XX

Just as in the churchyard with Miles, the whole thing was upon us. Much

as I had made of the fact that this name had never once, between

us, been sounded, the quick, smitten glare with which the child’s

face now received it fairly likened my breach of the silence to the

smash of a pane of glass. It added to the interposing cry, as if to

stay the blow, that Mrs. Grose, at the same instant, uttered over my

violence--the shriek of a creature scared, or rather wounded, which, in

turn, within a few seconds, was completed by a gasp of my own. I seized

my colleague’s arm. “She’s there, she’s there!”

Miss Jessel stood before us on the opposite bank exactly as she had

stood the other time, and I remember, strangely, as the first feeling

now produced in me, my thrill of joy at having brought on a proof. She

was there, and I was justified; she was there, and I was neither

cruel nor mad. She was there for poor scared Mrs. Grose, but she was

there most for Flora; and no moment of my monstrous time was perhaps

so extraordinary as that in which I consciously threw out to her--with

the sense that, pale and ravenous demon as she was, she would catch and

understand it--an inarticulate message of gratitude. She rose erect

on the spot my friend and I had lately quitted, and there was not,

in all the long reach of her desire, an inch of her evil that fell

short. This first vividness of vision and emotion were things of a

few seconds, during which Mrs. Grose’s dazed blink across to where I

pointed struck me as a sovereign sign that she too at last saw, just

as it carried my own eyes precipitately to the child. The revelation

then of the manner in which Flora was affected startled me, in truth,

far more than it would have done to find her also merely agitated,

for direct dismay was of course not what I had expected. Prepared and

on her guard as our pursuit had actually made her, she would repress

every betrayal; and I was therefore shaken, on the spot, by my first

glimpse of the particular one for which I had not allowed. To see her,

without a convulsion of her small pink face, not even feign to glance

in the direction of the prodigy I announced, but only, instead of

that, turn at _me_ an expression of hard, still gravity, an expression

absolutely new and unprecedented and that appeared to read and accuse

and judge me--this was a stroke that somehow converted the little girl

herself into the very presence that could make me quail. I quailed

even though my certitude that she thoroughly saw was never greater

than at that instant, and in the immediate need to defend myself

I called it passionately to witness. “She’s there, you little

unhappy thing--there, there, _there_, and you see her as well as you

see me!” I had said shortly before to Mrs. Grose that she was not at

these times a child, but an old, old woman, and that description of her

could not have been more strikingly confirmed than in the way in which,

for all answer to this, she simply showed me, without a concession, an

admission, of her eyes, a countenance of deeper and deeper, of indeed

suddenly quite fixed, reprobation. I was by this time--if I can put

the whole thing at all together--more appalled at what I may properly

call her manner than at anything else, though it was simultaneously

with this that I became aware of having Mrs. Grose also, and very

formidably, to reckon with. My elder companion, the next moment, at

any rate, blotted out everything but her own flushed face and her loud,

shocked protest, a burst of high disapproval. “What a dreadful turn,

to be sure, Miss! Where on earth do you see anything?”

I could only grasp her more quickly yet, for even while she spoke the

hideous plain presence stood undimmed and undaunted. It had already

lasted a minute, and it lasted while I continued, seizing my colleague,

quite thrusting her at it and presenting her to it, to insist with my

pointing hand. “You don’t see her exactly as _we_ see?--you mean

to say you don’t now--_now_? She’s as big as a blazing fire! Only

look, dearest woman, _look_----!” She looked, even as I did, and

gave me, with her deep groan of negation, repulsion, compassion--the

mixture with her pity of her relief at her exemption--a sense, touching

to me even then, that she would have backed me up if she could. I might

well have needed that, for with this hard blow of the proof that her

eyes were hopelessly sealed I felt my own situation horribly crumble,

I felt--I saw--my livid predecessor press, from her position, on my

defeat, and I was conscious, more than all, of what I should have

from this instant to deal with in the astounding little attitude

of Flora. Into this attitude Mrs. Grose immediately and violently

entered, breaking, even while there pierced through my sense of ruin a

prodigious private triumph, into breathless reassurance.

“She isn’t there, little lady, and nobody’s there--and you

never see nothing, my sweet! How can poor Miss Jessel--when poor Miss

Jessel’s dead and buried? _We_ know, don’t we, love?”--and she

appealed, blundering in, to the child. “It’s all a mere mistake and

a worry and a joke--and we’ll go home as fast as we can!”

Our companion, on this, had responded with a strange, quick primness

of propriety, and they were again, with Mrs. Grose on her feet, united,

as it were, in pained opposition to me. Flora continued to fix me with

her small mask of reprobation, and even at that minute I prayed God to

forgive me for seeming to see that, as she stood there holding tight

to our friend’s dress, her incomparable childish beauty had suddenly

failed, had quite vanished. I’ve said it already--she was literally,

she was hideously, hard; she had turned common and almost ugly. “I

don’t know what you mean. I see nobody. I see nothing. I never

_have_. I think you’re cruel. I don’t like you!” Then, after

this deliverance, which might have been that of a vulgarly pert little

girl in the street, she hugged Mrs. Grose more closely and buried in

her skirts the dreadful little face. In this position she produced an

almost furious wail. “Take me away, take me away--oh, take me away

from _her_!”

“From _me_?” I panted.

“From you--from you!” she cried.

Even Mrs. Grose looked across at me dismayed, while I had nothing

to do but communicate again with the figure that, on the opposite

bank, without a movement, as rigidly still as if catching, beyond the

interval, our voices, was as vividly there for my disaster as it was

not there for my service. The wretched child had spoken exactly as if

she had got from some outside source each of her stabbing little words,

and I could therefore, in the full despair of all I had to accept,

but sadly shake my head at her. “If I had ever doubted, all my doubt

would at present have gone. I’ve been living with the miserable

truth, and now it has only too much closed round me. Of course

I’ve lost you: I’ve interfered, and you’ve seen--under _her_

dictation”--with which I faced, over the pool again, our infernal

witness--“the easy and perfect way to meet it. I’ve done my best,

but I’ve lost you. Good-bye.” For Mrs. Grose I had an imperative,

an almost frantic “Go, go!” before which, in infinite distress,

but mutely possessed of the little girl and clearly convinced, in spite

of her blindness, that something awful had occurred and some collapse

engulfed us, she retreated, by the way we had come, as fast as she

could move.

Of what first happened when I was left alone I had no subsequent

memory. I only knew that at the end of, I suppose, a quarter of an

hour, an odorous dampness and roughness, chilling and piercing my

trouble, had made me understand that I must have thrown myself, on

my face, on the ground and given way to a wildness of grief. I must

have lain there long and cried and sobbed, for when I raised my head

the day was almost done. I got up and looked a moment, through the

twilight, at the grey pool and its blank, haunted edge, and then

I took, back to the house, my dreary and difficult course. When I

reached the gate in the fence the boat, to my surprise, was gone,

so that I had a fresh reflection to make on Flora’s extraordinary

command of the situation. She passed that night, by the most tacit,

and I should add, were not the word so grotesque a false note, the

happiest of arrangements, with Mrs. Grose. I saw neither of them on

my return, but, on the other hand, as by an ambiguous compensation,

I saw a great deal of Miles. I saw--I can use no other phrase--so much

of him that it was as if it were more than it had ever been. No evening

I had passed at Bly had the portentous quality of this one; in spite

of which--and in spite also of the deeper depths of consternation that

had opened beneath my feet--there was literally, in the ebbing actual,

an extraordinarily sweet sadness. On reaching the house I had never so

much as looked for the boy; I had simply gone straight to my room to

change what I was wearing and to take in, at a glance, much material

testimony to Flora’s rupture. Her little belongings had all been

removed. When later, by the schoolroom fire, I was served with tea

by the usual maid, I indulged, on the article of my other pupil,

in no inquiry whatever. He had his freedom now--he might have it to

the end! Well, he did have it; and it consisted--in part at least--of

his coming in at about eight o’clock and sitting down with me in

silence. On the removal of the tea-things I had blown out the candles

and drawn my chair closer: I was conscious of a mortal coldness and

felt as if I should never again be warm. So, when he appeared, I was

sitting in the glow with my thoughts. He paused a moment by the door as

if to look at me; then--as if to share them--came to the other side of

the hearth and sank into a chair. We sat there in absolute stillness;

yet he wanted, I felt, to be with me.