The next thing she did, however, was
to stoop straight down and pluck—quite as if it were all she was there
for—a big, ugly spray of withered fern. I instantly became sure she had
just come out of the copse. She waited for us, not herself taking a
step, and I was conscious of the rare solemnity with which we presently
approached her. She smiled and smiled, and we met; but it was all done
in a silence by this time flagrantly ominous. Mrs. Grose was the first
to break the spell: she threw herself on her knees and, drawing the
child to her breast, clasped in a long embrace the little tender,
yielding body. While this dumb convulsion lasted I could only watch
it—which I did the more intently when I saw Flora’s face peep at me
over our companion’s shoulder. It was serious now—the flicker had left
it; but it strengthened the pang with which I at that moment envied
Mrs. Grose the simplicity of _her_ relation. Still, all this while,
nothing more passed between us save that Flora had let her foolish fern
again drop to the ground. What she and I had virtually said to each
other was that pretexts were useless now. When Mrs. Grose finally got
up she kept the child’s hand, so that the two were still before me; and
the singular reticence of our communion was even more marked in the
frank look she launched me. “I’ll be hanged,” it said, “if _I’ll_
speak!”

It was Flora who, gazing all over me in candid wonder, was the first. She was struck with our bareheaded aspect. “Why, where are your
things?”

“Where yours are, my dear!” I promptly returned. She had already got back her gaiety, and appeared to take this as an
answer quite sufficient. “And where’s Miles?” she went on. There was something in the small valor of it that quite finished me:
these three words from her were, in a flash like the glitter of a drawn
blade, the jostle of the cup that my hand, for weeks and weeks, had
held high and full to the brim that now, even before speaking, I felt
overflow in a deluge. “I’ll tell you if you’ll tell _me_—” I heard
myself say, then heard the tremor in which it broke. “Well, what?”

Mrs. Grose’s suspense blazed at me, but it was too late now, and I
brought the thing out handsomely. “Where, my pet, is Miss Jessel?”


XX

Just as in the churchyard with Miles, the whole thing was upon us. Much
as I had made of the fact that this name had never once, between us,
been sounded, the quick, smitten glare with which the child’s face now
received it fairly likened my breach of the silence to the smash of a
pane of glass. It added to the interposing cry, as if to stay the blow,
that Mrs. Grose, at the same instant, uttered over my violence—the
shriek of a creature scared, or rather wounded, which, in turn, within
a few seconds, was completed by a gasp of my own. I seized my
colleague’s arm. “She’s there, she’s there!”

Miss Jessel stood before us on the opposite bank exactly as she had
stood the other time, and I remember, strangely, as the first feeling
now produced in me, my thrill of joy at having brought on a proof. She
was there, and I was justified; she was there, and I was neither cruel
nor mad. She was there for poor scared Mrs. Grose, but she was there
most for Flora; and no moment of my monstrous time was perhaps so
extraordinary as that in which I consciously threw out to her—with the
sense that, pale and ravenous demon as she was, she would catch and
understand it—an inarticulate message of gratitude. She rose erect on
the spot my friend and I had lately quitted, and there was not, in all
the long reach of her desire, an inch of her evil that fell short. This
first vividness of vision and emotion were things of a few seconds,
during which Mrs. Grose’s dazed blink across to where I pointed struck
me as a sovereign sign that she too at last saw, just as it carried my
own eyes precipitately to the child. The revelation then of the manner
in which Flora was affected startled me, in truth, far more than it
would have done to find her also merely agitated, for direct dismay was
of course not what I had expected. Prepared and on her guard as our
pursuit had actually made her, she would repress every betrayal; and I
was therefore shaken, on the spot, by my first glimpse of the
particular one for which I had not allowed. To see her, without a
convulsion of her small pink face, not even feign to glance in the
direction of the prodigy I announced, but only, instead of that, turn
at _me_ an expression of hard, still gravity, an expression absolutely
new and unprecedented and that appeared to read and accuse and judge
me—this was a stroke that somehow converted the little girl herself
into the very presence that could make me quail. I quailed even though
my certitude that she thoroughly saw was never greater than at that
instant, and in the immediate need to defend myself I called it
passionately to witness. “She’s there, you little unhappy thing—there,
there, _there_, and you see her as well as you see me!” I had said
shortly before to Mrs. Grose that she was not at these times a child,
but an old, old woman, and that description of her could not have been
more strikingly confirmed than in the way in which, for all answer to
this, she simply showed me, without a concession, an admission, of her
eyes, a countenance of deeper and deeper, of indeed suddenly quite
fixed, reprobation. I was by this time—if I can put the whole thing at
all together—more appalled at what I may properly call her manner than
at anything else, though it was simultaneously with this that I became
aware of having Mrs. Grose also, and very formidably, to reckon with. My elder companion, the next moment, at any rate, blotted out
everything but her own flushed face and her loud, shocked protest, a
burst of high disapproval. “What a dreadful turn, to be sure, miss! Where on earth do you see anything?”

I could only grasp her more quickly yet, for even while she spoke the
hideous plain presence stood undimmed and undaunted. It had already
lasted a minute, and it lasted while I continued, seizing my colleague,
quite thrusting her at it and presenting her to it, to insist with my
pointing hand. “You don’t see her exactly as _we_ see?—you mean to say
you don’t now—_now?_ She’s as big as a blazing fire! Only look, dearest
woman, _look_—!” She looked, even as I did, and gave me, with her deep
groan of negation, repulsion, compassion—the mixture with her pity of
her relief at her exemption—a sense, touching to me even then, that she
would have backed me up if she could. I might well have needed that,
for with this hard blow of the proof that her eyes were hopelessly
sealed I felt my own situation horribly crumble, I felt—I saw—my livid
predecessor press, from her position, on my defeat, and I was
conscious, more than all, of what I should have from this instant to
deal with in the astounding little attitude of Flora.