“With this outbreak at last.”

“The outbreak,” I returned, “will make a tremendous occasion of
Thursday night;” and everyone so agreed with me that, in the light of
it, we lost all attention for everything else. The last story, however
incomplete and like the mere opening of a serial, had been told; we
handshook and “candlestuck,” as somebody said, and went to bed. I knew the next day that a letter containing the key had, by the first
post, gone off to his London apartments; but in spite of—or perhaps
just on account of—the eventual diffusion of this knowledge we quite
let him alone till after dinner, till such an hour of the evening, in
fact, as might best accord with the kind of emotion on which our hopes
were fixed. Then he became as communicative as we could desire and
indeed gave us his best reason for being so. We had it from him again
before the fire in the hall, as we had had our mild wonders of the
previous night. It appeared that the narrative he had promised to read
us really required for a proper intelligence a few words of prologue. Let me say here distinctly, to have done with it, that this narrative,
from an exact transcript of my own made much later, is what I shall
presently give. Poor Douglas, before his death—when it was in
sight—committed to me the manuscript that reached him on the third of
these days and that, on the same spot, with immense effect, he began to
read to our hushed little circle on the night of the fourth. The
departing ladies who had said they would stay didn’t, of course, thank
heaven, stay: they departed, in consequence of arrangements made, in a
rage of curiosity, as they professed, produced by the touches with
which he had already worked us up. But that only made his little final
auditory more compact and select, kept it, round the hearth, subject to
a common thrill. The first of these touches conveyed that the written statement took up
the tale at a point after it had, in a manner, begun. The fact to be in
possession of was therefore that his old friend, the youngest of
several daughters of a poor country parson, had, at the age of twenty,
on taking service for the first time in the schoolroom, come up to
London, in trepidation, to answer in person an advertisement that had
already placed her in brief correspondence with the advertiser. This
person proved, on her presenting herself, for judgment, at a house in
Harley Street, that impressed her as vast and imposing—this prospective
patron proved a gentleman, a bachelor in the prime of life, such a
figure as had never risen, save in a dream or an old novel, before a
fluttered, anxious girl out of a Hampshire vicarage. One could easily
fix his type; it never, happily, dies out. He was handsome and bold and
pleasant, off-hand and gay and kind. He struck her, inevitably, as
gallant and splendid, but what took her most of all and gave her the
courage she afterward showed was that he put the whole thing to her as
a kind of favor, an obligation he should gratefully incur. She
conceived him as rich, but as fearfully extravagant—saw him all in a
glow of high fashion, of good looks, of expensive habits, of charming
ways with women. He had for his own town residence a big house filled
with the spoils of travel and the trophies of the chase; but it was to
his country home, an old family place in Essex, that he wished her
immediately to proceed. He had been left, by the death of their parents in India, guardian to a
small nephew and a small niece, children of a younger, a military
brother, whom he had lost two years before. These children were, by the
strangest of chances for a man in his position—a lone man without the
right sort of experience or a grain of patience—very heavily on his
hands. It had all been a great worry and, on his own part doubtless, a
series of blunders, but he immensely pitied the poor chicks and had
done all he could; had in particular sent them down to his other house,
the proper place for them being of course the country, and kept them
there, from the first, with the best people he could find to look after
them, parting even with his own servants to wait on them and going down
himself, whenever he might, to see how they were doing. The awkward
thing was that they had practically no other relations and that his own
affairs took up all his time. He had put them in possession of Bly,
which was healthy and secure, and had placed at the head of their
little establishment—but below stairs only—an excellent woman, Mrs.
Grose, whom he was sure his visitor would like and who had formerly
been maid to his mother. She was now housekeeper and was also acting
for the time as superintendent to the little girl, of whom, without
children of her own, she was, by good luck, extremely fond. There were
plenty of people to help, but of course the young lady who should go
down as governess would be in supreme authority. She would also have,
in holidays, to look after the small boy, who had been for a term at
school—young as he was to be sent, but what else could be done?—and
who, as the holidays were about to begin, would be back from one day to
the other. There had been for the two children at first a young lady
whom they had had the misfortune to lose. She had done for them quite
beautifully—she was a most respectable person—till her death, the great
awkwardness of which had, precisely, left no alternative but the school
for little Miles. Mrs. Grose, since then, in the way of manners and
things, had done as she could for Flora; and there were, further, a
cook, a housemaid, a dairywoman, an old pony, an old groom, and an old
gardener, all likewise thoroughly respectable. So far had Douglas presented his picture when someone put a question. “And what did the former governess die of?—of so much respectability?”

Our friend’s answer was prompt. “That will come out. I don’t
anticipate.”

“Excuse me—I thought that was just what you _are_ doing.”

“In her successor’s place,” I suggested, “I should have wished to learn
if the office brought with it—”

“Necessary danger to life?” Douglas completed my thought. “She did wish
to learn, and she did learn. You shall hear tomorrow what she learned. Meanwhile, of course, the prospect struck her as slightly grim. She was
young, untried, nervous: it was a vision of serious duties and little
company, of really great loneliness. She hesitated—took a couple of
days to consult and consider. But the salary offered much exceeded her
modest measure, and on a second interview she faced the music, she
engaged.” And Douglas, with this, made a pause that, for the benefit of
the company, moved me to throw in—

“The moral of which was of course the seduction exercised by the
splendid young man. She succumbed to it.”

He got up and, as he had done the night before, went to the fire, gave
a stir to a log with his foot, then stood a moment with his back to us.