He did what he wished.”

“With _her?_”

“With them all.”

It was as if now in my friend’s own eyes Miss Jessel had again
appeared. I seemed at any rate, for an instant, to see their evocation
of her as distinctly as I had seen her by the pond; and I brought out
with decision: “It must have been also what _she_ wished!”

Mrs. Grose’s face signified that it had been indeed, but she said at
the same time: “Poor woman—she paid for it!”

“Then you do know what she died of?” I asked. “No—I know nothing. I wanted not to know; I was glad enough I didn’t;
and I thanked heaven she was well out of this!”

“Yet you had, then, your idea—”

“Of her real reason for leaving? Oh, yes—as to that. She couldn’t have
stayed. Fancy it here—for a governess! And afterward I imagined—and I
still imagine. And what I imagine is dreadful.”

“Not so dreadful as what _I_ do,” I replied; on which I must have shown
her—as I was indeed but too conscious—a front of miserable defeat. It
brought out again all her compassion for me, and at the renewed touch
of her kindness my power to resist broke down. I burst, as I had, the
other time, made her burst, into tears; she took me to her motherly
breast, and my lamentation overflowed. “I don’t do it!” I sobbed in
despair; “I don’t save or shield them! It’s far worse than I
dreamed—they’re lost!”


VIII

What I had said to Mrs. Grose was true enough: there were in the matter
I had put before her depths and possibilities that I lacked resolution
to sound; so that when we met once more in the wonder of it we were of
a common mind about the duty of resistance to extravagant fancies. We
were to keep our heads if we should keep nothing else—difficult indeed
as that might be in the face of what, in our prodigious experience, was
least to be questioned. Late that night, while the house slept, we had
another talk in my room, when she went all the way with me as to its
being beyond doubt that I had seen exactly what I had seen. To hold her
perfectly in the pinch of that, I found I had only to ask her how, if I
had “made it up,” I came to be able to give, of each of the persons
appearing to me, a picture disclosing, to the last detail, their
special marks—a portrait on the exhibition of which she had instantly
recognized and named them. She wished of course—small blame to her!—to
sink the whole subject; and I was quick to assure her that my own
interest in it had now violently taken the form of a search for the way
to escape from it. I encountered her on the ground of a probability
that with recurrence—for recurrence we took for granted—I should get
used to my danger, distinctly professing that my personal exposure had
suddenly become the least of my discomforts. It was my new suspicion
that was intolerable; and yet even to this complication the later hours
of the day had brought a little ease. On leaving her, after my first outbreak, I had of course returned to my
pupils, associating the right remedy for my dismay with that sense of
their charm which I had already found to be a thing I could positively
cultivate and which had never failed me yet. I had simply, in other
words, plunged afresh into Flora’s special society and there become
aware—it was almost a luxury!—that she could put her little conscious
hand straight upon the spot that ached. She had looked at me in sweet
speculation and then had accused me to my face of having “cried.” I had
supposed I had brushed away the ugly signs: but I could literally—for
the time, at all events—rejoice, under this fathomless charity, that
they had not entirely disappeared. To gaze into the depths of blue of
the child’s eyes and pronounce their loveliness a trick of premature
cunning was to be guilty of a cynicism in preference to which I
naturally preferred to abjure my judgment and, so far as might be, my
agitation. I couldn’t abjure for merely wanting to, but I could repeat
to Mrs. Grose—as I did there, over and over, in the small hours—that
with their voices in the air, their pressure on one’s heart, and their
fragrant faces against one’s cheek, everything fell to the ground but
their incapacity and their beauty. It was a pity that, somehow, to
settle this once for all, I had equally to re-enumerate the signs of
subtlety that, in the afternoon, by the lake had made a miracle of my
show of self-possession. It was a pity to be obliged to reinvestigate
the certitude of the moment itself and repeat how it had come to me as
a revelation that the inconceivable communion I then surprised was a
matter, for either party, of habit. It was a pity that I should have
had to quaver out again the reasons for my not having, in my delusion,
so much as questioned that the little girl saw our visitant even as I
actually saw Mrs. Grose herself, and that she wanted, by just so much
as she did thus see, to make me suppose she didn’t, and at the same
time, without showing anything, arrive at a guess as to whether I
myself did! It was a pity that I needed once more to describe the
portentous little activity by which she sought to divert my
attention—the perceptible increase of movement, the greater intensity
of play, the singing, the gabbling of nonsense, and the invitation to
romp. Yet if I had not indulged, to prove there was nothing in it, in this
review, I should have missed the two or three dim elements of comfort
that still remained to me. I should not for instance have been able to
asseverate to my friend that I was certain—which was so much to the
good—that _I_ at least had not betrayed myself. I should not have been
prompted, by stress of need, by desperation of mind—I scarce know what
to call it—to invoke such further aid to intelligence as might spring
from pushing my colleague fairly to the wall. She had told me, bit by
bit, under pressure, a great deal; but a small shifty spot on the wrong
side of it all still sometimes brushed my brow like the wing of a bat;
and I remember how on this occasion—for the sleeping house and the
concentration alike of our danger and our watch seemed to help—I felt
the importance of giving the last jerk to the curtain. “I don’t believe
anything so horrible,” I recollect saying; “no, let us put it
definitely, my dear, that I don’t. But if I did, you know, there’s a
thing I should require now, just without sparing you the least bit
more—oh, not a scrap, come!—to get out of you. What was it you had in
mind when, in our distress, before Miles came back, over the letter
from his school, you said, under my insistence, that you didn’t pretend
for him that he had not literally _ever_ been ‘bad’? He has _not_
literally ‘ever,’ in these weeks that I myself have lived with him and
so closely watched him; he has been an imperturbable little prodigy of
delightful, lovable goodness. Therefore you might perfectly have made
the claim for him if you had not, as it happened, seen an exception to
take.