Why, of the very things that have delighted, fascinated, and yet, at bottom, as I now so strangely see, mystified and troubled me. Their more than earthly beauty, their absolutely unnatural goodness. Its a game, I went on; its a policy and a fraud!
On the part of little darlings?
As yet mere lovely babies? Yes, mad as that seems! The very act of bringing it out really helped me to trace itfollow it all up and piece it all together. They havent been goodtheyve only been absent. It has been easy to live with them, because theyre simply leading a life of their own. Theyre not minetheyre not ours. Theyre his and theyre hers!
Quints and that womans?
Quints and that womans. They want to get to them.
Oh, how, at this, poor Mrs. Grose appeared to study them! But for what?
For the love of all the evil that, in those dreadful days, the pair put into them. And to ply them with that evil still, to keep up the work of demons, is what brings the others back.
Laws![91] said my friend under her breath. The exclamation was homely, but it revealed a real acceptance of my further proof of what, in the bad timefor there had been a worse even than this!must have occurred. There could have been no such justification for me as the plain assent of her experience to whatever depth of depravity I found credible in our brace of scoundrels. It was in obvious submission of memory that she brought out after a moment: They were rascals! But what can they now do? she pursued.
Do? I echoed so loud that Miles and Flora, as they passed at their distance, paused an instant in their walk and looked at us. Dont they do enough? I demanded in a lower tone, while the children, having smiled and nodded and kissed hands to us, resumed their exhibition. We were held by it a minute; then I answered: They can destroy them! At this my companion did turn, but the inquiry she launched was a silent one, the effect of which was to make me more explicit. They dont know, as yet, quite howbut theyre trying hard. Theyre seen only across, as it were, and beyondin strange places and on high places, the top of towers, the roof of houses, the outside of windows, the further edge of pools; but theres a deep design, on either side, to shorten the distance and overcome the obstacle; and the success of the tempters is only a question of time. Theyve only to keep to their suggestions of danger.
For the children to come?
And perish in the attempt! Mrs. Grose slowly got up, and I scrupulously added: Unless, of course, we can prevent!
Standing there before me while I kept my seat, she visibly turned things over. Their uncle must do the preventing. He must take them away.
And whos to make him?
She had been scanning the distance, but she now dropped on me a foolish face. You, miss.
By writing to him that his house is poisoned and his little nephew and niece mad?
But if they are, miss?
And if I am myself, you mean? Thats charming news to be sent him by a governess whose prime undertaking was to give him no worry.
Mrs. Grose considered, following the children again. Yes, he do hate worry. That was the great reason
Why those fiends took him in so long? No doubt, though his indifference must have been awful. As Im not a fiend, at any rate, I shouldnt take him in.
My companion, after an instant and for all answer, sat down again and grasped my arm. Make him at any rate come to you.
I stared. To me? I had a sudden fear of what she might do. Him?
He ought to be herehe ought to help.
I quickly rose, and I think I must have shown her a queerer face than ever yet. You see me asking him for a visit? No, with her eyes on my face she evidently couldnt. Instead of it evenas a woman reads anothershe could see what I myself saw: his derision, his amusement, his contempt for the breakdown of my resignation at being left alone and for the fine machinery I had set in motion to attract his attention to my slighted charms. She didnt knowno one knewhow proud I had been to serve him and to stick to our terms; yet she nonetheless took the measure, I think, of the warning I now gave her. If you should so lose your head as to appeal to him for me
She was really frightened. Yes, miss?
I would leave, on the spot, both him and you.
XIII
It was all very well to join them, but speaking to them proved quite as much as ever an effort beyond my strengthoffered, in close quarters, difficulties as insurmountable as before. This situation continued a month, and with new aggravations and particular notes, the note above all, sharper and sharper, of the small ironic consciousness on the part of my pupils. It was not, I am as sure today as I was sure then, my mere infernal imagination: it was absolutely traceable that they were aware of my predicament and that this strange relation made, in a manner, for a long time, the air in which we moved. I dont mean that they had their tongues in their cheeks or did anything vulgar, for that was not one of their dangers: I do mean, on the other hand, that the element of the unnamed and untouched became, between us, greater than any other, and that so much avoidance could not have been so successfully effected without a great deal of tacit arrangement. It was as if, at moments, we were perpetually coming into sight of subjects before which we must stop short, turning suddenly out of alleys that we perceived to be blind, closing with a little bang that made us look at each otherfor, like all bangs, it was something louder than we had intendedthe doors we had indiscreetly opened. All roads lead to Rome,[92] and there were times when it might have struck us that almost every branch of study or subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground. Forbidden ground was the question of the return of the dead in general and of whatever, in especial, might survive, in memory, of the friends little children had lost. There were days when I could have sworn that one of them had, with a small invisible nudge, said to the other: She thinks shell do it this timebut she wont! To do it would have been to indulge for instanceand for once in a wayin some direct reference to the lady who had prepared them for my discipline. They had a delightful endless appetite for passages in my own history, to which I had again and again treated them; they were in possession of everything that had ever happened to me, had had, with every circumstance the story of my smallest adventures and of those of my brothers and sisters and of the cat and the dog at home, as well as many particulars of the eccentric nature of my father, of the furniture and arrangement of our house, and of the conversation of the old women of our village. There were things enough, taking one with another, to chatter about, if one went very fast and knew by instinct when to go round. They pulled with an art of their own the strings of my invention and my memory; and nothing else perhaps, when I thought of such occasions afterward, gave me so the suspicion of being watched from under cover. It was in any case over my life, my past, and my friends alone that we could take anything like our easea state of affairs that led them sometimes without the least pertinence to break out into sociable reminders.[93] I was invitedwith no visible connectionto repeat afresh Goody Goslings celebrated mot or to confirm the details already supplied as to the cleverness of the vicarage pony.
It was partly at such junctures as these and partly at quite different ones that, with the turn my matters had now taken, my predicament, as I have called it, grew most sensible. The fact that the days passed for me without another encounter ought, it would have appeared, to have done something toward soothing my nerves. Since the light brush, that second night on the upper landing, of the presence of a woman at the foot of the stair, I had seen nothing, whether in or out of the house, that one had better not have seen. There was many a corner round which I expected to come upon Quint, and many a situation that, in a merely sinister way, would have favored the appearance of Miss Jessel. The summer had turned, the summer had gone; the autumn had dropped upon Bly and had blown out half our lights. The place, with its gray sky and withered garlands, its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was like a theater after the performanceall strewn with crumpled playbills. There were exactly states of the air, conditions of sound and of stillness, unspeakable impressions of the kind of ministering moment, that brought back to me, long enough to catch it, the feeling of the medium[94] in which, that June evening out of doors, I had had my first sight of Quint, and in which, too, at those other instants, I had, after seeing him through the window, looked for him in vain in the circle of shrubbery. I recognized the signs, the portentsI recognized the moment, the spot. But they remained unaccompanied and empty, and I continued unmolested; if unmolested one could call a young woman whose sensibility had, in the most extraordinary fashion, not declined but deepened. I had said in my talk with Mrs. Grose on that horrid scene of Floras by the lakeand had perplexed her by so sayingthat it would from that moment distress me much more to lose my power than to keep it. I had then expressed what was vividly in my mind: the truth that, whether the children really saw or notsince, that is, it was not yet definitely provedI greatly preferred, as a safeguard, the fullness of my own exposure. I was ready to know the very worst that was to be known. What I had then had an ugly glimpse of was that my eyes might be sealed just while theirs were most opened. Well, my eyes were sealed, it appeared, at presenta consummation for which it seemed blasphemous not to thank God. There was, alas, a difficulty about that: I would have thanked him with all my soul had I not had in a proportionate measure this conviction of the secret of my pupils.