《两个魔法：螺丝在拧紧，覆盖结尾》

XIII

For an entire month the strange compact between the governess and her pupils held. She could sit with them, walk with them, teach them their lessons—but to speak freely to them proved as impossible as it had ever been, the difficulty only sharpened by their proximity. And what struck her most, looking back, was the small ironic consciousness that lived in the children’s manner. They knew exactly where the forbidden ground lay. They had, without a word exchanged on the subject, constructed a tacit arrangement by which the three of them skirted every dangerous topic as if by instinct. The governess was certain she was not imagining it. More than once she could have sworn that one child, with an invisible nudge, said to the other: “She thinks she’ll manage it this time—but she won’t.” To “manage it” would have been to speak directly of the previous governess, of the dead, of the things that lay behind. Instead, the children drew her relentlessly into the story of her own life—the eccentricities of her father, the furniture of her home, the sayings of old Goody Gosling, the cleverness of the vicarage pony. Over her past alone could they take their ease.

Meanwhile the apparitions had ceased. Since that second night on the upper landing, when something brushed past her in the dark, she had seen nothing she ought not to have seen. The summer had turned, the autumn had dropped upon Bly and blown out half the lights. The house, with its grey sky and scattered dead leaves, was like a theatre after the final performance. She recognized the portents, the particular stillnesses that had once preceded a sighting—yet nothing came, and she continued unmolested, if a young woman whose sensibility had deepened rather than declined could be called that. She had told Mrs. Grose she would rather lose her power to see than keep it, for the danger was that her own eyes might be sealed precisely when the children’s were widest. And so it seemed—they were sealed, and yet in another way they were opened, for she was now convinced the children had visitors of their own. She would have liked to cry out: “They’re here, you little wretches, and you can’t deny it!” But the children only answered with greater sociability, with tender embraces, with the inveterate kissing that always followed a moment of strain, and with the precious question—“When do you think he will come? Don’t you think we ought to write?”—about their uncle in Harley Street, which had become the perfect device for filling any awkward silence. She had even kept the children’s charming letters, all of which she judged too beautiful to be posted, and this only sharpened the irony of being plied with the supposition that the uncle might at any moment appear.