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X
CHAPTER 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.