“No, they were not in mine!” she roundly and distressfully returned.
“The master believed in him and placed him here because he was supposed
not to be well and the country air so good for him. So he had
everything to say. Yes”—she let me have it—“even about _them_.”

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

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

A rigid control, from the next day, was, as I have said, to follow
them; yet how often and how passionately, for a week, we came back
together to the subject! Much as we had discussed it that Sunday night,
I was, in the immediate later hours in especial—for it may be imagined
whether I slept—still haunted with the shadow of something she had not
told me. I myself had kept back nothing, but there was a word Mrs.
Grose had kept back. I was sure, moreover, by morning, that this was
not from a failure of frankness, but because on every side there were
fears. It seems to me indeed, in retrospect, that by the time the
morrow’s sun was high I had restlessly read into the facts before us
almost all the meaning they were to receive from subsequent and more
cruel occurrences. What they gave me above all was just the sinister
figure of the living man—the dead one would keep awhile!—and of the
months he had continuously passed at Bly, which, added up, made a
formidable stretch. The limit of this evil time had arrived only when,
on the dawn of a winter’s morning, Peter Quint was found, by a laborer
going to early work, stone dead on the road from the village: a
catastrophe explained—superficially at least—by a visible wound to his
head; such a wound as might have been produced—and as, on the final
evidence, _had_ been—by a fatal slip, in the dark and after leaving the
public house, on the steepish icy slope, a wrong path altogether, at
the bottom of which he lay. The icy slope, the turn mistaken at night
and in liquor, accounted for much—practically, in the end and after the
inquest and boundless chatter, for everything; but there had been
matters in his life—strange passages and perils, secret disorders,
vices more than suspected—that would have accounted for a good deal
more.

I scarce know how to put my story into words that shall be a credible
picture of my state of mind; but I was in these days literally able to
find a joy in the extraordinary flight of heroism the occasion demanded
of me. I now saw that I had been asked for a service admirable and
difficult; and there would be a greatness in letting it be seen—oh, in
the right quarter!—that I could succeed where many another girl might
have failed. It was an immense help to me—I confess I rather applaud
myself as I look back!—that I saw my service so strongly and so simply.
I was there to protect and defend the little creatures in the world the
most bereaved and the most lovable, the appeal of whose helplessness
had suddenly become only too explicit, a deep, constant ache of one’s
own committed heart. We were cut off, really, together; we were united
in our danger. They had nothing but me, and I—well, I had _them_. It
was in short a magnificent chance. This chance presented itself to me
in an image richly material. I was a screen—I was to stand before them.
The more I saw, the less they would. I began to watch them in a stifled
suspense, a disguised excitement that might well, had it continued too
long, have turned to something like madness. What saved me, as I now
see, was that it turned to something else altogether. It didn’t last as
suspense—it was superseded by horrible proofs. Proofs, I say, yes—from
the moment I really took hold.

This moment dated from an afternoon hour that I happened to spend in
the grounds with the younger of my pupils alone. We had left Miles
indoors, on the red cushion of a deep window seat; he had wished to
finish a book, and I had been glad to encourage a purpose so laudable
in a young man whose only defect was an occasional excess of the
restless. His sister, on the contrary, had been alert to come out, and
I strolled with her half an hour, seeking the shade, for the sun was
still high and the day exceptionally warm. I was aware afresh, with
her, as we went, of how, like her brother, she contrived—it was the
charming thing in both children—to let me alone without appearing to
drop me and to accompany me without appearing to surround. They were
never importunate and yet never listless. My attention to them all
really went to seeing them amuse themselves immensely without me: this
was a spectacle they seemed actively to prepare and that engaged me as
an active admirer. I walked in a world of their invention—they had no
occasion whatever to draw upon mine; so that my time was taken only
with being, for them, some remarkable person or thing that the game of
the moment required and that was merely, thanks to my superior, my
exalted stamp, a happy and highly distinguished sinecure. I forget what
I was on the present occasion; I only remember that I was something
very important and very quiet and that Flora was playing very hard. We
were on the edge of the lake, and, as we had lately begun geography,
the lake was the Sea of Azof.

Suddenly, in these circumstances, I became aware that, on the other
side of the Sea of Azof, we had an interested spectator. The way this
knowledge gathered in me was the strangest thing in the world—the
strangest, that is, except the very much stranger in which it quickly
merged itself. I had sat down with a piece of work—for I was something
or other that could sit—on the old stone bench which overlooked the
pond; and in this position I began to take in with certitude, and yet
without direct vision, the presence, at a distance, of a third person.
The old trees, the thick shrubbery, made a great and pleasant shade,
but it was all suffused with the brightness of the hot, still hour.
There was no ambiguity in anything; none whatever, at least, in the
conviction I from one moment to another found myself forming as to what
I should see straight before me and across the lake as a consequence of
raising my eyes. They were attached at this juncture to the stitching
in which I was engaged, and I can feel once more the spasm of my effort
not to move them till I should so have steadied myself as to be able to
make up my mind what to do. There was an alien object in view—a figure
whose right of presence I instantly, passionately questioned. I
recollect counting over perfectly the possibilities, reminding myself
that nothing was more natural, for instance, than the appearance of one
of the men about the place, or even of a messenger, a postman, or a
tradesman’s boy, from the village. That reminder had as little effect
on my practical certitude as I was conscious—still even without
looking—of its having upon the character and attitude of our visitor.
Nothing was more natural than that these things should be the other
things that they absolutely were not.

Of the positive identity of the apparition I would assure myself as
soon as the small clock of my courage should have ticked out the right
second; meanwhile, with an effort that was already sharp enough, I
transferred my eyes straight to little Flora, who, at the moment, was
about ten yards away. My heart had stood still for an instant with the
wonder and terror of the question whether she too would see; and I held
my breath while I waited for what a cry from her, what some sudden
innocent sign either of interest or of alarm, would tell me. I waited,
but nothing came; then, in the first place—and there is something more
dire in this, I feel, than in anything I have to relate—I was
determined by a sense that, within a minute, all sounds from her had
previously dropped; and, in the second, by the circumstance that, also
within the minute, she had, in her play, turned her back to the water.
This was her attitude when I at last looked at her—looked with the
confirmed conviction that we were still, together, under direct
personal notice. She had picked up a small flat piece of wood, which
happened to have in it a little hole that had evidently suggested to
her the idea of sticking in another fragment that might figure as a
mast and make the thing a boat. This second morsel, as I watched her,
she was very markedly and intently attempting to tighten in its place.
My apprehension of what she was doing sustained me so that after some
seconds I felt I was ready for more. Then I again shifted my eyes—I
faced what I had to face.

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.”

“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.”

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

“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. 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.”

“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.”

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

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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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!”

“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!”

What I had said to Mrs. Grose was true enough: there were in the matter
I had put before her depths and possibilities that I lacked resolution
to sound; so that when we met once more in the wonder of it we were of
a common mind about the duty of resistance to extravagant fancies. We
were to keep our heads if we should keep nothing else—difficult indeed
as that might be in the face of what, in our prodigious experience, was
least to be questioned. Late that night, while the house slept, we had
another talk in my room, when she went all the way with me as to its
being beyond doubt that I had seen exactly what I had seen. To hold her
perfectly in the pinch of that, I found I had only to ask her how, if I
had “made it up,” I came to be able to give, of each of the persons
appearing to me, a picture disclosing, to the last detail, their
special marks—a portrait on the exhibition of which she had instantly
recognized and named them. She wished of course—small blame to her!—to
sink the whole subject; and I was quick to assure her that my own
interest in it had now violently taken the form of a search for the way
to escape from it. I encountered her on the ground of a probability
that with recurrence—for recurrence we took for granted—I should get
used to my danger, distinctly professing that my personal exposure had
suddenly become the least of my discomforts. It was my new suspicion
that was intolerable; and yet even to this complication the later hours
of the day had brought a little ease.