THE TURN OF THE SCREW

by Henry James

[The text is take from the first American appearance of this book. ]

THE TURN OF THE SCREW

The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, butexcept the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Evein an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember nocomment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only casehe had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child. The case, Imay mention, was that of an apparition in just such an old house as hadgathered us for the occasion--an appearance, of a dreadful kind, to alittle boy sleeping in the room with his mother and waking her up in theterror of it; waking her not to dissipate his dread and soothe him tosleep again, but to encounter also, herself, before she had succeededin doing so, the same sight that had shaken him. It was this observationthat drew from Douglas--not immediately, but later in the evening--areply that had the interesting consequence to which I call attention. Someone else told a story not particularly effective, which I saw he wasnot following. This I took for a sign that he had himself something toproduce and that we should only have to wait. We waited in fact till twonights later; but that same evening, before we scattered, he brought outwhat was in his mind. 

"I quite agree--in regard to Griffin's ghost, or whatever it was--thatits appearing first to the little boy, at so tender an age, adds aparticular touch. But it's not the first occurrence of its charmingkind that I know to have involved a child. If the child gives the effectanother turn of the screw, what do you say to TWO children--?"

"We say, of course, " somebody exclaimed, "that they give two turns! Alsothat we want to hear about them. "

I can see Douglas there before the fire, to which he had got up topresent his back, looking down at his interlocutor with his hands inhis pockets. "Nobody but me, till now, has ever heard. It's quite toohorrible. " This, naturally, was declared by several voices to give thething the utmost price, and our friend, with quiet art, prepared histriumph by turning his eyes over the rest of us and going on: "It'sbeyond 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 losshow to qualify it. He passed his hand over his eyes, made a littlewincing 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 andpain. "

"Well then, " I said, "just sit right down and begin. "

He turned round to the fire, gave a kick to a log, watched it aninstant. Then as he faced us again: "I can't begin. I shall have to sendto town. " There was a unanimous groan at this, and much reproach; afterwhich, in his preoccupied way, he explained. "The story's written. It'sin a locked drawer--it has not been out for years. I could write to myman 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--appearedalmost to appeal for aid not to hesitate. He had broken a thicknessof ice, the formation of many a winter; had had his reasons for a longsilence. The others resented postponement, but it was just his scruplesthat charmed me. I adjured him to write by the first post and to agreewith us for an early hearing; then I asked him if the experience inquestion had been his own. To this his answer was prompt. "Oh, thankGod, 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 fireagain. "A woman's. She has been dead these twenty years. She sent me thepages in question before she died. " They were all listening now, andof course there was somebody to be arch, or at any rate to draw theinference. But if he put the inference by without a smile it was alsowithout irritation. "She was a most charming person, but she was tenyears 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 thisepisode was long before. I was at Trinity, and I found her at home onmy coming down the second summer. I was much there that year--it was abeautiful one; and we had, in her off-hours, some strolls and talks inthe garden--talks in which she struck me as awfully clever and nice. Ohyes; don't grin: I liked her extremely and am glad to this day to thinkshe liked me, too. If she hadn't she wouldn't have told me. She hadnever told anyone. It wasn't simply that she said so, but that I knewshe hadn't. I was sure; I could see. You'll easily judge why when youhear. "

"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 storywithout its coming out. I saw it, and she saw I saw it; but neither ofus spoke of it. I remember the time and the place--the corner of thelawn, 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 anddropped 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 anybodygoing?" It was almost the tone of hope. 

"Everybody will stay!"

"_I_ will"--and "_I_ will!" cried the ladies whose departure had beenfixed. Mrs. Griffin, however, expressed the need for a little morelight. "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 slightlybewildered. From our end of the great brown hall we heard his step onthe stair; whereupon Mrs. Griffin spoke. "Well, if I don't know who shewas 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 Thursdaynight;" and everyone so agreed with me that, in the light of it, we lostall attention for everything else. The last story, however incompleteand 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 firstpost, gone off to his London apartments; but in spite of--or perhapsjust on account of--the eventual diffusion of this knowledge we quitelet him alone till after dinner, till such an hour of the evening, infact, as might best accord with the kind of emotion on which our hopeswere fixed. Then he became as communicative as we could desire andindeed gave us his best reason for being so. We had it from him againbefore the fire in the hall, as we had had our mild wonders of theprevious night. It appeared that the narrative he had promised to readus 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 shallpresently give. Poor Douglas, before his death--when it was insight--committed to me the manuscript that reached him on the third ofthese days and that, on the same spot, with immense effect, he beganto read to our hushed little circle on the night of the fourth. Thedeparting ladies who had said they would stay didn't, of course, thankheaven, stay: they departed, in consequence of arrangements made, in arage of curiosity, as they professed, produced by the touches withwhich he had already worked us up. But that only made his little finalauditory more compact and select, kept it, round the hearth, subject toa common thrill. 

The first of these touches conveyed that the written statement took upthe tale at a point after it had, in a manner, begun. The fact to be inpossession of was therefore that his old friend, the youngest of severaldaughters of a poor country parson, had, at the age of twenty, on takingservice for the first time in the schoolroom, come up to London, intrepidation, to answer in person an advertisement that had alreadyplaced her in brief correspondence with the advertiser. This personproved, on her presenting herself, for judgment, at a house in HarleyStreet, that impressed her as vast and imposing--this prospective patronproved a gentleman, a bachelor in the prime of life, such a figure ashad 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, offhand and gay and kind. He struck her, inevitably, as gallant andsplendid, but what took her most of all and gave her the courage sheafterward showed was that he put the whole thing to her as a kind offavor, an obligation he should gratefully incur. She conceived himas rich, but as fearfully extravagant--saw him all in a glow of highfashion, of good looks, of expensive habits, of charming ways withwomen. He had for his own town residence a big house filled with thespoils of travel and the trophies of the chase; but it was to hiscountry home, an old family place in Essex, that he wished herimmediately to proceed. 

He had been left, by the death of their parents in India, guardian toa small nephew and a small niece, children of a younger, a militarybrother, whom he had lost two years before. These children were, by thestrangest of chances for a man in his position--a lone man without theright sort of experience or a grain of patience--very heavily on hishands. It had all been a great worry and, on his own part doubtless, aseries of blunders, but he immensely pitied the poor chicks and had doneall he could; had in particular sent them down to his other house, theproper 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 downhimself, whenever he might, to see how they were doing. The awkwardthing was that they had practically no other relations and that hisown 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 littleestablishment--but below stairs only--an excellent woman, Mrs. Grose, whom he was sure his visitor would like and who had formerly been maidto his mother. She was now housekeeper and was also acting for the timeas superintendent to the little girl, of whom, without children of herown, she was, by good luck, extremely fond. There were plenty of peopleto help, but of course the young lady who should go down as governesswould be in supreme authority. She would also have, in holidays, to lookafter the small boy, who had been for a term at school--young as he wasto be sent, but what else could be done?--and who, as the holidays wereabout to begin, would be back from one day to the other. There hadbeen for the two children at first a young lady whom they had had themisfortune to lose. She had done for them quite beautifully--she was amost respectable person--till her death, the great awkwardness of whichhad, precisely, left no alternative but the school for little Miles. Mrs. Grose, since then, in the way of manners and things, had done asshe could for Flora; and there were, further, a cook, a housemaid, adairywoman, an old pony, an old groom, and an old gardener, all likewisethoroughly 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'tanticipate. "

"Excuse me--I thought that was just what you ARE doing. "

"In her successor's place, " I suggested, "I should have wished to learnif the office brought with it--"

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

"The moral of which was of course the seduction exercised by thesplendid young man. She succumbed to it. "

He got up and, as he had done the night before, went to the fire, gavea 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 WASthe beauty of it. There were others, " he went on, "who hadn't succumbed. He told her frankly all his difficulty--that for several applicants theconditions had been prohibitive. They were, somehow, simply afraid. Itsounded dull--it sounded strange; and all the more so because of hismain condition. "

"Which was--?"

"That she should never trouble him--but never, never: neither appealnor complain nor write about anything; only meet all questions herself, receive all moneys from his solicitor, take the whole thing over and lethim alone. She promised to do this, and she mentioned to me that when, for a moment, disburdened, delighted, he held her hand, thanking her forthe 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, wasthe only other word of importance contributed to the subject till, thenext night, by the corner of the hearth, in the best chair, he openedthe faded red cover of a thin old-fashioned gilt-edged album. The wholething took indeed more nights than one, but on the first occasion thesame lady put another question. "What is your title?"

"I haven't one. "

"Oh, _I_ have!" I said. But Douglas, without heeding me, had begun toread with a fine clearness that was like a rendering to the ear of thebeauty of his author's hand. 

I

I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, alittle 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--foundmyself doubtful again, felt indeed sure I had made a mistake. In thisstate of mind I spent the long hours of bumping, swinging coach thatcarried me to the stopping place at which I was to be met by a vehiclefrom the house. This convenience, I was told, had been ordered, andI found, toward the close of the June afternoon, a commodious fly inwaiting for me. Driving at that hour, on a lovely day, through a countryto which the summer sweetness seemed to offer me a friendly welcome, myfortitude mounted afresh and, as we turned into the avenue, encountereda reprieve that was probably but a proof of the point to which it hadsunk. I suppose I had expected, or had dreaded, something so melancholythat what greeted me was a good surprise. I remember as a most pleasantimpression the broad, clear front, its open windows and fresh curtainsand the pair of maids looking out; I remember the lawn and the brightflowers and the crunch of my wheels on the gravel and the clusteredtreetops over which the rooks circled and cawed in the golden sky. Thescene had a greatness that made it a different affair from my own scanthome, and there immediately appeared at the door, with a little girl inher hand, a civil person who dropped me as decent a curtsy as if I hadbeen the mistress or a distinguished visitor. I had received in HarleyStreet a narrower notion of the place, and that, as I recalled it, mademe think the proprietor still more of a gentleman, suggested that what Iwas to enjoy might be something beyond his promise. 

I had no drop again till the next day, for I was carried triumphantlythrough the following hours by my introduction to the younger of mypupils. The little girl who accompanied Mrs. Grose appeared to me on thespot a creature so charming as to make it a great fortune to have todo with her. She was the most beautiful child I had ever seen, and Iafterward wondered that my employer had not told me more of her. I sleptlittle that night--I was too much excited; and this astonished me, too, I recollect, remained with me, adding to my sense of the liberality withwhich I was treated. The large, impressive room, one of the best inthe house, the great state bed, as I almost felt it, the full, figureddraperies, the long glasses in which, for the first time, I could seemyself from head to foot, all struck me--like the extraordinary charm ofmy small charge--as so many things thrown in. It was thrown in aswell, from the first moment, that I should get on with Mrs. Grose ina relation over which, on my way, in the coach, I fear I had ratherbrooded. The only thing indeed that in this early outlook might havemade me shrink again was the clear circumstance of her being so gladto 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 guardagainst showing it too much. I wondered even then a little why sheshould 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 connectionwith anything so beatific as the radiant image of my little girl, thevision of whose angelic beauty had probably more than anything else todo with the restlessness that, before morning, made me several timesrise 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 suchportions 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 thepossible 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 Ibelieved I recognized, faint and far, the cry of a child; there had beenanother when I found myself just consciously starting as at the passage, before my door, of a light footstep. But these fancies were not markedenough 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 comeback to me. To watch, teach, "form" little Flora would too evidentlybe the making of a happy and useful life. It had been agreed between usdownstairs that after this first occasion I should have her as a matterof course at night, her small white bed being already arranged, to thatend, in my room. What I had undertaken was the whole care of her, andshe had remained, just this last time, with Mrs. Grose only as an effectof our consideration for my inevitable strangeness and her naturaltimidity. In spite of this timidity--which the child herself, in theoddest way in the world, had been perfectly frank and brave about, allowing it, without a sign of uncomfortable consciousness, with thedeep, sweet serenity indeed of one of Raphael's holy infants, to bediscussed, to be imputed to her, and to determine us--I feel quite sureshe 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 admirationand 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 breadand milk. There were naturally things that in Flora's presence couldpass between us only as prodigious and gratified looks, obscure androundabout allusions. 

"And the little boy--does he look like her? Is he too so veryremarkable?"

One wouldn't flatter a child. "Oh, miss, MOST remarkable. If you thinkwell 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 withplacid 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'mafraid, however, " I remember feeling the impulse to add, "I'm rathereasily carried away. I was carried away in London!"

I can still see Mrs. Grose's broad face as she took this in. "In HarleyStreet?"

"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. Myother pupil, at any rate, as I understand, comes back tomorrow?"

"Not tomorrow--Friday, miss. He arrives, as you did, by the coach, undercare of the guard, and is to be met by the same carriage. "

I forthwith expressed that the proper as well as the pleasant andfriendly thing would be therefore that on the arrival of the publicconveyance I should be in waiting for him with his little sister; anidea in which Mrs. Grose concurred so heartily that I somehow tookher manner as a kind of comforting pledge--never falsified, thankheaven!--that we should on every question be quite at one. Oh, she wasglad I was there!

What I felt the next day was, I suppose, nothing that could be fairlycalled a reaction from the cheer of my arrival; it was probably at themost only a slight oppression produced by a fuller measure of thescale, as I walked round them, gazed up at them, took them in, of my newcircumstances. They had, as it were, an extent and mass for which I hadnot 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, bythe gentlest arts I could contrive, to win the child into the sense ofknowing 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 mightshow me the place. She showed it step by step and room by room andsecret by secret, with droll, delightful, childish talk about it andwith the result, in half an hour, of our becoming immense friends. Young as she was, I was struck, throughout our little tour, withher confidence and courage with the way, in empty chambers and dullcorridors, on crooked staircases that made me pause and even on thesummit of an old machicolated square tower that made me dizzy, hermorning music, her disposition to tell me so many more things than sheasked, rang out and led me on. I have not seen Bly since the day I leftit, and I daresay that to my older and more informed eyes it would nowappear sufficiently contracted. But as my little conductress, with herhair of gold and her frock of blue, danced before me round corners andpattered down passages, I had the view of a castle of romance inhabitedby a rosy sprite, such a place as would somehow, for diversion of theyoung idea, take all color out of storybooks and fairytales. Wasn't itjust a storybook over which I had fallen adoze and adream? No; it was abig, ugly, antique, but convenient house, embodying a few features ofa building still older, half-replaced and half-utilized, in which I hadthe fancy of our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers in agreat drifting ship. Well, I was, strangely, at the helm!

II

This came home to me when, two days later, I drove over with Flora tomeet, as Mrs. Grose said, the little gentleman; and all the more foran incident that, presenting itself the second evening, had deeplydisconcerted me. The first day had been, on the whole, as I haveexpressed, 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 butof a few words enclosing another, addressed to himself, with a sealstill unbroken. "This, I recognize, is from the headmaster, and theheadmaster's an awful bore. Read him, please; deal with him; but mindyou don't report. Not a word. I'm off!" I broke the seal with a greateffort--so great a one that I was a long time coming to it; took theunopened missive at last up to my room and only attacked it just beforegoing to bed. I had better have let it wait till morning, for it gave mea second sleepless night. With no counsel to take, the next day, Iwas full of distress; and it finally got so the better of me that Idetermined 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 aquick 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 atall. "

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 themfill 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 herhands 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 attenuatedas 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 mypocket. "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 itshould be impossible to keep him. That can have only one meaning. "Mrs. Grose listened with dumb emotion; she forbore to ask me whatthis meaning might be; so that, presently, to put the thing with somecoherence and with the mere aid of her presence to my own mind, I wenton: "That he's an injury to the others. "

At this, with one of the quick turns of simple folk, she suddenly flamedup. "Master Miles! HIM an injury?"

There was such a flood of good faith in it that, though I had not yetseen 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 wasthe beginning of a curiosity that, for all the next hours, was to deepenalmost to pain. Mrs. Grose was aware, I could judge, of what she hadproduced in me, and she followed it up with assurance. "You might aswell believe it of the little lady. Bless her, " she added the nextmoment--"LOOK at her!"

I turned and saw that Flora, whom, ten minutes before, I had establishedin the schoolroom with a sheet of white paper, a pencil, and a copy ofnice "round o's, " now presented herself to view at the open door. She expressed in her little way an extraordinary detachment fromdisagreeable duties, looking to me, however, with a great childishlight that seemed to offer it as a mere result of the affection she hadconceived for my person, which had rendered necessary that she shouldfollow me. I needed nothing more than this to feel the full force ofMrs. Grose's comparison, and, catching my pupil in my arms, covered herwith kisses in which there was a sob of atonement. 

Nonetheless, the rest of the day I watched for further occasion toapproach my colleague, especially as, toward evening, I began to fancyshe rather sought to avoid me. I overtook her, I remember, on thestaircase; 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 atnoon as a declaration that YOU'VE never known him to be bad. "

She threw back her head; she had clearly, by this time, and veryhonestly, adopted an attitude. "Oh, never known him--I don't pretendTHAT!"

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 notto the degree to contaminate--"

"To contaminate?"--my big word left her at a loss. I explained it. "Tocorrupt. "

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 afine bold humor that, with a laugh, a little silly doubtless, to matchher 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 inanother place. "What was the lady who was here before?"

"The last governess? She was also young and pretty--almost as young andalmost as pretty, miss, even as you. "

"Ah, then, I hope her youth and her beauty helped her!" I recollectthrowing 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 meanthat'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 myimpression of her having accidentally said more than she meant; and Imerely 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 somethings--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 thoughtit, after an instant, not opposed to this concession to pursue: "Did shedie here?"

"No--she went off. "

I don't know what there was in this brevity of Mrs. Grose's that struckme as ambiguous. "Went off to die?" Mrs. Grose looked straight out ofthe window, but I felt that, hypothetically, I had a right to know whatyoung 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. Wehad then a young woman--a nursemaid who had stayed on and who was a goodgirl and clever; and SHE took the children altogether for the interval. But our young lady never came back, and at the very moment I wasexpecting 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 mywork. "

III

Her thus turning her back on me was fortunately not, for my justpreoccupations, a snub that could check the growth of our mutual esteem. We met, after I had brought home little Miles, more intimately than everon the ground of my stupefaction, my general emotion: so monstrous was Ithen ready to pronounce it that such a child as had now been revealed tome should be under an interdict. I was a little late on the scene, andI felt, as he stood wistfully looking out for me before the door of theinn at which the coach had put him down, that I had seen him, on theinstant, without and within, in the great glow of freshness, the samepositive fragrance of purity, in which I had, from the first moment, seen his little sister. He was incredibly beautiful, and Mrs. Grose hadput her finger on it: everything but a sort of passion of tenderness forhim was swept away by his presence. What I then and there took him tomy heart for was something divine that I have never found to the samedegree in any child--his indescribable little air of knowing nothing inthe world but love. It would have been impossible to carry a bad namewith a greater sweetness of innocence, and by the time I had got back toBly with him I remained merely bewildered--so far, that is, as I was notoutraged--by the sense of the horrible letter locked up in my room, ina drawer. As soon as I could compass a private word with Mrs. Grose Ideclared 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 assureyou, miss, I do nothing else! What will you say, then?" she immediatelyadded. 

"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 byyou. We'll see it out. "

"We'll see it out!" I ardently echoed, giving her my hand to make it avow. 

She held me there a moment, then whisked up her apron again with herdetached 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 hadembraced like sisters, felt still more fortified and indignant. 

This, at all events, was for the time: a time so full that, as I recallthe way it went, it reminds me of all the art I now need to make it alittle distinct. What I look back at with amazement is the situation Iaccepted. I had undertaken, with my companion, to see it out, and I wasunder a charm, apparently, that could smooth away the extent and thefar and difficult connections of such an effort. I was lifted aloft on agreat wave of infatuation and pity. I found it simple, in my ignorance, my confusion, and perhaps my conceit, to assume that I could deal witha 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 theend 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 myown. I learned something--at first, certainly--that had not been oneof the teachings of my small, smothered life; learned to be amused, andeven amusing, and not to think for the morrow. It was the first time, ina manner, that I had known space and air and freedom, all the musicof summer and all the mystery of nature. And then there wasconsideration--and consideration was sweet. Oh, it was a trap--notdesigned, but deep--to my imagination, to my delicacy, perhaps to myvanity; to whatever, in me, was most excitable. The best way to pictureit all is to say that I was off my guard. They gave me so littletrouble--they were of a gentleness so extraordinary. I used tospeculate--but even this with a dim disconnectedness--as to how therough future (for all futures are rough!) would handle them and mightbruise them. They had the bloom of health and happiness; and yet, asif I had been in charge of a pair of little grandees, of princes of theblood, for whom everything, to be right, would have to be enclosed andprotected, the only form that, in my fancy, the afteryears could takefor them was that of a romantic, a really royal extension of the gardenand the park. It may be, of course, above all, that what suddenly brokeinto this gives the previous time a charm of stillness--that hush inwhich something gathers or crouches. The change was actually like thespring 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 finalretirement, a small interval alone. Much as I liked my companions, thishour was the thing in the day I liked most; and I liked it best of allwhen, as the light faded--or rather, I should say, the day lingered andthe last calls of the last birds sounded, in a flushed sky, from theold trees--I could take a turn into the grounds and enjoy, almost witha sense of property that amused and flattered me, the beauty and dignityof the place. It was a pleasure at these moments to feel myselftranquil and justified; doubtless, perhaps, also to reflect that by mydiscretion, my quiet good sense and general high propriety, I was givingpleasure--if he ever thought of it!--to the person to whose pressureI had responded. What I was doing was what he had earnestly hoped anddirectly asked of me, and that I COULD, after all, do it proved even agreater joy than I had expected. I daresay I fancied myself, in short, a remarkable young woman and took comfort in the faith that this wouldmore publicly appear. Well, I needed to be remarkable to offer a frontto the remarkable things that presently gave their first sign. 

It was plump, one afternoon, in the middle of my very hour: the childrenwere tucked away, and I had come out for my stroll. One of the thoughtsthat, as I don't in the least shrink now from noting, used to be with mein these wanderings was that it would be as charming as a charming storysuddenly to meet someone. Someone would appear there at the turn of apath and would stand before me and smile and approve. I didn't ask morethan that--I only asked that he should KNOW; and the only way to be surehe knew would be to see it, and the kind light of it, in his handsomeface. That was exactly present to me--by which I mean the facewas--when, on the first of these occasions, at the end of a long Juneday, I stopped short on emerging from one of the plantations and cominginto view of the house. What arrested me on the spot--and with a shockmuch greater than any vision had allowed for--was the sense that myimagination had, in a flash, turned real. He did stand there!--but highup, beyond the lawn and at the very top of the tower to which, on thatfirst morning, little Flora had conducted me. This tower was one ofa pair--square, incongruous, crenelated structures--that weredistinguished, for some reason, though I could see little difference, as the new and the old. They flanked opposite ends of the house and wereprobably architectural absurdities, redeemed in a measure indeed bynot being wholly disengaged nor of a height too pretentious, dating, intheir gingerbread antiquity, from a romantic revival that was already arespectable past. I admired them, had fancies about them, for we couldall profit in a degree, especially when they loomed through the dusk, by the grandeur of their actual battlements; yet it was not at such anelevation that the figure I had so often invoked seemed most in place. 

It produced in me, this figure, in the clear twilight, I remember, twodistinct gasps of emotion, which were, sharply, the shock of my firstand that of my second surprise. My second was a violent perception ofthe mistake of my first: the man who met my eyes was not the personI had precipitately supposed. There came to me thus a bewilderment ofvision of which, after these years, there is no living view that I canhope to give. An unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted objectof fear to a young woman privately bred; and the figure that faced mewas--a few more seconds assured me--as little anyone else I knew asit was the image that had been in my mind. I had not seen it inHarley Street--I had not seen it anywhere. The place, moreover, in thestrangest way in the world, had, on the instant, and by the very fact ofits appearance, become a solitude. To me at least, making my statementhere with a deliberation with which I have never made it, the wholefeeling of the moment returns. It was as if, while I took in--what I didtake in--all the rest of the scene had been stricken with death. I canhear again, as I write, the intense hush in which the sounds of eveningdropped. The rooks stopped cawing in the golden sky, and the friendlyhour lost, for the minute, all its voice. But there was no other changein nature, unless indeed it were a change that I saw with a strangersharpness. 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 apicture 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 wereconfronted across our distance quite long enough for me to ask myselfwith intensity who then he was and to feel, as an effect of my inabilityto say, a wonder that in a few instants more became intense. 

The great question, or one of these, is, afterward, I know, with regardto 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 ata 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 Ijust bridled a little with the sense that my office demanded that thereshould be no such ignorance and no such person. It lasted while thisvisitant, 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--seemedto fix me, from his position, with just the question, just the scrutinythrough the fading light, that his own presence provoked. We were toofar apart to call to each other, but there was a moment at which, atshorter range, some challenge between us, breaking the hush, would havebeen the right result of our straight mutual stare. He was in one of theangles, the one away from the house, very erect, as it struck me, andwith both hands on the ledge. So I saw him as I see the letters Iform on this page; then, exactly, after a minute, as if to add to thespectacle, he slowly changed his place--passed, looking at me hardall the while, to the opposite corner of the platform. Yes, I had thesharpest 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 fromone of the crenelations to the next. He stopped at the other corner, butless long, and even as he turned away still markedly fixed me. He turnedaway; that was all I knew. 

IV

It was not that I didn't wait, on this occasion, for more, for I wasrooted as deeply as I was shaken. Was there a "secret" at Bly--a mysteryof Udolpho or an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspectedconfinement? I can't say how long I turned it over, or how long, ina confusion of curiosity and dread, I remained where I had had mycollision; I only recall that when I re-entered the house darkness hadquite closed in. Agitation, in the interval, certainly had held me anddriven me, for I must, in circling about the place, have walked threemiles; but I was to be, later on, so much more overwhelmed that thismere dawn of alarm was a comparatively human chill. The most singularpart of it, in fact--singular as the rest had been--was the part Ibecame, in the hall, aware of in meeting Mrs. Grose. This picture comesback to me in the general train--the impression, as I received it on myreturn, of the wide white panelled space, bright in the lamplight andwith its portraits and red carpet, and of the good surprised look ofmy friend, which immediately told me she had missed me. It came tome straightway, under her contact, that, with plain heartiness, mererelieved anxiety at my appearance, she knew nothing whatever that couldbear upon the incident I had there ready for her. I had not suspectedin advance that her comfortable face would pull me up, and I somehowmeasured the importance of what I had seen by my thus finding myselfhesitate to mention it. Scarce anything in the whole history seems tome so odd as this fact that my real beginning of fear was one, as Imay say, with the instinct of sparing my companion. On the spot, accordingly, in the pleasant hall and with her eyes on me, I, fora reason that I couldn't then have phrased, achieved an inwardresolution--offered a vague pretext for my lateness and, with the pleaof the beauty of the night and of the heavy dew and wet feet, went assoon as possible to my room. 

Here it was another affair; here, for many days after, it was a queeraffair enough. There were hours, from day to day--or at least there weremoments, snatched even from clear duties--when I had to shut myself upto think. It was not so much yet that I was more nervous than I couldbear to be as that I was remarkably afraid of becoming so; for the truthI had now to turn over was, simply and clearly, the truth that I couldarrive at no account whatever of the visitor with whom I had been soinexplicably and yet, as it seemed to me, so intimately concerned. Ittook little time to see that I could sound without forms of inquiryand without exciting remark any domestic complications. The shock I hadsuffered must have sharpened all my senses; I felt sure, at the end ofthree days and as the result of mere closer attention, that I had notbeen 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 wasbut one sane inference: someone had taken a liberty rather gross. Thatwas what, repeatedly, I dipped into my room and locked the door to sayto myself. We had been, collectively, subject to an intrusion; someunscrupulous traveler, curious in old houses, had made his way inunobserved, enjoyed the prospect from the best point of view, and thenstolen out as he came. If he had given me such a bold hard stare, thatwas but a part of his indiscretion. The good thing, after all, was thatwe should surely see no more of him. 

This was not so good a thing, I admit, as not to leave me to judge thatwhat, essentially, made nothing else much signify was simply my charmingwork. My charming work was just my life with Miles and Flora, andthrough nothing could I so like it as through feeling that I could throwmyself into it in trouble. The attraction of my small charges was aconstant joy, leading me to wonder afresh at the vanity of my originalfears, the distaste I had begun by entertaining for the probable grayprose of my office. There was to be no gray prose, it appeared, and nolong grind; so how could work not be charming that presented itself asdaily beauty? It was all the romance of the nursery and the poetry ofthe schoolroom. I don't mean by this, of course, that we studiedonly fiction and verse; I mean I can express no otherwise the sortof interest my companions inspired. How can I describe that except bysaying that instead of growing used to them--and it's a marvel for agoverness: I call the sisterhood to witness!--I made constant freshdiscoveries. There was one direction, assuredly, in which thesediscoveries stopped: deep obscurity continued to cover the region of theboy'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 thetruth to say that--without a word--he himself had cleared it up. He hadmade the whole charge absurd. My conclusion bloomed there with thereal rose flush of his innocence: he was only too fine and fair for thelittle horrid, unclean school world, and he had paid a price for it. Ireflected acutely that the sense of such differences, such superioritiesof quality, always, on the part of the majority--which could includeeven stupid, sordid headmasters--turn infallibly to the vindictive. 

Both the children had a gentleness (it was their only fault, and itnever made Miles a muff) that kept them--how shall I express it?--almostimpersonal and certainly quite unpunishable. They were like the cherubsof the anecdote, who had--morally, at any rate--nothing to whack! Iremember feeling with Miles in especial as if he had had, as it were, nohistory. We expect of a small child a scant one, but there was inthis beautiful little boy something extraordinarily sensitive, yetextraordinarily happy, that, more than in any creature of his age I haveseen, struck me as beginning anew each day. He had never for a secondsuffered. I took this as a direct disproof of his having really beenchastised. If he had been wicked he would have "caught" it, and I shouldhave caught it by the rebound--I should have found the trace. I foundnothing at all, and he was therefore an angel. He never spoke of hisschool, never mentioned a comrade or a master; and I, for my part, wasquite too much disgusted to allude to them. Of course I was under thespell, and the wonderful part is that, even at the time, I perfectlyknew I was. But I gave myself up to it; it was an antidote to anypain, and I had more pains than one. I was in receipt in these days ofdisturbing letters from home, where things were not going well. But withmy children, what things in the world mattered? That was the questionI used to put to my scrappy retirements. I was dazzled by theirloveliness. 

There was a Sunday--to get on--when it rained with such force and for somany hours that there could be no procession to church; in consequenceof which, as the day declined, I had arranged with Mrs. Grose that, should the evening show improvement, we would attend together the lateservice. 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 matterof twenty minutes. Coming downstairs to meet my colleague in the hall, I remembered a pair of gloves that had required three stitches and thathad received them--with a publicity perhaps not edifying--while I satwith the children at their tea, served on Sundays, by exception, in thatcold, 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 itenabled me, on crossing the threshold, not only to recognize, on a chairnear the wide window, then closed, the articles I wanted, but to becomeaware of a person on the other side of the window and looking straightin. One step into the room had sufficed; my vision was instantaneous;it was all there. The person looking straight in was the person who hadalready appeared to me. He appeared thus again with I won't saygreater distinctness, for that was impossible, but with a nearness thatrepresented a forward stride in our intercourse and made me, as I methim, 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, thewindow, though the dining room was on the ground floor, not going downto 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 howintense the former had been. He remained but a few seconds--long enoughto convince me he also saw and recognized; but it was as if I had beenlooking 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, butit quitted me for a moment during which I could still watch it, see itfix successively several other things. On the spot there came to me theadded shock of a certitude that it was not for me he had come there. Hehad come for someone else. 

The flash of this knowledge--for it was knowledge in the midst ofdread--produced in me the most extraordinary effect, started as I stoodthere, a sudden vibration of duty and courage. I say courage becauseI was beyond all doubt already far gone. I bounded straight out of thedoor again, reached that of the house, got, in an instant, upon thedrive, and, passing along the terrace as fast as I could rush, turneda corner and came full in sight. But it was in sight of nothing now--myvisitor had vanished. I stopped, I almost dropped, with the real reliefof this; but I took in the whole scene--I gave him time to reappear. Icall it time, but how long was it? I can't speak to the purpose todayof 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. Theterrace and the whole place, the lawn and the garden beyond it, all Icould see of the park, were empty with a great emptiness. There wereshrubberies and big trees, but I remember the clear assurance I feltthat none of them concealed him. He was there or was not there: notthere 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 wasconfusedly present to me that I ought to place myself where he hadstood. I did so; I applied my face to the pane and looked, as he hadlooked, into the room. As if, at this moment, to show me exactly whathis 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 ofwhat had already occurred. She saw me as I had seen my own visitant; shepulled up short as I had done; I gave her something of the shock thatI had received. She turned white, and this made me ask myself if I hadblanched 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 Ishould presently meet her. I remained where I was, and while I waitedI thought of more things than one. But there's only one I take space tomention. I wondered why SHE should be scared. 

V

Oh, she let me know as soon as, round the corner of the house, sheloomed 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 awonderful 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. Myneed 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 whatI kept back. I put out my hand to her and she took it; I held her harda little, liking to feel her close to me. There was a kind of support inthe 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 expressedplainly that SHE had no wish to be, yet also that she knew too well herplace 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 thedining room a minute ago was the effect of that. What _I_ saw--justbefore--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'tguessed!" 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. Itonly 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 duskierdistance, then, pulling herself together, turned to me with abruptinconsequence. "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, thefaraway faint glimmer of a consciousness more acute: I somehow made outin it the delayed dawn of an idea I myself had not given her and thatwas as yet quite obscure to me. It comes back to me that I thoughtinstantly of this as something I could get from her; and I felt it to beconnected with the desire she presently showed to know more. "When wasit--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; sheturned away a little. I waited an instant; then I brought out: "Go tochurch. 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 camenearer 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, witha deeper dismay, found a touch of picture, I quickly added stroke tostroke. "He has red hair, very red, close-curling, and a pale face, longin shape, with straight, good features and little, rather queer whiskersthat are as red as his hair. His eyebrows are, somehow, darker; theylook particularly arched and as if they might move a good deal. His eyesare sharp, strange--awfully; but I only know clearly that they're rathersmall and very fixed. His mouth's wide, and his lips are thin, andexcept for his little whiskers he's quite clean-shaven. He gives me asort 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 startedand 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 worehis hat, but he did wear--well, there were waistcoats missed. They wereboth 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! Hedied. "

"Died?" I almost shrieked. 

She seemed fairly to square herself, plant herself more firmly to utterthe wonder of it. "Yes. Mr. Quint is dead. "

VI

It took of course more than that particular passage to place us togetherin presence of what we had now to live with as we could--my dreadfulliability to impressions of the order so vividly exemplified, and mycompanion's knowledge, henceforth--a knowledge half consternation andhalf compassion--of that liability. There had been, this evening, afterthe revelation left me, for an hour, so prostrate--there had been, foreither of us, no attendance on any service but a little service of tearsand vows, of prayers and promises, a climax to the series of mutualchallenges and pledges that had straightway ensued on our retreatingtogether to the schoolroom and shutting ourselves up there to haveeverything out. The result of our having everything out was simply toreduce our situation to the last rigor of its elements. She herself hadseen nothing, not the shadow of a shadow, and nobody in the house butthe governess was in the governess's plight; yet she accepted withoutdirectly impugning my sanity the truth as I gave it to her, and ended byshowing me, on this ground, an awestricken tenderness, an expressionof the sense of my more than questionable privilege, of which the verybreath has remained with me as that of the sweetest of human charities. 

What was settled between us, accordingly, that night, was that wethought 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. Iknew at this hour, I think, as well as I knew later, what I was capableof meeting to shelter my pupils; but it took me some time to be whollysure of what my honest ally was prepared for to keep terms with socompromising a contract. I was queer company enough--quite as queer asthe company I received; but as I trace over what we went through I seehow much common ground we must have found in the one idea that, by goodfortune, COULD steady us. It was the idea, the second movement, that ledme straight out, as I may say, of the inner chamber of my dread. I couldtake 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 beforewe separated for the night. We had gone over and over every feature ofwhat 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 possessedme. "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 tellingas that. She resumed in a moment, at any rate: "What if HE should seehim?"

"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 wasan awful conception, and yet, somehow, I could keep it at bay; which, moreover, as we lingered there, was what I succeeded in practicallyproving. I had an absolute certainty that I should see again what Ihad already seen, but something within me said that by offering myselfbravely as the sole subject of such experience, by accepting, byinviting, by surmounting it all, I should serve as an expiatory victimand guard the tranquility of my companions. The children, in especial, I should thus fence about and absolutely save. I recall one of the lastthings 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 andthe 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 continuedto think. "It IS rather odd. "

"That he has never spoken of him?"

"Never by the least allusion. And you tell me they were 'greatfriends'?"

"Oh, it wasn't HIM!" Mrs. Grose with emphasis declared. "It was Quint'sown 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!--asudden sickness of disgust. "Too free with MY boy?"

"Too free with everyone!"

I forbore, for the moment, to analyze this description further than bythe reflection that a part of it applied to several of the members ofthe household, of the half-dozen maids and men who were still of oursmall colony. But there was everything, for our apprehension, in thelucky fact that no discomfortable legend, no perturbation of scullions, had ever, within anyone's memory attached to the kind old place. It hadneither bad name nor ill fame, and Mrs. Grose, most apparently, onlydesired to cling to me and to quake in silence. I even put her, the verylast thing of all, to the test. It was when, at midnight, she had herhand on the schoolroom door to take leave. "I have it from you then--forit'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 terriblyshort 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 myimpressions of him: he was not a trouble-loving gentleman, nor so veryparticular perhaps about some of the company HE kept. All the same, Ipressed my interlocutress. "I promise you _I_ would have told!"

She felt my discrimination. "I daresay I was wrong. But, really, I wasafraid. "

"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 afraidof anything else? Not of his effect--?"

"His effect?" she repeated with a face of anguish and waiting while Ifaltered. 

"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 supposednot to be well and the country air so good for him. So he had everythingto say. Yes"--she let me have it--"even about THEM. "

"Them--that creature?" I had to smother a kind of howl. "And you couldbear 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 togetherto the subject! Much as we had discussed it that Sunday night, I was, inthe immediate later hours in especial--for it may be imagined whether Islept--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 keptback. I was sure, moreover, by morning, that this was not from a failureof frankness, but because on every side there were fears. It seems to meindeed, in retrospect, that by the time the morrow's sun was high I hadrestlessly read into the fact before us almost all the meaning they wereto receive from subsequent and more cruel occurrences. What they gave meabove all was just the sinister figure of the living man--the dead onewould keep awhile!--and of the months he had continuously passed at Bly, which, added up, made a formidable stretch. The limit of this evil timehad arrived only when, on the dawn of a winter's morning, Peter Quintwas found, by a laborer going to early work, stone dead on the roadfrom the village: a catastrophe explained--superficially at least--by avisible wound to his head; such a wound as might have been produced--andas, on the final evidence, HAD been--by a fatal slip, in the dark andafter leaving the public house, on the steepish icy slope, a wrongpath altogether, at the bottom of which he lay. The icy slope, the turnmistaken at night and in liquor, accounted for much--practically, inthe end and after the inquest and boundless chatter, for everything; butthere had been matters in his life--strange passages and perils, secretdisorders, vices more than suspected--that would have accounted for agood deal more. 

I scarce know how to put my story into words that shall be a crediblepicture of my state of mind; but I was in these days literally able tofind a joy in the extraordinary flight of heroism the occasion demandedof me. I now saw that I had been asked for a service admirable anddifficult; and there would be a greatness in letting it be seen--oh, inthe right quarter!--that I could succeed where many another girl mighthave failed. It was an immense help to me--I confess I rather applaudmyself 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 themost bereaved and the most lovable, the appeal of whose helplessness hadsuddenly become only too explicit, a deep, constant ache of one's owncommitted heart. We were cut off, really, together; we were united inour danger. They had nothing but me, and I--well, I had THEM. It wasin short a magnificent chance. This chance presented itself to me in animage richly material. I was a screen--I was to stand before them. Themore I saw, the less they would. I began to watch them in a stifledsuspense, a disguised excitement that might well, had it continued toolong, have turned to something like madness. What saved me, as I nowsee, was that it turned to something else altogether. It didn't last assuspense--it was superseded by horrible proofs. Proofs, I say, yes--fromthe moment I really took hold. 

This moment dated from an afternoon hour that I happened to spend in thegrounds 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 abook, and I had been glad to encourage a purpose so laudable in a youngman whose only defect was an occasional excess of the restless. Hissister, on the contrary, had been alert to come out, and I strolled withher half an hour, seeking the shade, for the sun was still high and theday exceptionally warm. I was aware afresh, with her, as we went, ofhow, like her brother, she contrived--it was the charming thing in bothchildren--to let me alone without appearing to drop me and to accompanyme without appearing to surround. They were never importunate and yetnever listless. My attention to them all really went to seeing themamuse themselves immensely without me: this was a spectacle they seemedactively to prepare and that engaged me as an active admirer. I walkedin a world of their invention--they had no occasion whatever to drawupon mine; so that my time was taken only with being, for them, someremarkable person or thing that the game of the moment required and thatwas merely, thanks to my superior, my exalted stamp, a happy and highlydistinguished sinecure. I forget what I was on the present occasion;I only remember that I was something very important and very quiet andthat 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 otherside of the Sea of Azof, we had an interested spectator. The way thisknowledge gathered in me was the strangest thing in the world--thestrangest, that is, except the very much stranger in which it quicklymerged itself. I had sat down with a piece of work--for I was somethingor other that could sit--on the old stone bench which overlooked thepond; and in this position I began to take in with certitude, and yetwithout direct vision, the presence, at a distance, of a third person. The old trees, the thick shrubbery, made a great and pleasant shade, butit was all suffused with the brightness of the hot, still hour. Therewas no ambiguity in anything; none whatever, at least, in the convictionI from one moment to another found myself forming as to what I shouldsee straight before me and across the lake as a consequence of raisingmy eyes. They were attached at this juncture to the stitching in which Iwas engaged, and I can feel once more the spasm of my effort not to movethem till I should so have steadied myself as to be able to make up mymind what to do. There was an alien object in view--a figure whose rightof presence I instantly, passionately questioned. I recollect countingover perfectly the possibilities, reminding myself that nothing was morenatural, for instance, then the appearance of one of the men about theplace, or even of a messenger, a postman, or a tradesman's boy, from thevillage. That reminder had as little effect on my practical certitudeas I was conscious--still even without looking--of its having upon thecharacter and attitude of our visitor. Nothing was more natural thanthat these things should be the other things that they absolutely werenot. 

Of the positive identity of the apparition I would assure myself assoon as the small clock of my courage should have ticked out the rightsecond; meanwhile, with an effort that was already sharp enough, Itransferred my eyes straight to little Flora, who, at the moment, wasabout ten yards away. My heart had stood still for an instant with thewonder and terror of the question whether she too would see; and Iheld my breath while I waited for what a cry from her, what some suddeninnocent sign either of interest or of alarm, would tell me. I waited, but nothing came; then, in the first place--and there is somethingmore dire in this, I feel, than in anything I have to relate--I wasdetermined by a sense that, within a minute, all sounds from her hadpreviously dropped; and, in the second, by the circumstance that, alsowithin 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 theconfirmed conviction that we were still, together, under direct personalnotice. She had picked up a small flat piece of wood, which happened tohave in it a little hole that had evidently suggested to her the ideaof sticking in another fragment that might figure as a mast and makethe thing a boat. This second morsel, as I watched her, she wasvery markedly and intently attempting to tighten in its place. Myapprehension of what she was doing sustained me so that after someseconds I felt I was ready for more. Then I again shifted my eyes--Ifaced what I had to face. 

VII

I got hold of Mrs. Grose as soon after this as I could; and I can giveno intelligible account of how I fought out the interval. Yet I stillhear myself cry as I fairly threw myself into her arms: "They KNOW--it'stoo 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, asshe released me, I made it out to her, made it out perhaps only now withfull coherency even to myself. "Two hours ago, in the garden"--I couldscarce articulate--"Flora SAW!"

Mrs. Grose took it as she might have taken a blow in the stomach. "Shehas told you?" she panted. 

"Not a word--that's the horror. She kept it to herself! The child ofeight, THAT child!" Unutterable still, for me, was the stupefaction ofit. 

Mrs. Grose, of course, could only gape the wider. "Then how do youknow?"

"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 prodigiousthings, for I got the slow reflection of them in my companion's face. "Another person--this time; but a figure of quite as unmistakable horrorand 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 thechild--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 notso near. "

"And without coming nearer?"

"Oh, for the effect and the feeling, she might have been as close asyou!"

My friend, with an odd impulse, fell back a step. "Was she someoneyou've never seen?"

"Yes. But someone the child has. Someone YOU have. " Then, to show how Ihad 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 caughtmyself up. "No, for God's sake, DON'T! She'll say she isn't--she'lllie!"

Mrs. Grose was not too bewildered instinctively to protest. "Ah, how CANyou?"

"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 seein it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don't know what IDON'T see--what I DON'T fear!"

Mrs. Grose tried to keep up with me. "You mean you're afraid of seeingher again?"

"Oh, no; that's nothing--now!" Then I explained. "It's of NOT seeingher. "

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 assuredlyWILL--without my knowing it. "

At the image of this possibility Mrs. Grose for a moment collapsed, yetpresently to pull herself together again, as if from the positive forceof the sense of what, should we yield an inch, there would really be togive way to. "Dear, dear--we must keep our heads! And after all, if shedoesn'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 bravelyinquired. 

She brought me, for the instant, almost round. "Oh, we must clutch atTHAT--we must cling to it! If it isn't a proof of what you say, it's aproof 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 lastraising 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. Sheonly 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 youmean 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--gavea shudder and walked to the window; and while she stood there lookingout 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 extraordinarybeauty. " I now recognized to what I had at last, stroke by stroke, brought the victim of my confidence, for she quite visibly weighedthis. "Oh, handsome--very, very, " I insisted; "wonderfully handsome. Butinfamous. "

She slowly came back to me. "Miss Jessel--WAS infamous. " She once moretook my hand in both her own, holding it as tight as if to fortify meagainst the increase of alarm I might draw from this disclosure. "Theywere both infamous, " she finally said. 

So, for a little, we faced it once more together; and I found absolutelya 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 hascertainly come to give me the whole thing. " She appeared to assent tothis, but still only in silence; seeing which I went on: "I must have itnow. 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. "SHEwas 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 theplace of a servant in the scale; but there was nothing to prevent anacceptance 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 formy full vision--on the evidence--of our employer's late clever, good-looking "own" man; impudent, assured, spoiled, depraved. "Thefellow was a hound. "

Mrs. Grose considered as if it were perhaps a little a case for a senseof 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 heras distinctly as I had seen her by the pond; and I brought out withdecision: "It must have been also what SHE wished!"

Mrs. Grose's face signified that it had been indeed, but she said at thesame 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 havestayed. Fancy it here--for a governess! And afterward I imagined--and Istill imagine. And what I imagine is dreadful. "

"Not so dreadful as what _I_ do, " I replied; on which I must have shownher--as I was indeed but too conscious--a front of miserable defeat. Itbrought out again all her compassion for me, and at the renewed touch ofher kindness my power to resist broke down. I burst, as I had, the othertime, 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; "Idon'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 matterI had put before her depths and possibilities that I lacked resolutionto sound; so that when we met once more in the wonder of it we were of acommon mind about the duty of resistance to extravagant fancies. We wereto keep our heads if we should keep nothing else--difficult indeed asthat might be in the face of what, in our prodigious experience, wasleast to be questioned. Late that night, while the house slept, we hadanother talk in my room, when she went all the way with me as to itsbeing beyond doubt that I had seen exactly what I had seen. To hold herperfectly in the pinch of that, I found I had only to ask her how, ifI had "made it up, " I came to be able to give, of each of the personsappearing to me, a picture disclosing, to the last detail, theirspecial marks--a portrait on the exhibition of which she had instantlyrecognized and named them. She wished of course--small blame to her!--tosink the whole subject; and I was quick to assure her that my owninterest in it had now violently taken the form of a search for the wayto escape from it. I encountered her on the ground of a probability thatwith recurrence--for recurrence we took for granted--I should getused to my danger, distinctly professing that my personal exposure hadsuddenly become the least of my discomforts. It was my new suspicionthat was intolerable; and yet even to this complication the later hoursof the day had brought a little ease. 

On leaving her, after my first outbreak, I had of course returned to mypupils, associating the right remedy for my dismay with that sense oftheir charm which I had already found to be a thing I could positivelycultivate and which had never failed me yet. I had simply, in otherwords, plunged afresh into Flora's special society and there becomeaware--it was almost a luxury!--that she could put her little conscioushand straight upon the spot that ached. She had looked at me in sweetspeculation and then had accused me to my face of having "cried. " I hadsupposed I had brushed away the ugly signs: but I could literally--forthe time, at all events--rejoice, under this fathomless charity, thatthey had not entirely disappeared. To gaze into the depths of blue ofthe child's eyes and pronounce their loveliness a trick of prematurecunning was to be guilty of a cynicism in preference to which Inaturally preferred to abjure my judgment and, so far as might be, myagitation. I couldn't abjure for merely wanting to, but I could repeatto Mrs. Grose--as I did there, over and over, in the small hours--thatwith their voices in the air, their pressure on one's heart, and theirfragrant faces against one's cheek, everything fell to the ground buttheir incapacity and their beauty. It was a pity that, somehow, tosettle this once for all, I had equally to re-enumerate the signs ofsubtlety that, in the afternoon, by the lake had made a miracle of myshow of self-possession. It was a pity to be obliged to reinvestigatethe certitude of the moment itself and repeat how it had come to me asa revelation that the inconceivable communion I then surprised was amatter, for either party, of habit. It was a pity that I should have hadto 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 Iactually saw Mrs. Grose herself, and that she wanted, by just so much asshe 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 littleactivity by which she sought to divert my attention--the perceptibleincrease of movement, the greater intensity of play, the singing, thegabbling of nonsense, and the invitation to romp. 

Yet if I had not indulged, to prove there was nothing in it, in thisreview, I should have missed the two or three dim elements of comfortthat still remained to me. I should not for instance have been able toasseverate to my friend that I was certain--which was so much to thegood--that _I_ at least had not betrayed myself. I should not have beenprompted, by stress of need, by desperation of mind--I scarce know whatto call it--to invoke such further aid to intelligence as might springfrom pushing my colleague fairly to the wall. She had told me, bit bybit, under pressure, a great deal; but a small shifty spot on the wrongside 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 theconcentration alike of our danger and our watch seemed to help--I feltthe importance of giving the last jerk to the curtain. "I don'tbelieve anything so horrible, " I recollect saying; "no, let us put itdefinitely, my dear, that I don't. But if I did, you know, there'sa thing I should require now, just without sparing you the least bitmore--oh, not a scrap, come!--to get out of you. What was it you had inmind when, in our distress, before Miles came back, over the letter fromhis school, you said, under my insistence, that you didn't pretend forhim 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 closelywatched him; he has been an imperturbable little prodigy of delightful, lovable goodness. Therefore you might perfectly have made the claim forhim if you had not, as it happened, seen an exception to take. What wasyour exception, and to what passage in your personal observation of himdid 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 gotmy answer. What my friend had had in mind proved to be immensely to thepurpose. It was neither more nor less than the circumstance that fora period of several months Quint and the boy had been perpetuallytogether. It was in fact the very appropriate truth that she hadventured to criticize the propriety, to hint at the incongruity, ofso close an alliance, and even to go so far on the subject as a frankoverture 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 Ipressed, was that SHE liked to see young gentlemen not forget theirstation. 

I pressed again, of course, at this. "You reminded him that Quint wasonly 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 uponme. "I was sure, at any rate, " she added, "that he didn't. But he deniedcertain occasions. "

"What occasions?"

"When they had been about together quite as if Quint were his tutor--anda very grand one--and Miss Jessel only for the little lady. When he hadgone off with the fellow, I mean, and spent hours with him. "

"He then prevaricated about it--he said he hadn't?" Her assent was clearenough 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 showanything. He denied, " she repeated; "he denied. "

Lord, how I pressed her now! "So that you could see he knew what wasbetween 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 dreadfulboldness of mind, and you keep back, out of timidity and modesty anddelicacy, even the impression that, in the past, when you had, withoutmy 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 thatsuggested to you, " I continued, "that he covered and concealed theirrelation. "

"Oh, he couldn't prevent--"

"Your learning the truth? I daresay! But, heavens, " I fell, withvehemence, 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 youthe 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 angelnow?"

"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 beable to tell you for some days. Only, put it to me again!" I cried in away that made my friend stare. "There are directions in which I mustnot for the present let myself go. " Meanwhile I returned to her firstexample--the one to which she had just previously referred--of the boy'shappy capacity for an occasional slip. "If Quint--on your remonstranceat the time you speak of--was a base menial, one of the things Milessaid to you, I find myself guessing, was that you were another. " Againher admission was so adequate that I continued: "And you forgave himthat?"

"Wouldn't YOU?"

"Oh, yes!" And we exchanged there, in the stillness, a sound of theoddest amusement. Then I went on: "At all events, while he was with theman--"

"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 suitedexactly the particularly deadly view I was in the very act of forbiddingmyself to entertain. But I so far succeeded in checking the expressionof this view that I will throw, just here, no further light on it thanmay be offered by the mention of my final observation to Mrs. Grose. "His having lied and been impudent are, I confess, less engagingspecimens than I had hoped to have from you of the outbreak in him ofthe little natural man. Still, " I mused, "They must do, for they make mefeel more than ever that I must watch. "

It made me blush, the next minute, to see in my friend's face how muchmore unreservedly she had forgiven him than her anecdote struck me aspresenting to my own tenderness an occasion for doing. This came outwhen, at the schoolroom door, she quitted me. "Surely you don't accuseHIM--"

"Of carrying on an intercourse that he conceals from me? Ah, rememberthat, until further evidence, I now accuse nobody. " Then, beforeshutting her out to go, by another passage, to her own place, "I mustjust wait, " I wound up. 

IX

I waited and waited, and the days, as they elapsed, took something frommy consternation. A very few of them, in fact, passing, in constantsight of my pupils, without a fresh incident, sufficed to give togrievous fancies and even to odious memories a kind of brush of thesponge. I have spoken of the surrender to their extraordinary childishgrace as a thing I could actively cultivate, and it may be imagined ifI neglected now to address myself to this source for whatever itwould yield. Stranger than I can express, certainly, was the effort tostruggle against my new lights; it would doubtless have been, however, a greater tension still had it not been so frequently successful. Iused to wonder how my little charges could help guessing that I thoughtstrange things about them; and the circumstances that these things onlymade them more interesting was not by itself a direct aid to keepingthem in the dark. I trembled lest they should see that they WERE soimmensely more interesting. Putting things at the worst, at all events, as in meditation I so often did, any clouding of their innocence couldonly be--blameless and foredoomed as they were--a reason the more fortaking risks. There were moments when, by an irresistible impulse, Ifound myself catching them up and pressing them to my heart. As soon asI 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 immediatecharm of my companions was a beguilement still effective even under theshadow of the possibility that it was studied. For if it occurred to methat I might occasionally excite suspicion by the little outbreaks of mysharper passion for them, so too I remember wondering if I mightn't seea 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 responsein children perpetually bowed over and hugged. The homage of which theywere so lavish succeeded, in truth, for my nerves, quite as well as ifI never appeared to myself, as I may say, literally to catch them at apurpose in it. They had never, I think, wanted to do so many things fortheir poor protectress; I mean--though they got their lessons better andbetter, which was naturally what would please her most--in the way ofdiverting, entertaining, surprising her; reading her passages, tellingher stories, acting her charades, pouncing out at her, in disguises, asanimals and historical characters, and above all astonishing her by the"pieces" they had secretly got by heart and could interminably recite. Ishould never get to the bottom--were I to let myself go even now--of theprodigious private commentary, all under still more private correction, with which, in these days, I overscored their full hours. They had shownme from the first a facility for everything, a general faculty which, taking a fresh start, achieved remarkable flights. They got their littletasks as if they loved them, and indulged, from the mere exuberance ofthe gift, in the most unimposed little miracles of memory. They notonly popped out at me as tigers and as Romans, but as Shakespeareans, astronomers, and navigators. This was so singularly the case that it hadpresumably 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 unnaturalcomposure on the subject of another school for Miles. What I rememberis that I was content not, for the time, to open the question, and thatcontentment must have sprung from the sense of his perpetually strikingshow of cleverness. He was too clever for a bad governess, for aparson's daughter, to spoil; and the strangest if not the brightestthread in the pensive embroidery I just spoke of was the impression Imight have got, if I had dared to work it out, that he was under someinfluence operating in his small intellectual life as a tremendousincitement. 

If it was easy to reflect, however, that such a boy could postponeschool, 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 meadd that in their company now--and I was careful almost never to be outof it--I could follow no scent very far. We lived in a cloud of musicand love and success and private theatricals. The musical sense in eachof the children was of the quickest, but the elder in especial had amarvelous knack of catching and repeating. The schoolroom pianobroke into all gruesome fancies; and when that failed there wereconfabulations in corners, with a sequel of one of them going out inthe highest spirits in order to "come in" as something new. I had hadbrothers myself, and it was no revelation to me that little girls couldbe slavish idolaters of little boys. What surpassed everything was thatthere was a little boy in the world who could have for the inferior age, sex, and intelligence so fine a consideration. They were extraordinarilyat one, and to say that they never either quarreled or complained isto make the note of praise coarse for their quality of sweetness. Sometimes, indeed, when I dropped into coarseness, I perhaps came acrosstraces of little understandings between them by which one of them shouldkeep me occupied while the other slipped away. There is a naive side, I suppose, in all diplomacy; but if my pupils practiced upon me, it wassurely with the minimum of grossness. It was all in the other quarterthat, after a lull, the grossness broke out. 

I find that I really hang back; but I must take my plunge. In going onwith the record of what was hideous at Bly, I not only challenge themost liberal faith--for which I little care; but--and this is anothermatter--I renew what I myself suffered, I again push my way through itto the end. There came suddenly an hour after which, as I look back, theaffair seems to me to have been all pure suffering; but I have at leastreached the heart of it, and the straightest road out is doubtless toadvance. One evening--with nothing to lead up or to prepare it--I feltthe cold touch of the impression that had breathed on me the night ofmy arrival and which, much lighter then, as I have mentioned, I shouldprobably have made little of in memory had my subsequent sojourn beenless agitated. I had not gone to bed; I sat reading by a couple ofcandles. 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 thesequestered home and appealed to the unavowed curiosity of my youth. Iremember that the book I had in my hand was Fielding's Amelia; also thatI was wholly awake. I recall further both a general conviction that itwas horribly late and a particular objection to looking at my watch. Ifigure, finally, that the white curtain draping, in the fashion of thosedays, the head of Flora's little bed, shrouded, as I had assured myselflong before, the perfection of childish rest. I recollect in short that, though I was deeply interested in my author, I found myself, at the turnof a page and with his spell all scattered, looking straight up fromhim and hard at the door of my room. There was a moment during whichI listened, reminded of the faint sense I had had, the first night, ofthere being something undefinably astir in the house, and noted the softbreath of the open casement just move the half-drawn blind. Then, withall the marks of a deliberation that must have seemed magnificent hadthere 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 thepassage, on which my light made little impression, noiselessly closedand locked the door. 

I can say now neither what determined nor what guided me, but I wentstraight along the lobby, holding my candle high, till I came withinsight of the tall window that presided over the great turn of thestaircase. At this point I precipitately found myself aware of threethings. They were practically simultaneous, yet they had flashes ofsuccession. My candle, under a bold flourish, went out, and I perceived, by the uncovered window, that the yielding dusk of earliest morningrendered it unnecessary. Without it, the next instant, I saw that therewas someone on the stair. I speak of sequences, but I required no lapseof seconds to stiffen myself for a third encounter with Quint. Theapparition had reached the landing halfway up and was therefore on thespot nearest the window, where at sight of me, it stopped short andfixed 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 theoak stair below, we faced each other in our common intensity. He wasabsolutely, on this occasion, a living, detestable, dangerous presence. But that was not the wonder of wonders; I reserve this distinction forquite another circumstance: the circumstance that dread had unmistakablyquitted me and that there was nothing in me there that didn't meet andmeasure 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 endof an instant magnificently aware of this. I felt, in a fierce rigor ofconfidence, that if I stood my ground a minute I should cease--forthe 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, inthe small hours, in a sleeping house, some enemy, some adventurer, some criminal. It was the dead silence of our long gaze at such closequarters that gave the whole horror, huge as it was, its only note ofthe unnatural. If I had met a murderer in such a place and at such anhour, 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 tomake me doubt if even _I_ were in life. I can't express what followed itsave by saying that the silence itself--which was indeed in a manneran attestation of my strength--became the element into which I saw thefigure disappear; in which I definitely saw it turn as I might haveseen the low wretch to which it had once belonged turn on receipt of anorder, and pass, with my eyes on the villainous back that no hunch couldhave more disfigured, straight down the staircase and into the darknessin which the next bend was lost. 

X

I remained awhile at the top of the stair, but with the effect presentlyof understanding that when my visitor had gone, he had gone: then Ireturned to my room. The foremost thing I saw there by the light of thecandle I had left burning was that Flora's little bed was empty; and onthis 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 herlying and over which (for the small silk counterpane and the sheets weredisarranged) the white curtains had been deceivingly pulled forward;then my step, to my unutterable relief, produced an answering sound: Iperceived 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 ofher candor and so little of her nightgown, with her pink bare feet andthe golden glow of her curls. She looked intensely grave, and I hadnever had such a sense of losing an advantage acquired (the thrillof which had just been so prodigious) as on my consciousness thatshe addressed me with a reproach. "You naughty: where HAVE youbeen?"--instead of challenging her own irregularity I found myselfarraigned and explaining. She herself explained, for that matter, withthe loveliest, eagerest simplicity. She had known suddenly, as she laythere, that I was out of the room, and had jumped up to see what hadbecome of me. I had dropped, with the joy of her reappearance, backinto my chair--feeling then, and then only, a little faint; and she hadpattered straight over to me, thrown herself upon my knee, given herselfto be held with the flame of the candle full in the wonderful littleface that was still flushed with sleep. I remember closing my eyes aninstant, yieldingly, consciously, as before the excess of somethingbeautiful that shone out of the blue of her own. "You were looking forme out of the window?" I said. "You thought I might be walking in thegrounds?"

"Well, you know, I thought someone was"--she never blanched as shesmiled 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 childishinconsequence, resentfully, though with a long sweetness in her littledrawl of the negative. 

At that moment, in the state of my nerves, I absolutely believed shelied; and if I once more closed my eyes it was before the dazzle of thethree 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 withstandit, 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 outat her on the spot and have it all over?--give it to her straight in herlovely little lighted face? "You see, you see, you KNOW that you do andthat you already quite suspect I believe it; therefore, why not franklyconfess it to me, so that we may at least live with it together andlearn perhaps, in the strangeness of our fate, where we are and whatit means?" This solicitation dropped, alas, as it came: if I couldimmediately 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 thecurtain 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 flameof the candle as if the question were as irrelevant, or at any rate asimpersonal, as Mrs. Marcet or nine-times-nine. "Oh, but you know, " shequite adequately answered, "that you might come back, you dear, and thatyou HAVE!" And after a little, when she had got into bed, I had, for along time, by almost sitting on her to hold her hand, to prove that Irecognized 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 myroommate unmistakably slept, and, stealing out, took noiseless turns inthe passage and even pushed as far as to where I had last met Quint. ButI never met him there again; and I may as well say at once that I on noother 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 Ionce recognized the presence of a woman seated on one of the lower stepswith her back presented to me, her body half-bowed and her head, in anattitude 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, ifinstead of being above I had been below, I should have had, for goingup, the same nerve I had lately shown Quint. Well, there continued tobe plenty of chance for nerve. On the eleventh night after my latestencounter with that gentleman--they were all numbered now--I had analarm that perilously skirted it and that indeed, from the particularquality of its unexpectedness, proved quite my sharpest shock. It wasprecisely the first night during this series that, weary with watching, I had felt that I might again without laxity lay myself down at myold hour. I slept immediately and, as I afterward knew, till about oneo'clock; but when I woke it was to sit straight up, as completely rousedas if a hand had shook me. I had left a light burning, but it was nowout, 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 mefurther, and the striking of a match completed the picture. 

The child had again got up--this time blowing out the taper, and hadagain, for some purpose of observation or response, squeezed in behindthe blind and was peering out into the night. That she now saw--as shehad not, I had satisfied myself, the previous time--was proved to me bythe fact that she was disturbed neither by my reillumination nor by thehaste I made to get into slippers and into a wrap. Hidden, protected, absorbed, she evidently rested on the sill--the casement openedforward--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 facewith the apparition we had met at the lake, and could now communicatewith it as she had not then been able to do. What I, on my side, had tocare for was, without disturbing her, to reach, from the corridor, someother window in the same quarter. I got to the door without her hearingme; I got out of it, closed it, and listened, from the other side, forsome sound from her. While I stood in the passage I had my eyes on herbrother's door, which was but ten steps off and which, indescribably, produced in me a renewal of the strange impulse that I lately spokeof as my temptation. What if I should go straight in and march to HISwindow?--what if, by risking to his boyish bewilderment a revelation ofmy motive, I should throw across the rest of the mystery the long halterof my boldness?

This thought held me sufficiently to make me cross to his threshold andpause again. I preternaturally listened; I figured to myself what mightportentously be; I wondered if his bed were also empty and he too weresecretly at watch. It was a deep, soundless minute, at the end of whichmy impulse failed. He was quiet; he might be innocent; the risk washideous; I turned away. There was a figure in the grounds--a figureprowling for a sight, the visitor with whom Flora was engaged; but itwas not the visitor most concerned with my boy. I hesitated afresh, buton 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 choosingthe right one. The right one suddenly presented itself to me as thelower one--though high above the gardens--in the solid corner of thehouse that I have spoken of as the old tower. This was a large, squarechamber, arranged with some state as a bedroom, the extravagant size ofwhich made it so inconvenient that it had not for years, though kept byMrs. Grose in exemplary order, been occupied. I had often admired it andI knew my way about in it; I had only, after just faltering at the firstchill gloom of its disuse, to pass across it and unbolt as quietly as Icould one of the shutters. Achieving this transit, I uncovered theglass without a sound and, applying my face to the pane, was able, thedarkness without being much less than within, to see that I commandedthe right direction. Then I saw something more. The moon made thenight 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 muchstraight at me as at something that was apparently above me. There wasclearly another person above me--there was a person on the tower; butthe presence on the lawn was not in the least what I had conceived andhad confidently hurried to meet. The presence on the lawn--I felt sickas 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 withwhich I kept my pupils in sight making it often difficult to meether privately, and the more as we each felt the importance of notprovoking--on the part of the servants quite as much as on that of thechildren--any suspicion of a secret flurry or that of a discussion ofmysteries. I drew a great security in this particular from her meresmooth aspect. There was nothing in her fresh face to pass on to othersmy horrible confidences. She believed me, I was sure, absolutely: if shehadn't I don't know what would have become of me, for I couldn't haveborne the business alone. But she was a magnificent monument to theblessing of a want of imagination, and if she could see in our littlecharges nothing but their beauty and amiability, their happiness andcleverness, she had no direct communication with the sources of mytrouble. If they had been at all visibly blighted or battered, she woulddoubtless 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 herlook, thank the Lord's mercy that if they were ruined the pieces wouldstill serve. Flights of fancy gave place, in her mind, to a steadyfireside glow, and I had already begun to perceive how, with thedevelopment of the conviction that--as time went on without a publicaccident--our young things could, after all, look out for themselves, she addressed her greatest solicitude to the sad case presented by theirinstructress. That, for myself, was a sound simplification: I couldengage that, to the world, my face should tell no tales, but it wouldhave been, in the conditions, an immense added strain to find myselfanxious about hers. 

At the hour I now speak of she had joined me, under pressure, on theterrace, where, with the lapse of the season, the afternoon sun was nowagreeable; and we sat there together while, before us, at a distance, but within call if we wished, the children strolled to and fro in oneof their most manageable moods. They moved slowly, in unison, below us, over the lawn, the boy, as they went, reading aloud from a storybook andpassing his arm round his sister to keep her quite in touch. Mrs. Grosewatched them with positive placidity; then I caught the suppressedintellectual creak with which she conscientiously turned to take from mea view of the back of the tapestry. I had made her a receptacle oflurid things, but there was an odd recognition of my superiority--myaccomplishments and my function--in her patience under my pain. Sheoffered her mind to my disclosures as, had I wished to mix a witch'sbroth and proposed it with assurance, she would have held out a largeclean saucepan. This had become thoroughly her attitude by the timethat, in my recital of the events of the night, I reached the point ofwhat Miles had said to me when, after seeing him, at such a monstroushour, almost on the very spot where he happened now to be, I had gonedown to bring him in; choosing then, at the window, with a concentratedneed of not alarming the house, rather that method than a signal moreresonant. I had left her meanwhile in little doubt of my small hope ofrepresenting with success even to her actual sympathy my sense of thereal splendor of the little inspiration with which, after I had got himinto the house, the boy met my final articulate challenge. As soon as Iappeared in the moonlight on the terrace, he had come to me as straightas 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 hungrilyhovered for him, along the lobby where I had listened and trembled, andso 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 forsomething plausible and not too grotesque. It would tax his invention, certainly, and I felt, this time, over his real embarrassment, a curiousthrill of triumph. It was a sharp trap for the inscrutable! He couldn'tplay 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 anequal dumb appeal as to how the deuce _I_ should. I was confronted atlast, as never yet, with all the risk attached even now to sounding myown horrid note. I remember in fact that as we pushed into his littlechamber, 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 noneed of striking a match--I remember how I suddenly dropped, sank uponthe edge of the bed from the force of the idea that he must know how hereally, as they say, "had" me. He could do what he liked, with all hiscleverness to help him, so long as I should continue to defer to theold tradition of the criminality of those caretakers of the young whominister to superstitions and fears. He "had" me indeed, and in a cleftstick; for who would ever absolve me, who would consent that I should gounhung, if, by the faintest tremor of an overture, I were the first tointroduce into our perfect intercourse an element so dire? No, no: itwas useless to attempt to convey to Mrs. Grose, just as it is scarcelyless so to attempt to suggest here, how, in our short, stiff brush inthe dark, he fairly shook me with admiration. I was of course thoroughlykind and merciful; never, never yet had I placed on his little shouldershands of such tenderness as those with which, while I rested against thebed, I held him there well under fire. I had no alternative but, in format least, to put it to him. 

"You must tell me now--and all the truth. What did you go out for? Whatwere 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 Itell you why, will you understand?" My heart, at this, leaped into mymouth. 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 stoodthere more than ever a little fairy prince. It was his brightness indeedthat gave me a respite. Would it be so great if he were really going totell me? "Well, " he said at last, "just exactly in order that you shoulddo this. "

"Do what?"

"Think me--for a change--BAD!" I shall never forget the sweetness andgaiety with which he brought out the word, nor how, on top of it, hebent 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 myarms, the most stupendous effort not to cry. He had given exactly theaccount of himself that permitted least of my going behind it, and itwas only with the effect of confirming my acceptance of it that, as Ipresently 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 knowit?"

"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 alsolooked--you saw. "

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

He literally bloomed so from this exploit that he could afford radiantlyto assent. "How otherwise should I have been bad enough?" he asked. Then, after another embrace, the incident and our interview closed on myrecognition of all the reserves of goodness that, for his joke, he hadbeen 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 Ireinforced it with the mention of still another remark that he had madebefore 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 MIGHTdo!' He threw that off to show me how good he is. He knows down tothe ground what he 'might' do. That's what he gave them a taste of atschool. "

"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 witheither child, you would clearly have understood. The more I've watchedand waited the more I've felt that if there were nothing else to make itsure it would be made so by the systematic silence of each. NEVER, by aslip of the tongue, have they so much as alluded to either of their oldfriends, 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 totheir fill; but even while they pretend to be lost in their fairytalethey're steeped in their vision of the dead restored. He's not readingto 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. WhatI'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 werevictims of it, passing and repassing in their interlocked sweetness, gave my colleague something to hold on by; and I felt how tight she heldas, without stirring in the breath of my passion, she covered them stillwith her eyes. "Of what other things have you got hold?"

"Why, of the very things that have delighted, fascinated, and yet, atbottom, as I now so strangely see, mystified and troubled me. Their morethan 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 ofbringing it out really helped me to trace it--follow it all up and pieceit all together. "They haven't been good--they've only been absent. Ithas been easy to live with them, because they're simply leading alife of their own. They're not mine--they're not ours. They're his andthey'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 forwhat?"

"For the love of all the evil that, in those dreadful days, the pair putinto them. And to ply them with that evil still, to keep up the work ofdemons, is what brings the others back. "

"Laws!" said my friend under her breath. The exclamation was homely, butit revealed a real acceptance of my further proof of what, in the badtime--for there had been a worse even than this!--must have occurred. There could have been no such justification for me as the plain assentof her experience to whatever depth of depravity I found credible inour brace of scoundrels. It was in obvious submission of memory that shebrought out after a moment: "They WERE rascals! But what can they nowdo?" she pursued. 

"Do?" I echoed so loud that Miles and Flora, as they passed at theirdistance, paused an instant in their walk and looked at us. "Don'tthey do enough?" I demanded in a lower tone, while the children, havingsmiled and nodded and kissed hands to us, resumed their exhibition. Wewere held by it a minute; then I answered: "They can destroy them!" Atthis my companion did turn, but the inquiry she launched was a silentone, 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 oftowers, the roof of houses, the outside of windows, the further edgeof pools; but there's a deep design, on either side, to shorten thedistance and overcome the obstacle; and the success of the tempters isonly a question of time. They've only to keep to their suggestions ofdanger. "

"For the children to come?"

"And perish in the attempt!" Mrs. Grose slowly got up, and Iscrupulously added: "Unless, of course, we can prevent!"

Standing there before me while I kept my seat, she visibly turned thingsover. "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 foolishface. "You, miss. "

"By writing to him that his house is poisoned and his little nephew andniece mad?"

"But if they ARE, miss?"

"And if I am myself, you mean? That's charming news to be sent him by agoverness whose prime undertaking was to give him no worry. "

Mrs. Grose considered, following the children again. "Yes, he do hateworry. That was the great reason--"

"Why those fiends took him in so long? No doubt, though his indifferencemust have been awful. As I'm not a fiend, at any rate, I shouldn't takehim in. "

My companion, after an instant and for all answer, sat down again andgrasped 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 thanever yet. "You see me asking him for a visit?" No, with her eyes onmy face she evidently couldn't. Instead of it even--as a woman readsanother--she could see what I myself saw: his derision, his amusement, his contempt for the breakdown of my resignation at being left alone andfor the fine machinery I had set in motion to attract his attention tomy slighted charms. She didn't know--no one knew--how proud I had beento serve him and to stick to our terms; yet she nonetheless took themeasure, I think, of the warning I now gave her. "If you should so loseyour 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 asmuch as ever an effort beyond my strength--offered, in close quarters, difficulties as insurmountable as before. This situation continued amonth, and with new aggravations and particular notes, the note aboveall, sharper and sharper, of the small ironic consciousness on the partof my pupils. It was not, I am as sure today as I was sure then, my mereinfernal imagination: it was absolutely traceable that they were awareof my predicament and that this strange relation made, in a manner, fora long time, the air in which we moved. I don't mean that they had theirtongues in their cheeks or did anything vulgar, for that was not oneof their dangers: I do mean, on the other hand, that the element of theunnamed and untouched became, between us, greater than any other, andthat so much avoidance could not have been so successfully effectedwithout a great deal of tacit arrangement. It was as if, at moments, wewere perpetually coming into sight of subjects before which we must stopshort, turning suddenly out of alleys that we perceived to be blind, closing with a little bang that made us look at each other--for, likeall bangs, it was something louder than we had intended--the doors wehad indiscreetly opened. All roads lead to Rome, and there were timeswhen it might have struck us that almost every branch of study orsubject of conversation skirted forbidden ground. Forbidden ground wasthe question of the return of the dead in general and of whatever, inespecial, might survive, in memory, of the friends little children hadlost. There were days when I could have sworn that one of them had, witha small invisible nudge, said to the other: "She thinks she'll do itthis time--but she WON'T!" To "do it" would have been to indulge forinstance--and for once in a way--in some direct reference to the ladywho had prepared them for my discipline. They had a delightful endlessappetite for passages in my own history, to which I had again andagain treated them; they were in possession of everything that hadever happened to me, had had, with every circumstance the story of mysmallest adventures and of those of my brothers and sisters and of thecat and the dog at home, as well as many particulars of the eccentricnature of my father, of the furniture and arrangement of our house, andof the conversation of the old women of our village. There were thingsenough, taking one with another, to chatter about, if one went very fastand knew by instinct when to go round. They pulled with an art of theirown the strings of my invention and my memory; and nothing else perhaps, when I thought of such occasions afterward, gave me so the suspicionof being watched from under cover. It was in any case over MY life, MYpast, and MY friends alone that we could take anything like our ease--astate of affairs that led them sometimes without the least pertinenceto break out into sociable reminders. I was invited--with no visibleconnection--to repeat afresh Goody Gosling's celebrated mot or toconfirm the details already supplied as to the cleverness of thevicarage pony. 

It was partly at such junctures as these and partly at quite differentones that, with the turn my matters had now taken, my predicament, as Ihave called it, grew most sensible. The fact that the days passed forme without another encounter ought, it would have appeared, to have donesomething toward soothing my nerves. Since the light brush, that secondnight on the upper landing, of the presence of a woman at the foot ofthe stair, I had seen nothing, whether in or out of the house, that onehad better not have seen. There was many a corner round which I expectedto 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 outhalf our lights. The place, with its gray sky and withered garlands, its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was like a theater afterthe performance--all strewn with crumpled playbills. There were exactlystates of the air, conditions of sound and of stillness, unspeakableimpressions of the KIND of ministering moment, that brought back to me, long enough to catch it, the feeling of the medium in which, that Juneevening 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 thewindow, looked for him in vain in the circle of shrubbery. I recognizedthe signs, the portents--I recognized the moment, the spot. But theyremained unaccompanied and empty, and I continued unmolested; ifunmolested one could call a young woman whose sensibility had, in themost extraordinary fashion, not declined but deepened. I had said in mytalk with Mrs. Grose on that horrid scene of Flora's by the lake--andhad perplexed her by so saying--that it would from that moment distressme much more to lose my power than to keep it. I had then expressed whatwas vividly in my mind: the truth that, whether the children reallysaw or not--since, that is, it was not yet definitely proved--I greatlypreferred, as a safeguard, the fullness of my own exposure. I was readyto know the very worst that was to be known. What I had then had an uglyglimpse of was that my eyes might be sealed just while theirs weremost opened. Well, my eyes WERE sealed, it appeared, at present--aconsummation for which it seemed blasphemous not to thank God. Therewas, alas, a difficulty about that: I would have thanked him with allmy soul had I not had in a proportionate measure this conviction of thesecret of my pupils. 

How can I retrace today the strange steps of my obsession? There weretimes 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, theyhad visitors who were known and were welcome. Then it was that, had Inot been deterred by the very chance that such an injury might provegreater than the injury to be averted, my exultation would have brokenout. "They're here, they're here, you little wretches, " I would havecried, "and you can't deny it now!" The little wretches denied it withall the added volume of their sociability and their tenderness, in justthe crystal depths of which--like the flash of a fish in a stream--themockery of their advantage peeped up. The shock, in truth, had sunk intome still deeper than I knew on the night when, looking out to see eitherQuint or Miss Jessel under the stars, I had beheld the boy overwhose rest I watched and who had immediately brought in with him--hadstraightway, there, turned it on me--the lovely upward look with which, from the battlements above me, the hideous apparition of Quint hadplayed. If it was a question of a scare, my discovery on this occasionhad scared me more than any other, and it was in the condition of nervesproduced by it that I made my actual inductions. They harassed me sothat sometimes, at odd moments, I shut myself up audibly to rehearse--itwas at once a fantastic relief and a renewed despair--the manner inwhich I might come to the point. I approached it from one side and theother while, in my room, I flung myself about, but I always broke downin the monstrous utterance of names. As they died away on my lips, Isaid to myself that I should indeed help them to represent somethinginfamous, if, by pronouncing them, I should violate as rare a littlecase of instinctive delicacy as any schoolroom, probably, had everknown. When I said to myself: "THEY have the manners to be silent, andyou, trusted as you are, the baseness to speak!" I felt myself crimsonand I covered my face with my hands. After these secret scenes Ichattered more than ever, going on volubly enough till one of ourprodigious, palpable hushes occurred--I can call them nothing else--thestrange, dizzy lift or swim (I try for terms!) into a stillness, a pauseof all life, that had nothing to do with the more or less noise that atthe moment we might be engaged in making and that I could hear throughany deepened exhilaration or quickened recitation or louder strum of thepiano. Then it was that the others, the outsiders, were there. Thoughthey were not angels, they "passed, " as the French say, causing me, while they stayed, to tremble with the fear of their addressing to theiryounger victims some yet more infernal message or more vivid image thanthey 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 andunguessable and that sprang from dreadful passages of intercourse in thepast. Such things naturally left on the surface, for the time, a chillwhich we vociferously denied that we felt; and we had, all three, withrepetition, got into such splendid training that we went, each time, almost automatically, to mark the close of the incident, through thevery same movements. It was striking of the children, at all events, to kiss me inveterately with a kind of wild irrelevance and never tofail--one or the other--of the precious question that had helped usthrough many a peril. "When do you think he WILL come? Don't you thinkwe OUGHT to write?"--there was nothing like that inquiry, we found byexperience, for carrying off an awkwardness. "He" of course was theiruncle in Harley Street; and we lived in much profusion of theory that hemight at any moment arrive to mingle in our circle. It was impossible tohave given less encouragement than he had done to such a doctrine, butif we had not had the doctrine to fall back upon we should havedeprived each other of some of our finest exhibitions. He never wrote tothem--that may have been selfish, but it was a part of the flattery ofhis trust of me; for the way in which a man pays his highest tribute toa woman is apt to be but by the more festal celebration of one of thesacred laws of his comfort; and I held that I carried out the spirit ofthe pledge given not to appeal to him when I let my charges understandthat their own letters were but charming literary exercises. They weretoo beautiful to be posted; I kept them myself; I have them all to thishour. This was a rule indeed which only added to the satiric effect ofmy being plied with the supposition that he might at any moment be amongus. It was exactly as if my charges knew how almost more awkward thananything else that might be for me. There appears to me, moreover, asI look back, no note in all this more extraordinary than the mere factthat, in spite of my tension and of their triumph, I never lost patiencewith them. Adorable they must in truth have been, I now reflect, that Ididn't in these days hate them! Would exasperation, however, if reliefhad longer been postponed, finally have betrayed me? It little matters, for relief arrived. I call it relief, though it was only the relief thata snap brings to a strain or the burst of a thunderstorm to a day ofsuffocation. It was at least change, and it came with a rush. 

XIV

Walking to church a certain Sunday morning, I had little Miles at myside and his sister, in advance of us and at Mrs. Grose's, well insight. 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, brightand sharp, made the church bells almost gay. It was an odd accident ofthought that I should have happened at such a moment to be particularlyand very gratefully struck with the obedience of my little charges. Whydid they never resent my inexorable, my perpetual society? Something orother had brought nearer home to me that I had all but pinned the boy tomy shawl and that, in the way our companions were marshaled before me, I might have appeared to provide against some danger of rebellion. Iwas like a gaoler with an eye to possible surprises and escapes. But allthis belonged--I mean their magnificent little surrender--just to thespecial array of the facts that were most abysmal. Turned out for Sundayby his uncle's tailor, who had had a free hand and a notion ofpretty waistcoats and of his grand little air, Miles's whole title toindependence, the rights of his sex and situation, were so stamped uponhim that if he had suddenly struck for freedom I should have had nothingto say. I was by the strangest of chances wondering how I should meethim when the revolution unmistakably occurred. I call it a revolutionbecause I now see how, with the word he spoke, the curtain rose on thelast 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, particularlyas uttered in the sweet, high, casual pipe with which, at allinterlocutors, but above all at his eternal governess, he threw offintonations as if he were tossing roses. There was something inthem that always made one "catch, " and I caught, at any rate, now soeffectually that I stopped as short as if one of the trees of thepark 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 andcharming than usual. I could feel in him how he already, from my atfirst finding nothing to reply, perceived the advantage he had gained. Iwas so slow to find anything that he had plenty of time, after a minute, to continue with his suggestive but inconclusive smile: "You know, mydear, that for a fellow to be with a lady ALWAYS--!" His "my dear" wasconstantly on his lips for me, and nothing could have expressed more theexact shade of the sentiment with which I desired to inspire my pupilsthan its fond familiarity. It was so respectfully easy. 

But, oh, how I felt that at present I must pick my own phrases! Iremember that, to gain time, I tried to laugh, and I seemed to see inthe 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 outbetween us. "Ah, of course, she's a jolly, 'perfect' lady; but, afterall, 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'regetting on. " Oh, but I felt helpless!

I have kept to this day the heartbreaking little idea of how he seemedto know that and to play with it. "And you can't say I've not beenawfully good, can you?"

I laid my hand on his shoulder, for, though I felt how much better itwould have been to walk on, I was not yet quite able. "No, I can't saythat, 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 childishreproach. "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 witsabout 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 AMI going back?"

I wore, in turning it over, my most responsible air. "Were you veryhappy 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 muchthat. "

"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 variouspersons, including several of the household of Bly, on their way to itand 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 muchfurther; I reflected hungrily that, for more than an hour, he would haveto be silent; and I thought with envy of the comparative dusk of the pewand of the almost spiritual help of the hassock on which I might bendmy knees. I seemed literally to be running a race with some confusionto which he was about to reduce me, but I felt that he had got in firstwhen, 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 ownsort, 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 retreatingfor a jump, yet leaving his thought so unfinished that, after we hadcome into the gate, another stop, which he imposed on me by the pressureof his arm, had become inevitable. Mrs. Grose and Flora had passed intothe church, the other worshippers had followed, and we were, for theminute, alone among the old, thick graves. We had paused, on the pathfrom 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!" Buthe didn't move, and he presently produced something that made me dropstraight down on the stone slab, as if suddenly to rest. "Does my unclethink 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 Imean 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 answerthat would not involve something of a sacrifice of my employer. Yet itappeared to me that we were all, at Bly, sufficiently sacrificed to makethat venial. "I don't think your uncle much cares. "

Miles, on this, stood looking at me. "Then don't you think he can bemade 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. Hegave me another look charged with that expression and then marched offalone into church. 

XV

The business was practically settled from the moment I never followedhim. It was a pitiful surrender to agitation, but my being aware of thishad somehow no power to restore me. I only sat there on my tomb and readinto 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, forabsence, the pretext that I was ashamed to offer my pupils and the restof the congregation such an example of delay. What I said to myselfabove all was that Miles had got something out of me and that the proofof it, for him, would be just this awkward collapse. He had got outof me that there was something I was much afraid of and that he shouldprobably 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 intolerablequestion of the grounds of his dismissal from school, for that wasreally but the question of the horrors gathered behind. That his uncleshould arrive to treat with me of these things was a solution that, strictly speaking, I ought now to have desired to bring on; but Icould so little face the ugliness and the pain of it that I simplyprocrastinated and lived from hand to mouth. The boy, to my deepdiscomposure, was immensely in the right, was in a position to sayto me: "Either you clear up with my guardian the mystery of thisinterruption of my studies, or you cease to expect me to lead with youa life that's so unnatural for a boy. " What was so unnatural for theparticular boy I was concerned with was this sudden revelation of aconsciousness and a plan. 

That was what really overcame me, what prevented my going in. I walkedround 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: hewould be so much more sure than ever to pass his arm into mine and makeme sit there for an hour in close, silent contact with his commentaryon our talk. For the first minute since his arrival I wanted to get awayfrom him. As I paused beneath the high east window and listened to thesounds of worship, I was taken with an impulse that might master me, I felt, completely should I give it the least encouragement. I mighteasily put an end to my predicament by getting away altogether. Herewas my chance; there was no one to stop me; I could give the whole thingup--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 ofso many of the servants would practically have left unoccupied. No one, in short, could blame me if I should just drive desperately off. Whatwas it to get away if I got away only till dinner? That would be ina couple of hours, at the end of which--I had the acute prevision--mylittle pupils would play at innocent wonder about my nonappearance intheir train. 

"What DID you do, you naughty, bad thing? Why in the world, to worry usso--and take our thoughts off, too, don't you know?--did you desert usat the very door?" I couldn't meet such questions nor, as they askedthem, their false little lovely eyes; yet it was all so exactly what Ishould have to meet that, as the prospect grew sharp to me, I at lastlet myself go. 

I got, so far as the immediate moment was concerned, away; I camestraight out of the churchyard and, thinking hard, retraced my stepsthrough the park. It seemed to me that by the time I reached the houseI had made up my mind I would fly. The Sunday stillness both of theapproaches and of the interior, in which I met no one, fairly excitedme with a sense of opportunity. Were I to get off quickly, this way, Ishould get off without a scene, without a word. My quickness would haveto be remarkable, however, and the question of a conveyance was thegreat one to settle. Tormented, in the hall, with difficultiesand obstacles, I remember sinking down at the foot of thestaircase--suddenly collapsing there on the lowest step and then, with arevulsion, recalling that it was exactly where more than a month before, in the darkness of night and just so bowed with evil things, I hadseen the specter of the most horrible of women. At this I was ableto straighten myself; I went the rest of the way up; I made, in mybewilderment, for the schoolroom, where there were objects belonging tome that I should have to take. But I opened the door to find again, in aflash, my eyes unsealed. In the presence of what I saw I reeled straightback 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 blushfor some housemaid who might have stayed at home to look after the placeand who, availing herself of rare relief from observation and of theschoolroom table and my pens, ink, and paper, had applied herself to theconsiderable effort of a letter to her sweetheart. There was an effortin the way that, while her arms rested on the table, her hands withevident weariness supported her head; but at the moment I took this inI had already become aware that, in spite of my entrance, her attitudestrangely persisted. Then it was--with the very act of its announcingitself--that her identity flared up in a change of posture. She rose, not as if she had heard me, but with an indescribable grand melancholyof indifference and detachment, and, within a dozen feet of me, stoodthere as my vile predecessor. Dishonored and tragic, she was all beforeme; but even as I fixed and, for memory, secured it, the awful imagepassed away. Dark as midnight in her black dress, her haggard beauty andher unutterable woe, she had looked at me long enough to appear to saythat 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 offeeling that it was I who was the intruder. It was as a wild protestagainst it that, actually addressing her--"You terrible, miserablewoman!"--I heard myself break into a sound that, by the open door, rangthrough the long passage and the empty house. She looked at me as ifshe heard me, but I had recovered myself and cleared the air. There wasnothing in the room the next minute but the sunshine and a sense that Imust stay. 

XVI

I had so perfectly expected that the return of my pupils would be markedby a demonstration that I was freshly upset at having to take intoaccount that they were dumb about my absence. Instead of gailydenouncing and caressing me, they made no allusion to my having failedthem, and I was left, for the time, on perceiving that she too saidnothing, to study Mrs. Grose's odd face. I did this to such purpose thatI 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 thehousekeeper's room, where, in the twilight, amid a smell of lately bakedbread, but with the place all swept and garnished, I found her sittingin pained placidity before the fire. So I see her still, so I see herbest: facing the flame from her straight chair in the dusky, shiningroom, a large clean image of the "put away"--of drawers closed andlocked and rest without a remedy. 

"Oh, yes, they asked me to say nothing; and to please them--so long asthey 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 tomeet a friend. "

She showed her surprise. "A friend--YOU?"

"Oh, yes, I have a couple!" I laughed. "But did the children give you areason?"

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

My face had made her rueful. "No, I like it worse!" But after an instantI 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 Isaid the same. "

I thought a moment. "You were too sweet, too--I can hear you all. Butnonetheless, 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, mydear, " I went on, "for a talk with Miss Jessel. "

I had by this time formed the habit of having Mrs. Grose literally wellin hand in advance of my sounding that note; so that even now, asshe bravely blinked under the signal of my word, I could keep hercomparatively 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 candorof 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 falteredmyself 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 havefallen away from me had I not been prepared. I still held her there, toshow 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! Isee it's the only way. What's 'out, ' as I told you, with Miles is thatif he thinks I'm afraid to--and has ideas of what he gains by that--heshall see he's mistaken. Yes, yes; his uncle shall have it here from meon the spot (and before the boy himself, if necessary) that if I'm to bereproached 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 shewas 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 undertaketo 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 andperfect? 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 wholething. After all, " I said, "it's their uncle's fault. If he left heresuch people--!"

"He didn't really in the least know them. The fault's mine. " She hadturned 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 tellhim?"

"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, andit made her, after a moment, inconsequently break down. The tears wereagain 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 hadchanged 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 blanksheet of paper and listened to the lash of the rain and the batter ofthe gusts. Finally I went out, taking a candle; I crossed the passageand 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 atrest, 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 inthe gloom!

I went in with my light and found him, in bed, very wide awake, but verymuch at his ease. "Well, what are YOU up to?" he asked with a grace ofsociability in which it occurred to me that Mrs. Grose, had she beenpresent, 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'relike 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 heldout 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 hadso 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 taperthere 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 andour eyes continued to meet, that my silence had all the air of admittinghis charge and that nothing in the whole world of reality was perhaps atthat moment so fabulous as our actual relation. "Certainly you shall goback to school, " I said, "if it be that that troubles you. But not tothe old place--we must find another, a better. How could I know it didtrouble you, this question, when you never told me so, never spoke of itat all?" His clear, listening face, framed in its smooth whiteness, madehim for the minute as appealing as some wistful patient in a children'shospital; and I would have given, as the resemblance came to me, all Ipossessed on earth really to be the nurse or the sister of charity whomight have helped to cure him. Well, even as it was, I perhaps mighthelp! "Do you know you've never said a word to me about your school--Imean the old one; never mentioned it in any way?"

He seemed to wonder; he smiled with the same loveliness. But he clearlygained time; he waited, he called for guidance. "Haven't I?" It wasn'tfor 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 fromhim, 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 hislittle resources taxed to play, under the spell laid on him, a partof 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 thatMAY have happened there. Therefore you can fancy how much I'm in thedark. Until you came out, that way, this morning, you had, since thefirst hour I saw you, scarce even made a reference to anything in yourprevious life. You seemed so perfectly to accept the present. " It wasextraordinary how my absolute conviction of his secret precocity (orwhatever I might call the poison of an influence that I dared but halfto phrase) made him, in spite of the faint breath of his inward trouble, appear as accessible as an older person--imposed him almost as anintellectual 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. "Idon'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 thepillow. "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 beautifullystaring. "My uncle must come down, and you must completely settlethings. "

"If we do, " I returned with some spirit, "you may be sure it will be totake 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'llhave to tell him a tremendous lot!"

The exultation with which he uttered this helped me somehow, for theinstant, to meet him rather more. "And how much will YOU, Miles, have totell 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 withyou. 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 unimpeachablegaiety; and doubtless it was that very note that most evoked for me thepoignancy, the unnatural childish tragedy, of his probable reappearanceat the end of three months with all this bravado and still moredishonor. It overwhelmed me now that I should never be able to bearthat, and it made me let myself go. I threw myself upon him and in thetenderness of my pity I embraced him. "Dear little Miles, dear littleMiles--!"

My face was close to his, and he let me kiss him, simply taking it withindulgent 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 hishand to look at as one had seen sick children look. "I've told you--Itold 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 merelease him, yet, when I had slowly risen, linger beside him. God knowsI never wished to harass him, but I felt that merely, at this, to turnmy 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. "Whathappened?"

It made me, the sound of the words, in which it seemed to me thatI caught for the very first time a small faint quaver of consentingconsciousness--it made me drop on my knees beside the bed and seizeonce more the chance of possessing him. "Dear little Miles, dear littleMiles, if you KNEW how I want to help you! It's only that, it's nothingbut that, and I'd rather die than give you a pain or do you a wrong--I'drather die than hurt a hair of you. Dear little Miles"--oh, I brought itout now even if I SHOULD go too far--"I just want you to help me to saveyou!" But I knew in a moment after this that I had gone too far. Theanswer to my appeal was instantaneous, but it came in the form of anextraordinary blast and chill, a gust of frozen air, and a shake of theroom as great as if, in the wild wind, the casement had crashed in. Theboy gave a loud, high shriek, which, lost in the rest of the shock ofsound, 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 andwas conscious of darkness. So for a moment we remained, while I staredabout me and saw that the drawn curtains were unstirred and the windowtight. "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 mequietly: "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 enoughto send it before the messenger should go to the village. Meanwhilethere had been, on the part of my pupils, no more brilliant, moreexemplary morning. It was exactly as if they had both had at heart togloss over any recent little friction. They performed the dizziest featsof arithmetic, soaring quite out of MY feeble range, and perpetrated, in higher spirits than ever, geographical and historical jokes. It wasconspicuous of course in Miles in particular that he appeared to wish toshow how easily he could let me down. This child, to my memory, reallylives in a setting of beauty and misery that no words can translate;there was a distinction all his own in every impulse he revealed; neverwas a small natural creature, to the uninitiated eye all frankness andfreedom, a more ingenious, a more extraordinary little gentleman. I hadperpetually to guard against the wonder of contemplation into which myinitiated view betrayed me; to check the irrelevant gaze and discouragedsigh in which I constantly both attacked and renounced the enigma ofwhat such a little gentleman could have done that deserved a penalty. Say that, by the dark prodigy I knew, the imagination of all evil HADbeen opened up to him: all the justice within me ached for the proofthat it could ever have flowered into an act. 

He had never, at any rate, been such a little gentleman as when, afterour early dinner on this dreadful day, he came round to me and asked ifI shouldn't like him, for half an hour, to play to me. David playingto Saul could never have shown a finer sense of the occasion. It wasliterally a charming exhibition of tact, of magnanimity, and quitetantamount to his saying outright: "The true knights we love to readabout never push an advantage too far. I know what you mean now: youmean that--to be let alone yourself and not followed up--you'll cease toworry and spy upon me, won't keep me so close to you, will let me goand come. Well, I 'come, ' you see--but I don't go! There'll be plenty oftime for that. I do really delight in your society, and I only want toshow you that I contended for a principle. " It may be imagined whether Iresisted this appeal or failed to accompany him again, hand in hand, tothe schoolroom. He sat down at the old piano and played as he had neverplayed; and if there are those who think he had better have been kickinga football I can only say that I wholly agree with them. For at theend of a time that under his influence I had quite ceased to measure, Istarted up with a strange sense of having literally slept at my post. Itwas after luncheon, and by the schoolroom fire, and yet I hadn'treally, in the least, slept: I had only done something much worse--I hadforgotten. Where, all this time, was Flora? When I put the question toMiles, he played on a minute before answering and then could only say:"Why, my dear, how do _I_ know?"--breaking moreover into a happy laughwhich, immediately after, as if it were a vocal accompaniment, heprolonged into incoherent, extravagant song. 

I went straight to my room, but his sister was not there; then, beforegoing downstairs, I looked into several others. As she was nowhereabout she would surely be with Mrs. Grose, whom, in the comfort of thattheory, I accordingly proceeded in quest of. I found her where I hadfound her the evening before, but she met my quick challenge with blank, scared ignorance. She had only supposed that, after the repast, I hadcarried 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 mysight without some special provision. Of course now indeed she might bewith the maids, so that the immediate thing was to look for her withoutan air of alarm. This we promptly arranged between us; but when, tenminutes later and in pursuance of our arrangement, we met in the hall, it was only to report on either side that after guarded inquiries wehad altogether failed to trace her. For a minute there, apart fromobservation, we exchanged mute alarms, and I could feel with what highinterest 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'tsearched. "

"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 mypressure. She communed, on the contrary, on the spot, with heruneasiness. "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 mytone--had never yet reached so calm an assurance. 

"The trick's played, " I went on; "they've successfully worked theirplan. He found the most divine little way to keep me quiet while shewent off. "

"'Divine'?" Mrs. Grose bewilderedly echoed. 

"Infernal, then!" I almost cheerfully rejoined. "He has provided forhimself 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 gaspingan instant at my sudden resignation, "Because of your letter?" sheeagerly brought out. 

I quickly, by way of answer, felt for my letter, drew it forth, held itup, 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 andopened it; I was already on the steps. 

My companion still demurred: the storm of the night and the earlymorning had dropped, but the afternoon was damp and gray. I came down tothe 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, " Icried, "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 daresayrightly called, though I reflect that it may in fact have been a sheetof water less remarkable than it appeared to my untraveled eyes. Myacquaintance with sheets of water was small, and the pool of Bly, at allevents on the few occasions of my consenting, under the protection ofmy pupils, to affront its surface in the old flat-bottomed boat mooredthere for our use, had impressed me both with its extent and itsagitation. The usual place of embarkation was half a mile from thehouse, but I had an intimate conviction that, wherever Flora mightbe, she was not near home. She had not given me the slip for any smalladventure, and, since the day of the very great one that I had sharedwith her by the pond, I had been aware, in our walks, of the quarter towhich she most inclined. This was why I had now given to Mrs. Grose'ssteps so marked a direction--a direction that made her, when sheperceived it, oppose a resistance that showed me she was freshlymystified. "You're going to the water, Miss?--you think she's IN--?"

"She may be, though the depth is, I believe, nowhere very great. Butwhat I judge most likely is that she's on the spot from which, the otherday, we saw together what I told you. "

"When she pretended not to see--?"

"With that astounding self-possession? I've always been sure she wantedto go back alone. And now her brother has managed it for her. "

Mrs. Grose still stood where she had stopped. "You suppose they reallyTALK of them?"

"I could meet this with a confidence! They say things that, if we heardthem, 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, Iwent 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 leastdanger. She exhaled a moan of relief as we at last came in sight of thegreater part of the water without a sight of the child. There was notrace of Flora on that nearer side of the bank where my observation ofher had been most startling, and none on the opposite edge, where, savefor 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 lengththat, with its ends out of view, it might have been taken for a scantriver. We looked at the empty expanse, and then I felt the suggestionof my friend's eyes. I knew what she meant and I replied with a negativeheadshake. 

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

My companion stared at the vacant mooring place and then again acrossthe lake. "Then where is it?"

"Our not seeing it is the strongest of proofs. She has used it to goover, 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 refugeformed by one of the recesses of the pool, an indentation masked, forthe hither side, by a projection of the bank and by a clump of treesgrowing close to the water. 

"But if the boat's there, where on earth's SHE?" my colleague anxiouslyasked. 

"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'sfar enough to have made the child prefer not to walk. She went straightover. "

"Laws!" cried my friend again; the chain of my logic was ever toomuch for her. It dragged her at my heels even now, and when we had gothalfway round--a devious, tiresome process, on ground much broken and bya path choked with overgrowth--I paused to give her breath. I sustainedher with a grateful arm, assuring her that she might hugely help me; andthis started us afresh, so that in the course of but few minutes more wereached a point from which we found the boat to be where I had supposedit. It had been intentionally left as much as possible out of sight andwas tied to one of the stakes of a fence that came, just there, down tothe 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, theprodigious character of the feat for a little girl; but I had lived, bythis time, too long among wonders and had panted to too many liveliermeasures. There was a gate in the fence, through which we passed, andthat 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 ifher performance was now complete. The next thing she did, however, wasto stoop straight down and pluck--quite as if it were all she was therefor--a big, ugly spray of withered fern. I instantly became sure shehad just come out of the copse. She waited for us, not herself taking astep, and I was conscious of the rare solemnity with which we presentlyapproached her. She smiled and smiled, and we met; but it was all donein a silence by this time flagrantly ominous. Mrs. Grose was the firstto break the spell: she threw herself on her knees and, drawing thechild to her breast, clasped in a long embrace the little tender, yielding body. While this dumb convulsion lasted I could only watchit--which I did the more intently when I saw Flora's face peep at meover our companion's shoulder. It was serious now--the flicker had leftit; but it strengthened the pang with which I at that moment envied Mrs. Grose the simplicity of HER relation. Still, all this while, nothingmore passed between us save that Flora had let her foolish fern againdrop to the ground. What she and I had virtually said to each other wasthat pretexts were useless now. When Mrs. Grose finally got up she keptthe child's hand, so that the two were still before me; and the singularreticence of our communion was even more marked in the frank look shelaunched 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 ananswer 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 drawnblade, the jostle of the cup that my hand, for weeks and weeks, hadheld high and full to the brim that now, even before speaking, I feltoverflow in a deluge. "I'll tell you if you'll tell ME--" I heard myselfsay, then heard the tremor in which it broke. 

"Well, what?"

Mrs. Grose's suspense blazed at me, but it was too late now, and Ibrought the thing out handsomely. "Where, my pet, is Miss Jessel?"

XX

Just as in the churchyard with Miles, the whole thing was upon us. Muchas 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 nowreceived it fairly likened my breach of the silence to the smash of apane 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--theshriek of a creature scared, or rather wounded, which, in turn, within afew seconds, was completed by a gasp of my own. I seized my colleague'sarm. "She's there, she's there!"

Miss Jessel stood before us on the opposite bank exactly as she hadstood the other time, and I remember, strangely, as the first feelingnow produced in me, my thrill of joy at having brought on a proof. Shewas there, and I was justified; she was there, and I was neither cruelnor mad. She was there for poor scared Mrs. Grose, but she was theremost for Flora; and no moment of my monstrous time was perhaps soextraordinary as that in which I consciously threw out to her--withthe sense that, pale and ravenous demon as she was, she would catch andunderstand it--an inarticulate message of gratitude. She rose erect onthe spot my friend and I had lately quitted, and there was not, in allthe long reach of her desire, an inch of her evil that fell short. Thisfirst vividness of vision and emotion were things of a few seconds, during which Mrs. Grose's dazed blink across to where I pointed struckme as a sovereign sign that she too at last saw, just as it carried myown eyes precipitately to the child. The revelation then of the mannerin which Flora was affected startled me, in truth, far more than itwould have done to find her also merely agitated, for direct dismaywas of course not what I had expected. Prepared and on her guard as ourpursuit had actually made her, she would repress every betrayal; and Iwas therefore shaken, on the spot, by my first glimpse of the particularone for which I had not allowed. To see her, without a convulsion ofher small pink face, not even feign to glance in the direction of theprodigy I announced, but only, instead of that, turn at ME an expressionof hard, still gravity, an expression absolutely new and unprecedentedand that appeared to read and accuse and judge me--this was a strokethat somehow converted the little girl herself into the very presencethat could make me quail. I quailed even though my certitude thatshe thoroughly saw was never greater than at that instant, and in theimmediate need to defend myself I called it passionately to witness. "She's there, you little unhappy thing--there, there, THERE, and you seeher as well as you see me!" I had said shortly before to Mrs. Grosethat she was not at these times a child, but an old, old woman, and thatdescription of her could not have been more strikingly confirmed than inthe way in which, for all answer to this, she simply showed me, withouta concession, an admission, of her eyes, a countenance of deeper anddeeper, of indeed suddenly quite fixed, reprobation. I was by thistime--if I can put the whole thing at all together--more appalled atwhat I may properly call her manner than at anything else, though it wassimultaneously with this that I became aware of having Mrs. Grosealso, and very formidably, to reckon with. My elder companion, the nextmoment, at any rate, blotted out everything but her own flushed face andher loud, shocked protest, a burst of high disapproval. "What a dreadfulturn, to be sure, miss! Where on earth do you see anything?"

I could only grasp her more quickly yet, for even while she spoke thehideous plain presence stood undimmed and undaunted. It had alreadylasted a minute, and it lasted while I continued, seizing my colleague, quite thrusting her at it and presenting her to it, to insist with mypointing hand. "You don't see her exactly as WE see?--you mean to sayyou don't now--NOW? She's as big as a blazing fire! Only look, dearestwoman, LOOK--!" She looked, even as I did, and gave me, with her deepgroan of negation, repulsion, compassion--the mixture with her pity ofher relief at her exemption--a sense, touching to me even then, that shewould have backed me up if she could. I might well have needed that, forwith this hard blow of the proof that her eyes were hopelessly sealedI felt my own situation horribly crumble, I felt--I saw--my lividpredecessor 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 inthe astounding little attitude of Flora. Into this attitude Mrs. Groseimmediately and violently entered, breaking, even while there piercedthrough my sense of ruin a prodigious private triumph, into breathlessreassurance. 

"She isn't there, little lady, and nobody's there--and you never seenothing, my sweet! How can poor Miss Jessel--when poor Miss Jessel'sdead and buried? WE know, don't we, love?"--and she appealed, blunderingin, to the child. "It's all a mere mistake and a worry and a joke--andwe'll go home as fast as we can!"

Our companion, on this, had responded with a strange, quick primness ofpropriety, and they were again, with Mrs. Grose on her feet, united, asit were, in pained opposition to me. Flora continued to fix me withher small mask of reprobation, and even at that minute I prayed God toforgive me for seeming to see that, as she stood there holding tightto our friend's dress, her incomparable childish beauty had suddenlyfailed, had quite vanished. I've said it already--she was literally, she was hideously, hard; she had turned common and almost ugly. "I don'tknow what you mean. I see nobody. I see nothing. I never HAVE. I thinkyou're cruel. I don't like you!" Then, after this deliverance, whichmight have been that of a vulgarly pert little girl in the street, shehugged Mrs. Grose more closely and buried in her skirts the dreadfullittle face. In this position she produced an almost furious wail. "Takeme 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 todo but communicate again with the figure that, on the opposite bank, without a movement, as rigidly still as if catching, beyond theinterval, our voices, was as vividly there for my disaster as it was notthere for my service. The wretched child had spoken exactly as if shehad got from some outside source each of her stabbing little words, andI could therefore, in the full despair of all I had to accept, but sadlyshake my head at her. "If I had ever doubted, all my doubt would atpresent have gone. I've been living with the miserable truth, and nowit has only too much closed round me. Of course I've lost you: I'veinterfered, and you've seen--under HER dictation"--with which I faced, over the pool again, our infernal witness--"the easy and perfect way tomeet 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, ininfinite distress, but mutely possessed of the little girl and clearlyconvinced, in spite of her blindness, that something awful had occurredand some collapse engulfed us, she retreated, by the way we had come, asfast 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, anodorous dampness and roughness, chilling and piercing my trouble, hadmade me understand that I must have thrown myself, on my face, on theground and given way to a wildness of grief. I must have lain there longand 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 andits blank, haunted edge, and then I took, back to the house, my drearyand 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 onFlora's extraordinary command of the situation. She passed that night, by the most tacit, and I should add, were not the word so grotesque afalse note, the happiest of arrangements, with Mrs. Grose. I sawneither of them on my return, but, on the other hand, as by an ambiguouscompensation, I saw a great deal of Miles. I saw--I can use no otherphrase--so much of him that it was as if it were more than it had everbeen. No evening I had passed at Bly had the portentous quality ofthis one; in spite of which--and in spite also of the deeper depths ofconsternation that had opened beneath my feet--there was literally, inthe ebbing actual, an extraordinarily sweet sadness. On reaching thehouse I had never so much as looked for the boy; I had simply gonestraight to my room to change what I was wearing and to take in, ata glance, much material testimony to Flora's rupture. Her littlebelongings had all been removed. When later, by the schoolroom fire, Iwas served with tea by the usual maid, I indulged, on the article of myother pupil, in no inquiry whatever. He had his freedom now--he mighthave it to the end! Well, he did have it; and it consisted--in part atleast--of his coming in at about eight o'clock and sitting down with mein silence. On the removal of the tea things I had blown out the candlesand drawn my chair closer: I was conscious of a mortal coldness and feltas if I should never again be warm. So, when he appeared, I was sittingin the glow with my thoughts. He paused a moment by the door as if tolook at me; then--as if to share them--came to the other side of thehearth and sank into a chair. We sat there in absolute stillness; yet hewanted, 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 markedlyfeverish that an illness was perhaps at hand; she had passed a night ofextreme unrest, a night agitated above all by fears that had for theirsubject not in the least her former, but wholly her present, governess. It was not against the possible re-entrance of Miss Jessel on the scenethat 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 meonce more. This I felt as soon as I had put to her the question ofher sense of the child's sincerity as against my own. "She persists indenying to you that she saw, or has ever seen, anything?"

My visitor's trouble, truly, was great. "Ah, miss, it isn't a matteron which I can push her! Yet it isn't either, I must say, as if I muchneeded to. It has made her, every inch of her, quite old. "

"Oh, I see her perfectly from here. She resents, for all the world likesome 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 theothers. 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 morebehind it. "I think indeed, miss, she never will. She do have a grandmanner about it!"

"And that manner"--I summed it up--"is practically what's the matterwith her now!"

Oh, that manner, I could see in my visitor's face, and not a little elsebesides! "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 itout. "Has she said to you since yesterday--except to repudiate herfamiliarity with anything so dreadful--a single other word about MissJessel?"

"Not one, miss. And of course you know, " my friend added, "I took itfrom her, by the lake, that, just then and there at least, there WASnobody. "

"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 thannature did; for it was wondrous material to play on! Flora has now hergrievance, 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 himthe lowest creature--!"

I winced at the fair show of the scene in Mrs. Grose's face; she lookedfor a minute as if she sharply saw them together. "And him who thinks sowell 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 ofme. "

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 myway?" Before she had time to reply, however, I had her in check. "I've abetter idea--the result of my reflections. My going WOULD seem the rightthing, and on Sunday I was terribly near it. Yet that won't do. It's YOUwho 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 thinkit. At all events, I want to try. Get off with his sister as soon aspossible and leave me with him alone. " I was amazed, myself, at thespirit I had still in reserve, and therefore perhaps a trifle the moredisconcerted 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 methat, in spite of Flora's presumable sequestration from the instant ofher return from the pool, it might already be too late. "Do you mean, " Ianxiously asked, "that they HAVE met?"

At this she quite flushed. "Ah, miss, I'm not such a fool as that! IfI've been obliged to leave her three or four times, it has been eachtime with one of the maids, and at present, though she's alone, she'slocked 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 newhope. I think he wants to give me an opening. I do believe that--poorlittle exquisite wretch!--he wants to speak. Last evening, in thefirelight and the silence, he sat with me for two hours as if it werejust 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 withouta breach of the silence or so much as a faint allusion to his sister'scondition and absence that we at last kissed for good night. All thesame, " I continued, "I can't, if her uncle sees her, consent to hisseeing her brother without my having given the boy--and most of allbecause things have got so bad--a little more time. "

My friend appeared on this ground more reluctant than I could quiteunderstand. "What do you mean by more time?"

"Well, a day or two--really to bring it out. He'll then be on MYside--of which you see the importance. If nothing comes, I shall onlyfail, and you will, at the worst, have helped me by doing, on yourarrival in town, whatever you may have found possible. " So I put itbefore her, but she continued for a little so inscrutably embarrassedthat I came again to her aid. "Unless, indeed, " I wound up, "you reallywant NOT to go. "

I could see it, in her face, at last clear itself; she put out her handto 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 wouldengage she shouldn't see me. "

"No, no: it's the place itself. She must leave it. " She held me a momentwith 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 meanthat, 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 myhonor, 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 dobefore, 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. "'ThankGod'?"

"It so justifies me!"

"It does that, miss!"

I couldn't have desired more emphasis, but I just hesitated. "She's sohorrible?"

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 ayoung 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 witha laugh that was doubtless significant enough. 

It only, in truth, left my friend still more grave. "Well, perhaps Iought 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 mydressing 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 lightof her expression, to be carried no further, and she gave me the wholething as she had never done. "I believe. "

Yes, it was a joy, and we were still shoulder to shoulder: if I mightcontinue sure of that I should care but little what else happened. Mysupport in the presence of disaster would be the same as it had beenin my early need of confidence, and if my friend would answer for myhonesty, I would answer for all the rest. On the point of taking leaveof her, nonetheless, I was to some extent embarrassed. "There's onething, of course--it occurs to me--to remember. My letter, giving thealarm, will have reached town before you. "

I now perceived still more how she had been beating about the bush andhow 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 sawyesterday, when I came back with Miss Flora, that it wasn't where youhad put it. Later in the evening I had the chance to question Luke, andhe declared that he had neither noticed nor touched it. " We could onlyexchange, 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 itand destroyed it. "

"And don't you see anything else?"

I faced her a moment with a sad smile. "It strikes me that by this timeyour eyes are open even wider than mine. "

They proved to be so indeed, but she could still blush, almost, to showit. "I make out now what he must have done at school. " And she gave, inher 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; soI showed them off as I might. "I hope then it was to more purpose thanin 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 containedonly the bare demand for an interview--that he is already much ashamedof having gone so far for so little, and that what he had on his mindlast evening was precisely the need of confession. " I seemed to myself, for the instant, to have mastered it, to see it all. "Leave us, leaveus"--I was already, at the door, hurrying her off. "I'll get it out ofhim. He'll meet me--he'll confess. If he confesses, he's saved. And ifhe's saved--"

"Then YOU are?" The dear woman kissed me on this, and I took herfarewell. "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 thegreat pinch really came. If I had counted on what it would give me tofind myself alone with Miles, I speedily perceived, at least, that itwould give me a measure. No hour of my stay in fact was so assailedwith apprehensions as that of my coming down to learn that the carriagecontaining Mrs. Grose and my younger pupil had already rolled out of thegates. Now I WAS, I said to myself, face to face with the elements, andfor much of the rest of the day, while I fought my weakness, I couldconsider that I had been supremely rash. It was a tighter place stillthan 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 toolittle of the explained, throw out whatever we might, in the suddennessof my colleague's act. The maids and the men looked blank; the effectof which on my nerves was an aggravation until I saw the necessity ofmaking it a positive aid. It was precisely, in short, by just clutchingthe helm that I avoided total wreck; and I dare say that, to bear upat all, I became, that morning, very grand and very dry. I welcomed theconsciousness that I was charged with much to do, and I caused it to beknown as well that, left thus to myself, I was quite remarkably firm. Iwandered with that manner, for the next hour or two, all over the placeand looked, I have no doubt, as if I were ready for any onset. So, forthe 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, noglimpse of him, but they had tended to make more public the changetaking place in our relation as a consequence of his having at thepiano, the day before, kept me, in Flora's interest, so beguiled andbefooled. The stamp of publicity had of course been fully given by herconfinement and departure, and the change itself was now ushered inby our nonobservance of the regular custom of the schoolroom. He hadalready disappeared when, on my way down, I pushed open his door, andI learned below that he had breakfasted--in the presence of a couple ofthe maids--with Mrs. Grose and his sister. He had then gone out, as hesaid, for a stroll; than which nothing, I reflected, could better haveexpressed his frank view of the abrupt transformation of my office. Whathe 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 inespecial--in the renouncement of one pretension. If so much had sprungto the surface, I scarce put it too strongly in saying that what hadperhaps sprung highest was the absurdity of our prolonging the fictionthat 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 thecare for my dignity, I had had to appeal to him to let me off strainingto meet him on the ground of his true capacity. He had at any ratehis 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, neitherchallenge nor hint. I had too much, from this moment, my other ideas. Yet when he at last arrived, the difficulty of applying them, theaccumulations of my problem, were brought straight home to me by thebeautiful little presence on which what had occurred had as yet, for theeye, dropped neither stain nor shadow. 

To mark, for the house, the high state I cultivated I decreed that mymeals with the boy should be served, as we called it, downstairs; sothat I had been awaiting him in the ponderous pomp of the room outsideof the window of which I had had from Mrs. Grose, that first scaredSunday, 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 myequilibrium depended on the success of my rigid will, the will to shutmy eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what I had to deal withwas, revoltingly, against nature. I could only get on at all by taking"nature" into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrousordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, butdemanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screwof ordinary human virtue. No attempt, nonetheless, could well requiremore 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 ofreference to what had occurred? How, on the other hand, could I makereference without a new plunge into the hideous obscure? Well, a sortof answer, after a time, had come to me, and it was so far confirmed asthat I was met, incontestably, by the quickened vision of what was rarein my little companion. It was indeed as if he had found even now--as hehad so often found at lessons--still some other delicate way to ease meoff. 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 factthat (opportunity aiding, precious opportunity which had now come) itwould be preposterous, with a child so endowed, to forego the help onemight wrest from absolute intelligence? What had his intelligence beengiven him for but to save him? Mightn't one, to reach his mind, risk thestretch of an angular arm over his character? It was as if, when we wereface 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 pocketsand looked at the joint, on which he seemed on the point of passing somehumorous 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. Londonwill set her up. Bly had ceased to agree with her. Come here and takeyour 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 terriblysuddenly?"

"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 mighthave become so if she had stayed. This was just the moment to seize. Thejourney will dissipate the influence"--oh, I was grand!--"and carry itoff. "

"I see, I see"--Miles, for that matter, was grand, too. He settled tohis repast with the charming little "table manner" that, from the day ofhis arrival, had relieved me of all grossness of admonition. Whateverhe had been driven from school for, it was not for ugly feeding. Hewas irreproachable, as always, today; but he was unmistakably moreconscious. He was discernibly trying to take for granted more thingsthan he found, without assistance, quite easy; and he dropped intopeaceful silence while he felt his situation. Our meal was of thebriefest--mine a vain pretense, and I had the things immediatelyremoved. While this was done Miles stood again with his hands in hislittle pockets and his back to me--stood and looked out of the widewindow through which, that other day, I had seen what pulled me up. Wecontinued silent while the maid was with us--as silent, it whimsicallyoccurred to me, as some young couple who, on their wedding journey, atthe inn, feel shy in the presence of the waiter. He turned round onlywhen the waiter had left us. "Well--so we're alone!"

XXIII

"Oh, more or less. " I fancy my smile was pale. "Not absolutely. Weshouldn'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 inhis pockets and planted there in front of me, "they don't much count, dothey?"

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 foreheadagainst the glass, in contemplation of the stupid shrubs I knew and thedull things of November. I had always my hypocrisy of "work, " behindwhich, now, I gained the sofa. Steadying myself with it there as I hadrepeatedly done at those moments of torment that I have described as themoments of my knowing the children to be given to something from whichI was barred, I sufficiently obeyed my habit of being prepared for theworst. But an extraordinary impression dropped on me as I extracted ameaning from the boy's embarrassed back--none other than the impressionthat I was not barred now. This inference grew in a few minutes to sharpintensity and seemed bound up with the direct perception that it waspositively HE who was. The frames and squares of the great window were akind of image, for him, of a kind of failure. I felt that I saw him, atany rate, shut in or shut out. He was admirable, but not comfortable: Itook it in with a throb of hope. Wasn't he looking, through the hauntedpane, for something he couldn't see?--and wasn't it the first time inthe whole business that he had known such a lapse? The first, the veryfirst: I found it a splendid portent. It made him anxious, though hewatched himself; he had been anxious all day and, even while in hisusual sweet little manner he sat at table, had needed all his smallstrange genius to give it a gloss. When he at last turned round to meetme, it was almost as if this genius had succumbed. "Well, I think I'mglad Bly agrees with ME!"

"You would certainly seem to have seen, these twenty-four hours, a gooddeal 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 withhim. "Well, do you like it?"

He stood there smiling; then at last he put into two words--"DoYOU?"--more discrimination than I had ever heard two words contain. Before I had time to deal with that, however, he continued as if withthe sense that this was an impertinence to be softened. "Nothing couldbe more charming than the way you take it, for of course if we're alonetogether 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 helpminding? Though I've renounced all claim to your company--you're sobeyond 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, gravernow, struck me as the most beautiful I had ever found in it. "You stayon just for THAT?"

"Certainly. I stay on as your friend and from the tremendous interestI take in you till something can be done for you that may be more worthyour while. That needn't surprise you. " My voice trembled so that I feltit 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 wasnothing in the world I wouldn't do for you?"

"Yes, yes!" He, on his side, more and more visibly nervous, had a toneto master; but he was so much more successful than I that, laughing outthrough his gravity, he could pretend we were pleasantly jesting. "Onlythat, 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 wantedme 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 finestlittle quiver of resentful passion; but I can't begin to express theeffect upon me of an implication of surrender even so faint. It was asif 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 forthat. "

He waited so long that I supposed it for the purpose of repudiating theassumption on which my action had been founded; but what he finally saidwas: "Do you mean now--here?"

"There couldn't be a better place or time. " He looked round himuneasily, and I had the rare--oh, the queer!--impression of the veryfirst 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 asperhaps the best thing to make him. Yet in the very pang of the effortI felt it vain to try sternness, and I heard myself the next instant sogentle as to be almost grotesque. "You want so to go out again?"

"Awfully!" He smiled at me heroically, and the touching little braveryof it was enhanced by his actually flushing with pain. He had picked uphis hat, which he had brought in, and stood twirling it in a way thatgave me, even as I was just nearly reaching port, a perverse horror ofwhat I was doing. To do it in ANY way was an act of violence, for whatdid it consist of but the obtrusion of the idea of grossness and guilton a small helpless creature who had been for me a revelation of thepossibilities of beautiful intercourse? Wasn't it base to create for abeing so exquisite a mere alien awkwardness? I suppose I now read intoour situation a clearness it couldn't have had at the time, for I seemto see our poor eyes already lighted with some spark of a previsionof the anguish that was to come. So we circled about, with terrors andscruples, like fighters not daring to close. But it was for each otherwe feared! That kept us a little longer suspended and unbruised. "I'lltell you everything, " Miles said--"I mean I'll tell you anything youlike. You'll stay on with me, and we shall both be all right, and I WILLtell you--I WILL. But not now. "

"Why not now?"

My insistence turned him from me and kept him once more at his windowin 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 seeLuke. "

I had not yet reduced him to quite so vulgar a lie, and I feltproportionately ashamed. But, horrible as it was, his lies made up mytruth. 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 forthat, satisfy, before you leave me, one very much smaller request. "

He looked as if he felt he had succeeded enough to be able still alittle to bargain. "Very much smaller--?"

"Yes, a mere fraction of the whole. Tell me"--oh, my work preoccupiedme, and I was offhand!--"if, yesterday afternoon, from the table in thehall, you took, you know, my letter. "

XXIV

My sense of how he received this suffered for a minute from somethingthat I can describe only as a fierce split of my attention--a strokethat at first, as I sprang straight up, reduced me to the mere blindmovement of getting hold of him, drawing him close, and, while I justfell for support against the nearest piece of furniture, instinctivelykeeping him with his back to the window. The appearance was full upon usthat I had already had to deal with here: Peter Quint had come into viewlike a sentinel before a prison. The next thing I saw was that, fromoutside, he had reached the window, and then I knew that, close to theglass and glaring in through it, he offered once more to the room hiswhite face of damnation. It represents but grossly what took placewithin 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 timerecovered her grasp of the ACT. It came to me in the very horror of theimmediate presence that the act would be, seeing and facing what I sawand faced, to keep the boy himself unaware. The inspiration--I cancall it by no other name--was that I felt how voluntarily, howtranscendently, I MIGHT. It was like fighting with a demon for ahuman soul, and when I had fairly so appraised it I saw how the humansoul--held out, in the tremor of my hands, at arm's length--had aperfect dew of sweat on a lovely childish forehead. The face that wasclose to mine was as white as the face against the glass, and out of itpresently came a sound, not low nor weak, but as if from much furtheraway, 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 whileI held him to my breast, where I could feel in the sudden fever of hislittle body the tremendous pulse of his little heart, I kept my eyes onthe thing at the window and saw it move and shift its posture. I havelikened it to a sentinel, but its slow wheel, for a moment, was ratherthe prowl of a baffled beast. My present quickened courage, however, wassuch 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, thescoundrel fixed as if to watch and wait. It was the very confidence thatI 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 takeit 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 ravageof uneasiness. What was prodigious was that at last, by my success, hissense was sealed and his communication stopped: he knew that he was inpresence, but knew not of what, and knew still less that I also was andthat I did know. And what did this strain of trouble matter when my eyeswent back to the window only to see that the air was clear again and--bymy personal triumph--the influence quenched? There was nothing there. Ifelt that the cause was mine and that I should surely get ALL. "And youfound 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 andthat reached him only through the pressure of his anxiety. Yet it didreach him. "Did I STEAL?"

I felt myself redden to the roots of my hair as well as wonder if itwere more strange to put to a gentleman such a question or to see himtake it with allowances that gave the very distance of his fall in theworld. "Was it for that you mightn't go back?"

The only thing he felt was rather a dreary little surprise. "Did youknow 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 itwas for pure tenderness--shook him as if to ask him why, if it was allfor nothing, he had condemned me to months of torment. "What then didyou do?"

He looked in vague pain all round the top of the room and drew hisbreath, two or three times over, as if with difficulty. He might havebeen standing at the bottom of the sea and raising his eyes to somefaint 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 itas this little person! He appeared to weigh my question, but in a mannerquite 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'tknow!"

He almost smiled at me in the desolation of his surrender, which wasindeed practically, by this time, so complete that I ought to have leftit there. But I was infatuated--I was blind with victory, though eventhen the very effect that was to have brought him so much nearer wasalready that of added separation. "Was it to everyone?" I asked. 

"No; it was only to--" But he gave a sick little headshake. "I don'tremember 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 darkerobscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pitythe appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent. It was for theinstant confounding and bottomless, for if he WERE innocent, what thenon earth was _I_? Paralyzed, while it lasted, by the mere brush of thequestion, I let him go a little, so that, with a deep-drawn sigh, heturned 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. "Anddid they repeat what you said?" I went on after a moment. 

He was soon at some distance from me, still breathing hard and againwith the air, though now without anger for it, of being confined againsthis will. Once more, as he had done before, he looked up at the dimday as if, of what had hitherto sustained him, nothing was left but anunspeakable anxiety. "Oh, yes, " he nevertheless replied--"they must haverepeated them. To those THEY liked, " he added. 

There was, somehow, less of it than I had expected; but I turned itover. "And these things came round--?"

"To the masters? Oh, yes!" he answered very simply. "But I didn't knowthey'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 wastoo bad. "

"Too bad?"

"What I suppose I sometimes said. To write home. "

I can't name the exquisite pathos of the contradiction given to sucha speech by such a speaker; I only know that the next instant I heardmyself throw off with homely force: "Stuff and nonsense!" But the nextafter that I must have sounded stern enough. "What WERE these things?"

My sternness was all for his judge, his executioner; yet it made himavert himself again, and that movement made ME, with a single bound andan irrepressible cry, spring straight upon him. For there again, againstthe glass, as if to blight his confession and stay his answer, was thehideous author of our woe--the white face of damnation. I felt a sickswim at the drop of my victory and all the return of my battle, so thatthe wildness of my veritable leap only served as a great betrayal. Isaw him, from the midst of my act, meet it with a divination, and on theperception that even now he only guessed, and that the window was stillto his own eyes free, I let the impulse flame up to convert the climaxof his dismay into the very proof of his liberation. "No more, nomore, no more!" I shrieked, as I tried to press him against me, to myvisitant. 

"Is she HERE?" Miles panted as he caught with his sealed eyes thedirection of my words. Then as his strange "she" staggered me and, witha gasp, I echoed it, "Miss Jessel, Miss Jessel!" he with a sudden furygave me back. 

I seized, stupefied, his supposition--some sequel to what we had done toFlora, but this made me only want to show him that it was better stillthan that. "It's not Miss Jessel! But it's at the window--straightbefore 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 baffleddog'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 placeand missing wholly, though it now, to my sense, filled the room like thetaste of poison, the wide, overwhelming presence. "It's HE?"

I was so determined to have all my proof that I flashed into ice tochallenge him. "Whom do you mean by 'he'?"

"Peter Quint--you devil!" His face gave again, round the room, itsconvulsed supplication. "WHERE?"

They are in my ears still, his supreme surrender of the name and histribute to my devotion. "What does he matter now, my own?--what will heEVER matter? _I_ have you, " I launched at the beast, "but he has lostyou forever!" Then, for the demonstration of my work, "There, THERE!" Isaid to Miles. 

But he had already jerked straight round, stared, glared again, andseen but the quiet day. With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of heuttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp withwhich 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 thatI held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.