二つの魔法：ねじの回転、覆い隠された結末

XIV

It was on a crisp Sunday morning, walking to church with Miles at her side and Flora ahead with Mrs. Grose, that the boy chose his moment. The air was bright and sharp, the church-bells almost gay, and the governess had been struck, with a kind of grateful wonder, by the obedience of her little charges—how they never resented her perpetual company, her pinning of the boy to her shawl. Then, with the casual sweetness that was his weapon, Miles asked: “Look here, my dear, you know—when in the world, please, am I going back to school?”

She stopped as if a tree had fallen across the road. The whole thing, she felt, was now virtually out between them. He could see the advantage he had gained; he waited, smiling his suggestive, inconclusive smile, and added that, after all, he was a fellow getting on. She managed to falter that he was indeed getting on. He played with the idea that she could not say he had not been awfully good. She laid her hand on his shoulder and admitted that she could not say it. He pressed, with childish reproach, that there had been “just that one night”—the night he had gone down, gone out of the house. He had done it, he explained with innocent extravagance, to show her he could. She felt a desperate wish to keep her wits about her. She assured him he could, that he certainly could again, but that he would not. He then took her arm and asked, with no less apparent innocence, when he was going back.

When she asked if he had been very happy at school, he was more than contented anywhere. When she suggested that, if he was happy here—his face opened with the lovely impatience of his kind. He wanted to see more life. He knew almost as much as she did, he confessed, and wanted to know more. She hurried their steps toward the church, hungry for the comparative dusk of the pew and the help of the hassock under her knees. But before they had even entered the churchyard, he threw out: “I want my own sort!” She laughed that there were not many of his own sort, unless perhaps dear little Flora. He reproached her for comparing him to a baby girl. She asked if he did not love their sweet Flora. He repeated, with charming evasion: “If I didn’t—and you too—”; and then, by a low oblong tomb among the old graves, he brought her to a halt and asked the question he had been working toward: “Does my uncle think what you think?” She was careful, but in the end she conceded that she did not think the uncle much cared. Miles stood looking at her, his face extraordinary with brightness, and said: “Then don’t you think he can be made to? In what way?” “By his coming down.” “I will!” the boy said, with an emphasis that made her feel the curtain had risen on the last act of her drama, and he marched alone into the church.