Chapter: It took of course more than that particular passage to place us together
in presence of what we had now to live with as we could--my dreadful
liability to impressions of the order so vividly exemplified, and my
companion's knowledge, henceforth--a knowledge half consternation and
half compassion--of that liability. There had been, this evening, after
the revelation left me, for an hour, so prostrate--there had been, for
either of us, no attendance on any service but a little service of tears
and vows, of prayers and promises, a climax to the series of mutual
challenges and pledges that had straightway ensued on our retreating
together to the schoolroom and shutting ourselves up there to have
everything out. The result of our having everything out was simply to
reduce our situation to the last rigor of its elements. She herself had
seen nothing, not the shadow of a shadow, and nobody in the house but
the governess was in the governess's plight; yet she accepted without
directly impugning my sanity the truth as I gave it to her, and ended by
showing me, on this ground, an awestricken tenderness, an expression
of the sense of my more than questionable privilege, of which the very
breath has remained with me as that of the sweetest of human charities.

What was settled between us, accordingly, that night, was that we
thought we might bear things together; and I was not even sure that,
in spite of her exemption, it was she who had the best of the burden. I
knew at this hour, I think, as well as I knew later, what I was capable
of meeting to shelter my pupils; but it took me some time to be wholly
sure of what my honest ally was prepared for to keep terms with so
compromising a contract. I was queer company enough--quite as queer as
the company I received; but as I trace over what we went through I see
how much common ground we must have found in the one idea that, by good
fortune, COULD steady us. It was the idea, the second movement, that led
me straight out, as I may say, of the inner chamber of my dread. I could
take the air in the court, at least, and there Mrs. Grose could join me.
Perfectly can I recall now the particular way strength came to me before
we separated for the night. We had gone over and over every feature of
what I had seen.

"He was looking for someone else, you say--someone who was not you?"

"He was looking for little Miles." A portentous clearness now possessed
me. "THAT'S whom he was looking for."

"But how do you know?"

"I know, I know, I know!" My exaltation grew. "And YOU know, my dear!"

She didn't deny this, but I required, I felt, not even so much telling
as that. She resumed in a moment, at any rate: "What if HE should see
him?"

"Little Miles? That's what he wants!"

She looked immensely scared again. "The child?"

"Heaven forbid! The man. He wants to appear to THEM." That he might was
an awful conception, and yet, somehow, I could keep it at bay; which,
moreover, as we lingered there, was what I succeeded in practically
proving. I had an absolute certainty that I should see again what I
had already seen, but something within me said that by offering myself
bravely as the sole subject of such experience, by accepting, by
inviting, by surmounting it all, I should serve as an expiatory victim
and guard the tranquility of my companions. The children, in especial,
I should thus fence about and absolutely save. I recall one of the last
things I said that night to Mrs. Grose.

"It does strike me that my pupils have never mentioned--"

She looked at me hard as I musingly pulled up. "His having been here and
the time they were with him?"

"The time they were with him, and his name, his presence, his history,
in any way."

"Oh, the little lady doesn't remember. She never heard or knew."

"The circumstances of his death?" I thought with some intensity.
"Perhaps not. But Miles would remember--Miles would know."

"Ah, don't try him!" broke from Mrs. Grose.

I returned her the look she had given me. "Don't be afraid." I continued
to think. "It IS rather odd."

"That he has never spoken of him?"

"Never by the least allusion. And you tell me they were 'great
friends'?"

"Oh, it wasn't HIM!" Mrs. Grose with emphasis declared. "It was Quint's
own fancy. To play with him, I mean--to spoil him." She paused a moment;
then she added: "Quint was much too free."

This gave me, straight from my vision of his face--SUCH a face!--a
sudden sickness of disgust. "Too free with MY boy?"

"Too free with everyone!"

I forbore, for the moment, to analyze this description further than by
the reflection that a part of it applied to several of the members of
the household, of the half-dozen maids and men who were still of our
small colony. But there was everything, for our apprehension, in the
lucky fact that no discomfortable legend, no perturbation of scullions,
had ever, within anyone's memory attached to the kind old place. It had
neither bad name nor ill fame, and Mrs. Grose, most apparently, only
desired to cling to me and to quake in silence. I even put her, the very
last thing of all, to the test. It was when, at midnight, she had her
hand on the schoolroom door to take leave. "I have it from you then--for
it's of great importance--that he was definitely and admittedly bad?"

"Oh, not admittedly. _I_ knew it--but the master didn't."

"And you never told him?"

"Well, he didn't like tale-bearing--he hated complaints. He was terribly
short with anything of that kind, and if people were all right to HIM--"

"He wouldn't be bothered with more?" This squared well enough with my
impressions of him: he was not a trouble-loving gentleman, nor so very
particular perhaps about some of the company HE kept. All the same, I
pressed my interlocutress. "I promise you _I_ would have told!"

She felt my discrimination. "I daresay I was wrong. But, really, I was
afraid."

"Afraid of what?"

"Of things that man could do. Quint was so clever--he was so deep."

I took this in still more than, probably, I showed. "You weren't afraid
of anything else? Not of his effect--?"

"His effect?" she repeated with a face of anguish and waiting while I
faltered.

"On innocent little precious lives. They were in your charge."

"No, they were not in mine!" she roundly and distressfully returned.
"The master believed in him and placed him here because he was supposed
not to be well and the country air so good for him. So he had everything
to say. Yes"--she let me have it--"even about THEM."

"Them--that creature?" I had to smother a kind of howl. "And you could
bear it!"

"No. I couldn't--and I can't now!" And the poor woman burst into tears.

A rigid control, from the next day, was, as I have said, to follow them;
yet how often and how passionately, for a week, we came back together
to the subject! Much as we had discussed it that Sunday night, I was, in
the immediate later hours in especial--for it may be imagined whether I
slept--still haunted with the shadow of something she had not told me.
I myself had kept back nothing, but there was a word Mrs. Grose had kept
back. I was sure, moreover, by morning, that this was not from a failure
of frankness, but because on every side there were fears. It seems to me
indeed, in retrospect, that by the time the morrow's sun was high I had
restlessly read into the fact before us almost all the meaning they were
to receive from subsequent and more cruel occurrences. What they gave me
above all was just the sinister figure of the living man--the dead one
would keep awhile!--and of the months he had continuously passed at Bly,
which, added up, made a formidable stretch. The limit of this evil time
had arrived only when, on the dawn of a winter's morning, Peter Quint
was found, by a laborer going to early work, stone dead on the road
from the village: a catastrophe explained--superficially at least--by a
visible wound to his head; such a wound as might have been produced--and
as, on the final evidence, HAD been--by a fatal slip, in the dark and
after leaving the public house, on the steepish icy slope, a wrong
path altogether, at the bottom of which he lay. The icy slope, the turn
mistaken at night and in liquor, accounted for much--practically, in
the end and after the inquest and boundless chatter, for everything; but
there had been matters in his life--strange passages and perils, secret
disorders, vices more than suspected--that would have accounted for a
good deal more.

I scarce know how to put my story into words that shall be a credible
picture of my state of mind; but I was in these days literally able to
find a joy in the extraordinary flight of heroism the occasion demanded
of me. I now saw that I had been asked for a service admirable and
difficult; and there would be a greatness in letting it be seen--oh, in
the right quarter!--that I could succeed where many another girl might
have failed. It was an immense help to me--I confess I rather applaud
myself as I look back!--that I saw my service so strongly and so simply.
I was there to protect and defend the little creatures in the world the
most bereaved and the most lovable, the appeal of whose helplessness had
suddenly become only too explicit, a deep, constant ache of one's own
committed heart. We were cut off, really, together; we were united in
our danger. They had nothing but me, and I--well, I had THEM. It was
in short a magnificent chance. This chance presented itself to me in an
image richly material. I was a screen--I was to stand before them. The
more I saw, the less they would. I began to watch them in a stifled
suspense, a disguised excitement that might well, had it continued too
long, have turned to something like madness. What saved me, as I now
see, was that it turned to something else altogether. It didn't last as
suspense--it was superseded by horrible proofs. Proofs, I say, yes--from
the moment I really took hold.

This moment dated from an afternoon hour that I happened to spend in the
grounds with the younger of my pupils alone. We had left Miles indoors,
on the red cushion of a deep window seat; he had wished to finish a
book, and I had been glad to encourage a purpose so laudable in a young
man whose only defect was an occasional excess of the restless. His
sister, on the contrary, had been alert to come out, and I strolled with
her half an hour, seeking the shade, for the sun was still high and the
day exceptionally warm. I was aware afresh, with her, as we went, of
how, like her brother, she contrived--it was the charming thing in both
children--to let me alone without appearing to drop me and to accompany
me without appearing to surround. They were never importunate and yet
never listless. My attention to them all really went to seeing them
amuse themselves immensely without me: this was a spectacle they seemed
actively to prepare and that engaged me as an active admirer. I walked
in a world of their invention--they had no occasion whatever to draw
upon mine; so that my time was taken only with being, for them, some
remarkable person or thing that the game of the moment required and that
was merely, thanks to my superior, my exalted stamp, a happy and highly
distinguished sinecure. I forget what I was on the present occasion;
I only remember that I was something very important and very quiet and
that Flora was playing very hard. We were on the edge of the lake, and,
as we had lately begun geography, the lake was the Sea of Azof.

Suddenly, in these circumstances, I became aware that, on the other
side of the Sea of Azof, we had an interested spectator. The way this
knowledge gathered in me was the strangest thing in the world--the
strangest, that is, except the very much stranger in which it quickly
merged itself. I had sat down with a piece of work--for I was something
or other that could sit--on the old stone bench which overlooked the
pond; and in this position I began to take in with certitude, and yet
without direct vision, the presence, at a distance, of a third person.
The old trees, the thick shrubbery, made a great and pleasant shade, but
it was all suffused with the brightness of the hot, still hour. There
was no ambiguity in anything; none whatever, at least, in the conviction
I from one moment to another found myself forming as to what I should
see straight before me and across the lake as a consequence of raising
my eyes. They were attached at this juncture to the stitching in which I
was engaged, and I can feel once more the spasm of my effort not to move
them till I should so have steadied myself as to be able to make up my
mind what to do. There was an alien object in view--a figure whose right
of presence I instantly, passionately questioned. I recollect counting
over perfectly the possibilities, reminding myself that nothing was more
natural, for instance, then the appearance of one of the men about the
place, or even of a messenger, a postman, or a tradesman's boy, from the
village. That reminder had as little effect on my practical certitude
as I was conscious--still even without looking--of its having upon the
character and attitude of our visitor. Nothing was more natural than
that these things should be the other things that they absolutely were
not.

Of the positive identity of the apparition I would assure myself as
soon as the small clock of my courage should have ticked out the right
second; meanwhile, with an effort that was already sharp enough, I
transferred my eyes straight to little Flora, who, at the moment, was
about ten yards away. My heart had stood still for an instant with the
wonder and terror of the question whether she too would see; and I
held my breath while I waited for what a cry from her, what some sudden
innocent sign either of interest or of alarm, would tell me. I waited,
but nothing came; then, in the first place--and there is something
more dire in this, I feel, than in anything I have to relate--I was
determined by a sense that, within a minute, all sounds from her had
previously dropped; and, in the second, by the circumstance that, also
within the minute, she had, in her play, turned her back to the water.
This was her attitude when I at last looked at her--looked with the
confirmed conviction that we were still, together, under direct personal
notice. She had picked up a small flat piece of wood, which happened to
have in it a little hole that had evidently suggested to her the idea
of sticking in another fragment that might figure as a mast and make
the thing a boat. This second morsel, as I watched her, she was
very markedly and intently attempting to tighten in its place. My
apprehension of what she was doing sustained me so that after some
seconds I felt I was ready for more. Then I again shifted my eyes--I
faced what I had to face.

I got hold of Mrs. Grose as soon after this as I could; and I can give
no intelligible account of how I fought out the interval. Yet I still
hear myself cry as I fairly threw myself into her arms: "They KNOW--it's
too monstrous: they know, they know!"

"And what on earth--?" I felt her incredulity as she held me.

"Why, all that WE know--and heaven knows what else besides!" Then, as
she released me, I made it out to her, made it out perhaps only now with
full coherency even to myself. "Two hours ago, in the garden"--I could
scarce articulate--"Flora SAW!"

Mrs. Grose took it as she might have taken a blow in the stomach. "She
has told you?" she panted.

"Not a word--that's the horror. She kept it to herself! The child of
eight, THAT child!" Unutterable still, for me, was the stupefaction of
it.

Mrs. Grose, of course, could only gape the wider. "Then how do you
know?"

"I was there--I saw with my eyes: saw that she was perfectly aware."

"Do you mean aware of HIM?"

"No--of HER." I was conscious as I spoke that I looked prodigious
things, for I got the slow reflection of them in my companion's face.
"Another person--this time; but a figure of quite as unmistakable horror
and evil: a woman in black, pale and dreadful--with such an air also,
and such a face!--on the other side of the lake. I was there with the
child--quiet for the hour; and in the midst of it she came."

"Came how--from where?"

"From where they come from! She just appeared and stood there--but not
so near."

"And without coming nearer?"

"Oh, for the effect and the feeling, she might have been as close as
you!"

My friend, with an odd impulse, fell back a step. "Was she someone
you've never seen?"

"Yes. But someone the child has. Someone YOU have." Then, to show how I
had thought it all out: "My predecessor--the one who died."

"Miss Jessel?"

"Miss Jessel. You don't believe me?" I pressed.

She turned right and left in her distress. "How can you be sure?"

This drew from me, in the state of my nerves, a flash of impatience.
"Then ask Flora--SHE'S sure!" But I had no sooner spoken than I caught
myself up. "No, for God's sake, DON'T! She'll say she isn't--she'll
lie!"

Mrs. Grose was not too bewildered instinctively to protest. "Ah, how CAN
you?"

"Because I'm clear. Flora doesn't want me to know."

"It's only then to spare you."

"No, no--there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see
in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don't know what I
DON'T see--what I DON'T fear!"

Mrs. Grose tried to keep up with me. "You mean you're afraid of seeing
her again?"

"Oh, no; that's nothing--now!" Then I explained. "It's of NOT seeing
her."

But my companion only looked wan. "I don't understand you."

"Why, it's that the child may keep it up--and that the child assuredly
WILL--without my knowing it."

At the image of this possibility Mrs. Grose for a moment collapsed, yet
presently to pull herself together again, as if from the positive force
of the sense of what, should we yield an inch, there would really be to
give way to. "Dear, dear--we must keep our heads! And after all, if she
doesn't mind it--!" She even tried a grim joke. "Perhaps she likes it!"

"Likes SUCH things--a scrap of an infant!"

"Isn't it just a proof of her blessed innocence?" my friend bravely
inquired.

She brought me, for the instant, almost round. "Oh, we must clutch at
THAT--we must cling to it! If it isn't a proof of what you say, it's a
proof of--God knows what! For the woman's a horror of horrors."

Mrs. Grose, at this, fixed her eyes a minute on the ground; then at last
raising them, "Tell me how you know," she said.

"Then you admit it's what she was?" I cried.

"Tell me how you know," my friend simply repeated.

"Know? By seeing her! By the way she looked."

"At you, do you mean--so wickedly?"

"Dear me, no--I could have borne that. She gave me never a glance. She
only fixed the child."

Mrs. Grose tried to see it. "Fixed her?"

"Ah, with such awful eyes!"

She stared at mine as if they might really have resembled them. "Do you
mean of dislike?"

"God help us, no. Of something much worse."

"Worse than dislike?--this left her indeed at a loss.

"With a determination--indescribable. With a kind of fury of intention."

I made her turn pale. "Intention?"

"To get hold of her." Mrs. Grose--her eyes just lingering on mine--gave
a shudder and walked to the window; and while she stood there looking
out I completed my statement. "THAT'S what Flora knows."

After a little she turned round. "The person was in black, you say?"

"In mourning--rather poor, almost shabby. But--yes--with extraordinary
beauty." I now recognized to what I had at last, stroke by stroke,
brought the victim of my confidence, for she quite visibly weighed
this. "Oh, handsome--very, very," I insisted; "wonderfully handsome. But
infamous."

She slowly came back to me. "Miss Jessel--WAS infamous." She once more
took my hand in both her own, holding it as tight as if to fortify me
against the increase of alarm I might draw from this disclosure. "They
were both infamous," she finally said.

So, for a little, we faced it once more together; and I found absolutely
a degree of help in seeing it now so straight. "I appreciate," I said,
"the great decency of your not having hitherto spoken; but the time has
certainly come to give me the whole thing." She appeared to assent to
this, but still only in silence; seeing which I went on: "I must have it
now. Of what did she die? Come, there was something between them."

"There was everything."

"In spite of the difference--?"

"Oh, of their rank, their condition"--she brought it woefully out. "SHE
was a lady."

I turned it over; I again saw. "Yes--she was a lady."

"And he so dreadfully below," said Mrs. Grose.

I felt that I doubtless needn't press too hard, in such company, on the
place of a servant in the scale; but there was nothing to prevent an
acceptance of my companion's own measure of my predecessor's abasement.
There was a way to deal with that, and I dealt; the more readily for
my full vision--on the evidence--of our employer's late clever,
good-looking "own" man; impudent, assured, spoiled, depraved. "The
fellow was a hound."

Mrs. Grose considered as if it were perhaps a little a case for a sense
of shades. "I've never seen one like him. 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!"

 Mrs. Grose accepted what the governess had to say about the appearance of the stranger without questioning anything. The governess knows what she herself is capable of to shelter her pupils, and she tells the housekeeper that the apparition was looking for little Miles. She cannot explain how she knows this, but she is sure of it. She suddenly remembers that neither of the pupils has even mentioned Peter Quint's name to her. Mrs. Grose states that Quint often took great liberties with the child. In fact, she adds, he was too free with everyone. The governess then wants to know if everyone knew that Quint was admittedly bad. Mrs. Grose knew about him, but the master suspected nothing; and she never presumed to inform, since the master didn't take well to people who bore tales and bothered him. And actually, she was afraid of what Peter Quint could do. The governess is shocked because she thinks that one would be more afraid of what effect this evil person might have on the innocent life of the young boy than of what the master or Quint would do. During the next week, Mrs. Grose and the governess talk incessantly of the appearance of this sinister figure. The governess learns that he had fallen on ice while coming home drunk from a tavern and was later found dead. Through it all, the governess discovers that she has more strength than ever and is more determined to protect her pupils from any danger. Soon after, the governess and little Flora are out by the lake when a figure appears standing on the opposite side, observing them. The governess watches to see if little Flora will take notice of the figure. She is certain that the girl sees it and only pretends to be oblivious to it. As soon as possible, the governess finds Mrs. Grose and explains that the children know of the presence of these other beings. Mrs. Grose is horrified and wants to know why the governess has come to such a conclusion. The governess explains that she was with Flora on the bank when Miss Jessel, Flora's previous governess, who died last year, appeared on the other side. Mrs. Grose is horrified and can't believe it. She wants to know how the governess was able to determine that it was Miss Jessel. The governess explains that by the way Miss Jessel looked so intently at little Flora and by the grand beauty and lady-like presence but at the same time an infamous quality that exuded from her. Then Mrs. Grose admits that Miss Jessel, in spite of her position, was familiar with Peter Quint. It is suggested that when she left her position, she couldn't return, but Mrs. Grose doesn't know exactly what Miss Jessel died of. Suddenly, the governess realizes that she can't shield or protect the young children because she fears that they are already lost.

