James The Turn Of The Screw

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to take in, at a glance, much material testimony to Flora's rupture.
Her little belongings had all been removed. When later, by the
schoolroom fire, I was served with tea by the usual maid, I indulged,
on the article of my other pupil, in no inquiry whatever. He had his
freedom now he might have it to the end! Well, he did have it; and
it consisted in part at least of his coming in at about eight o'clock
and sitting down with me in silence. On the removal of the tea
things I had blown out the candles and drawn my chair closer: I was
conscious of a mortal coldness and felt as if I should never again be
warm. So, when he appeared, I was sitting in the glow with my
thoughts. He paused a moment by the door as if to look at me;
then as if to share them came to the other side of the hearth and
sank into a chair. We sat there in absolute stillness; yet he wanted, I
felt, to be with me.
XXI
Before a new day, in my room, had fully broken, my eyes opened
to Mrs. Grose, who had come to my bedside with worse news. Flora
was so markedly feverish that an illness was perhaps at hand; she
had passed a night of extreme unrest, a night agitated above all by
fears that had for their subject not in the least her former, but
wholly her present, governess. It was not against the possible re-
entrance of Miss Jessel on the scene that she protested it was
conspicuously and passionately against mine. I was promptly on my
feet of course, and with an immense deal to ask; the more that my
friend had discernibly now girded her loins to meet me once more.
This I felt as soon as I had put to her the question of her sense of the
child's sincerity as against my own. "She persists in denying to you
that she saw, or has ever seen, anything?"
My visitor's trouble, truly, was great. "Ah, miss, it isn't a matter on
which I can push her! Yet it isn't either, I must say, as if I much
needed to. It has made her, every inch of her, quite old."
"Oh, I see her perfectly from here. She resents, for all the world
like some high little personage, the imputation on her truthfulness
and, as it were, her respectability. 'Miss Jessel indeed SHE!' Ah,
she's 'respectable,' the chit! The impression she gave me there
yesterday was, I assure you, the very strangest of all; it was quite
beyond any of the others. I DID put my foot in it! She'll never speak
to me again."
Hideous and obscure as it all was, it held Mrs. Grose briefly silent;
then she granted my point with a frankness which, I made sure, had
more behind it. "I think indeed, miss, she never will. She do have a
grand manner about it!"
"And that manner" I summed it up "is practically what's the
matter with her now!"
Oh, that manner, I could see in my visitor's face, and not a little
else besides! "She asks me every three minutes if I think you're
coming in."
"I see I see." I, too, on my side, had so much more than worked it
out. "Has she said to you since yesterday except to repudiate her
familiarity with anything so dreadful a single other word about
Miss Jessel?"
"Not one, miss. And of course you know," my friend added, "I took
it from her, by the lake, that, just then and there at least, there WAS
nobody."
"Rather! and, naturally, you take it from her still."
"I don't contradict her. What else can I do?"
"Nothing in the world! You've the cleverest little person to deal
with. They've made them their two friends, I mean still cleverer
even than nature did; for it was wondrous material to play on! Flora
has now her grievance, and she'll work it to the end."
"Yes, miss; but to WHAT end?"
"Why, that of dealing with me to her uncle. She'll make me out to
him the lowest creature !"
I winced at the fair show of the scene in Mrs. Grose's face; she
looked for a minute as if she sharply saw them together. "And him
who thinks so well of you!"
"He has an odd way it comes over me now," I laughed," of
proving it! But that doesn't matter. What Flora wants, of course, is to
get rid of me."
My companion bravely concurred. "Never again to so much as look
at you."
"So that what you've come to me now for," I asked, "is to speed me
on my way?" Before she had time to reply, however, I had her in
check. "I've a better idea the result of my reflections. My going
WOULD seem the right thing, and on Sunday I was terribly near it.
Yet that won't do. It's YOU who must go. You must take Flora."
My visitor, at this, did speculate. "But where in the world ?"
"Away from here. Away from THEM. Away, even most of all, now,
from me. Straight to her uncle."
"Only to tell on you ?"
"No, not 'only'! To leave me, in addition, with my remedy."
She was still vague. "And what IS your remedy?"
"Your loyalty, to begin with. And then Miles's."
She looked at me hard. "Do you think he ?"
"Won't, if he has the chance, turn on me? Yes, I venture still to
think it. At all events, I want to try. Get off with his sister as soon as
possible and leave me with him alone." I was amazed, myself, at the
spirit I had still in reserve, and therefore perhaps a trifle the more
disconcerted at the way in which, in spite of this fine example of it,
she hesitated. "There's one thing, of course," I went on: "they
mustn't, before she goes, see each other for three seconds." Then it
came over me that, in spite of Flora's presumable sequestration from
the instant of her return from the pool, it might already be too late.
"Do you mean," I anxiously asked, "that they HAVE met?"
At this she quite flushed. "Ah, miss, I'm not such a fool as that! If
I've been obliged to leave her three or four times, it has been each
time with one of the maids, and at present, though she's alone, she's
locked in safe. And yet and yet!" There were too many things.
"And yet what?"
"Well, are you so sure of the little gentleman?"
"I'm not sure of anything but YOU. But I have, since last evening,
a new hope. I think he wants to give me an opening. I do believe
that poor little exquisite wretch! he wants to speak. Last evening,
in the firelight and the silence, he sat with me for two hours as if it
were just coming."
Mrs. Grose looked hard, through the window, at the gray,
gathering day. "And did it come?"
"No, though I waited and waited, I confess it didn't, and it was
without a breach of the silence or so much as a faint allusion to his
sister's condition and absence that we at last kissed for good night.
All the same," I continued, "I can't, if her uncle sees her, consent to
his seeing her brother without my having given the boy and most of
all because things have got so bad a little more time."
My friend appeared on this ground more reluctant than I could
quite understand. "What do you mean by more time?"
"Well, a day or two really to bring it out. He'll then be on MY
side of which you see the importance. If nothing comes, I shall only
fail, and you will, at the worst, have helped me by doing, on your
arrival in town, whatever you may have found possible." So I put it
before her, but she continued for a little so inscrutably embarrassed
that I came again to her aid. "Unless, indeed," I wound up, "you
really want NOT to go."
I could see it, in her face, at last clear itself; she put out her hand
to me as a pledge. "I'll go I'll go. I'll go this morning."
I wanted to be very just. "If you SHOULD wish still to wait, I
would engage she shouldn't see me."
"No, no: it's the place itself. She must leave it." She held me a
moment with heavy eyes, then brought out the rest. "Your idea's the
right one. I myself, miss "
"Well?"
"I can't stay."
The look she gave me with it made me jump at possibilities. "You [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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