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

XVII

That evening, with the wind abroad and the rain lashing against the windows, the governess sat with Flora at peace beside her before a blank sheet of paper. She crossed at last to Miles’s door and listened. His voice tinkled out: “I say, you there—come in.” A gaiety in the gloom! She went in with her candle and found him in bed, very wide awake and very much at his ease. He had heard her, of course—she was like a troop of cavalry. He had not been asleep. He lay awake and thought. Of what? Of her, and of this queer business of theirs—the way she brought him up, and all the rest. She marked the coolness of his firm little hand. He had never, she pressed him, said a word about his old school, never mentioned a master, a comrade, or the least little thing that had happened there. He seemed to wonder, smiled with the same loveliness, gained time. “Haven’t I?” It was not for her to help him. Something in his tone and expression set her heart aching with the unutterable pathos of his little brain being taxed, under the spell laid upon him, to play a part of innocence and consistency. He accepted the present so perfectly; he had given her no inkling of anything in his previous life.

She told him he was tired of Bly. He liked Bly. He wanted to go to his uncle. He smiled and made a movement on the pillow. “Ah, you can’t get off with that!” She said she did not want to get off. He lay beautifully staring: “My uncle must come down, and you must completely settle things.” She returned, with some spirit, that if they did, it would be to take him quite away. He was exultant. “Well, don’t you understand that that’s exactly what I’m working for? You’ll have to tell him about the way you’ve let it all drop. You’ll have to tell him a tremendous lot!” He said it with admirable serenity, with positive unimpeachable gaiety—the very note that most evoked for her the poignancy, the unnatural childish tragedy, of his probable reappearance three months from now with all this bravado and still more dishonour. She threw herself upon him in the tenderness of her pity and embraced him. “Dear little Miles, dear little Miles! Is there nothing—nothing at all that you want to tell me?” He turned to face the wall, holding up his hand as sick children do. He had told her this morning. That she just want him not to worry her? No—to let him alone.

There was a singular little dignity in it, something that made her release him and yet linger. She told him she had just begun a letter to his uncle. He said, well, then, finish it. She asked what had happened before—before he came back, and before he went away. He gazed at her, his eyes meeting hers, and for the very first time she caught in the sound of his words a small faint quaver of consenting consciousness. She dropped on her knees beside the bed. “Dear little Miles, dear little Miles, if you knew how I want to help you! It’s only that, it’s nothing but that, and I’d rather die than give you a pain or do you a wrong—I’d rather die than hurt a hair of you. Dear little Miles—I just want you to help me to save you!”

But she knew in a moment she had gone too far. The answer came as an extraordinary blast and chill, a gust of frozen air, a shake of the room as great as if, in the wild wind, the casement had crashed in. The boy gave a loud, high shriek, which might have seemed, indistinctly, a note either of jubilation or of terror. She jumped to her feet. Darkness. The drawn curtains were unstirred, the window tight. “Why, the candle’s out!” she cried. “It was I who blew it, dear!” said Miles.