Chapter: It was not till late next day that I spoke to Mrs. Grose; the rigor with
which I kept my pupils in sight making it often difficult to meet
her privately, and the more as we each felt the importance of not
provoking--on the part of the servants quite as much as on that of the
children--any suspicion of a secret flurry or that of a discussion of
mysteries. I drew a great security in this particular from her mere
smooth aspect. There was nothing in her fresh face to pass on to others
my horrible confidences. She believed me, I was sure, absolutely: if she
hadn't I don't know what would have become of me, for I couldn't have
borne the business alone. But she was a magnificent monument to the
blessing of a want of imagination, and if she could see in our little
charges nothing but their beauty and amiability, their happiness and
cleverness, she had no direct communication with the sources of my
trouble. If they had been at all visibly blighted or battered, she would
doubtless have grown, on tracing it back, haggard enough to match them;
as matters stood, however, I could feel her, when she surveyed them,
with her large white arms folded and the habit of serenity in all her
look, thank the Lord's mercy that if they were ruined the pieces would
still serve. Flights of fancy gave place, in her mind, to a steady
fireside glow, and I had already begun to perceive how, with the
development of the conviction that--as time went on without a public
accident--our young things could, after all, look out for themselves,
she addressed her greatest solicitude to the sad case presented by their
instructress. That, for myself, was a sound simplification: I could
engage that, to the world, my face should tell no tales, but it would
have been, in the conditions, an immense added strain to find myself
anxious about hers.

At the hour I now speak of she had joined me, under pressure, on the
terrace, where, with the lapse of the season, the afternoon sun was now
agreeable; and we sat there together while, before us, at a distance,
but within call if we wished, the children strolled to and fro in one
of their most manageable moods. They moved slowly, in unison, below us,
over the lawn, the boy, as they went, reading aloud from a storybook and
passing his arm round his sister to keep her quite in touch. Mrs. Grose
watched them with positive placidity; then I caught the suppressed
intellectual creak with which she conscientiously turned to take from me
a view of the back of the tapestry. I had made her a receptacle of
lurid things, but there was an odd recognition of my superiority--my
accomplishments and my function--in her patience under my pain. She
offered her mind to my disclosures as, had I wished to mix a witch's
broth and proposed it with assurance, she would have held out a large
clean saucepan. This had become thoroughly her attitude by the time
that, in my recital of the events of the night, I reached the point of
what Miles had said to me when, after seeing him, at such a monstrous
hour, almost on the very spot where he happened now to be, I had gone
down to bring him in; choosing then, at the window, with a concentrated
need of not alarming the house, rather that method than a signal more
resonant. I had left her meanwhile in little doubt of my small hope of
representing with success even to her actual sympathy my sense of the
real splendor of the little inspiration with which, after I had got him
into the house, the boy met my final articulate challenge. As soon as I
appeared in the moonlight on the terrace, he had come to me as straight
as possible; on which I had taken his hand without a word and led him,
through the dark spaces, up the staircase where Quint had so hungrily
hovered for him, along the lobby where I had listened and trembled, and
so to his forsaken room.

Not a sound, on the way, had passed between us, and I had wondered--oh,
HOW I had wondered!--if he were groping about in his little mind for
something plausible and not too grotesque. It would tax his invention,
certainly, and I felt, this time, over his real embarrassment, a curious
thrill of triumph. It was a sharp trap for the inscrutable! He couldn't
play any longer at innocence; so how the deuce would he get out of it?
There beat in me indeed, with the passionate throb of this question an
equal dumb appeal as to how the deuce _I_ should. I was confronted at
last, as never yet, with all the risk attached even now to sounding my
own horrid note. I remember in fact that as we pushed into his little
chamber, where the bed had not been slept in at all and the window,
uncovered to the moonlight, made the place so clear that there was no
need of striking a match--I remember how I suddenly dropped, sank upon
the edge of the bed from the force of the idea that he must know how he
really, as they say, "had" me. He could do what he liked, with all his
cleverness to help him, so long as I should continue to defer to the
old tradition of the criminality of those caretakers of the young who
minister to superstitions and fears. He "had" me indeed, and in a cleft
stick; for who would ever absolve me, who would consent that I should go
unhung, if, by the faintest tremor of an overture, I were the first to
introduce into our perfect intercourse an element so dire? No, no: it
was useless to attempt to convey to Mrs. Grose, just as it is scarcely
less so to attempt to suggest here, how, in our short, stiff brush in
the dark, he fairly shook me with admiration. I was of course thoroughly
kind and merciful; never, never yet had I placed on his little shoulders
hands of such tenderness as those with which, while I rested against the
bed, I held him there well under fire. I had no alternative but, in form
at least, to put it to him.

"You must tell me now--and all the truth. What did you go out for? What
were you doing there?"

I can still see his wonderful smile, the whites of his beautiful eyes,
and the uncovering of his little teeth shine to me in the dusk. "If I
tell you why, will you understand?" My heart, at this, leaped into my
mouth. WOULD he tell me why? I found no sound on my lips to press it,
and I was aware of replying only with a vague, repeated, grimacing nod.
He was gentleness itself, and while I wagged my head at him he stood
there more than ever a little fairy prince. It was his brightness indeed
that gave me a respite. Would it be so great if he were really going to
tell me? "Well," he said at last, "just exactly in order that you should
do this."

"Do what?"

"Think me--for a change--BAD!" I shall never forget the sweetness and
gaiety with which he brought out the word, nor how, on top of it, he
bent forward and kissed me. It was practically the end of everything.
I met his kiss and I had to make, while I folded him for a minute in my
arms, the most stupendous effort not to cry. He had given exactly the
account of himself that permitted least of my going behind it, and it
was only with the effect of confirming my acceptance of it that, as I
presently glanced about the room, I could say--

"Then you didn't undress at all?"

He fairly glittered in the gloom. "Not at all. I sat up and read."

"And when did you go down?"

"At midnight. When I'm bad I AM bad!"

"I see, I see--it's charming. But how could you be sure I would know
it?"

"Oh, I arranged that with Flora." His answers rang out with a readiness!
"She was to get up and look out."

"Which is what she did do." It was I who fell into the trap!

"So she disturbed you, and, to see what she was looking at, you also
looked--you saw."

"While you," I concurred, "caught your death in the night air!"

He literally bloomed so from this exploit that he could afford radiantly
to assent. "How otherwise should I have been bad enough?" he asked.
Then, after another embrace, the incident and our interview closed on my
recognition of all the reserves of goodness that, for his joke, he had
been able to draw upon.


The particular impression I had received proved in the morning light,
I repeat, not quite successfully presentable to Mrs. Grose, though I
reinforced it with the mention of still another remark that he had made
before we separated. "It all lies in half a dozen words," I said to her,
"words that really settle the matter. 'Think, you know, what I MIGHT
do!' He threw that off to show me how good he is. He knows down to
the ground what he 'might' do. That's what he gave them a taste of at
school."

"Lord, you do change!" cried my friend.

"I don't change--I simply make it out. The four, depend upon it,
perpetually meet. If on either of these last nights you had been with
either child, you would clearly have understood. The more I've watched
and waited the more I've felt that if there were nothing else to make it
sure it would be made so by the systematic silence of each. NEVER, by a
slip of the tongue, have they so much as alluded to either of their old
friends, any more than Miles has alluded to his expulsion. Oh, yes,
we may sit here and look at them, and they may show off to us there to
their fill; but even while they pretend to be lost in their fairytale
they're steeped in their vision of the dead restored. He's not reading
to her," I declared; "they're talking of THEM--they're talking horrors!
I go on, I know, as if I were crazy; and it's a wonder I'm not. What
I've seen would have made YOU so; but it has only made me more lucid,
made me get hold of still other things."

My lucidity must have seemed awful, but the charming creatures who were
victims of it, passing and repassing in their interlocked sweetness,
gave my colleague something to hold on by; and I felt how tight she held
as, without stirring in the breath of my passion, she covered them still
with her eyes. "Of what other things have you got hold?"

"Why, of the very things that have delighted, fascinated, and yet, at
bottom, as I now so strangely see, mystified and troubled me. Their more
than earthly beauty, their absolutely unnatural goodness. It's a game,"
I went on; "it's a policy and a fraud!"

"On the part of little darlings--?"

"As yet mere lovely babies? Yes, mad as that seems!" The very act of
bringing it out really helped me to trace it--follow it all up and piece
it all together. "They haven't been good--they've only been absent. It
has been easy to live with them, because they're simply leading a
life of their own. They're not mine--they're not ours. They're his and
they're hers!"

"Quint's and that woman's?"

"Quint's and that woman's. They want to get to them."

Oh, how, at this, poor Mrs. Grose appeared to study them! "But for
what?"

"For the love of all the evil that, in those dreadful days, the pair put
into them. And to ply them with that evil still, to keep up the work of
demons, is what brings the others back."

"Laws!" said my friend under her breath. The exclamation was homely, but
it revealed a real acceptance of my further proof of what, in the bad
time--for there had been a worse even than this!--must have occurred.
There could have been no such justification for me as the plain assent
of her experience to whatever depth of depravity I found credible in
our brace of scoundrels. It was in obvious submission of memory that she
brought out after a moment: "They WERE rascals! But what can they now
do?" she pursued.

"Do?" I echoed so loud that Miles and Flora, as they passed at their
distance, paused an instant in their walk and looked at us. "Don't
they do enough?" I demanded in a lower tone, while the children, having
smiled and nodded and kissed hands to us, resumed their exhibition. We
were held by it a minute; then I answered: "They can destroy them!" At
this my companion did turn, but the inquiry she launched was a silent
one, the effect of which was to make me more explicit. "They don't know,
as yet, quite how--but they're trying hard. They're seen only across,
as it were, and beyond--in strange places and on high places, the top of
towers, the roof of houses, the outside of windows, the further edge
of pools; but there's a deep design, on either side, to shorten the
distance and overcome the obstacle; and the success of the tempters is
only a question of time. They've only to keep to their suggestions of
danger."

"For the children to come?"

"And perish in the attempt!" Mrs. Grose slowly got up, and I
scrupulously added: "Unless, of course, we can prevent!"

Standing there before me while I kept my seat, she visibly turned things
over. "Their uncle must do the preventing. He must take them away."

"And who's to make him?"

She had been scanning the distance, but she now dropped on me a foolish
face. "You, miss."

"By writing to him that his house is poisoned and his little nephew and
niece mad?"

"But if they ARE, miss?"

"And if I am myself, you mean? That's charming news to be sent him by a
governess whose prime undertaking was to give him no worry."

Mrs. Grose considered, following the children again. "Yes, he do hate
worry. That was the great reason--"

"Why those fiends took him in so long? No doubt, though his indifference
must have been awful. As I'm not a fiend, at any rate, I shouldn't take
him in."

My companion, after an instant and for all answer, sat down again and
grasped my arm. "Make him at any rate come to you."

I stared. "To ME?" I had a sudden fear of what she might do. "'Him'?"

"He ought to BE here--he ought to help."

I quickly rose, and I think I must have shown her a queerer face than
ever yet. "You see me asking him for a visit?" No, with her eyes on
my face she evidently couldn't. Instead of it even--as a woman reads
another--she could see what I myself saw: his derision, his amusement,
his contempt for the breakdown of my resignation at being left alone and
for the fine machinery I had set in motion to attract his attention to
my slighted charms. She didn't know--no one knew--how proud I had been
to serve him and to stick to our terms; yet she nonetheless took the
measure, I think, of the warning I now gave her. "If you should so lose
your head as to appeal to him for me--"

She was really frightened. "Yes, miss?"

"I would leave, on the spot, both him and you."

 After the recent incidents, the governess keeps close watch on her charges. She feels as though she could not withstand the pressure of these days if it were not for the comfort of Mrs. Grose, who apparently believes the governess' story without reservation. Even though Mrs. Grose is a good woman, she is lacking in imagination and thus could not comprehend fully the extent of the implications involved in the present danger. Thus, the governess has to explain the meaning of last night's escapades. As soon as she saw Miles in the yard, the governess went to the terrace, where Miles was able to see her. He came directly to her. Using the direct approach, she asked the reason for his being out on the lawn so late at night. Little Miles told her he did it so she would think him bad. His simple and sweet explanation was followed immediately by a genuine kiss. Miles explained how he had arranged the matter with Flora. His sister was to get up and look out the window. In this way the governess would be aroused and would then see him. After completing her narration of the preceding night to Mrs. Grose, the governess suggests that the children talk to Quint and Miss Vessel all the time. She realizes that neither pupil has even made an allusion to their old friends. She concludes that her pupils belong to them and not to her. Mrs. Grose is shocked and wonders why "Quint and that woman" continue to return. "What can they now do?" she asks. The governess explains that they return simply "for the love of all the evil that, in those dreadful days, the pair put into them." And unless something is done, the children will be destroyed. Mrs. Grose wants the governess to write immediately to the children's uncle and have him come down to solve the situation. The governess is horrified at this suggestion and reminds Mrs. Grose that the master does not like to be bothered and that he might think the story to be some "fine machinery had set in motion to attract his attention to her slighted charms." So she tells Mrs. Grose that the master is not to be disturbed. In fact, she would leave immediately if he were informed of the present difficulties.

