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CHAPTER 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 *** 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!"