The Two Magics: The Turn of the Screw, Covering End

X

When she crept back to her room, the candle still burning on the table, she saw at once that Flora’s little bed was empty. Her heart clawed at her chest — and then Flora herself ducked out from behind the window-blind, rosy, barefoot, golden-curled, indignant. “You naughty: where have you been?” she demanded, as though it were the governess who had committed the offense. The child explained, with the prettiest, blithest innocence, that she had waked and found the room empty and had simply gone to the window to look for her. When the governess asked if she had seen anyone, Flora answered, almost reproachfully, with a slow little Ah, no! — and in the state of her nerves, the governess absolutely believed her small companion was lying. For a moment, the temptation to seize the child by the shoulders and wring the truth from her was almost overpowering. But she could not bring herself to do it, and the chance slipped past her. After Flora had been tucked back into bed, the governess began a long vigil of her own: nights of slipping out into the corridor, of pacing past the spot where she had met Quint, of never quite finding him again. Once, from the top of the stairs, she glimpsed a woman seated below, bowed in an attitude of woe; the figure vanished before she could descend. On another night — the eleventh after her latest encounter with Quint — she woke to find her candle extinguished and Flora once more squeezed behind the blind, peering into the night. The child was not roused by the match the governess struck, but stood absorbed, fixed upon the apparition on the lawn. The governess, her mind suddenly seized by a wild impulse, almost went straight to Miles’s room — but checked herself, fearing to alarm him. Instead she slipped into a disused corner chamber of the old tower, unbolted a shutter, and looked out. There on the lawn, far below, stood a small figure gazing up not at her but at something above her: Miles, the boy himself, out alone in the dead of night.

XI

It was late the following day before she could speak with Mrs. Grose. They sat together on the terrace while, in the distance, the children strolled in their prettiest manner, Miles reading aloud to Flora with his arm around her. The governess told her everything: how she had seen the boy on the lawn, how she had gone down and led him silently through the dark house, up the staircase where Quint had hovered, and into his own chamber. There, in the moonlight, she had forced herself to put the question. “What did you go out for? What were you doing there?” Miles had smiled his wonderful smile, the whites of his eyes catching the dusk. “If I tell you why, will you understand?” he asked, and waited. She could only nod. “Just exactly in order that you should do this,” he said. “Think me — for a change — bad!” Then he had bent and kissed her, and she had held him, fighting down the wildest urge to weep. Yes, he had undressed — no, not at all, he had sat up and read. Yes, he had gone down at midnight. Yes, he had arranged it with Flora, who was to get up and look out, so that the governess would see and come down too. “How otherwise should I have been bad enough?” he asked, radiant with the success of his exploit. She could not, in the long aftermath, decide whether she had trapped him or been trapped herself.

XII

By the next morning, in clearer daylight, the impression was harder to set down, yet she tried. “It all lies in half-a-dozen words,” she told Mrs. Grose. “Think, you know, what I might do!” That was what he had meant: he knew, down to the ground, the full measure of the evil within his power. That, she was certain, was the taste he had given them at school. The four — the two living, the two dead — perpetually met, in some sphere beyond the governess’s reach, and the children’s unnatural goodness, their unearthly beauty, was itself the proof. They were not hers; they were not anyone’s at Bly. They were Quint’s and the woman’s, and they were reaching for their old masters with the steady patience of the damned. The tempters were shortening the distance, she cried — seen only across, on towers and rooftops, the edges of pools, the outside of windows — but a deep design was at work, and it was only a question of time. “They can destroy them!” she said, and Mrs. Grose, after a long stare at the children on the lawn, agreed that the uncle must be told, must come, must take them away. “You, Miss,” she said, almost foolishly. But the governess rose with a strange, sharp face. If she were to write to the master that his house was poisoned and his nephew and niece were mad — and, by implication, that she herself was mad — what then? He hated worry; that was why the ghosts had fastened on the place so long. She was no fiend, and she would not stoop to a confession that would only make her the object of his derision. She gave Mrs. Grose, at last, her warning. If her friend were ever to appeal to the master on her behalf, she would leave him, leave Bly, leave them all — and the children, far below, smiled and kissed their hands and went on with their little fairy-tale, in which the governess was the only one who could not pretend.