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CHAPTER 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 *** 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?"
>
CHAPTER 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.
>
CHAPTER 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.
>
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!"
>
CHAPTER 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 ***!--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."
>
CHAPTER 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 *** 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.
>