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 “grown-up” 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.

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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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?”

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

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—”

“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.”

“It won’t do _them!_— I nodded at the house.

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.”

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

“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.”

“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.

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.”

“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?_”

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

“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!”

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.”

“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?”

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.”

“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?”

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.”

“Well, he didn’t like tale-bearing—he hated complaints. He was terribly
short with anything of that kind, and if people were all right to
_him_—”

“He wouldn’t be bothered with more?” This squared well enough with my
impressions of him: he was not a trouble-loving gentleman, nor so very
particular perhaps about some of the company _he_ kept. All the same, I
pressed my interlocutress. “I promise you _I_ would have told!”

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

“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.”