The Turn of the Screw Henry James (free books to read .TXT) 📖

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 reentrance 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