Walking to church a certain Sunday morning, I had little Miles at my
side and his sister, in advance of us and at Mrs. Grose’s, well in
sight. 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,
bright and sharp, made the church-bells almost gay. It was an odd
accident of thought that I should have happened at such a moment to
be particularly and very gratefully struck with the obedience of my
little charges. Why did they never resent my inexorable, my perpetual
society? Something or other had brought nearer home to me that I had
all but pinned the boy to my shawl and that, in the way our companions
were marshalled before me, I might have appeared to provide against
some danger of rebellion. I was like a gaoler with an eye to possible
surprises and escapes. But all this belonged--I mean their magnificent
little surrender--just to the special array of the facts that were most
abysmal. Turned out for Sunday by his uncle’s tailor, who had had
a free hand and a notion of pretty waistcoats and of his grand little
air, Miles’s whole title to independence, the rights of his sex and
situation, were so stamped upon him that if he had suddenly struck
for freedom I should have had nothing to say. I was by the strangest
of chances wondering how I should meet him when the revolution
unmistakeably occurred. I call it a revolution because I now see how,
with the word he spoke, the curtain rose on the last 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, particularly
as uttered in the sweet, high, casual pipe with which, at all
interlocutors, but above all at his eternal governess, he threw off
intonations as if he were tossing roses. There was something in them
that always made one “catch” and I caught, at any rate, now so
effectually that I stopped as short as if one of the trees of the
park had fallen across the road. There was something new, on the spot,
between us, and he was perfectly aware that I recognised it, though,
to enable me to do so, he had no need to look a whit less candid and
charming than usual. I could feel in him how he already, from my
at first finding nothing to reply, perceived the advantage he had
gained. I was so slow to find anything that he had plenty of time,
after a minute, to continue with his suggestive but inconclusive
smile: “You know, my dear, that for a fellow to be with a lady
_always_----!” His “my dear” was constantly on his lips for me,
and nothing could have expressed more the exact shade of the sentiment
with which I desired to inspire my pupils than its fond familiarity. It
was so respectfully easy.
But, oh, how I felt that at present I must pick my own phrases! I
remember that, to gain time, I tried to laugh, and I seemed to see
in the beautiful face with which he watched me how ugly and queer I
looked. “And always with the same lady?” I returned.
He neither blenched nor winked. The whole thing was virtually out
between us. “Ah, of course, she’s a jolly, ‘perfect’ lady; but,
after all, 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’re
getting on.” Oh, but I felt helpless!
I have kept to this day the heartbreaking little idea of how he seemed
to know that and to play with it. “And you can’t say I’ve not
been awfully good, can you?”
I laid my hand on his shoulder, for, though I felt how much better it
would have been to walk on, I was not yet quite able. “No, I can’t
say that, 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 childish
reproach. “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 wits
about 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
_am_ I going back?”
I wore, in turning it over, my most responsible air. “Were you very
happy 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 much that.”
“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
various persons, including several of the household of Bly, on their
way to it and 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 much further; I reflected hungrily that, for more than an hour, he
would have to be silent; and I thought with envy of the comparative
dusk of the pew and of the almost spiritual help of the hassock on
which I might bend my knees. I seemed literally to be running a race
with some confusion to which he was about to reduce me, but I felt that
he had got in first when, 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 own
sort, 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 retreating for a jump, yet leaving his thought so unfinished that,
after we had come into the gate, another stop, which he imposed on me
by the pressure of his arm, had become inevitable. Mrs. Grose and Flora
had passed into the church, the other worshippers had followed, and we
were, for the minute, alone among the old, thick graves. We had paused,
on the path from the gate, by a low, oblong, tablelike tomb.
“Yes, if you didn’t----?”
He looked, while I waited, about at the graves. “Well, you know
what!” But he didn’t move, and he presently produced something
that made me drop straight down on the stone slab, as if suddenly to
rest. “Does my uncle think what _you_ think?”