Chapter 1

I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops,
a little see-saw of the right throbs and the wrong. After rising,
in town, to meet his appeal, I had at all events a couple of very
bad days--found myself doubtful again, felt indeed sure I had made
a mistake. In this state of mind I spent the long hours of bumping,
swinging coach that carried me to the stopping-place at which I was
to be met by a vehicle from the house. This convenience, I was told,
had been ordered, and I found, toward the close of the June afternoon,
a commodious fly in waiting for me. Driving at that hour, on a lovely
day, through a country to which the summer sweetness seemed to offer me
a friendly welcome, my fortitude mounted afresh and, as we turned into
the avenue, encountered a reprieve that was probably but a proof of the
point to which it had sunk. I suppose I had expected, or had dreaded,
something so melancholy that what greeted me was a good surprise. I
remember as a most pleasant impression the broad, clear front, its
open windows and fresh curtains and the pair of maids looking out;
I remember the lawn and the bright flowers and the crunch of my wheels
on the gravel and the clustered treetops over which the rooks circled
and cawed in the golden sky. The scene had a greatness that made it a
different affair from my own scant home, and there immediately appeared
at the door, with a little girl in her hand, a civil person who dropped
me as decent a curtsey as if I had been the mistress or a distinguished
visitor. I had received in Harley Street a narrower notion of the
place, and that, as I recalled it, made me think the proprietor still
more of a gentleman, suggested that what I was to enjoy might be
something beyond his promise.

I had no drop again till the next day, for I was carried triumphantly
through the following hours by my introduction to the younger of my
pupils. The little girl who accompanied Mrs. Grose appeared to me on
the spot a creature so charming as to make it a great fortune to have
to do with her. She was the most beautiful child I had ever seen,
and I afterwards wondered that my employer had not told me more of
her. I slept little that night--I was too much excited; and this
astonished me too, I recollect, remained with me, adding to my sense
of the liberality with which I was treated. The large, impressive room,
one of the best in the house, the great state bed, as I almost felt it,
the full, figured draperies, the long glasses in which, for the first
time, I could see myself from head to foot, all struck me--like the
extraordinary charm of my small charge--as so many things thrown in. It
was thrown in as well, from the first moment, that I should get on with
Mrs. Grose in a relation over which, on my way, in the coach, I fear
I had rather brooded. The only thing indeed that in this early outlook
might have made me shrink again was the clear circumstance of her being
so glad to see me. I perceived within half an hour that she was so
glad--stout, simple, plain, clean, wholesome woman--as to be positively
on her guard against showing it too much. I wondered even then a little
why she should wish not to show it, and that, with reflection, with
suspicion, might of course have made me uneasy.

But it was a comfort that there could be no uneasiness in a connection
with anything so beatific as the radiant image of my little girl,
the vision of whose angelic beauty had probably more than anything
else to do with the restlessness that, before morning, made me several
times rise and wander about my room to take in the whole picture and
prospect; to watch, from my open window, the faint summer dawn, to look
at such portions of the rest of the house as I could catch, and to
listen, while, in the fading dusk, the first birds began to twitter,
for the possible recurrence of a sound or two, less natural and not
without, but within, that I had fancied I heard. There had been a
moment when I believed I recognised, faint and far, the cry of a child;
there had been another when I found myself just consciously starting as
at the passage, before my door, of a light footstep. But these fancies
were not marked enough not to be thrown off, and it is only in the
light, or the gloom, I should rather say, of other and subsequent
matters that they now come back to me. To watch, teach, “form”
little Flora would too evidently be the making of a happy and useful
life. It had been agreed between us downstairs that after this first
occasion I should have her as a matter of course at night, her small
white bed being already arranged, to that end, in my room. What I had
undertaken was the whole care of her, and she had remained, just this
last time, with Mrs. Grose only as an effect of our consideration for
my inevitable strangeness and her natural timidity. In spite of this
timidity--which the child herself, in the oddest way in the world,
had been perfectly frank and brave about, allowing it, without a sign
of uncomfortable consciousness, with the deep, sweet serenity indeed
of one of Raphael’s holy infants, to be discussed, to be imputed to
her and to determine us--I felt quite sure she would presently like
me. It was part of what I already liked Mrs. Grose herself for, the
pleasure I could see her feel in my admiration and wonder as I sat at
supper with four tall candles and with my pupil, in a high chair and a
bib, brightly facing me, between them, over bread and milk. There were
naturally things that in Flora’s presence could pass between us only
as prodigious and gratified looks, obscure and roundabout allusions.

“And the little boy--does he look like her? Is he too so very
remarkable?”

One wouldn’t flatter a child. “Oh, Miss, _most_ remarkable. If you
think well of this one!”--and she stood there with a plate in her
hand, beaming at our companion, who looked from one of us to the other
with placid heavenly eyes that contained nothing to check us.

“Yes; if I do----?”

“You _will_ be carried away by the little gentleman!”

“Well, that, I think, is what I came for--to be carried away. I’m
afraid, however,” I remember feeling the impulse to add, “I’m
rather easily carried away. I was carried away in London!”

I can still see Mrs. Grose’s broad face as she took this in. “In
Harley Street?”

“In Harley Street.”

“Well, Miss, you’re not the first--and you won’t be the last.”

“Oh, I’ve no pretension,” I could laugh, “to being the only
one. My other pupil, at any rate, as I understand, comes back
tomorrow?”

“Not tomorrow--Friday, Miss. He arrives, as you did, by the coach,
under care of the guard, and is to be met by the same carriage.”

I forthwith expressed that the proper as well as the pleasant and
friendly thing would be therefore that on the arrival of the public
conveyance I should be in waiting for him with his little sister; an
idea in which Mrs. Grose concurred so heartily that I somehow took
her manner as a kind of comforting pledge--never falsified, thank
heaven!--that we should on every question be quite at one. Oh, she was
glad I was there!

What I felt the next day was, I suppose, nothing that could be fairly
called a reaction from the cheer of my arrival; it was probably at
the most only a slight oppression produced by a fuller measure of
the scale, as I walked round them, gazed up at them, took them in,
of my new circumstances. They had, as it were, an extent and mass for
which I had not been prepared and in the presence of which I found
myself, freshly, a little scared as well as a little proud. Lessons,
in this agitation, certainly suffered some delay; I reflected that
my first duty was, by the gentlest arts I could contrive, to win the
child into the sense of knowing me. I spent the day with her out of
doors; I arranged with her, to her great satisfaction, that it should
be she, she only, who might show me the place. She showed it step by
step and room by room and secret by secret, with droll, delightful,
childish talk about it and with the result, in half an hour, of our
becoming immense friends. Young as she was, I was struck, throughout
our little tour, with her confidence and courage with the way, in
empty chambers and dull corridors, on crooked staircases that made
me pause and even on the summit of an old machicolated square tower
that made me dizzy, her morning music, her disposition to tell me so
many more things than she asked, rang out and led me on. I have not
seen Bly since the day I left it, and I dare say that to my older and
more informed eyes it would now appear sufficiently contracted. But as
my little conductress, with her hair of gold and her frock of blue,
danced before me round corners and pattered down passages, I had the
view of a castle of romance inhabited by a rosy sprite, such a place as
would somehow, for diversion of the young idea, take all colour out of
storybooks and fairy-tales. Wasn’t it just a storybook over which
I had fallen a-doze and a-dream? No; it was a big, ugly, antique,
but convenient house, embodying a few features of a building still
older, half replaced and half utilised, in which I had the fancy of
our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers in a great drifting
ship. Well, I was, strangely, at the helm!