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.”
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126 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
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.”
HENRY JAMES 127
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,
128 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
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
grey, 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.”
HENRY JAMES 129
“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 mean that, since yesterday, you have
seen—?”
She shook her head with dignity. “I’ve heard—!”
“Heard?”
“From that child—horrors! There!” she sighed with
tragic relief. “On my honour, Miss, she says things—!” But
at this evocation she broke down; she dropped, with a sudden
sob, upon my sofa and, as I had seen her do before, gave way
to all the grief of it.
It was quite in another manner that I, for my part, let
myself go. “Oh, thank God!”
She sprang up again at this, drying her eyes with a
groan. “ ‘Thank God’?”
“It so justifies me!”
“It does that, Miss!”
I couldn’t have desired more emphasis, but I just
hesitated. “She’s so horrible?”
I saw my colleague scarce knew how to put it. “Really
shocking.”
“And about me?”
“About you, Miss—since you must have it. It’s beyond
everything, for a young lady; and I can’t think wherever she
must have picked up—”
“The appalling language she applied to me? I can,
then!” I broke in with a laugh that was doubtless significant
enough.
130 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
It only, in truth, left my friend still more grave. “Well,
perhaps I ought to also—since I’ve heard some of it before!
Yet I can’t bear it,” the poor woman went on while, with the
same movement, she glanced, on my dressing-table, at the
face of my watch. “But I must go back.”
I kept her, however. “Ah, if you can’t bear it—!”
“How can I stop with her, you mean? Why, just for that:
to get her away. Far from this,” she pursued, “far from
them—”
“She may be different? she may be free?” I seized her
almost with joy. “Then, in spite of yesterday, you believe—”
“In such doings?” Her simple description of them
required, in the light of her expression, to be carried no
further, and she gave me the whole thing as she had never
done. “I believe.”
Yes, it was a joy, and we were still shoulder to
shoulder: if I might continue sure of that I should care but
little what else happened. My support in the presence of
disaster would be the same as it had been in my early need of
confidence, and if my friend would answer for my honesty, I
would answer for all the rest. On the point of taking leave of
her, none the less, I was to some extent embarrassed.
“There’s one thing, of course—it occurs to me—to
remember. My letter, giving the alarm, will have reached
town before you.”
I now perceived still more how she had been beating
about the bush and how weary at last it had made her. “Your
letter won’t have got there. Your letter never went.”
“What then became of it?”
“Goodness knows! Master Miles—”
“Do you mean he took it?” I gasped.
She hung fire, but she overcame her reluctance. “I mean
that I saw yesterday, when I came back with Miss Flora, that
HENRY JAMES 131
it wasn’t where you had put it. Later in the evening I had the
chance to question Luke, and he declared that he had neither
noticed nor touched it.” We could only exchange, on this,
one of our deeper mutual soundings, and it was Mrs. Grose
who first brought up the plumb with an almost elate “You
see!”
“Yes, I see that if Miles took it instead he probably will
have read it and destroyed it.”
“And don’t you see anything else?”
I faced her a moment with a sad smile. “It strikes me
that by this time your eyes are open even wider than mine.”
They proved to be so indeed, but she could still blush,
almost, to show it. “I make out now what he must have done
at school.” And she gave, in her simple sharpness, an almost
droll disillusioned nod. “He stole!”
I turned it over—I tried to be more judicial. “Well—
perhaps.”
She looked as if she found me unexpectedly calm. “He
stole letters!”
She couldn’t know my reasons for a calmness after all
pretty shallow; so I showed them off as I might. “I hope then
it was to more purpose than in this case! The note, at any
rate, that I put on the table yesterday,” I pursued, “will have
given him so scant an advantage—for it contained only the
bare demand for an interview—that he is already much
ashamed of having gone so far for so little, and that what he
had on his mind last evening was precisely the need of
confession.” I seemed to myself, for the instant, to have
mastered it, to see it all. “Leave us, leave us”—I was already,
at the door, hurrying her off. “I’ll get it out of him. He’ll
meet me—he’ll confess. If he confesses, he’s saved. And if
he’s saved—”
132 THE TURN OF THE SCREW
“Then you are?” The dear woman kissed me on this,
and I took her farewell. “I’ll save you without him!” she
cried as she went.
