On leaving her, after my first outbreak, I had of course returned to my
pupils, associating the right remedy for my dismay with that sense of
their charm which I had already found to be a thing I could positively
cultivate and which had never failed me yet. I had simply, in other
words, plunged afresh into Flora’s special society and there become
aware—it was almost a luxury!—that she could put her little conscious
hand straight upon the spot that ached. She had looked at me in sweet
speculation and then had accused me to my face of having “cried.” I had
supposed I had brushed away the ugly signs: but I could literally—for
the time, at all events—rejoice, under this fathomless charity, that
they had not entirely disappeared. To gaze into the depths of blue of
the child’s eyes and pronounce their loveliness a trick of premature
cunning was to be guilty of a cynicism in preference to which I
naturally preferred to abjure my judgment and, so far as might be, my
agitation. I couldn’t abjure for merely wanting to, but I could repeat
to Mrs. Grose—as I did there, over and over, in the small hours—that
with their voices in the air, their pressure on one’s heart, and their
fragrant faces against one’s cheek, everything fell to the ground but
their incapacity and their beauty. It was a pity that, somehow, to
settle this once for all, I had equally to re-enumerate the signs of
subtlety that, in the afternoon, by the lake had made a miracle of my
show of self-possession. It was a pity to be obliged to reinvestigate
the certitude of the moment itself and repeat how it had come to me as
a revelation that the inconceivable communion I then surprised was a
matter, for either party, of habit. It was a pity that I should have
had to quaver out again the reasons for my not having, in my delusion,
so much as questioned that the little girl saw our visitant even as I
actually saw Mrs. Grose herself, and that she wanted, by just so much
as she did thus see, to make me suppose she didn’t, and at the same
time, without showing anything, arrive at a guess as to whether I
myself did! It was a pity that I needed once more to describe the
portentous little activity by which she sought to divert my
attention—the perceptible increase of movement, the greater intensity
of play, the singing, the gabbling of nonsense, and the invitation to
romp.

Yet if I had not indulged, to prove there was nothing in it, in this
review, I should have missed the two or three dim elements of comfort
that still remained to me. I should not for instance have been able to
asseverate to my friend that I was certain—which was so much to the
good—that _I_ at least had not betrayed myself. I should not have been
prompted, by stress of need, by desperation of mind—I scarce know what
to call it—to invoke such further aid to intelligence as might spring
from pushing my colleague fairly to the wall. She had told me, bit by
bit, under pressure, a great deal; but a small shifty spot on the wrong
side of it all still sometimes brushed my brow like the wing of a bat;
and I remember how on this occasion—for the sleeping house and the
concentration alike of our danger and our watch seemed to help—I felt
the importance of giving the last jerk to the curtain. “I don’t believe
anything so horrible,” I recollect saying; “no, let us put it
definitely, my dear, that I don’t. But if I did, you know, there’s a
thing I should require now, just without sparing you the least bit
more—oh, not a scrap, come!—to get out of you. What was it you had in
mind when, in our distress, before Miles came back, over the letter
from his school, you said, under my insistence, that you didn’t pretend
for him that he had not literally _ever_ been ‘bad’? He has _not_
literally ‘ever,’ in these weeks that I myself have lived with him and
so closely watched him; he has been an imperturbable little prodigy of
delightful, lovable goodness. Therefore you might perfectly have made
the claim for him if you had not, as it happened, seen an exception to
take. What was your exception, and to what passage in your personal
observation of him did you refer?”

It was a dreadfully austere inquiry, but levity was not our note, and,
at any rate, before the gray dawn admonished us to separate I had got
my answer. What my friend had had in mind proved to be immensely to the
purpose. It was neither more nor less than the circumstance that for a
period of several months Quint and the boy had been perpetually
together. It was in fact the very appropriate truth that she had
ventured to criticize the propriety, to hint at the incongruity, of so
close an alliance, and even to go so far on the subject as a frank
overture to Miss Jessel. Miss Jessel had, with a most strange manner,
requested her to mind her business, and the good woman had, on this,
directly approached little Miles. What she had said to him, since I
pressed, was that _she_ liked to see young gentlemen not forget their
station.

I pressed again, of course, at this. “You reminded him that Quint was
only a base menial?”

“As you might say! And it was his answer, for one thing, that was bad.”

“And for another thing?” I waited. “He repeated your words to Quint?”

“No, not that. It’s just what he _wouldn’t!_” she could still impress
upon me. “I was sure, at any rate,” she added, “that he didn’t. But he
denied certain occasions.”

“When they had been about together quite as if Quint were his tutor—and
a very grand one—and Miss Jessel only for the little lady. When he had
gone off with the fellow, I mean, and spent hours with him.”

“He then prevaricated about it—he said he hadn’t?” Her assent was clear
enough to cause me to add in a moment: “I see. He lied.”

“Oh!” Mrs. Grose mumbled. This was a suggestion that it didn’t matter;
which indeed she backed up by a further remark. “You see, after all,
Miss Jessel didn’t mind. She didn’t forbid him.”

I considered. “Did he put that to you as a justification?”

At this she dropped again. “No, he never spoke of it.”

“Never mentioned her in connection with Quint?”

She saw, visibly flushing, where I was coming out. “Well, he didn’t
show anything. He denied,” she repeated; “he denied.”

Lord, how I pressed her now! “So that you could see he knew what was
between the two wretches?”

“I don’t know—I don’t know!” the poor woman groaned.

“You do know, you dear thing,” I replied; “only you haven’t my dreadful
boldness of mind, and you keep back, out of timidity and modesty and
delicacy, even the impression that, in the past, when you had, without
my aid, to flounder about in silence, most of all made you miserable.
But I shall get it out of you yet! There was something in the boy that
suggested to you,” I continued, “that he covered and concealed their
relation.”

“Your learning the truth? I daresay! But, heavens,” I fell, with
vehemence, athinking, “what it shows that they must, to that extent,
have succeeded in making of him!”

“Ah, nothing that’s not nice _now!_” Mrs. Grose lugubriously pleaded.

“I don’t wonder you looked queer,” I persisted, “when I mentioned to
you the letter from his school!”

“I doubt if I looked as queer as you!” she retorted with homely force.
“And if he was so bad then as that comes to, how is he such an angel
now?”

“Yes, indeed—and if he was a fiend at school! How, how, how? Well,” I
said in my torment, “you must put it to me again, but I shall not be
able to tell you for some days. Only, put it to me again!” I cried in a
way that made my friend stare. “There are directions in which I must
not for the present let myself go.” Meanwhile I returned to her first
example—the one to which she had just previously referred—of the boy’s
happy capacity for an occasional slip. “If Quint—on your remonstrance
at the time you speak of—was a base menial, one of the things Miles
said to you, I find myself guessing, was that you were another.” Again
her admission was so adequate that I continued: “And you forgave him
that?”

“Oh, yes!” And we exchanged there, in the stillness, a sound of the
oddest amusement. Then I went on: “At all events, while he was with the
man—”

“Miss Flora was with the woman. It suited them all!”

It suited me, too, I felt, only too well; by which I mean that it
suited exactly the particularly deadly view I was in the very act of
forbidding myself to entertain. But I so far succeeded in checking the
expression of this view that I will throw, just here, no further light
on it than may be offered by the mention of my final observation to
Mrs. Grose. “His having lied and been impudent are, I confess, less
engaging specimens than I had hoped to have from you of the outbreak in
him of the little natural man. Still,” I mused, “They must do, for they
make me feel more than ever that I must watch.”

It made me blush, the next minute, to see in my friend’s face how much
more unreservedly she had forgiven him than her anecdote struck me as
presenting to my own tenderness an occasion for doing. This came out
when, at the schoolroom door, she quitted me. “Surely you don’t accuse
_him_—”

“Of carrying on an intercourse that he conceals from me? Ah, remember
that, until further evidence, I now accuse nobody.” Then, before
shutting her out to go, by another passage, to her own place, “I must
just wait,” I wound up.

I waited and waited, and the days, as they elapsed, took something from
my consternation. A very few of them, in fact, passing, in constant
sight of my pupils, without a fresh incident, sufficed to give to
grievous fancies and even to odious memories a kind of brush of the
sponge. I have spoken of the surrender to their extraordinary childish
grace as a thing I could actively cultivate, and it may be imagined if
I neglected now to address myself to this source for whatever it would
yield. Stranger than I can express, certainly, was the effort to
struggle against my new lights; it would doubtless have been, however,
a greater tension still had it not been so frequently successful. I
used to wonder how my little charges could help guessing that I thought
strange things about them; and the circumstances that these things only
made them more interesting was not by itself a direct aid to keeping
them in the dark. I trembled lest they should see that they _were_ so
immensely more interesting. Putting things at the worst, at all events,
as in meditation I so often did, any clouding of their innocence could
only be—blameless and foredoomed as they were—a reason the more for
taking risks. There were moments when, by an irresistible impulse, I
found myself catching them up and pressing them to my heart. As soon as
I had done so I used to say to myself: “What will they think of that?
Doesn’t it betray too much?” It would have been easy to get into a sad,
wild tangle about how much I might betray; but the real account, I
feel, of the hours of peace that I could still enjoy was that the
immediate charm of my companions was a beguilement still effective even
under the shadow of the possibility that it was studied. For if it
occurred to me that I might occasionally excite suspicion by the little
outbreaks of my sharper passion for them, so too I remember wondering
if I mightn’t see a queerness in the traceable increase of their own
demonstrations.

They were at this period extravagantly and preternaturally fond of me;
which, after all, I could reflect, was no more than a graceful response
in children perpetually bowed over and hugged. The homage of which they
were so lavish succeeded, in truth, for my nerves, quite as well as if
I never appeared to myself, as I may say, literally to catch them at a
purpose in it. They had never, I think, wanted to do so many things for
their poor protectress; I mean—though they got their lessons better and
better, which was naturally what would please her most—in the way of
diverting, entertaining, surprising her; reading her passages, telling
her stories, acting her charades, pouncing out at her, in disguises, as
animals and historical characters, and above all astonishing her by the
“pieces” they had secretly got by heart and could interminably recite.
I should never get to the bottom—were I to let myself go even now—of
the prodigious private commentary, all under still more private
correction, with which, in these days, I overscored their full hours.
They had shown me from the first a facility for everything, a general
faculty which, taking a fresh start, achieved remarkable flights. They
got their little tasks as if they loved them, and indulged, from the
mere exuberance of the gift, in the most unimposed little miracles of
memory. They not only popped out at me as tigers and as Romans, but as
Shakespeareans, astronomers, and navigators. This was so singularly the
case that it had presumably much to do with the fact as to which, at
the present day, I am at a loss for a different explanation: I allude
to my unnatural composure on the subject of another school for Miles.
What I remember is that I was content not, for the time, to open the
question, and that contentment must have sprung from the sense of his
perpetually striking show of cleverness. He was too clever for a bad
governess, for a parson’s daughter, to spoil; and the strangest if not
the brightest thread in the pensive embroidery I just spoke of was the
impression I might have got, if I had dared to work it out, that he was
under some influence operating in his small intellectual life as a
tremendous incitement.

If it was easy to reflect, however, that such a boy could postpone
school, it was at least as marked that for such a boy to have been
“kicked out” by a schoolmaster was a mystification without end. Let me
add that in their company now—and I was careful almost never to be out
of it—I could follow no scent very far. We lived in a cloud of music
and love and success and private theatricals. The musical sense in each
of the children was of the quickest, but the elder in especial had a
marvelous knack of catching and repeating. The schoolroom piano broke
into all gruesome fancies; and when that failed there were
confabulations in corners, with a sequel of one of them going out in
the highest spirits in order to “come in” as something new. I had had
brothers myself, and it was no revelation to me that little girls could
be slavish idolaters of little boys. What surpassed everything was that
there was a little boy in the world who could have for the inferior
age, sex, and intelligence so fine a consideration. They were
extraordinarily at one, and to say that they never either quarreled or
complained is to make the note of praise coarse for their quality of
sweetness. Sometimes, indeed, when I dropped into coarseness, I perhaps
came across traces of little understandings between them by which one
of them should keep me occupied while the other slipped away. There is
a _naïf_ side, I suppose, in all diplomacy; but if my pupils practiced
upon me, it was surely with the minimum of grossness. It was all in the
other quarter that, after a lull, the grossness broke out.

I find that I really hang back; but I must take my plunge. In going on
with the record of what was hideous at Bly, I not only challenge the
most liberal faith—for which I little care; but—and this is another
matter—I renew what I myself suffered, I again push my way through it
to the end. There came suddenly an hour after which, as I look back,
the affair seems to me to have been all pure suffering; but I have at
least reached the heart of it, and the straightest road out is
doubtless to advance. One evening—with nothing to lead up or to prepare
it—I felt the cold touch of the impression that had breathed on me the
night of my arrival and which, much lighter then, as I have mentioned,
I should probably have made little of in memory had my subsequent
sojourn been less agitated. I had not gone to bed; I sat reading by a
couple of candles. There was a roomful of old books at Bly—last-century
fiction, some of it, which, to the extent of a distinctly deprecated
renown, but never to so much as that of a stray specimen, had reached
the sequestered home and appealed to the unavowed curiosity of my
youth. I remember that the book I had in my hand was Fielding’s
_Amelia_; also that I was wholly awake. I recall further both a general
conviction that it was horribly late and a particular objection to
looking at my watch. I figure, finally, that the white curtain draping,
in the fashion of those days, the head of Flora’s little bed, shrouded,
as I had assured myself long before, the perfection of childish rest. I
recollect in short that, though I was deeply interested in my author, I
found myself, at the turn of a page and with his spell all scattered,
looking straight up from him and hard at the door of my room. There was
a moment during which I listened, reminded of the faint sense I had
had, the first night, of there being something undefinably astir in the
house, and noted the soft breath of the open casement just move the
half-drawn blind. Then, with all the marks of a deliberation that must
have seemed magnificent had there been anyone to admire it, I laid down
my book, rose to my feet, and, taking a candle, went straight out of
the room and, from the passage, on which my light made little
impression, noiselessly closed and locked the door.