Prologue

The story had held us, round the fire, suf­fi­ciently breath­less, but ex­cept the ob­vi­ous re­mark that it was grue­some, as, on Christ­mas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should es­sen­tially be, I re­mem­ber no com­ment ut­tered till some­body hap­pened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a vis­i­ta­tion had fallen on a child. The case, I may men­tion, was that of an ap­pari­tion in just such an old house as had gath­ered us for the oc­ca­sion—an ap­pear­ance, of a dread­ful kind, to a lit­tle boy sleep­ing in the room with his mother and wak­ing her up in the ter­ror of it; wak­ing her not to dis­si­pate his dread and soothe him to sleep again, but to en­counter also, her­self, be­fore she had suc­ceeded in do­ing so, the same sight that had shaken him. It was this ob­ser­va­tion that drew from Dou­glas—not im­me­di­ately, but later in the evening—a re­ply that had the in­ter­est­ing con­se­quence to which I call at­ten­tion. Some­one else told a story not par­tic­u­larly ef­fec­tive, which I saw he was not fol­low­ing. This I took for a sign that he had him­self some­thing to pro­duce and that we should only have to wait. We waited in fact till two nights later; but that same evening, be­fore we scat­tered, he brought out what was in his mind.

“I quite agree—in re­gard to Grif­fin’s ghost, or what­ever it was—that its ap­pear­ing first to the lit­tle boy, at so ten­der an age, adds a par­tic­u­lar touch. But it’s not the first oc­cur­rence of its charm­ing kind that I know to have in­volved a child. If the child gives the ef­fect an­other turn of the screw, what do you say to two chil­dren—?”

“We say, of course,” some­body ex­claimed, “that they give two turns! Also that we want to hear about them.”

I can see Dou­glas there be­fore the fire, to which he had got up to present his back, look­ing down at his in­ter­locu­tor with his hands in his pock­ets. “No­body but me, till now, has ever heard. It’s quite too hor­ri­ble.” This, nat­u­rally, was de­clared by sev­eral voices to give the thing the ut­most price, and our friend, with quiet art, pre­pared his tri­umph by turn­ing his eyes over the rest of us and go­ing on: “It’s be­yond ev­ery­thing. Noth­ing at all that I know touches it.”

“For sheer ter­ror?” I re­mem­ber ask­ing.

He seemed to say it was not so sim­ple as that; to be re­ally at a loss how to qual­ify it. He passed his hand over his eyes, made a lit­tle winc­ing gri­mace. “For dread­ful—dread­ful­ness!”

“Oh, how de­li­cious!” cried one of the women.

He took no no­tice of her; he looked at me, but as if, in­stead of me, he saw what he spoke of. “For gen­eral un­canny ug­li­ness and hor­ror and pain.”

“Well then,” I said, “just sit right down and be­gin.”

He turned round to the fire, gave a kick to a log, watched it an in­stant. Then as he faced us again: “I can’t be­gin. I shall have to send to town.” There was a unan­i­mous groan at this, and much re­proach; af­ter which, in his pre­oc­cu­pied way, he ex­plained. “The story’s writ­ten. It’s in a locked drawer—it has not been out for years. I could write to my man and en­close the key; he could send down the packet as he finds it.” It was to me in par­tic­u­lar that he ap­peared to pro­pound this—ap­peared al­most to ap­peal for aid not to hes­i­tate. He had bro­ken a thick­ness of ice, the for­ma­tion of many a win­ter; had had his rea­sons for a long si­lence. The oth­ers re­sented post­pone­ment, but it was just his scru­ples that charmed me. I ad­jured him to write by the first post and to agree with us for an early hear­ing; then I asked him if the ex­pe­ri­ence in ques­tion had been his own. To this his an­swer was prompt. “Oh, thank God, no!”

“And is the record yours? You took the thing down?”

“Noth­ing but the im­pres­sion. I took that here”—he tapped his heart. “I’ve never lost it.”

“Then your man­u­script—?”

“Is in old, faded ink, and in the most beau­ti­ful hand.” He hung fire again. “A woman’s. She has been dead these twenty years. She sent me the pages in ques­tion be­fore she died.” They were all lis­ten­ing now, and of course there was some­body to be arch, or at any rate to draw the in­fer­ence. But if he put the in­fer­ence by with­out a smile it was also with­out ir­ri­ta­tion. “She was a most charm­ing per­son, but she was ten years older than I. She was my sis­ter’s gov­erness,” he qui­etly said. “She was the most agree­able woman I’ve ever known in her po­si­tion; she would have been wor­thy of any what­ever. It was long ago, and this episode was long be­fore. I was at Trin­ity, and I found her at home on my com­ing down the sec­ond sum­mer. I was much there that year—it was a beau­ti­ful one; and we had, in her off-hours, some strolls and talks in the gar­den—talks in which she struck me as aw­fully clever and nice. Oh yes; don’t grin: I liked her ex­tremely and am glad to this day to think she liked me, too. If she hadn’t she wouldn’t have told me. She had never told any­one. It wasn’t sim­ply that she said so, but that I knew she hadn’t. I was sure; I could see. You’ll eas­ily judge why when you hear.”

“Be­cause the thing had been such a scare?”

He con­tin­ued to fix me. “You’ll eas­ily judge,” he re­peated: “You will.”

I fixed him, too. “I see. She was in love.”

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, off­hand 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.

The Turn of the Screw

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!

II

This came home to me when, two days later, I drove over with Flora to meet, as Mrs. Grose said, the lit­tle gen­tle­man; and all the more for an in­ci­dent that, pre­sent­ing it­self the sec­ond evening, had deeply dis­con­certed me. The first day had been, on the whole, as I have ex­pressed, re­as­sur­ing; but I was to see it wind up in keen ap­pre­hen­sion. The post­bag, that evening—it came late—con­tained a let­ter for me, which, how­ever, in the hand of my em­ployer, I found to be com­posed but of a few words en­clos­ing an­other, ad­dressed to him­self, with a seal still un­bro­ken. “This, I rec­og­nize, is from the head­mas­ter, and the head­mas­ter’s an aw­ful bore. Read him, please; deal with him; but mind you don’t re­port. Not a word. I’m off!” I broke the seal with a great ef­fort—so great a one that I was a long time com­ing to it; took the un­opened mis­sive at last up to my room and only at­tacked it just be­fore go­ing to bed. I had bet­ter have let it wait till morn­ing, for it gave me a sec­ond sleep­less night. With no coun­sel to take, the next day, I was full of dis­tress; and it fi­nally got so the bet­ter of me that I de­ter­mined to open my­self at least to Mrs. Grose.

“What does it mean? The child’s dis­missed his school.”

She gave me a look that I re­marked at the mo­ment; then, vis­i­bly, with a quick blank­ness, seemed to try to take it back. “But aren’t they all—?”

“Sent home—yes. But only for the hol­i­days. Miles may never go back at all.”

Con­sciously, un­der my at­ten­tion, she red­dened. “They won’t take him?”

“They ab­so­lutely de­cline.”

At this she raised her eyes, which she had turned from me; I saw them fill with good tears. “What has he done?”

I hes­i­tated; then I judged best sim­ply to hand her my let­ter—which, how­ever, had the ef­fect of mak­ing her, with­out tak­ing it, sim­ply put her hands be­hind her. She shook her head sadly. “Such things are not for me, miss.”

My coun­selor couldn’t read! I winced at my mis­take, which I at­ten­u­ated as I could, and opened my let­ter again to re­peat it to her; then, fal­ter­ing in the act and fold­ing it up once more, I put it back in my pocket. “Is he re­ally bad?”

The tears were still in her eyes. “Do the gen­tle­men say so?”

“They go into no par­tic­u­lars. They sim­ply ex­press their re­gret that it should be im­pos­si­ble to keep him. That can have only one mean­ing.” Mrs. Grose lis­tened with dumb emo­tion; she for­bore to ask me what this mean­ing might be; so that, presently, to put the thing with some co­her­ence and with the mere aid of her pres­ence to my own mind, I went on: “That he’s an in­jury to the oth­ers.”

At this, with one of the quick turns of sim­ple folk, she sud­denly flamed up. “Master Miles! him an in­jury?”

There was such a flood of good faith in it that, though I had not yet seen the child, my very fears made me jump to the ab­sur­dity of the idea. I found my­self, to meet my friend the bet­ter, of­fer­ing it, on the spot, sar­cas­ti­cally. “To his poor lit­tle in­no­cent mates!”

“It’s too dread­ful,” cried Mrs. Grose, “to say such cruel things! Why, he’s scarce ten years old.”

“Yes, yes; it would be in­cred­i­ble.”

She was ev­i­dently grate­ful for such a pro­fes­sion. “See him, miss, first. Then be­lieve it!” I felt forth­with a new im­pa­tience to see him; it was the be­gin­ning of a cu­rios­ity that, for all the next hours, was to deepen al­most to pain. Mrs. Grose was aware, I could judge, of what she had pro­duced in me, and she fol­lowed it up with as­sur­ance. “You might as well be­lieve it of the lit­tle lady. Bless her,” she added the next mo­ment—”Look at her!”

I turned and saw that Flora, whom, ten min­utes be­fore, I had es­tab­lished in the school­room with a sheet of white pa­per, a pen­cil, and a copy of nice “round o’s,” now pre­sented her­self to view at the open door. She ex­pressed in her lit­tle way an ex­tra­or­di­nary de­tach­ment from dis­agree­able du­ties, look­ing to me, how­ever, with a great child­ish light that seemed to of­fer it as a mere re­sult of the af­fec­tion she had con­ceived for my per­son, which had ren­dered nec­es­sary that she should fol­low me. I needed noth­ing more than this to feel the full force of Mrs. Grose’s com­par­i­son, and, catch­ing my pupil in my arms, cov­ered her with kisses in which there was a sob of atone­ment.

Nonethe­less, the rest of the day I watched for fur­ther oc­ca­sion to ap­proach my col­league, es­pe­cially as, to­ward evening, I be­gan to fancy she rather sought to avoid me. I over­took her, I re­mem­ber, on the stair­case; we went down to­gether, and at the bot­tom I de­tained her, hold­ing her there with a hand on her arm. “I take what you said to me at noon as a dec­la­ra­tion that you’ve never known him to be bad.”

She threw back her head; she had clearly, by this time, and very hon­estly, adopted an at­ti­tude. “Oh, never known him—I don’t pre­tend that!”

I was up­set again. “Then you have known him—?”

“Yes in­deed, miss, thank God!”

On re­flec­tion I ac­cepted this. “You mean that a boy who never is—?”

“Is no boy for me!”

I held her tighter. “You like them with the spirit to be naughty?” Then, keep­ing pace with her an­swer, “So do I!” I ea­gerly brought out. “But not to the de­gree to con­tam­i­nate—”

“To con­tam­i­nate?”—my big word left her at a loss. I ex­plained it. “To cor­rupt.”

She stared, tak­ing my mean­ing in; but it pro­duced in her an odd laugh. “Are you afraid he’ll cor­rupt you?” She put the ques­tion with such a fine bold hu­mor that, with a laugh, a lit­tle silly doubt­less, to match her own, I gave way for the time to the ap­pre­hen­sion of ridicule.

But the next day, as the hour for my drive ap­proached, I cropped up in an­other place. “What was the lady who was here be­fore?”

“The last gov­erness? She was also young and pretty—al­most as young and al­most as pretty, miss, even as you.”

“Ah, then, I hope her youth and her beauty helped her!” I rec­ol­lect throw­ing off. “He seems to like us young and pretty!”

“Oh, he did,” Mrs. Grose as­sented: “it was the way he liked ev­ery­one!” She had no sooner spo­ken in­deed than she caught her­self up. “I mean that’s his way—the mas­ter’s.”

I was struck. “But of whom did you speak first?”

She looked blank, but she col­ored. “Why, of him.”

“Of the mas­ter?”

“Of who else?”

There was so ob­vi­ously no one else that the next mo­ment I had lost my im­pres­sion of her hav­ing ac­ci­den­tally said more than she meant; and I merely asked what I wanted to know. “Did she see any­thing in the boy—?”

“That wasn’t right? She never told me.”

I had a scru­ple, but I over­came it. “Was she care­ful—par­tic­u­lar?”

Mrs. Grose ap­peared to try to be con­sci­en­tious. “About some things—yes.”

“But not about all?”

Again she con­sid­ered. “Well, miss—she’s gone. I won’t tell tales.”

“I quite un­der­stand your feel­ing,” I has­tened to re­ply; but I thought it, af­ter an in­stant, not op­posed to this con­ces­sion to pur­sue: “Did she die here?”

“No—she went off.”

I don’t know what there was in this brevity of Mrs. Grose’s that struck me as am­bigu­ous. “Went off to die?” Mrs. Grose looked straight out of the win­dow, but I felt that, hy­po­thet­i­cally, I had a right to know what young per­sons en­gaged for Bly were ex­pected to do. “She was taken ill, you mean, and went home?”

“She was not taken ill, so far as ap­peared, in this house. She left it, at the end of the year, to go home, as she said, for a short hol­i­day, to which the time she had put in had cer­tainly given her a right. We had then a young woman—a nurse­maid who had stayed on and who was a good girl and clever; and she took the chil­dren al­to­gether for the in­ter­val. But our young lady never came back, and at the very mo­ment I was ex­pect­ing her I heard from the mas­ter that she was dead.”

I turned this over. “But of what?”

“He never told me! But please, miss,” said Mrs. Grose, “I must get to my work.”

III

Her thus turn­ing her back on me was for­tu­nately not, for my just pre­oc­cu­pa­tions, a snub that could check the growth of our mu­tual es­teem. We met, af­ter I had brought home lit­tle Miles, more in­ti­mately than ever on the ground of my stu­pe­fac­tion, my gen­eral emo­tion: so mon­strous was I then ready to pro­nounce it that such a child as had now been re­vealed to me should be un­der an in­ter­dict. I was a lit­tle late on the scene, and I felt, as he stood wist­fully look­ing out for me be­fore the door of the inn at which the coach had put him down, that I had seen him, on the in­stant, with­out and within, in the great glow of fresh­ness, the same pos­i­tive fra­grance of pu­rity, in which I had, from the first mo­ment, seen his lit­tle sis­ter. He was in­cred­i­bly beau­ti­ful, and Mrs. Grose had put her fin­ger on it: ev­ery­thing but a sort of pas­sion of ten­der­ness for him was swept away by his pres­ence. What I then and there took him to my heart for was some­thing di­vine that I have never found to the same de­gree in any child—his in­de­scrib­able lit­tle air of know­ing noth­ing in the world but love. It would have been im­pos­si­ble to carry a bad name with a greater sweet­ness of in­no­cence, and by the time I had got back to Bly with him I re­mained merely be­wil­dered—so far, that is, as I was not out­raged—by the sense of the hor­ri­ble let­ter locked up in my room, in a drawer. As soon as I could com­pass a pri­vate word with Mrs. Grose I de­clared to her that it was grotesque.

She promptly un­der­stood me. “You mean the cruel charge—?”

“It doesn’t live an in­stant. My dear woman, look at him!”

She smiled at my pre­ten­tion to have dis­cov­ered his charm. “I as­sure you, miss, I do noth­ing else! What will you say, then?” she im­me­di­ately added.

“In an­swer to the let­ter?” I had made up my mind. “Noth­ing.”

“And to his un­cle?”

I was in­ci­sive. “Noth­ing.”

“And to the boy him­self?”

I was won­der­ful. “Noth­ing.”

She gave with her apron a great wipe to her mouth. “Then I’ll stand by you. We’ll see it out.”

“We’ll see it out!” I ar­dently echoed, giv­ing her my hand to make it a vow.

She held me there a mo­ment, then whisked up her apron again with her de­tached hand. “Would you mind, miss, if I used the free­dom—”

“To kiss me? No!” I took the good crea­ture in my arms and, af­ter we had em­braced like sis­ters, felt still more for­ti­fied and in­dig­nant.

This, at all events, was for the time: a time so full that, as I re­call the way it went, it re­minds me of all the art I now need to make it a lit­tle dis­tinct. What I look back at with amaze­ment is the sit­u­a­tion I ac­cepted. I had un­der­taken, with my com­pan­ion, to see it out, and I was un­der a charm, ap­par­ently, that could smooth away the ex­tent and the far and dif­fi­cult con­nec­tions of such an ef­fort. I was lifted aloft on a great wave of in­fat­u­a­tion and pity. I found it sim­ple, in my ig­no­rance, my con­fu­sion, and per­haps my con­ceit, to as­sume that I could deal with a boy whose ed­u­ca­tion for the world was all on the point of be­gin­ning. I am un­able even to re­mem­ber at this day what pro­posal I framed for the end of his hol­i­days and the re­sump­tion of his stud­ies. Les­sons with me, in­deed, that charm­ing sum­mer, we all had a the­ory that he was to have; but I now feel that, for weeks, the lessons must have been rather my own. I learned some­thing—at first, cer­tainly—that had not been one of the teach­ings of my small, smoth­ered life; learned to be amused, and even amus­ing, and not to think for the mor­row. It was the first time, in a man­ner, that I had known space and air and free­dom, all the mu­sic of sum­mer and all the mys­tery of na­ture. And then there was con­sid­er­a­tion—and con­sid­er­a­tion was sweet. Oh, it was a trap—not de­signed, but deep—to my imag­i­na­tion, to my del­i­cacy, per­haps to my van­ity; to what­ever, in me, was most ex­citable. The best way to pic­ture it all is to say that I was off my guard. They gave me so lit­tle trou­ble—they were of a gen­tle­ness so ex­tra­or­di­nary. I used to spec­u­late—but even this with a dim dis­con­nect­ed­ness—as to how the rough fu­ture (for all fu­tures are rough!) would han­dle them and might bruise them. They had the bloom of health and hap­pi­ness; and yet, as if I had been in charge of a pair of lit­tle grandees, of princes of the blood, for whom ev­ery­thing, to be right, would have to be en­closed and pro­tected, the only form that, in my fancy, the af­teryears could take for them was that of a ro­man­tic, a re­ally royal ex­ten­sion of the gar­den and the park. It may be, of course, above all, that what sud­denly broke into this gives the pre­vi­ous time a charm of still­ness—that hush in which some­thing gath­ers or crouches. The change was ac­tu­ally like the spring of a beast.

In the first weeks the days were long; they of­ten, at their finest, gave me what I used to call my own hour, the hour when, for my pupils, teatime and bed­time hav­ing come and gone, I had, be­fore my fi­nal re­tire­ment, a small in­ter­val alone. Much as I liked my com­pan­ions, this hour was the thing in the day I liked most; and I liked it best of all when, as the light faded—or rather, I should say, the day lin­gered and the last calls of the last birds sounded, in a flushed sky, from the old trees—I could take a turn into the grounds and en­joy, al­most with a sense of prop­erty that amused and flat­tered me, the beauty and dig­nity of the place. It was a plea­sure at these mo­ments to feel my­self tran­quil and jus­ti­fied; doubt­less, per­haps, also to re­flect that by my dis­cre­tion, my quiet good sense and gen­eral high pro­pri­ety, I was giv­ing plea­sure—if he ever thought of it!—to the per­son to whose pres­sure I had re­sponded. What I was do­ing was what he had earnestly hoped and di­rectly asked of me, and that I could, af­ter all, do it proved even a greater joy than I had ex­pected. I dare­say I fan­cied my­self, in short, a re­mark­able young woman and took com­fort in the faith that this would more pub­licly ap­pear. Well, I needed to be re­mark­able to of­fer a front to the re­mark­able things that presently gave their first sign.

It was plump, one af­ter­noon, in the mid­dle of my very hour: the chil­dren were tucked away, and I had come out for my stroll. One of the thoughts that, as I don’t in the least shrink now from not­ing, used to be with me in these wan­der­ings was that it would be as charm­ing as a charm­ing story sud­denly to meet some­one. Some­one would ap­pear there at the turn of a path and would stand be­fore me and smile and ap­prove. I didn’t ask more than that—I only asked that he should know; and the only way to be sure he knew would be to see it, and the kind light of it, in his hand­some face. That was ex­actly present to me—by which I mean the face was—when, on the first of these oc­ca­sions, at the end of a long June day, I stopped short on emerg­ing from one of the plan­ta­tions and com­ing into view of the house. What ar­rested me on the spot—and with a shock much greater than any vi­sion had al­lowed for—was the sense that my imag­i­na­tion had, in a flash, turned real. He did stand there!—but high up, be­yond the lawn and at the very top of the tower to which, on that first morn­ing, lit­tle Flora had con­ducted me. This tower was one of a pair—square, in­con­gru­ous, crenelated struc­tures—that were dis­tin­guished, for some rea­son, though I could see lit­tle dif­fer­ence, as the new and the old. They flanked op­po­site ends of the house and were prob­a­bly ar­chi­tec­tural ab­sur­di­ties, re­deemed in a mea­sure in­deed by not be­ing wholly dis­en­gaged nor of a height too pre­ten­tious, dat­ing, in their gin­ger­bread an­tiq­uity, from a ro­man­tic re­vival that was al­ready a re­spectable past. I ad­mired them, had fan­cies about them, for we could all profit in a de­gree, es­pe­cially when they loomed through the dusk, by the grandeur of their ac­tual bat­tle­ments; yet it was not at such an el­e­va­tion that the fig­ure I had so of­ten in­voked seemed most in place.

It pro­duced in me, this fig­ure, in the clear twi­light, I re­mem­ber, two dis­tinct gasps of emo­tion, which were, sharply, the shock of my first and that of my sec­ond sur­prise. My sec­ond was a vi­o­lent per­cep­tion of the mis­take of my first: the man who met my eyes was not the per­son I had pre­cip­i­tately sup­posed. There came to me thus a be­wil­der­ment of vi­sion of which, af­ter these years, there is no liv­ing view that I can hope to give. An un­known man in a lonely place is a per­mit­ted ob­ject of fear to a young woman pri­vately bred; and the fig­ure that faced me was—a few more sec­onds as­sured me—as lit­tle any­one else I knew as it was the im­age that had been in my mind. I had not seen it in Har­ley Street—I had not seen it any­where. The place, more­over, in the strangest way in the world, had, on the in­stant, and by the very fact of its ap­pear­ance, be­come a soli­tude. To me at least, mak­ing my state­ment here with a de­lib­er­a­tion with which I have never made it, the whole feel­ing of the mo­ment re­turns. It was as if, while I took in—what I did take in—all the rest of the scene had been stricken with death. I can hear again, as I write, the in­tense hush in which the sounds of evening dropped. The rooks stopped caw­ing in the golden sky, and the friendly hour lost, for the minute, all its voice. But there was no other change in na­ture, un­less in­deed it were a change that I saw with a stranger sharp­ness. The gold was still in the sky, the clear­ness in the air, and the man who looked at me over the bat­tle­ments was as def­i­nite as a pic­ture in a frame. That’s how I thought, with ex­tra­or­di­nary quick­ness, of each per­son that he might have been and that he was not. We were con­fronted across our dis­tance quite long enough for me to ask my­self with in­ten­sity who then he was and to feel, as an ef­fect of my in­abil­ity to say, a won­der that in a few in­stants more be­came in­tense.

The great ques­tion, or one of these, is, af­ter­ward, I know, with re­gard to cer­tain mat­ters, the ques­tion of how long they have lasted. Well, this mat­ter of mine, think what you will of it, lasted while I caught at a dozen pos­si­bil­i­ties, none of which made a dif­fer­ence for the bet­ter, that I could see, in there hav­ing been in the house—and for how long, above all?—a per­son of whom I was in ig­no­rance. It lasted while I just bri­dled a lit­tle with the sense that my of­fice de­manded that there should be no such ig­no­rance and no such per­son. It lasted while this vis­i­tant, at all events—and there was a touch of the strange free­dom, as I re­mem­ber, in the sign of fa­mil­iar­ity of his wear­ing no hat—seemed to fix me, from his po­si­tion, with just the ques­tion, just the scru­tiny through the fad­ing light, that his own pres­ence pro­voked. We were too far apart to call to each other, but there was a mo­ment at which, at shorter range, some chal­lenge be­tween us, break­ing the hush, would have been the right re­sult of our straight mu­tual stare. He was in one of the an­gles, the one away from the house, very erect, as it struck me, and with both hands on the ledge. So I saw him as I see the let­ters I form on this page; then, ex­actly, af­ter a minute, as if to add to the spec­ta­cle, he slowly changed his place—passed, look­ing at me hard all the while, to the op­po­site cor­ner of the plat­form. Yes, I had the sharpest sense that dur­ing this tran­sit he never took his eyes from me, and I can see at this mo­ment the way his hand, as he went, passed from one of the crenela­tions to the next. He stopped at the other cor­ner, but less long, and even as he turned away still markedly fixed me. He turned away; that was all I knew.

IV

It was not that I didn’t wait, on this oc­ca­sion, for more, for I was rooted as deeply as I was shaken. Was there a “se­cret” at Bly—a mys­tery of Udolpho or an in­sane, an un­men­tion­able rel­a­tive kept in un­sus­pected con­fine­ment? I can’t say how long I turned it over, or how long, in a con­fu­sion of cu­rios­ity and dread, I re­mained where I had had my col­li­sion; I only re­call that when I reen­tered the house dark­ness had quite closed in. Agi­ta­tion, in the in­ter­val, cer­tainly had held me and driven me, for I must, in cir­cling about the place, have walked three miles; but I was to be, later on, so much more over­whelmed that this mere dawn of alarm was a com­par­a­tively hu­man chill. The most sin­gu­lar part of it, in fact—sin­gu­lar as the rest had been—was the part I be­came, in the hall, aware of in meet­ing Mrs. Grose. This pic­ture comes back to me in the gen­eral train—the im­pres­sion, as I re­ceived it on my re­turn, of the wide white pan­elled space, bright in the lamp­light and with its por­traits and red car­pet, and of the good sur­prised look of my friend, which im­me­di­ately told me she had missed me. It came to me straight­way, un­der her con­tact, that, with plain hearti­ness, mere re­lieved anx­i­ety at my ap­pear­ance, she knew noth­ing what­ever that could bear upon the in­ci­dent I had there ready for her. I had not sus­pected in ad­vance that her com­fort­able face would pull me up, and I some­how mea­sured the im­por­tance of what I had seen by my thus find­ing my­self hes­i­tate to men­tion it. Scarce any­thing in the whole his­tory seems to me so odd as this fact that my real be­gin­ning of fear was one, as I may say, with the in­stinct of spar­ing my com­pan­ion. On the spot, ac­cord­ingly, in the pleas­ant hall and with her eyes on me, I, for a rea­son that I couldn’t then have phrased, achieved an in­ward res­o­lu­tion—of­fered a vague pre­text for my late­ness and, with the plea of the beauty of the night and of the heavy dew and wet feet, went as soon as pos­si­ble to my room.

Here it was an­other af­fair; here, for many days af­ter, it was a queer af­fair enough. There were hours, from day to day—or at least there were mo­ments, snatched even from clear du­ties—when I had to shut my­self up to think. It was not so much yet that I was more ner­vous than I could bear to be as that I was re­mark­ably afraid of be­com­ing so; for the truth I had now to turn over was, sim­ply and clearly, the truth that I could ar­rive at no ac­count what­ever of the vis­i­tor with whom I had been so in­ex­pli­ca­bly and yet, as it seemed to me, so in­ti­mately con­cerned. It took lit­tle time to see that I could sound with­out forms of in­quiry and with­out ex­cit­ing re­mark any do­mes­tic com­pli­ca­tions. The shock I had suf­fered must have sharp­ened all my senses; I felt sure, at the end of three days and as the re­sult of mere closer at­ten­tion, that I had not been prac­ticed upon by the ser­vants nor made the ob­ject of any “game.” Of what­ever it was that I knew, noth­ing was known around me. There was but one sane in­fer­ence: some­one had taken a lib­erty rather gross. That was what, re­peat­edly, I dipped into my room and locked the door to say to my­self. We had been, col­lec­tively, sub­ject to an in­tru­sion; some un­scrupu­lous trav­eler, cu­ri­ous in old houses, had made his way in un­ob­served, en­joyed the prospect from the best point of view, and then stolen out as he came. If he had given me such a bold hard stare, that was but a part of his in­dis­cre­tion. The good thing, af­ter all, was that we should surely see no more of him.

This was not so good a thing, I ad­mit, as not to leave me to judge that what, es­sen­tially, made noth­ing else much sig­nify was sim­ply my charm­ing work. My charm­ing work was just my life with Miles and Flora, and through noth­ing could I so like it as through feel­ing that I could throw my­self into it in trou­ble. The at­trac­tion of my small charges was a con­stant joy, lead­ing me to won­der afresh at the van­ity of my orig­i­nal fears, the dis­taste I had be­gun by en­ter­tain­ing for the prob­a­ble gray prose of my of­fice. There was to be no gray prose, it ap­peared, and no long grind; so how could work not be charm­ing that pre­sented it­self as daily beauty? It was all the ro­mance of the nurs­ery and the po­etry of the school­room. I don’t mean by this, of course, that we stud­ied only fic­tion and verse; I mean I can ex­press no oth­er­wise the sort of in­ter­est my com­pan­ions in­spired. How can I de­scribe that ex­cept by say­ing that in­stead of grow­ing used to them—and it’s a mar­vel for a gov­erness: I call the sis­ter­hood to wit­ness!—I made con­stant fresh dis­cov­er­ies. There was one di­rec­tion, as­suredly, in which these dis­cov­er­ies stopped: deep ob­scu­rity con­tin­ued to cover the re­gion of the boy’s con­duct at school. It had been promptly given me, I have noted, to face that mys­tery with­out a pang. Per­haps even it would be nearer the truth to say that—with­out a word—he him­self had cleared it up. He had made the whole charge ab­surd. My con­clu­sion bloomed there with the real rose flush of his in­no­cence: he was only too fine and fair for the lit­tle hor­rid, un­clean school world, and he had paid a price for it. I re­flected acutely that the sense of such dif­fer­ences, such su­pe­ri­or­i­ties of qual­ity, al­ways, on the part of the ma­jor­ity—which could in­clude even stupid, sor­did head­mas­ters—turn in­fal­li­bly to the vin­dic­tive.

Both the chil­dren had a gen­tle­ness (it was their only fault, and it never made Miles a muff) that kept them—how shall I ex­press it?—al­most im­per­sonal and cer­tainly quite un­pun­ish­able. They were like the cherubs of the anec­dote, who had—morally, at any rate—noth­ing to whack! I re­mem­ber feel­ing with Miles in es­pe­cial as if he had had, as it were, no his­tory. We ex­pect of a small child a scant one, but there was in this beau­ti­ful lit­tle boy some­thing ex­traor­di­nar­ily sen­si­tive, yet ex­traor­di­nar­ily happy, that, more than in any crea­ture of his age I have seen, struck me as be­gin­ning anew each day. He had never for a sec­ond suf­fered. I took this as a di­rect dis­proof of his hav­ing re­ally been chas­tised. If he had been wicked he would have “caught” it, and I should have caught it by the re­bound—I should have found the trace. I found noth­ing at all, and he was there­fore an an­gel. He never spoke of his school, never men­tioned a com­rade or a mas­ter; and I, for my part, was quite too much dis­gusted to al­lude to them. Of course I was un­der the spell, and the won­der­ful part is that, even at the time, I per­fectly knew I was. But I gave my­self up to it; it was an an­ti­dote to any pain, and I had more pains than one. I was in re­ceipt in these days of dis­turb­ing let­ters from home, where things were not go­ing well. But with my chil­dren, what things in the world mat­tered? That was the ques­tion I used to put to my scrappy re­tire­ments. I was daz­zled by their love­li­ness.

There was a Sun­day—to get on—when it rained with such force and for so many hours that there could be no pro­ces­sion to church; in con­se­quence of which, as the day de­clined, I had ar­ranged with Mrs. Grose that, should the evening show im­prove­ment, we would at­tend to­gether the late ser­vice. The rain hap­pily stopped, and I pre­pared for our walk, which, through the park and by the good road to the vil­lage, would be a mat­ter of twenty min­utes. Com­ing down­stairs to meet my col­league in the hall, I re­mem­bered a pair of gloves that had re­quired three stitches and that had re­ceived them—with a pub­lic­ity per­haps not ed­i­fy­ing—while I sat with the chil­dren at their tea, served on Sun­days, by ex­cep­tion, in that cold, clean tem­ple of ma­hogany and brass, the “grownup” din­ing room. The gloves had been dropped there, and I turned in to re­cover them. The day was gray enough, but the af­ter­noon light still lin­gered, and it en­abled me, on cross­ing the thresh­old, not only to rec­og­nize, on a chair near the wide win­dow, then closed, the ar­ti­cles I wanted, but to be­come aware of a per­son on the other side of the win­dow and look­ing straight in. One step into the room had suf­ficed; my vi­sion was in­stan­ta­neous; it was all there. The per­son look­ing straight in was the per­son who had al­ready ap­peared to me. He ap­peared thus again with I won’t say greater dis­tinct­ness, for that was im­pos­si­ble, but with a near­ness that rep­re­sented a for­ward stride in our in­ter­course and made me, as I met him, catch my breath and turn cold. He was the same—he was the same, and seen, this time, as he had been seen be­fore, from the waist up, the win­dow, though the din­ing room was on the ground floor, not go­ing down to the ter­race on which he stood. His face was close to the glass, yet the ef­fect of this bet­ter view was, strangely, only to show me how in­tense the for­mer had been. He re­mained but a few sec­onds—long enough to con­vince me he also saw and rec­og­nized; but it was as if I had been look­ing at him for years and had known him al­ways. Some­thing, how­ever, hap­pened this time that had not hap­pened be­fore; his stare into my face, through the glass and across the room, was as deep and hard as then, but it quit­ted me for a mo­ment dur­ing which I could still watch it, see it fix suc­ces­sively sev­eral other things. On the spot there came to me the added shock of a cer­ti­tude that it was not for me he had come there. He had come for some­one else.

The flash of this knowl­edge—for it was knowl­edge in the midst of dread—pro­duced in me the most ex­tra­or­di­nary ef­fect, started as I stood there, a sud­den vi­bra­tion of duty and courage. I say courage be­cause I was be­yond all doubt al­ready far gone. I bounded straight out of the door again, reached that of the house, got, in an in­stant, upon the drive, and, pass­ing along the ter­race as fast as I could rush, turned a cor­ner and came full in sight. But it was in sight of noth­ing now—my vis­i­tor had van­ished. I stopped, I al­most dropped, with the real re­lief of this; but I took in the whole scene—I gave him time to reap­pear. I call it time, but how long was it? I can’t speak to the pur­pose to­day of the du­ra­tion of these things. That kind of mea­sure must have left me: they couldn’t have lasted as they ac­tu­ally ap­peared to me to last. The ter­race and the whole place, the lawn and the gar­den be­yond it, all I could see of the park, were empty with a great empti­ness. There were shrub­beries and big trees, but I re­mem­ber the clear as­sur­ance I felt that none of them con­cealed him. He was there or was not there: not there if I didn’t see him. I got hold of this; then, in­stinc­tively, in­stead of re­turn­ing as I had come, went to the win­dow. It was con­fus­edly present to me that I ought to place my­self where he had stood. I did so; I ap­plied my face to the pane and looked, as he had looked, into the room. As if, at this mo­ment, to show me ex­actly what his range had been, Mrs. Grose, as I had done for him­self just be­fore, came in from the hall. With this I had the full im­age of a rep­e­ti­tion of what had al­ready oc­curred. She saw me as I had seen my own vis­i­tant; she pulled up short as I had done; I gave her some­thing of the shock that I had re­ceived. She turned white, and this made me ask my­self if I had blanched as much. She stared, in short, and re­treated on just my lines, and I knew she had then passed out and come round to me and that I should presently meet her. I re­mained where I was, and while I waited I thought of more things than one. But there’s only one I take space to men­tion. I won­dered why she should be scared.

V

Oh, she let me know as soon as, round the cor­ner of the house, she loomed again into view. “What in the name of good­ness is the mat­ter—?” She was now flushed and out of breath.

I said noth­ing till she came quite near. “With me?” I must have made a won­der­ful face. “Do I show it?”

“You’re as white as a sheet. You look aw­ful.”

I con­sid­ered; I could meet on this, with­out scru­ple, any in­no­cence. My need to re­spect the bloom of Mrs. Grose’s had dropped, with­out a rus­tle, from my shoul­ders, and if I wa­vered for the in­stant it was not with what I kept back. I put out my hand to her and she took it; I held her hard a lit­tle, lik­ing to feel her close to me. There was a kind of sup­port in the shy heave of her sur­prise. “You came for me for church, of course, but I can’t go.”

“Has any­thing hap­pened?”

“Yes. You must know now. Did I look very queer?”

“Through this win­dow? Dread­ful!”

“Well,” I said, “I’ve been fright­ened.” Mrs. Grose’s eyes ex­pressed plainly that she had no wish to be, yet also that she knew too well her place not to be ready to share with me any marked in­con­ve­nience. Oh, it was quite set­tled that she must share! “Just what you saw from the din­ing room a minute ago was the ef­fect of that. What I saw—just be­fore—was much worse.”

Her hand tight­ened. “What was it?”

“An ex­tra­or­di­nary man. Look­ing in.”

“What ex­tra­or­di­nary man?”

“I haven’t the least idea.”

Mrs. Grose gazed round us in vain. “Then where is he gone?”

“I know still less.”

“Have you seen him be­fore?”

“Yes—once. On the old tower.”

She could only look at me harder. “Do you mean he’s a stranger?”

“Oh, very much!”

“Yet you didn’t tell me?”

“No—for rea­sons. But now that you’ve guessed—”

Mrs. Grose’s round eyes en­coun­tered this charge. “Ah, I haven’t guessed!” she said very sim­ply. “How can I if you don’t imag­ine?”

“I don’t in the very least.”

“You’ve seen him nowhere but on the tower?”

“And on this spot just now.”

Mrs. Grose looked round again. “What was he do­ing on the tower?”

“Only stand­ing there and look­ing down at me.”

She thought a minute. “Was he a gen­tle­man?”

I found I had no need to think. “No.” She gazed in deeper won­der. “No.”

“Then no­body about the place? No­body from the vil­lage?”

“No­body—no­body. I didn’t tell you, but I made sure.”

She breathed a vague re­lief: this was, oddly, so much to the good. It only went in­deed a lit­tle way. “But if he isn’t a gen­tle­man—”

“What is he? He’s a hor­ror.”

“A hor­ror?”

“He’s—God help me if I know what he is!”

Mrs. Grose looked round once more; she fixed her eyes on the duskier dis­tance, then, pulling her­self to­gether, turned to me with abrupt in­con­se­quence. “It’s time we should be at church.”

“Oh, I’m not fit for church!”

“Won’t it do you good?”

“It won’t do them—!” I nod­ded at the house.

“The chil­dren?”

“I can’t leave them now.”

“You’re afraid—?”

I spoke boldly. “I’m afraid of him.”

Mrs. Grose’s large face showed me, at this, for the first time, the far­away faint glim­mer of a con­scious­ness more acute: I some­how made out in it the de­layed dawn of an idea I my­self had not given her and that was as yet quite ob­scure to me. It comes back to me that I thought in­stantly of this as some­thing I could get from her; and I felt it to be con­nected with the de­sire she presently showed to know more. “When was it—on the tower?”

“About the mid­dle of the month. At this same hour.”

“Al­most at dark,” said Mrs. Grose.

“Oh, no, not nearly. I saw him as I see you.”

“Then how did he get in?”

“And how did he get out?” I laughed. “I had no op­por­tu­nity to ask him! This evening, you see,” I pur­sued, “he has not been able to get in.”

“He only peeps?”

“I hope it will be con­fined to that!” She had now let go my hand; she turned away a lit­tle. I waited an in­stant; then I brought out: “Go to church. Good­bye. I must watch.”

Slowly she faced me again. “Do you fear for them?”

We met in an­other long look. “Don’t you?” In­stead of an­swer­ing she came nearer to the win­dow and, for a minute, ap­plied her face to the glass. “You see how he could see,” I mean­while went on.

She didn’t move. “How long was he here?”

“Till I came out. I came to meet him.”

Mrs. Grose at last turned round, and there was still more in her face. “I couldn’t have come out.”

“Nei­ther could I!” I laughed again. “But I did come. I have my duty.”

“So have I mine,” she replied; af­ter which she added: “What is he like?”

“I’ve been dy­ing to tell you. But he’s like no­body.”

“No­body?” she echoed.

“He has no hat.” Then see­ing in her face that she al­ready, in this, with a deeper dis­may, found a touch of pic­ture, I quickly added stroke to stroke. “He has red hair, very red, close-curl­ing, and a pale face, long in shape, with straight, good fea­tures and lit­tle, rather queer whiskers that are as red as his hair. His eye­brows are, some­how, darker; they look par­tic­u­larly arched and as if they might move a good deal. His eyes are sharp, strange—aw­fully; but I only know clearly that they’re rather small and very fixed. His mouth’s wide, and his lips are thin, and ex­cept for his lit­tle whiskers he’s quite clean-shaven. He gives me a sort of sense of look­ing like an ac­tor.”

“An ac­tor!” It was im­pos­si­ble to re­sem­ble one less, at least, than Mrs. Grose at that mo­ment.

“I’ve never seen one, but so I sup­pose them. He’s tall, ac­tive, erect,” I con­tin­ued, “but never—no, never!—a gen­tle­man.”

My com­pan­ion’s face had blanched as I went on; her round eyes started and her mild mouth gaped. “A gen­tle­man?” she gasped, con­founded, stu­pe­fied: “a gen­tle­man he?”

“You know him then?”

She vis­i­bly tried to hold her­self. “But he is hand­some?”

I saw the way to help her. “Re­mark­ably!”

“And dressed—?”

“In some­body’s clothes. They’re smart, but they’re not his own.”

She broke into a breath­less af­fir­ma­tive groan: “They’re the mas­ter’s!”

I caught it up. “You do know him?”

She fal­tered but a sec­ond. “Quint!” she cried.

“Quint?”

“Peter Quint—his own man, his valet, when he was here!”

“When the mas­ter was?”

Gap­ing still, but meet­ing me, she pieced it all to­gether. “He never wore his hat, but he did wear—well, there were waist­coats missed. They were both here—last year. Then the mas­ter went, and Quint was alone.”

I fol­lowed, but halt­ing a lit­tle. “Alone?”

“Alone with us.” Then, as from a deeper depth, “In charge,” she added.

“And what be­came of him?”

She hung fire so long that I was still more mys­ti­fied. “He went, too,” she brought out at last.

“Went where?”

Her ex­pres­sion, at this, be­came ex­tra­or­di­nary. “God knows where! He died.”

“Died?” I al­most shrieked.

She seemed fairly to square her­self, plant her­self more firmly to ut­ter the won­der of it. “Yes. Mr. Quint is dead.”

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 tale­bear­ing—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 fact 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, then 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.

VII

I got hold of Mrs. Grose as soon af­ter this as I could; and I can give no in­tel­li­gi­ble ac­count of how I fought out the in­ter­val. Yet I still hear my­self cry as I fairly threw my­self into her arms: “They know—it’s too mon­strous: they know, they know!”

“And what on earth—?” I felt her in­credulity as she held me.

“Why, all that we know—and heaven knows what else be­sides!” Then, as she re­leased me, I made it out to her, made it out per­haps only now with full co­herency even to my­self. “Two hours ago, in the gar­den”—I could scarce ar­tic­u­late—“Flora saw!”

Mrs. Grose took it as she might have taken a blow in the stom­ach. “She has told you?” she panted.

“Not a word—that’s the hor­ror. She kept it to her­self! The child of eight, that child!” Unut­ter­able still, for me, was the stu­pe­fac­tion of it.

Mrs. Grose, of course, could only gape the wider. “Then how do you know?”

“I was there—I saw with my eyes: saw that she was per­fectly aware.”

“Do you mean aware of him?”

“No—of her.” I was con­scious as I spoke that I looked prodi­gious things, for I got the slow re­flec­tion of them in my com­pan­ion’s face. “Another per­son—this time; but a fig­ure of quite as un­mis­tak­able hor­ror and evil: a woman in black, pale and dread­ful—with such an air also, and such a face!—on the other side of the lake. I was there with the child—quiet for the hour; and in the midst of it she came.”

“Came how—from where?”

“From where they come from! She just ap­peared and stood there—but not so near.”

“And with­out com­ing nearer?”

“Oh, for the ef­fect and the feel­ing, she might have been as close as you!”

My friend, with an odd im­pulse, fell back a step. “Was she some­one you’ve never seen?”

“Yes. But some­one the child has. Some­one you have.” Then, to show how I had thought it all out: “My pre­de­ces­sor—the one who died.”

“Miss Jes­sel?”

“Miss Jes­sel. You don’t be­lieve me?” I pressed.

She turned right and left in her dis­tress. “How can you be sure?”

This drew from me, in the state of my nerves, a flash of im­pa­tience. “Then ask Flora—she’s sure!” But I had no sooner spo­ken than I caught my­self up. “No, for God’s sake, don’t! She’ll say she isn’t—she’ll lie!”

Mrs. Grose was not too be­wil­dered in­stinc­tively to protest. “Ah, how can you?”

“Be­cause I’m clear. Flora doesn’t want me to know.”

“It’s only then to spare you.”

“No, no—there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don’t know what I don’t see—what I don’t fear!”

Mrs. Grose tried to keep up with me. “You mean you’re afraid of see­ing her again?”

“Oh, no; that’s noth­ing—now!” Then I ex­plained. “It’s of not see­ing her.”

But my com­pan­ion only looked wan. “I don’t un­der­stand you.”

“Why, it’s that the child may keep it up—and that the child as­suredly will—with­out my know­ing it.”

At the im­age of this pos­si­bil­ity Mrs. Grose for a mo­ment col­lapsed, yet presently to pull her­self to­gether again, as if from the pos­i­tive force of the sense of what, should we yield an inch, there would re­ally be to give way to. “Dear, dear—we must keep our heads! And af­ter all, if she doesn’t mind it—!” She even tried a grim joke. “Per­haps she likes it!”

“Likes such things—a scrap of an in­fant!”

“Isn’t it just a proof of her blessed in­no­cence?” my friend bravely in­quired.

She brought me, for the in­stant, al­most round. “Oh, we must clutch at that—we must cling to it! If it isn’t a proof of what you say, it’s a proof of—God knows what! For the woman’s a hor­ror of hor­rors.”

Mrs. Grose, at this, fixed her eyes a minute on the ground; then at last rais­ing them, “Tell me how you know,” she said.

“Then you ad­mit it’s what she was?” I cried.

“Tell me how you know,” my friend sim­ply re­peated.

“Know? By see­ing her! By the way she looked.”

“At you, do you mean—so wickedly?”

“Dear me, no—I could have borne that. She gave me never a glance. She only fixed the child.”

Mrs. Grose tried to see it. “Fixed her?”

“Ah, with such aw­ful eyes!”

She stared at mine as if they might re­ally have re­sem­bled them. “Do you mean of dis­like?”

“God help us, no. Of some­thing much worse.”

“Worse than dis­like?—this left her in­deed at a loss.

“With a de­ter­mi­na­tion—in­de­scrib­able. With a kind of fury of in­ten­tion.”

I made her turn pale. “In­ten­tion?”

“To get hold of her.” Mrs. Grose—her eyes just lin­ger­ing on mine—gave a shud­der and walked to the win­dow; and while she stood there look­ing out I com­pleted my state­ment. “That’s what Flora knows.”

After a lit­tle she turned round. “The per­son was in black, you say?”

“In mourn­ing—rather poor, al­most shabby. But—yes—with ex­tra­or­di­nary beauty.” I now rec­og­nized to what I had at last, stroke by stroke, brought the vic­tim of my con­fi­dence, for she quite vis­i­bly weighed this. “Oh, hand­some—very, very,” I in­sisted; “won­der­fully hand­some. But in­fa­mous.”

She slowly came back to me. “Miss Jes­sel—was in­fa­mous.” She once more took my hand in both her own, hold­ing it as tight as if to for­tify me against the in­crease of alarm I might draw from this dis­clo­sure. “They were both in­fa­mous,” she fi­nally said.

So, for a lit­tle, we faced it once more to­gether; and I found ab­so­lutely a de­gree of help in see­ing it now so straight. “I ap­pre­ci­ate,” I said, “the great de­cency of your not hav­ing hith­erto spo­ken; but the time has cer­tainly come to give me the whole thing.” She ap­peared to as­sent to this, but still only in si­lence; see­ing which I went on: “I must have it now. Of what did she die? Come, there was some­thing be­tween them.”

“There was ev­ery­thing.”

“In spite of the dif­fer­ence—?”

“Oh, of their rank, their con­di­tion”—she brought it woe­fully out. “She was a lady.”

I turned it over; I again saw. “Yes—she was a lady.”

“And he so dread­fully be­low,” said Mrs. Grose.

I felt that I doubt­less needn’t press too hard, in such com­pany, on the place of a ser­vant in the scale; but there was noth­ing to pre­vent an ac­cep­tance of my com­pan­ion’s own mea­sure of my pre­de­ces­sor’s abase­ment. There was a way to deal with that, and I dealt; the more read­ily for my full vi­sion—on the ev­i­dence—of our em­ployer’s late clever, good-look­ing “own” man; im­pu­dent, as­sured, spoiled, de­praved. “The fel­low was a hound.”

Mrs. Grose con­sid­ered as if it were per­haps a lit­tle a case for a sense of shades. “I’ve never seen one like him. He did what he wished.”

“With her?”

“With them all.”

It was as if now in my friend’s own eyes Miss Jes­sel had again ap­peared. I seemed at any rate, for an in­stant, to see their evo­ca­tion of her as dis­tinctly as I had seen her by the pond; and I brought out with de­ci­sion: “It must have been also what she wished!”

Mrs. Grose’s face sig­ni­fied that it had been in­deed, but she said at the same time: “Poor woman—she paid for it!”

“Then you do know what she died of?” I asked.

“No—I know noth­ing. I wanted not to know; I was glad enough I didn’t; and I thanked heaven she was well out of this!”

“Yet you had, then, your idea—”

“Of her real rea­son for leav­ing? Oh, yes—as to that. She couldn’t have stayed. Fancy it here—for a gov­erness! And af­ter­ward I imag­ined—and I still imag­ine. And what I imag­ine is dread­ful.”

“Not so dread­ful as what I do,” I replied; on which I must have shown her—as I was in­deed but too con­scious—a front of mis­er­able de­feat. It brought out again all her com­pas­sion for me, and at the re­newed touch of her kind­ness my power to re­sist broke down. I burst, as I had, the other time, made her burst, into tears; she took me to her moth­erly breast, and my lamen­ta­tion over­flowed. “I don’t do it!” I sobbed in de­spair; “I don’t save or shield them! It’s far worse than I dreamed—they’re lost!”