VI

It took of course more than that particular passage to place

us together in presence of what we had now to live with as we

could--my dreadful liability to impressions of the order so vividly

exemplified, and my companion’s knowledge, henceforth,--a knowledge

half consternation and half compassion,--of that liability. There had

been, this evening, after the revelation that left me, for an hour,

so prostrate--there had been, for either of us, no attendance on

any service but a little service of tears and vows, of prayers and

promises, a climax to the series of mutual challenges and pledges that

had straightway ensued on our retreating together to the schoolroom and

shutting ourselves up there to have everything out. The result of our

having everything out was simply to reduce our situation to the last

rigour of its elements. She herself had seen nothing, not the shadow

of a shadow, and nobody in the house but the governess was in the

governess’s plight; yet she accepted without directly impugning my

sanity the truth as I gave it to her, and ended by showing me, on this

ground, an awe-stricken tenderness, an expression of the sense of my

more than questionable privilege, of which the very breath has remained

with me as that of the sweetest of human charities.

What was settled between us, accordingly, that night, was that we

thought 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. I

knew at this hour, I think, as well as I knew later what I was capable

of meeting to shelter my pupils; but it took me some time to be wholly

sure of what my honest ally was prepared for to keep terms with so

compromising a contract. I was queer company enough--quite as queer as

the company I received; but as I trace over what we went through I see

how much common ground we must have found in the one idea that, by good

fortune, _could_ steady us. It was the idea, the second movement, that

led me straight out, as I may say, of the inner chamber of my dread. I

could take 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 before we separated for the night. We had gone over and over every

feature of what 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

possessed me. “_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

telling as that. She resumed in a moment, at any rate: “What if _he_

should see him?”

“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 was an awful conception, and yet, somehow, I could keep it at

bay; which, moreover, as we lingered there, was what I succeeded in

practically proving. I had an absolute certainty that I should see

again what I had already seen, but something within me said that

by offering myself bravely as the sole subject of such experience,

by accepting, by inviting, by surmounting it all, I should serve as

an expiatory victim and guard the tranquillity of my companions. The

children, in especial, I should thus fence about and absolutely save. I

recall one of the last things 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

and the 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

continued to think. “It is rather odd.”

“That he has never spoken of him?”

“Never by the least allusion. And you tell me they were ‘great

friends’?”

“Oh, it wasn’t _him_!” Mrs. Grose with emphasis declared. “It

was Quint’s own 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!--a

sudden sickness of disgust. “Too free with _my_ boy?”

“Too free with everyone!”

I forbore, for the moment, to analyse this description further than by

the reflection that a part of it applied to several of the members of

the household, of the half-dozen maids and men who were still of our

small colony. But there was everything, for our apprehension, in the

lucky fact that no discomfortable legend, no perturbation of scullions,

had ever, within anyone’s memory, attached to the kind old place. It

had neither bad name nor ill fame, and Mrs. Grose, most apparently,

only desired to cling to me and to quake in silence. I even put her,

the very last thing of all, to the test. It was when, at midnight, she

had her hand on the schoolroom door to take leave. “I have it from

you then--for it’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

terribly short 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 my impression of him: he was not a trouble-loving gentleman, nor

so very particular perhaps about some of the company _he_ kept. All

the same, I pressed my interlocutress. “I promise you _I_ would have

told!”

She felt my discrimination. “I dare say I was wrong. But, really,

I was afraid.”

“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

afraid of anything else? Not of his effect----?”

“His effect?” she repeated with a face of anguish and waiting while

I faltered.

“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 supposed not to be well and the country air so good for him. So

he had everything to say. Yes”--she let me have it--“even about

_them_.”

“Them--that creature?” I had to smother a kind of howl. “And you

could bear 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

together to the subject! Much as we had discussed it that Sunday night,

I was, in the immediate later hours in especial--for it may be imagined

whether I slept--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 kept back. I was sure, moreover, by morning, that this

was not from a failure of frankness, but because on every side there

were fears. It seems to me indeed, in retrospect, that by the time the

morrow’s sun was high I had restlessly read into the facts before us

almost all the meaning they were to receive from subsequent and more

cruel occurrences. What they gave me above all was just the sinister

figure of the living man--the dead one would keep awhile!--and of

the months he had continuously passed at Bly, which, added up, made

a formidable stretch. The limit of this evil time had arrived only

when, on the dawn of a winter’s morning, Peter Quint was found, by a

labourer going to early work, stone dead on the road from the village:

a catastrophe explained--superficially at least--by a visible wound

to his head; such a wound as might have been produced--and as, on the

final evidence, _had_ been--by a fatal slip, in the dark and after

leaving the public house, on the steepish icy slope, a wrong path

altogether, at the bottom of which he lay. The icy slope, the turn

mistaken at night and in liquor, accounted for much--practically, in

the end and after the inquest and boundless chatter, for everything;

but there had been matters in his life--strange passages and perils,

secret disorders, vices more than suspected--that would have accounted

for a good deal more.

I scarce know how to put my story into words that shall be a credible

picture of my state of mind; but I was in these days literally able to

find a joy in the extraordinary flight of heroism the occasion demanded

of me. I now saw that I had been asked for a service admirable and

difficult; and there would be a greatness in letting it be seen--oh,

in the right quarter!--that I could succeed where many another girl

might have failed. It was an immense help to me--I confess I rather

applaud myself 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 the most bereaved and the most loveable, the appeal of whose

helplessness had suddenly become only too explicit, a deep, constant

ache of one’s own committed heart. We were cut off, really, together;

we were united in our danger. They had nothing but me, and I--well, I

had _them_. It was in short a magnificent chance. This chance presented

itself to me in an image richly material. I was a screen--I was to

stand before them. The more I saw, the less they would. I began

to watch them in a stifled suspense, a disguised excitement that

might well, had it continued too long, have turned to something like

madness. What saved me, as I now see, was that it turned to something

else altogether. It didn’t last as suspense--it was superseded by

horrible proofs. Proofs, I say, yes--from the moment I really took

hold.

This moment dated from an afternoon hour that I happened to spend in

the grounds 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 a book, and I had been glad to encourage a purpose so laudable

in a young man whose only defect was an occasional excess of the

restless. His sister, on the contrary, had been alert to come out,

and I strolled with her half an hour, seeking the shade, for the sun

was still high and the day exceptionally warm. I was aware afresh, with

her, as we went, of how, like her brother, she contrived--it was the

charming thing in both children--to let me alone without appearing to

drop me and to accompany me without appearing to surround. They were

never importunate and yet never listless. My attention to them all

really went to seeing them amuse themselves immensely without me: this

was a spectacle they seemed actively to prepare and that engaged me as

an active admirer. I walked in a world of their invention--they had no

occasion whatever to draw upon mine; so that my time was taken only

with being, for them, some remarkable person or thing that the game

of the moment required and that was merely, thanks to my superior, my

exalted stamp, a happy and highly distinguished sinecure. I forget what

I was on the present occasion; I only remember that I was something

very important and very quiet and that 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 other

side of the Sea of Azof, we had an interested spectator. The way this

knowledge gathered in me was the strangest thing in the world--the

strangest, that is, except the very much stranger in which it quickly

merged itself. I had sat down with a piece of work--for I was something

or other that could sit--on the old stone bench which overlooked the

pond; and in this position I began to take in with certitude, and

yet without direct vision, the presence, at a distance, of a third

person. The old trees, the thick shrubbery, made a great and pleasant

shade, but it was all suffused with the brightness of the hot, still

hour. There was no ambiguity in anything; none whatever, at least,

in the conviction I from one moment to another found myself forming

as to what I should see straight before me and across the lake as a

consequence of raising my eyes. They were attached at this juncture

to the stitching in which I was engaged, and I can feel once more the

spasm of my effort not to move them till I should so have steadied

myself as to be able to make up my mind what to do. There was an

alien object in view--a figure whose right of presence I instantly,

passionately questioned. I recollect counting over perfectly the

possibilities, reminding myself that nothing was more natural, for

instance, than the appearance of one of the men about the place,

or even of a messenger, a postman or a tradesman’s boy, from the

village. That reminder had as little effect on my practical certitude

as I was conscious--still even without looking--of its having upon the

character and attitude of our visitor. Nothing was more natural than

that these things should be the other things that they absolutely were

not.

Of the positive identity of the apparition I would assure myself

as soon as the small clock of my courage should have ticked out the

right second; meanwhile, with an effort that was already sharp enough,

I transferred my eyes straight to little Flora, who, at the moment,

was about ten yards away. My heart had stood still for an instant with

the wonder and terror of the question whether she too would see; and I

held my breath while I waited for what a cry from her, what some sudden

innocent sign either of interest or of alarm, would tell me. I waited,

but nothing came; then, in the first place--and there is something

more dire in this, I feel, than in anything I have to relate--I was

determined by a sense that, within a minute, all sounds from her had

previously dropped; and, in the second, by the circumstance that,

also within 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

the confirmed conviction that we were still, together, under direct

personal notice. She had picked up a small flat piece of wood, which

happened to have in it a little hole that had evidently suggested to

her the idea of sticking in another fragment that might figure as

a mast and make the thing a boat. This second morsel, as I watched

her, she was very markedly and intently attempting to tighten in

its place. My apprehension of what she was doing sustained me so that

after some seconds I felt I was ready for more. Then I again shifted my

eyes--I faced what I had to face.