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.

 The governess is so shocked that she must lie down for an hour. After that, she and Mrs. Grose don't go to church but rather have their own "service" of tears, prayers and promises to each other in the schoolroom. Though Mrs. Grose has not seen anything, she does not question the governess's sanity but defers to her judgment. They decide to "bear things together," and the governess is certain she can protect Miles and Flora. As they go over the sighting, the governess expresses her sudden certainty that Quint was looking for Miles and that Quint wants to appear to the children. She recalls being sure she would see the ghost again but is willing even to sacrifice herself to protect the children. She tells Mrs. Grose she finds it strange that the children have never at all mentioned Quint. Mrs. Grose says that Flora does not know that he is dead, but Miles, whom the governess promises not ask, was "great friends" with Quint. Quint liked to play with Miles and was, in the words of Mrs. Grose "much to free" with him and with "every one. The governess considers the household servants but cannot think of any stories she has heard. There are no frightening legends attached to Bly. Just at midnight, as Mrs. Grose is about to leave, the governess demands to know if Quint was "definitely and admittedly bad. Mrs. Grose reveals that the master did not know that he was, and because he did not like complaints, she never told him. Quint, who was supposedly staying at the country house for his health, was given complete control over its inhabitants - including the children, which leads Mrs. Grose to break into tears. In the following days, the governess worries that there is something Mrs. Grose has not told her and thinks about Quint's death. He had been found dead on the road to the village, and is believed, after an inquest, to have died by accident after slipping down an icy hill while drunk. There is also much gossip about his secrets and vices. The governess is able to find happiness thinking about her heroism in protecting the children. Determined to keep them from seeing anything she has, she engages in a watchfulness over them "that might well, had it continued too long, have turned into something like madness. She is saved from that, she says, by encountering proof. One afternoon, she leaves Miles reading in the house, and goes with Flora to the lake on the property. As she sews and Flora plays, she becomes aware, without looking, that there is another person present across the lake. She prepares her reaction - hoping the person is the postman or a messenger - while staring at her sewing and then looks over at Flora, worried that she will see. Suddenly turning her back to the water, Flora attempts to stick a piece of wood into a hole in another flat piece to make a boat with a mast. The governess stares at her intent efforts for several minutes before looking up across the lake.

