"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.