He laughed for the first time. “You _are_ acute. Yes, she was in love.
That is, she had been. That came out—she couldn’t tell her story
without its coming out. I saw it, and she saw I saw it; but neither of
us spoke of it. I remember the time and the place—the corner of the
lawn, the shade of the great beeches and the long, hot summer
afternoon. It wasn’t a scene for a shudder; but oh—!” He quitted the
fire and dropped back into his chair.
“You’ll receive the packet Thursday morning?” I inquired.
“Probably not till the second post.”
“Well then; after dinner—”
“You’ll all meet me here?” He looked us round again. “Isn’t anybody
going?” It was almost the tone of hope.
“Everybody will stay!”
“_I_ will”—and “_I_ will!” cried the ladies whose departure had been
fixed. Mrs. Griffin, however, expressed the need for a little more
light. “Who was it she was in love with?”
“The story will tell,” I took upon myself to reply.
“Oh, I can’t wait for the story!”
“The story _won’t_ tell,” said Douglas; “not in any literal, vulgar
way.”
“More’s the pity, then. That’s the only way I ever understand.”
“Won’t _you_ tell, Douglas?” somebody else inquired.
He sprang to his feet again. “Yes—tomorrow. Now I must go to bed. Good
night.” And quickly catching up a candlestick, he left us slightly
bewildered. From our end of the great brown hall we heard his step on
the stair; whereupon Mrs. Griffin spoke. “Well, if I don’t know who she
was in love with, I know who _he_ was.”
“She was ten years older,” said her husband.
“_Raison de plus_—at that age! But it’s rather nice, his long
reticence.”
“Forty years!” Griffin put in.
“With this outbreak at last.”
“The outbreak,” I returned, “will make a tremendous occasion of
Thursday night;” and everyone so agreed with me that, in the light of
it, we lost all attention for everything else. The last story, however
incomplete and like the mere opening of a serial, had been told; we
handshook and “candlestuck,” as somebody said, and went to bed.
I knew the next day that a letter containing the key had, by the first
post, gone off to his London apartments; but in spite of—or perhaps
just on account of—the eventual diffusion of this knowledge we quite
let him alone till after dinner, till such an hour of the evening, in
fact, as might best accord with the kind of emotion on which our hopes
were fixed. Then he became as communicative as we could desire and
indeed gave us his best reason for being so. We had it from him again
before the fire in the hall, as we had had our mild wonders of the
previous night. It appeared that the narrative he had promised to read
us really required for a proper intelligence a few words of prologue.
Let me say here distinctly, to have done with it, that this narrative,
from an exact transcript of my own made much later, is what I shall
presently give. Poor Douglas, before his death—when it was in
sight—committed to me the manuscript that reached him on the third of
these days and that, on the same spot, with immense effect, he began to
read to our hushed little circle on the night of the fourth. The
departing ladies who had said they would stay didn’t, of course, thank
heaven, stay: they departed, in consequence of arrangements made, in a
rage of curiosity, as they professed, produced by the touches with
which he had already worked us up. But that only made his little final
auditory more compact and select, kept it, round the hearth, subject to
a common thrill.
The first of these touches conveyed that the written statement took up
the tale at a point after it had, in a manner, begun. The fact to be in
possession of was therefore that his old friend, the youngest of
several daughters of a poor country parson, had, at the age of twenty,
on taking service for the first time in the schoolroom, come up to
London, in trepidation, to answer in person an advertisement that had
already placed her in brief correspondence with the advertiser. This
person proved, on her presenting herself, for judgment, at a house in
Harley Street, that impressed her as vast and imposing—this prospective
patron proved a gentleman, a bachelor in the prime of life, such a
figure as had never risen, save in a dream or an old novel, before a
fluttered, anxious girl out of a Hampshire vicarage. One could easily
fix his type; it never, happily, dies out. He was handsome and bold and
pleasant, off-hand and gay and kind. He struck her, inevitably, as
gallant and splendid, but what took her most of all and gave her the
courage she afterward showed was that he put the whole thing to her as
a kind of favor, an obligation he should gratefully incur. She
conceived him as rich, but as fearfully extravagant—saw him all in a
glow of high fashion, of good looks, of expensive habits, of charming
ways with women. He had for his own town residence a big house filled
with the spoils of travel and the trophies of the chase; but it was to
his country home, an old family place in Essex, that he wished her
immediately to proceed.
He had been left, by the death of their parents in India, guardian to a
small nephew and a small niece, children of a younger, a military
brother, whom he had lost two years before. These children were, by the
strangest of chances for a man in his position—a lone man without the
right sort of experience or a grain of patience—very heavily on his
hands. It had all been a great worry and, on his own part doubtless, a
series of blunders, but he immensely pitied the poor chicks and had
done all he could; had in particular sent them down to his other house,
the proper place for them being of course the country, and kept them
there, from the first, with the best people he could find to look after
them, parting even with his own servants to wait on them and going down
himself, whenever he might, to see how they were doing. The awkward
thing was that they had practically no other relations and that his own
affairs took up all his time. He had put them in possession of Bly,
which was healthy and secure, and had placed at the head of their
little establishment—but below stairs only—an excellent woman, Mrs.
Grose, whom he was sure his visitor would like and who had formerly
been maid to his mother. She was now housekeeper and was also acting
for the time as superintendent to the little girl, of whom, without
children of her own, she was, by good luck, extremely fond. There were
plenty of people to help, but of course the young lady who should go
down as governess would be in supreme authority. She would also have,
in holidays, to look after the small boy, who had been for a term at
school—young as he was to be sent, but what else could be done?—and
who, as the holidays were about to begin, would be back from one day to
the other. There had been for the two children at first a young lady
whom they had had the misfortune to lose. She had done for them quite
beautifully—she was a most respectable person—till her death, the great
awkwardness of which had, precisely, left no alternative but the school
for little Miles. Mrs. Grose, since then, in the way of manners and
things, had done as she could for Flora; and there were, further, a
cook, a housemaid, a dairywoman, an old pony, an old groom, and an old
gardener, all likewise thoroughly respectable.
So far had Douglas presented his picture when someone put a question.
“And what did the former governess die of?—of so much respectability?”
Our friend’s answer was prompt. “That will come out. I don’t
anticipate.”
“Excuse me—I thought that was just what you _are_ doing.”
“In her successor’s place,” I suggested, “I should have wished to learn
if the office brought with it—”
“Necessary danger to life?” Douglas completed my thought. “She did wish
to learn, and she did learn. You shall hear tomorrow what she learned.
Meanwhile, of course, the prospect struck her as slightly grim. She was
young, untried, nervous: it was a vision of serious duties and little
company, of really great loneliness. She hesitated—took a couple of
days to consult and consider. But the salary offered much exceeded her
modest measure, and on a second interview she faced the music, she
engaged.” And Douglas, with this, made a pause that, for the benefit of
the company, moved me to throw in—
“The moral of which was of course the seduction exercised by the
splendid young man. She succumbed to it.”
He got up and, as he had done the night before, went to the fire, gave
a stir to a log with his foot, then stood a moment with his back to us.
“She saw him only twice.”
“Yes, but that’s just the beauty of her passion.”
A little to my surprise, on this, Douglas turned round to me. “It _was_
the beauty of it. There were others,” he went on, “who hadn’t
succumbed. He told her frankly all his difficulty—that for several
applicants the conditions had been prohibitive. They were, somehow,
simply afraid. It sounded dull—it sounded strange; and all the more so
because of his main condition.”
“Which was—?”
“That she should never trouble him—but never, never: neither appeal nor
complain nor write about anything; only meet all questions herself,
receive all moneys from his solicitor, take the whole thing over and
let him alone. She promised to do this, and she mentioned to me that
when, for a moment, disburdened, delighted, he held her hand, thanking
her for the sacrifice, she already felt rewarded.”
“But was that all her reward?” one of the ladies asked.
“She never saw him again.”
“Oh!” said the lady; which, as our friend immediately left us again,
was the only other word of importance contributed to the subject till,
the next night, by the corner of the hearth, in the best chair, he
opened the faded red cover of a thin old-fashioned gilt-edged album.
The whole thing took indeed more nights than one, but on the first
occasion the same lady put another question. “What is your title?”
“I haven’t one.”
“Oh, _I_ have!” I said. But Douglas, without heeding me, had begun to
read with a fine clearness that was like a rendering to the ear of the
beauty of his author’s hand.
I
I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a
little seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong. After rising, in town,
to meet his appeal, I had at all events a couple of very bad days—found
myself doubtful again, felt indeed sure I had made a mistake. In this
state of mind I spent the long hours of bumping, swinging coach that
carried me to the stopping place at which I was to be met by a vehicle
from the house. This convenience, I was told, had been ordered, and I
found, toward the close of the June afternoon, a commodious fly in
waiting for me. Driving at that hour, on a lovely day, through a
country to which the summer sweetness seemed to offer me a friendly
welcome, my fortitude mounted afresh and, as we turned into the avenue,
encountered a reprieve that was probably but a proof of the point to
which it had sunk. I suppose I had expected, or had dreaded, something
so melancholy that what greeted me was a good surprise. I remember as a
most pleasant impression the broad, clear front, its open windows and
fresh curtains and the pair of maids looking out; I remember the lawn
and the bright flowers and the crunch of my wheels on the gravel and
the clustered treetops over which the rooks circled and cawed in the
golden sky. The scene had a greatness that made it a different affair
from my own scant home, and there immediately appeared at the door,
with a little girl in her hand, a civil person who dropped me as decent
a curtsy as if I had been the mistress or a distinguished visitor. I
had received in Harley Street a narrower notion of the place, and that,
as I recalled it, made me think the proprietor still more of a
gentleman, suggested that what I was to enjoy might be something beyond
his promise.
I had no drop again till the next day, for I was carried triumphantly
through the following hours by my introduction to the younger of my
pupils. The little girl who accompanied Mrs. Grose appeared to me on
the spot a creature so charming as to make it a great fortune to have
to do with her. She was the most beautiful child I had ever seen, and I
afterward wondered that my employer had not told me more of her. I
slept little that night—I was too much excited; and this astonished me
too, I recollect, remained with me, adding to my sense of the
liberality with which I was treated. The large, impressive room, one of
the best in the house, the great state bed, as I almost felt it, the
full, figured draperies, the long glasses in which, for the first time,
I could see myself from head to foot, all struck me—like the
extraordinary charm of my small charge—as so many things thrown in. It
was thrown in as well, from the first moment, that I should get on with
Mrs. Grose in a relation over which, on my way, in the coach, I fear I
had rather brooded. The only thing indeed that in this early outlook
might have made me shrink again was the clear circumstance of her being
so glad to see me. I perceived within half an hour that she was so
glad—stout, simple, plain, clean, wholesome woman—as to be positively
on her guard against showing it too much. I wondered even then a little
why she should wish not to show it, and that, with reflection, with
suspicion, might of course have made me uneasy.
But it was a comfort that there could be no uneasiness in a connection
with anything so beatific as the radiant image of my little girl, the
vision of whose angelic beauty had probably more than anything else to
do with the restlessness that, before morning, made me several times
rise and wander about my room to take in the whole picture and
prospect; to watch, from my open window, the faint summer dawn, to look
at such portions of the rest of the house as I could catch, and to
listen, while, in the fading dusk, the first birds began to twitter,
for the possible recurrence of a sound or two, less natural and not
without, but within, that I had fancied I heard. There had been a
moment when I believed I recognized, faint and far, the cry of a child;
there had been another when I found myself just consciously starting as
at the passage, before my door, of a light footstep. But these fancies
were not marked enough not to be thrown off, and it is only in the
light, or the gloom, I should rather say, of other and subsequent
matters that they now come back to me. To watch, teach, “form” little
Flora would too evidently be the making of a happy and useful life. It
had been agreed between us downstairs that after this first occasion I
should have her as a matter of course at night, her small white bed
being already arranged, to that end, in my room. What I had undertaken
was the whole care of her, and she had remained, just this last time,
with Mrs. Grose only as an effect of our consideration for my
inevitable strangeness and her natural timidity. In spite of this
timidity—which the child herself, in the oddest way in the world, had
been perfectly frank and brave about, allowing it, without a sign of
uncomfortable consciousness, with the deep, sweet serenity indeed of
one of Raphael’s holy infants, to be discussed, to be imputed to her,
and to determine us—I feel quite sure she would presently like me. It
was part of what I already liked Mrs. Grose herself for, the pleasure I
could see her feel in my admiration and wonder as I sat at supper with
four tall candles and with my pupil, in a high chair and a bib,
brightly facing me, between them, over bread and milk. There were
naturally things that in Flora’s presence could pass between us only as
prodigious and gratified looks, obscure and roundabout allusions.
“And the little boy—does he look like her? Is he too so very
remarkable?”
One wouldn’t flatter a child. “Oh, miss, _most_ remarkable. If you
think well of this one!”—and she stood there with a plate in her hand,
beaming at our companion, who looked from one of us to the other with
placid heavenly eyes that contained nothing to check us.
“Yes; if I do—?”
“You _will_ be carried away by the little gentleman!”
“Well, that, I think, is what I came for—to be carried away. I’m
afraid, however,” I remember feeling the impulse to add, “I’m rather
easily carried away. I was carried away in London!”
I can still see Mrs. Grose’s broad face as she took this in. “In Harley
Street?”
“In Harley Street.”
“Well, miss, you’re not the first—and you won’t be the last.”
“Oh, I’ve no pretension,” I could laugh, “to being the only one. My
other pupil, at any rate, as I understand, comes back tomorrow?”
“Not tomorrow—Friday, miss. He arrives, as you did, by the coach, under
care of the guard, and is to be met by the same carriage.”
I forthwith expressed that the proper as well as the pleasant and
friendly thing would be therefore that on the arrival of the public
conveyance I should be in waiting for him with his little sister; an
idea in which Mrs. Grose concurred so heartily that I somehow took her
manner as a kind of comforting pledge—never falsified, thank
heaven!—that we should on every question be quite at one. Oh, she was
glad I was there!
What I felt the next day was, I suppose, nothing that could be fairly
called a reaction from the cheer of my arrival; it was probably at the
most only a slight oppression produced by a fuller measure of the
scale, as I walked round them, gazed up at them, took them in, of my
new circumstances. They had, as it were, an extent and mass for which I
had not been prepared and in the presence of which I found myself,
freshly, a little scared as well as a little proud. Lessons, in this
agitation, certainly suffered some delay; I reflected that my first
duty was, by the gentlest arts I could contrive, to win the child into
the sense of knowing me. I spent the day with her out-of-doors; I
arranged with her, to her great satisfaction, that it should be she,
she only, who might show me the place. She showed it step by step and
room by room and secret by secret, with droll, delightful, childish
talk about it and with the result, in half an hour, of our becoming
immense friends. Young as she was, I was struck, throughout our little
tour, with her confidence and courage with the way, in empty chambers
and dull corridors, on crooked staircases that made me pause and even
on the summit of an old machicolated square tower that made me dizzy,
her morning music, her disposition to tell me so many more things than
she asked, rang out and led me on. I have not seen Bly since the day I
left it, and I daresay that to my older and more informed eyes it would
now appear sufficiently contracted. But as my little conductress, with
her hair of gold and her frock of blue, danced before me round corners
and pattered down passages, I had the view of a castle of romance
inhabited by a rosy sprite, such a place as would somehow, for
diversion of the young idea, take all color out of storybooks and
fairytales. Wasn’t it just a storybook over which I had fallen adoze
and adream? No; it was a big, ugly, antique, but convenient house,
embodying a few features of a building still older, half-replaced and
half-utilized, in which I had the fancy of our being almost as lost as
a handful of passengers in a great drifting ship. Well, I was,
strangely, at the helm!