VI

It took of course more than that particular passage to place us

together in presence of what we had now to live with as we could—my

dreadful liability to impressions of the order so vividly exemplified,

and my companion’s knowledge, henceforth—a knowledge half consternation

and half compassion—of that liability. There had been, this evening,

after the revelation left me, for an hour, so prostrate—there had been,

for either of us, no attendance on any service but a little service of

tears and vows, of prayers and promises, a climax to the series of

mutual challenges and pledges that had straightway ensued on our

retreating together to the schoolroom and shutting ourselves up there

to have everything out. The result of our having everything out was

simply to reduce our situation to the last rigor of its elements. She

herself had seen nothing, not the shadow of a shadow, and nobody in the

house but the governess was in the governess’s plight; yet she accepted

without directly impugning my sanity the truth as I gave it to her, and

ended by showing me, on this ground, an awestricken tenderness, an

expression of the sense of my more than questionable privilege, of

which the very breath has remained with me as that of the sweetest of

human charities.

What was settled between us, accordingly, that night, was that we

thought we might bear things together; and I was not even sure that, in

spite of her exemption, it was she who had the best of the burden. I

knew at this hour, I think, as well as I knew later, what I was capable

of meeting to shelter my pupils; but it took me some time to be wholly

sure of what my honest ally was prepared for to keep terms with so

compromising a contract. I was queer company enough—quite as queer as

the company I received; but as I trace over what we went through I see

how much common ground we must have found in the one idea that, by good

fortune, _could_ steady us. It was the idea, the second movement, that

led me straight out, as I may say, of the inner chamber of my dread. I

could take the air in the court, at least, and there Mrs. Grose could

join me. Perfectly can I recall now the particular way strength came to

me before we separated for the night. We had gone over and over every

feature of what I had seen.

“He was looking for someone else, you say—someone who was not you?”

“He was looking for little Miles.” A portentous clearness now possessed

me. “_That’s_ whom he was looking for.”

“But how do you know?”

“I know, I know, I know!” My exaltation grew. “And _you_ know, my

dear!”

She didn’t deny this, but I required, I felt, not even so much telling

as that. She resumed in a moment, at any rate: “What if _he_ should see

him?”

“Little Miles? That’s what he wants!”

She looked immensely scared again. “The child?”

“Heaven forbid! The man. He wants to appear to _them_.” That he might

was an awful conception, and yet, somehow, I could keep it at bay;

which, moreover, as we lingered there, was what I succeeded in

practically proving. I had an absolute certainty that I should see

again what I had already seen, but something within me said that by

offering myself bravely as the sole subject of such experience, by

accepting, by inviting, by surmounting it all, I should serve as an

expiatory victim and guard the tranquility of my companions. The

children, in especial, I should thus fence about and absolutely save. I

recall one of the last things I said that night to Mrs. Grose.

“It does strike me that my pupils have never mentioned—”

She looked at me hard as I musingly pulled up. “His having been here

and the time they were with him?”

“The time they were with him, and his name, his presence, his history,

in any way.”

“Oh, the little lady doesn’t remember. She never heard or knew.”

“The circumstances of his death?” I thought with some intensity.

“Perhaps not. But Miles would remember—Miles would know.”

“Ah, don’t try him!” broke from Mrs. Grose.

I returned her the look she had given me. “Don’t be afraid.” I

continued to think. “It _is_ rather odd.”

“That he has never spoken of him?”

“Never by the least allusion. And you tell me they were ‘great

friends’?”

“Oh, it wasn’t _him!_” Mrs. Grose with emphasis declared. “It was

Quint’s own fancy. To play with him, I mean—to spoil him.” She paused a

moment; then she added: “Quint was much too free.”

This gave me, straight from my vision of his face—_such_ a face!—a

sudden sickness of disgust. “Too free with _my_ boy?”

“Too free with everyone!”

I forbore, for the moment, to analyze this description further than by

the reflection that a part of it applied to several of the members of

the household, of the half-dozen maids and men who were still of our

small colony. But there was everything, for our apprehension, in the

lucky fact that no discomfortable legend, no perturbation of scullions,

had ever, within anyone’s memory attached to the kind old place. It had

neither bad name nor ill fame, and Mrs. Grose, most apparently, only

desired to cling to me and to quake in silence. I even put her, the

very last thing of all, to the test. It was when, at midnight, she had

her hand on the schoolroom door to take leave. “I have it from you

then—for it’s of great importance—that he was definitely and admittedly

bad?”

“Oh, not admittedly. _I_ knew it—but the master didn’t.”

“And you never told him?”

“Well, he didn’t like tale-bearing—he hated complaints. He was terribly

short with anything of that kind, and if people were all right to

_him_—”

“He wouldn’t be bothered with more?” This squared well enough with my

impressions of him: he was not a trouble-loving gentleman, nor so very

particular perhaps about some of the company _he_ kept. All the same, I

pressed my interlocutress. “I promise you _I_ would have told!”

She felt my discrimination. “I daresay I was wrong. But, really, I was

afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“Of things that man could do. Quint was so clever—he was so deep.”

I took this in still more than, probably, I showed. “You weren’t afraid

of anything else? Not of his effect—?”

“His effect?” she repeated with a face of anguish and waiting while I

faltered.

“On innocent little precious lives. They were in your charge.”

“No, they were not in mine!” she roundly and distressfully returned.

“The master believed in him and placed him here because he was supposed

not to be well and the country air so good for him. So he had

everything to say. Yes”—she let me have it—“even about _them_.”

“Them—that creature?” I had to smother a kind of howl. “And you could

bear it!”

“No. I couldn’t—and I can’t now!” And the poor woman burst into tears.

A rigid control, from the next day, was, as I have said, to follow

them; yet how often and how passionately, for a week, we came back

together to the subject! Much as we had discussed it that Sunday night,

I was, in the immediate later hours in especial—for it may be imagined

whether I slept—still haunted with the shadow of something she had not

told me. I myself had kept back nothing, but there was a word Mrs.

Grose had kept back. I was sure, moreover, by morning, that this was

not from a failure of frankness, but because on every side there were

fears. It seems to me indeed, in retrospect, that by the time the

morrow’s sun was high I had restlessly read into the facts before us

almost all the meaning they were to receive from subsequent and more

cruel occurrences. What they gave me above all was just the sinister

figure of the living man—the dead one would keep awhile!—and of the

months he had continuously passed at Bly, which, added up, made a

formidable stretch. The limit of this evil time had arrived only when,

on the dawn of a winter’s morning, Peter Quint was found, by a laborer

going to early work, stone dead on the road from the village: a

catastrophe explained—superficially at least—by a visible wound to his

head; such a wound as might have been produced—and as, on the final

evidence, _had_ been—by a fatal slip, in the dark and after leaving the

public house, on the steepish icy slope, a wrong path altogether, at

the bottom of which he lay. The icy slope, the turn mistaken at night

and in liquor, accounted for much—practically, in the end and after the

inquest and boundless chatter, for everything; but there had been

matters in his life—strange passages and perils, secret disorders,

vices more than suspected—that would have accounted for a good deal

more.

I scarce know how to put my story into words that shall be a credible

picture of my state of mind; but I was in these days literally able to

find a joy in the extraordinary flight of heroism the occasion demanded

of me. I now saw that I had been asked for a service admirable and

difficult; and there would be a greatness in letting it be seen—oh, in

the right quarter!—that I could succeed where many another girl might

have failed. It was an immense help to me—I confess I rather applaud

myself as I look back!—that I saw my service so strongly and so simply.

I was there to protect and defend the little creatures in the world the

most bereaved and the most lovable, the appeal of whose helplessness

had suddenly become only too explicit, a deep, constant ache of one’s

own committed heart. We were cut off, really, together; we were united

in our danger. They had nothing but me, and I—well, I had _them_. It

was in short a magnificent chance. This chance presented itself to me

in an image richly material. I was a screen—I was to stand before them.

The more I saw, the less they would. I began to watch them in a stifled

suspense, a disguised excitement that might well, had it continued too

long, have turned to something like madness. What saved me, as I now

see, was that it turned to something else altogether. It didn’t last as

suspense—it was superseded by horrible proofs. Proofs, I say, yes—from

the moment I really took hold.

This moment dated from an afternoon hour that I happened to spend in

the grounds with the younger of my pupils alone. We had left Miles

indoors, on the red cushion of a deep window seat; he had wished to

finish a book, and I had been glad to encourage a purpose so laudable

in a young man whose only defect was an occasional excess of the

restless. His sister, on the contrary, had been alert to come out, and

I strolled with her half an hour, seeking the shade, for the sun was

still high and the day exceptionally warm. I was aware afresh, with

her, as we went, of how, like her brother, she contrived—it was the

charming thing in both children—to let me alone without appearing to

drop me and to accompany me without appearing to surround. They were

never importunate and yet never listless. My attention to them all

really went to seeing them amuse themselves immensely without me: this

was a spectacle they seemed actively to prepare and that engaged me as

an active admirer. I walked in a world of their invention—they had no

occasion whatever to draw upon mine; so that my time was taken only

with being, for them, some remarkable person or thing that the game of

the moment required and that was merely, thanks to my superior, my

exalted stamp, a happy and highly distinguished sinecure. I forget what

I was on the present occasion; I only remember that I was something

very important and very quiet and that Flora was playing very hard. We

were on the edge of the lake, and, as we had lately begun geography,

the lake was the Sea of Azof.

Suddenly, in these circumstances, I became aware that, on the other

side of the Sea of Azof, we had an interested spectator. The way this

knowledge gathered in me was the strangest thing in the world—the

strangest, that is, except the very much stranger in which it quickly

merged itself. I had sat down with a piece of work—for I was something

or other that could sit—on the old stone bench which overlooked the

pond; and in this position I began to take in with certitude, and yet

without direct vision, the presence, at a distance, of a third person.

The old trees, the thick shrubbery, made a great and pleasant shade,

but it was all suffused with the brightness of the hot, still hour.

There was no ambiguity in anything; none whatever, at least, in the

conviction I from one moment to another found myself forming as to what

I should see straight before me and across the lake as a consequence of

raising my eyes. They were attached at this juncture to the stitching

in which I was engaged, and I can feel once more the spasm of my effort

not to move them till I should so have steadied myself as to be able to

make up my mind what to do. There was an alien object in view—a figure

whose right of presence I instantly, passionately questioned. I

recollect counting over perfectly the possibilities, reminding myself

that nothing was more natural, for instance, than the appearance of one

of the men about the place, or even of a messenger, a postman, or a

tradesman’s boy, from the village. That reminder had as little effect

on my practical certitude as I was conscious—still even without

looking—of its having upon the character and attitude of our visitor.

Nothing was more natural than that these things should be the other

things that they absolutely were not.

Of the positive identity of the apparition I would assure myself as

soon as the small clock of my courage should have ticked out the right

second; meanwhile, with an effort that was already sharp enough, I

transferred my eyes straight to little Flora, who, at the moment, was

about ten yards away. My heart had stood still for an instant with the

wonder and terror of the question whether she too would see; and I held

my breath while I waited for what a cry from her, what some sudden

innocent sign either of interest or of alarm, would tell me. I waited,

but nothing came; then, in the first place—and there is something more

dire in this, I feel, than in anything I have to relate—I was

determined by a sense that, within a minute, all sounds from her had

previously dropped; and, in the second, by the circumstance that, also

within the minute, she had, in her play, turned her back to the water.

This was her attitude when I at last looked at her—looked with the

confirmed conviction that we were still, together, under direct

personal notice. She had picked up a small flat piece of wood, which

happened to have in it a little hole that had evidently suggested to

her the idea of sticking in another fragment that might figure as a

mast and make the thing a boat. This second morsel, as I watched her,

she was very markedly and intently attempting to tighten in its place.

My apprehension of what she was doing sustained me so that after some

seconds I felt I was ready for more. Then I again shifted my eyes—I

faced what I had to face.