XXIII
The fire had died to embers in the grate, and the November dusk pressed against the great window of the schoolroom, but neither the governess nor the boy by the hearth seemed to notice. Miles stood planted before her with his hands stuffed into his pockets, looking, as he so often did, like some miniature gentleman puzzling out a problem in a world grown suddenly too large. She had asked him something about companionship, about whether he ever felt the lack of others in their sequestered life, and he had answered with a candor that made her smile falter on her lips. “They don’t much count, do they?” he said of the absent servants, of Flora, of all the busy mediocrity that surrounded them. And when she pressed him on what he meant by “much,” he wheeled away to the window and pressed his forehead against the cold pane, contemplating the stupid shrubs she knew so well and the dull flat things of November.
From the sofa where she had retreated behind the hypocrisy of her work, she watched the narrow line of his back and felt an extraordinary conviction steal over her: for the first time in the whole bewildering business, it was he who was shut in or shut out, not she. The windowpane, haunted though she knew it to be, seemed to mirror for him some failure of his own, some lapse in the strange vigilance he had kept up so bravely. He had been anxious all day, polishing his small terrors with that prodigious little genius of his, and now at last that genius faltered. He turned back to her with an air almost of surrender. “Well, I think I’m glad Bly agrees with me!”
He had been miles and miles away, he said, freer than he had ever been. She asked him if he liked it, and he answered, with a discrimination in two simple words she had never heard two words contain, “Do you?” Then, as if to soften the impertinence, he said he hoped she did not particularly mind being alone with him. “Having to do with you?” she replied, and her voice trembled. “My dear child, how can I help minding? Though I’ve renounced all claim to your company—you’re so beyond me—I at least greatly enjoy it. What else should I stay on for?”
His face, when he looked at her, struck her as the most beautiful she had ever found in it—graver now, almost solemn. “You stay on just for that?” She told him yes, that she stayed on as his friend, with the tremendous interest she took in him, until something more worth his while could be done. She reminded him of the night of the storm, when she had sat upon his bed and told him there was nothing in the world she would not do for him. He laughed, a little shakily, and parried that it had been partly to get him to do something for her. She conceded it. “But, you know, you didn’t do it.”
“Oh, yes,” he answered, brightly, “you wanted me to tell you something.” And then, as if the question could no longer be postponed: “Ah, then, is that what you’ve stayed over for?” She confessed it was. He looked round him uneasily, and she saw, with a queer throb of triumph, the very first symptom in him of the immediate approach of fear—as if he were suddenly afraid of her, which struck her, she thought, as perhaps the best thing to make him. Yet she could not be stern, and heard herself the next instant so gentle as to be almost grotesque. “You want so to go out again?”
“Awfully!” He smiled at her heroically, and the touching bravery of it was enhanced by his actually flushing with pain. He had picked up his hat and stood twirling it. She felt the perverse horror of what she was about to do. Was it not base to obtrude the idea of grossness and guilt upon a being so exquisite? They circled about each other, she pleaded, like fighters not daring to close—but it was for each other they feared. “I’ll tell you everything,” Miles said at last. “I mean I’ll tell you anything you like. You’ll stay on with me, and we shall both be all right, and I will tell you—I will. But not now.”
“Why not now?” Her insistence turned him to the window again. Then, with the air of one for whom someone outside had frankly to be reckoned with, he said: “I have to see Luke.” She had not yet, she thought, reduced him to quite so vulgar a lie, and felt proportionately ashamed; but his lies made up her truth. She knitted thoughtfully. “Well, then, go to Luke, and I’ll wait for what you promise. Only, in return for that, satisfy, before you leave me, one very much smaller request.”
He looked as if he had succeeded enough to be able still a little to bargain. “Very much smaller?” “Yes, a mere fraction of the whole. Tell me”—oh, her work preoccupied her, and she was offhand—“if, yesterday afternoon, from the table in the hall, you took, you know, my letter.”
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