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CHAPTER 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!