What I had said to Mrs. Grose was true enough: there were in the matter
I had put before her depths and possibilities that I lacked resolution
to sound; so that when we met once more in the wonder of it we were of
a common mind about the duty of resistance to extravagant fancies. We
were to keep our heads if we should keep nothing else--difficult indeed
as that might be in the face of what, in our prodigious experience,
was least to be questioned. Late that night, while the house slept,
we had another talk in my room, when she went all the way with me as to
its being beyond doubt that I had seen exactly what I had seen. To hold
her perfectly in the pinch of that, I found I had only to ask her how,
if I had “made it up,” I came to be able to give, of each of the
persons appearing to me, a picture disclosing, to the last detail,
their special marks--a portrait on the exhibition of which she had
instantly recognised and named them. She wished, of course,--small
blame to her!--to sink the whole subject; and I was quick to assure her
that my own interest in it had now violently taken the form of a search
for the way to escape from it. I encountered her on the ground of a
probability that with recurrence--for recurrence we took for granted--I
should get used to my danger, distinctly professing that my personal
exposure had suddenly become the least of my discomforts. It was my new
suspicion that was intolerable; and yet even to this complication the
later hours of the day had brought a little ease.
On leaving her, after my first outbreak, I had of course returned to my
pupils, associating the right remedy for my dismay with that sense of
their charm which I had already found to be a thing I could positively
cultivate and which had never failed me yet. I had simply, in other
words, plunged afresh into Flora’s special society and there become
aware--it was almost a luxury!--that she could put her little conscious
hand straight upon the spot that ached. She had looked at me in sweet
speculation and then had accused me to my face of having “cried.”
I had supposed I had brushed away the ugly signs: but I could
literally--for the time, at all events--rejoice, under this fathomless
charity, that they had not entirely disappeared. To gaze into the
depths of blue of the child’s eyes and pronounce their loveliness a
trick of premature cunning was to be guilty of a cynicism in preference
to which I naturally preferred to abjure my judgment and, so far as
might be, my agitation. I couldn’t abjure for merely wanting to,
but I could repeat to Mrs. Grose--as I did there, over and over, in
the small hours--that with their voices in the air, their pressure
on one’s heart and their fragrant faces against one’s cheek,
everything fell to the ground but their incapacity and their beauty. It
was a pity that, somehow, to settle this once for all, I had equally to
re-enumerate the signs of subtlety that, in the afternoon, by the lake,
had made a miracle of my show of self-possession. It was a pity to be
obliged to re-investigate the certitude of the moment itself and repeat
how it had come to me as a revelation that the inconceivable communion
I then surprised was a matter, for either party, of habit. It was a
pity that I should have had to 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 I actually saw Mrs. Grose herself, and that she
wanted, by just so much as she 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 little activity by which she sought to
divert my attention--the perceptible increase of movement, the greater
intensity of play, the singing, the gabbling of nonsense, and the
invitation to romp.
Yet if I had not indulged, to prove there was nothing in it, in this
review, I should have missed the two or three dim elements of comfort
that still remained to me. I should not for instance have been able to
asseverate to my friend that I was certain--which was so much to the
good--that _I_ at least had not betrayed myself. I should not have
been prompted, by stress of need, by desperation of mind,--I scarce
know what to call it,--to invoke such further aid to intelligence
as might spring from pushing my colleague fairly to the wall. She
had told me, bit by bit, under pressure, a great deal; but a small
shifty spot on the wrong side 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 the concentration alike of our danger and our
watch seemed to help--I felt the importance of giving the last jerk to
the curtain. “I don’t believe anything so horrible,” I recollect
saying; “no, let us put it definitely, my dear, that I don’t. But
if I did, you know, there’s a thing I should require now, just
without sparing you the least bit more--oh, not a scrap, come!--to get
out of you. What was it you had in mind when, in our distress, before
Miles came back, over the letter from his school, you said, under my
insistence, that you didn’t pretend for him 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 closely watched him;
he has been an imperturbable little prodigy of delightful, loveable
goodness. Therefore you might perfectly have made the claim for him if
you had not, as it happened, seen an exception to take. What was your
exception, and to what passage in your personal observation of him did
you refer?”
It was a dreadfully austere inquiry, but levity was not our note, and,
at any rate, before the grey dawn admonished us to separate I had got
my answer. What my friend had had in mind proved to be immensely to
the purpose. It was neither more nor less than the circumstance that
for a period of several months Quint and the boy had been perpetually
together. It was in fact the very appropriate truth that she had
ventured to criticise the propriety, to hint at the incongruity, of
so close an alliance, and even to go so far on the subject as a frank
overture 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 I
pressed, was that _she_ liked to see young gentlemen not forget their
station.
I pressed again, of course, at this. “You reminded him that Quint was
only 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 upon me. “I was sure, at any rate,” she added, “that he
didn’t. But he denied certain occasions.”
“What occasions?”
“When they had been about together quite as if Quint were his
tutor--and a very grand one--and Miss Jessel only for the little
lady. When he had gone off with the fellow, I mean, and spent hours
with him.”
“He then prevaricated about it--he said he hadn’t?” Her assent
was clear enough 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.”