IX

I waited and waited, and the days, as they elapsed, took something from

my consternation. A very few of them, in fact, passing, in constant

sight of my pupils, without a fresh incident, sufficed to give to

grievous fancies and even to odious memories a kind of brush of the

sponge. I have spoken of the surrender to their extraordinary childish

grace as a thing I could actively cultivate, and it may be imagined if

I neglected now to address myself to this source for whatever it would

yield. Stranger than I can express, certainly, was the effort to

struggle against my new lights; it would doubtless have been, however,

a greater tension still had it not been so frequently successful. I

used to wonder how my little charges could help guessing that I thought

strange things about them; and the circumstances that these things only

made them more interesting was not by itself a direct aid to keeping

them in the dark. I trembled lest they should see that they _were_ so

immensely more interesting. Putting things at the worst, at all events,

as in meditation I so often did, any clouding of their innocence could

only be—blameless and foredoomed as they were—a reason the more for

taking risks. There were moments when, by an irresistible impulse, I

found myself catching them up and pressing them to my heart. As soon as

I had done so I used to say to myself: “What will they think of that?

Doesn’t it betray too much?” It would have been easy to get into a sad,

wild tangle about how much I might betray; but the real account, I

feel, of the hours of peace that I could still enjoy was that the

immediate charm of my companions was a beguilement still effective even

under the shadow of the possibility that it was studied. For if it

occurred to me that I might occasionally excite suspicion by the little

outbreaks of my sharper passion for them, so too I remember wondering

if I mightn’t see a queerness in the traceable increase of their own

demonstrations.

They were at this period extravagantly and preternaturally fond of me;

which, after all, I could reflect, was no more than a graceful response

in children perpetually bowed over and hugged. The homage of which they

were so lavish succeeded, in truth, for my nerves, quite as well as if

I never appeared to myself, as I may say, literally to catch them at a

purpose in it. They had never, I think, wanted to do so many things for

their poor protectress; I mean—though they got their lessons better and

better, which was naturally what would please her most—in the way of

diverting, entertaining, surprising her; reading her passages, telling

her stories, acting her charades, pouncing out at her, in disguises, as

animals and historical characters, and above all astonishing her by the

“pieces” they had secretly got by heart and could interminably recite.

I should never get to the bottom—were I to let myself go even now—of

the prodigious private commentary, all under still more private

correction, with which, in these days, I overscored their full hours.

They had shown me from the first a facility for everything, a general

faculty which, taking a fresh start, achieved remarkable flights. They

got their little tasks as if they loved them, and indulged, from the

mere exuberance of the gift, in the most unimposed little miracles of

memory. They not only popped out at me as tigers and as Romans, but as

Shakespeareans, astronomers, and navigators. This was so singularly the

case that it had presumably much to do with the fact as to which, at

the present day, I am at a loss for a different explanation: I allude

to my unnatural composure on the subject of another school for Miles.

What I remember is that I was content not, for the time, to open the

question, and that contentment must have sprung from the sense of his

perpetually striking show of cleverness. He was too clever for a bad

governess, for a parson’s daughter, to spoil; and the strangest if not

the brightest thread in the pensive embroidery I just spoke of was the

impression I might have got, if I had dared to work it out, that he was

under some influence operating in his small intellectual life as a

tremendous incitement.

If it was easy to reflect, however, that such a boy could postpone

school, it was at least as marked that for such a boy to have been

“kicked out” by a schoolmaster was a mystification without end. Let me

add that in their company now—and I was careful almost never to be out

of it—I could follow no scent very far. We lived in a cloud of music

and love and success and private theatricals. The musical sense in each

of the children was of the quickest, but the elder in especial had a

marvelous knack of catching and repeating. The schoolroom piano broke

into all gruesome fancies; and when that failed there were

confabulations in corners, with a sequel of one of them going out in

the highest spirits in order to “come in” as something new. I had had

brothers myself, and it was no revelation to me that little girls could

be slavish idolaters of little boys. What surpassed everything was that

there was a little boy in the world who could have for the inferior

age, sex, and intelligence so fine a consideration. They were

extraordinarily at one, and to say that they never either quarreled or

complained is to make the note of praise coarse for their quality of

sweetness. Sometimes, indeed, when I dropped into coarseness, I perhaps

came across traces of little understandings between them by which one

of them should keep me occupied while the other slipped away. There is

a _naïf_ side, I suppose, in all diplomacy; but if my pupils practiced

upon me, it was surely with the minimum of grossness. It was all in the

other quarter that, after a lull, the grossness broke out.

I find that I really hang back; but I must take my plunge. In going on

with the record of what was hideous at Bly, I not only challenge the

most liberal faith—for which I little care; but—and this is another

matter—I renew what I myself suffered, I again push my way through it

to the end. There came suddenly an hour after which, as I look back,

the affair seems to me to have been all pure suffering; but I have at

least reached the heart of it, and the straightest road out is

doubtless to advance. One evening—with nothing to lead up or to prepare

it—I felt the cold touch of the impression that had breathed on me the

night of my arrival and which, much lighter then, as I have mentioned,

I should probably have made little of in memory had my subsequent

sojourn been less agitated. I had not gone to bed; I sat reading by a

couple of candles. There was a roomful of old books at Bly—last-century

fiction, some of it, which, to the extent of a distinctly deprecated

renown, but never to so much as that of a stray specimen, had reached

the sequestered home and appealed to the unavowed curiosity of my

youth. I remember that the book I had in my hand was Fielding’s

_Amelia_; also that I was wholly awake. I recall further both a general

conviction that it was horribly late and a particular objection to

looking at my watch. I figure, finally, that the white curtain draping,

in the fashion of those days, the head of Flora’s little bed, shrouded,

as I had assured myself long before, the perfection of childish rest. I

recollect in short that, though I was deeply interested in my author, I

found myself, at the turn of a page and with his spell all scattered,

looking straight up from him and hard at the door of my room. There was

a moment during which I listened, reminded of the faint sense I had

had, the first night, of there being something undefinably astir in the

house, and noted the soft breath of the open casement just move the

half-drawn blind. Then, with all the marks of a deliberation that must

have seemed magnificent had there been anyone to admire it, I laid down

my book, rose to my feet, and, taking a candle, went straight out of

the room and, from the passage, on which my light made little

impression, noiselessly closed and locked the door.

I can say now neither what determined nor what guided me, but I went

straight along the lobby, holding my candle high, till I came within

sight of the tall window that presided over the great turn of the

staircase. At this point I precipitately found myself aware of three

things. They were practically simultaneous, yet they had flashes of

succession. My candle, under a bold flourish, went out, and I

perceived, by the uncovered window, that the yielding dusk of earliest

morning rendered it unnecessary. Without it, the next instant, I saw

that there was someone on the stair. I speak of sequences, but I

required no lapse of seconds to stiffen myself for a third encounter

with Quint. The apparition had reached the landing halfway up and was

therefore on the spot nearest the window, where at sight of me, it

stopped short and fixed me exactly as it had fixed me from the tower

and from the garden. He knew me as well as I knew him; and so, in the

cold, faint twilight, with a glimmer in the high glass and another on

the polish of the oak stair below, we faced each other in our common

intensity. He was absolutely, on this occasion, a living, detestable,

dangerous presence. But that was not the wonder of wonders; I reserve

this distinction for quite another circumstance: the circumstance that

dread had unmistakably quitted me and that there was nothing in me

there that didn’t meet and measure him.

I had plenty of anguish after that extraordinary moment, but I had,

thank God, no terror. And he knew I had not—I found myself at the end

of an instant magnificently aware of this. I felt, in a fierce rigor of

confidence, that if I stood my ground a minute I should cease—for the

time, at least—to have him to reckon with; and during the minute,

accordingly, the thing was as human and hideous as a real interview:

hideous just because it _was_ human, as human as to have met alone, in

the small hours, in a sleeping house, some enemy, some adventurer, some

criminal. It was the dead silence of our long gaze at such close

quarters that gave the whole horror, huge as it was, its only note of

the unnatural. If I had met a murderer in such a place and at such an

hour, we still at least would have spoken. Something would have passed,

in life, between us; if nothing had passed, one of us would have moved.

The moment was so prolonged that it would have taken but little more to

make me doubt if even _I_ were in life. I can’t express what followed

it save by saying that the silence itself—which was indeed in a manner

an attestation of my strength—became the element into which I saw the

figure disappear; in which I definitely saw it turn as I might have

seen the low wretch to which it had once belonged turn on receipt of an

order, and pass, with my eyes on the villainous back that no hunch

could have more disfigured, straight down the staircase and into the

darkness in which the next bend was lost.

X

I remained awhile at the top of the stair, but with the effect

presently of understanding that when my visitor had gone, he had gone:

then I returned to my room. The foremost thing I saw there by the light

of the candle I had left burning was that Flora’s little bed was empty;

and on this I caught my breath with all the terror that, five minutes

before, I had been able to resist. I dashed at the place in which I had

left her lying and over which (for the small silk counterpane and the

sheets were disarranged) the white curtains had been deceivingly pulled

forward; then my step, to my unutterable relief, produced an answering

sound: I perceived an agitation of the window blind, and the child,

ducking down, emerged rosily from the other side of it. She stood there

in so much of her candor and so little of her nightgown, with her pink

bare feet and the golden glow of her curls. She looked intensely grave,

and I had never had such a sense of losing an advantage acquired (the

thrill of which had just been so prodigious) as on my consciousness

that she addressed me with a reproach. “You naughty: where _have_ you

been?”—instead of challenging her own irregularity I found myself

arraigned and explaining. She herself explained, for that matter, with

the loveliest, eagerest simplicity. She had known suddenly, as she lay

there, that I was out of the room, and had jumped up to see what had

become of me. I had dropped, with the joy of her reappearance, back

into my chair—feeling then, and then only, a little faint; and she had

pattered straight over to me, thrown herself upon my knee, given

herself to be held with the flame of the candle full in the wonderful

little face that was still flushed with sleep. I remember closing my

eyes an instant, yieldingly, consciously, as before the excess of

something beautiful that shone out of the blue of her own. “You were

looking for me out of the window?” I said. “You thought I might be

walking in the grounds?”

“Well, you know, I thought someone was”—she never blanched as she

smiled out that at me.

Oh, how I looked at her now! “And did you see anyone?”

“Ah, _no!_” she returned, almost with the full privilege of childish

inconsequence, resentfully, though with a long sweetness in her little

drawl of the negative.

At that moment, in the state of my nerves, I absolutely believed she

lied; and if I once more closed my eyes it was before the dazzle of the

three or four possible ways in which I might take this up. One of

these, for a moment, tempted me with such singular intensity that, to

withstand it, I must have gripped my little girl with a spasm that,

wonderfully, she submitted to without a cry or a sign of fright. Why

not break out at her on the spot and have it all over?—give it to her

straight in her lovely little lighted face? “You see, you see, you

_know_ that you do and that you already quite suspect I believe it;

therefore, why not frankly confess it to me, so that we may at least

live with it together and learn perhaps, in the strangeness of our

fate, where we are and what it means?” This solicitation dropped, alas,

as it came: if I could immediately have succumbed to it I might have

spared myself—well, you’ll see what. Instead of succumbing I sprang

again to my feet, looked at her bed, and took a helpless middle way.

“Why did you pull the curtain over the place to make me think you were

still there?”

Flora luminously considered; after which, with her little divine smile:

“Because I don’t like to frighten you!”

“But if I had, by your idea, gone out—?”

She absolutely declined to be puzzled; she turned her eyes to the flame

of the candle as if the question were as irrelevant, or at any rate as

impersonal, as Mrs. Marcet or nine-times-nine. “Oh, but you know,” she

quite adequately answered, “that you might come back, you dear, and

that you _have!_” And after a little, when she had got into bed, I had,

for a long time, by almost sitting on her to hold her hand, to prove

that I recognized the pertinence of my return.

You may imagine the general complexion, from that moment, of my nights.

I repeatedly sat up till I didn’t know when; I selected moments when my

roommate unmistakably slept, and, stealing out, took noiseless turns in

the passage and even pushed as far as to where I had last met Quint.

But I never met him there again; and I may as well say at once that I

on no other occasion saw him in the house. I just missed, on the

staircase, on the other hand, a different adventure. Looking down it

from the top I once recognized the presence of a woman seated on one of

the lower steps with her back presented to me, her body half-bowed and

her head, in an attitude of woe, in her hands. I had been there but an

instant, however, when she vanished without looking round at me. I

knew, nonetheless, exactly what dreadful face she had to show; and I

wondered whether, if instead of being above I had been below, I should

have had, for going up, the same nerve I had lately shown Quint. Well,

there continued to be plenty of chance for nerve. On the eleventh night

after my latest encounter with that gentleman—they were all numbered

now—I had an alarm that perilously skirted it and that indeed, from the

particular quality of its unexpectedness, proved quite my sharpest

shock. It was precisely the first night during this series that, weary

with watching, I had felt that I might again without laxity lay myself

down at my old hour. I slept immediately and, as I afterward knew, till

about one o’clock; but when I woke it was to sit straight up, as

completely roused as if a hand had shook me. I had left a light

burning, but it was now out, and I felt an instant certainty that Flora

had extinguished it. This brought me to my feet and straight, in the

darkness, to her bed, which I found she had left. A glance at the

window enlightened me further, and the striking of a match completed

the picture.

The child had again got up—this time blowing out the taper, and had

again, for some purpose of observation or response, squeezed in behind

the blind and was peering out into the night. That she now saw—as she

had not, I had satisfied myself, the previous time—was proved to me by

the fact that she was disturbed neither by my reillumination nor by the

haste I made to get into slippers and into a wrap. Hidden, protected,

absorbed, she evidently rested on the sill—the casement opened

forward—and gave herself up. There was a great still moon to help her,

and this fact had counted in my quick decision. She was face to face

with the apparition we had met at the lake, and could now communicate

with it as she had not then been able to do. What I, on my side, had to

care for was, without disturbing her, to reach, from the corridor, some

other window in the same quarter. I got to the door without her hearing

me; I got out of it, closed it, and listened, from the other side, for

some sound from her. While I stood in the passage I had my eyes on her

brother’s door, which was but ten steps off and which, indescribably,

produced in me a renewal of the strange impulse that I lately spoke of

as my temptation. What if I should go straight in and march to _his_

window?—what if, by risking to his boyish bewilderment a revelation of

my motive, I should throw across the rest of the mystery the long

halter of my boldness?

This thought held me sufficiently to make me cross to his threshold and

pause again. I preternaturally listened; I figured to myself what might

portentously be; I wondered if his bed were also empty and he too were

secretly at watch. It was a deep, soundless minute, at the end of which

my impulse failed. He was quiet; he might be innocent; the risk was

hideous; I turned away. There was a figure in the grounds—a figure

prowling for a sight, the visitor with whom Flora was engaged; but it

was not the visitor most concerned with my boy. I hesitated afresh, but

on other grounds and only for a few seconds; then I had made my choice.

There were empty rooms at Bly, and it was only a question of choosing

the right one. The right one suddenly presented itself to me as the

lower one—though high above the gardens—in the solid corner of the

house that I have spoken of as the old tower. This was a large, square

chamber, arranged with some state as a bedroom, the extravagant size of

which made it so inconvenient that it had not for years, though kept by

Mrs. Grose in exemplary order, been occupied. I had often admired it

and I knew my way about in it; I had only, after just faltering at the

first chill gloom of its disuse, to pass across it and unbolt as

quietly as I could one of the shutters. Achieving this transit, I

uncovered the glass without a sound and, applying my face to the pane,

was able, the darkness without being much less than within, to see that

I commanded the right direction. Then I saw something more. The moon

made the night extraordinarily penetrable and showed me on the lawn a

person, diminished by distance, who stood there motionless and as if

fascinated, looking up to where I had appeared—looking, that is, not so

much straight at me as at something that was apparently above me. There

was clearly another person above me—there was a person on the tower;

but the presence on the lawn was not in the least what I had conceived

and had confidently hurried to meet. The presence on the lawn—I felt

sick as I made it out—was poor little Miles himself.