Though they were not angels, they “passed,”
as the French say, causing me, while they stayed, to tremble with the
fear of their addressing to their younger victims some yet more
infernal message or more vivid image than they had thought good enough
for myself. What it was most impossible to get rid of was the cruel idea that,
whatever I had seen, Miles and Flora saw _more_—things terrible and
unguessable and that sprang from dreadful passages of intercourse in
the past. Such things naturally left on the surface, for the time, a
chill which we vociferously denied that we felt; and we had, all three,
with repetition, got into such splendid training that we went, each
time, almost automatically, to mark the close of the incident, through
the very same movements. It was striking of the children, at all
events, to kiss me inveterately with a kind of wild irrelevance and
never to fail—one or the other—of the precious question that had helped
us through many a peril. “When do you think he _will_ come? Don’t you
think we _ought_ to write?”—there was nothing like that inquiry, we
found by experience, for carrying off an awkwardness. “He” of course
was their uncle in Harley Street; and we lived in much profusion of
theory that he might at any moment arrive to mingle in our circle. It
was impossible to have given less encouragement than he had done to
such a doctrine, but if we had not had the doctrine to fall back upon
we should have deprived each other of some of our finest exhibitions. He never wrote to them—that may have been selfish, but it was a part of
the flattery of his trust of me; for the way in which a man pays his
highest tribute to a woman is apt to be but by the more festal
celebration of one of the sacred laws of his comfort; and I held that I
carried out the spirit of the pledge given not to appeal to him when I
let my charges understand that their own letters were but charming
literary exercises. They were too beautiful to be posted; I kept them
myself; I have them all to this hour. This was a rule indeed which only
added to the satiric effect of my being plied with the supposition that
he might at any moment be among us. It was exactly as if my charges
knew how almost more awkward than anything else that might be for me. There appears to me, moreover, as I look back, no note in all this more
extraordinary than the mere fact that, in spite of my tension and of
their triumph, I never lost patience with them. Adorable they must in
truth have been, I now reflect, that I didn’t in these days hate them! Would exasperation, however, if relief had longer been postponed,
finally have betrayed me? It little matters, for relief arrived. I call
it relief, though it was only the relief that a snap brings to a strain
or the burst of a thunderstorm to a day of suffocation. It was at least
change, and it came with a rush. XIV

Walking to church a certain Sunday morning, I had little Miles at my
side and his sister, in advance of us and at Mrs. Grose’s, well in
sight. It was a crisp, clear day, the first of its order for some time;
the night had brought a touch of frost, and the autumn air, bright and
sharp, made the church bells almost gay. It was an odd accident of
thought that I should have happened at such a moment to be particularly
and very gratefully struck with the obedience of my little charges. Why
did they never resent my inexorable, my perpetual society? Something or
other had brought nearer home to me that I had all but pinned the boy
to my shawl and that, in the way our companions were marshaled before
me, I might have appeared to provide against some danger of rebellion. I was like a gaoler with an eye to possible surprises and escapes. But
all this belonged—I mean their magnificent little surrender—just to the
special array of the facts that were most abysmal. Turned out for
Sunday by his uncle’s tailor, who had had a free hand and a notion of
pretty waistcoats and of his grand little air, Miles’s whole title to
independence, the rights of his sex and situation, were so stamped upon
him that if he had suddenly struck for freedom I should have had
nothing to say. I was by the strangest of chances wondering how I
should meet him when the revolution unmistakably occurred. I call it a
revolution because I now see how, with the word he spoke, the curtain
rose on the last act of my dreadful drama, and the catastrophe was
precipitated. “Look here, my dear, you know,” he charmingly said, “when
in the world, please, am I going back to school?”

Transcribed here the speech sounds harmless enough, particularly as
uttered in the sweet, high, casual pipe with which, at all
interlocutors, but above all at his eternal governess, he threw off
intonations as if he were tossing roses. There was something in them
that always made one “catch,” and I caught, at any rate, now so
effectually that I stopped as short as if one of the trees of the park
had fallen across the road. There was something new, on the spot,
between us, and he was perfectly aware that I recognized it, though, to
enable me to do so, he had no need to look a whit less candid and
charming than usual. I could feel in him how he already, from my at
first finding nothing to reply, perceived the advantage he had gained. I was so slow to find anything that he had plenty of time, after a
minute, to continue with his suggestive but inconclusive smile: “You
know, my dear, that for a fellow to be with a lady _always_—!” His “my
dear” was constantly on his lips for me, and nothing could have
expressed more the exact shade of the sentiment with which I desired to
inspire my pupils than its fond familiarity. It was so respectfully
easy. But, oh, how I felt that at present I must pick my own phrases! I
remember that, to gain time, I tried to laugh, and I seemed to see in
the beautiful face with which he watched me how ugly and queer I
looked. “And always with the same lady?” I returned. He neither blanched nor winked. The whole thing was virtually out
between us. “Ah, of course, she’s a jolly, ‘perfect’ lady; but, after
all, I’m a fellow, don’t you see? that’s—well, getting on.”

I lingered there with him an instant ever so kindly. “Yes, you’re
getting on.” Oh, but I felt helpless! I have kept to this day the heartbreaking little idea of how he seemed
to know that and to play with it. “And you can’t say I’ve not been
awfully good, can you?”

I laid my hand on his shoulder, for, though I felt how much better it
would have been to walk on, I was not yet quite able. “No, I can’t say
that, Miles.”

“Except just that one night, you know—!”

“That one night?” I couldn’t look as straight as he. “Why, when I went down—went out of the house.”

“Oh, yes. But I forget what you did it for.”

“You forget?”—he spoke with the sweet extravagance of childish
reproach. “Why, it was to show you I could!”

“Oh, yes, you could.”

“And I can again.”

I felt that I might, perhaps, after all, succeed in keeping my wits
about me. “Certainly.