The business was practically settled from the moment I never followed
him. It was a pitiful surrender to agitation, but my being aware
of this had somehow no power to restore me. I only sat there on my
tomb and read into what my little friend had said to me the fulness
of its meaning; by the time I had grasped the whole of which I had
also embraced, for absence, the pretext that I was ashamed to offer my
pupils and the rest of the congregation such an example of delay. What
I said to myself above all was that Miles had got something out of
me and that the proof of it, for him, would be just this awkward
collapse. He had got out of me that there was something I was much
afraid of and that he should probably be able to make use of my fear
to gain, for his own purpose, more freedom. My fear was of having to
deal with the intolerable question of the grounds of his dismissal from
school, for that was really but the question of the horrors gathered
behind. That his uncle should arrive to treat with me of these things
was a solution that, strictly speaking, I ought now to have desired to
bring on; but I could so little face the ugliness and the pain of it
that I simply procrastinated and lived from hand to mouth. The boy, to
my deep discomposure, was immensely in the right, was in a position to
say to me: “Either you clear up with my guardian the mystery of this
interruption of my studies, or you cease to expect me to lead with you
a life that’s so unnatural for a boy.” What was so unnatural for
the particular boy I was concerned with was this sudden revelation of a
consciousness and a plan.
That was what really overcame me, what prevented my going in. I
walked round the church, hesitating, hovering; I reflected that I had
already, with him, hurt myself beyond repair. Therefore I could patch
up nothing, and it was too extreme an effort to squeeze beside him into
the pew: he would be so much more sure than ever to pass his arm into
mine and make me sit there for an hour in close, silent contact with
his commentary on our talk. For the first minute since his arrival I
wanted to get away from him. As I paused beneath the high east window
and listened to the sounds of worship, I was taken with an impulse
that might master me, I felt, completely should I give it the least
encouragement. I might easily put an end to my predicament by getting
away altogether. Here was my chance; there was no one to stop me; I
could give the whole thing up--turn my back and retreat. It was only a
question of hurrying again, for a few preparations, to the house which
the attendance at church of so many of the servants would practically
have left unoccupied. No one, in short, could blame me if I should just
drive desperately off. What was it to get away if I got away only till
dinner? That would be in a couple of hours, at the end of which--I had
the acute prevision--my little pupils would play at innocent wonder
about my non-appearance in their train.
“What _did_ you do, you naughty, bad thing? Why in the world, to
worry us so--and take our thoughts off too, don’t you know?--did you
desert us at the very door?” I couldn’t meet such questions nor,
as they asked them, their false little lovely eyes; yet it was all so
exactly what I should have to meet that, as the prospect grew sharp to
me, I at last let myself go.
I got, so far as the immediate moment was concerned, away; I came
straight out of the churchyard and, thinking hard, retraced my steps
through the park. It seemed to me that by the time I reached the
house I had made up my mind I would fly. The Sunday stillness both
of the approaches and of the interior, in which I met no one, fairly
excited me with a sense of opportunity. Were I to get off quickly,
this way, I should get off without a scene, without a word. My
quickness would have to be remarkable, however, and the question of a
conveyance was the great one to settle. Tormented, in the hall, with
difficulties and obstacles, I remember sinking down at the foot of
the staircase--suddenly collapsing there on the lowest step and then,
with a revulsion, recalling that it was exactly where more than a month
before, in the darkness of night and just so bowed with evil things,
I had seen the spectre of the most horrible of women. At this I was
able to straighten myself; I went the rest of the way up; I made, in
my bewilderment, for the schoolroom, where there were objects belonging
to me that I should have to take. But I opened the door to find again,
in a flash, my eyes unsealed. In the presence of what I saw I reeled
straight back upon my resistance.
Seated at my own table in clear noonday light I saw a person whom,
without my previous experience, I should have taken at the first
blush for some housemaid who might have stayed at home to look
after the place and who, availing herself of rare relief from
observation and of the schoolroom table and my pens, ink, and paper,
had applied herself to the considerable effort of a letter to her
sweetheart. There was an effort in the way that, while her arms rested
on the table, her hands with evident weariness supported her head;
but at the moment I took this in I had already become aware that,
in spite of my entrance, her attitude strangely persisted. Then it
was--with the very act of its announcing itself--that her identity
flared up in a change of posture. She rose, not as if she had heard
me, but with an indescribable grand melancholy of indifference and
detachment, and, within a dozen feet of me, stood there as my vile
predecessor. Dishonoured and tragic, she was all before me; but even as
I fixed and, for memory, secured it, the awful image passed away. Dark
as midnight in her black dress, her haggard beauty and her unutterable
woe, she had looked at me long enough to appear to say that her right
to sit at my table was as good as mine to sit at hers. While these
instants lasted indeed I had the extraordinary chill of a feeling that
it was I who was the intruder. It was as a wild protest against it
that, actually addressing her--“You terrible, miserable woman!”--I
heard myself break into a sound that, by the open door, rang through
the long passage and the empty house. She looked at me as if she heard
me, but I had recovered myself and cleared the air. There was nothing
in the room the next minute but the sunshine and a sense that I must
stay.