二つの魔法：ねじの回転、覆い隠された結末

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.