He was looking for someone else, you saysomeone who was not you?
He was looking for little Miles. A portentous clearness now possessed me. Thats 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 didnt 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? Thats what he wants!
She looked immensely scared again. The child?
Heaven forbid![52] The man. He wants to appear to them. That he might was an awful conception, and yet, somehow, I could keep it at bay;[53] 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 doesnt remember. She never heard or knew.
The circumstances of his death? I thought with some intensity. Perhaps not. But Miles would rememberMiles would know.
Ah, dont try him![54] broke from Mrs. Grose.
I returned her the look she had given me. Dont 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 wasnt him! Mrs. Grose with emphasis declared. It was Quints own fancy. To play with him, I meanto spoil him. She paused a moment; then she added: Quint was much too free.[55]
This gave me, straight from my vision of his facesuch 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 anyones memory attached to the kind old place. It had neither bad name nor ill fame,[56] 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 thenfor its of great importancethat he was definitely and admittedly bad?
Oh, not admittedly. I knew itbut the master didnt.
And you never told him?
Well, he didnt like tale-bearinghe hated complaints.[57] He was terribly short with anything of that kind, and if people were all right to him
He wouldnt 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 cleverhe was so deep.[58]
I took this in still more than, probably, I showed. You werent 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. Yesshe let me have iteven about them.
Themthat creature? I had to smother a kind of howl. And you could bear it!
No. I couldntand I cant now! And the poor woman burst into tears.
A rigid control, from the next day, was, as I have said, to follow them;[59] 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 especialfor it may be imagined whether I sleptstill 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 morrows 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 manthe 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 winters morning, Peter Quint was found, by a laborer going to early work, stone dead on the road from the village: a catastrophe explainedsuperficially at leastby a visible wound to his head; such a wound as might have been producedand as, on the final evidence, had beenby 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 muchpractically, in the end and after the inquest and boundless chatter, for everything; but there had been matters in his lifestrange passages and perils, secret disorders, vices more than suspectedthat 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 seenoh, in the right quarter!that I could succeed where many another girl might have failed. It was an immense help to meI 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 ones own committed heart. We were cut off, really, together; we were united in our danger. They had nothing but me, and Iwell, I had them. It was in short a magnificent chance. This chance presented itself to me in an image richly material. I was a screenI was to stand before them.[60] 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 didnt last as suspenseit was superseded by horrible proofs. Proofs, I say, yesfrom 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 contrivedit was the charming thing in both childrento 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 inventionthey 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.[61]