X
I REMAINED awhile at the top of the stair, but with the effect
presently of understanding that when my visitor had gone, he
had gone: then I returned to my room. The foremost thing I
saw there by the light of the candle I had left burning was
that Flora’s little bed was empty; and on this I caught my
breath with all the terror that, five minutes before, I had been
able to resist. I dashed at the place in which I had left her
lying and over which (for the small silk counterpane and the
sheets were disarranged) the white curtains had been
deceivingly pulled forward; then my step, to my unutterable
relief, produced an answering sound: I perceived an agitation
of the window-blind, and the child, ducking down, emerged
rosily from the other side of it. She stood there in so much of
her candour and so little of her nightgown, with her pink
bare feet and the golden glow of her curls. She looked
intensely grave, and I had never had such a sense of losing
an advantage acquired (the thrill of which had just been so
prodigious) as on my consciousness that she addressed me
with a reproach. “You naughty: where have you been?”—
instead of challenging her own irregularity I found myself
arraigned and explaining. She herself explained, for that
matter, with the loveliest, eagerest simplicity. She had
known suddenly, as she lay there, that I was out of the room,
and had jumped up to see what had become of me. I had
dropped, with the joy of her reappearance, back into my
chair—feeling then, and then only, a little faint; and she had
pattered straight over to me, thrown herself upon my knee,
given herself to be held with the flame of the candle full in
70
HENRY JAMES 71
the wonderful little face that was still flushed with sleep. I
remember closing my eyes an instant, yielding, consciously,
as before the excess of something beautiful that shone out of
the blue of her own. “You were looking for me out of the
window?” I said. “You thought I might be walking in the
grounds?”
“Well, you know, I thought someone was”—she never
blanched as she smiled out that at me.
Oh, how I looked at her now! “And did you see
anyone?”
“Ah, no!” she returned, almost with the full privilege of
childish inconsequence, resentfully, though with a long
sweetness in her little drawl of the negative.
At that moment, in the state of my nerves, I absolutely
believed she lied; and if I once more closed my eyes it was
before the dazzle of the three or four possible ways in which
I might take this up. One of these, for a moment, tempted me
with such singular intensity that, to withstand it, I must have
gripped my little girl with a spasm that, wonderfully, she
submitted to without a cry or a sign of fright. Why not break
out at her on the spot and have it all over?—give it to her
straight in her lovely little lighted face? “You see, you see,
you know that you do and that you already quite suspect I
believe it; therefore, why not frankly confess it to me, so that
we may at least live with it together and learn perhaps, in the
strangeness of our fate, where we are and what it means?”
This solicitation dropped, alas, as it came: if I could
immediately have succumbed to it I might have spared
myself—well, you’ll see what. Instead of succumbing I
sprang again to my feet, looked at her bed, and took a
helpless middle way. “Why did you pull the curtain over the
place to make me think you were still there?”
72 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
Flora luminously considered; after which, with her little
divine smile: “Because I don’t like to frighten you!”
“But if I had, by your idea, gone out—?”
She absolutely declined to be puzzled; she turned her
eyes to the flame of the candle as if the question were as
irrelevant, or at any rate as impersonal, as Mrs. Marcet or
nine-times-nine. “Oh, but you know,” she quite adequately
answered, “that you might come back, you dear, and that you
have!” And after a little, when she had got into bed, I had,
for a long time, by almost sitting on her to hold her hand, to
prove that I recognised the pertinence of my return.
You may imagine the general complexion, from that
moment, of my nights. I repeatedly sat up till I didn’t know
when; I selected moments when my room-mate
unmistakeably slept, and, stealing out, took noiseless turns in
the passage and even pushed as far as to where I had last met
Quint. But I never met him there again; and I may as well
say at once that I on no other occasion saw him in the house.
I just missed, on the staircase, on the other hand, a different
adventure. Looking down it from the top I once recognised
the presence of a woman seated on one of the lower steps
with her back presented to me, her body half bowed and her
head, in an attitude of woe, in her hands. I had been there but
an instant, however, when she vanished without looking
round at me. I knew, none the less, exactly what dreadful
face she had to show; and I wondered whether, if instead of
being above I had been below, I should have had, for going
up, the same nerve I had lately shown Quint. Well, there
continued to be plenty of chance for nerve. On the eleventh
night after my last encounter with that gentleman—they
were all numbered now—I had an alarm that perilously
skirted it and that indeed, from the particular quality of its
unexpectedness, proved quite my sharpest shock. It was
HENRY JAMES 73
precisely the first night during this series that, weary with
watching, I had felt that I might again without laxity lay
myself down at my old hour. I slept immediately and, as I
afterwards know, till about one o’clock; but when I woke it
was to sit straight up, as completely roused as if a hand had
shook me. I had left a light burning, but it was now out, and I
felt an instant certainty that Flora had extinguished it. This
brought me to my feet and straight, in the darkness, to her
bed, which I found she had left. A glance at the window
enlightened me further, and the striking of a match
completed the picture.
The child had again got up—this time blowing out the
taper, and had again, for some purpose of observation or
response, squeezed in behind the blind and was peering out
into the night. That she now saw—as she had not, I had
satisfied myself, the previous time—was proved to me by the
fact that she was disturbed neither by my re-illumination nor
by the haste I made to get into slippers and into a wrap.
Hidden, protected, absorbed, she evidently rested on the
sill—the casement opened forward—and gave herself up.
There was a great still moon to help her, and this fact had
counted in my quick decision. She was face to face with the
apparition we had met at the lake, and could now
communicate with it as she had not then been able to do.
What I, on my side, had to care for was, without disturbing
her, to reach, from the corridor, some other window in the
same quarter. I got to the door without her hearing me; I got
out of it, closed it and listened, from the other side, for some
sound from her. While I stood in the passage I had my eyes
on her brother’s door, which was but ten steps off and which,
indescribably, produced in me a renewal of the strange
impulse that I lately spoke of as my temptation. What if I
should go straight in and march to his window?—what if, by
74 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
risking to his boyish bewilderment a revelation of my
motive, I should throw across the rest of the mystery the long
halter of my boldness?
This thought held me sufficiently to make me cross to
his threshold and pause again. I preternaturally listened; I
figured to myself what might portentously be; I wondered if
his bed were also empty and he too were secretly at watch. It
was a deep, soundless minute, at the end of which my
impulse failed. He was quiet; he might be innocent; the risk
was hideous; I turned away. There was a figure in the
grounds—a figure prowling for a sight, the visitor with
whom Flora was engaged; but it was not the visitor most
concerned with my boy. I hesitated afresh, but on other
grounds and only a few seconds; then I had made my choice.
There were empty rooms at Bly, and it was only a question
of choosing the right one. The right one suddenly presented
itself to me as the lower one—though high above the
gardens—in the solid corner of the house that I have spoken
of as the old tower. This was a large, square chamber,
arranged with some state as a bedroom, the extravagant size
of which made it so inconvenient that it had not for years,
though kept by Mrs. Grose in exemplary order, been
occupied. I had often admired it and I knew my way about in
it; I had only, after just faltering at the first chill gloom of its
disuse, to pass across it and unbolt as quietly as I could one
of the shutters. Achieving this transit, I uncovered the glass
without a sound and, applying my face to the pane, was able,
the darkness without being much less than within, to see that
I commanded the right direction. Then I saw something
more. The moon made the night extraordinarily penetrable
and showed me on the lawn a person, diminished by
distance, who stood there motionless and as if fascinated,
looking up to where I had appeared—looking, that is, not so
HENRY JAMES 75
much straight at me as at something that was apparently
above me. There was clearly another person above me—
there was a person on the tower; but the presence on the
lawn was not in the least what I had conceived and had
confidently hurried to meet. The presence on the lawn—I felt
sick as I made it out—was poor little Miles himself.
