Chapter 3

Her thus turning her back on me was fortunately not, for my just
preoccupations, a snub that could check the growth of our mutual
esteem. We met, after I had brought home little Miles, more intimately
than ever on the ground of my stupefaction, my general emotion: so
monstrous was I then ready to pronounce it that such a child as had
now been revealed to me should be under an interdict. I was a little
late on the scene, and I felt, as he stood wistfully looking out for me
before the door of the inn at which the coach had put him down, that I
had seen him, on the instant, without and within, in the great glow of
freshness, the same positive fragrance of purity, in which I had, from
the first moment, seen his little sister. He was incredibly beautiful,
and Mrs. Grose had put her finger on it: everything but a sort of
passion of tenderness for him was swept away by his presence. What
I then and there took him to my heart for was something divine that
I have never found to the same degree in any child--his indescribable
little air of knowing nothing in the world but love. It would have been
impossible to carry a bad name with a greater sweetness of innocence,
and by the time I had got back to Bly with him I remained merely
bewildered--so far, that is, as I was not outraged--by the sense of the
horrible letter locked up in my room, in a drawer. As soon as I could
compass a private word with Mrs. Grose I declared to her that it was
grotesque.

She promptly understood me. “You mean the cruel charge----?”

“It doesn’t live an instant. My dear woman, _look_ at him!”

She smiled at my pretension to have discovered his charm. “I
assure you, Miss, I do nothing else! What will you say, then?” she
immediately added.

“In answer to the letter?” I had made up my mind. “Nothing.”

“And to his uncle?”

I was incisive. “Nothing.”

“And to the boy himself?”

I was wonderful. “Nothing.”

She gave with her apron a great wipe to her mouth. “Then I’ll stand
by you. We’ll see it out.”

“We’ll see it out!” I ardently echoed, giving her my hand to make
it a vow.

She held me there a moment, then whisked up her apron again with her
detached hand. “Would you mind, Miss, if I used the freedom----”

“To kiss me? No!” I took the good creature in my arms and, after we
had embraced like sisters, felt still more fortified and indignant.

This, at all events, was for the time: a time so full that, as I
recall the way it went, it reminds me of all the art I now need to
make it a little distinct. What I look back at with amazement is the
situation I accepted. I had undertaken, with my companion, to see it
out, and I was under a charm, apparently, that could smooth away the
extent and the far and difficult connections of such an effort. I
was lifted aloft on a great wave of infatuation and pity. I found
it simple, in my ignorance, my confusion, and perhaps my conceit,
to assume that I could deal with a boy whose education for the world
was all on the point of beginning. I am unable even to remember at
this day what proposal I framed for the end of his holidays and the
resumption of his studies. Lessons with me, indeed, that charming
summer, we all had a theory that he was to have; but I now feel
that, for weeks, the lessons must have been rather my own. I learnt
something--at first certainly--that had not been one of the teachings
of my small, smothered life; learnt to be amused, and even amusing,
and not to think for the morrow. It was the first time, in a manner,
that I had known space and air and freedom, all the music of summer
and all the mystery of nature. And then there was consideration--and
consideration was sweet. Oh, it was a trap--not designed, but deep--to
my imagination, to my delicacy, perhaps to my vanity; to whatever,
in me, was most excitable. The best way to picture it all is to say
that I was off my guard. They gave me so little trouble--they were of
a gentleness so extraordinary. I used to speculate--but even this with
a dim disconnectedness--as to how the rough future (for all futures are
rough!) would handle them and might bruise them. They had the bloom of
health and happiness; and yet, as if I had been in charge of a pair
of little grandees, of princes of the blood, for whom everything,
to be right, would have to be enclosed and protected, the only form
that, in my fancy, the after-years could take for them was that of a
romantic, a really royal extension of the garden and the park. It may
be, of course, above all, that what suddenly broke into this gives
the previous time a charm of stillness--that hush in which something
gathers or crouches. The change was actually like the spring of a
beast.

In the first weeks the days were long; they often, at their finest,
gave me what I used to call my own hour, the hour when, for my pupils,
tea-time and bed-time having come and gone, I had, before my final
retirement, a small interval alone. Much as I liked my companions,
this hour was the thing in the day I liked most; and I liked it best
of all when, as the light faded--or rather, I should say, the day
lingered and the last calls of the last birds sounded, in a flushed
sky, from the old trees--I could take a turn into the grounds and
enjoy, almost with a sense of property that amused and flattered me,
the beauty and dignity of the place. It was a pleasure at these moments
to feel myself tranquil and justified; doubtless, perhaps, also to
reflect that by my discretion, my quiet good sense and general high
propriety, I was giving pleasure--if he ever thought of it!--to the
person to whose pressure I had responded. What I was doing was what he
had earnestly hoped and directly asked of me, and that I _could_, after
all, do it proved even a greater joy than I had expected. I dare say
I fancied myself, in short, a remarkable young woman and took comfort
in the faith that this would more publicly appear. Well, I needed to
be remarkable to offer a front to the remarkable things that presently
gave their first sign.

It was plump, one afternoon, in the middle of my very hour: the
children were tucked away and I had come out for my stroll. One of the
thoughts that, as I don’t in the least shrink now from noting, used
to be with me in these wanderings was that it would be as charming
as a charming story suddenly to meet someone. Someone would appear
there at the turn of a path and would stand before me and smile and
approve. I didn’t ask more than that--I only asked that he should
_know_; and the only way to be sure he knew would be to see it, and
the kind light of it, in his handsome face. That was exactly present
to me--by which I mean the face was--when, on the first of these
occasions, at the end of a long June day, I stopped short on emerging
from one of the plantations and coming into view of the house. What
arrested me on the spot--and with a shock much greater than any vision
had allowed for--was the sense that my imagination had, in a flash,
turned real. He did stand there!--but high up, beyond the lawn and at
the very top of the tower to which, on that first morning, little Flora
had conducted me. This tower was one of a pair--square, incongruous,
crenelated structures--that were distinguished, for some reason, though
I could see little difference, as the new and the old. They flanked
opposite ends of the house and were probably architectural absurdities,
redeemed in a measure indeed by not being wholly disengaged nor of a
height too pretentious, dating, in their gingerbread antiquity, from a
romantic revival that was already a respectable past. I admired them,
had fancies about them, for we could all profit in a degree, especially
when they loomed through the dusk, by the grandeur of their actual
battlements; yet it was not at such an elevation that the figure I had
so often invoked seemed most in place.

It produced in me, this figure, in the clear twilight, I remember, two
distinct gasps of emotion, which were, sharply, the shock of my first
and that of my second surprise. My second was a violent perception of
the mistake of my first: the man who met my eyes was not the person
I had precipitately supposed. There came to me thus a bewilderment
of vision of which, after these years, there is no living view that
I can hope to give. An unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted
object of fear to a young woman privately bred; and the figure that
faced me was--a few more seconds assured me--as little anyone else I
knew as it was the image that had been in my mind. I had not seen it
in Harley Street--I had not seen it anywhere. The place, moreover, in
the strangest way in the world, had, on the instant, and by the very
fact of its appearance, become a solitude. To me at least, making my
statement here with a deliberation with which I have never made it,
the whole feeling of the moment returns. It was as if, while I took
in--what I did take in--all the rest of the scene had been stricken
with death. I can hear again, as I write, the intense hush in which the
sounds of evening dropped. The rooks stopped cawing in the golden sky
and the friendly hour lost, for the minute, all its voice. But there
was no other change in nature, unless indeed it were a change that
I saw with a stranger sharpness. The gold was still in the sky, the
clearness in the air, and the man who looked at me over the battlements
was as definite as a picture in a frame. That’s how I thought,
with extraordinary quickness, of each person that he might have been
and that he was not. We were confronted across our distance quite long
enough for me to ask myself with intensity who then he was and to feel,
as an effect of my inability to say, a wonder that in a few instants
more became intense.

The great question, or one of these, is, afterwards, I know,
with regard to certain matters, the question of how long they
have lasted. Well, this matter of mine, think what you will of it,
lasted while I caught at a dozen possibilities, none of which made
a difference for the better, that I could see, in there having been
in the house--and for how long, above all?--a person of whom I was in
ignorance. It lasted while I just bridled a little with the sense that
my office demanded that there should be no such ignorance and no such
person. It lasted while this visitant, at all events,--and there was a
touch of the strange freedom, as I remember, in the sign of familiarity
of his wearing no hat,--seemed to fix me, from his position, with just
the question, just the scrutiny through the fading light, that his own
presence provoked. We were too far apart to call to each other, but
there was a moment at which, at shorter range, some challenge between
us, breaking the hush, would have been the right result of our straight
mutual stare. He was in one of the angles, the one away from the house,
very erect, as it struck me, and with both hands on the ledge. So
I saw him as I see the letters I form on this page; then, exactly,
after a minute, as if to add to the spectacle, he slowly changed
his place--passed, looking at me hard all the while, to the opposite
corner of the platform. Yes, I had the sharpest sense that during this
transit he never took his eyes from me, and I can see at this moment
the way his hand, as he went, passed from one of the crenelations to
the next. He stopped at the other corner, but less long, and even as
he turned away still markedly fixed me. He turned away; that was all
I knew.