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Mrs. Grose’s round face blanched as the description unfolded. When the governess pressed—dressed in somebody’s clothes, smart but not his own?—the housekeeper broke into a breathless groan. They were the master’s. She faltered but a moment before she cried the name: Peter Quint, the master’s own man, his valet when he was here last year. He never wore his hat, but he did wear waistcoats—some of them missing. When the master went, Quint was alone, in charge of the household. What became of him? He died. On a winter’s morning, stone dead on the road from the village. Such a catastrophe as the icy slope could explain. The governess could barely whisper the word.
VI
That night, in the schoolroom, the two women had everything out. Mrs. Grose had seen nothing herself, but she accepted the governess’s truth without questioning her sanity, and ended by showing her an awe-stricken tenderness that felt like the sweetest of human charities. What was settled between them was that they would bear things together. The governess knew what she was capable of meeting to shelter her pupils; she only wondered what Mrs. Grose was prepared for.
Quint, the governess concluded with a kind of terrible clarity, had been looking for little Miles. That was whom he was looking for. He wanted to appear to them—the children. But by offering herself as the sole subject of these visitations, by accepting, by inviting, by surmounting the horror, she might serve as an expiatory victim and guard the children’s tranquillity. She would stand before them, a screen.
In the days that followed, she pressed Mrs. Grose on every detail. The children had never mentioned Quint—not his name, his presence, his history. The little lady didn’t remember; she had never heard or known. But Miles would remember. Quint, Mrs. Grose emphasized, had been much too free. Too free with everyone, including the children. He was a man of strange passages and vices more than suspected, but the wound to his head from the icy slope was what the inquest settled on.
There was, the governess found, a kind of joy in this extraordinary flight of heroism the occasion demanded. She had been asked for a service admirable and difficult, and there would be a greatness in letting it be seen that she could succeed where many another girl might have failed. We were cut off together, she thought; united in our danger. They had nothing but me, and I had them. I was to be a screen.
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