Into this
attitude Mrs. Grose immediately and violently entered, breaking, even
while there pierced through my sense of ruin a prodigious private
triumph, into breathless reassurance. “She isn’t there, little lady, and nobody’s there—and you never see
nothing, my sweet! How can poor Miss Jessel—when poor Miss Jessel’s
dead and buried? _We_ know, don’t we, love?”—and she appealed,
blundering in, to the child. “It’s all a mere mistake and a worry and a
joke—and we’ll go home as fast as we can!”

Our companion, on this, had responded with a strange, quick primness of
propriety, and they were again, with Mrs. Grose on her feet, united, as
it were, in pained opposition to me. Flora continued to fix me with her
small mask of reprobation, and even at that minute I prayed God to
forgive me for seeming to see that, as she stood there holding tight to
our friend’s dress, her incomparable childish beauty had suddenly
failed, had quite vanished. I’ve said it already—she was literally, she
was hideously, hard; she had turned common and almost ugly. “I don’t
know what you mean. I see nobody. I see nothing. I never _have_. I
think you’re cruel. I don’t like you!” Then, after this deliverance,
which might have been that of a vulgarly pert little girl in the
street, she hugged Mrs. Grose more closely and buried in her skirts the
dreadful little face. In this position she produced an almost furious
wail. “Take me away, take me away—oh, take me away from _her!_”

“From _me?_” I panted. “From you—from you!” she cried. Even Mrs. Grose looked across at me dismayed, while I had nothing to do
but communicate again with the figure that, on the opposite bank,
without a movement, as rigidly still as if catching, beyond the
interval, our voices, was as vividly there for my disaster as it was
not there for my service. The wretched child had spoken exactly as if
she had got from some outside source each of her stabbing little words,
and I could therefore, in the full despair of all I had to accept, but
sadly shake my head at her. “If I had ever doubted, all my doubt would
at present have gone. I’ve been living with the miserable truth, and
now it has only too much closed round me. Of course I’ve lost you: I’ve
interfered, and you’ve seen—under _her_ dictation”—with which I faced,
over the pool again, our infernal witness—“the easy and perfect way to
meet it. I’ve done my best, but I’ve lost you. Goodbye.” For Mrs. Grose
I had an imperative, an almost frantic “Go, go!” before which, in
infinite distress, but mutely possessed of the little girl and clearly
convinced, in spite of her blindness, that something awful had occurred
and some collapse engulfed us, she retreated, by the way we had come,
as fast as she could move. Of what first happened when I was left alone I had no subsequent
memory. I only knew that at the end of, I suppose, a quarter of an
hour, an odorous dampness and roughness, chilling and piercing my
trouble, had made me understand that I must have thrown myself, on my
face, on the ground and given way to a wildness of grief. I must have
lain there long and cried and sobbed, for when I raised my head the day
was almost done. I got up and looked a moment, through the twilight, at
the gray pool and its blank, haunted edge, and then I took, back to the
house, my dreary and difficult course. When I reached the gate in the
fence the boat, to my surprise, was gone, so that I had a fresh
reflection to make on Flora’s extraordinary command of the situation. She passed that night, by the most tacit, and I should add, were not
the word so grotesque a false note, the happiest of arrangements, with
Mrs. Grose. I saw neither of them on my return, but, on the other hand,
as by an ambiguous compensation, I saw a great deal of Miles. I saw—I
can use no other phrase—so much of him that it was as if it were more
than it had ever been. No evening I had passed at Bly had the
portentous quality of this one; in spite of which—and in spite also of
the deeper depths of consternation that had opened beneath my
feet—there was literally, in the ebbing actual, an extraordinarily
sweet sadness. On reaching the house I had never so much as looked for
the boy; I had simply gone straight to my room to change what I was
wearing and to take in, at a glance, much material testimony to Flora’s
rupture. Her little belongings had all been removed. When later, by the
schoolroom fire, I was served with tea by the usual maid, I indulged,
on the article of my other pupil, in no inquiry whatever. He had his
freedom now—he might have it to the end! Well, he did have it; and it
consisted—in part at least—of his coming in at about eight o’clock and
sitting down with me in silence. On the removal of the tea things I had
blown out the candles and drawn my chair closer: I was conscious of a
mortal coldness and felt as if I should never again be warm. So, when
he appeared, I was sitting in the glow with my thoughts. He paused a
moment by the door as if to look at me; then—as if to share them—came
to the other side of the hearth and sank into a chair. We sat there in
absolute stillness; yet he wanted, I felt, to be with me. XXI

Before a new day, in my room, had fully broken, my eyes opened to Mrs.
Grose, who had come to my bedside with worse news. Flora was so
markedly feverish that an illness was perhaps at hand; she had passed a
night of extreme unrest, a night agitated above all by fears that had
for their subject not in the least her former, but wholly her present,
governess. It was not against the possible re-entrance of Miss Jessel
on the scene that she protested—it was conspicuously and passionately
against mine. I was promptly on my feet of course, and with an immense
deal to ask; the more that my friend had discernibly now girded her
loins to meet me once more. This I felt as soon as I had put to her the
question of her sense of the child’s sincerity as against my own. “She
persists in denying to you that she saw, or has ever seen, anything?”

My visitor’s trouble, truly, was great. “Ah, miss, it isn’t a matter on
which I can push her! Yet it isn’t either, I must say, as if I much
needed to. It has made her, every inch of her, quite old.”

“Oh, I see her perfectly from here. She resents, for all the world like
some high little personage, the imputation on her truthfulness and, as
it were, her respectability. ‘Miss Jessel indeed—_she!_’ Ah, she’s
‘respectable,’ the chit! The impression she gave me there yesterday
was, I assure you, the very strangest of all; it was quite beyond any
of the others. I _did_ put my foot in it! She’ll never speak to me
again.”

Hideous and obscure as it all was, it held Mrs. Grose briefly silent;
then she granted my point with a frankness which, I made sure, had more
behind it. “I think indeed, miss, she never will.