I waited and waited, and the days, as they elapsed, took something from
my consternation. A very few of them, in fact, passing, in constant
sight of my pupils, without a fresh incident, sufficed to give to
grievous fancies and even to odious memories a kind of brush of the
sponge. I have spoken of the surrender to their extraordinary childish
grace as a thing I could actively cultivate, and it may be imagined
if I neglected now to address myself to this source for whatever it
would yield. Stranger than I can express, certainly, was the effort to
struggle against my new lights; it would doubtless have been, however,
a greater tension still had it not been so frequently successful. I
used to wonder how my little charges could help guessing that I thought
strange things about them; and the circumstance that these things only
made them more interesting was not by itself a direct aid to keeping
them in the dark. I trembled lest they should see that they _were_ so
immensely more interesting. Putting things at the worst, at all events,
as in meditation I so often did, any clouding of their innocence could
only be--blameless and foredoomed as they were--a reason the more for
taking risks. There were moments when, by an irresistible impulse,
I found myself catching them up and pressing them to my heart. As
soon as I 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 immediate charm of my companions was a beguilement
still effective even under the shadow of the possibility that it was
studied. For if it occurred to me that I might occasionally excite
suspicion by the little outbreaks of my sharper passion for them,
so too I remember wondering if I mightn’t see a 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
response in children perpetually bowed over and hugged. The homage of
which they were so lavish succeeded, in truth, for my nerves, quite
as well as if I never appeared to myself, as I may say, literally to
catch them at a purpose in it. They had never, I think, wanted to do so
many things for their poor protectress; I mean--though they got their
lessons better and better, which was naturally what would please her
most--in the way of diverting, entertaining, surprising her; reading
her passages, telling her stories, acting her charades, pouncing out
at her, in disguises, as animals and historical characters, and above
all astonishing her by the “pieces” they had secretly got by heart
and could interminably recite. I should never get to the bottom--were
I to let myself go even now--of the prodigious private commentary,
all under still more private correction, with which, in these days,
I overscored their full hours. They had shown me from the first
a facility for everything, a general faculty which, taking a fresh
start, achieved remarkable flights. They got their little tasks as if
they loved them, and indulged, from the mere exuberance of the gift,
in the most unimposed little miracles of memory. They not only popped
out at me as tigers and as Romans, but as Shakespeareans, astronomers,
and navigators. This was so singularly the case that it had presumably
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 unnatural composure on
the subject of another school for Miles. What I remember is that I was
content not, for the time, to open the question, and that contentment
must have sprung from the sense of his perpetually striking show of
cleverness. He was too clever for a bad governess, for a parson’s
daughter, to spoil; and the strangest if not the brightest thread in
the pensive embroidery I just spoke of was the impression I might have
got, if I had dared to work it out, that he was under some influence
operating in his small intellectual life as a tremendous incitement.
If it was easy to reflect, however, that such a boy could postpone
school, it was at least as marked that for such a boy to have been
“kicked out” by a school-master was a mystification without
end. Let me add that in their company now--and I was careful almost
never to be out of it--I could follow no scent very far. We lived in
a cloud of music and love and success and private theatricals. The
musical sense in each of the children was of the quickest, but the
elder in especial had a marvellous knack of catching and repeating. The
schoolroom piano broke into all gruesome fancies; and when that
failed there were confabulations in corners, with a sequel of one of
them going out in the highest spirits in order to “come in” as
something new. I had had brothers myself, and it was no revelation to
me that little girls could be slavish idolaters of little boys. What
surpassed everything was that there was a little boy in the world
who could have for the inferior age, sex, and intelligence so fine
a consideration. They were extraordinarily at one, and to say that
they never either quarrelled or complained is to make the note of
praise coarse for their quality of sweetness. Sometimes, indeed,
when I dropped into coarseness, I perhaps came across traces of
little understandings between them by which one of them should keep
me occupied while the other slipped away. There is a _naïf_ side, I
suppose, in all diplomacy; but if my pupils practised upon me, it was
surely with the minimum of grossness. It was all in the other quarter
that, after a lull, the grossness broke out.
I find that I really hang back; but I must take my plunge. In going
on with the record of what was hideous at Bly, I not only challenge
the most liberal faith--for which I little care; but--and this is
another matter--I renew what I myself suffered, I again push my way
through it to the end. There came suddenly an hour after which, as
I look back, the affair seems to me to have been all pure suffering;
but I have at least reached the heart of it, and the straightest road
out is doubtless to advance. One evening--with nothing to lead up
or to prepare it--I felt the cold touch of the impression that had
breathed on me the night of my arrival and which, much lighter then,
as I have mentioned, I should probably have made little of in memory
had my subsequent sojourn been less agitated. I had not gone to bed;
I sat reading by a couple of candles. 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 the sequestered home and appealed to the unavowed
curiosity of my youth. I remember that the book I had in my hand was
Fielding’s _Amelia_; also that I was wholly awake. I recall further
both a general conviction that it was horribly late and a particular
objection to looking at my watch. I figure, finally, that the white
curtain draping, in the fashion of those days, the head of Flora’s
little bed, shrouded, as I had assured myself long before, the
perfection of childish rest. I recollect in short that, though I was
deeply interested in my author, I found myself, at the turn of a page
and with his spell all scattered, looking straight up from him and hard
at the door of my room. There was a moment during which I listened,
reminded of the faint sense I had had, the first night, of there being
something undefineably astir in the house, and noted the soft breath of
the open casement just move the half-drawn blind. Then, with all the
marks of a deliberation that must have seemed magnificent had there
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 the passage,
on which my light made little impression, noiselessly closed and locked
the door.
I can say now neither what determined nor what guided me, but I
went straight along the lobby, holding my candle high, till I came
within sight of the tall window that presided over the great turn
of the staircase. At this point I precipitately found myself aware
of three things. They were practically simultaneous, yet they had
flashes of succession. My candle, under a bold flourish, went out,
and I perceived, by the uncovered window, that the yielding dusk of
earliest morning rendered it unnecessary. Without it, the next instant,
I saw that there was someone on the stair. I speak of sequences, but I
required no lapse of seconds to stiffen myself for a third encounter
with Quint. The apparition had reached the landing half-way up and
was therefore on the spot nearest the window, where at sight of me,
it stopped short and fixed 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 the oak stair below, we faced each other in our common
intensity. He was absolutely, on this occasion, a living, detestable,
dangerous presence. But that was not the wonder of wonders; I reserve
this distinction for quite another circumstance: the circumstance that
dread had unmistakeably quitted me and that there was nothing in me
there that didn’t meet and measure 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 end
of an instant magnificently aware of this. I felt, in a fierce rigour
of confidence, that if I stood my ground a minute I should cease--for
the 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,
in the small hours, in a sleeping house, some enemy, some adventurer,
some criminal. It was the dead silence of our long gaze at such close
quarters that gave the whole horror, huge as it was, its only note of
the unnatural. If I had met a murderer in such a place and at such
an hour, 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 to make me doubt if even _I_ were in life. I can’t express what
followed it save by saying that the silence itself--which was indeed in
a manner an attestation of my strength--became the element into which I
saw the figure disappear; in which I definitely saw it turn as I might
have seen the low wretch to which it had once belonged turn on receipt
of an order, and pass, with my eyes on the villainous back that no
hunch could have more disfigured, straight down the staircase and into
the darkness in which the next bend was lost.
X
I remained awhile at the top of the stair, but with the effect
presently of understanding that when my visitor had gone, he had
gone: then I returned to my room. The foremost thing I saw there
by the light of the candle I had left burning was that Flora’s
little bed was empty; and on this 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 her lying and over which
(for the small silk counterpane and the sheets were disarranged)
the white curtains had been deceivingly pulled forward; then my step,
to my unutterable relief, produced an answering sound: I perceived 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 of her
candour and so little of her nightgown, with her pink bare feet and
the golden glow of her curls. She looked intensely grave, and I had
never had such a sense of losing an advantage acquired (the thrill
of which had just been so prodigious) as on my consciousness that
she addressed me with a reproach. “You naughty: where _have_ you
been?”--instead of challenging her own irregularity I found myself
arraigned and explaining. She herself explained, for that matter, with
the loveliest, eagerest simplicity. She had known suddenly, as she lay
there, that I was out of the room, and had jumped up to see what had
become of me. I had dropped, with the joy of her reappearance, back
into my chair--feeling then, and then only, a little faint; and she
had pattered straight over to me, thrown herself upon my knee, given
herself to be held with the flame of the candle full in the wonderful
little face that was still flushed with sleep. I remember closing
my eyes an instant, yieldingly, consciously, as before the excess of
something beautiful that shone out of the blue of her own. “You were
looking for me out of the window?” I said. “You thought I might be
walking in the grounds?”
“Well, you know, I thought someone was”--she never blanched as she
smiled 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
childish inconsequence, resentfully, though with a long sweetness in
her little drawl of the negative.
At that moment, in the state of my nerves, I absolutely believed she
lied; and if I once more closed my eyes it was before the dazzle of
the three 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 withstand it, 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 out at her on the spot and have it all over?--give it to her
straight in her lovely little lighted face? “You see, you see, you
_know_ that you do and that you already quite suspect I believe it;
therefore why not frankly confess it to me, so that we may at least
live with it together and learn perhaps, in the strangeness of our
fate, where we are and what it means?” This solicitation dropped,
alas, as it came: if I could immediately 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 the curtain 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 flame
of the candle as if the question were as irrelevant, or at any rate as
impersonal, as Mrs. Marcet or nine-times-nine. “Oh, but you know,”
she quite adequately answered, “that you might come back, you dear,
and that you _have_!” And after a little, when she had got into bed,
I had, for a long time, by almost sitting on her to hold her hand, to
prove that I recognised 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 my room-mate unmistakeably slept, and, stealing out,
took noiseless turns in the passage and even pushed as far as to
where I had last met Quint. But I never met him there again; and I
may as well say at once that I on no other 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 I once recognised the presence
of a woman seated on one of the lower steps with her back presented to
me, her body half bowed and her head, in an attitude of woe, in her
hands. I had been there but an instant, however, when she vanished
without looking round at me. I knew, none the less, exactly what
dreadful face she had to show; and I wondered whether, if instead
of being above I had been below, I should have had, for going up,
the same nerve I had lately shown Quint. Well, there continued to
be plenty of chance for nerve. On the eleventh night after my latest
encounter with that gentleman--they were all numbered now--I had an
alarm that perilously skirted it and that indeed, from the particular
quality of its unexpectedness, proved quite my sharpest shock. It
was precisely the first night during this series that, weary with
watching, I had felt that I might again without laxity lay myself
down at my old hour. I slept immediately and, as I afterwards knew,
till about one o’clock; but when I woke it was to sit straight up,
as completely roused as if a hand had shook me. I had left a light
burning, but it was now out, 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 me further, and the striking of a match completed
the picture.
The child had again got up--this time blowing out the taper, and had
again, for some purpose of observation or response, squeezed in behind
the blind and was peering out into the night. That she now saw--as
she had not, I had satisfied myself, the previous time--was proved to
me by the fact that she was disturbed neither by my re-illumination
nor by the haste I made to get into slippers and into a wrap. Hidden,
protected, absorbed, she evidently rested on the sill--the casement
opened forward--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 face with the apparition we had met at the lake, and could
now communicate with it as she had not then been able to do. What I,
on my side, had to care for was, without disturbing her, to reach, from
the corridor, some other window in the same quarter. I got to the door
without her hearing me; I got out of it, closed it and listened, from
the other side, for some sound from her. While I stood in the passage
I had my eyes on her brother’s door, which was but ten steps off and
which, indescribably, produced in me a renewal of the strange impulse
that I lately spoke of as my temptation. What if I should go straight
in and march to _his_ window?--what if, by risking to his boyish
bewilderment a revelation of my motive, I should throw across the rest
of the mystery the long halter of my boldness?
This thought held me sufficiently to make me cross to his threshold
and pause again. I preternaturally listened; I figured to myself what
might portentously be; I wondered if his bed were also empty and he
too were secretly at watch. It was a deep, soundless minute, at the
end of which my impulse failed. He was quiet; he might be innocent; the
risk was hideous; I turned away. There was a figure in the grounds--a
figure prowling for a sight, the visitor with whom Flora was engaged;
but it was not the visitor most concerned with my boy. I hesitated
afresh, but on other grounds and only a few seconds; then I had made
my choice. There were empty rooms at Bly, and it was only a question
of choosing the right one. The right one suddenly presented itself
to me as the lower one--though high above the gardens--in the solid
corner of the house that I have spoken of as the old tower. This was
a large, square chamber, arranged with some state as a bedroom, the
extravagant size of which made it so inconvenient that it had not for
years, though kept by Mrs. Grose in exemplary order, been occupied. I
had often admired it and I knew my way about in it; I had only, after
just faltering at the first chill gloom of its disuse, to pass across
it and unbolt as quietly as I could one of the shutters. Achieving
this transit, I uncovered the glass without a sound and, applying
my face to the pane, was able, the darkness without being much less
than within, to see that I commanded the right direction. Then I saw
something more. The moon made the night 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 much straight at me as at something
that was apparently above me. There was clearly another person above
me--there was a person on the tower; but the presence on the lawn was
not in the least what I had conceived and had confidently hurried to
meet. The presence on the lawn--I felt sick as I made it out--was poor
little Miles himself.