What I had said to Mrs. Grose was true enough: there were in the matter I had put before her depths and possibilities that I lacked resolution to sound; so that when we met once more in the wonder of it we were of a common mind about the duty of resistance to extravagant fancies. We were to keep our heads if we should keep nothing else--difficult indeed as that might be in the face of what, in our prodigious experience, was least to be questioned.
Late that night, while the house slept, we had another talk in my room, when she went all the way with me as to its being beyond doubt that I had seen exactly what I had seen. To hold her perfectly in the pinch of that, I found I had only to ask her how, if I had "made it up,"
I came to be able to give, of each of the persons appearing to me, a picture disclosing, to the last detail, their special marks--a portrait on the exhibition of which she had instantly recognized and named them.
She wished of course--small blame to her!--to sink the whole subject; and I was quick to assure her that my own interest in it had now violently taken the form of a search for the way to escape from it.
I encountered her on the ground of a probability that with recurrence-- for recurrence we took for granted--I should get used to my danger, distinctly professing that my personal exposure had suddenly become the least of my discomforts. It was my new suspicion that was intolerable; and yet even to this complication the later hours of the day had brought a little ease.
On leaving her, after my first outbreak, I had of course returned to my pupils, associating the right remedy for my dismay with that sense of their charm which I had already found to be a thing I could positively cultivate and which had never failed me yet.
I had simply, in other words, plunged afresh into Flora's special society and there become aware--it was almost a luxury!-- that she could put her little conscious hand straight upon the spot that ached. She had looked at me in sweet speculation and then had accused me to my face of having "cried."
I had supposed I had brushed away the ugly signs: but I could literally--for the time, at all events--rejoice, under this fathomless charity, that they had not entirely disappeared.
To gaze into the depths of blue of the child's eyes and pronounce their loveliness a trick of premature cunning was to be guilty of a cynicism in preference to which I naturally preferred to abjure my judgment and, so far as might be, my agitation.
I couldn't abjure for merely wanting to, but I could repeat to Mrs. Grose--as I did there, over and over, in the small hours-- that with their voices in the air, their pressure on one's heart, and their fragrant faces against one's cheek, everything fell to the ground but their incapacity and their beauty.
It was a pity that, somehow, to settle this once for all, I had equally to re-enumerate the signs of subtlety that, in the afternoon, by the lake had made a miracle of my show of self-possession. It was a pity to be obliged to reinvestigate the certitude of the moment itself and repeat how it had come to me as a revelation that the inconceivable communion I then surprised was a matter, for either party, of habit.
It was a pity that I should have had to quaver out again the reasons for my not having, in my delusion, so much as questioned that the little girl saw our visitant even as I actually saw Mrs. Grose herself, and that she wanted, by just so much as she did thus see, to make me suppose she didn't, and at the same time, without showing anything, arrive at a guess as to whether I myself did! It was a pity that I needed once more to describe the portentous little activity by which she sought to divert my attention--the perceptible increase of movement, the greater intensity of play, the singing, the gabbling of nonsense, and the invitation to romp.
Yet if I had not indulged, to prove there was nothing in it, in this review, I should have missed the two or three dim elements of comfort that still remained to me. I should not for instance have been able to asseverate to my friend that I was certain--which was so much to the good--that _I_ at least had not betrayed myself.
I should not have been prompted, by stress of need, by desperation of mind--I scarce know what to call it--to invoke such further aid to intelligence as might spring from pushing my colleague fairly to the wall. She had told me, bit by bit, under pressure, a great deal; but a small shifty spot on the wrong side of it all still sometimes brushed my brow like the wing of a bat; and I remember how on this occasion--for the sleeping house and the concentration alike of our danger and our watch seemed to help--
I felt the importance of giving the last jerk to the curtain.
"I don't believe anything so horrible," I recollect saying;
"no, let us put it definitely, my dear, that I don't. But if I did, you know, there's a thing I should require now, just without sparing you the least bit more--oh, not a scrap, come!--to get out of you.