Yet it was when she had got off--and I missed her on the spot--that
the great pinch really came. If I had counted on what it would give
me to find myself alone with Miles, I speedily perceived, at least,
that it would give me a measure. No hour of my stay in fact was so
assailed with apprehensions as that of my coming down to learn that
the carriage containing Mrs. Grose and my younger pupil had already
rolled out of the gates. Now I _was_, I said to myself, face to face
with the elements, and for much of the rest of the day, while I fought
my weakness, I could consider that I had been supremely rash. It was a
tighter place still than I had yet turned round in; all the more that,
for the first time, I could see in the aspect of others a confused
reflection of the crisis. What had happened naturally caused them all
to stare; there was too little of the explained, throw out whatever we
might, in the suddenness of my colleague’s act. The maids and the men
looked blank; the effect of which on my nerves was an aggravation until
I saw the necessity of making it a positive aid. It was precisely,
in short, by just clutching the helm that I avoided total wreck; and
I dare say that, to bear up at all, I became, that morning, very grand
and very dry. I welcomed the consciousness that I was charged with much
to do, and I caused it to be known as well that, left thus to myself,
I was quite remarkably firm. I wandered with that manner, for the next
hour or two, all over the place and looked, I have no doubt, as if I
were ready for any onset. So, for the benefit of whom it might concern,
I paraded with a sick heart.
The person it appeared least to concern proved to be, till dinner,
little Miles himself. My perambulations had given me, meanwhile, no
glimpse of him, but they had tended to make more public the change
taking place in our relation as a consequence of his having at the
piano, the day before, kept me, in Flora’s interest, so beguiled
and befooled. The stamp of publicity had of course been fully given by
her confinement and departure, and the change itself was now ushered
in by our non-observance of the regular custom of the schoolroom. He
had already disappeared when, on my way down, I pushed open his door,
and I learned below that he had breakfasted--in the presence of a
couple of the maids--with Mrs. Grose and his sister. He had then gone
out, as he said, for a stroll; than which nothing, I reflected, could
better have expressed his frank view of the abrupt transformation of
my office. What he would now permit this office to consist of was yet
to be settled: there was a queer relief, at all events--I mean for
myself in especial--in the renouncement of one pretension. If so much
had sprung to the surface, I scarce put it too strongly in saying that
what had perhaps sprung highest was the absurdity of our prolonging
the fiction that I had anything more to teach him. It sufficiently
stuck out that, by tacit little tricks in which even more than myself
he carried out the care for my dignity, I had had to appeal to him to
let me off straining to meet him on the ground of his true capacity. He
had at any rate his freedom now; I was never to touch it again; as I
had amply shown, moreover, when, on his joining me in the schoolroom
the previous night, I had uttered, on the subject of the interval
just concluded, neither challenge nor hint. I had too much, from this
moment, my other ideas. Yet when he at last arrived the difficulty of
applying them, the accumulations of my problem, were brought straight
home to me by the beautiful little presence on which what had occurred
had as yet, for the eye, dropped neither stain nor shadow.
To mark, for the house, the high state I cultivated I decreed that
my meals with the boy should be served, as we called it, downstairs;
so that I had been awaiting him in the ponderous pomp of the room
outside of the window of which I had had from Mrs. Grose, that first
scared Sunday, my flash of something it would scarce have done to call
light. Here at present I felt afresh--for I had felt it again and
again--how my equilibrium depended on the success of my rigid will,
the will to shut my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what
I had to deal with was, revoltingly, against nature. I could only get
on at all by taking “nature” into my confidence and my account,
by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of
course, and unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front,
only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue. No attempt,
none the less, could well require more tact than just this attempt
to supply, one’s self, _all_ the nature. How could I put even a
little of that article into a suppression of reference to what had
occurred? How, on the other hand, could I make a reference without a
new plunge into the hideous obscure? Well, a sort of answer, after a
time, had come to me, and it was so far confirmed as that I was met,
incontestably, by the quickened vision of what was rare in my little
companion. It was indeed as if he had found even now--as he had
so often found at lessons--still some other delicate way to ease me
off. Wasn’t there light in the fact which, as we shared our solitude,
broke out with a specious glitter it had never yet quite worn?--the
fact that (opportunity aiding, precious opportunity which had now come)
it would be preposterous, with a child so endowed, to forgo the help
one might wrest from absolute intelligence? What had his intelligence
been given him for but to save him? Mightn’t one, to reach his mind,
risk the stretch of an angular arm over his character? It was as if,
when we were face to face in the dining-room, he had literally shown me
the way. The roast mutton was on the table, and I had dispensed with
attendance. Miles, before he sat down, stood a moment with his hands
in his pockets and looked at the joint, on which he seemed on the point
of passing some humorous judgment. But what he presently produced was:
“I say, my dear, is she really very awfully ill?”
“Little Flora? Not so bad but that she’ll presently be better.
London will set her up. Bly had ceased to agree with her. Come
here and take your mutton.”
He alertly obeyed me, carried the plate carefully to his seat, and,
when he was established, went on. “Did Bly disagree with her so
terribly suddenly?”
“Not so suddenly as you might think. One had seen it coming on.”
“Then why didn’t you get her off before?”
“Before what?”
“Before she became too ill to travel.”
I found myself prompt. “She’s _not_ too ill to travel: she only
might have become so if she had stayed. This was just the moment
to seize. The journey will dissipate the influence”--oh, I was
grand!--“and carry it off.”
“I see, I see”--Miles, for that matter, was grand too. He settled
to his repast with the charming little “table manner” that,
from the day of his arrival, had relieved me of all grossness of
admonition. Whatever he had been driven from school for, it was not
for ugly feeding. He was irreproachable, as always, today; but he was
unmistakeably more conscious. He was discernibly trying to take for
granted more things than he found, without assistance, quite easy;
and he dropped into peaceful silence while he felt his situation. Our
meal was of the briefest--mine a vain pretence, and I had the things
immediately removed. While this was done Miles stood again with his
hands in his little pockets and his back to me--stood and looked out of
the wide window through which, that other day, I had seen what pulled
me up. We continued silent while the maid was with us--as silent,
it whimsically occurred to me, as some young couple who, on their
wedding-journey, at the inn, feel shy in the presence of the waiter. He
turned round only when the waiter had left us. “Well--so we’re
alone!”