Do you mean she spoke?”

“It came to that. I found her, on my return, in the schoolroom.”

“And what did she say?” I can hear the good woman still, and the
candour of her stupefaction.

“That she suffers the torments----!”

It was this, of a truth, that made her, as she filled out my picture,
gape. “Do you mean,” she faltered, “--of the lost?”

“Of the lost. Of the damned. And that’s why, to share them----” I
faltered myself with the horror of it.

But my companion, with less imagination, kept me up. “To share
them----?”

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

“Because you’ve made up your mind? But to what?”

“To everything.”

“And what do you call ‘everything’?”

“Why, sending for their uncle.”

“Oh, Miss, in pity do,” my friend broke out.

“Ah, but I will, I _will_! I see it’s the only way. What’s
‘out,’ as I told you, with Miles is that if he thinks I’m
afraid to--and has ideas of what he gains by that--he shall see
he’s mistaken. Yes, yes; his uncle shall have it here from me on
the spot (and before the boy himself if necessary) that if I’m to be
reproached with having done nothing again about more school----”

“Yes, Miss----” my companion pressed me.

“Well, there’s that awful reason.”

There were now clearly so many of these for my poor colleague that she
was excusable for being vague. “But--a--which?”

“Why, the letter from his old place.”

“You’ll show it to the master?”

“I ought to have done so on the instant.”

“Oh, no!” said Mrs. Grose with decision.

“I’ll put it before him,” I went on inexorably, “that I can’t
undertake to work the question on behalf of a child who has been
expelled----”

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

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

“He didn’t really in the least know them. The fault’s mine.”
She had turned quite pale.

“Well, you shan’t suffer,” I answered.

“The children shan’t!” she emphatically returned.

I was silent awhile; we looked at each other. “Then what am I to tell
him?”

“You needn’t tell him anything. _I’ll_ tell him.”

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

“I tell the bailiff. _He_ writes.”

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

My question had a sarcastic force that I had not fully intended, and
it made her, after a moment, inconsequently break down. The tears were
again in her eyes. “Ah, Miss, _you_ write!”

“Well--tonight,” I at last answered; and on this we separated.


XVII

I went so far, in the evening, as to make a beginning. The weather
had changed back, a great wind was abroad, and beneath the lamp, in
my room, with Flora at peace beside me, I sat for a long time before
a blank sheet of paper and listened to the lash of the rain and the
batter of the gusts. Finally I went out, taking a candle; I crossed the
passage and listened a minute at Miles’s door. What, under my endless
obsession, I had been impelled to listen for was some betrayal of his
not being at rest, and I presently caught one, but not in the form I
had expected. His voice tinkled out. “I say, you there--come in.”
It was a gaiety in the gloom!

I went in with my light and found him, in bed, very wide awake, but
very much at his ease. “Well, what are _you_ up to?” he asked with
a grace of sociability in which it occurred to me that Mrs. Grose, had
she been present, might have looked in vain for proof that anything was
“out.”

I stood over him with my candle. “How did you know I was there?”

“Why, of course I heard you. Did you fancy you made no noise?
You’re like a troop of cavalry!” he beautifully laughed.

“Then you weren’t asleep?”

“Not much! I lie awake and think.”

I had put my candle, designedly, a short way off, and then, as he
held out his friendly old hand to me, had sat down on the edge of his
bed. “What is it,” I asked, “that you think of?”

“What in the world, my dear, but _you_?”

“Ah, the pride I take in your appreciation doesn’t insist on
that! I had so far rather you slept.”

“Well, I think also, you know, of this queer business of ours.”

I marked the coolness of his firm little hand. “Of what queer
business, Miles?”

“Why, the way you bring me up. And all the rest!”

I fairly held my breath a minute, and even from my glimmering taper
there was light enough to show how he smiled up at me from his
pillow. “What do you mean by all the rest?”

“Oh, you know, you know!”

I could say nothing for a minute, though I felt, as I held his hand
and our eyes continued to meet, that my silence had all the air of
admitting his charge and that nothing in the whole world of reality was
perhaps at that moment so fabulous as our actual relation. “Certainly
you shall go back to school,” I said, “if it be that that troubles
you. But not to the old place--we must find another, a better. How
could I know it did trouble you, this question, when you never told
me so, never spoke of it at all?” His clear, listening face, framed
in its smooth whiteness, made him for the minute as appealing as some
wistful patient in a children’s hospital; and I would have given, as
the resemblance came to me, all I possessed on earth really to be the
nurse or the sister of charity who might have helped to cure him. Well,
even as it was, I perhaps might help! “Do you know you’ve never
said a word to me about your school--I mean the old one; never
mentioned it in any way?”

He seemed to wonder; he smiled with the same loveliness. But he clearly
gained time; he waited, he called for guidance. “Haven’t I?” It
wasn’t for _me_ to help him--it was for the thing I had met!

Something in his tone and the expression of his face, as I got this
from him, set my heart aching with such a pang as it had never yet
known; so unutterably touching was it to see his little brain puzzled
and his little resources taxed to play, under the spell laid on him,
a part of innocence and consistency. “No, never--from the hour you
came back. You’ve never mentioned to me one of your masters, one of
your comrades, nor the least little thing that ever happened to you at
school. Never, little Miles--no, never--have you given me an inkling of
anything that _may_ have happened there. Therefore you can fancy how
much I’m in the dark. Until you came out, that way, this morning,
you had, since the first hour I saw you, scarce even made a reference
to anything in your previous life. You seemed so perfectly to accept
the present.” It was extraordinary how my absolute conviction of his
secret precocity (or whatever I might call the poison of an influence
that I dared but half to phrase) made him, in spite of the faint breath
of his inward trouble, appear as accessible as an older person--imposed
him almost as an intellectual equal. “I thought you wanted to go on
as you are.”

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

“You’re tired of Bly?”

“Oh, no, I like Bly.”

“Well, then----?”

“Oh, _you_ know what a boy wants!”

I felt that I didn’t know so well as Miles, and I took temporary
refuge. “You want to go to your uncle?”

Again, at this, with his sweet ironic face, he made a movement on the
pillow. “Ah, you can’t get off with that!”

I was silent a little, and it was I, now, I think, who changed
colour. “My dear, I don’t want to get off!”

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

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

“Well, don’t you understand that that’s exactly what I’m
working for? You’ll have to tell him--about the way you’ve let it
all drop: you’ll have to tell him a tremendous lot!”

The exultation with which he uttered this helped me somehow, for the
instant, to meet him rather more. “And how much will _you_, Miles,
have to tell him? There are things he’ll ask you!”

He turned it over. “Very likely. But what things?”

“The things you’ve never told me. To make up his mind what to do
with you. He can’t send you back----”

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

He said it with admirable serenity, with positive unimpeachable
gaiety; and doubtless it was that very note that most evoked for me the
poignancy, the unnatural childish tragedy, of his probable reappearance
at the end of three months with all this bravado and still more
dishonour. It overwhelmed me now that I should never be able to bear
that, and it made me let myself go. I threw myself upon him and in the
tenderness of my pity I embraced him. “Dear little Miles, dear little
Miles----!”

My face was close to his, and he let me kiss him, simply taking it with
indulgent good-humour. “Well, old lady?”

“Is there nothing--nothing at all that you want to tell me?”

He turned off a little, facing round toward the wall and holding up
his hand to look at as one had seen sick children look. “I’ve told
you--I told you this morning.”

Oh, I was sorry for him! “That you just want me not to worry you?”

He looked round at me now, as if in recognition of my understanding
him; then ever so gently, “To let me alone,” he replied.

There was even a singular little dignity in it, something that made
me release him, yet, when I had slowly risen, linger beside him. God
knows I never wished to harass him, but I felt that merely, at this,
to turn my back on him was to abandon or, to put it more truly, to lose
him. “I’ve just begun a letter to your uncle,” I said.

“Well, then, finish it!”

I waited a minute. “What happened before?”

He gazed up at me again. “Before what?”

“Before you came back. And before you went away.”

For some time he was silent, but he continued to meet my eyes. “What
happened?”

It made me, the sound of the words, in which it seemed to me that
I caught for the very first time a small faint quaver of consenting
consciousness--it made me drop on my knees beside the bed and seize
once more the chance of possessing him. “Dear little Miles, dear
little Miles, if you _knew_ how I want to help you! It’s only that,
it’s nothing but that, and I’d rather die than give you a pain
or do you a wrong--I’d rather die than hurt a hair of you. Dear
little Miles”--oh, I brought it out now even if I _should_ go too
far--“I just want you to help me to save you!” But I knew in a
moment after this that I had gone too far. The answer to my appeal was
instantaneous, but it came in the form of an extraordinary blast and
chill, a gust of frozen air and a shake of the room as great as if,
in the wild wind, the casement had crashed in. The boy gave a loud,
high shriek, which, lost in the rest of the shock of sound, might have
seemed, indistinctly, though I was so close to him, a note either of
jubilation or of terror. I jumped to my feet again and was conscious of
darkness. So for a moment we remained, while I stared about me and saw
that the drawn curtains were unstirred and the window tight. “Why,
the candle’s out!” I then cried.

“It was I who blew it, dear!” said Miles.


XVIII

The next day, after lessons, Mrs. Grose found a moment to say to me
quietly: “Have you written, Miss?”

“Yes--I’ve written.” But I didn’t add--for the hour--that
my letter, sealed and directed, was still in my pocket. There would
be time enough to send it before the messenger should go to the
village. Meanwhile there had been, on the part of my pupils, no more
brilliant, more exemplary morning. It was exactly as if they had both
had at heart to gloss over any recent little friction. They performed
the dizziest feats of arithmetic, soaring quite out of _my_ feeble
range, and perpetrated, in higher spirits than ever, geographical and
historical jokes. It was conspicuous of course in Miles in particular
that he appeared to wish to show how easily he could let me down. This
child, to my memory, really lives in a setting of beauty and misery
that no words can translate; there was a distinction all his own in
every impulse he revealed; never was a small natural creature, to the
uninitiated eye all frankness and freedom, a more ingenious, a more
extraordinary little gentleman. I had perpetually to guard against
the wonder of contemplation into which my initiated view betrayed me;
to check the irrelevant gaze and discouraged sigh in which I constantly
both attacked and renounced the enigma of what such a little gentleman
could have done that deserved a penalty. Say that, by the dark prodigy
I knew, the imagination of all evil _had_ been opened up to him:
all the justice within me ached for the proof that it could ever have
flowered into an act.

He had never, at any rate, been such a little gentleman as when, after
our early dinner on this dreadful day, he came round to me and asked if
I shouldn’t like him, for half an hour, to play to me. David playing
to Saul could never have shown a finer sense of the occasion. It was
literally a charming exhibition of tact, of magnanimity, and quite
tantamount to his saying outright: “The true knights we love to read
about never push an advantage too far. I know what you mean now: you
mean that--to be let alone yourself and not followed up--you’ll cease
to worry and spy upon me, won’t keep me so close to you, will let me
go and come. Well, I ‘come,’ you see--but I don’t go! There’ll
be plenty of time for that. I do really delight in your society,
and I only want to show you that I contended for a principle.” It
may be imagined whether I resisted this appeal or failed to accompany
him again, hand in hand, to the schoolroom. He sat down at the old
piano and played as he had never played, and if there are those who
think he had better have been kicking a football I can only say that
I wholly agree with them. For at the end of a time that under his
influence I had quite ceased to measure I started up with a strange
sense of having literally slept at my post. It was after luncheon,
and by the schoolroom fire, and yet I hadn’t really, in the least,
slept: I had only done something much worse--I had forgotten. Where,
all this time, was Flora? When I put the question to Miles he played on
a minute before answering, and then could only say: “Why, my dear,
how do _I_ know?”--breaking moreover into a happy laugh which,
immediately after, as if it were a vocal accompaniment, he prolonged
into incoherent, extravagant song.

I went straight to my room, but his sister was not there; then, before
going downstairs, I looked into several others. As she was nowhere
about she would surely be with Mrs. Grose, whom, in the comfort of
that theory, I accordingly proceeded in quest of. I found her where I
had found her the evening before, but she met my quick challenge with
blank, scared ignorance. She had only supposed that, after the repast,
I had carried off both the children; as to which she was quite in her
right, for it was the very first time I had allowed the little girl
out of my sight without some special provision. Of course now indeed
she might be with the maids, so that the immediate thing was to look
for her without an air of alarm. This we promptly arranged between us;
but when, ten minutes later and in pursuance of our arrangement, we met
in the hall, it was only to report on either side that after guarded
inquiries we had altogether failed to trace her. For a minute there,
apart from observation, we exchanged mute alarms, and I could feel with
what high interest my friend returned me all those I had from the first
given her.

“She’ll be above,” she presently said--“in one of the rooms you
haven’t searched.”

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

Mrs. Grose stared. “Without a hat?”

I naturally also looked volumes. “Isn’t that woman always without
one?”

“She’s with _her_?”

“She’s with _her_!” I declared. “We must find them.”

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

“Oh, _he’s_ with Quint. They’re in the schoolroom.”

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

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

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

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

She had helplessly gloomed at the upper regions. “You leave
him----?”

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

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

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

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

“What do I care when the child has nothing? I can’t wait to
dress,” I cried, “and if you must do so, I leave you. Try
meanwhile, yourself, upstairs.”

“With _them_?” Oh, on this, the poor woman promptly joined me!


XIX

We went straight to the lake, as it was called at Bly, and I dare say
rightly called, though I reflect that it may in fact have been a sheet
of water less remarkable than it appeared to my untravelled eyes. My
acquaintance with sheets of water was small, and the pool of Bly, at
all events on the few occasions of my consenting, under the protection
of my pupils, to affront its surface in the old flat-bottomed boat
moored there for our use, had impressed me both with its extent and
its agitation. The usual place of embarkation was half a mile from
the house, but I had an intimate conviction that, wherever Flora
might be, she was not near home. She had not given me the slip for
any small adventure, and, since the day of the very great one that I
had shared with her by the pond, I had been aware, in our walks, of
the quarter to which she most inclined. This was why I had now given
to Mrs. Grose’s steps so marked a direction--a direction that made
her, when she perceived it, oppose a resistance that showed me she was
freshly mystified. “You’re going to the water, Miss?--you think
she’s _in_----?”

“She may be, though the depth is, I believe, nowhere very great. But
what I judge most likely is that she’s on the spot from which, the
other day, we saw together what I told you.”

“When she pretended not to see----?”

“With that astounding self-possession! I’ve always been sure she
wanted to go back alone. And now her brother has managed it for her.”

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

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

“And if she _is_ there----?”

“Yes?”

“Then Miss Jessel is?”

“Beyond a doubt. You shall see.”

“Oh, thank you!” my friend cried, planted so firm that, taking it
in, I went straight on without her. By the time I reached the pool,
however, she was close behind me, and I knew that, whatever, to her
apprehension, might befall me, the exposure of my society struck her
as her least danger. She exhaled a moan of relief as we at last came
in sight of the greater part of the water without a sight of the
child. There was no trace of Flora on that nearer side of the bank
where my observation of her had been most startling, and none on the
opposite edge, where, save for a margin of some twenty yards, a thick
copse came down to the water. The pond, oblong in shape, had a width so
scant compared to its length that, with its ends out of view, it might
have been taken for a scant river. We looked at the empty expanse, and
then I felt the suggestion of my friend’s eyes. I knew what she meant
and I replied with a negative headshake.

“No, no; wait! She has taken the boat.”

My companion stared at the vacant mooring-place and then again across
the lake. “Then where is it?”

“Our not seeing it is the strongest of proofs. She has used it to go
over, and then has managed to hide it.”

“All alone--that child?”

“She’s not alone, and at such times she’s not a child: she’s
an old, old woman.” I scanned all the visible shore while Mrs. Grose
took again, into the queer element I offered her, one of her plunges
of submission; then I pointed out that the boat might perfectly be in a
small refuge formed by one of the recesses of the pool, an indentation
masked, for the hither side, by a projection of the bank and by a clump
of trees growing close to the water.

“But if the boat’s there, where on earth’s _she_?” my colleague
anxiously asked.

“That’s exactly what we must learn.” And I started to walk
further.

“By going all the way round?”

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

“Laws!” cried my friend again; the chain of my logic was ever too
much for her. It dragged her at my heels even now, and when we had
got half-way round--a devious, tiresome process, on ground much broken
and by a path choked with overgrowth--I paused to give her breath. I
sustained her with a grateful arm, assuring her that she might hugely
help me; and this started us afresh, so that in the course of but
few minutes more we reached a point from which we found the boat to
be where I had supposed it. It had been intentionally left as much as
possible out of sight and was tied to one of the stakes of a fence that
came, just there, down to the brink and that had been an assistance
to disembarking. I recognised, as I looked at the pair of short, thick
oars, quite safely drawn up, the prodigious character of the feat for
a little girl; but I had lived, by this time, too long among wonders
and had panted to too many livelier measures. There was a gate in the
fence, through which we passed, and that brought us, after a trifling
interval, more into the open. Then, “There she is!” we both
exclaimed at once.

Flora, a short way off, stood before us on the grass and smiled as
if her performance was now complete. The next thing she did, however,
was to stoop straight down and pluck--quite as if it were all she was
there for--a big, ugly spray of withered fern. I instantly became sure
she had just come out of the copse. She waited for us, not herself
taking a step, and I was conscious of the rare solemnity with which
we presently approached her. She smiled and smiled, and we met; but it
was all done in a silence by this time flagrantly ominous. Mrs. Grose
was the first to break the spell: she threw herself on her knees and,
drawing the child to her breast, clasped in a long embrace the little
tender, yielding body. While this dumb convulsion lasted I could only
watch it--which I did the more intently when I saw Flora’s face peep
at me over our companion’s shoulder. It was serious now--the flicker
had left it; but it strengthened the pang with which I at that moment
envied Mrs. Grose the simplicity of _her_ relation. Still, all this
while, nothing more passed between us save that Flora had let her
foolish fern again drop to the ground. What she and I had virtually
said to each other was that pretexts were useless now. When Mrs. Grose
finally got up she kept the child’s hand, so that the two were still
before me; and the singular reticence of our communion was even more
marked in the frank look she launched me. “I’ll be hanged,” it
said, “if _I’ll_ speak!”

It was Flora who, gazing all over me in candid wonder, was the
first. She was struck with our bareheaded aspect. “Why, where are
your things?”

“Where yours are, my dear!” I promptly returned.

She had already got back her gaiety, and appeared to take this as an
answer quite sufficient. “And where’s Miles?” she went on.

There was something in the small valour of it that quite finished me:
these three words from her were, in a flash like the glitter of a
drawn blade, the jostle of the cup that my hand, for weeks and weeks,
had held high and full to the brim and that now, even before speaking,
I felt overflow in a deluge. “I’ll tell you if you’ll tell
_me_----” I heard myself say, then heard the tremor in which it
broke.

“Well, what?”

Mrs. Grose’s suspense blazed at me, but it was too late now, and I
brought the thing out handsomely. “Where, my pet, is Miss Jessel?”


XX

Just as in the churchyard with Miles, the whole thing was upon us. Much
as I had made of the fact that this name had never once, between
us, been sounded, the quick, smitten glare with which the child’s
face now received it fairly likened my breach of the silence to the
smash of a pane of glass. It added to the interposing cry, as if to
stay the blow, that Mrs. Grose, at the same instant, uttered over my
violence--the shriek of a creature scared, or rather wounded, which, in
turn, within a few seconds, was completed by a gasp of my own. I seized
my colleague’s arm. “She’s there, she’s there!”

Miss Jessel stood before us on the opposite bank exactly as she had
stood the other time, and I remember, strangely, as the first feeling
now produced in me, my thrill of joy at having brought on a proof. She
was there, and I was justified; she was there, and I was neither
cruel nor mad. She was there for poor scared Mrs. Grose, but she was
there most for Flora; and no moment of my monstrous time was perhaps
so extraordinary as that in which I consciously threw out to her--with
the sense that, pale and ravenous demon as she was, she would catch and
understand it--an inarticulate message of gratitude. She rose erect
on the spot my friend and I had lately quitted, and there was not,
in all the long reach of her desire, an inch of her evil that fell
short. This first vividness of vision and emotion were things of a
few seconds, during which Mrs. Grose’s dazed blink across to where I
pointed struck me as a sovereign sign that she too at last saw, just
as it carried my own eyes precipitately to the child. The revelation
then of the manner in which Flora was affected startled me, in truth,
far more than it would have done to find her also merely agitated,
for direct dismay was of course not what I had expected. Prepared and
on her guard as our pursuit had actually made her, she would repress
every betrayal; and I was therefore shaken, on the spot, by my first
glimpse of the particular one for which I had not allowed. To see her,
without a convulsion of her small pink face, not even feign to glance
in the direction of the prodigy I announced, but only, instead of
that, turn at _me_ an expression of hard, still gravity, an expression
absolutely new and unprecedented and that appeared to read and accuse
and judge me--this was a stroke that somehow converted the little girl
herself into the very presence that could make me quail. I quailed
even though my certitude that she thoroughly saw was never greater
than at that instant, and in the immediate need to defend myself
I called it passionately to witness. “She’s there, you little
unhappy thing--there, there, _there_, and you see her as well as you
see me!” I had said shortly before to Mrs. Grose that she was not at
these times a child, but an old, old woman, and that description of her
could not have been more strikingly confirmed than in the way in which,
for all answer to this, she simply showed me, without a concession, an
admission, of her eyes, a countenance of deeper and deeper, of indeed
suddenly quite fixed, reprobation. I was by this time--if I can put
the whole thing at all together--more appalled at what I may properly
call her manner than at anything else, though it was simultaneously
with this that I became aware of having Mrs. Grose also, and very
formidably, to reckon with. My elder companion, the next moment, at
any rate, blotted out everything but her own flushed face and her loud,
shocked protest, a burst of high disapproval. “What a dreadful turn,
to be sure, Miss! Where on earth do you see anything?”

I could only grasp her more quickly yet, for even while she spoke the
hideous plain presence stood undimmed and undaunted. It had already
lasted a minute, and it lasted while I continued, seizing my colleague,
quite thrusting her at it and presenting her to it, to insist with my
pointing hand. “You don’t see her exactly as _we_ see?--you mean
to say you don’t now--_now_? She’s as big as a blazing fire! Only
look, dearest woman, _look_----!” She looked, even as I did, and
gave me, with her deep groan of negation, repulsion, compassion--the
mixture with her pity of her relief at her exemption--a sense, touching
to me even then, that she would have backed me up if she could. I might
well have needed that, for with this hard blow of the proof that her
eyes were hopelessly sealed I felt my own situation horribly crumble,
I felt--I saw--my livid predecessor press, from her position, on my
defeat, and I was conscious, more than all, of what I should have
from this instant to deal with in the astounding little attitude
of Flora. Into this attitude Mrs. Grose immediately and violently
entered, breaking, even while there pierced through my sense of ruin a
prodigious private triumph, into breathless reassurance.

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

Our companion, on this, had responded with a strange, quick primness
of propriety, and they were again, with Mrs. Grose on her feet, united,
as it were, in pained opposition to me. Flora continued to fix me with
her small mask of reprobation, and even at that minute I prayed God to
forgive me for seeming to see that, as she stood there holding tight
to our friend’s dress, her incomparable childish beauty had suddenly
failed, had quite vanished. I’ve said it already--she was literally,
she was hideously, hard; she had turned common and almost ugly. “I
don’t know what you mean. I see nobody. I see nothing. I never
_have_. I think you’re cruel. I don’t like you!” Then, after
this deliverance, which might have been that of a vulgarly pert little
girl in the street, she hugged Mrs. Grose more closely and buried in
her skirts the dreadful little face. In this position she produced an
almost furious wail. “Take me away, take me away--oh, take me away
from _her_!”

“From _me_?” I panted.

“From you--from you!” she cried.

Even Mrs. Grose looked across at me dismayed, while I had nothing
to do but communicate again with the figure that, on the opposite
bank, without a movement, as rigidly still as if catching, beyond the
interval, our voices, was as vividly there for my disaster as it was
not there for my service. The wretched child had spoken exactly as if
she had got from some outside source each of her stabbing little words,
and I could therefore, in the full despair of all I had to accept,
but sadly shake my head at her. “If I had ever doubted, all my doubt
would at present have gone. I’ve been living with the miserable
truth, and now it has only too much closed round me. Of course
I’ve lost you: I’ve interfered, and you’ve seen--under _her_
dictation”--with which I faced, over the pool again, our infernal
witness--“the easy and perfect way to meet it. I’ve done my best,
but I’ve lost you. Good-bye.” For Mrs. Grose I had an imperative,
an almost frantic “Go, go!” before which, in infinite distress,
but mutely possessed of the little girl and clearly convinced, in spite
of her blindness, that something awful had occurred and some collapse
engulfed us, she retreated, by the way we had come, as fast as she
could move.

Of what first happened when I was left alone I had no subsequent
memory. I only knew that at the end of, I suppose, a quarter of an
hour, an odorous dampness and roughness, chilling and piercing my
trouble, had made me understand that I must have thrown myself, on
my face, on the ground and given way to a wildness of grief. I must
have lain there long and cried and sobbed, for when I raised my head
the day was almost done. I got up and looked a moment, through the
twilight, at the grey pool and its blank, haunted edge, and then
I took, back to the house, my dreary and difficult course. When I
reached the gate in the fence the boat, to my surprise, was gone,
so that I had a fresh reflection to make on Flora’s extraordinary
command of the situation. She passed that night, by the most tacit,
and I should add, were not the word so grotesque a false note, the
happiest of arrangements, with Mrs. Grose. I saw neither of them on
my return, but, on the other hand, as by an ambiguous compensation,
I saw a great deal of Miles. I saw--I can use no other phrase--so much
of him that it was as if it were more than it had ever been. No evening
I had passed at Bly had the portentous quality of this one; in spite
of which--and in spite also of the deeper depths of consternation that
had opened beneath my feet--there was literally, in the ebbing actual,
an extraordinarily sweet sadness. On reaching the house I had never so
much as looked for the boy; I had simply gone straight to my room to
change what I was wearing and to take in, at a glance, much material
testimony to Flora’s rupture. Her little belongings had all been
removed. When later, by the schoolroom fire, I was served with tea
by the usual maid, I indulged, on the article of my other pupil,
in no inquiry whatever. He had his freedom now--he might have it to
the end! Well, he did have it; and it consisted--in part at least--of
his coming in at about eight o’clock and sitting down with me in
silence. On the removal of the tea-things I had blown out the candles
and drawn my chair closer: I was conscious of a mortal coldness and
felt as if I should never again be warm. So, when he appeared, I was
sitting in the glow with my thoughts. He paused a moment by the door as
if to look at me; then--as if to share them--came to the other side of
the hearth and sank into a chair. We sat there in absolute stillness;
yet he wanted, I felt, to be with me.


XXI

Before a new day, in my room, had fully broken, my eyes opened to
Mrs. Grose, who had come to my bedside with worse news. Flora was so
markedly feverish that an illness was perhaps at hand; she had passed
a night of extreme unrest, a night agitated above all by fears that had
for their subject not in the least her former, but wholly her present,
governess. It was not against the possible re-entrance of Miss Jessel
on the scene that she protested--it was conspicuously and passionately
against mine. I was promptly on my feet of course, and with an immense
deal to ask; the more that my friend had discernibly now girded her
loins to meet me once more. This I felt as soon as I had put to her
the question of her sense of the child’s sincerity as against my
own. “She persists in denying to you that she saw, or has ever seen,
anything?”

My visitor’s trouble, truly, was great. “Ah, Miss, it isn’t a
matter on which I can push her! Yet it isn’t either, I must say, as
if I much needed to. It has made her, every inch of her, quite old.”

“Oh, I see her perfectly from here. She resents, for all the world
like some high little personage, the imputation on her truthfulness
and, as it were, her respectability. ‘Miss Jessel indeed--_she_!’
Ah, she’s ‘respectable,’ the chit! The impression she gave me
there yesterday was, I assure you, the very strangest of all; it was
quite beyond any of the others. I _did_ put my foot in it! She’ll
never speak to me again.”

Hideous and obscure as it all was, it held Mrs. Grose briefly silent;
then she granted my point with a frankness which, I made sure, had more
behind it. “I think indeed, Miss, she never will. She do have a grand
manner about it!”

“And that manner”--I summed it up--“is practically what’s the
matter with her now!”

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

“I see--I see.” I too, on my side, had so much more than worked it
out. “Has she said to you since yesterday--except to repudiate her
familiarity with anything so dreadful--a single other word about Miss
Jessel?”

“Not one, Miss. And of course you know,” my friend added, “I took
it from her, by the lake, that, just then and there at least, there
_was_ nobody.”

“Rather! And, naturally, you take it from her still.”

“I don’t contradict her. What else can I do?”

“Nothing in the world! You’ve the cleverest little person to deal
with. They’ve made them--their two friends, I mean--still cleverer
even than nature did; for it was wondrous material to play on! Flora
has now her grievance, and she’ll work it to the end.”

“Yes, Miss; but to _what_ end?”

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

I winced at the fair show of the scene in Mrs. Grose’s face; she
looked for a minute as if she sharply saw them together. “And him who
thinks so well of you!”

“He has an odd way--it comes over me now,” I laughed, “--of
proving it! But that doesn’t matter. What Flora wants, of course, is
to get rid of me.”

My companion bravely concurred. “Never again to so much as look at
you.”

“So that what you’ve come to me now for,” I asked, “is to speed
me on my way?” Before she had time to reply, however, I had her in
check. “I’ve a better idea--the result of my reflections. My going
_would_ seem the right thing, and on Sunday I was terribly near it. Yet
that won’t do. It’s _you_ who must go. You must take Flora.”

My visitor, at this, did speculate. “But where in the world----?”

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

“Only to tell on you----?”

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

She was still vague. “And what _is_ your remedy?”

“Your loyalty, to begin with. And then Miles’s.”

She looked at me hard. “Do you think he----?”

“Won’t if he has the chance, turn on me? Yes, I venture still
to think it. At all events, I want to try. Get off with his sister
as soon as possible and leave me with him alone.” I was amazed,
myself, at the spirit I had still in reserve, and therefore perhaps a
trifle the more disconcerted at the way in which, in spite of this fine
example of it, she hesitated. “There’s one thing, of course,” I
went on: “they mustn’t, before she goes, see each other for three
seconds.” Then it came over me that, in spite of Flora’s presumable
sequestration from the instant of her return from the pool, it might
already be too late. “Do you mean,” I anxiously asked, “that they
_have_ met?”

At this she quite flushed. “Ah, Miss, I’m not such a fool as
that! If I’ve been obliged to leave her three or four times, it has
been each time with one of the maids, and at present, though she’s
alone, she’s locked in safe. And yet--and yet!” There were too many
things.

“And yet what?”

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

“I’m not sure of anything but _you_. But I have, since last
evening, a new hope. I think he wants to give me an opening. I do
believe that--poor little exquisite wretch!--he wants to speak. Last
evening, in the firelight and the silence, he sat with me for two hours
as if it were just coming.”

Mrs. Grose looked hard, through the window, at the grey, gathering
day. “And did it come?”

“No, though I waited and waited, I confess it didn’t, and it
was without a breach of the silence or so much as a faint allusion
to his sister’s condition and absence that we at last kissed for
good-night. All the same,” I continued, “I can’t, if her uncle
sees her, consent to his seeing her brother without my having giv

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