My quickness would have
to be remarkable, however, and the question of a conveyance was the
great one to settle. Tormented, in the hall, with difficulties and
obstacles, I remember sinking down at the foot of the
staircase—suddenly collapsing there on the lowest step and then, with a
revulsion, recalling that it was exactly where more than a month
before, in the darkness of night and just so bowed with evil things, I
had seen the specter of the most horrible of women. At this I was able
to straighten myself; I went the rest of the way up; I made, in my
bewilderment, for the schoolroom, where there were objects belonging to
me that I should have to take. But I opened the door to find again, in
a flash, my eyes unsealed. In the presence of what I saw I reeled
straight back upon my resistance. Seated at my own table in clear noonday light I saw a person whom,
without my previous experience, I should have taken at the first blush
for some housemaid who might have stayed at home to look after the
place and who, availing herself of rare relief from observation and of
the schoolroom table and my pens, ink, and paper, had applied herself
to the considerable effort of a letter to her sweetheart. There was an
effort in the way that, while her arms rested on the table, her hands
with evident weariness supported her head; but at the moment I took
this in I had already become aware that, in spite of my entrance, her
attitude strangely persisted. Then it was—with the very act of its
announcing itself—that her identity flared up in a change of posture. She rose, not as if she had heard me, but with an indescribable grand
melancholy of indifference and detachment, and, within a dozen feet of
me, stood there as my vile predecessor. Dishonored and tragic, she was
all before me; but even as I fixed and, for memory, secured it, the
awful image passed away. Dark as midnight in her black dress, her
haggard beauty and her unutterable woe, she had looked at me long
enough to appear to say that her right to sit at my table was as good
as mine to sit at hers. While these instants lasted, indeed, I had the
extraordinary chill of feeling that it was I who was the intruder. It
was as a wild protest against it that, actually addressing her—“You
terrible, miserable woman!”—I heard myself break into a sound that, by
the open door, rang through the long passage and the empty house. She
looked at me as if she heard me, but I had recovered myself and cleared
the air. There was nothing in the room the next minute but the sunshine
and a sense that I must stay. XVI

I had so perfectly expected that the return of my pupils would be
marked by a demonstration that I was freshly upset at having to take
into account that they were dumb about my absence. Instead of gaily
denouncing and caressing me, they made no allusion to my having failed
them, and I was left, for the time, on perceiving that she too said
nothing, to study Mrs. Grose’s odd face. I did this to such purpose
that I made sure they had in some way bribed her to silence; a silence
that, however, I would engage to break down on the first private
opportunity. This opportunity came before tea: I secured five minutes
with her in the housekeeper’s room, where, in the twilight, amid a
smell of lately baked bread, but with the place all swept and
garnished, I found her sitting in pained placidity before the fire. So
I see her still, so I see her best: facing the flame from her straight
chair in the dusky, shining room, a large clean image of the “put
away”—of drawers closed and locked and rest without a remedy. “Oh, yes, they asked me to say nothing; and to please them—so long as
they were there—of course I promised. But what had happened to you?”

“I only went with you for the walk,” I said. “I had then to come back
to meet a friend.”

She showed her surprise. “A friend—_you?_”

“Oh, yes, I have a couple!” I laughed. “But did the children give you a
reason?”

“For not alluding to your leaving us? Yes; they said you would like it
better. Do you like it better?”

My face had made her rueful. “No, I like it worse!” But after an
instant I added: “Did they say why I should like it better?”

“No; Master Miles only said, ‘We must do nothing but what she likes!’”

“I wish indeed he would. And what did Flora say?”

“Miss Flora was too sweet. She said, ‘Oh, of course, of course!’—and I
said the same.”

I thought a moment. “You were too sweet, too—I can hear you all. But
nonetheless, between Miles and me, it’s now all out.”

“All out?” My companion stared. “But what, miss?”

“Everything. It doesn’t matter. I’ve made up my mind. I came home, my
dear,” I went on, “for a talk with Miss Jessel.”

I had by this time formed the habit of having Mrs. Grose literally well
in hand in advance of my sounding that note; so that even now, as she
bravely blinked under the signal of my word, I could keep her
comparatively firm. “A talk! Do you mean she spoke?”

“It came to that. I found her, on my return, in the schoolroom.”

“And what did she say?” I can hear the good woman still, and the candor
of her stupefaction. “That she suffers the torments—!”

It was this, of a truth, that made her, as she filled out my picture,
gape. “Do you mean,” she faltered, “—of the lost?”

“Of the lost. Of the damned. And that’s why, to share them—” I faltered
myself with the horror of it. But my companion, with less imagination, kept me up. “To share them—?”

“She wants Flora.” Mrs. Grose might, as I gave it to her, fairly have
fallen away from me had I not been prepared. I still held her there, to
show I was. “As I’ve told you, however, it doesn’t matter.”

“Because you’ve made up your mind? But to what?”

“To everything.”

“And what do you call ‘everything’?”

“Why, sending for their uncle.”

“Oh, miss, in pity do,” my friend broke out. “ah, but I will, I _will!_
I see it’s the only way. What’s ‘out,’ as I told you, with Miles is
that if he thinks I’m afraid to—and has ideas of what he gains by
that—he shall see he’s mistaken. Yes, yes; his uncle shall have it here
from me on the spot (and before the boy himself, if necessary) that if
I’m to be reproached with having done nothing again about more school—”

“Yes, miss—” my companion pressed me. “Well, there’s that awful reason.”

There were now clearly so many of these for my poor colleague that she
was excusable for being vague. “But—a—which?”

“Why, the letter from his old place.”

“You’ll show it to the master?”

“I ought to have done so on the instant.”

“Oh, no!” said Mrs. Grose with decision. “I’ll put it before him,” I went on inexorably, “that I can’t undertake
to work the question on behalf of a child who has been expelled—”

“For we’ve never in the least known what!” Mrs. Grose declared. “For wickedness. For what else—when he’s so clever and beautiful and
perfect? Is he stupid? Is he untidy? Is he infirm? Is he ill-natured? He’s exquisite—so it can be only _that_; and that would open up the
whole thing.