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
show anything. He denied,” she repeated; “he denied.”
Lord, how I pressed her now! “So that you could see he knew what was
between 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 dreadful boldness of mind, and you keep back, out of timidity and
modesty and delicacy, even the impression that, in the past, when you
had, without my 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 that suggested to you,” I continued, “that he covered and
concealed their relation.”
“Oh, he couldn’t prevent----”
“Your learning the truth? I dare say! But, heavens,” I fell, with
vehemence, a-thinking, “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 you the 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
angel now?”
“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 be able to tell you for some days. Only, put it to me
again!” I cried in a way that made my friend stare. “There are
directions in which I must not for the present let myself go.”
Meanwhile I returned to her first example--the one to which she
had just previously referred--of the boy’s happy capacity for an
occasional slip. “If Quint--on your remonstrance at the time you
speak of--was a base menial, one of the things Miles said to you, I
find myself guessing, was that you were another.” Again her admission
was so adequate that I continued: “And you forgave him that?”
“Wouldn’t _you_?”
“Oh, yes!” And we exchanged there, in the stillness, a sound of the
oddest amusement. Then I went on: “At all events, while he was with
the man----”
“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
suited exactly the particularly deadly view I was in the very act of
forbidding myself to entertain. But I so far succeeded in checking the
expression of this view that I will throw, just here, no further light
on it than may be offered by the mention of my final observation to
Mrs. Grose. “His having lied and been impudent are, I confess, less
engaging specimens than I had hoped to have from you of the outbreak in
him of the little natural man. Still,” I mused, “they must do, for
they make me feel more than ever that I must watch.”
It made me blush, the next minute, to see in my friend’s face how
much more unreservedly she had forgiven him than her anecdote struck
me as presenting to my own tenderness an occasion for doing. This came
out when, at the schoolroom door, she quitted me. “Surely you don’t
accuse _him_----”
“Of carrying on an intercourse that he conceals from me? Ah, remember
that, until further evidence, I now accuse nobody.” Then, before
shutting her out to go, by another passage, to her own place, “I must
just wait,” I wound up.