二つの魔法：ねじの回転、覆い隠された結末

XV

The governess sat down on the tomb and read into his words their full meaning. He had got something out of her—proof, for him, that she was afraid, that he could use her fear to gain more freedom. The real horror was that his uncle’s arrival would mean confronting the question of why Miles had been expelled from school. She could not face the ugliness of it. She simply procrastinated, and lived from hand to mouth. Yet she could not bring herself to follow him into the church, to squeeze into the pew beside him and sit an hour under his commentary. For the first time since his arrival, she wanted to get away from him entirely.

The temptation took her, and she gave it the least encouragement. She could give the whole thing up—turn her back, retreat, drive off while the household was at worship. But when she reached the house and sank down, bewildered, on the lowest step of the staircase, she recalled with a revulsion that it was exactly there, more than a month before in the darkness, that she had seen the spectre of the most horrible of women. She straightened herself and went on up. In the schoolroom, however, her eyes were unsealed. There, at her own table, in clear noonday light, sat a figure she would have taken for some housemaid writing a letter to her sweetheart—her arms resting on the table, her hands supporting her head. Then the figure rose, with an indescribable grand melancholy of indifference, and stood there within a dozen feet of her as her vile predecessor. Dishonoured and tragic, dark as midnight, the apparition of Miss Jessel looked at her long enough to seem to say that her right to sit at that table was as good as the governess’s. There swept over the governess the extraordinary chill of a feeling that it was she who was the intruder. As a wild protest she cried aloud—“You terrible, miserable woman!”—and the sound rang through the empty house. The image passed. There was nothing in the room but the sunshine, and a sense that she must stay.