I stay on as your friend and from the tremendous interest I
take in you till something can be done for you that may be more worth
your while. That needn’t surprise you.” My voice trembled so that I
felt it impossible to suppress the shake. “Don’t you remember how I
told you, when I came and sat on your bed the night of the storm, that
there was nothing in the world I wouldn’t do for you?”

“Yes, yes!” He, on his side, more and more visibly nervous, had a tone
to master; but he was so much more successful than I that, laughing out
through his gravity, he could pretend we were pleasantly jesting. “Only
that, I think, was to get me to do something for _you!_”

“It was partly to get you to do something,” I conceded. “But, you know,
you didn’t do it.”

“Oh, yes,” he said with the brightest superficial eagerness, “you
wanted me to tell you something.”

“That’s it. Out, straight out. What you have on your mind, you know.”

“Ah, then, is _that_ what you’ve stayed over for?”

He spoke with a gaiety through which I could still catch the finest
little quiver of resentful passion; but I can’t begin to express the
effect upon me of an implication of surrender even so faint. It was as
if what I had yearned for had come at last only to astonish me. “Well,
yes—I may as well make a clean breast of it, it was precisely for
that.”

He waited so long that I supposed it for the purpose of repudiating the
assumption on which my action had been founded; but what he finally
said was: “Do you mean now—here?”

“There couldn’t be a better place or time.” He looked round him
uneasily, and I had the rare—oh, the queer!—impression of the very
first symptom I had seen in him of the approach of immediate fear. It
was as if he were suddenly afraid of me—which struck me indeed as
perhaps the best thing to make him. Yet in the very pang of the effort
I felt it vain to try sternness, and I heard myself the next instant so
gentle as to be almost grotesque. “You want so to go out again?”

“Awfully!” He smiled at me heroically, and the touching little bravery
of it was enhanced by his actually flushing with pain. He had picked up
his hat, which he had brought in, and stood twirling it in a way that
gave me, even as I was just nearly reaching port, a perverse horror of
what I was doing. To do it in _any_ way was an act of violence, for
what did it consist of but the obtrusion of the idea of grossness and
guilt on a small helpless creature who had been for me a revelation of
the possibilities of beautiful intercourse? Wasn’t it base to create
for a being so exquisite a mere alien awkwardness? I suppose I now read
into our situation a clearness it couldn’t have had at the time, for I
seem to see our poor eyes already lighted with some spark of a
prevision of the anguish that was to come. So we circled about, with
terrors and scruples, like fighters not daring to close. But it was for
each other we feared! That kept us a little longer suspended and
unbruised. “I’ll tell you everything,” Miles said—“I mean I’ll tell you
anything you like. You’ll stay on with me, and we shall both be all
right, and I _will_ tell you—I _will_. But not now.”

“Why not now?”

My insistence turned him from me and kept him once more at his window
in a silence during which, between us, you might have heard a pin drop. Then he was before me again with the air of a person for whom, outside,
someone who had frankly to be reckoned with was waiting. “I have to see
Luke.”

I had not yet reduced him to quite so vulgar a lie, and I felt
proportionately ashamed. But, horrible as it was, his lies made up my
truth. I achieved thoughtfully a few loops of my knitting. “Well, then,
go to Luke, and I’ll wait for what you promise. Only, in return for
that, satisfy, before you leave me, one very much smaller request.”

He looked as if he felt he had succeeded enough to be able still a
little to bargain. “Very much smaller—?”

“Yes, a mere fraction of the whole. Tell me”—oh, my work preoccupied
me, and I was offhand!—“if, yesterday afternoon, from the table in the
hall, you took, you know, my letter.”


XXIV

My sense of how he received this suffered for a minute from something
that I can describe only as a fierce split of my attention—a stroke
that at first, as I sprang straight up, reduced me to the mere blind
movement of getting hold of him, drawing him close, and, while I just
fell for support against the nearest piece of furniture, instinctively
keeping him with his back to the window. The appearance was full upon
us that I had already had to deal with here: Peter Quint had come into
view like a sentinel before a prison. The next thing I saw was that,
from outside, he had reached the window, and then I knew that, close to
the glass and glaring in through it, he offered once more to the room
his white face of damnation. It represents but grossly what took place
within me at the sight to say that on the second my decision was made;
yet I believe that no woman so overwhelmed ever in so short a time
recovered her grasp of the _act_. It came to me in the very horror of
the immediate presence that the act would be, seeing and facing what I
saw and faced, to keep the boy himself unaware. The inspiration—I can
call it by no other name—was that I felt how voluntarily, how
transcendently, I _might_. It was like fighting with a demon for a
human soul, and when I had fairly so appraised it I saw how the human
soul—held out, in the tremor of my hands, at arm’s length—had a perfect
dew of sweat on a lovely childish forehead. The face that was close to
mine was as white as the face against the glass, and out of it
presently came a sound, not low nor weak, but as if from much further
away, that I drank like a waft of fragrance. “Yes—I took it.”

At this, with a moan of joy, I enfolded, I drew him close; and while I
held him to my breast, where I could feel in the sudden fever of his
little body the tremendous pulse of his little heart, I kept my eyes on
the thing at the window and saw it move and shift its posture. I have
likened it to a sentinel, but its slow wheel, for a moment, was rather
the prowl of a baffled beast. My present quickened courage, however,
was such that, not too much to let it through, I had to shade, as it
were, my flame. Meanwhile the glare of the face was again at the
window, the scoundrel fixed as if to watch and wait. It was the very
confidence that I might now defy him, as well as the positive
certitude, by this time, of the child’s unconsciousness, that made me
go on. “What did you take it for?”

“To see what you said about me.”

“You opened the letter?”

“I opened it.”

My eyes were now, as I held him off a little again, on Miles’s own
face, in which the collapse of mockery showed me how complete was the
ravage of uneasiness.