It seems to me indeed, in retrospect, that by the time the
morrow’s 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 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, then 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.