Before a new day, in my room, had fully broken, my eyes opened to
Mrs. Grose, who had come to my bedside with worse news. Flora was so
markedly feverish that an illness was perhaps at hand; she had passed
a night of extreme unrest, a night agitated above all by fears that had
for their subject not in the least her former, but wholly her present,
governess. It was not against the possible re-entrance of Miss Jessel
on the scene that she protested--it was conspicuously and passionately
against mine. I was promptly on my feet of course, and with an immense
deal to ask; the more that my friend had discernibly now girded her
loins to meet me once more. This I felt as soon as I had put to her
the question of her sense of the child’s sincerity as against my
own. “She persists in denying to you that she saw, or has ever seen,
anything?”
My visitor’s trouble, truly, was great. “Ah, Miss, it isn’t a
matter on which I can push her! Yet it isn’t either, I must say, as
if I much needed to. It has made her, every inch of her, quite old.”
“Oh, I see her perfectly from here. She resents, for all the world
like some high little personage, the imputation on her truthfulness
and, as it were, her respectability. ‘Miss Jessel indeed--_she_!’
Ah, she’s ‘respectable,’ the chit! The impression she gave me
there yesterday was, I assure you, the very strangest of all; it was
quite beyond any of the others. I _did_ put my foot in it! She’ll
never speak to me again.”
Hideous and obscure as it all was, it held Mrs. Grose briefly silent;
then she granted my point with a frankness which, I made sure, had more
behind it. “I think indeed, Miss, she never will. She do have a grand
manner about it!”
“And that manner”--I summed it up--“is practically what’s the
matter with her now!”
Oh, that manner, I could see in my visitor’s face, and not a little
else besides! “She asks me every three minutes if I think you’re
coming in.”
“I see--I see.” I too, on my side, had so much more than worked it
out. “Has she said to you since yesterday--except to repudiate her
familiarity with anything so dreadful--a single other word about Miss
Jessel?”
“Not one, Miss. And of course you know,” my friend added, “I took
it from her, by the lake, that, just then and there at least, there
_was_ nobody.”
“Rather! And, naturally, you take it from her still.”
“I don’t contradict her. What else can I do?”
“Nothing in the world! You’ve the cleverest little person to deal
with. They’ve made them--their two friends, I mean--still cleverer
even than nature did; for it was wondrous material to play on! Flora
has now her grievance, and she’ll work it to the end.”
“Yes, Miss; but to _what_ end?”
“Why, that of dealing with me to her uncle. She’ll make me out to
him the lowest creature----!”
I winced at the fair show of the scene in Mrs. Grose’s face; she
looked for a minute as if she sharply saw them together. “And him who
thinks so well of you!”
“He has an odd way--it comes over me now,” I laughed, “--of
proving it! But that doesn’t matter. What Flora wants, of course, is
to get rid of me.”
My companion bravely concurred. “Never again to so much as look at
you.”
“So that what you’ve come to me now for,” I asked, “is to speed
me on my way?” Before she had time to reply, however, I had her in
check. “I’ve a better idea--the result of my reflections. My going
_would_ seem the right thing, and on Sunday I was terribly near it. Yet
that won’t do. It’s _you_ who must go. You must take Flora.”
My visitor, at this, did speculate. “But where in the world----?”
“Away from here. Away from _them_. Away, even most of all, now, from
me. Straight to her uncle.”
“Only to tell on you----?”
“No, not ‘only’! To leave me, in addition, with my remedy.”
She was still vague. “And what _is_ your remedy?”
“Your loyalty, to begin with. And then Miles’s.”
She looked at me hard. “Do you think he----?”
“Won’t if he has the chance, turn on me? Yes, I venture still
to think it. At all events, I want to try. Get off with his sister
as soon as possible and leave me with him alone.” I was amazed,
myself, at the spirit I had still in reserve, and therefore perhaps a
trifle the more disconcerted at the way in which, in spite of this fine
example of it, she hesitated. “There’s one thing, of course,” I
went on: “they mustn’t, before she goes, see each other for three
seconds.” Then it came over me that, in spite of Flora’s presumable
sequestration from the instant of her return from the pool, it might
already be too late. “Do you mean,” I anxiously asked, “that they
_have_ met?”
At this she quite flushed. “Ah, Miss, I’m not such a fool as
that! If I’ve been obliged to leave her three or four times, it has
been each time with one of the maids, and at present, though she’s
alone, she’s locked in safe. And yet--and yet!” There were too many
things.
“And yet what?”
“Well, are you so sure of the little gentleman?”
“I’m not sure of anything but _you_. But I have, since last
evening, a new hope. I think he wants to give me an opening. I do
believe that--poor little exquisite wretch!--he wants to speak. Last
evening, in the firelight and the silence, he sat with me for two hours
as if it were just coming.”
Mrs. Grose looked hard, through the window, at the grey, gathering
day. “And did it come?”
“No, though I waited and waited, I confess it didn’t, and it
was without a breach of the silence or so much as a faint allusion
to his sister’s condition and absence that we at last kissed for
good-night. All the same,” I continued, “I can’t, if her uncle
sees her, consent to his seeing her brother without my having given
the boy--and most of all because things have got so bad--a little more
time.”
My friend appeared on this ground more reluctant than I could quite
understand. “What do you mean by more time?”
“Well, a day or two--really to bring it out. He’ll then be on _my_
side--of which you see the importance. If nothing comes, I shall only
fail, and you will, at the worst, have helped me by doing, on your
arrival in town, whatever you may have found possible.” So I put it
before her, but she continued for a little so inscrutably embarrassed
that I came again to her aid. “Unless, indeed,” I wound up, “you
really want _not_ to go.”
I could see it, in her face, at last clear itself; she put out her hand
to me as a pledge. “I’ll go--I’ll go. I’ll go this morning.”
I wanted to be very just. “If you _should_ wish still to wait, I
would engage she shouldn’t see me.”
“No, no: it’s the place itself. She must leave it.” She held me a
moment with heavy eyes, then brought out the rest. “Your idea’s the
right one. I myself, Miss----”
“Well?”
“I can’t stay.”
The look she gave me with it made me jump at possibilities. “You mean
that, since yesterday, you _have_ seen----?”
She shook her head with dignity. “I’ve _heard_----!”
“Heard?”
“From that child--horrors! There!” she sighed with tragic
relief. “On my honour, Miss, she says things----!” But at this
evocation she broke down; she dropped, with a sudden sob, upon my sofa
and, as I had seen her do before, gave way to all the grief of it.
It was quite in another manner that I, for my part, let myself
go. “Oh, thank God!”
She sprang up again at this, drying her eyes with a groan. “‘Thank
God’?”
“It so justifies me!”
“It does that, Miss!”
I couldn’t have desired more emphasis, but I just hesitated.
“She’s so horrible?”