The Turn of the Screw

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 afterward showed was that he put
the whole thing to her as a kind of favor, an obligation he should gratefully
incur. She conceived him as rich, but as fearfully extravagant—saw him
all in a glow of high fashion, of good looks, of expensive habits, of charming
ways with women. He had for his own town residence a big house filled with the
spoils of travel and the trophies of the chase; but it was to his country home,
an old family place in Essex, that he wished her immediately to proceed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Which was—?”

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

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

“She never saw him again.”

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

“I haven’t one.”

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

I

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes; if I do—?”

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

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

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

“In Harley Street.”

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

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

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

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

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

II

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

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

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

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

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

“They absolutely decline.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, yes; it would be incredible.”

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

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

Nonetheless, the rest of the day I watched for further occasion to approach my
colleague, especially as, toward evening, I began to fancy she rather sought to
avoid me. I overtook her, I remember, on the staircase; we went down together,
and at the bottom I detained her, holding her there with a hand on her arm.
“I take what you said to me at noon as a declaration that
you’ve never known him to be bad.”

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

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

“Yes indeed, miss, thank God!”

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

“Is no boy for me!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She looked blank, but she colored. “Why, of him.”

“Of the master?”

“Of who else?”

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

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

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

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

“But not about all?”

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

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

“No—she went off.”

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

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

I turned this over. “But of what?”

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

III

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

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

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

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

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

“And to his uncle?”

I was incisive. “Nothing.”

“And to the boy himself?”

I was wonderful. “Nothing.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV

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

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

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

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

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

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

V

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

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

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

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

“Has anything happened?”

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

“Through this window? Dreadful!”

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

Her hand tightened. “What was it?”

“An extraordinary man. Looking in.”

“What extraordinary man?”

“I haven’t the least idea.”

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

“I know still less.”

“Have you seen him before?”

“Yes—once. On the old tower.”

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

“Oh, very much!”

“Yet you didn’t tell me?”

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

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

“I don’t in the very least.”

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

“And on this spot just now.”

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

“Only standing there and looking down at me.”

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

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

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

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

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

“What is he? He’s a horror.”

“A horror?”

“He’s—God help me if I know what he is!”

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

“Oh, I’m not fit for church!”

“Won’t it do you good?”

“It won’t do them!— I nodded at the house.

“The children?”

“I can’t leave them now.”

“You’re afraid—?”

I spoke boldly. “I’m afraid of him.”

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

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

“Almost at dark,” said Mrs. Grose.

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

“Then how did he get in?”

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

“He only peeps?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Nobody?” she echoed.

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

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

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

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

“You know him then?”

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

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

“And dressed—?”

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

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

I caught it up. “You do know him?”

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

“Quint?”

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

“When the master was?”

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

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

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

“And what became of him?”

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

“Went where?”

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

“Died?” I almost shrieked.

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

VI

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

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

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

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

“But how do you know?”

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

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

“Little Miles? That’s what he wants!”

She looked immensely scared again. “The child?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That he has never spoken of him?”

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

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

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

“Too free with everyone!”

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

“Oh, not admittedly. I knew it—but the master
didn’t.”

“And you never told him?”

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

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

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

“Afraid of what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suddenly, in these circumstances, I became aware that, on the other side of the
Sea of Azof, we had an interested spectator. The way this knowledge gathered in
me was the strangest thing in the world—the strangest, that is, except
the very much stranger in which it quickly merged itself. I had sat down with a
piece of work—for I was something or other that could sit—on the
old stone bench which overlooked the pond; and in this position I began to take
in with certitude, and yet without direct vision, the presence, at a distance,
of a third person. The old trees, the thick shrubbery, made a great and
pleasant shade, but it was all suffused with the brightness of the hot, still
hour. There was no ambiguity in anything; none whatever, at least, in the
conviction I from one moment to another found myself forming as to what I
should see straight before me and across the lake as a consequence of raising
my eyes. They were attached at this juncture to the stitching in which I was
engaged, and I can feel once more the spasm of my effort not to move them till
I should so have steadied myself as to be able to make up my mind what to do.
There was an alien object in view—a figure whose right of presence I
instantly, passionately questioned. I recollect counting over perfectly the
possibilities, reminding myself that nothing was more natural, for instance,
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 unmistakable horror and evil: a woman in black, pale and
dreadful—with such an air also, and such a face!—on the other side
of the lake. I was there with the child—quiet for the hour; and in the
midst of it she came.”

“Came how—from where?”

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

“And without coming nearer?”

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

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

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

“Miss Jessel?”

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s only then to spare you.”

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

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

“Oh, no; that’s nothing—now!” Then I explained.
“It’s of not seeing her.”

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

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

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

“Likes such things—a scrap of an infant!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“At you, do you mean—so wickedly?”

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

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

“Ah, with such awful eyes!”

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

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

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

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

I made her turn pale. “Intention?”

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

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

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

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

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

“There was everything.”

“In spite of the difference—?”

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

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

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

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

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

“With her?”

“With them all.”

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

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

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

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

“Yet you had, then, your idea—”

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

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

VIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What occasions?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Never mentioned her in connection with Quint?”

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

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

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

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

“Oh, he couldn’t prevent—”

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

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

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

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

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

“Wouldn’t you?”

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

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

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

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

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

IX

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

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

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

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

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

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

X

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

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

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

“Ah, no!” she returned, almost with the full privilege of
childish inconsequence, resentfully, though with a long sweetness in her little
drawl of the negative.

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

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

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

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

You may imagine the general complexion, from that moment, of my nights. I
repeatedly sat up till I didn’t know when; I selected moments when my
roommate unmistakably slept, and, stealing out, took noiseless turns in the
passage and even pushed as far as to where I had last met Quint. But I never
met him there again; and I may as well say at once that I on no other occasion
saw him in the house. I just missed, on the staircase, on the other hand, a
different adventure. Looking down it from the top I once recognized the
presence of a woman seated on one of the lower steps with her back presented to
me, her body half-bowed and her head, in an attitude of woe, in her hands. I
had been there but an instant, however, when she vanished without looking round
at me. I knew, nonetheless, exactly what dreadful face she had to show; and I
wondered whether, if instead of being above I had been below, I should have
had, for going up, the same nerve I had lately shown Quint. Well, there
continued to be plenty of chance for nerve. On the eleventh night after my
latest encounter with that gentleman—they were all numbered now—I
had an alarm that perilously skirted it and that indeed, from the particular
quality of its unexpectedness, proved quite my sharpest shock. It was precisely
the first night during this series that, weary with watching, I had felt that I
might again without laxity lay myself down at my old hour. I slept immediately
and, as I afterward knew, till about one o’clock; but when I woke it was
to sit straight up, as completely roused as if a hand had shook me. I had left
a light burning, but it was now out, and I felt an instant certainty that Flora
had extinguished it. This brought me to my feet and straight, in the darkness,
to her bed, which I found she had left. A glance at the window enlightened me
further, and the striking of a match completed the picture.

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

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

XI

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

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

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

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

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

“Do what?”

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

“Then you didn’t undress at all?”

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

“And when did you go down?”

“At midnight. When I’m bad I am bad!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

XII

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

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

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

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

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

“On the part of little darlings—?”

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

“Quint’s and that woman’s?”

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

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

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

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

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

“For the children to come?”

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

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

“And who’s to make him?”

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

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

“But if they are, miss?”

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

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

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

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

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

“He ought to be here—he ought to help.”

I quickly rose, and I think I must have shown her a queerer face than ever yet.
“You see me asking him for a visit?” No, with her eyes on my face
she evidently couldn’t. Instead of it even—as a woman reads
another—she could see what I myself saw: his derision, his amusement, his
contempt for the breakdown of my resignation at being left alone and for the
fine machinery I had set in motion to attract his attention to my slighted
charms. She didn’t know—no one knew—how proud I had been to
serve him and to stick to our terms; yet she nonetheless took the measure, I
think, of the warning I now gave her. “If you should so lose your head as
to appeal to him for me—”

She was really frightened. “Yes, miss?”

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

XIII

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

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

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

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

XIV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, yes, you could.”

“And I can again.”

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

“No, not that again. It was nothing.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What is it, then?”

“Well—I want to see more life.”

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

“I want my own sort!”

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

“You really compare me to a baby girl?”

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

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

“Yes, if you didn’t—?”

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

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

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

“Know what, Miles?”

“Why, the way I’m going on.”

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

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

“In what way?”

“Why, by his coming down.”

“But who’ll get him to come down?”

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

XV

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

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

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

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

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

XVI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I thought a moment. “You were too sweet, too—I can hear you all.
But nonetheless, between Miles and me, it’s now all out.”

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

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

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

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

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

“That she suffers the torments—!”

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

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

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

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

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

“To everything.”

“And what do you call ‘everything’?”

“Why, sending for their uncle.”

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

“Yes, miss—” my companion pressed me.

“Well, there’s that awful reason.”

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

“Why, the letter from his old place.”

“You’ll show it to the master?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I tell the bailiff. He writes.”

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

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

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

XVII

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

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

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

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

“Then you weren’t asleep?”

“Not much! I lie awake and think.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, you know, you know!”

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

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

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

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

“You’re tired of Bly?”

“Oh, no, I like Bly.”

“Well, then—?”

“Oh, you know what a boy wants!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, then, finish it!”

I waited a minute. “What happened before?”

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

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

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

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

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

XVIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mrs. Grose stared. “Without a hat?”

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

“She’s with her?”

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

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

“Oh, he’s with Quint. They’re in the
schoolroom.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XIX

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

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

“When she pretended not to see—?”

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

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

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

“And if she is there—”

“Yes?”

“Then Miss Jessel is?”

“Beyond a doubt. You shall see.”

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

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

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

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

“All alone—that child?”

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

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

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

“By going all the way round?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, what?”

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

XX

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

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

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

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

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

“From me?” I panted.

“From you—from you!” she cried.

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

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

XXI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, miss; but to what end?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Only to tell on you—?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And yet what?”

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

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

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

“No, though I waited and waited, I confess it didn’t, and it was
without a breach of the silence or so much as a faint allusion to his
sister’s condition and absence that we at last kissed for good night. All
the same,” I continued, “I can’t, if her uncle sees her,
consent to his seeing her brother without my having given the boy—and
most of all because things have got so bad—a little more time.”

My friend appeared on this ground more reluctant than I could quite understand.
“What do you mean by more time?”

“Well, a day or two—really to bring it out. He’ll then be on
my side—of which you see the importance. If nothing comes, I shall
only fail, and you will, at the worst, have helped me by doing, on your arrival
in town, whatever you may have found possible.” So I put it before her,
but she continued for a little so inscrutably embarrassed that I came again to
her aid. “Unless, indeed,” I wound up, “you really want
not to go.”

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

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

“No, no: it’s the place itself. She must leave it.” She held
me a moment with heavy eyes, then brought out the rest. “Your
idea’s the right one. I myself, miss—”

“Well?”

“I can’t stay.”

The look she gave me with it made me jump at possibilities. “You mean
that, since yesterday, you have seen—?”

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

“Heard?”

“From that child—horrors! There!” she sighed with tragic
relief. “On my honor, miss, she says things—!” But at this
evocation she broke down; she dropped, with a sudden sob, upon my sofa and, as
I had seen her do before, gave way to all the grief of it.

It was quite in another manner that I, for my part, let myself go. “Oh,
thank God!”

She sprang up again at this, drying her eyes with a groan. “‘Thank
God’?”

“It so justifies me!”

“It does that, miss!”

I couldn’t have desired more emphasis, but I just hesitated.
“She’s so horrible?”

I saw my colleague scarce knew how to put it. “Really shocking.”

“And about me?”

“About you, miss—since you must have it. It’s beyond
everything, for a young lady; and I can’t think wherever she must have
picked up—”

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

It only, in truth, left my friend still more grave. “Well, perhaps I
ought to also—since I’ve heard some of it before! Yet I can’t
bear it,” the poor woman went on while, with the same movement, she
glanced, on my dressing table, at the face of my watch. “But I must go
back.”

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

“How can I stop with her, you mean? Why, just for that: to get her
away. Far from this,” she pursued, “far from
them—”

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

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

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

I now perceived still more how she had been beating about the bush and how
weary at last it had made her. “Your letter won’t have got there.
Your letter never went.”

“What then became of it?”

“Goodness knows! Master Miles—”

“Do you mean he took it?” I gasped.

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

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

“And don’t you see anything else?”

I faced her a moment with a sad smile. “It strikes me that by this time
your eyes are open even wider than mine.”

They proved to be so indeed, but she could still blush, almost, to show it.
“I make out now what he must have done at school.” And she gave, in
her simple sharpness, an almost droll disillusioned nod. “He
stole!”

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

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

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

“Then you are?” The dear woman kissed me on this, and I took
her farewell. “I’ll save you without him!” she cried as she
went.

XXII

Yet it was when she had got off—and I missed her on the spot—that
the great pinch really came. If I had counted on what it would give me to find
myself alone with Miles, I speedily perceived, at least, that it would give me
a measure. No hour of my stay in fact was so assailed with apprehensions as
that of my coming down to learn that the carriage containing Mrs. Grose and my
younger pupil had already rolled out of the gates. Now I was, I said to
myself, face to face with the elements, and for much of the rest of the day,
while I fought my weakness, I could consider that I had been supremely rash. It
was a tighter place still than I had yet turned round in; all the more that,
for the first time, I could see in the aspect of others a confused reflection
of the crisis. What had happened naturally caused them all to stare; there was
too little of the explained, throw out whatever we might, in the suddenness of
my colleague’s act. The maids and the men looked blank; the effect of
which on my nerves was an aggravation until I saw the necessity of making it a
positive aid. It was precisely, in short, by just clutching the helm that I
avoided total wreck; and I dare say that, to bear up at all, I became, that
morning, very grand and very dry. I welcomed the consciousness that I was
charged with much to do, and I caused it to be known as well that, left thus to
myself, I was quite remarkably firm. I wandered with that manner, for the next
hour or two, all over the place and looked, I have no doubt, as if I were ready
for any onset. So, for the benefit of whom it might concern, I paraded with a
sick heart.

The person it appeared least to concern proved to be, till dinner, little Miles
himself. My perambulations had given me, meanwhile, no glimpse of him, but they
had tended to make more public the change taking place in our relation as a
consequence of his having at the piano, the day before, kept me, in
Flora’s interest, so beguiled and befooled. The stamp of publicity had of
course been fully given by her confinement and departure, and the change itself
was now ushered in by our nonobservance of the regular custom of the
schoolroom. He had already disappeared when, on my way down, I pushed open his
door, and I learned below that he had breakfasted—in the presence of a
couple of the maids—with Mrs. Grose and his sister. He had then gone out,
as he said, for a stroll; than which nothing, I reflected, could better have
expressed his frank view of the abrupt transformation of my office. What he
would not permit this office to consist of was yet to be settled: there was a
queer relief, at all events—I mean for myself in especial—in the
renouncement of one pretension. If so much had sprung to the surface, I scarce
put it too strongly in saying that what had perhaps sprung highest was the
absurdity of our prolonging the fiction that I had anything more to teach him.
It sufficiently stuck out that, by tacit little tricks in which even more than
myself he carried out the care for my dignity, I had had to appeal to him to
let me off straining to meet him on the ground of his true capacity. He had at
any rate his freedom now; I was never to touch it again; as I had amply shown,
moreover, when, on his joining me in the schoolroom the previous night, I had
uttered, on the subject of the interval just concluded, neither challenge nor
hint. I had too much, from this moment, my other ideas. Yet when he at last
arrived, the difficulty of applying them, the accumulations of my problem, were
brought straight home to me by the beautiful little presence on which what had
occurred had as yet, for the eye, dropped neither stain nor shadow.

To mark, for the house, the high state I cultivated I decreed that my meals
with the boy should be served, as we called it, downstairs; so that I had been
awaiting him in the ponderous pomp of the room outside of the window of which I
had had from Mrs. Grose, that first scared Sunday, my flash of something it
would scarce have done to call light. Here at present I felt afresh—for I
had felt it again and again—how my equilibrium depended on the success of
my rigid will, the will to shut my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that
what I had to deal with was, revoltingly, against nature. I could only get on
at all by taking “nature” into my confidence and my account, by
treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and
unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of
the screw of ordinary human virtue. No attempt, nonetheless, could well require
more tact than just this attempt to supply, one’s self, all the
nature. How could I put even a little of that article into a suppression of
reference to what had occurred? How, on the other hand, could I make reference
without a new plunge into the hideous obscure? Well, a sort of answer, after a
time, had come to me, and it was so far confirmed as that I was met,
incontestably, by the quickened vision of what was rare in my little companion.
It was indeed as if he had found even now—as he had so often found at
lessons—still some other delicate way to ease me off. Wasn’t there
light in the fact which, as we shared our solitude, broke out with a specious
glitter it had never yet quite worn?—the fact that (opportunity aiding,
precious opportunity which had now come) it would be preposterous, with a child
so endowed, to forego the help one might wrest from absolute intelligence? What
had his intelligence been given him for but to save him? Mightn’t one, to
reach his mind, risk the stretch of an angular arm over his character? It was
as if, when we were face to face in the dining room, he had literally shown me
the way. The roast mutton was on the table, and I had dispensed with
attendance. Miles, before he sat down, stood a moment with his hands in his
pockets and looked at the joint, on which he seemed on the point of passing
some humorous judgment. But what he presently produced was: “I say, my
dear, is she really very awfully ill?”

“Little Flora? Not so bad but that she’ll presently be better.
London will set her up. Bly had ceased to agree with her. Come here and take
your mutton.”

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

“Not so suddenly as you might think. One had seen it coming on.”

“Then why didn’t you get her off before?”

“Before what?”

“Before she became too ill to travel.”

I found myself prompt. “She’s not too ill to travel: she
only might have become so if she had stayed. This was just the moment to seize.
The journey will dissipate the influence”—oh, I was
grand!—“and carry it off.”

“I see, I see”—Miles, for that matter, was grand, too. He
settled to his repast with the charming little “table manner” that,
from the day of his arrival, had relieved me of all grossness of admonition.
Whatever he had been driven from school for, it was not for ugly feeding. He
was irreproachable, as always, today; but he was unmistakably more conscious.
He was discernibly trying to take for granted more things than he found,
without assistance, quite easy; and he dropped into peaceful silence while he
felt his situation. Our meal was of the briefest—mine a vain pretense,
and I had the things immediately removed. While this was done Miles stood again
with his hands in his little pockets and his back to me—stood and looked
out of the wide window through which, that other day, I had seen what pulled me
up. We continued silent while the maid was with us—as silent, it
whimsically occurred to me, as some young couple who, on their wedding journey,
at the inn, feel shy in the presence of the waiter. He turned round only when
the waiter had left us. “Well—so we’re alone!”

XXIII

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes”—with all accommodation—“everything
depends!” On this, however, he faced to the window again and presently
reached it with his vague, restless, cogitating step. He remained there awhile,
with his forehead against the glass, in contemplation of the stupid shrubs I
knew and the dull things of November. I had always my hypocrisy of
“work,” behind which, now, I gained the sofa. Steadying myself with
it there as I had repeatedly done at those moments of torment that I have
described as the moments of my knowing the children to be given to something
from which I was barred, I sufficiently obeyed my habit of being prepared for
the worst. But an extraordinary impression dropped on me as I extracted a
meaning from the boy’s embarrassed back—none other than the
impression that I was not barred now. This inference grew in a few minutes to
sharp intensity and seemed bound up with the direct perception that it was
positively he who was. The frames and squares of the great window were a kind
of image, for him, of a kind of failure. I felt that I saw him, at any rate,
shut in or shut out. He was admirable, but not comfortable: I took it in with a
throb of hope. Wasn’t he looking, through the haunted pane, for something
he couldn’t see?—and wasn’t it the first time in the whole
business that he had known such a lapse? The first, the very first: I found it
a splendid portent. It made him anxious, though he watched himself; he had been
anxious all day and, even while in his usual sweet little manner he sat at
table, had needed all his small strange genius to give it a gloss. When he at
last turned round to meet me, it was almost as if this genius had succumbed.
“Well, I think I’m glad Bly agrees with me!”

“You would certainly seem to have seen, these twenty-four hours, a good
deal more of it than for some time before. I hope,” I went on bravely,
“that you’ve been enjoying yourself.”

“Oh, yes, I’ve been ever so far; all round about—miles and
miles away. I’ve never been so free.”

He had really a manner of his own, and I could only try to keep up with him.
“Well, do you like it?”

He stood there smiling; then at last he put into two words—“Do
you?”—more discrimination than I had ever heard two words
contain. Before I had time to deal with that, however, he continued as if with
the sense that this was an impertinence to be softened. “Nothing could be
more charming than the way you take it, for of course if we’re alone
together now it’s you that are alone most. But I hope,” he threw
in, “you don’t particularly mind!”

“Having to do with you?” I asked. “My dear child, how can I
help minding? Though I’ve renounced all claim to your
company—you’re so beyond me—I at least greatly enjoy it. What
else should I stay on for?”

He looked at me more directly, and the expression of his face, graver now,
struck me as the most beautiful I had ever found in it. “You stay on just
for that?”

“Certainly. I stay on as your friend and from the tremendous interest I
take in you till something can be done for you that may be more worth your
while. That needn’t surprise you.” My voice trembled so that I felt
it impossible to suppress the shake. “Don’t you remember how I told
you, when I came and sat on your bed the night of the storm, that there was
nothing in the world I wouldn’t do for you?”

“Yes, yes!” He, on his side, more and more visibly nervous, had a
tone to master; but he was so much more successful than I that, laughing out
through his gravity, he could pretend we were pleasantly jesting. “Only
that, I think, was to get me to do something for you!”

“It was partly to get you to do something,” I conceded. “But,
you know, you didn’t do it.”

“Oh, yes,” he said with the brightest superficial eagerness,
“you wanted me to tell you something.”

“That’s it. Out, straight out. What you have on your mind, you
know.”

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

He spoke with a gaiety through which I could still catch the finest little
quiver of resentful passion; but I can’t begin to express the effect upon
me of an implication of surrender even so faint. It was as if what I had
yearned for had come at last only to astonish me. “Well, yes—I may
as well make a clean breast of it, it was precisely for that.”

He waited so long that I supposed it for the purpose of repudiating the
assumption on which my action had been founded; but what he finally said was:
“Do you mean now—here?”

“There couldn’t be a better place or time.” He looked round
him uneasily, and I had the rare—oh, the queer!—impression of the
very first symptom I had seen in him of the approach of immediate fear. It was
as if he were suddenly afraid of me—which struck me indeed as perhaps the
best thing to make him. Yet in the very pang of the effort I felt it vain to
try sternness, and I heard myself the next instant so gentle as to be almost
grotesque. “You want so to go out again?”

“Awfully!” He smiled at me heroically, and the touching little
bravery of it was enhanced by his actually flushing with pain. He had picked up
his hat, which he had brought in, and stood twirling it in a way that gave me,
even as I was just nearly reaching port, a perverse horror of what I was doing.
To do it in any way was an act of violence, for what did it consist of
but the obtrusion of the idea of grossness and guilt on a small helpless
creature who had been for me a revelation of the possibilities of beautiful
intercourse? Wasn’t it base to create for a being so exquisite a mere
alien awkwardness? I suppose I now read into our situation a clearness it
couldn’t have had at the time, for I seem to see our poor eyes already
lighted with some spark of a prevision of the anguish that was to come. So we
circled about, with terrors and scruples, like fighters not daring to close.
But it was for each other we feared! That kept us a little longer suspended and
unbruised. “I’ll tell you everything,” Miles
said—“I mean I’ll tell you anything you like. You’ll
stay on with me, and we shall both be all right, and I will tell
you—I will. But not now.”

“Why not now?”

My insistence turned him from me and kept him once more at his window in a
silence during which, between us, you might have heard a pin drop. Then he was
before me again with the air of a person for whom, outside, someone who had
frankly to be reckoned with was waiting. “I have to see Luke.”

I had not yet reduced him to quite so vulgar a lie, and I felt proportionately
ashamed. But, horrible as it was, his lies made up my truth. I achieved
thoughtfully a few loops of my knitting. “Well, then, go to Luke, and
I’ll wait for what you promise. Only, in return for that, satisfy, before
you leave me, one very much smaller request.”

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

“Yes, a mere fraction of the whole. Tell me”—oh, my work
preoccupied me, and I was offhand!—“if, yesterday afternoon, from
the table in the hall, you took, you know, my letter.”

XXIV

My sense of how he received this suffered for a minute from something that I
can describe only as a fierce split of my attention—a stroke that at
first, as I sprang straight up, reduced me to the mere blind movement of
getting hold of him, drawing him close, and, while I just fell for support
against the nearest piece of furniture, instinctively keeping him with his back
to the window. The appearance was full upon us that I had already had to deal
with here: Peter Quint had come into view like a sentinel before a prison. The
next thing I saw was that, from outside, he had reached the window, and then I
knew that, close to the glass and glaring in through it, he offered once more
to the room his white face of damnation. It represents but grossly what took
place within me at the sight to say that on the second my decision was made;
yet I believe that no woman so overwhelmed ever in so short a time recovered
her grasp of the act. It came to me in the very horror of the immediate
presence that the act would be, seeing and facing what I saw and faced, to keep
the boy himself unaware. The inspiration—I can call it by no other
name—was that I felt how voluntarily, how transcendently, I might.
It was like fighting with a demon for a human soul, and when I had fairly so
appraised it I saw how the human soul—held out, in the tremor of my
hands, at arm’s length—had a perfect dew of sweat on a lovely
childish forehead. The face that was close to mine was as white as the face
against the glass, and out of it presently came a sound, not low nor weak, but
as if from much further away, that I drank like a waft of fragrance.

“Yes—I took it.”

At this, with a moan of joy, I enfolded, I drew him close; and while I held him
to my breast, where I could feel in the sudden fever of his little body the
tremendous pulse of his little heart, I kept my eyes on the thing at the window
and saw it move and shift its posture. I have likened it to a sentinel, but its
slow wheel, for a moment, was rather the prowl of a baffled beast. My present
quickened courage, however, was such that, not too much to let it through, I
had to shade, as it were, my flame. Meanwhile the glare of the face was again
at the window, the scoundrel fixed as if to watch and wait. It was the very
confidence that I might now defy him, as well as the positive certitude, by
this time, of the child’s unconsciousness, that made me go on.
“What did you take it for?”

“To see what you said about me.”

“You opened the letter?”

“I opened it.”

My eyes were now, as I held him off a little again, on Miles’s own face,
in which the collapse of mockery showed me how complete was the ravage of
uneasiness. What was prodigious was that at last, by my success, his sense was
sealed and his communication stopped: he knew that he was in presence, but knew
not of what, and knew still less that I also was and that I did know. And what
did this strain of trouble matter when my eyes went back to the window only to
see that the air was clear again and—by my personal triumph—the
influence quenched? There was nothing there. I felt that the cause was mine and
that I should surely get all. “And you found
nothing!”—I let my elation out.

He gave the most mournful, thoughtful little headshake. “Nothing.”

“Nothing, nothing!” I almost shouted in my joy.

“Nothing, nothing,” he sadly repeated.

I kissed his forehead; it was drenched. “So what have you done with
it?”

“I’ve burned it.”

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

Oh, what this brought up! “At school?”

“Did you take letters?—or other things?”

“Other things?” He appeared now to be thinking of something far off
and that reached him only through the pressure of his anxiety. Yet it did reach
him. “Did I steal?”

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

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

“I know everything.”

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

“Everything. Therefore did you—?” But I couldn’t
say it again.

Miles could, very simply. “No. I didn’t steal.”

My face must have shown him I believed him utterly; yet my hands—but it
was for pure tenderness—shook him as if to ask him why, if it was all for
nothing, he had condemned me to months of torment. “What then did you
do?”

He looked in vague pain all round the top of the room and drew his breath, two
or three times over, as if with difficulty. He might have been standing at the
bottom of the sea and raising his eyes to some faint green twilight.
“Well—I said things.”

“Only that?”

“They thought it was enough!”

“To turn you out for?”

Never, truly, had a person “turned out” shown so little to explain
it as this little person! He appeared to weigh my question, but in a manner
quite detached and almost helpless. “Well, I suppose I
oughtn’t.”

“But to whom did you say them?”

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

He almost smiled at me in the desolation of his surrender, which was indeed
practically, by this time, so complete that I ought to have left it there. But
I was infatuated—I was blind with victory, though even then the very
effect that was to have brought him so much nearer was already that of added
separation. “Was it to everyone?” I asked.

“No; it was only to—” But he gave a sick little headshake.
“I don’t remember their names.”

“Were they then so many?”

“No—only a few. Those I liked.”

Those he liked? I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker
obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the
appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent. It was for the instant
confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent, what then on earth
was I? Paralyzed, while it lasted, by the mere brush of the question, I
let him go a little, so that, with a deep-drawn sigh, he turned away from me
again; which, as he faced toward the clear window, I suffered, feeling that I
had nothing now there to keep him from. “And did they repeat what you
said?” I went on after a moment.

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

There was, somehow, less of it than I had expected; but I turned it over.
“And these things came round—?”

“To the masters? Oh, yes!” he answered very simply. “But I
didn’t know they’d tell.”

“The masters? They didn’t—they’ve never told.
That’s why I ask you.”

He turned to me again his little beautiful fevered face. “Yes, it was too
bad.”

“Too bad?”

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

I can’t name the exquisite pathos of the contradiction given to such a
speech by such a speaker; I only know that the next instant I heard myself
throw off with homely force: “Stuff and nonsense!” But the next
after that I must have sounded stern enough. “What were these
things?”

My sternness was all for his judge, his executioner; yet it made him avert
himself again, and that movement made me, with a single bound and an
irrepressible cry, spring straight upon him. For there again, against the
glass, as if to blight his confession and stay his answer, was the hideous
author of our woe—the white face of damnation. I felt a sick swim at the
drop of my victory and all the return of my battle, so that the wildness of my
veritable leap only served as a great betrayal. I saw him, from the midst of my
act, meet it with a divination, and on the perception that even now he only
guessed, and that the window was still to his own eyes free, I let the impulse
flame up to convert the climax of his dismay into the very proof of his
liberation. “No more, no more, no more!” I shrieked, as I tried to
press him against me, to my visitant.

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

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

At this, after a second in which his head made the movement of a baffled
dog’s on a scent and then gave a frantic little shake for air and light,
he was at me in a white rage, bewildered, glaring vainly over the place and
missing wholly, though it now, to my sense, filled the room like the taste of
poison, the wide, overwhelming presence. “It’s he?”

I was so determined to have all my proof that I flashed into ice to challenge
him. “Whom do you mean by ‘he’?”

“Peter Quint—you devil!” His face gave again, round the room,
its convulsed supplication. “Where?”

They are in my ears still, his supreme surrender of the name and his tribute to
my devotion. “What does he matter now, my own?—what will he
ever matter? I have you,” I launched at the beast,
“but he has lost you forever!” Then, for the demonstration of my
work, “There, there!” I said to Miles.

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