HenryJames_all.txt

THE TURN OF THE SCREW

by Henry James


[The text is take from the first American appearance of this book.]





THE TURN OF THE SCREW


The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but
except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve
in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no
comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case
he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child. The case, I
may mention, was that of an apparition in just such an old house as had
gathered us for the occasion--an appearance, of a dreadful kind, to a
little boy sleeping in the room with his mother and waking her up in the
terror of it; waking her not to dissipate his dread and soothe him to
sleep again, but to encounter also, herself, before she had succeeded
in doing so, the same sight that had shaken him. It was this observation
that drew from Douglas--not immediately, but later in the evening--a
reply that had the interesting consequence to which I call attention.
Someone else told a story not particularly effective, which I saw he was
not following. This I took for a sign that he had himself something to
produce and that we should only have to wait. We waited in fact till two
nights later; but that same evening, before we scattered, he brought out
what was in his mind.

"I quite agree--in regard to Griffin's ghost, or whatever it was--that
its appearing first to the little boy, at so tender an age, adds a
particular touch. But it's not the first occurrence of its charming
kind that I know to have involved a child. If the child gives the effect
another turn of the screw, what do you say to TWO children--?"

"We say, of course," somebody exclaimed, "that they give two turns! Also
that we want to hear about them."

I can see Douglas there before the fire, to which he had got up to
present his back, looking down at his interlocutor with his hands in
his pockets. "Nobody but me, till now, has ever heard. It's quite too
horrible." This, naturally, was declared by several voices to give the
thing the utmost price, and our friend, with quiet art, prepared his
triumph by turning his eyes over the rest of us and going on: "It's
beyond everything. Nothing at all that I know touches it."

"For sheer terror?" I remember asking.

He seemed to say it was not so simple as that; to be really at a loss
how to qualify it. He passed his hand over his eyes, made a little
wincing grimace. "For dreadful--dreadfulness!"

"Oh, how delicious!" cried one of the women.

He took no notice of her; he looked at me, but as if, instead of me,
he saw what he spoke of. "For general uncanny ugliness and horror and
pain."

"Well then," I said, "just sit right down and begin."

He turned round to the fire, gave a kick to a log, watched it an
instant. Then as he faced us again: "I can't begin. I shall have to send
to town." There was a unanimous groan at this, and much reproach; after
which, in his preoccupied way, he explained. "The story's written. It's
in a locked drawer--it has not been out for years. I could write to my
man and enclose the key; he could send down the packet as he finds it."
It was to me in particular that he appeared to propound this--appeared
almost to appeal for aid not to hesitate. He had broken a thickness
of ice, the formation of many a winter; had had his reasons for a long
silence. The others resented postponement, but it was just his scruples
that charmed me. I adjured him to write by the first post and to agree
with us for an early hearing; then I asked him if the experience in
question had been his own. To this his answer was prompt. "Oh, thank
God, no!"

"And is the record yours? You took the thing down?"

"Nothing but the impression. I took that HERE"--he tapped his heart.
"I've never lost it."

"Then your manuscript--?"

"Is in old, faded ink, and in the most beautiful hand." He hung fire
again. "A woman's. She has been dead these twenty years. She sent me the
pages in question before she died." They were all listening now, and
of course there was somebody to be arch, or at any rate to draw the
inference. But if he put the inference by without a smile it was also
without irritation. "She was a most charming person, but she was ten
years older than I. She was my sister's governess," he quietly said.
"She was the most agreeable woman I've ever known in her position;
she would have been worthy of any whatever. It was long ago, and this
episode was long before. I was at Trinity, and I found her at home on
my coming down the second summer. I was much there that year--it was a
beautiful one; and we had, in her off-hours, some strolls and talks in
the garden--talks in which she struck me as awfully clever and nice. Oh
yes; don't grin: I liked her extremely and am glad to this day to think
she liked me, too. If she hadn't she wouldn't have told me. She had
never told anyone. It wasn't simply that she said so, but that I knew
she hadn't. I was sure; I could see. You'll easily judge why when you
hear."

"Because the thing had been such a scare?"

He continued to fix me. "You'll easily judge," he repeated: "YOU will."

I fixed him, too. "I see. She was in love."

He laughed for the first time. "You ARE acute. Yes, she was in love.
That is, she had been. That came out--she couldn't tell her story
without its coming out. I saw it, and she saw I saw it; but neither of
us spoke of it. I remember the time and the place--the corner of the
lawn, the shade of the great beeches and the long, hot summer afternoon.
It wasn't a scene for a shudder; but oh--!" He quitted the fire and
dropped back into his chair.

"You'll receive the packet Thursday morning?" I inquired.

"Probably not till the second post."

"Well then; after dinner--"

"You'll all meet me here?" He looked us round again. "Isn't anybody
going?" It was almost the tone of hope.

"Everybody will stay!"

"_I_ will"--and "_I_ will!" cried the ladies whose departure had been
fixed. Mrs. Griffin, however, expressed the need for a little more
light. "Who was it she was in love with?"

"The story will tell," I took upon myself to reply.

"Oh, I can't wait for the story!"

"The story WON'T tell," said Douglas; "not in any literal, vulgar way."

"More's the pity, then. That's the only way I ever understand."

"Won't YOU tell, Douglas?" somebody else inquired.

He sprang to his feet again. "Yes--tomorrow. Now I must go to bed.
Good night." And quickly catching up a candlestick, he left us slightly
bewildered. From our end of the great brown hall we heard his step on
the stair; whereupon Mrs. Griffin spoke. "Well, if I don't know who she
was in love with, I know who HE was."

"She was ten years older," said her husband.

"Raison de plus--at that age! But it's rather nice, his long reticence."

"Forty years!" Griffin put in.

"With this outbreak at last."

"The outbreak," I returned, "will make a tremendous occasion of Thursday
night;" and everyone so agreed with me that, in the light of it, we lost
all attention for everything else. The last story, however incomplete
and like the mere opening of a serial, had been told; we handshook and
"candlestuck," as somebody said, and went to bed.

I knew the next day that a letter containing the key had, by the first
post, gone off to his London apartments; but in spite of--or perhaps
just on account of--the eventual diffusion of this knowledge we quite
let him alone till after dinner, till such an hour of the evening, in
fact, as might best accord with the kind of emotion on which our hopes
were fixed. Then he became as communicative as we could desire and
indeed gave us his best reason for being so. We had it from him again
before the fire in the hall, as we had had our mild wonders of the
previous night. It appeared that the narrative he had promised to read
us really required for a proper intelligence a few words of prologue.
Let me say here distinctly, to have done with it, that this narrative,
from an exact transcript of my own made much later, is what I shall
presently give. Poor Douglas, before his death--when it was in
sight--committed to me the manuscript that reached him on the third of
these days and that, on the same spot, with immense effect, he began
to read to our hushed little circle on the night of the fourth. The
departing ladies who had said they would stay didn't, of course, thank
heaven, stay: they departed, in consequence of arrangements made, in a
rage of curiosity, as they professed, produced by the touches with
which he had already worked us up. But that only made his little final
auditory more compact and select, kept it, round the hearth, subject to
a common thrill.

The first of these touches conveyed that the written statement took up
the tale at a point after it had, in a manner, begun. The fact to be in
possession of was therefore that his old friend, the youngest of several
daughters of a poor country parson, had, at the age of twenty, on taking
service for the first time in the schoolroom, come up to London, in
trepidation, to answer in person an advertisement that had already
placed her in brief correspondence with the advertiser. This person
proved, on her presenting herself, for judgment, at a house in Harley
Street, that impressed her as vast and imposing--this prospective patron
proved a gentleman, a bachelor in the prime of life, such a figure as
had never risen, save in a dream or an old novel, before a fluttered,
anxious girl out of a Hampshire vicarage. One could easily fix his type;
it never, happily, dies out. He was handsome and bold and pleasant,
offhand and gay and kind. He struck her, inevitably, as gallant and
splendid, but what took her most of all and gave her the courage she
afterward showed was that he put the whole thing to her as a kind of
favor, an obligation he should gratefully incur. She conceived him
as rich, but as fearfully extravagant--saw him all in a glow of high
fashion, of good looks, of expensive habits, of charming ways with
women. He had for his own town residence a big house filled with the
spoils of travel and the trophies of the chase; but it was to his
country home, an old family place in Essex, that he wished her
immediately to proceed.

He had been left, by the death of their parents in India, guardian to
a small nephew and a small niece, children of a younger, a military
brother, whom he had lost two years before. These children were, by the
strangest of chances for a man in his position--a lone man without the
right sort of experience or a grain of patience--very heavily on his
hands. It had all been a great worry and, on his own part doubtless, a
series of blunders, but he immensely pitied the poor chicks and had done
all he could; had in particular sent them down to his other house, the
proper place for them being of course the country, and kept them there,
from the first, with the best people he could find to look after them,
parting even with his own servants to wait on them and going down
himself, whenever he might, to see how they were doing. The awkward
thing was that they had practically no other relations and that his
own affairs took up all his time. He had put them in possession of Bly,
which was healthy and secure, and had placed at the head of their little
establishment--but below stairs only--an excellent woman, Mrs. Grose,
whom he was sure his visitor would like and who had formerly been maid
to his mother. She was now housekeeper and was also acting for the time
as superintendent to the little girl, of whom, without children of her
own, she was, by good luck, extremely fond. There were plenty of people
to help, but of course the young lady who should go down as governess
would be in supreme authority. She would also have, in holidays, to look
after the small boy, who had been for a term at school--young as he was
to be sent, but what else could be done?--and who, as the holidays were
about to begin, would be back from one day to the other. There had
been for the two children at first a young lady whom they had had the
misfortune to lose. She had done for them quite beautifully--she was a
most respectable person--till her death, the great awkwardness of which
had, precisely, left no alternative but the school for little Miles.
Mrs. Grose, since then, in the way of manners and things, had done as
she could for Flora; and there were, further, a cook, a housemaid, a
dairywoman, an old pony, an old groom, and an old gardener, all likewise
thoroughly respectable.

So far had Douglas presented his picture when someone put a question.
"And what did the former governess die of?--of so much respectability?"

Our friend's answer was prompt. "That will come out. I don't
anticipate."

"Excuse me--I thought that was just what you ARE doing."

"In her successor's place," I suggested, "I should have wished to learn
if the office brought with it--"

"Necessary danger to life?" Douglas completed my thought. "She did wish
to learn, and she did learn. You shall hear tomorrow what she learned.
Meanwhile, of course, the prospect struck her as slightly grim. She was
young, untried, nervous: it was a vision of serious duties and little
company, of really great loneliness. She hesitated--took a couple of
days to consult and consider. But the salary offered much exceeded
her modest measure, and on a second interview she faced the music, she
engaged." And Douglas, with this, made a pause that, for the benefit of
the company, moved me to throw in--

"The moral of which was of course the seduction exercised by the
splendid young man. She succumbed to it."

He got up and, as he had done the night before, went to the fire, gave
a stir to a log with his foot, then stood a moment with his back to us.
"She saw him only twice."

"Yes, but that's just the beauty of her passion."

A little to my surprise, on this, Douglas turned round to me. "It WAS
the beauty of it. There were others," he went on, "who hadn't succumbed.
He told her frankly all his difficulty--that for several applicants the
conditions had been prohibitive. They were, somehow, simply afraid. It
sounded dull--it sounded strange; and all the more so because of his
main condition."

"Which was--?"

"That she should never trouble him--but never, never: neither appeal
nor complain nor write about anything; only meet all questions herself,
receive all moneys from his solicitor, take the whole thing over and let
him alone. She promised to do this, and she mentioned to me that when,
for a moment, disburdened, delighted, he held her hand, thanking her for
the sacrifice, she already felt rewarded."

"But was that all her reward?" one of the ladies asked.

"She never saw him again."

"Oh!" said the lady; which, as our friend immediately left us again, was
the only other word of importance contributed to the subject till, the
next night, by the corner of the hearth, in the best chair, he opened
the faded red cover of a thin old-fashioned gilt-edged album. The whole
thing took indeed more nights than one, but on the first occasion the
same lady put another question. "What is your title?"

"I haven't one."

"Oh, _I_ have!" I said. But Douglas, without heeding me, had begun to
read with a fine clearness that was like a rendering to the ear of the
beauty of his author's hand.




I


I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a
little seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong. After rising, in town,
to meet his appeal, I had at all events a couple of very bad days--found
myself doubtful again, felt indeed sure I had made a mistake. In this
state of mind I spent the long hours of bumping, swinging coach that
carried me to the stopping place at which I was to be met by a vehicle
from the house. This convenience, I was told, had been ordered, and
I found, toward the close of the June afternoon, a commodious fly in
waiting for me. Driving at that hour, on a lovely day, through a country
to which the summer sweetness seemed to offer me a friendly welcome, my
fortitude mounted afresh and, as we turned into the avenue, encountered
a reprieve that was probably but a proof of the point to which it had
sunk. I suppose I had expected, or had dreaded, something so melancholy
that what greeted me was a good surprise. I remember as a most pleasant
impression the broad, clear front, its open windows and fresh curtains
and the pair of maids looking out; I remember the lawn and the bright
flowers and the crunch of my wheels on the gravel and the clustered
treetops over which the rooks circled and cawed in the golden sky. The
scene had a greatness that made it a different affair from my own scant
home, and there immediately appeared at the door, with a little girl in
her hand, a civil person who dropped me as decent a curtsy as if I had
been the mistress or a distinguished visitor. I had received in Harley
Street a narrower notion of the place, and that, as I recalled it, made
me think the proprietor still more of a gentleman, suggested that what I
was to enjoy might be something beyond his promise.

I had no drop again till the next day, for I was carried triumphantly
through the following hours by my introduction to the younger of my
pupils. The little girl who accompanied Mrs. Grose appeared to me on the
spot a creature so charming as to make it a great fortune to have to
do with her. She was the most beautiful child I had ever seen, and I
afterward wondered that my employer had not told me more of her. I slept
little that night--I was too much excited; and this astonished me, too,
I recollect, remained with me, adding to my sense of the liberality with
which I was treated. The large, impressive room, one of the best in
the house, the great state bed, as I almost felt it, the full, figured
draperies, the long glasses in which, for the first time, I could see
myself from head to foot, all struck me--like the extraordinary charm of
my small charge--as so many things thrown in. It was thrown in as
well, from the first moment, that I should get on with Mrs. Grose in
a relation over which, on my way, in the coach, I fear I had rather
brooded. The only thing indeed that in this early outlook might have
made me shrink again was the clear circumstance of her being so glad
to see me. I perceived within half an hour that she was so glad--stout,
simple, plain, clean, wholesome woman--as to be positively on her guard
against showing it too much. I wondered even then a little why she
should wish not to show it, and that, with reflection, with suspicion,
might of course have made me uneasy.

But it was a comfort that there could be no uneasiness in a connection
with anything so beatific as the radiant image of my little girl, the
vision of whose angelic beauty had probably more than anything else to
do with the restlessness that, before morning, made me several times
rise and wander about my room to take in the whole picture and prospect;
to watch, from my open window, the faint summer dawn, to look at such
portions of the rest of the house as I could catch, and to listen,
while, in the fading dusk, the first birds began to twitter, for the
possible recurrence of a sound or two, less natural and not without,
but within, that I had fancied I heard. There had been a moment when I
believed I recognized, faint and far, the cry of a child; there had been
another when I found myself just consciously starting as at the passage,
before my door, of a light footstep. But these fancies were not marked
enough not to be thrown off, and it is only in the light, or the gloom,
I should rather say, of other and subsequent matters that they now come
back to me. To watch, teach, "form" little Flora would too evidently
be the making of a happy and useful life. It had been agreed between us
downstairs that after this first occasion I should have her as a matter
of course at night, her small white bed being already arranged, to that
end, in my room. What I had undertaken was the whole care of her, and
she had remained, just this last time, with Mrs. Grose only as an effect
of our consideration for my inevitable strangeness and her natural
timidity. In spite of this timidity--which the child herself, in the
oddest way in the world, had been perfectly frank and brave about,
allowing it, without a sign of uncomfortable consciousness, with the
deep, sweet serenity indeed of one of Raphael's holy infants, to be
discussed, to be imputed to her, and to determine us--I feel quite sure
she would presently like me. It was part of what I already liked Mrs.
Grose herself for, the pleasure I could see her feel in my admiration
and wonder as I sat at supper with four tall candles and with my pupil,
in a high chair and a bib, brightly facing me, between them, over bread
and milk. There were naturally things that in Flora's presence could
pass between us only as prodigious and gratified looks, obscure and
roundabout allusions.

"And the little boy--does he look like her? Is he too so very
remarkable?"

One wouldn't flatter a child. "Oh, miss, MOST remarkable. If you think
well of this one!"--and she stood there with a plate in her hand,
beaming at our companion, who looked from one of us to the other with
placid heavenly eyes that contained nothing to check us.

"Yes; if I do--?"

"You WILL be carried away by the little gentleman!"

"Well, that, I think, is what I came for--to be carried away. I'm
afraid, however," I remember feeling the impulse to add, "I'm rather
easily carried away. I was carried away in London!"

I can still see Mrs. Grose's broad face as she took this in. "In Harley
Street?"

"In Harley Street."

"Well, miss, you're not the first--and you won't be the last."

"Oh, I've no pretension," I could laugh, "to being the only one. My
other pupil, at any rate, as I understand, comes back tomorrow?"

"Not tomorrow--Friday, miss. He arrives, as you did, by the coach, under
care of the guard, and is to be met by the same carriage."

I forthwith expressed that the proper as well as the pleasant and
friendly thing would be therefore that on the arrival of the public
conveyance I should be in waiting for him with his little sister; an
idea in which Mrs. Grose concurred so heartily that I somehow took
her manner as a kind of comforting pledge--never falsified, thank
heaven!--that we should on every question be quite at one. Oh, she was
glad I was there!

What I felt the next day was, I suppose, nothing that could be fairly
called a reaction from the cheer of my arrival; it was probably at the
most only a slight oppression produced by a fuller measure of the
scale, as I walked round them, gazed up at them, took them in, of my new
circumstances. They had, as it were, an extent and mass for which I had
not been prepared and in the presence of which I found myself, freshly,
a little scared as well as a little proud. Lessons, in this agitation,
certainly suffered some delay; I reflected that my first duty was, by
the gentlest arts I could contrive, to win the child into the sense of
knowing me. I spent the day with her out-of-doors; I arranged with her,
to her great satisfaction, that it should be she, she only, who might
show me the place. She showed it step by step and room by room and
secret by secret, with droll, delightful, childish talk about it and
with the result, in half an hour, of our becoming immense friends.
Young as she was, I was struck, throughout our little tour, with
her confidence and courage with the way, in empty chambers and dull
corridors, on crooked staircases that made me pause and even on the
summit of an old machicolated square tower that made me dizzy, her
morning music, her disposition to tell me so many more things than she
asked, rang out and led me on. I have not seen Bly since the day I left
it, and I daresay that to my older and more informed eyes it would now
appear sufficiently contracted. But as my little conductress, with her
hair of gold and her frock of blue, danced before me round corners and
pattered down passages, I had the view of a castle of romance inhabited
by a rosy sprite, such a place as would somehow, for diversion of the
young idea, take all color out of storybooks and fairytales. Wasn't it
just a storybook over which I had fallen adoze and adream? No; it was a
big, ugly, antique, but convenient house, embodying a few features of
a building still older, half-replaced and half-utilized, in which I had
the fancy of our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers in a
great drifting ship. Well, I was, strangely, at the helm!




II


This came home to me when, two days later, I drove over with Flora to
meet, as Mrs. Grose said, the little gentleman; and all the more for
an incident that, presenting itself the second evening, had deeply
disconcerted me. The first day had been, on the whole, as I have
expressed, reassuring; but I was to see it wind up in keen apprehension.
The postbag, that evening--it came late--contained a letter for me,
which, however, in the hand of my employer, I found to be composed but
of a few words enclosing another, addressed to himself, with a seal
still unbroken. "This, I recognize, is from the headmaster, and the
headmaster's an awful bore. Read him, please; deal with him; but mind
you don't report. Not a word. I'm off!" I broke the seal with a great
effort--so great a one that I was a long time coming to it; took the
unopened missive at last up to my room and only attacked it just before
going to bed. I had better have let it wait till morning, for it gave me
a second sleepless night. With no counsel to take, the next day, I
was full of distress; and it finally got so the better of me that I
determined to open myself at least to Mrs. Grose.

"What does it mean? The child's dismissed his school."

She gave me a look that I remarked at the moment; then, visibly, with a
quick blankness, seemed to try to take it back. "But aren't they all--?"

"Sent home--yes. But only for the holidays. Miles may never go back at
all."

Consciously, under my attention, she reddened. "They won't take him?"

"They absolutely decline."

At this she raised her eyes, which she had turned from me; I saw them
fill with good tears. "What has he done?"

I hesitated; then I judged best simply to hand her my letter--which,
however, had the effect of making her, without taking it, simply put her
hands behind her. She shook her head sadly. "Such things are not for me,
miss."

My counselor couldn't read! I winced at my mistake, which I attenuated
as I could, and opened my letter again to repeat it to her; then,
faltering in the act and folding it up once more, I put it back in my
pocket. "Is he really BAD?"

The tears were still in her eyes. "Do the gentlemen say so?"

"They go into no particulars. They simply express their regret that it
should be impossible to keep him. That can have only one meaning."
Mrs. Grose listened with dumb emotion; she forbore to ask me what
this meaning might be; so that, presently, to put the thing with some
coherence and with the mere aid of her presence to my own mind, I went
on: "That he's an injury to the others."

At this, with one of the quick turns of simple folk, she suddenly flamed
up. "Master Miles! HIM an injury?"

There was such a flood of good faith in it that, though I had not yet
seen the child, my very fears made me jump to the absurdity of the idea.
I found myself, to meet my friend the better, offering it, on the spot,
sarcastically. "To his poor little innocent mates!"

"It's too dreadful," cried Mrs. Grose, "to say such cruel things! Why,
he's scarce ten years old."

"Yes, yes; it would be incredible."

She was evidently grateful for such a profession. "See him, miss, first.
THEN believe it!" I felt forthwith a new impatience to see him; it was
the beginning of a curiosity that, for all the next hours, was to deepen
almost to pain. Mrs. Grose was aware, I could judge, of what she had
produced in me, and she followed it up with assurance. "You might as
well believe it of the little lady. Bless her," she added the next
moment--"LOOK at her!"

I turned and saw that Flora, whom, ten minutes before, I had established
in the schoolroom with a sheet of white paper, a pencil, and a copy of
nice "round o's," now presented herself to view at the open door.
She expressed in her little way an extraordinary detachment from
disagreeable duties, looking to me, however, with a great childish
light that seemed to offer it as a mere result of the affection she had
conceived for my person, which had rendered necessary that she should
follow me. I needed nothing more than this to feel the full force of
Mrs. Grose's comparison, and, catching my pupil in my arms, covered her
with kisses in which there was a sob of atonement.

Nonetheless, the rest of the day I watched for further occasion to
approach my colleague, especially as, toward evening, I began to fancy
she rather sought to avoid me. I overtook her, I remember, on the
staircase; we went down together, and at the bottom I detained her,
holding her there with a hand on her arm. "I take what you said to me at
noon as a declaration that YOU'VE never known him to be bad."

She threw back her head; she had clearly, by this time, and very
honestly, adopted an attitude. "Oh, never known him--I don't pretend
THAT!"

I was upset again. "Then you HAVE known him--?"

"Yes indeed, miss, thank God!"

On reflection I accepted this. "You mean that a boy who never is--?"

"Is no boy for ME!"

I held her tighter. "You like them with the spirit to be naughty?" Then,
keeping pace with her answer, "So do I!" I eagerly brought out. "But not
to the degree to contaminate--"

"To contaminate?"--my big word left her at a loss. I explained it. "To
corrupt."

She stared, taking my meaning in; but it produced in her an odd laugh.
"Are you afraid he'll corrupt YOU?" She put the question with such a
fine bold humor that, with a laugh, a little silly doubtless, to match
her own, I gave way for the time to the apprehension of ridicule.

But the next day, as the hour for my drive approached, I cropped up in
another place. "What was the lady who was here before?"

"The last governess? She was also young and pretty--almost as young and
almost as pretty, miss, even as you."

"Ah, then, I hope her youth and her beauty helped her!" I recollect
throwing off. "He seems to like us young and pretty!"

"Oh, he DID," Mrs. Grose assented: "it was the way he liked everyone!"
She had no sooner spoken indeed than she caught herself up. "I mean
that's HIS way--the master's."

I was struck. "But of whom did you speak first?"

She looked blank, but she colored. "Why, of HIM."

"Of the master?"

"Of who else?"

There was so obviously no one else that the next moment I had lost my
impression of her having accidentally said more than she meant; and I
merely asked what I wanted to know. "Did SHE see anything in the boy--?"

"That wasn't right? She never told me."

I had a scruple, but I overcame it. "Was she careful--particular?"

Mrs. Grose appeared to try to be conscientious. "About some
things--yes."

"But not about all?"

Again she considered. "Well, miss--she's gone. I won't tell tales."

"I quite understand your feeling," I hastened to reply; but I thought
it, after an instant, not opposed to this concession to pursue: "Did she
die here?"

"No--she went off."

I don't know what there was in this brevity of Mrs. Grose's that struck
me as ambiguous. "Went off to die?" Mrs. Grose looked straight out of
the window, but I felt that, hypothetically, I had a right to know what
young persons engaged for Bly were expected to do. "She was taken ill,
you mean, and went home?"

"She was not taken ill, so far as appeared, in this house. She left it,
at the end of the year, to go home, as she said, for a short holiday,
to which the time she had put in had certainly given her a right. We
had then a young woman--a nursemaid who had stayed on and who was a good
girl and clever; and SHE took the children altogether for the interval.
But our young lady never came back, and at the very moment I was
expecting her I heard from the master that she was dead."

I turned this over. "But of what?"

"He never told me! But please, miss," said Mrs. Grose, "I must get to my
work."




III


Her thus turning her back on me was fortunately not, for my just
preoccupations, a snub that could check the growth of our mutual esteem.
We met, after I had brought home little Miles, more intimately than ever
on the ground of my stupefaction, my general emotion: so monstrous was I
then ready to pronounce it that such a child as had now been revealed to
me should be under an interdict. I was a little late on the scene, and
I felt, as he stood wistfully looking out for me before the door of the
inn at which the coach had put him down, that I had seen him, on the
instant, without and within, in the great glow of freshness, the same
positive fragrance of purity, in which I had, from the first moment,
seen his little sister. He was incredibly beautiful, and Mrs. Grose had
put her finger on it: everything but a sort of passion of tenderness for
him was swept away by his presence. What I then and there took him to
my heart for was something divine that I have never found to the same
degree in any child--his indescribable little air of knowing nothing in
the world but love. It would have been impossible to carry a bad name
with a greater sweetness of innocence, and by the time I had got back to
Bly with him I remained merely bewildered--so far, that is, as I was not
outraged--by the sense of the horrible letter locked up in my room, in
a drawer. As soon as I could compass a private word with Mrs. Grose I
declared to her that it was grotesque.

She promptly understood me. "You mean the cruel charge--?"

"It doesn't live an instant. My dear woman, LOOK at him!"

She smiled at my pretention to have discovered his charm. "I assure
you, miss, I do nothing else! What will you say, then?" she immediately
added.

"In answer to the letter?" I had made up my mind. "Nothing."

"And to his uncle?"

I was incisive. "Nothing."

"And to the boy himself?"

I was wonderful. "Nothing."

She gave with her apron a great wipe to her mouth. "Then I'll stand by
you. We'll see it out."

"We'll see it out!" I ardently echoed, giving her my hand to make it a
vow.

She held me there a moment, then whisked up her apron again with her
detached hand. "Would you mind, miss, if I used the freedom--"

"To kiss me? No!" I took the good creature in my arms and, after we had
embraced like sisters, felt still more fortified and indignant.

This, at all events, was for the time: a time so full that, as I recall
the way it went, it reminds me of all the art I now need to make it a
little distinct. What I look back at with amazement is the situation I
accepted. I had undertaken, with my companion, to see it out, and I was
under a charm, apparently, that could smooth away the extent and the
far and difficult connections of such an effort. I was lifted aloft on a
great wave of infatuation and pity. I found it simple, in my ignorance,
my confusion, and perhaps my conceit, to assume that I could deal with
a boy whose education for the world was all on the point of beginning.
I am unable even to remember at this day what proposal I framed for the
end of his holidays and the resumption of his studies. Lessons with me,
indeed, that charming summer, we all had a theory that he was to have;
but I now feel that, for weeks, the lessons must have been rather my
own. I learned something--at first, certainly--that had not been one
of the teachings of my small, smothered life; learned to be amused, and
even amusing, and not to think for the morrow. It was the first time, in
a manner, that I had known space and air and freedom, all the music
of summer and all the mystery of nature. And then there was
consideration--and consideration was sweet. Oh, it was a trap--not
designed, but deep--to my imagination, to my delicacy, perhaps to my
vanity; to whatever, in me, was most excitable. The best way to picture
it all is to say that I was off my guard. They gave me so little
trouble--they were of a gentleness so extraordinary. I used to
speculate--but even this with a dim disconnectedness--as to how the
rough future (for all futures are rough!) would handle them and might
bruise them. They had the bloom of health and happiness; and yet, as
if I had been in charge of a pair of little grandees, of princes of the
blood, for whom everything, to be right, would have to be enclosed and
protected, the only form that, in my fancy, the afteryears could take
for them was that of a romantic, a really royal extension of the garden
and the park. It may be, of course, above all, that what suddenly broke
into this gives the previous time a charm of stillness--that hush in
which something gathers or crouches. The change was actually like the
spring of a beast.

In the first weeks the days were long; they often, at their finest,
gave me what I used to call my own hour, the hour when, for my pupils,
teatime and bedtime having come and gone, I had, before my final
retirement, a small interval alone. Much as I liked my companions, this
hour was the thing in the day I liked most; and I liked it best of all
when, as the light faded--or rather, I should say, the day lingered and
the last calls of the last birds sounded, in a flushed sky, from the
old trees--I could take a turn into the grounds and enjoy, almost with
a sense of property that amused and flattered me, the beauty and dignity
of the place. It was a pleasure at these moments to feel myself
tranquil and justified; doubtless, perhaps, also to reflect that by my
discretion, my quiet good sense and general high propriety, I was giving
pleasure--if he ever thought of it!--to the person to whose pressure
I had responded. What I was doing was what he had earnestly hoped and
directly asked of me, and that I COULD, after all, do it proved even a
greater joy than I had expected. I daresay I fancied myself, in short,
a remarkable young woman and took comfort in the faith that this would
more publicly appear. Well, I needed to be remarkable to offer a front
to the remarkable things that presently gave their first sign.

It was plump, one afternoon, in the middle of my very hour: the children
were tucked away, and I had come out for my stroll. One of the thoughts
that, as I don't in the least shrink now from noting, used to be with me
in these wanderings was that it would be as charming as a charming story
suddenly to meet someone. Someone would appear there at the turn of a
path and would stand before me and smile and approve. I didn't ask more
than that--I only asked that he should KNOW; and the only way to be sure
he knew would be to see it, and the kind light of it, in his handsome
face. That was exactly present to me--by which I mean the face
was--when, on the first of these occasions, at the end of a long June
day, I stopped short on emerging from one of the plantations and coming
into view of the house. What arrested me on the spot--and with a shock
much greater than any vision had allowed for--was the sense that my
imagination had, in a flash, turned real. He did stand there!--but high
up, beyond the lawn and at the very top of the tower to which, on that
first morning, little Flora had conducted me. This tower was one of
a pair--square, incongruous, crenelated structures--that were
distinguished, for some reason, though I could see little difference,
as the new and the old. They flanked opposite ends of the house and were
probably architectural absurdities, redeemed in a measure indeed by
not being wholly disengaged nor of a height too pretentious, dating, in
their gingerbread antiquity, from a romantic revival that was already a
respectable past. I admired them, had fancies about them, for we could
all profit in a degree, especially when they loomed through the dusk,
by the grandeur of their actual battlements; yet it was not at such an
elevation that the figure I had so often invoked seemed most in place.

It produced in me, this figure, in the clear twilight, I remember, two
distinct gasps of emotion, which were, sharply, the shock of my first
and that of my second surprise. My second was a violent perception of
the mistake of my first: the man who met my eyes was not the person
I had precipitately supposed. There came to me thus a bewilderment of
vision of which, after these years, there is no living view that I can
hope to give. An unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted object
of fear to a young woman privately bred; and the figure that faced me
was--a few more seconds assured me--as little anyone else I knew as
it was the image that had been in my mind. I had not seen it in
Harley Street--I had not seen it anywhere. The place, moreover, in the
strangest way in the world, had, on the instant, and by the very fact of
its appearance, become a solitude. To me at least, making my statement
here with a deliberation with which I have never made it, the whole
feeling of the moment returns. It was as if, while I took in--what I did
take in--all the rest of the scene had been stricken with death. I can
hear again, as I write, the intense hush in which the sounds of evening
dropped. The rooks stopped cawing in the golden sky, and the friendly
hour lost, for the minute, all its voice. But there was no other change
in nature, unless indeed it were a change that I saw with a stranger
sharpness. The gold was still in the sky, the clearness in the air,
and the man who looked at me over the battlements was as definite as a
picture in a frame. That's how I thought, with extraordinary quickness,
of each person that he might have been and that he was not. We were
confronted across our distance quite long enough for me to ask myself
with intensity who then he was and to feel, as an effect of my inability
to say, a wonder that in a few instants more became intense.

The great question, or one of these, is, afterward, I know, with regard
to certain matters, the question of how long they have lasted. Well,
this matter of mine, think what you will of it, lasted while I caught at
a dozen possibilities, none of which made a difference for the better,
that I could see, in there having been in the house--and for how long,
above all?--a person of whom I was in ignorance. It lasted while I
just bridled a little with the sense that my office demanded that there
should be no such ignorance and no such person. It lasted while this
visitant, at all events--and there was a touch of the strange freedom,
as I remember, in the sign of familiarity of his wearing no hat--seemed
to fix me, from his position, with just the question, just the scrutiny
through the fading light, that his own presence provoked. We were too
far apart to call to each other, but there was a moment at which, at
shorter range, some challenge between us, breaking the hush, would have
been the right result of our straight mutual stare. He was in one of the
angles, the one away from the house, very erect, as it struck me, and
with both hands on the ledge. So I saw him as I see the letters I
form on this page; then, exactly, after a minute, as if to add to the
spectacle, he slowly changed his place--passed, looking at me hard
all the while, to the opposite corner of the platform. Yes, I had the
sharpest sense that during this transit he never took his eyes from me,
and I can see at this moment the way his hand, as he went, passed from
one of the crenelations to the next. He stopped at the other corner, but
less long, and even as he turned away still markedly fixed me. He turned
away; that was all I knew.




IV


It was not that I didn't wait, on this occasion, for more, for I was
rooted as deeply as I was shaken. Was there a "secret" at Bly--a mystery
of Udolpho or an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected
confinement? I can't say how long I turned it over, or how long, in
a confusion of curiosity and dread, I remained where I had had my
collision; I only recall that when I re-entered the house darkness had
quite closed in. Agitation, in the interval, certainly had held me and
driven me, for I must, in circling about the place, have walked three
miles; but I was to be, later on, so much more overwhelmed that this
mere dawn of alarm was a comparatively human chill. The most singular
part of it, in fact--singular as the rest had been--was the part I
became, in the hall, aware of in meeting Mrs. Grose. This picture comes
back to me in the general train--the impression, as I received it on my
return, of the wide white panelled space, bright in the lamplight and
with its portraits and red carpet, and of the good surprised look of
my friend, which immediately told me she had missed me. It came to
me straightway, under her contact, that, with plain heartiness, mere
relieved anxiety at my appearance, she knew nothing whatever that could
bear upon the incident I had there ready for her. I had not suspected
in advance that her comfortable face would pull me up, and I somehow
measured the importance of what I had seen by my thus finding myself
hesitate to mention it. Scarce anything in the whole history seems to
me so odd as this fact that my real beginning of fear was one, as I
may say, with the instinct of sparing my companion. On the spot,
accordingly, in the pleasant hall and with her eyes on me, I, for
a reason that I couldn't then have phrased, achieved an inward
resolution--offered a vague pretext for my lateness and, with the plea
of the beauty of the night and of the heavy dew and wet feet, went as
soon as possible to my room.

Here it was another affair; here, for many days after, it was a queer
affair enough. There were hours, from day to day--or at least there were
moments, snatched even from clear duties--when I had to shut myself up
to think. It was not so much yet that I was more nervous than I could
bear to be as that I was remarkably afraid of becoming so; for the truth
I had now to turn over was, simply and clearly, the truth that I could
arrive at no account whatever of the visitor with whom I had been so
inexplicably and yet, as it seemed to me, so intimately concerned. It
took little time to see that I could sound without forms of inquiry
and without exciting remark any domestic complications. The shock I had
suffered must have sharpened all my senses; I felt sure, at the end of
three days and as the result of mere closer attention, that I had not
been practiced upon by the servants nor made the object of any "game."
Of whatever it was that I knew, nothing was known around me. There was
but one sane inference: someone had taken a liberty rather gross. That
was what, repeatedly, I dipped into my room and locked the door to say
to myself. We had been, collectively, subject to an intrusion; some
unscrupulous traveler, curious in old houses, had made his way in
unobserved, enjoyed the prospect from the best point of view, and then
stolen out as he came. If he had given me such a bold hard stare, that
was but a part of his indiscretion. The good thing, after all, was that
we should surely see no more of him.

This was not so good a thing, I admit, as not to leave me to judge that
what, essentially, made nothing else much signify was simply my charming
work. My charming work was just my life with Miles and Flora, and
through nothing could I so like it as through feeling that I could throw
myself into it in trouble. The attraction of my small charges was a
constant joy, leading me to wonder afresh at the vanity of my original
fears, the distaste I had begun by entertaining for the probable gray
prose of my office. There was to be no gray prose, it appeared, and no
long grind; so how could work not be charming that presented itself as
daily beauty? It was all the romance of the nursery and the poetry of
the schoolroom. I don't mean by this, of course, that we studied
only fiction and verse; I mean I can express no otherwise the sort
of interest my companions inspired. How can I describe that except by
saying that instead of growing used to them--and it's a marvel for a
governess: I call the sisterhood to witness!--I made constant fresh
discoveries. There was one direction, assuredly, in which these
discoveries stopped: deep obscurity continued to cover the region of the
boy's conduct at school. It had been promptly given me, I have noted,
to face that mystery without a pang. Perhaps even it would be nearer the
truth to say that--without a word--he himself had cleared it up. He had
made the whole charge absurd. My conclusion bloomed there with the
real rose flush of his innocence: he was only too fine and fair for the
little horrid, unclean school world, and he had paid a price for it. I
reflected acutely that the sense of such differences, such superiorities
of quality, always, on the part of the majority--which could include
even stupid, sordid headmasters--turn infallibly to the vindictive.

Both the children had a gentleness (it was their only fault, and it
never made Miles a muff) that kept them--how shall I express it?--almost
impersonal and certainly quite unpunishable. They were like the cherubs
of the anecdote, who had--morally, at any rate--nothing to whack! I
remember feeling with Miles in especial as if he had had, as it were, no
history. We expect of a small child a scant one, but there was in
this beautiful little boy something extraordinarily sensitive, yet
extraordinarily happy, that, more than in any creature of his age I have
seen, struck me as beginning anew each day. He had never for a second
suffered. I took this as a direct disproof of his having really been
chastised. If he had been wicked he would have "caught" it, and I should
have caught it by the rebound--I should have found the trace. I found
nothing at all, and he was therefore an angel. He never spoke of his
school, never mentioned a comrade or a master; and I, for my part, was
quite too much disgusted to allude to them. Of course I was under the
spell, and the wonderful part is that, even at the time, I perfectly
knew I was. But I gave myself up to it; it was an antidote to any
pain, and I had more pains than one. I was in receipt in these days of
disturbing letters from home, where things were not going well. But with
my children, what things in the world mattered? That was the question
I used to put to my scrappy retirements. I was dazzled by their
loveliness.

There was a Sunday--to get on--when it rained with such force and for so
many hours that there could be no procession to church; in consequence
of which, as the day declined, I had arranged with Mrs. Grose that,
should the evening show improvement, we would attend together the late
service. The rain happily stopped, and I prepared for our walk, which,
through the park and by the good road to the village, would be a matter
of twenty minutes. Coming downstairs to meet my colleague in the hall,
I remembered a pair of gloves that had required three stitches and that
had received them--with a publicity perhaps not edifying--while I sat
with the children at their tea, served on Sundays, by exception, in that
cold, clean temple of mahogany and brass, the "grown-up" dining room.
The gloves had been dropped there, and I turned in to recover them.
The day was gray enough, but the afternoon light still lingered, and it
enabled me, on crossing the threshold, not only to recognize, on a chair
near the wide window, then closed, the articles I wanted, but to become
aware of a person on the other side of the window and looking straight
in. One step into the room had sufficed; my vision was instantaneous;
it was all there. The person looking straight in was the person who had
already appeared to me. He appeared thus again with I won't say
greater distinctness, for that was impossible, but with a nearness that
represented a forward stride in our intercourse and made me, as I met
him, catch my breath and turn cold. He was the same--he was the same,
and seen, this time, as he had been seen before, from the waist up, the
window, though the dining room was on the ground floor, not going down
to the terrace on which he stood. His face was close to the glass,
yet the effect of this better view was, strangely, only to show me how
intense the former had been. He remained but a few seconds--long enough
to convince me he also saw and recognized; but it was as if I had been
looking at him for years and had known him always. Something, however,
happened this time that had not happened before; his stare into my face,
through the glass and across the room, was as deep and hard as then, but
it quitted me for a moment during which I could still watch it, see it
fix successively several other things. On the spot there came to me the
added shock of a certitude that it was not for me he had come there. He
had come for someone else.

The flash of this knowledge--for it was knowledge in the midst of
dread--produced in me the most extraordinary effect, started as I stood
there, a sudden vibration of duty and courage. I say courage because
I was beyond all doubt already far gone. I bounded straight out of the
door again, reached that of the house, got, in an instant, upon the
drive, and, passing along the terrace as fast as I could rush, turned
a corner and came full in sight. But it was in sight of nothing now--my
visitor had vanished. I stopped, I almost dropped, with the real relief
of this; but I took in the whole scene--I gave him time to reappear. I
call it time, but how long was it? I can't speak to the purpose today
of the duration of these things. That kind of measure must have left me:
they couldn't have lasted as they actually appeared to me to last. The
terrace and the whole place, the lawn and the garden beyond it, all I
could see of the park, were empty with a great emptiness. There were
shrubberies and big trees, but I remember the clear assurance I felt
that none of them concealed him. He was there or was not there: not
there if I didn't see him. I got hold of this; then, instinctively,
instead of returning as I had come, went to the window. It was
confusedly present to me that I ought to place myself where he had
stood. I did so; I applied my face to the pane and looked, as he had
looked, into the room. As if, at this moment, to show me exactly what
his range had been, Mrs. Grose, as I had done for himself just before,
came in from the hall. With this I had the full image of a repetition of
what had already occurred. She saw me as I had seen my own visitant; she
pulled up short as I had done; I gave her something of the shock that
I had received. She turned white, and this made me ask myself if I had
blanched as much. She stared, in short, and retreated on just MY lines,
and I knew she had then passed out and come round to me and that I
should presently meet her. I remained where I was, and while I waited
I thought of more things than one. But there's only one I take space to
mention. I wondered why SHE should be scared.




V


Oh, she let me know as soon as, round the corner of the house, she
loomed again into view. "What in the name of goodness is the matter--?"
She was now flushed and out of breath.

I said nothing till she came quite near. "With me?" I must have made a
wonderful face. "Do I show it?"

"You're as white as a sheet. You look awful."

I considered; I could meet on this, without scruple, any innocence. My
need to respect the bloom of Mrs. Grose's had dropped, without a rustle,
from my shoulders, and if I wavered for the instant it was not with what
I kept back. I put out my hand to her and she took it; I held her hard
a little, liking to feel her close to me. There was a kind of support in
the shy heave of her surprise. "You came for me for church, of course,
but I can't go."

"Has anything happened?"

"Yes. You must know now. Did I look very queer?"

"Through this window? Dreadful!"

"Well," I said, "I've been frightened." Mrs. Grose's eyes expressed
plainly that SHE had no wish to be, yet also that she knew too well her
place not to be ready to share with me any marked inconvenience. Oh,
it was quite settled that she MUST share! "Just what you saw from the
dining room a minute ago was the effect of that. What _I_ saw--just
before--was much worse."

Her hand tightened. "What was it?"

"An extraordinary man. Looking in."

"What extraordinary man?"

"I haven't the least idea."

Mrs. Grose gazed round us in vain. "Then where is he gone?"

"I know still less."

"Have you seen him before?"

"Yes--once. On the old tower."

She could only look at me harder. "Do you mean he's a stranger?"

"Oh, very much!"

"Yet you didn't tell me?"

"No--for reasons. But now that you've guessed--"

Mrs. Grose's round eyes encountered this charge. "Ah, I haven't
guessed!" she said very simply. "How can I if YOU don't imagine?"

"I don't in the very least."

"You've seen him nowhere but on the tower?"

"And on this spot just now."

Mrs. Grose looked round again. "What was he doing on the tower?"

"Only standing there and looking down at me."

She thought a minute. "Was he a gentleman?"

I found I had no need to think. "No." She gazed in deeper wonder. "No."

"Then nobody about the place? Nobody from the village?"

"Nobody--nobody. I didn't tell you, but I made sure."

She breathed a vague relief: this was, oddly, so much to the good. It
only went indeed a little way. "But if he isn't a gentleman--"

"What IS he? He's a horror."

"A horror?"

"He's--God help me if I know WHAT he is!"

Mrs. Grose looked round once more; she fixed her eyes on the duskier
distance, then, pulling herself together, turned to me with abrupt
inconsequence. "It's time we should be at church."

"Oh, I'm not fit for church!"

"Won't it do you good?"

"It won't do THEM--! I nodded at the house.

"The children?"

"I can't leave them now."

"You're afraid--?"

I spoke boldly. "I'm afraid of HIM."

Mrs. Grose's large face showed me, at this, for the first time, the
faraway faint glimmer of a consciousness more acute: I somehow made out
in it the delayed dawn of an idea I myself had not given her and that
was as yet quite obscure to me. It comes back to me that I thought
instantly of this as something I could get from her; and I felt it to be
connected with the desire she presently showed to know more. "When was
it--on the tower?"

"About the middle of the month. At this same hour."

"Almost at dark," said Mrs. Grose.

"Oh, no, not nearly. I saw him as I see you."

"Then how did he get in?"

"And how did he get out?" I laughed. "I had no opportunity to ask him!
This evening, you see," I pursued, "he has not been able to get in."

"He only peeps?"

"I hope it will be confined to that!" She had now let go my hand; she
turned away a little. I waited an instant; then I brought out: "Go to
church. Goodbye. I must watch."

Slowly she faced me again. "Do you fear for them?"

We met in another long look. "Don't YOU?" Instead of answering she came
nearer to the window and, for a minute, applied her face to the glass.
"You see how he could see," I meanwhile went on.

She didn't move. "How long was he here?"

"Till I came out. I came to meet him."

Mrs. Grose at last turned round, and there was still more in her face.
"_I_ couldn't have come out."

"Neither could I!" I laughed again. "But I did come. I have my duty."

"So have I mine," she replied; after which she added: "What is he like?"

"I've been dying to tell you. But he's like nobody."

"Nobody?" she echoed.

"He has no hat." Then seeing in her face that she already, in this, with
a deeper dismay, found a touch of picture, I quickly added stroke to
stroke. "He has red hair, very red, close-curling, and a pale face, long
in shape, with straight, good features and little, rather queer whiskers
that are as red as his hair. His eyebrows are, somehow, darker; they
look particularly arched and as if they might move a good deal. His eyes
are sharp, strange--awfully; but I only know clearly that they're rather
small and very fixed. His mouth's wide, and his lips are thin, and
except for his little whiskers he's quite clean-shaven. He gives me a
sort of sense of looking like an actor."

"An actor!" It was impossible to resemble one less, at least, than Mrs.
Grose at that moment.

"I've never seen one, but so I suppose them. He's tall, active, erect,"
I continued, "but never--no, never!--a gentleman."

My companion's face had blanched as I went on; her round eyes started
and her mild mouth gaped. "A gentleman?" she gasped, confounded,
stupefied: "a gentleman HE?"

"You know him then?"

She visibly tried to hold herself. "But he IS handsome?"

I saw the way to help her. "Remarkably!"

"And dressed--?"

"In somebody's clothes." "They're smart, but they're not his own."

She broke into a breathless affirmative groan: "They're the master's!"

I caught it up. "You DO know him?"

She faltered but a second. "Quint!" she cried.

"Quint?"

"Peter Quint--his own man, his valet, when he was here!"

"When the master was?"

Gaping still, but meeting me, she pieced it all together. "He never wore
his hat, but he did wear--well, there were waistcoats missed. They were
both here--last year. Then the master went, and Quint was alone."

I followed, but halting a little. "Alone?"

"Alone with US." Then, as from a deeper depth, "In charge," she added.

"And what became of him?"

She hung fire so long that I was still more mystified. "He went, too,"
she brought out at last.

"Went where?"

Her expression, at this, became extraordinary. "God knows where! He
died."

"Died?" I almost shrieked.

She seemed fairly to square herself, plant herself more firmly to utter
the wonder of it. "Yes. Mr. Quint is dead."




VI


It took of course more than that particular passage to place us together
in presence of what we had now to live with as we could--my dreadful
liability to impressions of the order so vividly exemplified, and my
companion's knowledge, henceforth--a knowledge half consternation and
half compassion--of that liability. There had been, this evening, after
the revelation left me, for an hour, so prostrate--there had been, for
either of us, no attendance on any service but a little service of tears
and vows, of prayers and promises, a climax to the series of mutual
challenges and pledges that had straightway ensued on our retreating
together to the schoolroom and shutting ourselves up there to have
everything out. The result of our having everything out was simply to
reduce our situation to the last rigor of its elements. She herself had
seen nothing, not the shadow of a shadow, and nobody in the house but
the governess was in the governess's plight; yet she accepted without
directly impugning my sanity the truth as I gave it to her, and ended by
showing me, on this ground, an awestricken tenderness, an expression
of the sense of my more than questionable privilege, of which the very
breath has remained with me as that of the sweetest of human charities.

What was settled between us, accordingly, that night, was that we
thought we might bear things together; and I was not even sure that,
in spite of her exemption, it was she who had the best of the burden. I
knew at this hour, I think, as well as I knew later, what I was capable
of meeting to shelter my pupils; but it took me some time to be wholly
sure of what my honest ally was prepared for to keep terms with so
compromising a contract. I was queer company enough--quite as queer as
the company I received; but as I trace over what we went through I see
how much common ground we must have found in the one idea that, by good
fortune, COULD steady us. It was the idea, the second movement, that led
me straight out, as I may say, of the inner chamber of my dread. I could
take the air in the court, at least, and there Mrs. Grose could join me.
Perfectly can I recall now the particular way strength came to me before
we separated for the night. We had gone over and over every feature of
what I had seen.

"He was looking for someone else, you say--someone who was not you?"

"He was looking for little Miles." A portentous clearness now possessed
me. "THAT'S whom he was looking for."

"But how do you know?"

"I know, I know, I know!" My exaltation grew. "And YOU know, my dear!"

She didn't deny this, but I required, I felt, not even so much telling
as that. She resumed in a moment, at any rate: "What if HE should see
him?"

"Little Miles? That's what he wants!"

She looked immensely scared again. "The child?"

"Heaven forbid! The man. He wants to appear to THEM." That he might was
an awful conception, and yet, somehow, I could keep it at bay; which,
moreover, as we lingered there, was what I succeeded in practically
proving. I had an absolute certainty that I should see again what I
had already seen, but something within me said that by offering myself
bravely as the sole subject of such experience, by accepting, by
inviting, by surmounting it all, I should serve as an expiatory victim
and guard the tranquility of my companions. The children, in especial,
I should thus fence about and absolutely save. I recall one of the last
things I said that night to Mrs. Grose.

"It does strike me that my pupils have never mentioned--"

She looked at me hard as I musingly pulled up. "His having been here and
the time they were with him?"

"The time they were with him, and his name, his presence, his history,
in any way."

"Oh, the little lady doesn't remember. She never heard or knew."

"The circumstances of his death?" I thought with some intensity.
"Perhaps not. But Miles would remember--Miles would know."

"Ah, don't try him!" broke from Mrs. Grose.

I returned her the look she had given me. "Don't be afraid." I continued
to think. "It IS rather odd."

"That he has never spoken of him?"

"Never by the least allusion. And you tell me they were 'great
friends'?"

"Oh, it wasn't HIM!" Mrs. Grose with emphasis declared. "It was Quint's
own fancy. To play with him, I mean--to spoil him." She paused a moment;
then she added: "Quint was much too free."

This gave me, straight from my vision of his face--SUCH a face!--a
sudden sickness of disgust. "Too free with MY boy?"

"Too free with everyone!"

I forbore, for the moment, to analyze this description further than by
the reflection that a part of it applied to several of the members of
the household, of the half-dozen maids and men who were still of our
small colony. But there was everything, for our apprehension, in the
lucky fact that no discomfortable legend, no perturbation of scullions,
had ever, within anyone's memory attached to the kind old place. It had
neither bad name nor ill fame, and Mrs. Grose, most apparently, only
desired to cling to me and to quake in silence. I even put her, the very
last thing of all, to the test. It was when, at midnight, she had her
hand on the schoolroom door to take leave. "I have it from you then--for
it's of great importance--that he was definitely and admittedly bad?"

"Oh, not admittedly. _I_ knew it--but the master didn't."

"And you never told him?"

"Well, he didn't like tale-bearing--he hated complaints. He was terribly
short with anything of that kind, and if people were all right to HIM--"

"He wouldn't be bothered with more?" This squared well enough with my
impressions of him: he was not a trouble-loving gentleman, nor so very
particular perhaps about some of the company HE kept. All the same, I
pressed my interlocutress. "I promise you _I_ would have told!"

She felt my discrimination. "I daresay I was wrong. But, really, I was
afraid."

"Afraid of what?"

"Of things that man could do. Quint was so clever--he was so deep."

I took this in still more than, probably, I showed. "You weren't afraid
of anything else? Not of his effect--?"

"His effect?" she repeated with a face of anguish and waiting while I
faltered.

"On innocent little precious lives. They were in your charge."

"No, they were not in mine!" she roundly and distressfully returned.
"The master believed in him and placed him here because he was supposed
not to be well and the country air so good for him. So he had everything
to say. Yes"--she let me have it--"even about THEM."

"Them--that creature?" I had to smother a kind of howl. "And you could
bear it!"

"No. I couldn't--and I can't now!" And the poor woman burst into tears.

A rigid control, from the next day, was, as I have said, to follow them;
yet how often and how passionately, for a week, we came back together
to the subject! Much as we had discussed it that Sunday night, I was, in
the immediate later hours in especial--for it may be imagined whether I
slept--still haunted with the shadow of something she had not told me.
I myself had kept back nothing, but there was a word Mrs. Grose had kept
back. I was sure, moreover, by morning, that this was not from a failure
of frankness, but because on every side there were fears. It seems to me
indeed, in retrospect, that by the time the morrow's sun was high I had
restlessly read into the fact before us almost all the meaning they were
to receive from subsequent and more cruel occurrences. What they gave me
above all was just the sinister figure of the living man--the dead one
would keep awhile!--and of the months he had continuously passed at Bly,
which, added up, made a formidable stretch. The limit of this evil time
had arrived only when, on the dawn of a winter's morning, Peter Quint
was found, by a laborer going to early work, stone dead on the road
from the village: a catastrophe explained--superficially at least--by a
visible wound to his head; such a wound as might have been produced--and
as, on the final evidence, HAD been--by a fatal slip, in the dark and
after leaving the public house, on the steepish icy slope, a wrong
path altogether, at the bottom of which he lay. The icy slope, the turn
mistaken at night and in liquor, accounted for much--practically, in
the end and after the inquest and boundless chatter, for everything; but
there had been matters in his life--strange passages and perils, secret
disorders, vices more than suspected--that would have accounted for a
good deal more.

I scarce know how to put my story into words that shall be a credible
picture of my state of mind; but I was in these days literally able to
find a joy in the extraordinary flight of heroism the occasion demanded
of me. I now saw that I had been asked for a service admirable and
difficult; and there would be a greatness in letting it be seen--oh, in
the right quarter!--that I could succeed where many another girl might
have failed. It was an immense help to me--I confess I rather applaud
myself as I look back!--that I saw my service so strongly and so simply.
I was there to protect and defend the little creatures in the world the
most bereaved and the most lovable, the appeal of whose helplessness had
suddenly become only too explicit, a deep, constant ache of one's own
committed heart. We were cut off, really, together; we were united in
our danger. They had nothing but me, and I--well, I had THEM. It was
in short a magnificent chance. This chance presented itself to me in an
image richly material. I was a screen--I was to stand before them. The
more I saw, the less they would. I began to watch them in a stifled
suspense, a disguised excitement that might well, had it continued too
long, have turned to something like madness. What saved me, as I now
see, was that it turned to something else altogether. It didn't last as
suspense--it was superseded by horrible proofs. Proofs, I say, yes--from
the moment I really took hold.

This moment dated from an afternoon hour that I happened to spend in the
grounds with the younger of my pupils alone. We had left Miles indoors,
on the red cushion of a deep window seat; he had wished to finish a
book, and I had been glad to encourage a purpose so laudable in a young
man whose only defect was an occasional excess of the restless. His
sister, on the contrary, had been alert to come out, and I strolled with
her half an hour, seeking the shade, for the sun was still high and the
day exceptionally warm. I was aware afresh, with her, as we went, of
how, like her brother, she contrived--it was the charming thing in both
children--to let me alone without appearing to drop me and to accompany
me without appearing to surround. They were never importunate and yet
never listless. My attention to them all really went to seeing them
amuse themselves immensely without me: this was a spectacle they seemed
actively to prepare and that engaged me as an active admirer. I walked
in a world of their invention--they had no occasion whatever to draw
upon mine; so that my time was taken only with being, for them, some
remarkable person or thing that the game of the moment required and that
was merely, thanks to my superior, my exalted stamp, a happy and highly
distinguished sinecure. I forget what I was on the present occasion;
I only remember that I was something very important and very quiet and
that Flora was playing very hard. We were on the edge of the lake, and,
as we had lately begun geography, the lake was the Sea of Azof.

Suddenly, in these circumstances, I became aware that, on the other
side of the Sea of Azof, we had an interested spectator. The way this
knowledge gathered in me was the strangest thing in the world--the
strangest, that is, except the very much stranger in which it quickly
merged itself. I had sat down with a piece of work--for I was something
or other that could sit--on the old stone bench which overlooked the
pond; and in this position I began to take in with certitude, and yet
without direct vision, the presence, at a distance, of a third person.
The old trees, the thick shrubbery, made a great and pleasant shade, but
it was all suffused with the brightness of the hot, still hour. There
was no ambiguity in anything; none whatever, at least, in the conviction
I from one moment to another found myself forming as to what I should
see straight before me and across the lake as a consequence of raising
my eyes. They were attached at this juncture to the stitching in which I
was engaged, and I can feel once more the spasm of my effort not to move
them till I should so have steadied myself as to be able to make up my
mind what to do. There was an alien object in view--a figure whose right
of presence I instantly, passionately questioned. I recollect counting
over perfectly the possibilities, reminding myself that nothing was more
natural, for instance, then the appearance of one of the men about the
place, or even of a messenger, a postman, or a tradesman's boy, from the
village. That reminder had as little effect on my practical certitude
as I was conscious--still even without looking--of its having upon the
character and attitude of our visitor. Nothing was more natural than
that these things should be the other things that they absolutely were
not.

Of the positive identity of the apparition I would assure myself as
soon as the small clock of my courage should have ticked out the right
second; meanwhile, with an effort that was already sharp enough, I
transferred my eyes straight to little Flora, who, at the moment, was
about ten yards away. My heart had stood still for an instant with the
wonder and terror of the question whether she too would see; and I
held my breath while I waited for what a cry from her, what some sudden
innocent sign either of interest or of alarm, would tell me. I waited,
but nothing came; then, in the first place--and there is something
more dire in this, I feel, than in anything I have to relate--I was
determined by a sense that, within a minute, all sounds from her had
previously dropped; and, in the second, by the circumstance that, also
within the minute, she had, in her play, turned her back to the water.
This was her attitude when I at last looked at her--looked with the
confirmed conviction that we were still, together, under direct personal
notice. She had picked up a small flat piece of wood, which happened to
have in it a little hole that had evidently suggested to her the idea
of sticking in another fragment that might figure as a mast and make
the thing a boat. This second morsel, as I watched her, she was
very markedly and intently attempting to tighten in its place. My
apprehension of what she was doing sustained me so that after some
seconds I felt I was ready for more. Then I again shifted my eyes--I
faced what I had to face.




VII


I got hold of Mrs. Grose as soon after this as I could; and I can give
no intelligible account of how I fought out the interval. Yet I still
hear myself cry as I fairly threw myself into her arms: "They KNOW--it's
too monstrous: they know, they know!"

"And what on earth--?" I felt her incredulity as she held me.

"Why, all that WE know--and heaven knows what else besides!" Then, as
she released me, I made it out to her, made it out perhaps only now with
full coherency even to myself. "Two hours ago, in the garden"--I could
scarce articulate--"Flora SAW!"

Mrs. Grose took it as she might have taken a blow in the stomach. "She
has told you?" she panted.

"Not a word--that's the horror. She kept it to herself! The child of
eight, THAT child!" Unutterable still, for me, was the stupefaction of
it.

Mrs. Grose, of course, could only gape the wider. "Then how do you
know?"

"I was there--I saw with my eyes: saw that she was perfectly aware."

"Do you mean aware of HIM?"

"No--of HER." I was conscious as I spoke that I looked prodigious
things, for I got the slow reflection of them in my companion's face.
"Another person--this time; but a figure of quite as unmistakable horror
and evil: a woman in black, pale and dreadful--with such an air also,
and such a face!--on the other side of the lake. I was there with the
child--quiet for the hour; and in the midst of it she came."

"Came how--from where?"

"From where they come from! She just appeared and stood there--but not
so near."

"And without coming nearer?"

"Oh, for the effect and the feeling, she might have been as close as
you!"

My friend, with an odd impulse, fell back a step. "Was she someone
you've never seen?"

"Yes. But someone the child has. Someone YOU have." Then, to show how I
had thought it all out: "My predecessor--the one who died."

"Miss Jessel?"

"Miss Jessel. You don't believe me?" I pressed.

She turned right and left in her distress. "How can you be sure?"

This drew from me, in the state of my nerves, a flash of impatience.
"Then ask Flora--SHE'S sure!" But I had no sooner spoken than I caught
myself up. "No, for God's sake, DON'T! She'll say she isn't--she'll
lie!"

Mrs. Grose was not too bewildered instinctively to protest. "Ah, how CAN
you?"

"Because I'm clear. Flora doesn't want me to know."

"It's only then to spare you."

"No, no--there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see
in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don't know what I
DON'T see--what I DON'T fear!"

Mrs. Grose tried to keep up with me. "You mean you're afraid of seeing
her again?"

"Oh, no; that's nothing--now!" Then I explained. "It's of NOT seeing
her."

But my companion only looked wan. "I don't understand you."

"Why, it's that the child may keep it up--and that the child assuredly
WILL--without my knowing it."

At the image of this possibility Mrs. Grose for a moment collapsed, yet
presently to pull herself together again, as if from the positive force
of the sense of what, should we yield an inch, there would really be to
give way to. "Dear, dear--we must keep our heads! And after all, if she
doesn't mind it--!" She even tried a grim joke. "Perhaps she likes it!"

"Likes SUCH things--a scrap of an infant!"

"Isn't it just a proof of her blessed innocence?" my friend bravely
inquired.

She brought me, for the instant, almost round. "Oh, we must clutch at
THAT--we must cling to it! If it isn't a proof of what you say, it's a
proof of--God knows what! For the woman's a horror of horrors."

Mrs. Grose, at this, fixed her eyes a minute on the ground; then at last
raising them, "Tell me how you know," she said.

"Then you admit it's what she was?" I cried.

"Tell me how you know," my friend simply repeated.

"Know? By seeing her! By the way she looked."

"At you, do you mean--so wickedly?"

"Dear me, no--I could have borne that. She gave me never a glance. She
only fixed the child."

Mrs. Grose tried to see it. "Fixed her?"

"Ah, with such awful eyes!"

She stared at mine as if they might really have resembled them. "Do you
mean of dislike?"

"God help us, no. Of something much worse."

"Worse than dislike?--this left her indeed at a loss.

"With a determination--indescribable. With a kind of fury of intention."

I made her turn pale. "Intention?"

"To get hold of her." Mrs. Grose--her eyes just lingering on mine--gave
a shudder and walked to the window; and while she stood there looking
out I completed my statement. "THAT'S what Flora knows."

After a little she turned round. "The person was in black, you say?"

"In mourning--rather poor, almost shabby. But--yes--with extraordinary
beauty." I now recognized to what I had at last, stroke by stroke,
brought the victim of my confidence, for she quite visibly weighed
this. "Oh, handsome--very, very," I insisted; "wonderfully handsome. But
infamous."

She slowly came back to me. "Miss Jessel--WAS infamous." She once more
took my hand in both her own, holding it as tight as if to fortify me
against the increase of alarm I might draw from this disclosure. "They
were both infamous," she finally said.

So, for a little, we faced it once more together; and I found absolutely
a degree of help in seeing it now so straight. "I appreciate," I said,
"the great decency of your not having hitherto spoken; but the time has
certainly come to give me the whole thing." She appeared to assent to
this, but still only in silence; seeing which I went on: "I must have it
now. Of what did she die? Come, there was something between them."

"There was everything."

"In spite of the difference--?"

"Oh, of their rank, their condition"--she brought it woefully out. "SHE
was a lady."

I turned it over; I again saw. "Yes--she was a lady."

"And he so dreadfully below," said Mrs. Grose.

I felt that I doubtless needn't press too hard, in such company, on the
place of a servant in the scale; but there was nothing to prevent an
acceptance of my companion's own measure of my predecessor's abasement.
There was a way to deal with that, and I dealt; the more readily for
my full vision--on the evidence--of our employer's late clever,
good-looking "own" man; impudent, assured, spoiled, depraved. "The
fellow was a hound."

Mrs. Grose considered as if it were perhaps a little a case for a sense
of shades. "I've never seen one like him. He did what he wished."

"With HER?"

"With them all."

It was as if now in my friend's own eyes Miss Jessel had again appeared.
I seemed at any rate, for an instant, to see their evocation of her
as distinctly as I had seen her by the pond; and I brought out with
decision: "It must have been also what SHE wished!"

Mrs. Grose's face signified that it had been indeed, but she said at the
same time: "Poor woman--she paid for it!"

"Then you do know what she died of?" I asked.

"No--I know nothing. I wanted not to know; I was glad enough I didn't;
and I thanked heaven she was well out of this!"

"Yet you had, then, your idea--"

"Of her real reason for leaving? Oh, yes--as to that. She couldn't have
stayed. Fancy it here--for a governess! And afterward I imagined--and I
still imagine. And what I imagine is dreadful."

"Not so dreadful as what _I_ do," I replied; on which I must have shown
her--as I was indeed but too conscious--a front of miserable defeat. It
brought out again all her compassion for me, and at the renewed touch of
her kindness my power to resist broke down. I burst, as I had, the other
time, made her burst, into tears; she took me to her motherly breast,
and my lamentation overflowed. "I don't do it!" I sobbed in despair; "I
don't save or shield them! It's far worse than I dreamed--they're lost!"




VIII


What I had said to Mrs. Grose was true enough: there were in the matter
I had put before her depths and possibilities that I lacked resolution
to sound; so that when we met once more in the wonder of it we were of a
common mind about the duty of resistance to extravagant fancies. We were
to keep our heads if we should keep nothing else--difficult indeed as
that might be in the face of what, in our prodigious experience, was
least to be questioned. Late that night, while the house slept, we had
another talk in my room, when she went all the way with me as to its
being beyond doubt that I had seen exactly what I had seen. To hold her
perfectly in the pinch of that, I found I had only to ask her how, if
I had "made it up," I came to be able to give, of each of the persons
appearing to me, a picture disclosing, to the last detail, their
special marks--a portrait on the exhibition of which she had instantly
recognized and named them. She wished of course--small blame to her!--to
sink the whole subject; and I was quick to assure her that my own
interest in it had now violently taken the form of a search for the way
to escape from it. I encountered her on the ground of a probability that
with recurrence--for recurrence we took for granted--I should get
used to my danger, distinctly professing that my personal exposure had
suddenly become the least of my discomforts. It was my new suspicion
that was intolerable; and yet even to this complication the later hours
of the day had brought a little ease.

On leaving her, after my first outbreak, I had of course returned to my
pupils, associating the right remedy for my dismay with that sense of
their charm which I had already found to be a thing I could positively
cultivate and which had never failed me yet. I had simply, in other
words, plunged afresh into Flora's special society and there become
aware--it was almost a luxury!--that she could put her little conscious
hand straight upon the spot that ached. She had looked at me in sweet
speculation and then had accused me to my face of having "cried." I had
supposed I had brushed away the ugly signs: but I could literally--for
the time, at all events--rejoice, under this fathomless charity, that
they had not entirely disappeared. To gaze into the depths of blue of
the child's eyes and pronounce their loveliness a trick of premature
cunning was to be guilty of a cynicism in preference to which I
naturally preferred to abjure my judgment and, so far as might be, my
agitation. I couldn't abjure for merely wanting to, but I could repeat
to Mrs. Grose--as I did there, over and over, in the small hours--that
with their voices in the air, their pressure on one's heart, and their
fragrant faces against one's cheek, everything fell to the ground but
their incapacity and their beauty. It was a pity that, somehow, to
settle this once for all, I had equally to re-enumerate the signs of
subtlety that, in the afternoon, by the lake had made a miracle of my
show of self-possession. It was a pity to be obliged to reinvestigate
the certitude of the moment itself and repeat how it had come to me as
a revelation that the inconceivable communion I then surprised was a
matter, for either party, of habit. It was a pity that I should have had
to quaver out again the reasons for my not having, in my delusion,
so much as questioned that the little girl saw our visitant even as I
actually saw Mrs. Grose herself, and that she wanted, by just so much as
she did thus see, to make me suppose she didn't, and at the same time,
without showing anything, arrive at a guess as to whether I myself did!
It was a pity that I needed once more to describe the portentous little
activity by which she sought to divert my attention--the perceptible
increase of movement, the greater intensity of play, the singing, the
gabbling of nonsense, and the invitation to romp.

Yet if I had not indulged, to prove there was nothing in it, in this
review, I should have missed the two or three dim elements of comfort
that still remained to me. I should not for instance have been able to
asseverate to my friend that I was certain--which was so much to the
good--that _I_ at least had not betrayed myself. I should not have been
prompted, by stress of need, by desperation of mind--I scarce know what
to call it--to invoke such further aid to intelligence as might spring
from pushing my colleague fairly to the wall. She had told me, bit by
bit, under pressure, a great deal; but a small shifty spot on the wrong
side of it all still sometimes brushed my brow like the wing of a bat;
and I remember how on this occasion--for the sleeping house and the
concentration alike of our danger and our watch seemed to help--I felt
the importance of giving the last jerk to the curtain. "I don't
believe anything so horrible," I recollect saying; "no, let us put it
definitely, my dear, that I don't. But if I did, you know, there's
a thing I should require now, just without sparing you the least bit
more--oh, not a scrap, come!--to get out of you. What was it you had in
mind when, in our distress, before Miles came back, over the letter from
his school, you said, under my insistence, that you didn't pretend for
him that he had not literally EVER been 'bad'? He has NOT literally
'ever,' in these weeks that I myself have lived with him and so closely
watched him; he has been an imperturbable little prodigy of delightful,
lovable goodness. Therefore you might perfectly have made the claim for
him if you had not, as it happened, seen an exception to take. What was
your exception, and to what passage in your personal observation of him
did you refer?"

It was a dreadfully austere inquiry, but levity was not our note, and,
at any rate, before the gray dawn admonished us to separate I had got
my answer. What my friend had had in mind proved to be immensely to the
purpose. It was neither more nor less than the circumstance that for
a period of several months Quint and the boy had been perpetually
together. It was in fact the very appropriate truth that she had
ventured to criticize the propriety, to hint at the incongruity, of
so close an alliance, and even to go so far on the subject as a frank
overture to Miss Jessel. Miss Jessel had, with a most strange manner,
requested her to mind her business, and the good woman had, on this,
directly approached little Miles. What she had said to him, since I
pressed, was that SHE liked to see young gentlemen not forget their
station.

I pressed again, of course, at this. "You reminded him that Quint was
only a base menial?"

"As you might say! And it was his answer, for one thing, that was bad."

"And for another thing?" I waited. "He repeated your words to Quint?"

"No, not that. It's just what he WOULDN'T!" she could still impress upon
me. "I was sure, at any rate," she added, "that he didn't. But he denied
certain occasions."

"What occasions?"

"When they had been about together quite as if Quint were his tutor--and
a very grand one--and Miss Jessel only for the little lady. When he had
gone off with the fellow, I mean, and spent hours with him."

"He then prevaricated about it--he said he hadn't?" Her assent was clear
enough to cause me to add in a moment: "I see. He lied."

"Oh!" Mrs. Grose mumbled. This was a suggestion that it didn't matter;
which indeed she backed up by a further remark. "You see, after all,
Miss Jessel didn't mind. She didn't forbid him."

I considered. "Did he put that to you as a justification?"

At this she dropped again. "No, he never spoke of it."

"Never mentioned her in connection with Quint?"

She saw, visibly flushing, where I was coming out. "Well, he didn't show
anything. He denied," she repeated; "he denied."

Lord, how I pressed her now! "So that you could see he knew what was
between the two wretches?"

"I don't know--I don't know!" the poor woman groaned.

"You do know, you dear thing," I replied; "only you haven't my dreadful
boldness of mind, and you keep back, out of timidity and modesty and
delicacy, even the impression that, in the past, when you had, without
my aid, to flounder about in silence, most of all made you miserable.
But I shall get it out of you yet! There was something in the boy that
suggested to you," I continued, "that he covered and concealed their
relation."

"Oh, he couldn't prevent--"

"Your learning the truth? I daresay! But, heavens," I fell, with
vehemence, athinking, "what it shows that they must, to that extent,
have succeeded in making of him!"

"Ah, nothing that's not nice NOW!" Mrs. Grose lugubriously pleaded.

"I don't wonder you looked queer," I persisted, "when I mentioned to you
the letter from his school!"

"I doubt if I looked as queer as you!" she retorted with homely force.
"And if he was so bad then as that comes to, how is he such an angel
now?"

"Yes, indeed--and if he was a fiend at school! How, how, how? Well,"
I said in my torment, "you must put it to me again, but I shall not be
able to tell you for some days. Only, put it to me again!" I cried in a
way that made my friend stare. "There are directions in which I must
not for the present let myself go." Meanwhile I returned to her first
example--the one to which she had just previously referred--of the boy's
happy capacity for an occasional slip. "If Quint--on your remonstrance
at the time you speak of--was a base menial, one of the things Miles
said to you, I find myself guessing, was that you were another." Again
her admission was so adequate that I continued: "And you forgave him
that?"

"Wouldn't YOU?"

"Oh, yes!" And we exchanged there, in the stillness, a sound of the
oddest amusement. Then I went on: "At all events, while he was with the
man--"

"Miss Flora was with the woman. It suited them all!"

It suited me, too, I felt, only too well; by which I mean that it suited
exactly the particularly deadly view I was in the very act of forbidding
myself to entertain. But I so far succeeded in checking the expression
of this view that I will throw, just here, no further light on it than
may be offered by the mention of my final observation to Mrs. Grose.
"His having lied and been impudent are, I confess, less engaging
specimens than I had hoped to have from you of the outbreak in him of
the little natural man. Still," I mused, "They must do, for they make me
feel more than ever that I must watch."

It made me blush, the next minute, to see in my friend's face how much
more unreservedly she had forgiven him than her anecdote struck me as
presenting to my own tenderness an occasion for doing. This came out
when, at the schoolroom door, she quitted me. "Surely you don't accuse
HIM--"

"Of carrying on an intercourse that he conceals from me? Ah, remember
that, until further evidence, I now accuse nobody." Then, before
shutting her out to go, by another passage, to her own place, "I must
just wait," I wound up.




IX


I waited and waited, and the days, as they elapsed, took something from
my consternation. A very few of them, in fact, passing, in constant
sight of my pupils, without a fresh incident, sufficed to give to
grievous fancies and even to odious memories a kind of brush of the
sponge. I have spoken of the surrender to their extraordinary childish
grace as a thing I could actively cultivate, and it may be imagined if
I neglected now to address myself to this source for whatever it
would yield. Stranger than I can express, certainly, was the effort to
struggle against my new lights; it would doubtless have been, however,
a greater tension still had it not been so frequently successful. I
used to wonder how my little charges could help guessing that I thought
strange things about them; and the circumstances that these things only
made them more interesting was not by itself a direct aid to keeping
them in the dark. I trembled lest they should see that they WERE so
immensely more interesting. Putting things at the worst, at all events,
as in meditation I so often did, any clouding of their innocence could
only be--blameless and foredoomed as they were--a reason the more for
taking risks. There were moments when, by an irresistible impulse, I
found myself catching them up and pressing them to my heart. As soon as
I had done so I used to say to myself: "What will they think of that?
Doesn't it betray too much?" It would have been easy to get into a sad,
wild tangle about how much I might betray; but the real account, I feel,
of the hours of peace that I could still enjoy was that the immediate
charm of my companions was a beguilement still effective even under the
shadow of the possibility that it was studied. For if it occurred to me
that I might occasionally excite suspicion by the little outbreaks of my
sharper passion for them, so too I remember wondering if I mightn't see
a queerness in the traceable increase of their own demonstrations.

They were at this period extravagantly and preternaturally fond of me;
which, after all, I could reflect, was no more than a graceful response
in children perpetually bowed over and hugged. The homage of which they
were so lavish succeeded, in truth, for my nerves, quite as well as if
I never appeared to myself, as I may say, literally to catch them at a
purpose in it. They had never, I think, wanted to do so many things for
their poor protectress; I mean--though they got their lessons better and
better, which was naturally what would please her most--in the way of
diverting, entertaining, surprising her; reading her passages, telling
her stories, acting her charades, pouncing out at her, in disguises, as
animals and historical characters, and above all astonishing her by the
"pieces" they had secretly got by heart and could interminably recite. I
should never get to the bottom--were I to let myself go even now--of the
prodigious private commentary, all under still more private correction,
with which, in these days, I overscored their full hours. They had shown
me from the first a facility for everything, a general faculty which,
taking a fresh start, achieved remarkable flights. They got their little
tasks as if they loved them, and indulged, from the mere exuberance of
the gift, in the most unimposed little miracles of memory. They not
only popped out at me as tigers and as Romans, but as Shakespeareans,
astronomers, and navigators. This was so singularly the case that it had
presumably much to do with the fact as to which, at the present day,
I am at a loss for a different explanation: I allude to my unnatural
composure on the subject of another school for Miles. What I remember
is that I was content not, for the time, to open the question, and that
contentment must have sprung from the sense of his perpetually striking
show of cleverness. He was too clever for a bad governess, for a
parson's daughter, to spoil; and the strangest if not the brightest
thread in the pensive embroidery I just spoke of was the impression I
might have got, if I had dared to work it out, that he was under some
influence operating in his small intellectual life as a tremendous
incitement.

If it was easy to reflect, however, that such a boy could postpone
school, it was at least as marked that for such a boy to have been
"kicked out" by a schoolmaster was a mystification without end. Let me
add that in their company now--and I was careful almost never to be out
of it--I could follow no scent very far. We lived in a cloud of music
and love and success and private theatricals. The musical sense in each
of the children was of the quickest, but the elder in especial had a
marvelous knack of catching and repeating. The schoolroom piano
broke into all gruesome fancies; and when that failed there were
confabulations in corners, with a sequel of one of them going out in
the highest spirits in order to "come in" as something new. I had had
brothers myself, and it was no revelation to me that little girls could
be slavish idolaters of little boys. What surpassed everything was that
there was a little boy in the world who could have for the inferior age,
sex, and intelligence so fine a consideration. They were extraordinarily
at one, and to say that they never either quarreled or complained is
to make the note of praise coarse for their quality of sweetness.
Sometimes, indeed, when I dropped into coarseness, I perhaps came across
traces of little understandings between them by which one of them should
keep me occupied while the other slipped away. There is a naive side,
I suppose, in all diplomacy; but if my pupils practiced upon me, it was
surely with the minimum of grossness. It was all in the other quarter
that, after a lull, the grossness broke out.

I find that I really hang back; but I must take my plunge. In going on
with the record of what was hideous at Bly, I not only challenge the
most liberal faith--for which I little care; but--and this is another
matter--I renew what I myself suffered, I again push my way through it
to the end. There came suddenly an hour after which, as I look back, the
affair seems to me to have been all pure suffering; but I have at least
reached the heart of it, and the straightest road out is doubtless to
advance. One evening--with nothing to lead up or to prepare it--I felt
the cold touch of the impression that had breathed on me the night of
my arrival and which, much lighter then, as I have mentioned, I should
probably have made little of in memory had my subsequent sojourn been
less agitated. I had not gone to bed; I sat reading by a couple of
candles. There was a roomful of old books at Bly--last-century fiction,
some of it, which, to the extent of a distinctly deprecated renown,
but never to so much as that of a stray specimen, had reached the
sequestered home and appealed to the unavowed curiosity of my youth. I
remember that the book I had in my hand was Fielding's Amelia; also that
I was wholly awake. I recall further both a general conviction that it
was horribly late and a particular objection to looking at my watch. I
figure, finally, that the white curtain draping, in the fashion of those
days, the head of Flora's little bed, shrouded, as I had assured myself
long before, the perfection of childish rest. I recollect in short that,
though I was deeply interested in my author, I found myself, at the turn
of a page and with his spell all scattered, looking straight up from
him and hard at the door of my room. There was a moment during which
I listened, reminded of the faint sense I had had, the first night, of
there being something undefinably astir in the house, and noted the soft
breath of the open casement just move the half-drawn blind. Then, with
all the marks of a deliberation that must have seemed magnificent had
there been anyone to admire it, I laid down my book, rose to my feet,
and, taking a candle, went straight out of the room and, from the
passage, on which my light made little impression, noiselessly closed
and locked the door.

I can say now neither what determined nor what guided me, but I went
straight along the lobby, holding my candle high, till I came within
sight of the tall window that presided over the great turn of the
staircase. At this point I precipitately found myself aware of three
things. They were practically simultaneous, yet they had flashes of
succession. My candle, under a bold flourish, went out, and I perceived,
by the uncovered window, that the yielding dusk of earliest morning
rendered it unnecessary. Without it, the next instant, I saw that there
was someone on the stair. I speak of sequences, but I required no lapse
of seconds to stiffen myself for a third encounter with Quint. The
apparition had reached the landing halfway up and was therefore on the
spot nearest the window, where at sight of me, it stopped short and
fixed me exactly as it had fixed me from the tower and from the garden.
He knew me as well as I knew him; and so, in the cold, faint twilight,
with a glimmer in the high glass and another on the polish of the
oak stair below, we faced each other in our common intensity. He was
absolutely, on this occasion, a living, detestable, dangerous presence.
But that was not the wonder of wonders; I reserve this distinction for
quite another circumstance: the circumstance that dread had unmistakably
quitted me and that there was nothing in me there that didn't meet and
measure him.

I had plenty of anguish after that extraordinary moment, but I had,
thank God, no terror. And he knew I had not--I found myself at the end
of an instant magnificently aware of this. I felt, in a fierce rigor of
confidence, that if I stood my ground a minute I should cease--for
the time, at least--to have him to reckon with; and during the minute,
accordingly, the thing was as human and hideous as a real interview:
hideous just because it WAS human, as human as to have met alone, in
the small hours, in a sleeping house, some enemy, some adventurer,
some criminal. It was the dead silence of our long gaze at such close
quarters that gave the whole horror, huge as it was, its only note of
the unnatural. If I had met a murderer in such a place and at such an
hour, we still at least would have spoken. Something would have passed,
in life, between us; if nothing had passed, one of us would have moved.
The moment was so prolonged that it would have taken but little more to
make me doubt if even _I_ were in life. I can't express what followed it
save by saying that the silence itself--which was indeed in a manner
an attestation of my strength--became the element into which I saw the
figure disappear; in which I definitely saw it turn as I might have
seen the low wretch to which it had once belonged turn on receipt of an
order, and pass, with my eyes on the villainous back that no hunch could
have more disfigured, straight down the staircase and into the darkness
in which the next bend was lost.




X


I remained awhile at the top of the stair, but with the effect presently
of understanding that when my visitor had gone, he had gone: then I
returned to my room. The foremost thing I saw there by the light of the
candle I had left burning was that Flora's little bed was empty; and on
this I caught my breath with all the terror that, five minutes before,
I had been able to resist. I dashed at the place in which I had left her
lying and over which (for the small silk counterpane and the sheets were
disarranged) the white curtains had been deceivingly pulled forward;
then my step, to my unutterable relief, produced an answering sound: I
perceived an agitation of the window blind, and the child, ducking down,
emerged rosily from the other side of it. She stood there in so much of
her candor and so little of her nightgown, with her pink bare feet and
the golden glow of her curls. She looked intensely grave, and I had
never had such a sense of losing an advantage acquired (the thrill
of which had just been so prodigious) as on my consciousness that
she addressed me with a reproach. "You naughty: where HAVE you
been?"--instead of challenging her own irregularity I found myself
arraigned and explaining. She herself explained, for that matter, with
the loveliest, eagerest simplicity. She had known suddenly, as she lay
there, that I was out of the room, and had jumped up to see what had
become of me. I had dropped, with the joy of her reappearance, back
into my chair--feeling then, and then only, a little faint; and she had
pattered straight over to me, thrown herself upon my knee, given herself
to be held with the flame of the candle full in the wonderful little
face that was still flushed with sleep. I remember closing my eyes an
instant, yieldingly, consciously, as before the excess of something
beautiful that shone out of the blue of her own. "You were looking for
me out of the window?" I said. "You thought I might be walking in the
grounds?"

"Well, you know, I thought someone was"--she never blanched as she
smiled out that at me.

Oh, how I looked at her now! "And did you see anyone?"

"Ah, NO!" she returned, almost with the full privilege of childish
inconsequence, resentfully, though with a long sweetness in her little
drawl of the negative.

At that moment, in the state of my nerves, I absolutely believed she
lied; and if I once more closed my eyes it was before the dazzle of the
three or four possible ways in which I might take this up. One of these,
for a moment, tempted me with such singular intensity that, to withstand
it, I must have gripped my little girl with a spasm that, wonderfully,
she submitted to without a cry or a sign of fright. Why not break out
at her on the spot and have it all over?--give it to her straight in her
lovely little lighted face? "You see, you see, you KNOW that you do and
that you already quite suspect I believe it; therefore, why not frankly
confess it to me, so that we may at least live with it together and
learn perhaps, in the strangeness of our fate, where we are and what
it means?" This solicitation dropped, alas, as it came: if I could
immediately have succumbed to it I might have spared myself--well,
you'll see what. Instead of succumbing I sprang again to my feet,
looked at her bed, and took a helpless middle way. "Why did you pull the
curtain over the place to make me think you were still there?"

Flora luminously considered; after which, with her little divine smile:
"Because I don't like to frighten you!"

"But if I had, by your idea, gone out--?"

She absolutely declined to be puzzled; she turned her eyes to the flame
of the candle as if the question were as irrelevant, or at any rate as
impersonal, as Mrs. Marcet or nine-times-nine. "Oh, but you know," she
quite adequately answered, "that you might come back, you dear, and that
you HAVE!" And after a little, when she had got into bed, I had, for a
long time, by almost sitting on her to hold her hand, to prove that I
recognized the pertinence of my return.

You may imagine the general complexion, from that moment, of my nights.
I repeatedly sat up till I didn't know when; I selected moments when my
roommate unmistakably slept, and, stealing out, took noiseless turns in
the passage and even pushed as far as to where I had last met Quint. But
I never met him there again; and I may as well say at once that I on no
other occasion saw him in the house. I just missed, on the staircase,
on the other hand, a different adventure. Looking down it from the top I
once recognized the presence of a woman seated on one of the lower steps
with her back presented to me, her body half-bowed and her head, in an
attitude of woe, in her hands. I had been there but an instant, however,
when she vanished without looking round at me. I knew, nonetheless,
exactly what dreadful face she had to show; and I wondered whether, if
instead of being above I had been below, I should have had, for going
up, the same nerve I had lately shown Quint. Well, there continued to
be plenty of chance for nerve. On the eleventh night after my latest
encounter with that gentleman--they were all numbered now--I had an
alarm that perilously skirted it and that indeed, from the particular
quality of its unexpectedness, proved quite my sharpest shock. It was
precisely the first night during this series that, weary with watching,
I had felt that I might again without laxity lay myself down at my
old hour. I slept immediately and, as I afterward knew, till about one
o'clock; but when I woke it was to sit straight up, as completely roused
as if a hand had shook me. I had left a light burning, but it was now
out, and I felt an instant certainty that Flora had extinguished it.
This brought me to my feet and straight, in the darkness, to her bed,
which I found she had left. A glance at the window enlightened me
further, and the striking of a match completed the picture.

The child had again got up--this time blowing out the taper, and had
again, for some purpose of observation or response, squeezed in behind
the blind and was peering out into the night. That she now saw--as she
had not, I had satisfied myself, the previous time--was proved to me by
the fact that she was disturbed neither by my reillumination nor by the
haste I made to get into slippers and into a wrap. Hidden, protected,
absorbed, she evidently rested on the sill--the casement opened
forward--and gave herself up. There was a great still moon to help her,
and this fact had counted in my quick decision. She was face to face
with the apparition we had met at the lake, and could now communicate
with it as she had not then been able to do. What I, on my side, had to
care for was, without disturbing her, to reach, from the corridor, some
other window in the same quarter. I got to the door without her hearing
me; I got out of it, closed it, and listened, from the other side, for
some sound from her. While I stood in the passage I had my eyes on her
brother's door, which was but ten steps off and which, indescribably,
produced in me a renewal of the strange impulse that I lately spoke
of as my temptation. What if I should go straight in and march to HIS
window?--what if, by risking to his boyish bewilderment a revelation of
my motive, I should throw across the rest of the mystery the long halter
of my boldness?

This thought held me sufficiently to make me cross to his threshold and
pause again. I preternaturally listened; I figured to myself what might
portentously be; I wondered if his bed were also empty and he too were
secretly at watch. It was a deep, soundless minute, at the end of which
my impulse failed. He was quiet; he might be innocent; the risk was
hideous; I turned away. There was a figure in the grounds--a figure
prowling for a sight, the visitor with whom Flora was engaged; but it
was not the visitor most concerned with my boy. I hesitated afresh, but
on other grounds and only for a few seconds; then I had made my choice.
There were empty rooms at Bly, and it was only a question of choosing
the right one. The right one suddenly presented itself to me as the
lower one--though high above the gardens--in the solid corner of the
house that I have spoken of as the old tower. This was a large, square
chamber, arranged with some state as a bedroom, the extravagant size of
which made it so inconvenient that it had not for years, though kept by
Mrs. Grose in exemplary order, been occupied. I had often admired it and
I knew my way about in it; I had only, after just faltering at the first
chill gloom of its disuse, to pass across it and unbolt as quietly as I
could one of the shutters. Achieving this transit, I uncovered the
glass without a sound and, applying my face to the pane, was able, the
darkness without being much less than within, to see that I commanded
the right direction. Then I saw something more. The moon made the
night extraordinarily penetrable and showed me on the lawn a person,
diminished by distance, who stood there motionless and as if fascinated,
looking up to where I had appeared--looking, that is, not so much
straight at me as at something that was apparently above me. There was
clearly another person above me--there was a person on the tower; but
the presence on the lawn was not in the least what I had conceived and
had confidently hurried to meet. The presence on the lawn--I felt sick
as I made it out--was poor little Miles himself.




XI


It was not till late next day that I spoke to Mrs. Grose; the rigor with
which I kept my pupils in sight making it often difficult to meet
her privately, and the more as we each felt the importance of not
provoking--on the part of the servants quite as much as on that of the
children--any suspicion of a secret flurry or that of a discussion of
mysteries. I drew a great security in this particular from her mere
smooth aspect. There was nothing in her fresh face to pass on to others
my horrible confidences. She believed me, I was sure, absolutely: if she
hadn't I don't know what would have become of me, for I couldn't have
borne the business alone. But she was a magnificent monument to the
blessing of a want of imagination, and if she could see in our little
charges nothing but their beauty and amiability, their happiness and
cleverness, she had no direct communication with the sources of my
trouble. If they had been at all visibly blighted or battered, she would
doubtless have grown, on tracing it back, haggard enough to match them;
as matters stood, however, I could feel her, when she surveyed them,
with her large white arms folded and the habit of serenity in all her
look, thank the Lord's mercy that if they were ruined the pieces would
still serve. Flights of fancy gave place, in her mind, to a steady
fireside glow, and I had already begun to perceive how, with the
development of the conviction that--as time went on without a public
accident--our young things could, after all, look out for themselves,
she addressed her greatest solicitude to the sad case presented by their
instructress. That, for myself, was a sound simplification: I could
engage that, to the world, my face should tell no tales, but it would
have been, in the conditions, an immense added strain to find myself
anxious about hers.

At the hour I now speak of she had joined me, under pressure, on the
terrace, where, with the lapse of the season, the afternoon sun was now
agreeable; and we sat there together while, before us, at a distance,
but within call if we wished, the children strolled to and fro in one
of their most manageable moods. They moved slowly, in unison, below us,
over the lawn, the boy, as they went, reading aloud from a storybook and
passing his arm round his sister to keep her quite in touch. Mrs. Grose
watched them with positive placidity; then I caught the suppressed
intellectual creak with which she conscientiously turned to take from me
a view of the back of the tapestry. I had made her a receptacle of
lurid things, but there was an odd recognition of my superiority--my
accomplishments and my function--in her patience under my pain. She
offered her mind to my disclosures as, had I wished to mix a witch's
broth and proposed it with assurance, she would have held out a large
clean saucepan. This had become thoroughly her attitude by the time
that, in my recital of the events of the night, I reached the point of
what Miles had said to me when, after seeing him, at such a monstrous
hour, almost on the very spot where he happened now to be, I had gone
down to bring him in; choosing then, at the window, with a concentrated
need of not alarming the house, rather that method than a signal more
resonant. I had left her meanwhile in little doubt of my small hope of
representing with success even to her actual sympathy my sense of the
real splendor of the little inspiration with which, after I had got him
into the house, the boy met my final articulate challenge. As soon as I
appeared in the moonlight on the terrace, he had come to me as straight
as possible; on which I had taken his hand without a word and led him,
through the dark spaces, up the staircase where Quint had so hungrily
hovered for him, along the lobby where I had listened and trembled, and
so to his forsaken room.

Not a sound, on the way, had passed between us, and I had wondered--oh,
HOW I had wondered!--if he were groping about in his little mind for
something plausible and not too grotesque. It would tax his invention,
certainly, and I felt, this time, over his real embarrassment, a curious
thrill of triumph. It was a sharp trap for the inscrutable! He couldn't
play any longer at innocence; so how the deuce would he get out of it?
There beat in me indeed, with the passionate throb of this question an
equal dumb appeal as to how the deuce _I_ should. I was confronted at
last, as never yet, with all the risk attached even now to sounding my
own horrid note. I remember in fact that as we pushed into his little
chamber, where the bed had not been slept in at all and the window,
uncovered to the moonlight, made the place so clear that there was no
need of striking a match--I remember how I suddenly dropped, sank upon
the edge of the bed from the force of the idea that he must know how he
really, as they say, "had" me. He could do what he liked, with all his
cleverness to help him, so long as I should continue to defer to the
old tradition of the criminality of those caretakers of the young who
minister to superstitions and fears. He "had" me indeed, and in a cleft
stick; for who would ever absolve me, who would consent that I should go
unhung, if, by the faintest tremor of an overture, I were the first to
introduce into our perfect intercourse an element so dire? No, no: it
was useless to attempt to convey to Mrs. Grose, just as it is scarcely
less so to attempt to suggest here, how, in our short, stiff brush in
the dark, he fairly shook me with admiration. I was of course thoroughly
kind and merciful; never, never yet had I placed on his little shoulders
hands of such tenderness as those with which, while I rested against the
bed, I held him there well under fire. I had no alternative but, in form
at least, to put it to him.

"You must tell me now--and all the truth. What did you go out for? What
were you doing there?"

I can still see his wonderful smile, the whites of his beautiful eyes,
and the uncovering of his little teeth shine to me in the dusk. "If I
tell you why, will you understand?" My heart, at this, leaped into my
mouth. WOULD he tell me why? I found no sound on my lips to press it,
and I was aware of replying only with a vague, repeated, grimacing nod.
He was gentleness itself, and while I wagged my head at him he stood
there more than ever a little fairy prince. It was his brightness indeed
that gave me a respite. Would it be so great if he were really going to
tell me? "Well," he said at last, "just exactly in order that you should
do this."

"Do what?"

"Think me--for a change--BAD!" I shall never forget the sweetness and
gaiety with which he brought out the word, nor how, on top of it, he
bent forward and kissed me. It was practically the end of everything.
I met his kiss and I had to make, while I folded him for a minute in my
arms, the most stupendous effort not to cry. He had given exactly the
account of himself that permitted least of my going behind it, and it
was only with the effect of confirming my acceptance of it that, as I
presently glanced about the room, I could say--

"Then you didn't undress at all?"

He fairly glittered in the gloom. "Not at all. I sat up and read."

"And when did you go down?"

"At midnight. When I'm bad I AM bad!"

"I see, I see--it's charming. But how could you be sure I would know
it?"

"Oh, I arranged that with Flora." His answers rang out with a readiness!
"She was to get up and look out."

"Which is what she did do." It was I who fell into the trap!

"So she disturbed you, and, to see what she was looking at, you also
looked--you saw."

"While you," I concurred, "caught your death in the night air!"

He literally bloomed so from this exploit that he could afford radiantly
to assent. "How otherwise should I have been bad enough?" he asked.
Then, after another embrace, the incident and our interview closed on my
recognition of all the reserves of goodness that, for his joke, he had
been able to draw upon.




XII


The particular impression I had received proved in the morning light,
I repeat, not quite successfully presentable to Mrs. Grose, though I
reinforced it with the mention of still another remark that he had made
before we separated. "It all lies in half a dozen words," I said to her,
"words that really settle the matter. 'Think, you know, what I MIGHT
do!' He threw that off to show me how good he is. He knows down to
the ground what he 'might' do. That's what he gave them a taste of at
school."

"Lord, you do change!" cried my friend.

"I don't change--I simply make it out. The four, depend upon it,
perpetually meet. If on either of these last nights you had been with
either child, you would clearly have understood. The more I've watched
and waited the more I've felt that if there were nothing else to make it
sure it would be made so by the systematic silence of each. NEVER, by a
slip of the tongue, have they so much as alluded to either of their old
friends, any more than Miles has alluded to his expulsion. Oh, yes,
we may sit here and look at them, and they may show off to us there to
their fill; but even while they pretend to be lost in their fairytale
they're steeped in their vision of the dead restored. He's not reading
to her," I declared; "they're talking of THEM--they're talking horrors!
I go on, I know, as if I were crazy; and it's a wonder I'm not. What
I've seen would have made YOU so; but it has only made me more lucid,
made me get hold of still other things."

My lucidity must have seemed awful, but the charming creatures who were
victims of it, passing and repassing in their interlocked sweetness,
gave my colleague something to hold on by; and I felt how tight she held
as, without stirring in the breath of my passion, she covered them still
with her eyes. "Of what other things have you got hold?"

"Why, of the very things that have delighted, fascinated, and yet, at
bottom, as I now so strangely see, mystified and troubled me. Their more
than earthly beauty, their absolutely unnatural goodness. It's a game,"
I went on; "it's a policy and a fraud!"

"On the part of little darlings--?"

"As yet mere lovely babies? Yes, mad as that seems!" The very act of
bringing it out really helped me to trace it--follow it all up and piece
it all together. "They haven't been good--they've only been absent. It
has been easy to live with them, because they're simply leading a
life of their own. They're not mine--they're not ours. They're his and
they're hers!"

"Quint's and that woman's?"

"Quint's and that woman's. They want to get to them."

Oh, how, at this, poor Mrs. Grose appeared to study them! "But for
what?"

"For the love of all the evil that, in those dreadful days, the pair put
into them. And to ply them with that evil still, to keep up the work of
demons, is what brings the others back."

"Laws!" said my friend under her breath. The exclamation was homely, but
it revealed a real acceptance of my further proof of what, in the bad
time--for there had been a worse even than this!--must have occurred.
There could have been no such justification for me as the plain assent
of her experience to whatever depth of depravity I found credible in
our brace of scoundrels. It was in obvious submission of memory that she
brought out after a moment: "They WERE rascals! But what can they now
do?" she pursued.

"Do?" I echoed so loud that Miles and Flora, as they passed at their
distance, paused an instant in their walk and looked at us. "Don't
they do enough?" I demanded in a lower tone, while the children, having
smiled and nodded and kissed hands to us, resumed their exhibition. We
were held by it a minute; then I answered: "They can destroy them!" At
this my companion did turn, but the inquiry she launched was a silent
one, the effect of which was to make me more explicit. "They don't know,
as yet, quite how--but they're trying hard. They're seen only across,
as it were, and beyond--in strange places and on high places, the top of
towers, the roof of houses, the outside of windows, the further edge
of pools; but there's a deep design, on either side, to shorten the
distance and overcome the obstacle; and the success of the tempters is
only a question of time. They've only to keep to their suggestions of
danger."

"For the children to come?"

"And perish in the attempt!" Mrs. Grose slowly got up, and I
scrupulously added: "Unless, of course, we can prevent!"

Standing there before me while I kept my seat, she visibly turned things
over. "Their uncle must do the preventing. He must take them away."

"And who's to make him?"

She had been scanning the distance, but she now dropped on me a foolish
face. "You, miss."

"By writing to him that his house is poisoned and his little nephew and
niece mad?"

"But if they ARE, miss?"

"And if I am myself, you mean? That's charming news to be sent him by a
governess whose prime undertaking was to give him no worry."

Mrs. Grose considered, following the children again. "Yes, he do hate
worry. That was the great reason--"

"Why those fiends took him in so long? No doubt, though his indifference
must have been awful. As I'm not a fiend, at any rate, I shouldn't take
him in."

My companion, after an instant and for all answer, sat down again and
grasped my arm. "Make him at any rate come to you."

I stared. "To ME?" I had a sudden fear of what she might do. "'Him'?"

"He ought to BE here--he ought to help."

I quickly rose, and I think I must have shown her a queerer face than
ever yet. "You see me asking him for a visit?" No, with her eyes on
my face she evidently couldn't. Instead of it even--as a woman reads
another--she could see what I myself saw: his derision, his amusement,
his contempt for the breakdown of my resignation at being left alone and
for the fine machinery I had set in motion to attract his attention to
my slighted charms. She didn't know--no one knew--how proud I had been
to serve him and to stick to our terms; yet she nonetheless took the
measure, I think, of the warning I now gave her. "If you should so lose
your head as to appeal to him for me--"

She was really frightened. "Yes, miss?"

"I would leave, on the spot, both him and you."




XIII


It was all very well to join them, but speaking to them proved quite as
much as ever an effort beyond my strength--offered, in close quarters,
difficulties as insurmountable as before. This situation continued a
month, and with new aggravations and particular notes, the note above
all, sharper and sharper, of the small ironic consciousness on the part
of my pupils. It was not, I am as sure today as I was sure then, my mere
infernal imagination: it was absolutely traceable that they were aware
of my predicament and that this strange relation made, in a manner, for
a long time, the air in which we moved. I don't mean that they had their
tongues in their cheeks or did anything vulgar, for that was not one
of their dangers: I do mean, on the other hand, that the element of the
unnamed and untouched became, between us, greater than any other, and
that so much avoidance could not have been so successfully effected
without a great deal of tacit arrangement. It was as if, at moments, we
were perpetually coming into sight of subjects before which we must stop
short, turning suddenly out of alleys that we perceived to be blind,
closing with a little bang that made us look at each other--for, like
all bangs, it was something louder than we had intended--the doors we
had indiscreetly opened. All roads lead to Rome, and there were times
when it might have struck us that almost every branch of study or
subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground. Forbidden ground was
the question of the return of the dead in general and of whatever, in
especial, might survive, in memory, of the friends little children had
lost. There were days when I could have sworn that one of them had, with
a small invisible nudge, said to the other: "She thinks she'll do it
this time--but she WON'T!" To "do it" would have been to indulge for
instance--and for once in a way--in some direct reference to the lady
who had prepared them for my discipline. They had a delightful endless
appetite for passages in my own history, to which I had again and
again treated them; they were in possession of everything that had
ever happened to me, had had, with every circumstance the story of my
smallest adventures and of those of my brothers and sisters and of the
cat and the dog at home, as well as many particulars of the eccentric
nature of my father, of the furniture and arrangement of our house, and
of the conversation of the old women of our village. There were things
enough, taking one with another, to chatter about, if one went very fast
and knew by instinct when to go round. They pulled with an art of their
own the strings of my invention and my memory; and nothing else perhaps,
when I thought of such occasions afterward, gave me so the suspicion
of being watched from under cover. It was in any case over MY life, MY
past, and MY friends alone that we could take anything like our ease--a
state of affairs that led them sometimes without the least pertinence
to break out into sociable reminders. I was invited--with no visible
connection--to repeat afresh Goody Gosling's celebrated mot or to
confirm the details already supplied as to the cleverness of the
vicarage pony.

It was partly at such junctures as these and partly at quite different
ones that, with the turn my matters had now taken, my predicament, as I
have called it, grew most sensible. The fact that the days passed for
me without another encounter ought, it would have appeared, to have done
something toward soothing my nerves. Since the light brush, that second
night on the upper landing, of the presence of a woman at the foot of
the stair, I had seen nothing, whether in or out of the house, that one
had better not have seen. There was many a corner round which I expected
to come upon Quint, and many a situation that, in a merely sinister way,
would have favored the appearance of Miss Jessel. The summer had turned,
the summer had gone; the autumn had dropped upon Bly and had blown out
half our lights. The place, with its gray sky and withered garlands,
its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was like a theater after
the performance--all strewn with crumpled playbills. There were exactly
states of the air, conditions of sound and of stillness, unspeakable
impressions of the KIND of ministering moment, that brought back to me,
long enough to catch it, the feeling of the medium in which, that June
evening out of doors, I had had my first sight of Quint, and in which,
too, at those other instants, I had, after seeing him through the
window, looked for him in vain in the circle of shrubbery. I recognized
the signs, the portents--I recognized the moment, the spot. But they
remained unaccompanied and empty, and I continued unmolested; if
unmolested one could call a young woman whose sensibility had, in the
most extraordinary fashion, not declined but deepened. I had said in my
talk with Mrs. Grose on that horrid scene of Flora's by the lake--and
had perplexed her by so saying--that it would from that moment distress
me much more to lose my power than to keep it. I had then expressed what
was vividly in my mind: the truth that, whether the children really
saw or not--since, that is, it was not yet definitely proved--I greatly
preferred, as a safeguard, the fullness of my own exposure. I was ready
to know the very worst that was to be known. What I had then had an ugly
glimpse of was that my eyes might be sealed just while theirs were
most opened. Well, my eyes WERE sealed, it appeared, at present--a
consummation for which it seemed blasphemous not to thank God. There
was, alas, a difficulty about that: I would have thanked him with all
my soul had I not had in a proportionate measure this conviction of the
secret of my pupils.

How can I retrace today the strange steps of my obsession? There were
times of our being together when I would have been ready to swear that,
literally, in my presence, but with my direct sense of it closed, they
had visitors who were known and were welcome. Then it was that, had I
not been deterred by the very chance that such an injury might prove
greater than the injury to be averted, my exultation would have broken
out. "They're here, they're here, you little wretches," I would have
cried, "and you can't deny it now!" The little wretches denied it with
all the added volume of their sociability and their tenderness, in just
the crystal depths of which--like the flash of a fish in a stream--the
mockery of their advantage peeped up. The shock, in truth, had sunk into
me still deeper than I knew on the night when, looking out to see either
Quint or Miss Jessel under the stars, I had beheld the boy over
whose rest I watched and who had immediately brought in with him--had
straightway, there, turned it on me--the lovely upward look with which,
from the battlements above me, the hideous apparition of Quint had
played. If it was a question of a scare, my discovery on this occasion
had scared me more than any other, and it was in the condition of nerves
produced by it that I made my actual inductions. They harassed me so
that sometimes, at odd moments, I shut myself up audibly to rehearse--it
was at once a fantastic relief and a renewed despair--the manner in
which I might come to the point. I approached it from one side and the
other while, in my room, I flung myself about, but I always broke down
in the monstrous utterance of names. As they died away on my lips, I
said to myself that I should indeed help them to represent something
infamous, if, by pronouncing them, I should violate as rare a little
case of instinctive delicacy as any schoolroom, probably, had ever
known. When I said to myself: "THEY have the manners to be silent, and
you, trusted as you are, the baseness to speak!" I felt myself crimson
and I covered my face with my hands. After these secret scenes I
chattered more than ever, going on volubly enough till one of our
prodigious, palpable hushes occurred--I can call them nothing else--the
strange, dizzy lift or swim (I try for terms!) into a stillness, a pause
of all life, that had nothing to do with the more or less noise that at
the moment we might be engaged in making and that I could hear through
any deepened exhilaration or quickened recitation or louder strum of the
piano. Then it was that the others, the outsiders, were there. Though
they were not angels, they "passed," as the French say, causing me,
while they stayed, to tremble with the fear of their addressing to their
younger victims some yet more infernal message or more vivid image than
they had thought good enough for myself.

What it was most impossible to get rid of was the cruel idea that,
whatever I had seen, Miles and Flora saw MORE--things terrible and
unguessable and that sprang from dreadful passages of intercourse in the
past. Such things naturally left on the surface, for the time, a chill
which we vociferously denied that we felt; and we had, all three, with
repetition, got into such splendid training that we went, each time,
almost automatically, to mark the close of the incident, through the
very same movements. It was striking of the children, at all events,
to kiss me inveterately with a kind of wild irrelevance and never to
fail--one or the other--of the precious question that had helped us
through many a peril. "When do you think he WILL come? Don't you think
we OUGHT to write?"--there was nothing like that inquiry, we found by
experience, for carrying off an awkwardness. "He" of course was their
uncle in Harley Street; and we lived in much profusion of theory that he
might at any moment arrive to mingle in our circle. It was impossible to
have given less encouragement than he had done to such a doctrine, but
if we had not had the doctrine to fall back upon we should have
deprived each other of some of our finest exhibitions. He never wrote to
them--that may have been selfish, but it was a part of the flattery of
his trust of me; for the way in which a man pays his highest tribute to
a woman is apt to be but by the more festal celebration of one of the
sacred laws of his comfort; and I held that I carried out the spirit of
the pledge given not to appeal to him when I let my charges understand
that their own letters were but charming literary exercises. They were
too beautiful to be posted; I kept them myself; I have them all to this
hour. This was a rule indeed which only added to the satiric effect of
my being plied with the supposition that he might at any moment be among
us. It was exactly as if my charges knew how almost more awkward than
anything else that might be for me. There appears to me, moreover, as
I look back, no note in all this more extraordinary than the mere fact
that, in spite of my tension and of their triumph, I never lost patience
with them. Adorable they must in truth have been, I now reflect, that I
didn't in these days hate them! Would exasperation, however, if relief
had longer been postponed, finally have betrayed me? It little matters,
for relief arrived. I call it relief, though it was only the relief that
a snap brings to a strain or the burst of a thunderstorm to a day of
suffocation. It was at least change, and it came with a rush.




XIV


Walking to church a certain Sunday morning, I had little Miles at my
side and his sister, in advance of us and at Mrs. Grose's, well in
sight. It was a crisp, clear day, the first of its order for some time;
the night had brought a touch of frost, and the autumn air, bright
and sharp, made the church bells almost gay. It was an odd accident of
thought that I should have happened at such a moment to be particularly
and very gratefully struck with the obedience of my little charges. Why
did they never resent my inexorable, my perpetual society? Something or
other had brought nearer home to me that I had all but pinned the boy to
my shawl and that, in the way our companions were marshaled before me,
I might have appeared to provide against some danger of rebellion. I
was like a gaoler with an eye to possible surprises and escapes. But all
this belonged--I mean their magnificent little surrender--just to the
special array of the facts that were most abysmal. Turned out for Sunday
by his uncle's tailor, who had had a free hand and a notion of
pretty waistcoats and of his grand little air, Miles's whole title to
independence, the rights of his sex and situation, were so stamped upon
him that if he had suddenly struck for freedom I should have had nothing
to say. I was by the strangest of chances wondering how I should meet
him when the revolution unmistakably occurred. I call it a revolution
because I now see how, with the word he spoke, the curtain rose on the
last act of my dreadful drama, and the catastrophe was precipitated.
"Look here, my dear, you know," he charmingly said, "when in the world,
please, am I going back to school?"

Transcribed here the speech sounds harmless enough, particularly
as uttered in the sweet, high, casual pipe with which, at all
interlocutors, but above all at his eternal governess, he threw off
intonations as if he were tossing roses. There was something in
them that always made one "catch," and I caught, at any rate, now so
effectually that I stopped as short as if one of the trees of the
park had fallen across the road. There was something new, on the spot,
between us, and he was perfectly aware that I recognized it, though,
to enable me to do so, he had no need to look a whit less candid and
charming than usual. I could feel in him how he already, from my at
first finding nothing to reply, perceived the advantage he had gained. I
was so slow to find anything that he had plenty of time, after a minute,
to continue with his suggestive but inconclusive smile: "You know, my
dear, that for a fellow to be with a lady ALWAYS--!" His "my dear" was
constantly on his lips for me, and nothing could have expressed more the
exact shade of the sentiment with which I desired to inspire my pupils
than its fond familiarity. It was so respectfully easy.

But, oh, how I felt that at present I must pick my own phrases! I
remember that, to gain time, I tried to laugh, and I seemed to see in
the beautiful face with which he watched me how ugly and queer I looked.
"And always with the same lady?" I returned.

He neither blanched nor winked. The whole thing was virtually out
between us. "Ah, of course, she's a jolly, 'perfect' lady; but, after
all, I'm a fellow, don't you see? that's--well, getting on."

I lingered there with him an instant ever so kindly. "Yes, you're
getting on." Oh, but I felt helpless!

I have kept to this day the heartbreaking little idea of how he seemed
to know that and to play with it. "And you can't say I've not been
awfully good, can you?"

I laid my hand on his shoulder, for, though I felt how much better it
would have been to walk on, I was not yet quite able. "No, I can't say
that, Miles."

"Except just that one night, you know--!"

"That one night?" I couldn't look as straight as he.

"Why, when I went down--went out of the house."

"Oh, yes. But I forget what you did it for."

"You forget?"--he spoke with the sweet extravagance of childish
reproach. "Why, it was to show you I could!"

"Oh, yes, you could."

"And I can again."

I felt that I might, perhaps, after all, succeed in keeping my wits
about me. "Certainly. But you won't."

"No, not THAT again. It was nothing."

"It was nothing," I said. "But we must go on."

He resumed our walk with me, passing his hand into my arm. "Then when AM
I going back?"

I wore, in turning it over, my most responsible air. "Were you very
happy at school?"

He just considered. "Oh, I'm happy enough anywhere!"

"Well, then," I quavered, "if you're just as happy here--!"

"Ah, but that isn't everything! Of course YOU know a lot--"

"But you hint that you know almost as much?" I risked as he paused.

"Not half I want to!" Miles honestly professed. "But it isn't so much
that."

"What is it, then?"

"Well--I want to see more life."

"I see; I see." We had arrived within sight of the church and of various
persons, including several of the household of Bly, on their way to it
and clustered about the door to see us go in. I quickened our step;
I wanted to get there before the question between us opened up much
further; I reflected hungrily that, for more than an hour, he would have
to be silent; and I thought with envy of the comparative dusk of the pew
and of the almost spiritual help of the hassock on which I might bend
my knees. I seemed literally to be running a race with some confusion
to which he was about to reduce me, but I felt that he had got in first
when, before we had even entered the churchyard, he threw out--

"I want my own sort!"

It literally made me bound forward. "There are not many of your own
sort, Miles!" I laughed. "Unless perhaps dear little Flora!"

"You really compare me to a baby girl?"

This found me singularly weak. "Don't you, then, LOVE our sweet Flora?"

"If I didn't--and you, too; if I didn't--!" he repeated as if retreating
for a jump, yet leaving his thought so unfinished that, after we had
come into the gate, another stop, which he imposed on me by the pressure
of his arm, had become inevitable. Mrs. Grose and Flora had passed into
the church, the other worshippers had followed, and we were, for the
minute, alone among the old, thick graves. We had paused, on the path
from the gate, by a low, oblong, tablelike tomb.

"Yes, if you didn't--?"

He looked, while I waited, at the graves. "Well, you know what!" But
he didn't move, and he presently produced something that made me drop
straight down on the stone slab, as if suddenly to rest. "Does my uncle
think what YOU think?"

I markedly rested. "How do you know what I think?"

"Ah, well, of course I don't; for it strikes me you never tell me. But I
mean does HE know?"

"Know what, Miles?"

"Why, the way I'm going on."

I perceived quickly enough that I could make, to this inquiry, no answer
that would not involve something of a sacrifice of my employer. Yet it
appeared to me that we were all, at Bly, sufficiently sacrificed to make
that venial. "I don't think your uncle much cares."

Miles, on this, stood looking at me. "Then don't you think he can be
made to?"

"In what way?"

"Why, by his coming down."

"But who'll get him to come down?"

"_I_ will!" the boy said with extraordinary brightness and emphasis. He
gave me another look charged with that expression and then marched off
alone into church.




XV


The business was practically settled from the moment I never followed
him. It was a pitiful surrender to agitation, but my being aware of this
had somehow no power to restore me. I only sat there on my tomb and read
into what my little friend had said to me the fullness of its meaning;
by the time I had grasped the whole of which I had also embraced, for
absence, the pretext that I was ashamed to offer my pupils and the rest
of the congregation such an example of delay. What I said to myself
above all was that Miles had got something out of me and that the proof
of it, for him, would be just this awkward collapse. He had got out
of me that there was something I was much afraid of and that he should
probably be able to make use of my fear to gain, for his own purpose,
more freedom. My fear was of having to deal with the intolerable
question of the grounds of his dismissal from school, for that was
really but the question of the horrors gathered behind. That his uncle
should arrive to treat with me of these things was a solution that,
strictly speaking, I ought now to have desired to bring on; but I
could so little face the ugliness and the pain of it that I simply
procrastinated and lived from hand to mouth. The boy, to my deep
discomposure, was immensely in the right, was in a position to say
to me: "Either you clear up with my guardian the mystery of this
interruption of my studies, or you cease to expect me to lead with you
a life that's so unnatural for a boy." What was so unnatural for the
particular boy I was concerned with was this sudden revelation of a
consciousness and a plan.

That was what really overcame me, what prevented my going in. I walked
round the church, hesitating, hovering; I reflected that I had already,
with him, hurt myself beyond repair. Therefore I could patch up nothing,
and it was too extreme an effort to squeeze beside him into the pew: he
would be so much more sure than ever to pass his arm into mine and make
me sit there for an hour in close, silent contact with his commentary
on our talk. For the first minute since his arrival I wanted to get away
from him. As I paused beneath the high east window and listened to the
sounds of worship, I was taken with an impulse that might master me,
I felt, completely should I give it the least encouragement. I might
easily put an end to my predicament by getting away altogether. Here
was my chance; there was no one to stop me; I could give the whole thing
up--turn my back and retreat. It was only a question of hurrying again,
for a few preparations, to the house which the attendance at church of
so many of the servants would practically have left unoccupied. No one,
in short, could blame me if I should just drive desperately off. What
was it to get away if I got away only till dinner? That would be in
a couple of hours, at the end of which--I had the acute prevision--my
little pupils would play at innocent wonder about my nonappearance in
their train.

"What DID you do, you naughty, bad thing? Why in the world, to worry us
so--and take our thoughts off, too, don't you know?--did you desert us
at the very door?" I couldn't meet such questions nor, as they asked
them, their false little lovely eyes; yet it was all so exactly what I
should have to meet that, as the prospect grew sharp to me, I at last
let myself go.

I got, so far as the immediate moment was concerned, away; I came
straight out of the churchyard and, thinking hard, retraced my steps
through the park. It seemed to me that by the time I reached the house
I had made up my mind I would fly. The Sunday stillness both of the
approaches and of the interior, in which I met no one, fairly excited
me with a sense of opportunity. Were I to get off quickly, this way, I
should get off without a scene, without a word. My quickness would have
to be remarkable, however, and the question of a conveyance was the
great one to settle. Tormented, in the hall, with difficulties
and obstacles, I remember sinking down at the foot of the
staircase--suddenly collapsing there on the lowest step and then, with a
revulsion, recalling that it was exactly where more than a month before,
in the darkness of night and just so bowed with evil things, I had
seen the specter of the most horrible of women. At this I was able
to straighten myself; I went the rest of the way up; I made, in my
bewilderment, for the schoolroom, where there were objects belonging to
me that I should have to take. But I opened the door to find again, in a
flash, my eyes unsealed. In the presence of what I saw I reeled straight
back upon my resistance.

Seated at my own table in clear noonday light I saw a person whom,
without my previous experience, I should have taken at the first blush
for some housemaid who might have stayed at home to look after the place
and who, availing herself of rare relief from observation and of the
schoolroom table and my pens, ink, and paper, had applied herself to the
considerable effort of a letter to her sweetheart. There was an effort
in the way that, while her arms rested on the table, her hands with
evident weariness supported her head; but at the moment I took this in
I had already become aware that, in spite of my entrance, her attitude
strangely persisted. Then it was--with the very act of its announcing
itself--that her identity flared up in a change of posture. She rose,
not as if she had heard me, but with an indescribable grand melancholy
of indifference and detachment, and, within a dozen feet of me, stood
there as my vile predecessor. Dishonored and tragic, she was all before
me; but even as I fixed and, for memory, secured it, the awful image
passed away. Dark as midnight in her black dress, her haggard beauty and
her unutterable woe, she had looked at me long enough to appear to say
that her right to sit at my table was as good as mine to sit at hers.
While these instants lasted, indeed, I had the extraordinary chill of
feeling that it was I who was the intruder. It was as a wild protest
against it that, actually addressing her--"You terrible, miserable
woman!"--I heard myself break into a sound that, by the open door, rang
through the long passage and the empty house. She looked at me as if
she heard me, but I had recovered myself and cleared the air. There was
nothing in the room the next minute but the sunshine and a sense that I
must stay.




XVI


I had so perfectly expected that the return of my pupils would be marked
by a demonstration that I was freshly upset at having to take into
account that they were dumb about my absence. Instead of gaily
denouncing and caressing me, they made no allusion to my having failed
them, and I was left, for the time, on perceiving that she too said
nothing, to study Mrs. Grose's odd face. I did this to such purpose that
I made sure they had in some way bribed her to silence; a silence that,
however, I would engage to break down on the first private opportunity.
This opportunity came before tea: I secured five minutes with her in the
housekeeper's room, where, in the twilight, amid a smell of lately baked
bread, but with the place all swept and garnished, I found her sitting
in pained placidity before the fire. So I see her still, so I see her
best: facing the flame from her straight chair in the dusky, shining
room, a large clean image of the "put away"--of drawers closed and
locked and rest without a remedy.

"Oh, yes, they asked me to say nothing; and to please them--so long as
they were there--of course I promised. But what had happened to you?"

"I only went with you for the walk," I said. "I had then to come back to
meet a friend."

She showed her surprise. "A friend--YOU?"

"Oh, yes, I have a couple!" I laughed. "But did the children give you a
reason?"

"For not alluding to your leaving us? Yes; they said you would like it
better. Do you like it better?"

My face had made her rueful. "No, I like it worse!" But after an instant
I added: "Did they say why I should like it better?"

"No; Master Miles only said, 'We must do nothing but what she likes!'"

"I wish indeed he would. And what did Flora say?"

"Miss Flora was too sweet. She said, 'Oh, of course, of course!'--and I
said the same."

I thought a moment. "You were too sweet, too--I can hear you all. But
nonetheless, between Miles and me, it's now all out."

"All out?" My companion stared. "But what, miss?"

"Everything. It doesn't matter. I've made up my mind. I came home, my
dear," I went on, "for a talk with Miss Jessel."

I had by this time formed the habit of having Mrs. Grose literally well
in hand in advance of my sounding that note; so that even now, as
she bravely blinked under the signal of my word, I could keep her
comparatively firm. "A talk! Do you mean she spoke?"

"It came to that. I found her, on my return, in the schoolroom."

"And what did she say?" I can hear the good woman still, and the candor
of her stupefaction.

"That she suffers the torments--!"

It was this, of a truth, that made her, as she filled out my picture,
gape. "Do you mean," she faltered, "--of the lost?"

"Of the lost. Of the damned. And that's why, to share them-" I faltered
myself with the horror of it.

But my companion, with less imagination, kept me up. "To share them--?"

"She wants Flora." Mrs. Grose might, as I gave it to her, fairly have
fallen away from me had I not been prepared. I still held her there, to
show I was. "As I've told you, however, it doesn't matter."

"Because you've made up your mind? But to what?"

"To everything."

"And what do you call 'everything'?"

"Why, sending for their uncle."

"Oh, miss, in pity do," my friend broke out. "ah, but I will, I WILL! I
see it's the only way. What's 'out,' as I told you, with Miles is that
if he thinks I'm afraid to--and has ideas of what he gains by that--he
shall see he's mistaken. Yes, yes; his uncle shall have it here from me
on the spot (and before the boy himself, if necessary) that if I'm to be
reproached with having done nothing again about more school--"

"Yes, miss--" my companion pressed me.

"Well, there's that awful reason."

There were now clearly so many of these for my poor colleague that she
was excusable for being vague. "But--a--which?"

"Why, the letter from his old place."

"You'll show it to the master?"

"I ought to have done so on the instant."

"Oh, no!" said Mrs. Grose with decision.

"I'll put it before him," I went on inexorably, "that I can't undertake
to work the question on behalf of a child who has been expelled--"

"For we've never in the least known what!" Mrs. Grose declared.

"For wickedness. For what else--when he's so clever and beautiful and
perfect? Is he stupid? Is he untidy? Is he infirm? Is he ill-natured?
He's exquisite--so it can be only THAT; and that would open up the whole
thing. After all," I said, "it's their uncle's fault. If he left here
such people--!"

"He didn't really in the least know them. The fault's mine." She had
turned quite pale.

"Well, you shan't suffer," I answered.

"The children shan't!" she emphatically returned.

I was silent awhile; we looked at each other. "Then what am I to tell
him?"

"You needn't tell him anything. _I_'ll tell him."

I measured this. "Do you mean you'll write--?" Remembering she couldn't,
I caught myself up. "How do you communicate?"

"I tell the bailiff. HE writes."

"And should you like him to write our story?"

My question had a sarcastic force that I had not fully intended, and
it made her, after a moment, inconsequently break down. The tears were
again in her eyes. "Ah, miss, YOU write!"

"Well--tonight," I at last answered; and on this we separated.




XVII


I went so far, in the evening, as to make a beginning. The weather had
changed back, a great wind was abroad, and beneath the lamp, in my room,
with Flora at peace beside me, I sat for a long time before a blank
sheet of paper and listened to the lash of the rain and the batter of
the gusts. Finally I went out, taking a candle; I crossed the passage
and listened a minute at Miles's door. What, under my endless obsession,
I had been impelled to listen for was some betrayal of his not being at
rest, and I presently caught one, but not in the form I had expected.
His voice tinkled out. "I say, you there--come in." It was a gaiety in
the gloom!

I went in with my light and found him, in bed, very wide awake, but very
much at his ease. "Well, what are YOU up to?" he asked with a grace of
sociability in which it occurred to me that Mrs. Grose, had she been
present, might have looked in vain for proof that anything was "out."

I stood over him with my candle. "How did you know I was there?"

"Why, of course I heard you. Did you fancy you made no noise? You're
like a troop of cavalry!" he beautifully laughed.

"Then you weren't asleep?"

"Not much! I lie awake and think."

I had put my candle, designedly, a short way off, and then, as he held
out his friendly old hand to me, had sat down on the edge of his bed.
"What is it," I asked, "that you think of?"

"What in the world, my dear, but YOU?"

"Ah, the pride I take in your appreciation doesn't insist on that! I had
so far rather you slept."

"Well, I think also, you know, of this queer business of ours."

I marked the coolness of his firm little hand. "Of what queer business,
Miles?"

"Why, the way you bring me up. And all the rest!"

I fairly held my breath a minute, and even from my glimmering taper
there was light enough to show how he smiled up at me from his pillow.
"What do you mean by all the rest?"

"Oh, you know, you know!"

I could say nothing for a minute, though I felt, as I held his hand and
our eyes continued to meet, that my silence had all the air of admitting
his charge and that nothing in the whole world of reality was perhaps at
that moment so fabulous as our actual relation. "Certainly you shall go
back to school," I said, "if it be that that troubles you. But not to
the old place--we must find another, a better. How could I know it did
trouble you, this question, when you never told me so, never spoke of it
at all?" His clear, listening face, framed in its smooth whiteness, made
him for the minute as appealing as some wistful patient in a children's
hospital; and I would have given, as the resemblance came to me, all I
possessed on earth really to be the nurse or the sister of charity who
might have helped to cure him. Well, even as it was, I perhaps might
help! "Do you know you've never said a word to me about your school--I
mean the old one; never mentioned it in any way?"

He seemed to wonder; he smiled with the same loveliness. But he clearly
gained time; he waited, he called for guidance. "Haven't I?" It wasn't
for ME to help him--it was for the thing I had met!

Something in his tone and the expression of his face, as I got this from
him, set my heart aching with such a pang as it had never yet known;
so unutterably touching was it to see his little brain puzzled and his
little resources taxed to play, under the spell laid on him, a part
of innocence and consistency. "No, never--from the hour you came back.
You've never mentioned to me one of your masters, one of your comrades,
nor the least little thing that ever happened to you at school. Never,
little Miles--no, never--have you given me an inkling of anything that
MAY have happened there. Therefore you can fancy how much I'm in the
dark. Until you came out, that way, this morning, you had, since the
first hour I saw you, scarce even made a reference to anything in your
previous life. You seemed so perfectly to accept the present." It was
extraordinary how my absolute conviction of his secret precocity (or
whatever I might call the poison of an influence that I dared but half
to phrase) made him, in spite of the faint breath of his inward trouble,
appear as accessible as an older person--imposed him almost as an
intellectual equal. "I thought you wanted to go on as you are."

It struck me that at this he just faintly colored. He gave, at any rate,
like a convalescent slightly fatigued, a languid shake of his head. "I
don't--I don't. I want to get away."

"You're tired of Bly?"

"Oh, no, I like Bly."

"Well, then--?"

"Oh, YOU know what a boy wants!"

I felt that I didn't know so well as Miles, and I took temporary refuge.
"You want to go to your uncle?"

Again, at this, with his sweet ironic face, he made a movement on the
pillow. "Ah, you can't get off with that!"

I was silent a little, and it was I, now, I think, who changed color.
"My dear, I don't want to get off!"

"You can't, even if you do. You can't, you can't!"--he lay beautifully
staring. "My uncle must come down, and you must completely settle
things."

"If we do," I returned with some spirit, "you may be sure it will be to
take you quite away."

"Well, don't you understand that that's exactly what I'm working for?
You'll have to tell him--about the way you've let it all drop: you'll
have to tell him a tremendous lot!"

The exultation with which he uttered this helped me somehow, for the
instant, to meet him rather more. "And how much will YOU, Miles, have to
tell him? There are things he'll ask you!"

He turned it over. "Very likely. But what things?"

"The things you've never told me. To make up his mind what to do with
you. He can't send you back--"

"Oh, I don't want to go back!" he broke in. "I want a new field."

He said it with admirable serenity, with positive unimpeachable
gaiety; and doubtless it was that very note that most evoked for me the
poignancy, the unnatural childish tragedy, of his probable reappearance
at the end of three months with all this bravado and still more
dishonor. It overwhelmed me now that I should never be able to bear
that, and it made me let myself go. I threw myself upon him and in the
tenderness of my pity I embraced him. "Dear little Miles, dear little
Miles--!"

My face was close to his, and he let me kiss him, simply taking it with
indulgent good humor. "Well, old lady?"

"Is there nothing--nothing at all that you want to tell me?"

He turned off a little, facing round toward the wall and holding up his
hand to look at as one had seen sick children look. "I've told you--I
told you this morning."

Oh, I was sorry for him! "That you just want me not to worry you?"

He looked round at me now, as if in recognition of my understanding him;
then ever so gently, "To let me alone," he replied.

There was even a singular little dignity in it, something that made me
release him, yet, when I had slowly risen, linger beside him. God knows
I never wished to harass him, but I felt that merely, at this, to turn
my back on him was to abandon or, to put it more truly, to lose him.
"I've just begun a letter to your uncle," I said.

"Well, then, finish it!"

I waited a minute. "What happened before?"

He gazed up at me again. "Before what?"

"Before you came back. And before you went away."

For some time he was silent, but he continued to meet my eyes. "What
happened?"

It made me, the sound of the words, in which it seemed to me that
I caught for the very first time a small faint quaver of consenting
consciousness--it made me drop on my knees beside the bed and seize
once more the chance of possessing him. "Dear little Miles, dear little
Miles, if you KNEW how I want to help you! It's only that, it's nothing
but that, and I'd rather die than give you a pain or do you a wrong--I'd
rather die than hurt a hair of you. Dear little Miles"--oh, I brought it
out now even if I SHOULD go too far--"I just want you to help me to save
you!" But I knew in a moment after this that I had gone too far. The
answer to my appeal was instantaneous, but it came in the form of an
extraordinary blast and chill, a gust of frozen air, and a shake of the
room as great as if, in the wild wind, the casement had crashed in. The
boy gave a loud, high shriek, which, lost in the rest of the shock of
sound, might have seemed, indistinctly, though I was so close to him,
a note either of jubilation or of terror. I jumped to my feet again and
was conscious of darkness. So for a moment we remained, while I stared
about me and saw that the drawn curtains were unstirred and the window
tight. "Why, the candle's out!" I then cried.

"It was I who blew it, dear!" said Miles.




XVIII


The next day, after lessons, Mrs. Grose found a moment to say to me
quietly: "Have you written, miss?"

"Yes--I've written." But I didn't add--for the hour--that my letter,
sealed and directed, was still in my pocket. There would be time enough
to send it before the messenger should go to the village. Meanwhile
there had been, on the part of my pupils, no more brilliant, more
exemplary morning. It was exactly as if they had both had at heart to
gloss over any recent little friction. They performed the dizziest feats
of arithmetic, soaring quite out of MY feeble range, and perpetrated,
in higher spirits than ever, geographical and historical jokes. It was
conspicuous of course in Miles in particular that he appeared to wish to
show how easily he could let me down. This child, to my memory, really
lives in a setting of beauty and misery that no words can translate;
there was a distinction all his own in every impulse he revealed; never
was a small natural creature, to the uninitiated eye all frankness and
freedom, a more ingenious, a more extraordinary little gentleman. I had
perpetually to guard against the wonder of contemplation into which my
initiated view betrayed me; to check the irrelevant gaze and discouraged
sigh in which I constantly both attacked and renounced the enigma of
what such a little gentleman could have done that deserved a penalty.
Say that, by the dark prodigy I knew, the imagination of all evil HAD
been opened up to him: all the justice within me ached for the proof
that it could ever have flowered into an act.

He had never, at any rate, been such a little gentleman as when, after
our early dinner on this dreadful day, he came round to me and asked if
I shouldn't like him, for half an hour, to play to me. David playing
to Saul could never have shown a finer sense of the occasion. It was
literally a charming exhibition of tact, of magnanimity, and quite
tantamount to his saying outright: "The true knights we love to read
about never push an advantage too far. I know what you mean now: you
mean that--to be let alone yourself and not followed up--you'll cease to
worry and spy upon me, won't keep me so close to you, will let me go
and come. Well, I 'come,' you see--but I don't go! There'll be plenty of
time for that. I do really delight in your society, and I only want to
show you that I contended for a principle." It may be imagined whether I
resisted this appeal or failed to accompany him again, hand in hand, to
the schoolroom. He sat down at the old piano and played as he had never
played; and if there are those who think he had better have been kicking
a football I can only say that I wholly agree with them. For at the
end of a time that under his influence I had quite ceased to measure, I
started up with a strange sense of having literally slept at my post. It
was after luncheon, and by the schoolroom fire, and yet I hadn't
really, in the least, slept: I had only done something much worse--I had
forgotten. Where, all this time, was Flora? When I put the question to
Miles, he played on a minute before answering and then could only say:
"Why, my dear, how do _I_ know?"--breaking moreover into a happy laugh
which, immediately after, as if it were a vocal accompaniment, he
prolonged into incoherent, extravagant song.

I went straight to my room, but his sister was not there; then, before
going downstairs, I looked into several others. As she was nowhere
about she would surely be with Mrs. Grose, whom, in the comfort of that
theory, I accordingly proceeded in quest of. I found her where I had
found her the evening before, but she met my quick challenge with blank,
scared ignorance. She had only supposed that, after the repast, I had
carried off both the children; as to which she was quite in her right,
for it was the very first time I had allowed the little girl out of my
sight without some special provision. Of course now indeed she might be
with the maids, so that the immediate thing was to look for her without
an air of alarm. This we promptly arranged between us; but when, ten
minutes later and in pursuance of our arrangement, we met in the hall,
it was only to report on either side that after guarded inquiries we
had altogether failed to trace her. For a minute there, apart from
observation, we exchanged mute alarms, and I could feel with what high
interest my friend returned me all those I had from the first given her.

"She'll be above," she presently said--"in one of the rooms you haven't
searched."

"No; she's at a distance." I had made up my mind. "She has gone out."

Mrs. Grose stared. "Without a hat?"

I naturally also looked volumes. "Isn't that woman always without one?"

"She's with HER?"

"She's with HER!" I declared. "We must find them."

My hand was on my friend's arm, but she failed for the moment,
confronted with such an account of the matter, to respond to my
pressure. She communed, on the contrary, on the spot, with her
uneasiness. "And where's Master Miles?"

"Oh, HE'S with Quint. They're in the schoolroom."

"Lord, miss!" My view, I was myself aware--and therefore I suppose my
tone--had never yet reached so calm an assurance.

"The trick's played," I went on; "they've successfully worked their
plan. He found the most divine little way to keep me quiet while she
went off."

"'Divine'?" Mrs. Grose bewilderedly echoed.

"Infernal, then!" I almost cheerfully rejoined. "He has provided for
himself as well. But come!"

She had helplessly gloomed at the upper regions. "You leave him--?"

"So long with Quint? Yes--I don't mind that now."

She always ended, at these moments, by getting possession of my hand,
and in this manner she could at present still stay me. But after gasping
an instant at my sudden resignation, "Because of your letter?" she
eagerly brought out.

I quickly, by way of answer, felt for my letter, drew it forth, held it
up, and then, freeing myself, went and laid it on the great hall table.
"Luke will take it," I said as I came back. I reached the house door and
opened it; I was already on the steps.

My companion still demurred: the storm of the night and the early
morning had dropped, but the afternoon was damp and gray. I came down to
the drive while she stood in the doorway. "You go with nothing on?"

"What do I care when the child has nothing? I can't wait to dress," I
cried, "and if you must do so, I leave you. Try meanwhile, yourself,
upstairs."

"With THEM?" Oh, on this, the poor woman promptly joined me!




XIX


We went straight to the lake, as it was called at Bly, and I daresay
rightly called, though I reflect that it may in fact have been a sheet
of water less remarkable than it appeared to my untraveled eyes. My
acquaintance with sheets of water was small, and the pool of Bly, at all
events on the few occasions of my consenting, under the protection of
my pupils, to affront its surface in the old flat-bottomed boat moored
there for our use, had impressed me both with its extent and its
agitation. The usual place of embarkation was half a mile from the
house, but I had an intimate conviction that, wherever Flora might
be, she was not near home. She had not given me the slip for any small
adventure, and, since the day of the very great one that I had shared
with her by the pond, I had been aware, in our walks, of the quarter to
which she most inclined. This was why I had now given to Mrs. Grose's
steps so marked a direction--a direction that made her, when she
perceived it, oppose a resistance that showed me she was freshly
mystified. "You're going to the water, Miss?--you think she's IN--?"

"She may be, though the depth is, I believe, nowhere very great. But
what I judge most likely is that she's on the spot from which, the other
day, we saw together what I told you."

"When she pretended not to see--?"

"With that astounding self-possession? I've always been sure she wanted
to go back alone. And now her brother has managed it for her."

Mrs. Grose still stood where she had stopped. "You suppose they really
TALK of them?"

"I could meet this with a confidence! They say things that, if we heard
them, would simply appall us."

"And if she IS there--"

"Yes?"

"Then Miss Jessel is?"

"Beyond a doubt. You shall see."

"Oh, thank you!" my friend cried, planted so firm that, taking it in, I
went straight on without her. By the time I reached the pool, however,
she was close behind me, and I knew that, whatever, to her apprehension,
might befall me, the exposure of my society struck her as her least
danger. She exhaled a moan of relief as we at last came in sight of the
greater part of the water without a sight of the child. There was no
trace of Flora on that nearer side of the bank where my observation of
her had been most startling, and none on the opposite edge, where, save
for a margin of some twenty yards, a thick copse came down to the water.
The pond, oblong in shape, had a width so scant compared to its length
that, with its ends out of view, it might have been taken for a scant
river. We looked at the empty expanse, and then I felt the suggestion
of my friend's eyes. I knew what she meant and I replied with a negative
headshake.

"No, no; wait! She has taken the boat."

My companion stared at the vacant mooring place and then again across
the lake. "Then where is it?"

"Our not seeing it is the strongest of proofs. She has used it to go
over, and then has managed to hide it."

"All alone--that child?"

"She's not alone, and at such times she's not a child: she's an old,
old woman." I scanned all the visible shore while Mrs. Grose took again,
into the queer element I offered her, one of her plunges of submission;
then I pointed out that the boat might perfectly be in a small refuge
formed by one of the recesses of the pool, an indentation masked, for
the hither side, by a projection of the bank and by a clump of trees
growing close to the water.

"But if the boat's there, where on earth's SHE?" my colleague anxiously
asked.

"That's exactly what we must learn." And I started to walk further.

"By going all the way round?"

"Certainly, far as it is. It will take us but ten minutes, but it's
far enough to have made the child prefer not to walk. She went straight
over."

"Laws!" cried my friend again; the chain of my logic was ever too
much for her. It dragged her at my heels even now, and when we had got
halfway round--a devious, tiresome process, on ground much broken and by
a path choked with overgrowth--I paused to give her breath. I sustained
her with a grateful arm, assuring her that she might hugely help me; and
this started us afresh, so that in the course of but few minutes more we
reached a point from which we found the boat to be where I had supposed
it. It had been intentionally left as much as possible out of sight and
was tied to one of the stakes of a fence that came, just there, down to
the brink and that had been an assistance to disembarking. I recognized,
as I looked at the pair of short, thick oars, quite safely drawn up, the
prodigious character of the feat for a little girl; but I had lived, by
this time, too long among wonders and had panted to too many livelier
measures. There was a gate in the fence, through which we passed, and
that brought us, after a trifling interval, more into the open. Then,
"There she is!" we both exclaimed at once.

Flora, a short way off, stood before us on the grass and smiled as if
her performance was now complete. The next thing she did, however, was
to stoop straight down and pluck--quite as if it were all she was there
for--a big, ugly spray of withered fern. I instantly became sure she
had just come out of the copse. She waited for us, not herself taking a
step, and I was conscious of the rare solemnity with which we presently
approached her. She smiled and smiled, and we met; but it was all done
in a silence by this time flagrantly ominous. Mrs. Grose was the first
to break the spell: she threw herself on her knees and, drawing the
child to her breast, clasped in a long embrace the little tender,
yielding body. While this dumb convulsion lasted I could only watch
it--which I did the more intently when I saw Flora's face peep at me
over our companion's shoulder. It was serious now--the flicker had left
it; but it strengthened the pang with which I at that moment envied Mrs.
Grose the simplicity of HER relation. Still, all this while, nothing
more passed between us save that Flora had let her foolish fern again
drop to the ground. What she and I had virtually said to each other was
that pretexts were useless now. When Mrs. Grose finally got up she kept
the child's hand, so that the two were still before me; and the singular
reticence of our communion was even more marked in the frank look she
launched me. "I'll be hanged," it said, "if _I_'ll speak!"

It was Flora who, gazing all over me in candid wonder, was the first.
She was struck with our bareheaded aspect. "Why, where are your things?"

"Where yours are, my dear!" I promptly returned.

She had already got back her gaiety, and appeared to take this as an
answer quite sufficient. "And where's Miles?" she went on.

There was something in the small valor of it that quite finished me:
these three words from her were, in a flash like the glitter of a drawn
blade, the jostle of the cup that my hand, for weeks and weeks, had
held high and full to the brim that now, even before speaking, I felt
overflow in a deluge. "I'll tell you if you'll tell ME--" I heard myself
say, then heard the tremor in which it broke.

"Well, what?"

Mrs. Grose's suspense blazed at me, but it was too late now, and I
brought the thing out handsomely. "Where, my pet, is Miss Jessel?"




XX


Just as in the churchyard with Miles, the whole thing was upon us. Much
as I had made of the fact that this name had never once, between us,
been sounded, the quick, smitten glare with which the child's face now
received it fairly likened my breach of the silence to the smash of a
pane of glass. It added to the interposing cry, as if to stay the blow,
that Mrs. Grose, at the same instant, uttered over my violence--the
shriek of a creature scared, or rather wounded, which, in turn, within a
few seconds, was completed by a gasp of my own. I seized my colleague's
arm. "She's there, she's there!"

Miss Jessel stood before us on the opposite bank exactly as she had
stood the other time, and I remember, strangely, as the first feeling
now produced in me, my thrill of joy at having brought on a proof. She
was there, and I was justified; she was there, and I was neither cruel
nor mad. She was there for poor scared Mrs. Grose, but she was there
most for Flora; and no moment of my monstrous time was perhaps so
extraordinary as that in which I consciously threw out to her--with
the sense that, pale and ravenous demon as she was, she would catch and
understand it--an inarticulate message of gratitude. She rose erect on
the spot my friend and I had lately quitted, and there was not, in all
the long reach of her desire, an inch of her evil that fell short. This
first vividness of vision and emotion were things of a few seconds,
during which Mrs. Grose's dazed blink across to where I pointed struck
me as a sovereign sign that she too at last saw, just as it carried my
own eyes precipitately to the child. The revelation then of the manner
in which Flora was affected startled me, in truth, far more than it
would have done to find her also merely agitated, for direct dismay
was of course not what I had expected. Prepared and on her guard as our
pursuit had actually made her, she would repress every betrayal; and I
was therefore shaken, on the spot, by my first glimpse of the particular
one for which I had not allowed. To see her, without a convulsion of
her small pink face, not even feign to glance in the direction of the
prodigy I announced, but only, instead of that, turn at ME an expression
of hard, still gravity, an expression absolutely new and unprecedented
and that appeared to read and accuse and judge me--this was a stroke
that somehow converted the little girl herself into the very presence
that could make me quail. I quailed even though my certitude that
she thoroughly saw was never greater than at that instant, and in the
immediate need to defend myself I called it passionately to witness.
"She's there, you little unhappy thing--there, there, THERE, and you see
her as well as you see me!" I had said shortly before to Mrs. Grose
that she was not at these times a child, but an old, old woman, and that
description of her could not have been more strikingly confirmed than in
the way in which, for all answer to this, she simply showed me, without
a concession, an admission, of her eyes, a countenance of deeper and
deeper, of indeed suddenly quite fixed, reprobation. I was by this
time--if I can put the whole thing at all together--more appalled at
what I may properly call her manner than at anything else, though it was
simultaneously with this that I became aware of having Mrs. Grose
also, and very formidably, to reckon with. My elder companion, the next
moment, at any rate, blotted out everything but her own flushed face and
her loud, shocked protest, a burst of high disapproval. "What a dreadful
turn, to be sure, miss! Where on earth do you see anything?"

I could only grasp her more quickly yet, for even while she spoke the
hideous plain presence stood undimmed and undaunted. It had already
lasted a minute, and it lasted while I continued, seizing my colleague,
quite thrusting her at it and presenting her to it, to insist with my
pointing hand. "You don't see her exactly as WE see?--you mean to say
you don't now--NOW? She's as big as a blazing fire! Only look, dearest
woman, LOOK--!" She looked, even as I did, and gave me, with her deep
groan of negation, repulsion, compassion--the mixture with her pity of
her relief at her exemption--a sense, touching to me even then, that she
would have backed me up if she could. I might well have needed that, for
with this hard blow of the proof that her eyes were hopelessly sealed
I felt my own situation horribly crumble, I felt--I saw--my livid
predecessor press, from her position, on my defeat, and I was conscious,
more than all, of what I should have from this instant to deal with in
the astounding little attitude of Flora. Into this attitude Mrs. Grose
immediately and violently entered, breaking, even while there pierced
through my sense of ruin a prodigious private triumph, into breathless
reassurance.

"She isn't there, little lady, and nobody's there--and you never see
nothing, my sweet! How can poor Miss Jessel--when poor Miss Jessel's
dead and buried? WE know, don't we, love?"--and she appealed, blundering
in, to the child. "It's all a mere mistake and a worry and a joke--and
we'll go home as fast as we can!"

Our companion, on this, had responded with a strange, quick primness of
propriety, and they were again, with Mrs. Grose on her feet, united, as
it were, in pained opposition to me. Flora continued to fix me with
her small mask of reprobation, and even at that minute I prayed God to
forgive me for seeming to see that, as she stood there holding tight
to our friend's dress, her incomparable childish beauty had suddenly
failed, had quite vanished. I've said it already--she was literally,
she was hideously, hard; she had turned common and almost ugly. "I don't
know what you mean. I see nobody. I see nothing. I never HAVE. I think
you're cruel. I don't like you!" Then, after this deliverance, which
might have been that of a vulgarly pert little girl in the street, she
hugged Mrs. Grose more closely and buried in her skirts the dreadful
little face. In this position she produced an almost furious wail. "Take
me away, take me away--oh, take me away from HER!"

"From ME?" I panted.

"From you--from you!" she cried.

Even Mrs. Grose looked across at me dismayed, while I had nothing to
do but communicate again with the figure that, on the opposite bank,
without a movement, as rigidly still as if catching, beyond the
interval, our voices, was as vividly there for my disaster as it was not
there for my service. The wretched child had spoken exactly as if she
had got from some outside source each of her stabbing little words, and
I could therefore, in the full despair of all I had to accept, but sadly
shake my head at her. "If I had ever doubted, all my doubt would at
present have gone. I've been living with the miserable truth, and now
it has only too much closed round me. Of course I've lost you: I've
interfered, and you've seen--under HER dictation"--with which I faced,
over the pool again, our infernal witness--"the easy and perfect way to
meet it. I've done my best, but I've lost you. Goodbye." For Mrs.
Grose I had an imperative, an almost frantic "Go, go!" before which, in
infinite distress, but mutely possessed of the little girl and clearly
convinced, in spite of her blindness, that something awful had occurred
and some collapse engulfed us, she retreated, by the way we had come, as
fast as she could move.

Of what first happened when I was left alone I had no subsequent memory.
I only knew that at the end of, I suppose, a quarter of an hour, an
odorous dampness and roughness, chilling and piercing my trouble, had
made me understand that I must have thrown myself, on my face, on the
ground and given way to a wildness of grief. I must have lain there long
and cried and sobbed, for when I raised my head the day was almost done.
I got up and looked a moment, through the twilight, at the gray pool and
its blank, haunted edge, and then I took, back to the house, my dreary
and difficult course. When I reached the gate in the fence the boat,
to my surprise, was gone, so that I had a fresh reflection to make on
Flora's extraordinary command of the situation. She passed that night,
by the most tacit, and I should add, were not the word so grotesque a
false note, the happiest of arrangements, with Mrs. Grose. I saw
neither of them on my return, but, on the other hand, as by an ambiguous
compensation, I saw a great deal of Miles. I saw--I can use no other
phrase--so much of him that it was as if it were more than it had ever
been. No evening I had passed at Bly had the portentous quality of
this one; in spite of which--and in spite also of the deeper depths of
consternation that had opened beneath my feet--there was literally, in
the ebbing actual, an extraordinarily sweet sadness. On reaching the
house I had never so much as looked for the boy; I had simply gone
straight to my room to change what I was wearing and to take in, at
a glance, much material testimony to Flora's rupture. Her little
belongings had all been removed. When later, by the schoolroom fire, I
was served with tea by the usual maid, I indulged, on the article of my
other pupil, in no inquiry whatever. He had his freedom now--he might
have it to the end! Well, he did have it; and it consisted--in part at
least--of his coming in at about eight o'clock and sitting down with me
in silence. On the removal of the tea things I had blown out the candles
and drawn my chair closer: I was conscious of a mortal coldness and felt
as if I should never again be warm. So, when he appeared, I was sitting
in the glow with my thoughts. He paused a moment by the door as if to
look at me; then--as if to share them--came to the other side of the
hearth and sank into a chair. We sat there in absolute stillness; yet he
wanted, I felt, to be with me.




XXI


Before a new day, in my room, had fully broken, my eyes opened to Mrs.
Grose, who had come to my bedside with worse news. Flora was so markedly
feverish that an illness was perhaps at hand; she had passed a night of
extreme unrest, a night agitated above all by fears that had for their
subject not in the least her former, but wholly her present, governess.
It was not against the possible re-entrance of Miss Jessel on the scene
that she protested--it was conspicuously and passionately against mine.
I was promptly on my feet of course, and with an immense deal to ask;
the more that my friend had discernibly now girded her loins to meet me
once more. This I felt as soon as I had put to her the question of
her sense of the child's sincerity as against my own. "She persists in
denying to you that she saw, or has ever seen, anything?"

My visitor's trouble, truly, was great. "Ah, miss, it isn't a matter
on which I can push her! Yet it isn't either, I must say, as if I much
needed to. It has made her, every inch of her, quite old."

"Oh, I see her perfectly from here. She resents, for all the world like
some high little personage, the imputation on her truthfulness and,
as it were, her respectability. 'Miss Jessel indeed--SHE!' Ah, she's
'respectable,' the chit! The impression she gave me there yesterday was,
I assure you, the very strangest of all; it was quite beyond any of the
others. I DID put my foot in it! She'll never speak to me again."

Hideous and obscure as it all was, it held Mrs. Grose briefly silent;
then she granted my point with a frankness which, I made sure, had more
behind it. "I think indeed, miss, she never will. She do have a grand
manner about it!"

"And that manner"--I summed it up--"is practically what's the matter
with her now!"

Oh, that manner, I could see in my visitor's face, and not a little else
besides! "She asks me every three minutes if I think you're coming in."

"I see--I see." I, too, on my side, had so much more than worked it
out. "Has she said to you since yesterday--except to repudiate her
familiarity with anything so dreadful--a single other word about Miss
Jessel?"

"Not one, miss. And of course you know," my friend added, "I took it
from her, by the lake, that, just then and there at least, there WAS
nobody."

"Rather! and, naturally, you take it from her still."

"I don't contradict her. What else can I do?"

"Nothing in the world! You've the cleverest little person to deal with.
They've made them--their two friends, I mean--still cleverer even than
nature did; for it was wondrous material to play on! Flora has now her
grievance, and she'll work it to the end."

"Yes, miss; but to WHAT end?"

"Why, that of dealing with me to her uncle. She'll make me out to him
the lowest creature--!"

I winced at the fair show of the scene in Mrs. Grose's face; she looked
for a minute as if she sharply saw them together. "And him who thinks so
well of you!"

"He has an odd way--it comes over me now," I laughed,"--of proving it!
But that doesn't matter. What Flora wants, of course, is to get rid of
me."

My companion bravely concurred. "Never again to so much as look at you."

"So that what you've come to me now for," I asked, "is to speed me on my
way?" Before she had time to reply, however, I had her in check. "I've a
better idea--the result of my reflections. My going WOULD seem the right
thing, and on Sunday I was terribly near it. Yet that won't do. It's YOU
who must go. You must take Flora."

My visitor, at this, did speculate. "But where in the world--?"

"Away from here. Away from THEM. Away, even most of all, now, from me.
Straight to her uncle."

"Only to tell on you--?"

"No, not 'only'! To leave me, in addition, with my remedy."

She was still vague. "And what IS your remedy?"

"Your loyalty, to begin with. And then Miles's."

She looked at me hard. "Do you think he--?"

"Won't, if he has the chance, turn on me? Yes, I venture still to think
it. At all events, I want to try. Get off with his sister as soon as
possible and leave me with him alone." I was amazed, myself, at the
spirit I had still in reserve, and therefore perhaps a trifle the more
disconcerted at the way in which, in spite of this fine example of it,
she hesitated. "There's one thing, of course," I went on: "they mustn't,
before she goes, see each other for three seconds." Then it came over me
that, in spite of Flora's presumable sequestration from the instant of
her return from the pool, it might already be too late. "Do you mean," I
anxiously asked, "that they HAVE met?"

At this she quite flushed. "Ah, miss, I'm not such a fool as that! If
I've been obliged to leave her three or four times, it has been each
time with one of the maids, and at present, though she's alone, she's
locked in safe. And yet--and yet!" There were too many things.

"And yet what?"

"Well, are you so sure of the little gentleman?"

"I'm not sure of anything but YOU. But I have, since last evening, a new
hope. I think he wants to give me an opening. I do believe that--poor
little exquisite wretch!--he wants to speak. Last evening, in the
firelight and the silence, he sat with me for two hours as if it were
just coming."

Mrs. Grose looked hard, through the window, at the gray, gathering day.
"And did it come?"

"No, though I waited and waited, I confess it didn't, and it was without
a breach of the silence or so much as a faint allusion to his sister's
condition and absence that we at last kissed for good night. All the
same," I continued, "I can't, if her uncle sees her, consent to his
seeing her brother without my having given the boy--and most of all
because things have got so bad--a little more time."

My friend appeared on this ground more reluctant than I could quite
understand. "What do you mean by more time?"

"Well, a day or two--really to bring it out. He'll then be on MY
side--of which you see the importance. If nothing comes, I shall only
fail, and you will, at the worst, have helped me by doing, on your
arrival in town, whatever you may have found possible." So I put it
before her, but she continued for a little so inscrutably embarrassed
that I came again to her aid. "Unless, indeed," I wound up, "you really
want NOT to go."

I could see it, in her face, at last clear itself; she put out her hand
to me as a pledge. "I'll go--I'll go. I'll go this morning."

I wanted to be very just. "If you SHOULD wish still to wait, I would
engage she shouldn't see me."

"No, no: it's the place itself. She must leave it." She held me a moment
with heavy eyes, then brought out the rest. "Your idea's the right one.
I myself, miss--"

"Well?"

"I can't stay."

The look she gave me with it made me jump at possibilities. "You mean
that, since yesterday, you HAVE seen--?"

She shook her head with dignity. "I've HEARD--!"

"Heard?"

"From that child--horrors! There!" she sighed with tragic relief. "On my
honor, miss, she says things--!" But at this evocation she broke down;
she dropped, with a sudden sob, upon my sofa and, as I had seen her do
before, gave way to all the grief of it.

It was quite in another manner that I, for my part, let myself go. "Oh,
thank God!"

She sprang up again at this, drying her eyes with a groan. "'Thank
God'?"

"It so justifies me!"

"It does that, miss!"

I couldn't have desired more emphasis, but I just hesitated. "She's so
horrible?"

I saw my colleague scarce knew how to put it. "Really shocking."

"And about me?"

"About you, miss--since you must have it. It's beyond everything, for a
young lady; and I can't think wherever she must have picked up--"

"The appalling language she applied to me? I can, then!" I broke in with
a laugh that was doubtless significant enough.

It only, in truth, left my friend still more grave. "Well, perhaps I
ought to also--since I've heard some of it before! Yet I can't bear it,"
the poor woman went on while, with the same movement, she glanced, on my
dressing table, at the face of my watch. "But I must go back."

I kept her, however. "Ah, if you can't bear it--!"

"How can I stop with her, you mean? Why, just FOR that: to get her away.
Far from this," she pursued, "far from THEM-"

"She may be different? She may be free?" I seized her almost with joy.
"Then, in spite of yesterday, you BELIEVE--"

"In such doings?" Her simple description of them required, in the light
of her expression, to be carried no further, and she gave me the whole
thing as she had never done. "I believe."

Yes, it was a joy, and we were still shoulder to shoulder: if I might
continue sure of that I should care but little what else happened. My
support in the presence of disaster would be the same as it had been
in my early need of confidence, and if my friend would answer for my
honesty, I would answer for all the rest. On the point of taking leave
of her, nonetheless, I was to some extent embarrassed. "There's one
thing, of course--it occurs to me--to remember. My letter, giving the
alarm, will have reached town before you."

I now perceived still more how she had been beating about the bush and
how weary at last it had made her. "Your letter won't have got there.
Your letter never went."

"What then became of it?"

"Goodness knows! Master Miles--"

"Do you mean HE took it?" I gasped.

She hung fire, but she overcame her reluctance. "I mean that I saw
yesterday, when I came back with Miss Flora, that it wasn't where you
had put it. Later in the evening I had the chance to question Luke, and
he declared that he had neither noticed nor touched it." We could only
exchange, on this, one of our deeper mutual soundings, and it was Mrs.
Grose who first brought up the plumb with an almost elated "You see!"

"Yes, I see that if Miles took it instead he probably will have read it
and destroyed it."

"And don't you see anything else?"

I faced her a moment with a sad smile. "It strikes me that by this time
your eyes are open even wider than mine."

They proved to be so indeed, but she could still blush, almost, to show
it. "I make out now what he must have done at school." And she gave, in
her simple sharpness, an almost droll disillusioned nod. "He stole!"

I turned it over--I tried to be more judicial. "Well--perhaps."

She looked as if she found me unexpectedly calm. "He stole LETTERS!"

She couldn't know my reasons for a calmness after all pretty shallow; so
I showed them off as I might. "I hope then it was to more purpose than
in this case! The note, at any rate, that I put on the table yesterday,"
I pursued, "will have given him so scant an advantage--for it contained
only the bare demand for an interview--that he is already much ashamed
of having gone so far for so little, and that what he had on his mind
last evening was precisely the need of confession." I seemed to myself,
for the instant, to have mastered it, to see it all. "Leave us, leave
us"--I was already, at the door, hurrying her off. "I'll get it out of
him. He'll meet me--he'll confess. If he confesses, he's saved. And if
he's saved--"

"Then YOU are?" The dear woman kissed me on this, and I took her
farewell. "I'll save you without him!" she cried as she went.




XXII


Yet it was when she had got off--and I missed her on the spot--that the
great pinch really came. If I had counted on what it would give me to
find myself alone with Miles, I speedily perceived, at least, that it
would give me a measure. No hour of my stay in fact was so assailed
with apprehensions as that of my coming down to learn that the carriage
containing Mrs. Grose and my younger pupil had already rolled out of the
gates. Now I WAS, I said to myself, face to face with the elements, and
for much of the rest of the day, while I fought my weakness, I could
consider that I had been supremely rash. It was a tighter place still
than I had yet turned round in; all the more that, for the first time,
I could see in the aspect of others a confused reflection of the crisis.
What had happened naturally caused them all to stare; there was too
little of the explained, throw out whatever we might, in the suddenness
of my colleague's act. The maids and the men looked blank; the effect
of which on my nerves was an aggravation until I saw the necessity of
making it a positive aid. It was precisely, in short, by just clutching
the helm that I avoided total wreck; and I dare say that, to bear up
at all, I became, that morning, very grand and very dry. I welcomed the
consciousness that I was charged with much to do, and I caused it to be
known as well that, left thus to myself, I was quite remarkably firm. I
wandered with that manner, for the next hour or two, all over the place
and looked, I have no doubt, as if I were ready for any onset. So, for
the benefit of whom it might concern, I paraded with a sick heart.

The person it appeared least to concern proved to be, till dinner,
little Miles himself. My perambulations had given me, meanwhile, no
glimpse of him, but they had tended to make more public the change
taking place in our relation as a consequence of his having at the
piano, the day before, kept me, in Flora's interest, so beguiled and
befooled. The stamp of publicity had of course been fully given by her
confinement and departure, and the change itself was now ushered in
by our nonobservance of the regular custom of the schoolroom. He had
already disappeared when, on my way down, I pushed open his door, and
I learned below that he had breakfasted--in the presence of a couple of
the maids--with Mrs. Grose and his sister. He had then gone out, as he
said, for a stroll; than which nothing, I reflected, could better have
expressed his frank view of the abrupt transformation of my office. What
he would not permit this office to consist of was yet to be settled:
there was a queer relief, at all events--I mean for myself in
especial--in the renouncement of one pretension. If so much had sprung
to the surface, I scarce put it too strongly in saying that what had
perhaps sprung highest was the absurdity of our prolonging the fiction
that I had anything more to teach him. It sufficiently stuck out that,
by tacit little tricks in which even more than myself he carried out the
care for my dignity, I had had to appeal to him to let me off straining
to meet him on the ground of his true capacity. He had at any rate
his freedom now; I was never to touch it again; as I had amply shown,
moreover, when, on his joining me in the schoolroom the previous night,
I had uttered, on the subject of the interval just concluded, neither
challenge nor hint. I had too much, from this moment, my other ideas.
Yet when he at last arrived, the difficulty of applying them, the
accumulations of my problem, were brought straight home to me by the
beautiful little presence on which what had occurred had as yet, for the
eye, dropped neither stain nor shadow.

To mark, for the house, the high state I cultivated I decreed that my
meals with the boy should be served, as we called it, downstairs; so
that I had been awaiting him in the ponderous pomp of the room outside
of the window of which I had had from Mrs. Grose, that first scared
Sunday, my flash of something it would scarce have done to call light.
Here at present I felt afresh--for I had felt it again and again--how my
equilibrium depended on the success of my rigid will, the will to shut
my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what I had to deal with
was, revoltingly, against nature. I could only get on at all by taking
"nature" into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous
ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but
demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw
of ordinary human virtue. No attempt, nonetheless, could well require
more tact than just this attempt to supply, one's self, ALL the nature.
How could I put even a little of that article into a suppression of
reference to what had occurred? How, on the other hand, could I make
reference without a new plunge into the hideous obscure? Well, a sort
of answer, after a time, had come to me, and it was so far confirmed as
that I was met, incontestably, by the quickened vision of what was rare
in my little companion. It was indeed as if he had found even now--as he
had so often found at lessons--still some other delicate way to ease me
off. Wasn't there light in the fact which, as we shared our solitude,
broke out with a specious glitter it had never yet quite worn?--the fact
that (opportunity aiding, precious opportunity which had now come) it
would be preposterous, with a child so endowed, to forego the help one
might wrest from absolute intelligence? What had his intelligence been
given him for but to save him? Mightn't one, to reach his mind, risk the
stretch of an angular arm over his character? It was as if, when we were
face to face in the dining room, he had literally shown me the way.
The roast mutton was on the table, and I had dispensed with attendance.
Miles, before he sat down, stood a moment with his hands in his pockets
and looked at the joint, on which he seemed on the point of passing some
humorous judgment. But what he presently produced was: "I say, my dear,
is she really very awfully ill?"

"Little Flora? Not so bad but that she'll presently be better. London
will set her up. Bly had ceased to agree with her. Come here and take
your mutton."

He alertly obeyed me, carried the plate carefully to his seat, and,
when he was established, went on. "Did Bly disagree with her so terribly
suddenly?"

"Not so suddenly as you might think. One had seen it coming on."

"Then why didn't you get her off before?"

"Before what?"

"Before she became too ill to travel."

I found myself prompt. "She's NOT too ill to travel: she only might
have become so if she had stayed. This was just the moment to seize. The
journey will dissipate the influence"--oh, I was grand!--"and carry it
off."

"I see, I see"--Miles, for that matter, was grand, too. He settled to
his repast with the charming little "table manner" that, from the day of
his arrival, had relieved me of all grossness of admonition. Whatever
he had been driven from school for, it was not for ugly feeding. He
was irreproachable, as always, today; but he was unmistakably more
conscious. He was discernibly trying to take for granted more things
than he found, without assistance, quite easy; and he dropped into
peaceful silence while he felt his situation. Our meal was of the
briefest--mine a vain pretense, and I had the things immediately
removed. While this was done Miles stood again with his hands in his
little pockets and his back to me--stood and looked out of the wide
window through which, that other day, I had seen what pulled me up. We
continued silent while the maid was with us--as silent, it whimsically
occurred to me, as some young couple who, on their wedding journey, at
the inn, feel shy in the presence of the waiter. He turned round only
when the waiter had left us. "Well--so we're alone!"




XXIII


"Oh, more or less." I fancy my smile was pale. "Not absolutely. We
shouldn't like that!" I went on.

"No--I suppose we shouldn't. Of course we have the others."

"We have the others--we have indeed the others," I concurred.

"Yet even though we have them," he returned, still with his hands in
his pockets and planted there in front of me, "they don't much count, do
they?"

I made the best of it, but I felt wan. "It depends on what you call
'much'!"

"Yes"--with all accommodation--"everything depends!" On this, however,
he faced to the window again and presently reached it with his vague,
restless, cogitating step. He remained there awhile, with his forehead
against the glass, in contemplation of the stupid shrubs I knew and the
dull things of November. I had always my hypocrisy of "work," behind
which, now, I gained the sofa. Steadying myself with it there as I had
repeatedly done at those moments of torment that I have described as the
moments of my knowing the children to be given to something from which
I was barred, I sufficiently obeyed my habit of being prepared for the
worst. But an extraordinary impression dropped on me as I extracted a
meaning from the boy's embarrassed back--none other than the impression
that I was not barred now. This inference grew in a few minutes to sharp
intensity and seemed bound up with the direct perception that it was
positively HE who was. The frames and squares of the great window were a
kind of image, for him, of a kind of failure. I felt that I saw him, at
any rate, shut in or shut out. He was admirable, but not comfortable: I
took it in with a throb of hope. Wasn't he looking, through the haunted
pane, for something he couldn't see?--and wasn't it the first time in
the whole business that he had known such a lapse? The first, the very
first: I found it a splendid portent. It made him anxious, though he
watched himself; he had been anxious all day and, even while in his
usual sweet little manner he sat at table, had needed all his small
strange genius to give it a gloss. When he at last turned round to meet
me, it was almost as if this genius had succumbed. "Well, I think I'm
glad Bly agrees with ME!"

"You would certainly seem to have seen, these twenty-four hours, a good
deal more of it than for some time before. I hope," I went on bravely,
"that you've been enjoying yourself."

"Oh, yes, I've been ever so far; all round about--miles and miles away.
I've never been so free."

He had really a manner of his own, and I could only try to keep up with
him. "Well, do you like it?"

He stood there smiling; then at last he put into two words--"Do
YOU?"--more discrimination than I had ever heard two words contain.
Before I had time to deal with that, however, he continued as if with
the sense that this was an impertinence to be softened. "Nothing could
be more charming than the way you take it, for of course if we're alone
together now it's you that are alone most. But I hope," he threw in,
"you don't particularly mind!"

"Having to do with you?" I asked. "My dear child, how can I help
minding? Though I've renounced all claim to your company--you're so
beyond me--I at least greatly enjoy it. What else should I stay on for?"

He looked at me more directly, and the expression of his face, graver
now, struck me as the most beautiful I had ever found in it. "You stay
on just for THAT?"

"Certainly. I stay on as your friend and from the tremendous interest
I take in you till something can be done for you that may be more worth
your while. That needn't surprise you." My voice trembled so that I felt
it impossible to suppress the shake. "Don't you remember how I told you,
when I came and sat on your bed the night of the storm, that there was
nothing in the world I wouldn't do for you?"

"Yes, yes!" He, on his side, more and more visibly nervous, had a tone
to master; but he was so much more successful than I that, laughing out
through his gravity, he could pretend we were pleasantly jesting. "Only
that, I think, was to get me to do something for YOU!"

"It was partly to get you to do something," I conceded. "But, you know,
you didn't do it."

"Oh, yes," he said with the brightest superficial eagerness, "you wanted
me to tell you something."

"That's it. Out, straight out. What you have on your mind, you know."

"Ah, then, is THAT what you've stayed over for?"

He spoke with a gaiety through which I could still catch the finest
little quiver of resentful passion; but I can't begin to express the
effect upon me of an implication of surrender even so faint. It was as
if what I had yearned for had come at last only to astonish me. "Well,
yes--I may as well make a clean breast of it, it was precisely for
that."

He waited so long that I supposed it for the purpose of repudiating the
assumption on which my action had been founded; but what he finally said
was: "Do you mean now--here?"

"There couldn't be a better place or time." He looked round him
uneasily, and I had the rare--oh, the queer!--impression of the very
first symptom I had seen in him of the approach of immediate fear.
It was as if he were suddenly afraid of me--which struck me indeed as
perhaps the best thing to make him. Yet in the very pang of the effort
I felt it vain to try sternness, and I heard myself the next instant so
gentle as to be almost grotesque. "You want so to go out again?"

"Awfully!" He smiled at me heroically, and the touching little bravery
of it was enhanced by his actually flushing with pain. He had picked up
his hat, which he had brought in, and stood twirling it in a way that
gave me, even as I was just nearly reaching port, a perverse horror of
what I was doing. To do it in ANY way was an act of violence, for what
did it consist of but the obtrusion of the idea of grossness and guilt
on a small helpless creature who had been for me a revelation of the
possibilities of beautiful intercourse? Wasn't it base to create for a
being so exquisite a mere alien awkwardness? I suppose I now read into
our situation a clearness it couldn't have had at the time, for I seem
to see our poor eyes already lighted with some spark of a prevision
of the anguish that was to come. So we circled about, with terrors and
scruples, like fighters not daring to close. But it was for each other
we feared! That kept us a little longer suspended and unbruised. "I'll
tell you everything," Miles said--"I mean I'll tell you anything you
like. You'll stay on with me, and we shall both be all right, and I WILL
tell you--I WILL. But not now."

"Why not now?"

My insistence turned him from me and kept him once more at his window
in a silence during which, between us, you might have heard a pin drop.
Then he was before me again with the air of a person for whom, outside,
someone who had frankly to be reckoned with was waiting. "I have to see
Luke."

I had not yet reduced him to quite so vulgar a lie, and I felt
proportionately ashamed. But, horrible as it was, his lies made up my
truth. I achieved thoughtfully a few loops of my knitting. "Well, then,
go to Luke, and I'll wait for what you promise. Only, in return for
that, satisfy, before you leave me, one very much smaller request."

He looked as if he felt he had succeeded enough to be able still a
little to bargain. "Very much smaller--?"

"Yes, a mere fraction of the whole. Tell me"--oh, my work preoccupied
me, and I was offhand!--"if, yesterday afternoon, from the table in the
hall, you took, you know, my letter."




XXIV


My sense of how he received this suffered for a minute from something
that I can describe only as a fierce split of my attention--a stroke
that at first, as I sprang straight up, reduced me to the mere blind
movement of getting hold of him, drawing him close, and, while I just
fell for support against the nearest piece of furniture, instinctively
keeping him with his back to the window. The appearance was full upon us
that I had already had to deal with here: Peter Quint had come into view
like a sentinel before a prison. The next thing I saw was that, from
outside, he had reached the window, and then I knew that, close to the
glass and glaring in through it, he offered once more to the room his
white face of damnation. It represents but grossly what took place
within me at the sight to say that on the second my decision was made;
yet I believe that no woman so overwhelmed ever in so short a time
recovered her grasp of the ACT. It came to me in the very horror of the
immediate presence that the act would be, seeing and facing what I saw
and faced, to keep the boy himself unaware. The inspiration--I can
call it by no other name--was that I felt how voluntarily, how
transcendently, I MIGHT. It was like fighting with a demon for a
human soul, and when I had fairly so appraised it I saw how the human
soul--held out, in the tremor of my hands, at arm's length--had a
perfect dew of sweat on a lovely childish forehead. The face that was
close to mine was as white as the face against the glass, and out of it
presently came a sound, not low nor weak, but as if from much further
away, that I drank like a waft of fragrance.

"Yes--I took it."

At this, with a moan of joy, I enfolded, I drew him close; and while
I held him to my breast, where I could feel in the sudden fever of his
little body the tremendous pulse of his little heart, I kept my eyes on
the thing at the window and saw it move and shift its posture. I have
likened it to a sentinel, but its slow wheel, for a moment, was rather
the prowl of a baffled beast. My present quickened courage, however, was
such that, not too much to let it through, I had to shade, as it were,
my flame. Meanwhile the glare of the face was again at the window, the
scoundrel fixed as if to watch and wait. It was the very confidence that
I might now defy him, as well as the positive certitude, by this time,
of the child's unconsciousness, that made me go on. "What did you take
it for?"

"To see what you said about me."

"You opened the letter?"

"I opened it."

My eyes were now, as I held him off a little again, on Miles's own face,
in which the collapse of mockery showed me how complete was the ravage
of uneasiness. What was prodigious was that at last, by my success, his
sense was sealed and his communication stopped: he knew that he was in
presence, but knew not of what, and knew still less that I also was and
that I did know. And what did this strain of trouble matter when my eyes
went back to the window only to see that the air was clear again and--by
my personal triumph--the influence quenched? There was nothing there. I
felt that the cause was mine and that I should surely get ALL. "And you
found nothing!"--I let my elation out.

He gave the most mournful, thoughtful little headshake. "Nothing."

"Nothing, nothing!" I almost shouted in my joy.

"Nothing, nothing," he sadly repeated.

I kissed his forehead; it was drenched. "So what have you done with it?"

"I've burned it."

"Burned it?" It was now or never. "Is that what you did at school?"

Oh, what this brought up! "At school?"

"Did you take letters?--or other things?"

"Other things?" He appeared now to be thinking of something far off and
that reached him only through the pressure of his anxiety. Yet it did
reach him. "Did I STEAL?"

I felt myself redden to the roots of my hair as well as wonder if it
were more strange to put to a gentleman such a question or to see him
take it with allowances that gave the very distance of his fall in the
world. "Was it for that you mightn't go back?"

The only thing he felt was rather a dreary little surprise. "Did you
know I mightn't go back?"

"I know everything."

He gave me at this the longest and strangest look. "Everything?"

"Everything. Therefore DID you--?" But I couldn't say it again.

Miles could, very simply. "No. I didn't steal."

My face must have shown him I believed him utterly; yet my hands--but it
was for pure tenderness--shook him as if to ask him why, if it was all
for nothing, he had condemned me to months of torment. "What then did
you do?"

He looked in vague pain all round the top of the room and drew his
breath, two or three times over, as if with difficulty. He might have
been standing at the bottom of the sea and raising his eyes to some
faint green twilight. "Well--I said things."

"Only that?"

"They thought it was enough!"

"To turn you out for?"

Never, truly, had a person "turned out" shown so little to explain it
as this little person! He appeared to weigh my question, but in a manner
quite detached and almost helpless. "Well, I suppose I oughtn't."

"But to whom did you say them?"

He evidently tried to remember, but it dropped--he had lost it. "I don't
know!"

He almost smiled at me in the desolation of his surrender, which was
indeed practically, by this time, so complete that I ought to have left
it there. But I was infatuated--I was blind with victory, though even
then the very effect that was to have brought him so much nearer was
already that of added separation. "Was it to everyone?" I asked.

"No; it was only to--" But he gave a sick little headshake. "I don't
remember their names."

"Were they then so many?"

"No--only a few. Those I liked."

Those he liked? I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker
obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity
the appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent. It was for the
instant confounding and bottomless, for if he WERE innocent, what then
on earth was _I_? Paralyzed, while it lasted, by the mere brush of the
question, I let him go a little, so that, with a deep-drawn sigh, he
turned away from me again; which, as he faced toward the clear window,
I suffered, feeling that I had nothing now there to keep him from. "And
did they repeat what you said?" I went on after a moment.

He was soon at some distance from me, still breathing hard and again
with the air, though now without anger for it, of being confined against
his will. Once more, as he had done before, he looked up at the dim
day as if, of what had hitherto sustained him, nothing was left but an
unspeakable anxiety. "Oh, yes," he nevertheless replied--"they must have
repeated them. To those THEY liked," he added.

There was, somehow, less of it than I had expected; but I turned it
over. "And these things came round--?"

"To the masters? Oh, yes!" he answered very simply. "But I didn't know
they'd tell."

"The masters? They didn't--they've never told. That's why I ask you."

He turned to me again his little beautiful fevered face. "Yes, it was
too bad."

"Too bad?"

"What I suppose I sometimes said. To write home."

I can't name the exquisite pathos of the contradiction given to such
a speech by such a speaker; I only know that the next instant I heard
myself throw off with homely force: "Stuff and nonsense!" But the next
after that I must have sounded stern enough. "What WERE these things?"

My sternness was all for his judge, his executioner; yet it made him
avert himself again, and that movement made ME, with a single bound and
an irrepressible cry, spring straight upon him. For there again, against
the glass, as if to blight his confession and stay his answer, was the
hideous author of our woe--the white face of damnation. I felt a sick
swim at the drop of my victory and all the return of my battle, so that
the wildness of my veritable leap only served as a great betrayal. I
saw him, from the midst of my act, meet it with a divination, and on the
perception that even now he only guessed, and that the window was still
to his own eyes free, I let the impulse flame up to convert the climax
of his dismay into the very proof of his liberation. "No more, no
more, no more!" I shrieked, as I tried to press him against me, to my
visitant.

"Is she HERE?" Miles panted as he caught with his sealed eyes the
direction of my words. Then as his strange "she" staggered me and, with
a gasp, I echoed it, "Miss Jessel, Miss Jessel!" he with a sudden fury
gave me back.

I seized, stupefied, his supposition--some sequel to what we had done to
Flora, but this made me only want to show him that it was better still
than that. "It's not Miss Jessel! But it's at the window--straight
before us. It's THERE--the coward horror, there for the last time!"

At this, after a second in which his head made the movement of a baffled
dog's on a scent and then gave a frantic little shake for air and light,
he was at me in a white rage, bewildered, glaring vainly over the place
and missing wholly, though it now, to my sense, filled the room like the
taste of poison, the wide, overwhelming presence. "It's HE?"

I was so determined to have all my proof that I flashed into ice to
challenge him. "Whom do you mean by 'he'?"

"Peter Quint--you devil!" His face gave again, round the room, its
convulsed supplication. "WHERE?"

They are in my ears still, his supreme surrender of the name and his
tribute to my devotion. "What does he matter now, my own?--what will he
EVER matter? _I_ have you," I launched at the beast, "but he has lost
you forever!" Then, for the demonstration of my work, "There, THERE!" I
said to Miles.

But he had already jerked straight round, stared, glared again, and
seen but the quiet day. With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he
uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp with
which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall.
I caught him, yes, I held him--it may be imagined with what a passion;
but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that
I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart,
dispossessed, had stopped.









THE ASPERN PAPERS

By Henry James


First American book edition,

Macmillan and Co., 1888.





I


I had taken Mrs. Prest into my confidence; in truth without her I
should have made but little advance, for the fruitful idea in the whole
business dropped from her friendly lips. It was she who invented the
short cut, who severed the Gordian knot. It is not supposed to be the
nature of women to rise as a general thing to the largest and most
liberal view--I mean of a practical scheme; but it has struck me that
they sometimes throw off a bold conception--such as a man would not have
risen to--with singular serenity. "Simply ask them to take you in on the
footing of a lodger"--I don't think that unaided I should have risen to
that. I was beating about the bush, trying to be ingenious, wondering
by what combination of arts I might become an acquaintance, when she
offered this happy suggestion that the way to become an acquaintance was
first to become an inmate. Her actual knowledge of the Misses Bordereau
was scarcely larger than mine, and indeed I had brought with me from
England some definite facts which were new to her. Their name had been
mixed up ages before with one of the greatest names of the century, and
they lived now in Venice in obscurity, on very small means, unvisited,
unapproachable, in a dilapidated old palace on an out-of-the-way canal:
this was the substance of my friend's impression of them. She herself
had been established in Venice for fifteen years and had done a great
deal of good there; but the circle of her benevolence did not include
the two shy, mysterious and, as it was somehow supposed, scarcely
respectable Americans (they were believed to have lost in their long
exile all national quality, besides having had, as their name implied,
some French strain in their origin), who asked no favors and desired no
attention. In the early years of her residence she had made an attempt
to see them, but this had been successful only as regards the little
one, as Mrs. Prest called the niece; though in reality as I afterward
learned she was considerably the bigger of the two. She had heard Miss
Bordereau was ill and had a suspicion that she was in want; and she had
gone to the house to offer assistance, so that if there were suffering
(and American suffering), she should at least not have it on her
conscience. The "little one" received her in the great cold, tarnished
Venetian sala, the central hall of the house, paved with marble and
roofed with dim crossbeams, and did not even ask her to sit down. This
was not encouraging for me, who wished to sit so fast, and I remarked
as much to Mrs. Prest. She however replied with profundity, "Ah, but
there's all the difference: I went to confer a favor and you will go
to ask one. If they are proud you will be on the right side." And she
offered to show me their house to begin with--to row me thither in her
gondola. I let her know that I had already been to look at it half a
dozen times; but I accepted her invitation, for it charmed me to hover
about the place. I had made my way to it the day after my arrival in
Venice (it had been described to me in advance by the friend in England
to whom I owed definite information as to their possession of the
papers), and I had besieged it with my eyes while I considered my plan
of campaign. Jeffrey Aspern had never been in it that I knew of;
but some note of his voice seemed to abide there by a roundabout
implication, a faint reverberation.

Mrs. Prest knew nothing about the papers, but she was interested in my
curiosity, as she was always interested in the joys and sorrows of her
friends. As we went, however, in her gondola, gliding there under the
sociable hood with the bright Venetian picture framed on either side by
the movable window, I could see that she was amused by my infatuation,
the way my interest in the papers had become a fixed idea. "One would
think you expected to find in them the answer to the riddle of the
universe," she said; and I denied the impeachment only by replying
that if I had to choose between that precious solution and a bundle
of Jeffrey Aspern's letters I knew indeed which would appear to me the
greater boon. She pretended to make light of his genius, and I took
no pains to defend him. One doesn't defend one's god: one's god is
in himself a defense. Besides, today, after his long comparative
obscuration, he hangs high in the heaven of our literature, for all the
world to see; he is a part of the light by which we walk. The most I
said was that he was no doubt not a woman's poet: to which she rejoined
aptly enough that he had been at least Miss Bordereau's. The strange
thing had been for me to discover in England that she was still alive:
it was as if I had been told Mrs. Siddons was, or Queen Caroline, or
the famous Lady Hamilton, for it seemed to me that she belonged to a
generation as extinct. "Why, she must be tremendously old--at least a
hundred," I had said; but on coming to consider dates I saw that it was
not strictly necessary that she should have exceeded by very much the
common span. Nonetheless she was very far advanced in life, and her
relations with Jeffrey Aspern had occurred in her early womanhood.
"That is her excuse," said Mrs. Prest, half-sententiously and yet also
somewhat as if she were ashamed of making a speech so little in the
real tone of Venice. As if a woman needed an excuse for having loved the
divine poet! He had been not only one of the most brilliant minds of
his day (and in those years, when the century was young, there were,
as everyone knows, many), but one of the most genial men and one of the
handsomest.

The niece, according to Mrs. Prest, was not so old, and she risked the
conjecture that she was only a grandniece. This was possible; I had
nothing but my share in the very limited knowledge of my English fellow
worshipper John Cumnor, who had never seen the couple. The world, as I
say, had recognized Jeffrey Aspern, but Cumnor and I had recognized him
most. The multitude, today, flocked to his temple, but of that temple he
and I regarded ourselves as the ministers. We held, justly, as I think,
that we had done more for his memory than anyone else, and we had done
it by opening lights into his life. He had nothing to fear from us
because he had nothing to fear from the truth, which alone at such a
distance of time we could be interested in establishing. His early
death had been the only dark spot in his life, unless the papers in Miss
Bordereau's hands should perversely bring out others. There had been an
impression about 1825 that he had "treated her badly," just as there had
been an impression that he had "served," as the London populace says,
several other ladies in the same way. Each of these cases Cumnor and
I had been able to investigate, and we had never failed to acquit
him conscientiously of shabby behavior. I judged him perhaps more
indulgently than my friend; certainly, at any rate, it appeared to me
that no man could have walked straighter in the given circumstances.
These were almost always awkward. Half the women of his time, to speak
liberally, had flung themselves at his head, and out of this pernicious
fashion many complications, some of them grave, had not failed to arise.
He was not a woman's poet, as I had said to Mrs. Prest, in the modern
phase of his reputation; but the situation had been different when
the man's own voice was mingled with his song. That voice, by every
testimony, was one of the sweetest ever heard. "Orpheus and the
Maenads!" was the exclamation that rose to my lips when I first turned
over his correspondence. Almost all the Maenads were unreasonable, and
many of them insupportable; it struck me in short that he was kinder,
more considerate than, in his place (if I could imagine myself in such a
place!) I should have been.

It was certainly strange beyond all strangeness, and I shall not take
up space with attempting to explain it, that whereas in all these other
lines of research we had to deal with phantoms and dust, the mere echoes
of echoes, the one living source of information that had lingered
on into our time had been unheeded by us. Every one of Aspern's
contemporaries had, according to our belief, passed away; we had not
been able to look into a single pair of eyes into which his had looked
or to feel a transmitted contact in any aged hand that his had touched.
Most dead of all did poor Miss Bordereau appear, and yet she alone had
survived. We exhausted in the course of months our wonder that we had
not found her out sooner, and the substance of our explanation was that
she had kept so quiet. The poor lady on the whole had had reason for
doing so. But it was a revelation to us that it was possible to keep so
quiet as that in the latter half of the nineteenth century--the age of
newspapers and telegrams and photographs and interviewers. And she had
taken no great trouble about it either: she had not hidden herself away
in an undiscoverable hole; she had boldly settled down in a city of
exhibition. The only secret of her safety that we could perceive was
that Venice contained so many curiosities that were greater than she.
And then accident had somehow favored her, as was shown for example in
the fact that Mrs. Prest had never happened to mention her to me, though
I had spent three weeks in Venice--under her nose, as it were--five
years before. Mrs. Prest had not mentioned this much to anyone; she
appeared almost to have forgotten she was there. Of course she had not
the responsibilities of an editor. It was no explanation of the
old woman's having eluded us to say that she lived abroad, for our
researches had again and again taken us (not only by correspondence
but by personal inquiry) to France, to Germany, to Italy, in which
countries, not counting his important stay in England, so many of the
too few years of Aspern's career were spent. We were glad to think at
least that in all our publishings (some people consider I believe that
we have overdone them), we had only touched in passing and in the most
discreet manner on Miss Bordereau's connection. Oddly enough, even if we
had had the material (and we often wondered what had become of it), it
would have been the most difficult episode to handle.

The gondola stopped, the old palace was there; it was a house of the
class which in Venice carries even in extreme dilapidation the dignified
name. "How charming! It's gray and pink!" my companion exclaimed;
and that is the most comprehensive description of it. It was not
particularly old, only two or three centuries; and it had an air not so
much of decay as of quiet discouragement, as if it had rather missed its
career. But its wide front, with a stone balcony from end to end of the
piano nobile or most important floor, was architectural enough, with the
aid of various pilasters and arches; and the stucco with which in the
intervals it had long ago been endued was rosy in the April afternoon.
It overlooked a clean, melancholy, unfrequented canal, which had
a narrow riva or convenient footway on either side. "I don't know
why--there are no brick gables," said Mrs. Prest, "but this corner has
seemed to me before more Dutch than Italian, more like Amsterdam than
like Venice. It's perversely clean, for reasons of its own; and though
you can pass on foot scarcely anyone ever thinks of doing so. It has the
air of a Protestant Sunday. Perhaps the people are afraid of the Misses
Bordereau. I daresay they have the reputation of witches."

I forget what answer I made to this--I was given up to two other
reflections. The first of these was that if the old lady lived in such a
big, imposing house she could not be in any sort of misery and therefore
would not be tempted by a chance to let a couple of rooms. I expressed
this idea to Mrs. Prest, who gave me a very logical reply. "If she
didn't live in a big house how could it be a question of her having
rooms to spare? If she were not amply lodged herself you would lack
ground to approach her. Besides, a big house here, and especially in
this quartier perdu, proves nothing at all: it is perfectly compatible
with a state of penury. Dilapidated old palazzi, if you will go out of
the way for them, are to be had for five shillings a year. And as for
the people who live in them--no, until you have explored Venice socially
as much as I have you can form no idea of their domestic desolation.
They live on nothing, for they have nothing to live on." The other idea
that had come into my head was connected with a high blank wall which
appeared to confine an expanse of ground on one side of the house.
Blank I call it, but it was figured over with the patches that please a
painter, repaired breaches, crumblings of plaster, extrusions of brick
that had turned pink with time; and a few thin trees, with the poles of
certain rickety trellises, were visible over the top. The place was a
garden, and apparently it belonged to the house. It suddenly occurred to
me that if it did belong to the house I had my pretext.

I sat looking out on all this with Mrs. Prest (it was covered with the
golden glow of Venice) from the shade of our felze, and she asked me if
I would go in then, while she waited for me, or come back another time.
At first I could not decide--it was doubtless very weak of me. I wanted
still to think I MIGHT get a footing, and I was afraid to meet failure,
for it would leave me, as I remarked to my companion, without another
arrow for my bow. "Why not another?" she inquired as I sat there
hesitating and thinking it over; and she wished to know why even now
and before taking the trouble of becoming an inmate (which might be
wretchedly uncomfortable after all, even if it succeeded), I had not
the resource of simply offering them a sum of money down. In that way I
might obtain the documents without bad nights.

"Dearest lady," I exclaimed, "excuse the impatience of my tone when
I suggest that you must have forgotten the very fact (surely I
communicated it to you) which pushed me to throw myself upon your
ingenuity. The old woman won't have the documents spoken of; they are
personal, delicate, intimate, and she hasn't modern notions, God bless
her! If I should sound that note first I should certainly spoil the
game. I can arrive at the papers only by putting her off her guard, and
I can put her off her guard only by ingratiating diplomatic practices.
Hypocrisy, duplicity are my only chance. I am sorry for it, but for
Jeffrey Aspern's sake I would do worse still. First I must take tea with
her; then tackle the main job." And I told over what had happened to
John Cumnor when he wrote to her. No notice whatever had been taken of
his first letter, and the second had been answered very sharply, in six
lines, by the niece. "Miss Bordereau requested her to say that she
could not imagine what he meant by troubling them. They had none of Mr.
Aspern's papers, and if they had should never think of showing them
to anyone on any account whatever. She didn't know what he was talking
about and begged he would let her alone." I certainly did not want to be
met that way.

"Well," said Mrs. Prest after a moment, provokingly, "perhaps after all
they haven't any of his things. If they deny it flat how are you sure?"

"John Cumnor is sure, and it would take me long to tell you how his
conviction, or his very strong presumption--strong enough to stand
against the old lady's not unnatural fib--has built itself up. Besides,
he makes much of the internal evidence of the niece's letter."

"The internal evidence?"

"Her calling him 'Mr. Aspern.'"

"I don't see what that proves."

"It proves familiarity, and familiarity implies the possession of
mementoes, or relics. I can't tell you how that 'Mr.' touches me--how it
bridges over the gulf of time and brings our hero near to me--nor what
an edge it gives to my desire to see Juliana. You don't say, 'Mr.'
Shakespeare."

"Would I, any more, if I had a box full of his letters?"

"Yes, if he had been your lover and someone wanted them!" And I added
that John Cumnor was so convinced, and so all the more convinced by
Miss Bordereau's tone, that he would have come himself to Venice on the
business were it not that for him there was the obstacle that it would
be difficult to disprove his identity with the person who had written
to them, which the old ladies would be sure to suspect in spite of
dissimulation and a change of name. If they were to ask him point-blank
if he were not their correspondent it would be too awkward for him to
lie; whereas I was fortunately not tied in that way. I was a fresh hand
and could say no without lying.

"But you will have to change your name," said Mrs. Prest. "Juliana lives
out of the world as much as it is possible to live, but none the less
she has probably heard of Mr. Aspern's editors; she perhaps possesses
what you have published."

"I have thought of that," I returned; and I drew out of my pocketbook a
visiting card, neatly engraved with a name that was not my own.

"You are very extravagant; you might have written it," said my
companion.

"This looks more genuine."

"Certainly, you are prepared to go far! But it will be awkward about
your letters; they won't come to you in that mask."

"My banker will take them in, and I will go every day to fetch them. It
will give me a little walk."

"Shall you only depend upon that?" asked Mrs. Prest. "Aren't you coming
to see me?"

"Oh, you will have left Venice, for the hot months, long before
there are any results. I am prepared to roast all summer--as well as
hereafter, perhaps you'll say! Meanwhile, John Cumnor will bombard me
with letters addressed, in my feigned name, to the care of the padrona."

"She will recognize his hand," my companion suggested.

"On the envelope he can disguise it."

"Well, you're a precious pair! Doesn't it occur to you that even if you
are able to say you are not Mr. Cumnor in person they may still suspect
you of being his emissary?"

"Certainly, and I see only one way to parry that."

"And what may that be?"

I hesitated a moment. "To make love to the niece."

"Ah," cried Mrs. Prest, "wait till you see her!"




II


"I must work the garden--I must work the garden," I said to myself, five
minutes later, as I waited, upstairs, in the long, dusky sala, where the
bare scagliola floor gleamed vaguely in a chink of the closed shutters.
The place was impressive but it looked cold and cautious. Mrs. Prest had
floated away, giving me a rendezvous at the end of half an hour by
some neighboring water steps; and I had been let into the house,
after pulling the rusty bell wire, by a little red-headed, white-faced
maidservant, who was very young and not ugly and wore clicking pattens
and a shawl in the fashion of a hood. She had not contented herself
with opening the door from above by the usual arrangement of a creaking
pulley, though she had looked down at me first from an upper window,
dropping the inevitable challenge which in Italy precedes the hospitable
act. As a general thing I was irritated by this survival of medieval
manners, though as I liked the old I suppose I ought to have liked it;
but I was so determined to be genial that I took my false card out of
my pocket and held it up to her, smiling as if it were a magic token. It
had the effect of one indeed, for it brought her, as I say, all the way
down. I begged her to hand it to her mistress, having first written
on it in Italian the words, "Could you very kindly see a gentleman,
an American, for a moment?" The little maid was not hostile, and I
reflected that even that was perhaps something gained. She colored,
she smiled and looked both frightened and pleased. I could see that my
arrival was a great affair, that visits were rare in that house, and
that she was a person who would have liked a sociable place. When she
pushed forward the heavy door behind me I felt that I had a foot in the
citadel. She pattered across the damp, stony lower hall and I followed
her up the high staircase--stonier still, as it seemed--without an
invitation. I think she had meant I should wait for her below, but such
was not my idea, and I took up my station in the sala. She flitted, at
the far end of it, into impenetrable regions, and I looked at the place
with my heart beating as I had known it to do in the dentist's parlor.
It was gloomy and stately, but it owed its character almost entirely
to its noble shape and to the fine architectural doors--as high as
the doors of houses--which, leading into the various rooms, repeated
themselves on either side at intervals. They were surmounted with old
faded painted escutcheons, and here and there, in the spaces between
them, brown pictures, which I perceived to be bad, in battered frames,
were suspended. With the exception of several straw-bottomed chairs with
their backs to the wall, the grand obscure vista contained nothing else
to minister to effect. It was evidently never used save as a passage,
and little even as that. I may add that by the time the door opened
again through which the maidservant had escaped, my eyes had grown used
to the want of light.

I had not meant by my private ejaculation that I must myself cultivate
the soil of the tangled enclosure which lay beneath the windows, but the
lady who came toward me from the distance over the hard, shining floor
might have supposed as much from the way in which, as I went rapidly to
meet her, I exclaimed, taking care to speak Italian: "The garden, the
garden--do me the pleasure to tell me if it's yours!"

She stopped short, looking at me with wonder; and then, "Nothing here is
mine," she answered in English, coldly and sadly.

"Oh, you are English; how delightful!" I remarked, ingenuously. "But
surely the garden belongs to the house?"

"Yes, but the house doesn't belong to me." She was a long, lean, pale
person, habited apparently in a dull-colored dressing gown, and she
spoke with a kind of mild literalness. She did not ask me to sit down,
any more than years before (if she were the niece) she had asked Mrs.
Prest, and we stood face to face in the empty pompous hall.

"Well then, would you kindly tell me to whom I must address myself? I'm
afraid you'll think me odiously intrusive, but you know I MUST have a
garden--upon my honor I must!"

Her face was not young, but it was simple; it was not fresh, but it was
mild. She had large eyes which were not bright, and a great deal of hair
which was not "dressed," and long fine hands which were--possibly--not
clean. She clasped these members almost convulsively as, with a
confused, alarmed look, she broke out, "Oh, don't take it away from us;
we like it ourselves!"

"You have the use of it then?"

"Oh, yes. If it wasn't for that!" And she gave a shy, melancholy smile.

"Isn't it a luxury, precisely? That's why, intending to be in Venice
some weeks, possibly all summer, and having some literary work, some
reading and writing to do, so that I must be quiet, and yet if possible
a great deal in the open air--that's why I have felt that a garden
is really indispensable. I appeal to your own experience," I went on,
smiling. "Now can't I look at yours?"

"I don't know, I don't understand," the poor woman murmured, planted
there and letting her embarrassed eyes wander all over my strangeness.

"I mean only from one of those windows--such grand ones as you have
here--if you will let me open the shutters." And I walked toward the
back of the house. When I had advanced halfway I stopped and waited, as
if I took it for granted she would accompany me. I had been of necessity
very abrupt, but I strove at the same time to give her the impression of
extreme courtesy. "I have been looking at furnished rooms all over
the place, and it seems impossible to find any with a garden attached.
Naturally in a place like Venice gardens are rare. It's absurd if you
like, for a man, but I can't live without flowers."

"There are none to speak of down there." She came nearer to me, as if,
though she mistrusted me, I had drawn her by an invisible thread. I went
on again, and she continued as she followed me: "We have a few, but they
are very common. It costs too much to cultivate them; one has to have a
man."

"Why shouldn't I be the man?" I asked. "I'll work without wages; or
rather I'll put in a gardener. You shall have the sweetest flowers in
Venice."

She protested at this, with a queer little sigh which might also have
been a gush of rapture at the picture I presented. Then she observed,
"We don't know you--we don't know you."

"You know me as much as I know you: that is much more, because you know
my name. And if you are English I am almost a countryman."

"We are not English," said my companion, watching me helplessly while I
threw open the shutters of one of the divisions of the wide high window.

"You speak the language so beautifully: might I ask what you are?" Seen
from above the garden was certainly shabby; but I perceived at a glance
that it had great capabilities. She made no rejoinder, she was so lost
in staring at me, and I exclaimed, "You don't mean to say you are also
by chance American?"

"I don't know; we used to be."

"Used to be? Surely you haven't changed?"

"It's so many years ago--we are nothing."

"So many years that you have been living here? Well, I don't wonder at
that; it's a grand old house. I suppose you all use the garden," I went
on, "but I assure you I shouldn't be in your way. I would be very quiet
and stay in one corner."

"We all use it?" she repeated after me, vaguely, not coming close to
the window but looking at my shoes. She appeared to think me capable of
throwing her out.

"I mean all your family, as many as you are."

"There is only one other; she is very old--she never goes down."

"Only one other, in all this great house!" I feigned to be not only
amazed but almost scandalized. "Dear lady, you must have space then to
spare!"

"To spare?" she repeated, in the same dazed way.

"Why, you surely don't live (two quiet women--I see YOU are quiet,
at any rate) in fifty rooms!" Then with a burst of hope and cheer I
demanded: "Couldn't you let me two or three? That would set me up!"

I had not struck the note that translated my purpose, and I need
not reproduce the whole of the tune I played. I ended by making my
interlocutress believe that I was an honorable person, though of course
I did not even attempt to persuade her that I was not an eccentric one.
I repeated that I had studies to pursue; that I wanted quiet; that I
delighted in a garden and had vainly sought one up and down the city;
that I would undertake that before another month was over the dear old
house should be smothered in flowers. I think it was the flowers that
won my suit, for I afterward found that Miss Tita (for such the name of
this high tremulous spinster proved somewhat incongruously to be) had an
insatiable appetite for them. When I speak of my suit as won I mean that
before I left her she had promised that she would refer the question to
her aunt. I inquired who her aunt might be and she answered, "Why, Miss
Bordereau!" with an air of surprise, as if I might have been expected to
know. There were contradictions like this in Tita Bordereau which, as I
observed later, contributed to make her an odd and affecting person.
It was the study of the two ladies to live so that the world should not
touch them, and yet they had never altogether accepted the idea that it
never heard of them. In Tita at any rate a grateful susceptibility to
human contact had not died out, and contact of a limited order there
would be if I should come to live in the house.

"We have never done anything of the sort; we have never had a lodger or
any kind of inmate." So much as this she made a point of saying to me.
"We are very poor, we live very badly. The rooms are very bare--that you
might take; they have nothing in them. I don't know how you would sleep,
how you would eat."

"With your permission, I could easily put in a bed and a few tables and
chairs. C'est la moindre des choses and the affair of an hour or two.
I know a little man from whom I can hire what I should want for a few
months, for a trifle, and my gondolier can bring the things round in his
boat. Of course in this great house you must have a second kitchen, and
my servant, who is a wonderfully handy fellow" (this personage was an
evocation of the moment), "can easily cook me a chop there. My tastes
and habits are of the simplest; I live on flowers!" And then I ventured
to add that if they were very poor it was all the more reason they
should let their rooms. They were bad economists--I had never heard of
such a waste of material.

I saw in a moment that the good lady had never before been spoken to
in that way, with a kind of humorous firmness which did not exclude
sympathy but was on the contrary founded on it. She might easily have
told me that my sympathy was impertinent, but this by good fortune
did not occur to her. I left her with the understanding that she would
consider the matter with her aunt and that I might come back the next
day for their decision.

"The aunt will refuse; she will think the whole proceeding very louche!"
Mrs. Prest declared shortly after this, when I had resumed my place in
her gondola. She had put the idea into my head and now (so little are
women to be counted on) she appeared to take a despondent view of it.
Her pessimism provoked me and I pretended to have the best hopes; I
went so far as to say that I had a distinct presentiment that I should
succeed. Upon this Mrs. Prest broke out, "Oh, I see what's in your head!
You fancy you have made such an impression in a quarter of an hour that
she is dying for you to come and can be depended upon to bring the old
one round. If you do get in you'll count it as a triumph."

I did count it as a triumph, but only for the editor (in the last
analysis), not for the man, who had not the tradition of personal
conquest. When I went back on the morrow the little maidservant
conducted me straight through the long sala (it opened there as before
in perfect perspective and was lighter now, which I thought a good
omen) into the apartment from which the recipient of my former visit had
emerged on that occasion. It was a large shabby parlor, with a fine
old painted ceiling and a strange figure sitting alone at one of the
windows. They come back to me now almost with the palpitation they
caused, the successive feelings that accompanied my consciousness that
as the door of the room closed behind me I was really face to face with
the Juliana of some of Aspern's most exquisite and most renowned lyrics.
I grew used to her afterward, though never completely; but as she sat
there before me my heart beat as fast as if the miracle of resurrection
had taken place for my benefit. Her presence seemed somehow to contain
his, and I felt nearer to him at that first moment of seeing her than
I ever had been before or ever have been since. Yes, I remember my
emotions in their order, even including a curious little tremor that
took me when I saw that the niece was not there. With her, the day
before, I had become sufficiently familiar, but it almost exceeded my
courage (much as I had longed for the event) to be left alone with
such a terrible relic as the aunt. She was too strange, too literally
resurgent. Then came a check, with the perception that we were not
really face to face, inasmuch as she had over her eyes a horrible
green shade which, for her, served almost as a mask. I believed for the
instant that she had put it on expressly, so that from underneath it she
might scrutinize me without being scrutinized herself. At the same
time it increased the presumption that there was a ghastly death's-head
lurking behind it. The divine Juliana as a grinning skull--the vision
hung there until it passed. Then it came to me that she WAS tremendously
old--so old that death might take her at any moment, before I had time
to get what I wanted from her. The next thought was a correction to
that; it lighted up the situation. She would die next week, she would
die tomorrow--then I could seize her papers. Meanwhile she sat there
neither moving nor speaking. She was very small and shrunken, bent
forward, with her hands in her lap. She was dressed in black, and her
head was wrapped in a piece of old black lace which showed no hair.

My emotion keeping me silent she spoke first, and the remark she made
was exactly the most unexpected.




III


"Our house is very far from the center, but the little canal is very
comme il faut."

"It's the sweetest corner of Venice and I can imagine nothing more
charming," I hastened to reply. The old lady's voice was very thin and
weak, but it had an agreeable, cultivated murmur, and there was wonder
in the thought that that individual note had been in Jeffrey Aspern's
ear.

"Please to sit down there. I hear very well," she said quietly, as if
perhaps I had been shouting at her; and the chair she pointed to was
at a certain distance. I took possession of it, telling her that I
was perfectly aware that I had intruded, that I had not been properly
introduced and could only throw myself upon her indulgence. Perhaps the
other lady, the one I had had the honor of seeing the day before, would
have explained to her about the garden. That was literally what had
given me courage to take a step so unconventional. I had fallen in love
at sight with the whole place (she herself probably was so used to
it that she did not know the impression it was capable of making on a
stranger), and I had felt it was really a case to risk something. Was
her own kindness in receiving me a sign that I was not wholly out in
my calculation? It would render me extremely happy to think so. I could
give her my word of honor that I was a most respectable, inoffensive
person and that as an inmate they would be barely conscious of my
existence. I would conform to any regulations, any restrictions if they
would only let me enjoy the garden. Moreover I should be delighted to
give her references, guarantees; they would be of the very best, both in
Venice and in England as well as in America.

She listened to me in perfect stillness and I felt that she was looking
at me with great attention, though I could see only the lower part of
her bleached and shriveled face. Independently of the refining process
of old age it had a delicacy which once must have been great. She had
been very fair, she had had a wonderful complexion. She was silent a
little after I had ceased speaking; then she inquired, "If you are so
fond of a garden why don't you go to terra firma, where there are so
many far better than this?"

"Oh, it's the combination!" I answered, smiling; and then, with rather a
flight of fancy, "It's the idea of a garden in the middle of the sea."

"It's not in the middle of the sea; you can't see the water."

I stared a moment, wondering whether she wished to convict me of fraud.
"Can't see the water? Why, dear madam, I can come up to the very gate in
my boat."

She appeared inconsequent, for she said vaguely in reply to this, "Yes,
if you have got a boat. I haven't any; it's many years since I have been
in one of the gondolas." She uttered these words as if the gondolas were
a curious faraway craft which she knew only by hearsay.

"Let me assure you of the pleasure with which I would put mine at your
service!" I exclaimed. I had scarcely said this, however, before I
became aware that the speech was in questionable taste and might also do
me the injury of making me appear too eager, too possessed of a hidden
motive. But the old woman remained impenetrable and her attitude
bothered me by suggesting that she had a fuller vision of me than I
had of her. She gave me no thanks for my somewhat extravagant offer
but remarked that the lady I had seen the day before was her niece;
she would presently come in. She had asked her to stay away a little
on purpose, because she herself wished to see me at first alone. She
relapsed into silence, and I asked myself why she had judged this
necessary and what was coming yet; also whether I might venture on some
judicious remark in praise of her companion. I went so far as to say
that I should be delighted to see her again: she had been so very
courteous to me, considering how odd she must have thought me--a
declaration which drew from Miss Bordereau another of her whimsical
speeches.

"She has very good manners; I bred her up myself!" I was on the point
of saying that that accounted for the easy grace of the niece, but I
arrested myself in time, and the next moment the old woman went on:
"I don't care who you may be--I don't want to know; it signifies very
little today." This had all the air of being a formula of dismissal, as
if her next words would be that I might take myself off now that she
had had the amusement of looking on the face of such a monster of
indiscretion. Therefore I was all the more surprised when she added,
with her soft, venerable quaver, "You may have as many rooms as you
like--if you will pay a good deal of money."

I hesitated but for a single instant, long enough to ask myself what she
meant in particular by this condition. First it struck me that she must
have really a large sum in her mind; then I reasoned quickly that
her idea of a large sum would probably not correspond to my own. My
deliberation, I think, was not so visible as to diminish the promptitude
with which I replied, "I will pay with pleasure and of course in advance
whatever you may think is proper to ask me."

"Well then, a thousand francs a month," she rejoined instantly, while
her baffling green shade continued to cover her attitude.

The figure, as they say, was startling and my logic had been at fault.
The sum she had mentioned was, by the Venetian measure of such matters,
exceedingly large; there was many an old palace in an out-of-the-way
corner that I might on such terms have enjoyed by the year. But so far
as my small means allowed I was prepared to spend money, and my decision
was quickly taken. I would pay her with a smiling face what she asked,
but in that case I would give myself the compensation of extracting the
papers from her for nothing. Moreover if she had asked five times
as much I should have risen to the occasion; so odious would it have
appeared to me to stand chaffering with Aspern's Juliana. It was queer
enough to have a question of money with her at all. I assured her that
her views perfectly met my own and that on the morrow I should have the
pleasure of putting three months' rent into her hand. She received this
announcement with serenity and with no apparent sense that after all
it would be becoming of her to say that I ought to see the rooms first.
This did not occur to her and indeed her serenity was mainly what I
wanted. Our little bargain was just concluded when the door opened and
the younger lady appeared on the threshold. As soon as Miss Bordereau
saw her niece she cried out almost gaily, "He will give three
thousand--three thousand tomorrow!"

Miss Tita stood still, with her patient eyes turning from one of us to
the other; then she inquired, scarcely above her breath, "Do you mean
francs?"

"Did you mean francs or dollars?" the old woman asked of me at this.

"I think francs were what you said," I answered, smiling.

"That is very good," said Miss Tita, as if she had become conscious that
her own question might have looked overreaching.

"What do YOU know? You are ignorant," Miss Bordereau remarked; not with
acerbity but with a strange, soft coldness.

"Yes, of money--certainly of money!" Miss Tita hastened to exclaim.

"I am sure you have your own branches of knowledge," I took the liberty
of saying, genially. There was something painful to me, somehow, in the
turn the conversation had taken, in the discussion of the rent.

"She had a very good education when she was young. I looked into that
myself," said Miss Bordereau. Then she added, "But she has learned
nothing since."

"I have always been with you," Miss Tita rejoined very mildly, and
evidently with no intention of making an epigram.

"Yes, but for that!" her aunt declared with more satirical force. She
evidently meant that but for this her niece would never have got on
at all; the point of the observation however being lost on Miss Tita,
though she blushed at hearing her history revealed to a stranger. Miss
Bordereau went on, addressing herself to me: "And what time will you
come tomorrow with the money?"

"The sooner the better. If it suits you I will come at noon."

"I am always here but I have my hours," said the old woman, as if her
convenience were not to be taken for granted.

"You mean the times when you receive?"

"I never receive. But I will see you at noon, when you come with the
money."

"Very good, I shall be punctual;" and I added, "May I shake hands with
you, on our contract?" I thought there ought to be some little form, it
would make me really feel easier, for I foresaw that there would be
no other. Besides, though Miss Bordereau could not today be called
personally attractive and there was something even in her wasted
antiquity that bade one stand at one's distance, I felt an irresistible
desire to hold in my own for a moment the hand that Jeffrey Aspern had
pressed.

For a minute she made no answer, and I saw that my proposal failed to
meet with her approbation. She indulged in no movement of withdrawal,
which I half-expected; she only said coldly, "I belong to a time when
that was not the custom."

I felt rather snubbed but I exclaimed good humoredly to Miss Tita, "Oh,
you will do as well!" I shook hands with her while she replied, with a
small flutter, "Yes, yes, to show it's all arranged!"

"Shall you bring the money in gold?" Miss Bordereau demanded, as I was
turning to the door.

I looked at her for a moment. "Aren't you a little afraid, after all, of
keeping such a sum as that in the house?" It was not that I was annoyed
at her avidity but I was really struck with the disparity between such a
treasure and such scanty means of guarding it.

"Whom should I be afraid of if I am not afraid of you?" she asked with
her shrunken grimness.

"Ah well," said I, laughing, "I shall be in point of fact a protector
and I will bring gold if you prefer."

"Thank you," the old woman returned with dignity and with an inclination
of her head which evidently signified that I might depart. I passed out
of the room, reflecting that it would not be easy to circumvent her. As
I stood in the sala again I saw that Miss Tita had followed me, and I
supposed that as her aunt had neglected to suggest that I should take a
look at my quarters it was her purpose to repair the omission. But she
made no such suggestion; she only stood there with a dim, though not a
languid smile, and with an effect of irresponsible, incompetent youth
which was almost comically at variance with the faded facts of her
person. She was not infirm, like her aunt, but she struck me as still
more helpless, because her inefficiency was spiritual, which was not the
case with Miss Bordereau's. I waited to see if she would offer to
show me the rest of the house, but I did not precipitate the question,
inasmuch as my plan was from this moment to spend as much of my time as
possible in her society. I only observed at the end of a minute:

"I have had better fortune than I hoped. It was very kind of her to see
me. Perhaps you said a good word for me."

"It was the idea of the money," said Miss Tita.

"And did you suggest that?"

"I told her that you would perhaps give a good deal."

"What made you think that?"

"I told her I thought you were rich."

"And what put that idea into your head?"

"I don't know; the way you talked."

"Dear me, I must talk differently now," I declared. "I'm sorry to say
it's not the case."

"Well," said Miss Tita, "I think that in Venice the forestieri, in
general, often give a great deal for something that after all isn't
much." She appeared to make this remark with a comforting intention,
to wish to remind me that if I had been extravagant I was not really
foolishly singular. We walked together along the sala, and as I took its
magnificent measure I said to her that I was afraid it would not form
a part of my quartiere. Were my rooms by chance to be among those that
opened into it? "Not if you go above, on the second floor," she answered
with a little startled air, as if she had rather taken for granted I
would know my proper place.

"And I infer that that's where your aunt would like me to be."

"She said your apartments ought to be very distinct."

"That certainly would be best." And I listened with respect while she
told me that up above I was free to take whatever I liked; that there
was another staircase, but only from the floor on which we stood, and
that to pass from it to the garden-story or to come up to my lodging I
should have in effect to cross the great hall. This was an immense
point gained; I foresaw that it would constitute my whole leverage in
my relations with the two ladies. When I asked Miss Tita how I was to
manage at present to find my way up she replied with an access of that
sociable shyness which constantly marked her manner.

"Perhaps you can't. I don't see--unless I should go with you." She
evidently had not thought of this before.

We ascended to the upper floor and visited a long succession of empty
rooms. The best of them looked over the garden; some of the others had a
view of the blue lagoon, above the opposite rough-tiled housetops. They
were all dusty and even a little disfigured with long neglect, but I saw
that by spending a few hundred francs I should be able to convert three
or four of them into a convenient habitation. My experiment was turning
out costly, yet now that I had all but taken possession I ceased to
allow this to trouble me. I mentioned to my companion a few of the
things that I should put in, but she replied rather more precipitately
than usual that I might do exactly what I liked; she seemed to wish to
notify me that the Misses Bordereau would take no overt interest in my
proceedings. I guessed that her aunt had instructed her to adopt this
tone, and I may as well say now that I came afterward to distinguish
perfectly (as I believed) between the speeches she made on her own
responsibility and those the old lady imposed upon her. She took
no notice of the unswept condition of the rooms and indulged in no
explanations nor apologies. I said to myself that this was a sign that
Juliana and her niece (disenchanting idea!) were untidy persons, with a
low Italian standard; but I afterward recognized that a lodger who had
forced an entrance had no locus standi as a critic. We looked out of a
good many windows, for there was nothing within the rooms to look at,
and still I wanted to linger. I asked her what several different objects
in the prospect might be, but in no case did she appear to know. She was
evidently not familiar with the view--it was as if she had not looked
at it for years--and I presently saw that she was too preoccupied with
something else to pretend to care for it. Suddenly she said--the remark
was not suggested:

"I don't know whether it will make any difference to you, but the money
is for me."

"The money?"

"The money you are going to bring."

"Why, you'll make me wish to stay here two or three years." I spoke as
benevolently as possible, though it had begun to act on my nerves that
with these women so associated with Aspern the pecuniary question should
constantly come back.

"That would be very good for me," she replied, smiling.

"You put me on my honor!"

She looked as if she failed to understand this, but went on: "She wants
me to have more. She thinks she is going to die."

"Ah, not soon, I hope!" I exclaimed with genuine feeling. I had
perfectly considered the possibility that she would destroy her papers
on the day she should feel her end really approach. I believed that she
would cling to them till then, and I think I had an idea that she
read Aspern's letters over every night or at least pressed them to her
withered lips. I would have given a good deal to have a glimpse of the
latter spectacle. I asked Miss Tita if the old lady were seriously ill,
and she replied that she was only very tired--she had lived so very,
very long. That was what she said herself--she wanted to die for a
change. Besides, all her friends were dead long ago; either they ought
to have remained or she ought to have gone. That was another thing her
aunt often said--she was not at all content.

"But people don't die when they like, do they?" Miss Tita inquired. I
took the liberty of asking why, if there was actually enough money to
maintain both of them, there would not be more than enough in case of
her being left alone. She considered this difficult problem a moment
and then she said, "Oh, well, you know, she takes care of me. She thinks
that when I'm alone I shall be a great fool, I shall not know how to
manage."

"I should have supposed that you took care of her. I'm afraid she is
very proud."

"Why, have you discovered that already?" Miss Tita cried with the
glimmer of an illumination in her face.

"I was shut up with her there for a considerable time, and she struck
me, she interested me extremely. It didn't take me long to make my
discovery. She won't have much to say to me while I'm here."

"No, I don't think she will," my companion averred.

"Do you suppose she has some suspicion of me?"

Miss Tita's honest eyes gave me no sign that I had touched a mark. "I
shouldn't think so--letting you in after all so easily."

"Oh, so easily! she has covered her risk. But where is it that one could
take an advantage of her?"

"I oughtn't to tell you if I knew, ought I?" And Miss Tita added, before
I had time to reply to this, smiling dolefully, "Do you think we have
any weak points?"

"That's exactly what I'm asking. You would only have to mention them for
me to respect them religiously."

She looked at me, at this, with that air of timid but candid and even
gratified curiosity with which she had confronted me from the first; and
then she said, "There is nothing to tell. We are terribly quiet. I don't
know how the days pass. We have no life."

"I wish I might think that I should bring you a little."

"Oh, we know what we want," she went on. "It's all right."

There were various things I desired to ask her: how in the world they
did live; whether they had any friends or visitors, any relations in
America or in other countries. But I judged such an inquiry would
be premature; I must leave it to a later chance. "Well, don't YOU be
proud," I contented myself with saying. "Don't hide from me altogether."

"Oh, I must stay with my aunt," she returned, without looking at me.
And at the same moment, abruptly, without any ceremony of parting, she
quitted me and disappeared, leaving me to make my own way downstairs. I
remained a while longer, wandering about the bright desert (the sun was
pouring in) of the old house, thinking the situation over on the
spot. Not even the pattering little serva came to look after me, and I
reflected that after all this treatment showed confidence.




IV


Perhaps it did, but all the same, six weeks later, toward the middle of
June, the moment when Mrs. Prest undertook her annual migration, I had
made no measurable advance. I was obliged to confess to her that I had
no results to speak of. My first step had been unexpectedly rapid, but
there was no appearance that it would be followed by a second. I was
a thousand miles from taking tea with my hostesses--that privilege
of which, as I reminded Mrs. Prest, we both had had a vision. She
reproached me with wanting boldness, and I answered that even to be bold
you must have an opportunity: you may push on through a breach but
you can't batter down a dead wall. She answered that the breach I had
already made was big enough to admit an army and accused me of wasting
precious hours in whimpering in her salon when I ought to have been
carrying on the struggle in the field. It is true that I went to see her
very often, on the theory that it would console me (I freely expressed
my discouragement) for my want of success on my own premises. But I
began to perceive that it did not console me to be perpetually chaffed
for my scruples, especially when I was really so vigilant; and I was
rather glad when my derisive friend closed her house for the summer. She
had expected to gather amusement from the drama of my intercourse with
the Misses Bordereau, and she was disappointed that the intercourse, and
consequently the drama, had not come off. "They'll lead you on to your
ruin," she said before she left Venice. "They'll get all your money
without showing you a scrap." I think I settled down to my business with
more concentration after she had gone away.

It was a fact that up to that time I had not, save on a single brief
occasion, had even a moment's contact with my queer hostesses. The
exception had occurred when I carried them according to my promise the
terrible three thousand francs. Then I found Miss Tita waiting for me in
the hall, and she took the money from my hand so that I did not see
her aunt. The old lady had promised to receive me, but she apparently
thought nothing of breaking that vow. The money was contained in a bag
of chamois leather, of respectable dimensions, which my banker had given
me, and Miss Tita had to make a big fist to receive it. This she did
with extreme solemnity, though I tried to treat the affair a little as a
joke. It was in no jocular strain, yet it was with simplicity, that she
inquired, weighing the money in her two palms: "Don't you think it's
too much?" To which I replied that that would depend upon the amount of
pleasure I should get for it. Hereupon she turned away from me quickly,
as she had done the day before, murmuring in a tone different from any
she had used hitherto: "Oh, pleasure, pleasure--there's no pleasure in
this house!"

After this, for a long time, I never saw her, and I wondered that the
common chances of the day should not have helped us to meet. It could
only be evident that she was immensely on her guard against them; and in
addition to this the house was so big that for each other we were lost
in it. I used to look out for her hopefully as I crossed the sala in my
comings and goings, but I was not rewarded with a glimpse of the tail of
her dress. It was as if she never peeped out of her aunt's apartment. I
used to wonder what she did there week after week and year after year.
I had never encountered such a violent parti pris of seclusion; it was
more than keeping quiet--it was like hunted creatures feigning death.
The two ladies appeared to have no visitors whatever and no sort of
contact with the world. I judged at least that people could not have
come to the house and that Miss Tita could not have gone out without my
having some observation of it. I did what I disliked myself for doing
(reflecting that it was only once in a way): I questioned my servant
about their habits and let him divine that I should be interested in any
information he could pick up. But he picked up amazingly little for a
knowing Venetian: it must be added that where there is a perpetual fast
there are very few crumbs on the floor. His cleverness in other ways was
sufficient, if it was not quite all that I had attributed to him on
the occasion of my first interview with Miss Tita. He had helped my
gondolier to bring me round a boatload of furniture; and when these
articles had been carried to the top of the palace and distributed
according to our associated wisdom he organized my household with
such promptitude as was consistent with the fact that it was composed
exclusively of himself. He made me in short as comfortable as I could be
with my indifferent prospects. I should have been glad if he had fallen
in love with Miss Bordereau's maid or, failing this, had taken her
in aversion; either event might have brought about some kind of
catastrophe, and a catastrophe might have led to some parley. It was
my idea that she would have been sociable, and I myself on various
occasions saw her flit to and fro on domestic errands, so that I was
sure she was accessible. But I tasted of no gossip from that fountain,
and I afterward learned that Pasquale's affections were fixed upon an
object that made him heedless of other women. This was a young lady with
a powdered face, a yellow cotton gown, and much leisure, who used often
to come to see him. She practiced, at her convenience, the art of a
stringer of beads (these ornaments are made in Venice, in profusion; she
had her pocket full of them, and I used to find them on the floor of my
apartment), and kept an eye on the maiden in the house. It was not for
me of course to make the domestics tattle, and I never said a word to
Miss Bordereau's cook.

It seemed to me a proof of the old lady's determination to have nothing
to do with me that she should never have sent me a receipt for my three
months' rent. For some days I looked out for it and then, when I had
given it up, I wasted a good deal of time in wondering what her reason
had been for neglecting so indispensable and familiar a form. At first I
was tempted to send her a reminder, after which I relinquished the idea
(against my judgment as to what was right in the particular case), on
the general ground of wishing to keep quiet. If Miss Bordereau
suspected me of ulterior aims she would suspect me less if I should
be businesslike, and yet I consented not to be so. It was possible she
intended her omission as an impertinence, a visible irony, to show
how she could overreach people who attempted to overreach her. On that
hypothesis it was well to let her see that one did not notice her little
tricks. The real reading of the matter, I afterward perceived, was
simply the poor old woman's desire to emphasize the fact that I was in
the enjoyment of a favor as rigidly limited as it had been liberally
bestowed. She had given me part of her house, and now she would not give
me even a morsel of paper with her name on it. Let me say that even
at first this did not make me too miserable, for the whole episode was
essentially delightful to me. I foresaw that I should have a summer
after my own literary heart, and the sense of holding my opportunity
was much greater than the sense of losing it. There could be no Venetian
business without patience, and since I adored the place I was much more
in the spirit of it for having laid in a large provision. That spirit
kept me perpetual company and seemed to look out at me from the revived
immortal face--in which all his genius shone--of the great poet who was
my prompter. I had invoked him and he had come; he hovered before me
half the time; it was as if his bright ghost had returned to earth to
tell me that he regarded the affair as his own no less than mine and
that we should see it fraternally, cheerfully to a conclusion. It was
as if he had said, "Poor dear, be easy with her; she has some natural
prejudices; only give her time. Strange as it may appear to you she was
very attractive in 1820. Meanwhile are we not in Venice together, and
what better place is there for the meeting of dear friends? See how it
glows with the advancing summer; how the sky and the sea and the rosy
air and the marble of the palaces all shimmer and melt together." My
eccentric private errand became a part of the general romance and the
general glory--I felt even a mystic companionship, a moral fraternity
with all those who in the past had been in the service of art. They
had worked for beauty, for a devotion; and what else was I doing? That
element was in everything that Jeffrey Aspern had written, and I was
only bringing it to the light.

I lingered in the sala when I went to and fro; I used to watch--as long
as I thought decent--the door that led to Miss Bordereau's part of the
house. A person observing me might have supposed I was trying to cast a
spell upon it or attempting some odd experiment in hypnotism. But I was
only praying it would open or thinking what treasure probably lurked
behind it. I hold it singular, as I look back, that I should never
have doubted for a moment that the sacred relics were there; never have
failed to feel a certain joy at being under the same roof with them.
After all they were under my hand--they had not escaped me yet; and they
made my life continuous, in a fashion, with the illustrious life they
had touched at the other end. I lost myself in this satisfaction to the
point of assuming--in my quiet extravagance--that poor Miss Tita also
went back, went back, as I used to phrase it. She did indeed, the gentle
spinster, but not quite so far as Jeffrey Aspern, who was simply
hearsay to her, quite as he was to me. Only she had lived for years with
Juliana, she had seen and handled the papers and (even though she was
stupid) some esoteric knowledge had rubbed off on her. That was what the
old woman represented--esoteric knowledge; and this was the idea with
which my editorial heart used to thrill. It literally beat faster often,
of an evening, when I had been out, as I stopped with my candle in the
re-echoing hall on my way up to bed. It was as if at such a moment as
that, in the stillness, after the long contradiction of the day, Miss
Bordereau's secrets were in the air, the wonder of her survival more
palpable. These were the acute impressions. I had them in another form,
with more of a certain sort of reciprocity, during the hours that I sat
in the garden looking up over the top of my book at the closed windows
of my hostess. In these windows no sign of life ever appeared; it was
as if, for fear of my catching a glimpse of them, the two ladies
passed their days in the dark. But this only proved to me that they had
something to conceal; which was what I had wished to demonstrate. Their
motionless shutters became as expressive as eyes consciously closed,
and I took comfort in thinking that at all events through invisible
themselves they saw me between the lashes.

I made a point of spending as much time as possible in the garden, to
justify the picture I had originally given of my horticultural passion.
And I not only spent time, but (hang it! as I said) I spent money. As
soon as I had got my rooms arranged and could give the proper thought to
the matter I surveyed the place with a clever expert and made terms for
having it put in order. I was sorry to do this, for personally I liked
it better as it was, with its weeds and its wild, rough tangle, its
sweet, characteristic Venetian shabbiness. I had to be consistent, to
keep my promise that I would smother the house in flowers. Moreover
I formed this graceful project that by flowers I would make my way--I
would succeed by big nosegays. I would batter the old women with
lilies--I would bombard their citadel with roses. Their door would have
to yield to the pressure when a mountain of carnations should be piled
up against it. The place in truth had been brutally neglected. The
Venetian capacity for dawdling is of the largest, and for a good
many days unlimited litter was all my gardener had to show for his
ministrations. There was a great digging of holes and carting about
of earth, and after a while I grew so impatient that I had thoughts of
sending for my bouquets to the nearest stand. But I reflected that the
ladies would see through the chinks of their shutters that they must
have been bought and might make up their minds from this that I was a
humbug. So I composed myself and finally, though the delay was long,
perceived some appearances of bloom. This encouraged me, and I waited
serenely enough till they multiplied. Meanwhile the real summer days
arrived and began to pass, and as I look back upon them they seem to me
almost the happiest of my life. I took more and more care to be in the
garden whenever it was not too hot. I had an arbor arranged and a
low table and an armchair put into it; and I carried out books and
portfolios (I had always some business of writing in hand), and worked
and waited and mused and hoped, while the golden hours elapsed and the
plants drank in the light and the inscrutable old palace turned pale and
then, as the day waned, began to flush in it and my papers rustled in
the wandering breeze of the Adriatic.

Considering how little satisfaction I got from it at first it is
remarkable that I should not have grown more tired of wondering what
mystic rites of ennui the Misses Bordereau celebrated in their darkened
rooms; whether this had always been the tenor of their life and how in
previous years they had escaped elbowing their neighbors. It was clear
that they must have had other habits and other circumstances; that they
must once have been young or at least middle-aged. There was no end
to the questions it was possible to ask about them and no end to
the answers it was not possible to frame. I had known many of my
country-people in Europe and was familiar with the strange ways they
were liable to take up there; but the Misses Bordereau formed altogether
a new type of the American absentee. Indeed it was plain that the
American name had ceased to have any application to them--I had seen
this in the ten minutes I spent in the old woman's room. You could
never have said whence they came, from the appearance of either of them;
wherever it was they had long ago dropped the local accent and fashion.
There was nothing in them that one recognized, and putting the question
of speech aside they might have been Norwegians or Spaniards. Miss
Bordereau, after all, had been in Europe nearly three-quarters of a
century; it appeared by some verses addressed to her by Aspern on the
occasion of his own second absence from America--verses of which Cumnor
and I had after infinite conjecture established solidly enough the
date--that she was even then, as a girl of twenty, on the foreign side
of the sea. There was an implication in the poem (I hope not just for
the phrase) that he had come back for her sake. We had no real light
upon her circumstances at that moment, any more than we had upon her
origin, which we believed to be of the sort usually spoken of as modest.
Cumnor had a theory that she had been a governess in some family in
which the poet visited and that, in consequence of her position, there
was from the first something unavowed, or rather something positively
clandestine, in their relations. I on the other hand had hatched a
little romance according to which she was the daughter of an artist, a
painter or a sculptor, who had left the western world when the century
was fresh, to study in the ancient schools. It was essential to my
hypothesis that this amiable man should have lost his wife, should have
been poor and unsuccessful and should have had a second daughter, of a
disposition quite different from Juliana's. It was also indispensable
that he should have been accompanied to Europe by these young ladies and
should have established himself there for the remainder of a struggling,
saddened life. There was a further implication that Miss Bordereau
had had in her youth a perverse and adventurous, albeit a generous and
fascinating character, and that she had passed through some singular
vicissitudes. By what passions had she been ravaged, by what sufferings
had she been blanched, what store of memories had she laid away for the
monotonous future?

I asked myself these things as I sat spinning theories about her in my
arbor and the bees droned in the flowers. It was incontestable that,
whether for right or for wrong, most readers of certain of Aspern's
poems (poems not as ambiguous as the sonnets--scarcely more divine, I
think--of Shakespeare) had taken for granted that Juliana had not always
adhered to the steep footway of renunciation. There hovered about her
name a perfume of reckless passion, an intimation that she had not been
exactly as the respectable young person in general. Was this a sign that
her singer had betrayed her, had given her away, as we say nowadays, to
posterity? Certain it is that it would have been difficult to put one's
finger on the passage in which her fair fame suffered an imputation.
Moreover was not any fame fair enough that was so sure of duration and
was associated with works immortal through their beauty? It was a
part of my idea that the young lady had had a foreign lover (and an
unedifying tragical rupture) before her meeting with Jeffrey Aspern.
She had lived with her father and sister in a queer old-fashioned,
expatriated, artistic Bohemia, in the days when the aesthetic was only
the academic and the painters who knew the best models for a contadina
and pifferaro wore peaked hats and long hair. It was a society less
furnished than the coteries of today (in its ignorance of the wonderful
chances, the opportunities of the early bird, with which its path was
strewn), with tatters of old stuff and fragments of old crockery; so
that Miss Bordereau appeared not to have picked up or have inherited
many objects of importance. There was no enviable bric-a-brac, with its
provoking legend of cheapness, in the room in which I had seen her. Such
a fact as that suggested bareness, but nonetheless it worked happily
into the sentimental interest I had always taken in the early movements
of my countrymen as visitors to Europe. When Americans went abroad in
1820 there was something romantic, almost heroic in it, as compared with
the perpetual ferryings of the present hour, when photography and other
conveniences have annihilated surprise. Miss Bordereau sailed with
her family on a tossing brig, in the days of long voyages and sharp
differences; she had her emotions on the top of yellow diligences,
passed the night at inns where she dreamed of travelers' tales, and was
struck, on reaching the Eternal City, with the elegance of Roman pearls
and scarfs. There was something touching to me in all that, and my
imagination frequently went back to the period. If Miss Bordereau
carried it there of course Jeffrey Aspern at other times had done so a
great deal more. It was a much more important fact, if one were looking
at his genius critically, that he had lived in the days before the
general transfusion. It had happened to me to regret that he had known
Europe at all; I should have liked to see what he would have written
without that experience, by which he had incontestably been enriched.
But as his fate had ordered otherwise I went with him--I tried to judge
how the Old World would have struck him. It was not only there, however,
that I watched him; the relations he had entertained with the new had
even a livelier interest. His own country after all had had most of his
life, and his muse, as they said at that time, was essentially American.
That was originally what I had loved him for: that at a period when
our native land was nude and crude and provincial, when the famous
"atmosphere" it is supposed to lack was not even missed, when literature
was lonely there and art and form almost impossible, he had found means
to live and write like one of the first; to be free and general and not
at all afraid; to feel, understand, and express everything.




V


I was seldom at home in the evening, for when I attempted to occupy
myself in my apartments the lamplight brought in a swarm of noxious
insects, and it was too hot for closed windows. Accordingly I spent the
late hours either on the water (the moonlight of Venice is famous), or
in the splendid square which serves as a vast forecourt to the strange
old basilica of Saint Mark. I sat in front of Florian's cafe, eating
ices, listening to music, talking with acquaintances: the traveler will
remember how the immense cluster of tables and little chairs stretches
like a promontory into the smooth lake of the Piazza. The whole place,
of a summer's evening, under the stars and with all the lamps, all the
voices and light footsteps on marble (the only sounds of the arcades
that enclose it), is like an open-air saloon dedicated to cooling drinks
and to a still finer degustation--that of the exquisite impressions
received during the day. When I did not prefer to keep mine to myself
there was always a stray tourist, disencumbered of his Baedeker, to
discuss them with, or some domesticated painter rejoicing in the return
of the season of strong effects. The wonderful church, with its
low domes and bristling embroideries, the mystery of its mosaic and
sculpture, looking ghostly in the tempered gloom, and the sea breeze
passed between the twin columns of the Piazzetta, the lintels of a door
no longer guarded, as gently as if a rich curtain were swaying there. I
used sometimes on these occasions to think of the Misses Bordereau and
of the pity of their being shut up in apartments which in the Venetian
July even Venetian vastness did not prevent from being stuffy. Their
life seemed miles away from the life of the Piazza, and no doubt it was
really too late to make the austere Juliana change her habits. But
poor Miss Tita would have enjoyed one of Florian's ices, I was sure;
sometimes I even had thoughts of carrying one home to her. Fortunately
my patience bore fruit, and I was not obliged to do anything so
ridiculous.

One evening about the middle of July I came in earlier than usual--I
forget what chance had led to this--and instead of going up to my
quarters made my way into the garden. The temperature was very high; it
was such a night as one would gladly have spent in the open air, and
I was in no hurry to go to bed. I had floated home in my gondola,
listening to the slow splash of the oar in the narrow dark canals, and
now the only thought that solicited me was the vague reflection that it
would be pleasant to recline at one's length in the fragrant darkness
on a garden bench. The odor of the canal was doubtless at the bottom
of that aspiration and the breath of the garden, as I entered it, gave
consistency to my purpose. It was delicious--just such an air as must
have trembled with Romeo's vows when he stood among the flowers and
raised his arms to his mistress's balcony. I looked at the windows of
the palace to see if by chance the example of Verona (Verona being
not far off) had been followed; but everything was dim, as usual, and
everything was still. Juliana, on summer nights in her youth, might have
murmured down from open windows at Jeffrey Aspern, but Miss Tita was
not a poet's mistress any more than I was a poet. This however did not
prevent my gratification from being great as I became aware on reaching
the end of the garden that Miss Tita was seated in my little bower. At
first I only made out an indistinct figure, not in the least counting on
such an overture from one of my hostesses; it even occurred to me that
some sentimental maidservant had stolen in to keep a tryst with her
sweetheart. I was going to turn away, not to frighten her, when the
figure rose to its height and I recognized Miss Bordereau's niece. I
must do myself the justice to say that I did not wish to frighten her
either, and much as I had longed for some such accident I should have
been capable of retreating. It was as if I had laid a trap for her
by coming home earlier than usual and adding to that eccentricity
by creeping into the garden. As she rose she spoke to me, and then I
reflected that perhaps, secure in my almost inveterate absence, it was
her nightly practice to take a lonely airing. There was no trap, in
truth, because I had had no suspicion. At first I took for granted that
the words she uttered expressed discomfiture at my arrival; but as she
repeated them--I had not caught them clearly--I had the surprise of
hearing her say, "Oh, dear, I'm so very glad you've come!" She and her
aunt had in common the property of unexpected speeches. She came out of
the arbor almost as if she were going to throw herself into my arms.

I hasten to add that she did nothing of the kind; she did not even shake
hands with me. It was a gratification to her to see me and presently she
told me why--because she was nervous when she was out-of-doors at night
alone. The plants and bushes looked so strange in the dark, and there
were all sorts of queer sounds--she could not tell what they were--like
the noises of animals. She stood close to me, looking about her with an
air of greater security but without any demonstration of interest in me
as an individual. Then I guessed that nocturnal prowlings were not in
the least her habit, and I was also reminded (I had been struck with the
circumstance in talking with her before I took possession) that it was
impossible to overestimate her simplicity.

"You speak as if you were lost in the backwoods," I said, laughing. "How
you manage to keep out of this charming place when you have only three
steps to take to get into it is more than I have yet been able to
discover. You hide away mighty well so long as I am on the premises, I
know; but I had a hope that you peeped out a little at other times. You
and your poor aunt are worse off than Carmelite nuns in their cells.
Should you mind telling me how you exist without air, without exercise,
without any sort of human contact? I don't see how you carry on the
common business of life."

She looked at me as if I were talking some strange tongue, and her
answer was so little of an answer that I was considerably irritated.
"We go to bed very early--earlier than you would believe." I was on the
point of saying that this only deepened the mystery when she gave me
some relief by adding, "Before you came we were not so private. But I
never have been out at night."

"Never in these fragrant alleys, blooming here under your nose?"

"Ah," said Miss Tita, "they were never nice till now!" There was an
unmistakable reference in this and a flattering comparison, so that
it seemed to me I had gained a small advantage. As it would help me to
follow it up to establish a sort of grievance I asked her why, since
she thought my garden nice, she had never thanked me in any way for the
flowers I had been sending up in such quantities for the previous three
weeks. I had not been discouraged--there had been, as she would have
observed, a daily armful; but I had been brought up in the common forms
and a word of recognition now and then would have touched me in the
right place.

"Why I didn't know they were for me!"

"They were for both of you. Why should I make a difference?"

Miss Tita reflected as if she might by thinking of a reason for that,
but she failed to produce one. Instead of this she asked abruptly, "Why
in the world do you want to know us?"

"I ought after all to make a difference," I replied. "That question is
your aunt's; it isn't yours. You wouldn't ask it if you hadn't been put
up to it."

"She didn't tell me to ask you," Miss Tita replied without confusion;
she was the oddest mixture of the shrinking and the direct.

"Well, she has often wondered about it herself and expressed her wonder
to you. She has insisted on it, so that she has put the idea into your
head that I am insufferably pushing. Upon my word I think I have
been very discreet. And how completely your aunt must have lost every
tradition of sociability, to see anything out of the way in the idea
that respectable intelligent people, living as we do under the same
roof, should occasionally exchange a remark! What could be more natural?
We are of the same country, and we have at least some of the same
tastes, since, like you, I am intensely fond of Venice."

My interlocutress appeared incapable of grasping more than one clause
in any proposition, and she declared quickly, eagerly, as if she were
answering my whole speech: "I am not in the least fond of Venice. I
should like to go far away!"

"Has she always kept you back so?" I went on, to show her that I could
be as irrelevant as herself.

"She told me to come out tonight; she has told me very often," said Miss
Tita. "It is I who wouldn't come. I don't like to leave her."

"Is she too weak, is she failing?" I demanded, with more emotion, I
think, than I intended to show. I judged this by the way her eyes rested
upon me in the darkness. It embarrassed me a little, and to turn
the matter off I continued genially: "Do let us sit down together
comfortably somewhere, and you will tell me all about her."

Miss Tita made no resistance to this. We found a bench less secluded,
less confidential, as it were, than the one in the arbor; and we were
still sitting there when I heard midnight ring out from those clear
bells of Venice which vibrate with a solemnity of their own over the
lagoon and hold the air so much more than the chimes of other places.
We were together more than an hour, and our interview gave, as it struck
me, a great lift to my undertaking. Miss Tita accepted the situation
without a protest; she had avoided me for three months, yet now she
treated me almost as if these three months had made me an old friend. If
I had chosen I might have inferred from this that though she had avoided
me she had given a good deal of consideration to doing so. She paid no
attention to the flight of time--never worried at my keeping her so long
away from her aunt. She talked freely, answering questions and asking
them and not even taking advantage of certain longish pauses with which
they inevitably alternated to say she thought she had better go in. It
was almost as if she were waiting for something--something I might say
to her--and intended to give me my opportunity. I was the more struck
by this as she told me that her aunt had been less well for a good many
days and in a way that was rather new. She was weaker; at moments it
seemed as if she had no strength at all; yet more than ever before she
wished to be left alone. That was why she had told her to come out--not
even to remain in her own room, which was alongside; she said her niece
irritated her, made her nervous. She sat still for hours together, as
if she were asleep; she had always done that, musing and dozing; but at
such times formerly she gave at intervals some small sign of life, of
interest, liking her companion to be near her with her work. Miss Tita
confided to me that at present her aunt was so motionless that she
sometimes feared she was dead; moreover she took hardly any food--one
couldn't see what she lived on. The great thing was that she still on
most days got up; the serious job was to dress her, to wheel her out of
her bedroom. She clung to as many of her old habits as possible and she
had always, little company as they had received for years, made a point
of sitting in the parlor.

I scarcely knew what to think of all this--of Miss Tita's sudden
conversion to sociability and of the strange circumstance that the more
the old lady appeared to decline toward her end the less she should
desire to be looked after. The story did not hang together, and I even
asked myself whether it were not a trap laid for me, the result of a
design to make me show my hand. I could not have told why my companions
(as they could only by courtesy be called) should have this purpose--why
they should try to trip up so lucrative a lodger. At any rate I kept on
my guard, so that Miss Tita should not have occasion again to ask me if
I had an arriere-pensee. Poor woman, before we parted for the night my
mind was at rest as to HER capacity for entertaining one.

She told me more about their affairs than I had hoped; there was no
need to be prying, for it evidently drew her out simply to feel that I
listened, that I cared. She ceased wondering why I cared, and at last,
as she spoke of the brilliant life they had led years before, she almost
chattered. It was Miss Tita who judged it brilliant; she said that when
they first came to live in Venice, years and years before (I saw that
her mind was essentially vague about dates and the order in which events
had occurred), there was scarcely a week that they had not some visitor
or did not make some delightful passeggio in the city. They had seen all
the curiosities; they had even been to the Lido in a boat (she spoke
as if I might think there was a way on foot); they had had a collation
there, brought in three baskets and spread out on the grass. I asked
her what people they had known and she said, Oh! very nice ones--the
Cavaliere Bombicci and the Contessa Altemura, with whom they had had a
great friendship. Also English people--the Churtons and the Goldies and
Mrs. Stock-Stock, whom they had loved dearly; she was dead and gone,
poor dear. That was the case with most of their pleasant circle (this
expression was Miss Tita's own), though a few were left, which was a
wonder considering how they had neglected them. She mentioned the names
of two or three Venetian old women; of a certain doctor, very clever,
who was so kind--he came as a friend, he had really given up practice;
of the avvocato Pochintesta, who wrote beautiful poems and had addressed
one to her aunt. These people came to see them without fail every year,
usually at the capo d'anno, and of old her aunt used to make them some
little present--her aunt and she together: small things that she, Miss
Tita, made herself, like paper lampshades or mats for the decanters of
wine at dinner or those woolen things that in cold weather were worn
on the wrists. The last few years there had not been many presents; she
could not think what to make, and her aunt had lost her interest and
never suggested. But the people came all the same; if the Venetians
liked you once they liked you forever.

There was something affecting in the good faith of this sketch of former
social glories; the picnic at the Lido had remained vivid through the
ages, and poor Miss Tita evidently was of the impression that she had
had a brilliant youth. She had in fact had a glimpse of the Venetian
world in its gossiping, home-keeping, parsimonious, professional walks;
for I observed for the first time that she had acquired by contact
something of the trick of the familiar, soft-sounding, almost infantile
speech of the place. I judged that she had imbibed this invertebrate
dialect from the natural way the names of things and people--mostly
purely local--rose to her lips. If she knew little of what they
represented she knew still less of anything else. Her aunt had drawn
in--her failing interest in the table mats and lampshades was a sign of
that--and she had not been able to mingle in society or to entertain
it alone; so that the matter of her reminiscences struck one as an old
world altogether. If she had not been so decent her references would
have seemed to carry one back to the queer rococo Venice of Casanova.
I found myself falling into the error of thinking of her too as one of
Jeffrey Aspern's contemporaries; this came from her having so little in
common with my own. It was possible, I said to myself, that she had not
even heard of him; it might very well be that Juliana had not cared to
lift even for her the veil that covered the temple of her youth. In this
case she perhaps would not know of the existence of the papers, and I
welcomed that presumption--it made me feel more safe with her--until
I remembered that we had believed the letter of disavowal received by
Cumnor to be in the handwriting of the niece. If it had been dictated
to her she had of course to know what it was about; yet after all the
effect of it was to repudiate the idea of any connection with the poet.
I held it probable at all events that Miss Tita had not read a word of
his poetry. Moreover if, with her companion, she had always escaped the
interviewer there was little occasion for her having got it into her
head that people were "after" the letters. People had not been after
them, inasmuch as they had not heard of them; and Cumnor's fruitless
feeler would have been a solitary accident.

When midnight sounded Miss Tita got up; but she stopped at the door of
the house only after she had wandered two or three times with me round
the garden. "When shall I see you again?" I asked before she went in; to
which she replied with promptness that she should like to come out the
next night. She added however that she should not come--she was so far
from doing everything she liked.

"You might do a few things that _I_ like," I said with a sigh.

"Oh, you--I don't believe you!" she murmured at this, looking at me with
her simple solemnity.

"Why don't you believe me?"

"Because I don't understand you."

"That is just the sort of occasion to have faith." I could not say more,
though I should have liked to, as I saw that I only mystified her; for
I had no wish to have it on my conscience that I might pass for
having made love to her. Nothing less should I have seemed to do had
I continued to beg a lady to "believe in me" in an Italian garden on
a midsummer night. There was some merit in my scruples, for Miss Tita
lingered and lingered: I perceived that she felt that she should
not really soon come down again and wished therefore to protract the
present. She insisted too on making the talk between us personal to
ourselves; and altogether her behavior was such as would have been
possible only to a completely innocent woman.

"I shall like the flowers better now that I know they are also meant for
me."

"How could you have doubted it? If you will tell me the kind you like
best I will send a double lot of them."

"Oh, I like them all best!" Then she went on, familiarly: "Shall you
study--shall you read and write--when you go up to your rooms?"

"I don't do that at night, at this season. The lamplight brings in the
animals."

"You might have known that when you came."

"I did know it!"

"And in winter do you work at night?"

"I read a good deal, but I don't often write." She listened as if these
details had a rare interest, and suddenly a temptation quite at variance
with the prudence I had been teaching myself associated itself with her
plain, mild face. Ah yes, she was safe and I could make her safer!
It seemed to me from one moment to another that I could not wait
longer--that I really must take a sounding. So I went on: "In general
before I go to sleep--very often in bed (it's a bad habit, but I confess
to it), I read some great poet. In nine cases out of ten it's a volume
of Jeffrey Aspern."

I watched her well as I pronounced that name but I saw nothing
wonderful. Why should I indeed--was not Jeffrey Aspern the property of
the human race?

"Oh, we read him--we HAVE read him," she quietly replied.

"He is my poet of poets--I know him almost by heart."

For an instant Miss Tita hesitated; then her sociability was too much
for her.

"Oh, by heart--that's nothing!" she murmured, smiling. "My aunt used to
know him--to know him"--she paused an instant and I wondered what she
was going to say--"to know him as a visitor."

"As a visitor?" I repeated, staring.

"He used to call on her and take her out."

I continued to stare. "My dear lady, he died a hundred years ago!"

"Well," she said mirthfully, "my aunt is a hundred and fifty."

"Mercy on us!" I exclaimed; "why didn't you tell me before? I should
like so to ask her about him."

"She wouldn't care for that--she wouldn't tell you," Miss Tita replied.

"I don't care what she cares for! She MUST tell me--it's not a chance to
be lost."

"Oh, you should have come twenty years ago: then she still talked about
him."

"And what did she say?" I asked eagerly.

"I don't know--that he liked her immensely."

"And she--didn't she like him?"

"She said he was a god." Miss Tita gave me this information flatly,
without expression; her tone might have made it a piece of trivial
gossip. But it stirred me deeply as she dropped the words into the
summer night; it seemed such a direct testimony.

"Fancy, fancy!" I murmured. And then, "Tell me this, please--has she got
a portrait of him? They are distressingly rare."

"A portrait? I don't know," said Miss Tita; and now there was
discomfiture in her face. "Well, good night!" she added; and she turned
into the house.

I accompanied her into the wide, dusky, stone-paved passage which on the
ground floor corresponded with our grand sala. It opened at one end into
the garden, at the other upon the canal, and was lighted now only by the
small lamp that was always left for me to take up as I went to bed. An
extinguished candle which Miss Tita apparently had brought down with her
stood on the same table with it. "Good night, good night!" I replied,
keeping beside her as she went to get her light. "Surely you would know,
shouldn't you, if she had one?"

"If she had what?" the poor lady asked, looking at me queerly over the
flame of her candle.

"A portrait of the god. I don't know what I wouldn't give to see it."

"I don't know what she has got. She keeps her things locked up." And
Miss Tita went away, toward the staircase, with the sense evidently that
she had said too much.

I let her go--I wished not to frighten her--and I contented myself with
remarking that Miss Bordereau would not have locked up such a glorious
possession as that--a thing a person would be proud of and hang up in a
prominent place on the parlor wall. Therefore of course she had not any
portrait. Miss Tita made no direct answer to this and, candle in hand,
with her back to me, ascended two or three stairs. Then she stopped
short and turned round, looking at me across the dusky space.

"Do you write--do you write?" There was a shake in her voice--she could
scarcely bring out what she wanted to ask.

"Do I write? Oh, don't speak of my writing on the same day with
Aspern's!"

"Do you write about HIM--do you pry into his life?"

"Ah, that's your aunt's question; it can't be yours!" I said, in a tone
of slightly wounded sensibility.

"All the more reason then that you should answer it. Do you, please?"

I thought I had allowed for the falsehoods I should have to tell; but
I found that in fact when it came to the point I had not. Besides, now
that I had an opening there was a kind of relief in being frank. Lastly
(it was perhaps fanciful, even fatuous), I guessed that Miss Tita
personally would not in the last resort be less my friend. So after a
moment's hesitation I answered, "Yes, I have written about him and I am
looking for more material. In heaven's name have you got any?"

"Santo Dio!" she exclaimed, without heeding my question; and she hurried
upstairs and out of sight. I might count upon her in the last resort,
but for the present she was visibly alarmed. The proof of it was that
she began to hide again, so that for a fortnight I never beheld her. I
found my patience ebbing and after four or five days of this I told the
gardener to stop the flowers.




VI


One afternoon, as I came down from my quarters to go out, I found Miss
Tita in the sala: it was our first encounter on that ground since I had
come to the house. She put on no air of being there by accident; there
was an ignorance of such arts in her angular, diffident directness. That
I might be quite sure she was waiting for me she informed me of the fact
and told me that Miss Bordereau wished to see me: she would take me into
the room at that moment if I had time. If I had been late for a love
tryst I would have stayed for this, and I quickly signified that I
should be delighted to wait upon the old lady. "She wants to talk with
you--to know you," Miss Tita said, smiling as if she herself appreciated
that idea; and she led me to the door of her aunt's apartment. I
stopped her a moment before she had opened it, looking at her with some
curiosity. I told her that this was a great satisfaction to me and a
great honor; but all the same I should like to ask what had made
Miss Bordereau change so suddenly. It was only the other day that
she wouldn't suffer me near her. Miss Tita was not embarrassed by my
question; she had as many little unexpected serenities as if she told
fibs, but the odd part of them was that they had on the contrary their
source in her truthfulness. "Oh, my aunt changes," she answered; "it's
so terribly dull--I suppose she's tired."

"But you told me that she wanted more and more to be alone."

Poor Miss Tita colored, as if she found me over-insistent. "Well, if
you don't believe she wants to see you--I haven't invented it! I think
people often are capricious when they are very old."

"That's perfectly true. I only wanted to be clear as to whether you have
repeated to her what I told you the other night."

"What you told me?"

"About Jeffrey Aspern--that I am looking for materials."

"If I had told her do you think she would have sent for you?"

"That's exactly what I want to know. If she wants to keep him to herself
she might have sent for me to tell me so."

"She won't speak of him," said Miss Tita. Then as she opened the door
she added in a lower tone, "I have told her nothing."

The old woman was sitting in the same place in which I had seen her
last, in the same position, with the same mystifying bandage over her
eyes. her welcome was to turn her almost invisible face to me and show
me that while she sat silent she saw me clearly. I made no motion to
shake hands with her; I felt too well on this occasion that that was out
of place forever. It had been sufficiently enjoined upon me that she was
too sacred for that sort of reciprocity--too venerable to touch. There
was something so grim in her aspect (it was partly the accident of her
green shade), as I stood there to be measured, that I ceased on the spot
to feel any doubt as to her knowing my secret, though I did not in the
least suspect that Miss Tita had not just spoken the truth. She had not
betrayed me, but the old woman's brooding instinct had served her;
she had turned me over and over in the long, still hours, and she had
guessed. The worst of it was that she looked terribly like an old woman
who at a pinch would burn her papers. Miss Tita pushed a chair forward,
saying to me, "This will be a good place for you to sit." As I took
possession of it I asked after Miss Bordereau's health; expressed the
hope that in spite of the very hot weather it was satisfactory. She
replied that it was good enough--good enough; that it was a great thing
to be alive.

"Oh, as to that, it depends upon what you compare it with!" I exclaimed,
laughing.

"I don't compare--I don't compare. If I did that I should have given
everything up long ago."

I liked to think that this was a subtle allusion to the rapture she had
known in the society of Jeffrey Aspern--though it was true that such an
allusion would have accorded ill with the wish I imputed to her to keep
him buried in her soul. What it accorded with was my constant conviction
that no human being had ever had a more delightful social gift than his,
and what it seemed to convey was that nothing in the world was worth
speaking of if one pretended to speak of that. But one did not! Miss
Tita sat down beside her aunt, looking as if she had reason to believe
some very remarkable conversation would come off between us.

"It's about the beautiful flowers," said the old lady; "you sent us so
many--I ought to have thanked you for them before. But I don't write
letters and I receive only at long intervals."

She had not thanked me while the flowers continued to come, but she
departed from her custom so far as to send for me as soon as she began
to fear that they would not come any more. I noted this; I remembered
what an acquisitive propensity she had shown when it was a question of
extracting gold from me, and I privately rejoiced at the happy thought I
had had in suspending my tribute. She had missed it and she was willing
to make a concession to bring it back. At the first sign of this
concession I could only go to meet her. "I am afraid you have not
had many, of late, but they shall begin again immediately--tomorrow,
tonight."

"Oh, do send us some tonight!" Miss Tita cried, as if it were an immense
circumstance.

"What else should you do with them? It isn't a manly taste to make a
bower of your room," the old woman remarked.

"I don't make a bower of my room, but I am exceedingly fond of growing
flowers, of watching their ways. There is nothing unmanly in that: it
has been the amusement of philosophers, of statesmen in retirement; even
I think of great captains."

"I suppose you know you can sell them--those you don't use," Miss
Bordereau went on. "I daresay they wouldn't give you much for them;
still, you could make a bargain."

"Oh, I have never made a bargain, as you ought to know. My gardener
disposes of them and I ask no questions."

"I would ask a few, I can promise you!" said Miss Bordereau; and it was
the first time I had heard her laugh. I could not get used to the
idea that this vision of pecuniary profit was what drew out the divine
Juliana most.

"Come into the garden yourself and pick them; come as often as you like;
come every day. They are all for you," I pursued, addressing Miss Tita
and carrying off this veracious statement by treating it as an innocent
joke. "I can't imagine why she doesn't come down," I added, for Miss
Bordereau's benefit.

"You must make her come; you must come up and fetch her," said the old
woman, to my stupefaction. "That odd thing you have made in the corner
would be a capital place for her to sit."

The allusion to my arbor was irreverent; it confirmed the impression I
had already received that there was a flicker of impertinence in Miss
Bordereau's talk, a strange mocking lambency which must have been a part
of her adventurous youth and which had outlived passions and faculties.
Nonetheless I asked, "Wouldn't it be possible for you to come down there
yourself? Wouldn't it do you good to sit there in the shade, in the
sweet air?"

"Oh, sir, when I move out of this it won't be to sit in the air, and
I'm afraid that any that may be stirring around me won't be particularly
sweet! It will be a very dark shade indeed. But that won't be just yet,"
Miss Bordereau continued cannily, as if to correct any hopes that this
courageous allusion to the last receptacle of her mortality might lead
me to entertain. "I have sat here many a day and I have had enough of
arbors in my time. But I'm not afraid to wait till I'm called."

Miss Tita had expected some interesting talk, but perhaps she found it
less genial on her aunt's side (considering that I had been sent
for with a civil intention) than she had hoped. As if to give the
conversation a turn that would put our companion in a light more
favorable she said to me, "Didn't I tell you the other night that she
had sent me out? You see that I can do what I like!"

"Do you pity her--do you teach her to pity herself?" Miss Bordereau
demanded before I had time to answer this appeal. "She has a much easier
life than I had when I was her age."

"You must remember that it has been quite open to me to think you rather
inhuman."

"Inhuman? That's what the poets used to call the women a hundred years
ago. Don't try that; you won't do as well as they!" Juliana declared.
"There is no more poetry in the world--that I know of at least. But
I won't bandy words with you," she pursued, and I well remember the
old-fashioned, artificial sound she gave to the speech. "You have made
me talk, talk! It isn't good for me at all." I got up at this and told
her I would take no more of her time; but she detained me to ask, "Do
you remember, the day I saw you about the rooms, that you offered us the
use of your gondola?" And when I assented, promptly, struck again with
her disposition to make a "good thing" of being there and wondering what
she now had in her eye, she broke out, "Why don't you take that girl out
in it and show her the place?"

"Oh, dear Aunt, what do you want to do with me?" cried the "girl" with a
piteous quaver. "I know all about the place!"

"Well then, go with him as a cicerone!" said Miss Bordereau with an
effort of something like cruelty in her implacable power of retort--an
incongruous suggestion that she was a sarcastic, profane, cynical old
woman. "Haven't we heard that there have been all sorts of changes in
all these years? You ought to see them and at your age (I don't mean
because you're so young) you ought to take the chances that come. You're
old enough, my dear, and this gentleman won't hurt you. He will show you
the famous sunsets, if they still go on--DO they go on? The sun set for
me so long ago. But that's not a reason. Besides, I shall never miss
you; you think you are too important. Take her to the Piazza; it used
to be very pretty," Miss Bordereau continued, addressing herself to me.
"What have they done with the funny old church? I hope it hasn't tumbled
down. Let her look at the shops; she may take some money, she may buy
what she likes."

Poor Miss Tita had got up, discountenanced and helpless, and as we stood
there before her aunt it would certainly have seemed to a spectator of
the scene that the old woman was amusing herself at our expense. Miss
Tita protested, in a confusion of exclamations and murmurs; but I
lost no time in saying that if she would do me the honor to accept the
hospitality of my boat I would engage that she should not be bored.
Or if she did not want so much of my company the boat itself, with the
gondolier, was at her service; he was a capital oar and she might have
every confidence. Miss Tita, without definitely answering this speech,
looked away from me, out of the window, as if she were going to cry; and
I remarked that once we had Miss Bordereau's approval we could easily
come to an understanding. We would take an hour, whichever she liked,
one of the very next days. As I made my obeisance to the old lady I
asked her if she would kindly permit me to see her again.

For a moment she said nothing; then she inquired, "Is it very necessary
to your happiness?"

"It diverts me more than I can say."

"You are wonderfully civil. Don't you know it almost kills ME?"

"How can I believe that when I see you more animated, more brilliant
than when I came in?"

"That is very true, Aunt," said Miss Tita. "I think it does you good."

"Isn't it touching, the solicitude we each have that the other shall
enjoy herself?" sneered Miss Bordereau. "If you think me brilliant
today you don't know what you are talking about; you have never seen an
agreeable woman. Don't try to pay me a compliment; I have been spoiled,"
she went on. "My door is shut, but you may sometimes knock."

With this she dismissed me, and I left the room. The latch closed behind
me, but Miss Tita, contrary to my hope, had remained within. I passed
slowly across the hall and before taking my way downstairs I waited
a little. My hope was answered; after a minute Miss Tita followed me.
"That's a delightful idea about the Piazza," I said. "When will you
go--tonight, tomorrow?"

She had been disconcerted, as I have mentioned, but I had already
perceived and I was to observe again that when Miss Tita was embarrassed
she did not (as most women would have done) turn away from you and try
to escape, but came closer, as it were, with a deprecating, clinging
appeal to be spared, to be protected. Her attitude was perpetually a
sort of prayer for assistance, for explanation; and yet no woman in the
world could have been less of a comedian. From the moment you were kind
to her she depended on you absolutely; her self-consciousness dropped
from her and she took the greatest intimacy, the innocent intimacy which
was the only thing she could conceive, for granted. She told me she did
not know what had got into her aunt; she had changed so quickly, she had
got some idea. I replied that she must find out what the idea was and
then let me know; we would go and have an ice together at Florian's, and
she should tell me while we listened to the band.

"Oh, it will take me a long time to find out!" she said, rather
ruefully; and she could promise me this satisfaction neither for that
night nor for the next. I was patient now, however, for I felt that I
had only to wait; and in fact at the end of the week, one lovely evening
after dinner, she stepped into my gondola, to which in honor of the
occasion I had attached a second oar.

We swept in the course of five minutes into the Grand Canal; whereupon
she uttered a murmur of ecstasy as fresh as if she had been a tourist
just arrived. She had forgotten how splendid the great waterway looked
on a clear, hot summer evening, and how the sense of floating between
marble palaces and reflected lights disposed the mind to sympathetic
talk. We floated long and far, and though Miss Tita gave no high-pitched
voice to her satisfaction I felt that she surrendered herself. She was
more than pleased, she was transported; the whole thing was an immense
liberation. The gondola moved with slow strokes, to give her time to
enjoy it, and she listened to the plash of the oars, which grew louder
and more musically liquid as we passed into narrow canals, as if it were
a revelation of Venice. When I asked her how long it was since she had
been in a boat she answered, "Oh, I don't know; a long time--not since
my aunt began to be ill." This was not the only example she gave me of
her extreme vagueness about the previous years and the line which marked
off the period when Miss Bordereau flourished. I was not at liberty to
keep her out too long, but we took a considerable GIRO before going
to the Piazza. I asked her no questions, keeping the conversation on
purpose away from her domestic situation and the things I wanted to
know; I poured treasures of information about Venice into her ears,
described Florence and Rome, discoursed to her on the charms and
advantages of travel. She reclined, receptive, on the deep leather
cushions, turned her eyes conscientiously to everything I pointed out to
her, and never mentioned to me till sometime afterward that she might
be supposed to know Florence better than I, as she had lived there for
years with Miss Bordereau. At last she asked, with the shy impatience of
a child, "Are we not really going to the Piazza? That's what I want to
see!" I immediately gave the order that we should go straight; and
then we sat silent with the expectation of arrival. As some time still
passed, however, she said suddenly, of her own movement, "I have found
out what is the matter with my aunt: she is afraid you will go!"

"What has put that into her head?"

"She has had an idea you have not been happy. That is why she is
different now."

"You mean she wants to make me happier?"

"Well, she wants you not to go; she wants you to stay."

"I suppose you mean on account of the rent," I remarked candidly.

Miss Tita's candor showed itself a match for my own. "Yes, you know; so
that I shall have more."

"How much does she want you to have?" I asked, laughing. "She ought to
fix the sum, so that I may stay till it's made up."

"Oh, that wouldn't please me," said Miss Tita. "It would be unheard of,
your taking that trouble."

"But suppose I should have my own reasons for staying in Venice?"

"Then it would be better for you to stay in some other house."

"And what would your aunt say to that?"

"She wouldn't like it at all. But I should think you would do well to
give up your reasons and go away altogether."

"Dear Miss Tita," I said, "it's not so easy to give them up!"

She made no immediate answer to this, but after a moment she broke out:
"I think I know what your reasons are!"

"I daresay, because the other night I almost told you how I wish you
would help me to make them good."

"I can't do that without being false to my aunt."

"What do you mean, being false to her?"

"Why, she would never consent to what you want. She has been asked, she
has been written to. It made her fearfully angry."

"Then she HAS got papers of value?" I demanded quickly.

"Oh, she has got everything!" sighed Miss Tita with a curious weariness,
a sudden lapse into gloom.

These words caused all my pulses to throb, for I regarded them as
precious evidence. For some minutes I was too agitated to speak, and
in the interval the gondola approached the Piazzetta. After we had
disembarked I asked my companion whether she would rather walk round the
square or go and sit at the door of the cafe; to which she replied that
she would do whichever I liked best--I must only remember again how
little time she had. I assured her there was plenty to do both, and we
made the circuit of the long arcades. Her spirits revived at the sight
of the bright shop windows, and she lingered and stopped, admiring or
disapproving of their contents, asking me what I thought of things,
theorizing about prices. My attention wandered from her; her words of
a while before, "Oh, she has got everything!" echoed so in my
consciousness. We sat down at last in the crowded circle at Florian's,
finding an unoccupied table among those that were ranged in the square.
It was a splendid night and all the world was out-of-doors; Miss Tita
could not have wished the elements more auspicious for her return to
society. I saw that she enjoyed it even more than she told; she was
agitated with the multitude of her impressions. She had forgotten
what an attractive thing the world is, and it was coming over her that
somehow she had for the best years of her life been cheated of it. This
did not make her angry; but as she looked all over the charming scene
her face had, in spite of its smile of appreciation, the flush of a sort
of wounded surprise. She became silent, as if she were thinking with a
secret sadness of opportunities, forever lost, which ought to have been
easy; and this gave me a chance to say to her, "Did you mean a while ago
that your aunt has a plan of keeping me on by admitting me occasionally
to her presence?"

"She thinks it will make a difference with you if you sometimes see
her. She wants you so much to stay that she is willing to make that
concession."

"And what good does she consider that I think it will do me to see her?"

"I don't know; she thinks it's interesting," said Miss Tita simply. "You
told her you found it so."

"So I did; but everyone doesn't think so."

"No, of course not, or more people would try."

"Well, if she is capable of making that reflection she is capable of
making this further one," I went on: "that I must have a particular
reason for not doing as others do, in spite of the interest she
offers--for not leaving her alone." Miss Tita looked as if she failed to
grasp this rather complicated proposition; so I continued, "If you have
not told her what I said to you the other night may she not at least
have guessed it?"

"I don't know; she is very suspicious."

"But she has not been made so by indiscreet curiosity, by persecution?"

"No, no; it isn't that," said Miss Tita, turning on me a somewhat
troubled face. "I don't know how to say it: it's on account of
something--ages ago, before I was born--in her life."

"Something? What sort of thing?" I asked as if I myself could have no
idea.

"Oh, she has never told me," Miss Tita answered; and I was sure she was
speaking the truth.

Her extreme limpidity was almost provoking, and I felt for the moment
that she would have been more satisfactory if she had been less
ingenuous. "Do you suppose it's something to which Jeffrey Aspern's
letters and papers--I mean the things in her possession--have
reference?"

"I daresay it is!" my companion exclaimed as if this were a very happy
suggestion. "I have never looked at any of those things."

"None of them? Then how do you know what they are?"

"I don't," said Miss Tita placidly. "I have never had them in my hands.
But I have seen them when she has had them out."

"Does she have them out often?"

"Not now, but she used to. She is very fond of them."

"In spite of their being compromising?"

"Compromising?" Miss Tita repeated as if she was ignorant of the meaning
of the word. I felt almost as one who corrupts the innocence of youth.

"I mean their containing painful memories."

"Oh, I don't think they are painful."

"You mean you don't think they affect her reputation?"

At this a singular look came into the face of Miss Bordereau's niece--a
kind of confession of helplessness, an appeal to me to deal fairly,
generously with her. I had brought her to the Piazza, placed her among
charming influences, paid her an attention she appreciated, and now I
seemed to let her perceive that all this had been a bribe--a bribe to
make her turn in some way against her aunt. She was of a yielding nature
and capable of doing almost anything to please a person who was kind to
her; but the greatest kindness of all would be not to presume too much
on this. It was strange enough, as I afterward thought, that she had
not the least air of resenting my want of consideration for her aunt's
character, which would have been in the worst possible taste if anything
less vital (from my point of view) had been at stake. I don't think she
really measured it. "Do you mean that she did something bad?" she asked
in a moment.

"Heaven forbid I should say so, and it's none of my business. Besides,
if she did," I added, laughing, "it was in other ages, in another world.
But why should she not destroy her papers?"

"Oh, she loves them too much."

"Even now, when she may be near her end?"

"Perhaps when she's sure of that she will."

"Well, Miss Tita," I said, "it's just what I should like you to
prevent."

"How can I prevent it?"

"Couldn't you get them away from her?"

"And give them to you?"

This put the case very crudely, though I am sure there was no irony in
her intention. "Oh, I mean that you might let me see them and look them
over. It isn't for myself; there is no personal avidity in my desire.
It is simply that they would be of such immense interest to the public,
such immeasurable importance as a contribution to Jeffrey Aspern's
history."

She listened to me in her usual manner, as if my speech were full of
reference to things she had never heard of, and I felt particularly like
the reporter of a newspaper who forces his way into a house of mourning.
This was especially the case when after a moment she said. "There was
a gentleman who some time ago wrote to her in very much those words. He
also wanted her papers."

"And did she answer him?" I asked, rather ashamed of myself for not
having her rectitude.

"Only when he had written two or three times. He made her very angry."

"And what did she say?"

"She said he was a devil," Miss Tita replied simply.

"She used that expression in her letter?"

"Oh, no; she said it to me. She made me write to him."

"And what did you say?"

"I told him there were no papers at all."

"Ah, poor gentleman!" I exclaimed.

"I knew there were, but I wrote what she bade me."

"Of course you had to do that. But I hope I shall not pass for a devil."

"It will depend upon what you ask me to do for you," said Miss Tita,
smiling.

"Oh, if there is a chance of YOUR thinking so my affair is in a bad way!
I shan't ask you to steal for me, nor even to fib--for you can't fib,
unless on paper. But the principal thing is this--to prevent her from
destroying the papers."

"Why, I have no control of her," said Miss Tita. "It's she who controls
me."

"But she doesn't control her own arms and legs, does she? The way she
would naturally destroy her letters would be to burn them. Now she can't
burn them without fire, and she can't get fire unless you give it to
her."

"I have always done everything she has asked," my companion rejoined.
"Besides, there's Olimpia."

I was on the point of saying that Olimpia was probably corruptible, but
I thought it best not to sound that note. So I simply inquired if that
faithful domestic could not be managed.

"Everyone can be managed by my aunt," said Miss Tita. And then she
observed that her holiday was over; she must go home.

I laid my hand on her arm, across the table, to stay her a moment. "What
I want of you is a general promise to help me."

"Oh, how can I--how can I?" she asked, wondering and troubled. She was
half-surprised, half-frightened at my wishing to make her play an active
part.

"This is the main thing: to watch her carefully and warn me in time,
before she commits that horrible sacrilege."

"I can't watch her when she makes me go out."

"That's very true."

"And when you do, too."

"Mercy on us; do you think she will have done anything tonight?"

"I don't know; she is very cunning."

"Are you trying to frighten me?" I asked.

I felt this inquiry sufficiently answered when my companion murmured in
a musing, almost envious way, "Oh, but she loves them--she loves them!"

This reflection, repeated with such emphasis, gave me great comfort; but
to obtain more of that balm I said, "If she shouldn't intend to destroy
the objects we speak of before her death she will probably have made
some disposition by will."

"By will?"

"Hasn't she made a will for your benefit?"

"Why, she has so little to leave. That's why she likes money," said Miss
Tita.

"Might I ask, since we are really talking things over, what you and she
live on?"

"On some money that comes from America, from a lawyer. He sends it every
quarter. It isn't much!"

"And won't she have disposed of that?"

My companion hesitated--I saw she was blushing. "I believe it's mine,"
she said; and the look and tone which accompanied these words betrayed
so the absence of the habit of thinking of herself that I almost thought
her charming. The next instant she added, "But she had a lawyer once,
ever so long ago. And some people came and signed something."

"They were probably witnesses. And you were not asked to sign? Well
then," I argued rapidly and hopefully, "it is because you are the
legatee; she has left all her documents to you!"

"If she has it's with very strict conditions," Miss Tita responded,
rising quickly, while the movement gave the words a little character
of decision. They seemed to imply that the bequest would be accompanied
with a command that the articles bequeathed should remain concealed from
every inquisitive eye and that I was very much mistaken if I thought she
was the person to depart from an injunction so solemn.

"Oh, of course you will have to abide by the terms," I said; and
she uttered nothing to mitigate the severity of this conclusion.
Nonetheless, later, just before we disembarked at her own door, on
our return, which had taken place almost in silence, she said to
me abruptly, "I will do what I can to help you." I was grateful for
this--it was very well so far as it went; but it did not keep me from
remembering that night in a worried waking hour that I now had her
word for it to reinforce my own impression that the old woman was very
cunning.




VII


The fear of what this side of her character might have led her to do
made me nervous for days afterward. I waited for an intimation from
Miss Tita; I almost figured to myself that it was her duty to keep me
informed, to let me know definitely whether or no Miss Bordereau had
sacrificed her treasures. But as she gave no sign I lost patience and
determined to judge so far as was possible with my own senses. I sent
late one afternoon to ask if I might pay the ladies a visit, and
my servant came back with surprising news. Miss Bordereau could be
approached without the least difficulty; she had been moved out into
the sala and was sitting by the window that overlooked the garden. I
descended and found this picture correct; the old lady had been wheeled
forth into the world and had a certain air, which came mainly perhaps
from some brighter element in her dress, of being prepared again to have
converse with it. It had not yet, however, begun to flock about her;
she was perfectly alone and, though the door leading to her own quarters
stood open, I had at first no glimpse of Miss Tita. The window at which
she sat had the afternoon shade and, one of the shutters having been
pushed back, she could see the pleasant garden, where the summer sun had
by this time dried up too many of the plants--she could see the yellow
light and the long shadows.

"Have you come to tell me that you will take the rooms for six months
more?" she asked as I approached her, startling me by something coarse
in her cupidity almost as much as if she had not already given me a
specimen of it. Juliana's desire to make our acquaintance lucrative had
been, as I have sufficiently indicated, a false note in my image of the
woman who had inspired a great poet with immortal lines; but I may say
here definitely that I recognized after all that it behooved me to make
a large allowance for her. It was I who had kindled the unholy flame; it
was I who had put into her head that she had the means of making
money. She appeared never to have thought of that; she had been living
wastefully for years, in a house five times too big for her, on a
footing that I could explain only by the presumption that, excessive as
it was, the space she enjoyed cost her next to nothing and that small
as were her revenues they left her, for Venice, an appreciable margin. I
had descended on her one day and taught her to calculate, and my
almost extravagant comedy on the subject of the garden had presented me
irresistibly in the light of a victim. Like all persons who achieve the
miracle of changing their point of view when they are old she had been
intensely converted; she had seized my hint with a desperate, tremulous
clutch.

I invited myself to go and get one of the chairs that stood, at a
distance, against the wall (she had given herself no concern as to
whether I should sit or stand); and while I placed it near her I
began, gaily, "Oh, dear madam, what an imagination you have, what an
intellectual sweep! I am a poor devil of a man of letters who lives
from day to day. How can I take palaces by the year? My existence is
precarious. I don't know whether six months hence I shall have bread to
put in my mouth. I have treated myself for once; it has been an immense
luxury. But when it comes to going on--!"

"Are your rooms too dear? If they are you can have more for the same
money," Juliana responded. "We can arrange, we can combinare, as they
say here."

"Well yes, since you ask me, they are too dear," I said. "Evidently you
suppose me richer than I am."

She looked at me in her barricaded way. "If you write books don't you
sell them?"

"Do you mean don't people buy them? A little--not so much as I could
wish. Writing books, unless one be a great genius--and even then!--is
the last road to fortune. I think there is no more money to be made by
literature."

"Perhaps you don't choose good subjects. What do you write about?" Miss
Bordereau inquired.

"About the books of other people. I'm a critic, an historian, in a small
way." I wondered what she was coming to.

"And what other people, now?"

"Oh, better ones than myself: the great writers mainly--the great
philosophers and poets of the past; those who are dead and gone and
can't speak for themselves."

"And what do you say about them?"

"I say they sometimes attached themselves to very clever women!" I
answered, laughing. I spoke with great deliberation, but as my words
fell upon the air they struck me as imprudent. However, I risked them
and I was not sorry, for perhaps after all the old woman would be
willing to treat. It seemed to be tolerably obvious that she knew my
secret: why therefore drag the matter out? But she did not take what I
had said as a confession; she only asked:

"Do you think it's right to rake up the past?"

"I don't know that I know what you mean by raking it up; but how can we
get at it unless we dig a little? The present has such a rough way of
treading it down."

"Oh, I like the past, but I don't like critics," the old woman declared
with her fine tranquility.

"Neither do I, but I like their discoveries."

"Aren't they mostly lies?"

"The lies are what they sometimes discover," I said, smiling at the
quiet impertinence of this. "They often lay bare the truth."

"The truth is God's, it isn't man's; we had better leave it alone. Who
can judge of it--who can say?"

"We are terribly in the dark, I know," I admitted; "but if we give up
trying what becomes of all the fine things? What becomes of the work I
just mentioned, that of the great philosophers and poets? It is all vain
words if there is nothing to measure it by."

"You talk as if you were a tailor," said Miss Bordereau whimsically; and
then she added quickly, in a different manner, "This house is very fine;
the proportions are magnificent. Today I wanted to look at this place
again. I made them bring me out here. When your man came, just now, to
learn if I would see you, I was on the point of sending for you, to
ask if you didn't mean to go on. I wanted to judge what I'm letting you
have. This sala is very grand," she pursued, like an auctioneer, moving
a little, as I guessed, her invisible eyes. "I don't believe you often
have lived in such a house, eh?"

"I can't often afford to!" I said.

"Well then, how much will you give for six months?"

I was on the point of exclaiming--and the air of excruciation in my face
would have denoted a moral face--"Don't, Juliana; for HIS sake, don't!"
But I controlled myself and asked less passionately: "Why should I
remain so long as that?"

"I thought you liked it," said Miss Bordereau with her shriveled
dignity.

"So I thought I should."

For a moment she said nothing more, and I left my own words to suggest
to her what they might. I half-expected her to say, coldly enough, that
if I had been disappointed we need not continue the discussion, and
this in spite of the fact that I believed her now to have in her
mind (however it had come there) what would have told her that my
disappointment was natural. But to my extreme surprise she ended by
observing: "If you don't think we have treated you well enough perhaps
we can discover some way of treating you better." This speech was
somehow so incongruous that it made me laugh again, and I excused myself
by saying that she talked as if I were a sulky boy, pouting in the
corner, to be "brought round." I had not a grain of complaint to
make; and could anything have exceeded Miss Tita's graciousness in
accompanying me a few nights before to the Piazza? At this the old woman
went on: "Well, you brought it on yourself!" And then in a different
tone, "She is a very nice girl." I assented cordially to this
proposition, and she expressed the hope that I did so not merely to be
obliging, but that I really liked her. Meanwhile I wondered still more
what Miss Bordereau was coming to. "Except for me, today," she said,
"she has not a relation in the world." Did she by describing her niece
as amiable and unencumbered wish to represent her as a parti?

It was perfectly true that I could not afford to go on with my rooms at
a fancy price and that I had already devoted to my undertaking almost
all the hard cash I had set apart for it. My patience and my time were
by no means exhausted, but I should be able to draw upon them only on a
more usual Venetian basis. I was willing to pay the venerable woman
with whom my pecuniary dealings were such a discord twice as much as any
other padrona di casa would have asked, but I was not willing to pay her
twenty times as much. I told her so plainly, and my plainness appeared
to have some success, for she exclaimed, "Very good; you have done what
I asked--you have made an offer!"

"Yes, but not for half a year. Only by the month."

"Oh, I must think of that then." She seemed disappointed that I would
not tie myself to a period, and I guessed that she wished both to secure
me and to discourage me; to say severely, "Do you dream that you can get
off with less than six months? Do you dream that even by the end of that
time you will be appreciably nearer your victory?" What was more in my
mind was that she had a fancy to play me the trick of making me engage
myself when in fact she had annihilated the papers. There was a moment
when my suspense on this point was so acute that I all but broke out
with the question, and what kept it back was but a kind of instinctive
recoil (lest it should be a mistake), from the last violence of
self-exposure. She was such a subtle old witch that one could never
tell where one stood with her. You may imagine whether it cleared up the
puzzle when, just after she had said she would think of my proposal
and without any formal transition, she drew out of her pocket with an
embarrassed hand a small object wrapped in crumpled white paper. She
held it there a moment and then she asked, "Do you know much about
curiosities?"

"About curiosities?"

"About antiquities, the old gimcracks that people pay so much for today.
Do you know the kind of price they bring?"

I thought I saw what was coming, but I said ingenuously, "Do you want to
buy something?"

"No, I want to sell. What would an amateur give me for that?" She
unfolded the white paper and made a motion for me to take from her a
small oval portrait. I possessed myself of it with a hand of which I
could only hope that she did not perceive the tremor, and she added, "I
would part with it only for a good price."

At the first glance I recognized Jeffrey Aspern, and I was well aware
that I flushed with the act. As she was watching me however I had the
consistency to exclaim, "What a striking face! Do tell me who it is."

"It's an old friend of mine, a very distinguished man in his day. He
gave it to me himself, but I'm afraid to mention his name, lest you
never should have heard of him, critic and historian as you are. I know
the world goes fast and one generation forgets another. He was all the
fashion when I was young."

She was perhaps amazed at my assurance, but I was surprised at hers; at
her having the energy, in her state of health and at her time of
life, to wish to sport with me that way simply for her private
entertainment--the humor to test me and practice on me. This, at least,
was the interpretation that I put upon her production of the portrait,
for I could not believe that she really desired to sell it or cared
for any information I might give her. What she wished was to dangle it
before my eyes and put a prohibitive price on it. "The face comes back
to me, it torments me," I said, turning the object this way and that and
looking at it very critically. It was a careful but not a supreme work
of art, larger than the ordinary miniature and representing a young man
with a remarkably handsome face, in a high-collared green coat and
a buff waistcoat. I judged the picture to have a valuable quality
of resemblance and to have been painted when the model was about
twenty-five years old. There are, as all the world knows, three other
portraits of the poet in existence, but none of them is of so early a
date as this elegant production. "I have never seen the original but
I have seen other likenesses," I went on. "You expressed doubt of this
generation having heard of the gentleman, but he strikes me for all the
world as a celebrity. Now who is he? I can't put my finger on him--I
can't give him a label. Wasn't he a writer? Surely he's a poet." I was
determined that it should be she, not I, who should first pronounce
Jeffrey Aspern's name.

My resolution was taken in ignorance of Miss Bordereau's extremely
resolute character, and her lips never formed in my hearing the
syllables that meant so much for her. She neglected to answer my
question but raised her hand to take back the picture, with a gesture
which though ineffectual was in a high degree peremptory. "It's only
a person who should know for himself that would give me my price," she
said with a certain dryness.

"Oh, then, you have a price?" I did not restore the precious thing; not
from any vindictive purpose but because I instinctively clung to it. We
looked at each other hard while I retained it.

"I know the least I would take. What it occurred to me to ask you about
is the most I shall be able to get."

She made a movement, drawing herself together as if, in a spasm of
dread at having lost her treasure, she were going to attempt the immense
effort of rising to snatch it from me. I instantly placed it in her hand
again, saying as I did so, "I should like to have it myself, but with
your ideas I could never afford it."

She turned the small oval plate over in her lap, with its face down,
and I thought I saw her catch her breath a little, as if she had had
a strain or an escape. This however did not prevent her saying in a
moment, "You would buy a likeness of a person you don't know, by an
artist who has no reputation?"

"The artist may have no reputation, but that thing is wonderfully well
painted," I replied, to give myself a reason.

"It's lucky you thought of saying that, because the painter was my
father."

"That makes the picture indeed precious!" I exclaimed, laughing; and I
may add that a part of my laughter came from my satisfaction in finding
that I had been right in my theory of Miss Bordereau's origin. Aspern
had of course met the young lady when he went to her father's studio as
a sitter. I observed to Miss Bordereau that if she would entrust me with
her property for twenty-four hours I should be happy to take advice upon
it; but she made no answer to this save to slip it in silence into her
pocket. This convinced me still more that she had no sincere intention
of selling it during her lifetime, though she may have desired to
satisfy herself as to the sum her niece, should she leave it to her,
might expect eventually to obtain for it. "Well, at any rate I hope
you will not offer it without giving me notice," I said as she remained
irresponsive. "Remember that I am a possible purchaser."

"I should want your money first!" she returned with unexpected rudeness;
and then, as if she bethought herself that I had just cause to complain
of such an insinuation and wished to turn the matter off, asked abruptly
what I talked about with her niece when I went out with her that way in
the evening.

"You speak as if we had set up the habit," I replied. "Certainly I
should be very glad if it were to become a habit. But in that case I
should feel a still greater scruple at betraying a lady's confidence."

"Her confidence? Has she got confidence?"

"Here she is--she can tell you herself," I said; for Miss Tita now
appeared on the threshold of the old woman's parlor. "Have you got
confidence, Miss Tita? Your aunt wants very much to know."

"Not in her, not in her!" the younger lady declared, shaking her head
with a dolefulness that was neither jocular not affected. "I don't know
what to do with her; she has fits of horrid imprudence. She is so easily
tired--and yet she has begun to roam--to drag herself about the house."
And she stood looking down at her immemorial companion with a sort of
helpless wonder, as if all their years of familiarity had not made her
perversities, on occasion, any more easy to follow.

"I know what I'm about. I'm not losing my mind. I daresay you would like
to think so," said Miss Bordereau with a cynical little sigh.

"I don't suppose you came out here yourself. Miss Tita must have had to
lend you a hand," I interposed with a pacifying intention.

"Oh, she insisted that we should push her; and when she insists!" said
Miss Tita in the same tone of apprehension; as if there were no knowing
what service that she disapproved of her aunt might force her next to
render.

"I have always got most things done I wanted, thank God! The people I
have lived with have humored me," the old woman continued, speaking out
of the gray ashes of her vanity.

"I suppose you mean that they have obeyed you."

"Well, whatever it is, when they like you."

"It's just because I like you that I want to resist," said Miss Tita
with a nervous laugh.

"Oh, I suspect you'll bring Miss Bordereau upstairs next to pay me a
visit," I went on; to which the old lady replied:

"Oh, no; I can keep an eye on you from here!"

"You are very tired; you will certainly be ill tonight!" cried Miss
Tita.

"Nonsense, my dear; I feel better at this moment than I have done for
a month. Tomorrow I shall come out again. I want to be where I can see
this clever gentleman."

"Shouldn't you perhaps see me better in your sitting room?" I inquired.

"Don't you mean shouldn't you have a better chance at me?" she returned,
fixing me a moment with her green shade.

"Ah, I haven't that anywhere! I look at you but I don't see you."

"You excite her dreadfully--and that is not good," said Miss Tita,
giving me a reproachful, appealing look.

"I want to watch you--I want to watch you!" the old lady went on.

"Well then, let us spend as much of our time together as possible--I
don't care where--and that will give you every facility."

"Oh, I've seen you enough for today. I'm satisfied. Now I'll go home."
Miss Tita laid her hands on the back of her aunt's chair and began to
push, but I begged her to let me take her place. "Oh, yes, you may move
me this way--you shan't in any other!" Miss Bordereau exclaimed as she
felt herself propelled firmly and easily over the smooth, hard floor.
Before we reached the door of her own apartment she commanded me to
stop, and she took a long, last look up and down the noble sala. "Oh,
it's a magnificent house!" she murmured; after which I pushed her
forward. When we had entered the parlor Miss Tita told me that she
should now be able to manage, and at the same moment the little
red-haired donna came to meet her mistress. Miss Tita's idea was
evidently to get her aunt immediately back to bed. I confess that in
spite of this urgency I was guilty of the indiscretion of lingering; it
held me there to think that I was nearer the documents I coveted--that
they were probably put away somewhere in the faded, unsociable room.
The place had indeed a bareness which did not suggest hidden treasures;
there were no dusky nooks nor curtained corners, no massive cabinets nor
chests with iron bands. Moreover it was possible, it was perhaps even
probable that the old lady had consigned her relics to her bedroom, to
some battered box that was shoved under the bed, to the drawer of some
lame dressing table, where they would be in the range of vision by the
dim night lamp. Nonetheless I scrutinized every article of furniture,
every conceivable cover for a hoard, and noticed that there were half a
dozen things with drawers, and in particular a tall old secretary,
with brass ornaments of the style of the Empire--a receptacle somewhat
rickety but still capable of keeping a great many secrets. I don't
know why this article fascinated me so, inasmuch as I certainly had no
definite purpose of breaking into it; but I stared at it so hard that
Miss Tita noticed me and changed color. Her doing this made me think
I was right and that wherever they might have been before the Aspern
papers at that moment languished behind the peevish little lock of the
secretary. It was hard to remove my eyes from the dull mahogany front
when I reflected that a simple panel divided me from the goal of my
hopes; but I remembered my prudence and with an effort took leave of
Miss Bordereau. To make the effort graceful I said to her that I should
certainly bring her an opinion about the little picture.

"The little picture?" Miss Tita asked, surprised.

"What do YOU know about it, my dear?" the old woman demanded. "You
needn't mind. I have fixed my price."

"And what may that be?"

"A thousand pounds."

"Oh Lord!" cried poor Miss Tita irrepressibly.

"Is that what she talks to you about?" said Miss Bordereau.

"Imagine your aunt's wanting to know!" I had to separate from Miss Tita
with only those words, though I should have liked immensely to add, "For
heaven's sake meet me tonight in the garden!"




VIII


As it turned out the precaution had not been needed, for three hours
later, just as I had finished my dinner, Miss Bordereau's niece
appeared, unannounced, in the open doorway of the room in which my
simple repasts were served. I remember well that I felt no surprise at
seeing her; which is not a proof that I did not believe in her timidity.
It was immense, but in a case in which there was a particular reason for
boldness it never would have prevented her from running up to my rooms.
I saw that she was now quite full of a particular reason; it threw her
forward--made her seize me, as I rose to meet her, by the arm.

"My aunt is very ill; I think she is dying!"

"Never in the world," I answered bitterly. "Don't you be afraid!"

"Do go for a doctor--do, do! Olimpia is gone for the one we always have,
but she doesn't come back; I don't know what has happened to her. I told
her that if he was not at home she was to follow him where he had gone;
but apparently she is following him all over Venice. I don't know what
to do--she looks so as if she were sinking."

"May I see her, may I judge?" I asked. "Of course I shall be delighted
to bring someone; but hadn't we better send my man instead, so that I
may stay with you?"

Miss Tita assented to this and I dispatched my servant for the best
doctor in the neighborhood. I hurried downstairs with her, and on the
way she told me that an hour after I quitted them in the afternoon Miss
Bordereau had had an attack of "oppression," a terrible difficulty in
breathing. This had subsided but had left her so exhausted that she did
not come up: she seemed all gone. I repeated that she was not gone, that
she would not go yet; whereupon Miss Tita gave me a sharper sidelong
glance than she had ever directed at me and said, "Really, what do you
mean? I suppose you don't accuse her of making believe!" I forget what
reply I made to this, but I grant that in my heart I thought the old
woman capable of any weird maneuver. Miss Tita wanted to know what I
had done to her; her aunt had told her that I had made her so angry. I
declared I had done nothing--I had been exceedingly careful; to which
my companion rejoined that Miss Bordereau had assured her she had had
a scene with me--a scene that had upset her. I answered with some
resentment that it was a scene of her own making--that I couldn't think
what she was angry with me for unless for not seeing my way to give a
thousand pounds for the portrait of Jeffrey Aspern. "And did she show
you that? Oh, gracious--oh, deary me!" groaned Miss Tita, who appeared
to feel that the situation was passing out of her control and that the
elements of her fate were thickening around her. I said that I would
give anything to possess it, yet that I had not a thousand pounds; but
I stopped when we came to the door of Miss Bordereau's room. I had an
immense curiosity to pass it, but I thought it my duty to represent
to Miss Tita that if I made the invalid angry she ought perhaps to be
spared the sight of me. "The sight of you? Do you think she can SEE?" my
companion demanded almost with indignation. I did think so but forebore
to say it, and I softly followed my conductress.

I remember that what I said to her as I stood for a moment beside the
old woman's bed was, "Does she never show you her eyes then? Have you
never seen them?" Miss Bordereau had been divested of her green shade,
but (it was not my fortune to behold Juliana in her nightcap) the upper
half of her face was covered by the fall of a piece of dingy lacelike
muslin, a sort of extemporized hood which, wound round her head,
descended to the end of her nose, leaving nothing visible but her white
withered cheeks and puckered mouth, closed tightly and, as it were
consciously. Miss Tita gave me a glance of surprise, evidently not
seeing a reason for my impatience. "You mean that she always wears
something? She does it to preserve them."

"Because they are so fine?"

"Oh, today, today!" And Miss Tita shook her head, speaking very low.
"But they used to be magnificent!"

"Yes indeed, we have Aspern's word for that." And as I looked again at
the old woman's wrappings I could imagine that she had not wished to
allow people a reason to say that the great poet had overdone it. But
I did not waste my time in considering Miss Bordereau, in whom the
appearance of respiration was so slight as to suggest that no human
attention could ever help her more. I turned my eyes all over the room,
rummaging with them the closets, the chests of drawers, the tables. Miss
Tita met them quickly and read, I think, what was in them; but she
did not answer it, turning away restlessly, anxiously, so that I felt
rebuked, with reason, for a preoccupation that was almost profane in
the presence of our dying companion. All the same I took another look,
endeavoring to pick out mentally the place to try first, for a person
who should wish to put his hand on Miss Bordereau's papers directly
after her death. The room was a dire confusion; it looked like the room
of an old actress. There were clothes hanging over chairs, odd-looking
shabby bundles here and there, and various pasteboard boxes piled
together, battered, bulging, and discolored, which might have been fifty
years old. Miss Tita after a moment noticed the direction of my
eyes again and, as if she guessed how I judged the air of the place
(forgetting I had no business to judge it at all), said, perhaps to
defend herself from the imputation of complicity in such untidiness:

"She likes it this way; we can't move things. There are old bandboxes
she has had most of her life." Then she added, half taking pity on my
real thought, "Those things were THERE." And she pointed to a small,
low trunk which stood under a sofa where there was just room for it.
It appeared to be a queer, superannuated coffer, of painted wood, with
elaborate handles and shriveled straps and with the color (it had last
been endued with a coat of light green) much rubbed off. It evidently
had traveled with Juliana in the olden time--in the days of her
adventures, which it had shared. It would have made a strange figure
arriving at a modern hotel.

"WERE there--they aren't now?" I asked, startled by Miss Tita's
implication.

She was going to answer, but at that moment the doctor came in--the
doctor whom the little maid had been sent to fetch and whom she had at
last overtaken. My servant, going on his own errand, had met her with
her companion in tow, and in the sociable Venetian spirit, retracing his
steps with them, had also come up to the threshold of Miss Bordereau's
room, where I saw him peeping over the doctor's shoulder. I motioned him
away the more instantly that the sight of his prying face reminded me
that I myself had almost as little to do there--an admonition confirmed
by the sharp way the little doctor looked at me, appearing to take me
for a rival who had the field before him. He was a short, fat, brisk
gentleman who wore the tall hat of his profession and seemed to look
at everything but his patient. He looked particularly at me, as if it
struck him that I should be better for a dose, so that I bowed to him
and left him with the women, going down to smoke a cigar in the garden.
I was nervous; I could not go further; I could not leave the place.
I don't know exactly what I thought might happen, but it seemed to me
important to be there. I wandered about in the alleys--the warm night
had come on--smoking cigar after cigar and looking at the light in Miss
Bordereau's windows. They were open now, I could see; the situation
was different. Sometimes the light moved, but not quickly; it did not
suggest the hurry of a crisis. Was the old woman dying, or was she
already dead? Had the doctor said that there was nothing to be done at
her tremendous age but to let her quietly pass away; or had he simply
announced with a look a little more conventional that the end of the end
had come? Were the other two women moving about to perform the offices
that follow in such a case? It made me uneasy not to be nearer, as if I
thought the doctor himself might carry away the papers with him. I bit
my cigar hard as it came over me again that perhaps there were now no
papers to carry!

I wandered about for an hour--for an hour and a half. I looked out for
Miss Tita at one of the windows, having a vague idea that she might come
there to give me some sign. Would she not see the red tip of my cigar
moving about in the dark and feel that I wanted eminently to know what
the doctor had said? I am afraid it is a proof my anxieties had made me
gross that I should have taken in some degree for granted that at such
an hour, in the midst of the greatest change that could take place in
her life, they were uppermost also in Miss Tita's mind. My servant came
down and spoke to me; he knew nothing save that the doctor had gone
after a visit of half an hour. If he had stayed half an hour then Miss
Bordereau was still alive: it could not have taken so much time as that
to enunciate the contrary. I sent the man out of the house; there were
moments when the sense of his curiosity annoyed me, and this was one of
them. HE had been watching my cigar tip from an upper window, if Miss
Tita had not; he could not know what I was after and I could not tell
him, though I was conscious he had fantastic private theories about me
which he thought fine and which I, had I known them, should have thought
offensive.

I went upstairs at last but I ascended no higher than the sala. The
door of Miss Bordereau's apartment was open, showing from the parlor the
dimness of a poor candle. I went toward it with a light tread, and
at the same moment Miss Tita appeared and stood looking at me as I
approached. "She's better--she's better," she said, even before I had
asked. "The doctor has given her something; she woke up, came back to
life while he was there. He says there is no immediate danger."

"No immediate danger? Surely he thinks her condition strange!"

"Yes, because she had been excited. That affects her dreadfully."

"It will do so again then, because she excites herself. She did so this
afternoon."

"Yes; she mustn't come out any more," said Miss Tita, with one of her
lapses into a deeper placidity.

"What is the use of making such a remark as that if you begin to rattle
her about again the first time she bids you?"

"I won't--I won't do it any more."

"You must learn to resist her," I went on.

"Oh, yes, I shall; I shall do so better if you tell me it's right."

"You mustn't do it for me; you must do it for yourself. It all comes
back to you, if you are frightened."

"Well, I am not frightened now," said Miss Tita cheerfully. "She is very
quiet."

"Is she conscious again--does she speak?"

"No, she doesn't speak, but she takes my hand. She holds it fast."

"Yes," I rejoined, "I can see what force she still has by the way she
grabbed that picture this afternoon. But if she holds you fast how comes
it that you are here?"

Miss Tita hesitated a moment; though her face was in deep shadow (she
had her back to the light in the parlor and I had put down my own
candle far off, near the door of the sala), I thought I saw her smile
ingenuously. "I came on purpose--I heard your step."

"Why, I came on tiptoe, as inaudibly as possible."

"Well, I heard you," said Miss Tita.

"And is your aunt alone now?"

"Oh, no; Olimpia is sitting there."

On my side I hesitated. "Shall we then step in there?" And I nodded at
the parlor; I wanted more and more to be on the spot.

"We can't talk there--she will hear us."

I was on the point of replying that in that case we would sit silent,
but I was too conscious that this would not do, as there was something I
desired immensely to ask her. So I proposed that we should walk a little
in the sala, keeping more at the other end, where we should not disturb
the old lady. Miss Tita assented unconditionally; the doctor was coming
again, she said, and she would be there to meet him at the door.
We strolled through the fine superfluous hall, where on the marble
floor--particularly as at first we said nothing--our footsteps were more
audible than I had expected. When we reached the other end--the wide
window, inveterately closed, connecting with the balcony that overhung
the canal--I suggested that we should remain there, as she would see the
doctor arrive still better. I opened the window and we passed out on the
balcony. The air of the canal seemed even heavier, hotter than that of
the sala. The place was hushed and void; the quiet neighborhood had gone
to sleep. A lamp, here and there, over the narrow black water, glimmered
in double; the voice of a man going homeward singing, with his jacket
on his shoulder and his hat on his ear, came to us from a distance.
This did not prevent the scene from being very comme il faut, as Miss
Bordereau had called it the first time I saw her. Presently a gondola
passed along the canal with its slow rhythmical plash, and as we
listened we watched it in silence. It did not stop, it did not carry the
doctor; and after it had gone on I said to Miss Tita:

"And where are they now--the things that were in the trunk?"

"In the trunk?"

"That green box you pointed out to me in her room. You said her papers
had been there; you seemed to imply that she had transferred them."

"Oh, yes; they are not in the trunk," said Miss Tita.

"May I ask if you have looked?"

"Yes, I have looked--for you."

"How for me, dear Miss Tita? Do you mean you would have given them to me
if you had found them?" I asked, almost trembling.

She delayed to reply and I waited. Suddenly she broke out, "I don't know
what I would do--what I wouldn't!"

"Would you look again--somewhere else?"

She had spoken with a strange unexpected emotion, and she went on in the
same tone: "I can't--I can't--while she lies there. It isn't decent."

"No, it isn't decent," I replied gravely. "Let the poor lady rest in
peace." And the words, on my lips, were not hypocritical, for I felt
reprimanded and shamed.

Miss Tita added in a moment, as if she had guessed this and were sorry
for me, but at the same time wished to explain that I did drive her on
or at least did insist too much: "I can't deceive her that way. I can't
deceive her--perhaps on her deathbed."

"Heaven forbid I should ask you, though I have been guilty myself!"

"You have been guilty?"

"I have sailed under false colors." I felt now as if I must tell her
that I had given her an invented name, on account of my fear that her
aunt would have heard of me and would refuse to take me in. I explained
this and also that I had really been a party to the letter written to
them by John Cumnor months before.

She listened with great attention, looking at me with parted lips, and
when I had made my confession she said, "Then your real name--what is
it?" She repeated it over twice when I had told her, accompanying it
with the exclamation "Gracious, gracious!" Then she added, "I like your
own best."

"So do I," I said, laughing. "Ouf! it's a relief to get rid of the
other."

"So it was a regular plot--a kind of conspiracy?"

"Oh, a conspiracy--we were only two," I replied, leaving out Mrs. Prest
of course.

She hesitated; I thought she was perhaps going to say that we had been
very base. But she remarked after a moment, in a candid, wondering way,
"How much you must want them!"

"Oh, I do, passionately!" I conceded, smiling. And this chance made
me go on, forgetting my compunction of a moment before. "How can she
possibly have changed their place herself? How can she walk? How can
she arrive at that sort of muscular exertion? How can she lift and carry
things?"

"Oh, when one wants and when one has so much will!" said Miss Tita, as
if she had thought over my question already herself and had simply had
no choice but that answer--the idea that in the dead of night, or at
some moment when the coast was clear, the old woman had been capable of
a miraculous effort.

"Have you questioned Olimpia? Hasn't she helped her--hasn't she done it
for her?" I asked; to which Miss Tita replied promptly and positively
that their servant had had nothing to do with the matter, though without
admitting definitely that she had spoken to her. It was as if she were
a little shy, a little ashamed now of letting me see how much she had
entered into my uneasiness and had me on her mind. Suddenly she said to
me, without any immediate relevance:

"I feel as if you were a new person, now that you have got a new name."

"It isn't a new one; it is a very good old one, thank heaven!"

She looked at me a moment. "I do like it better."

"Oh, if you didn't I would almost go on with the other!"

"Would you really?"

I laughed again, but for all answer to this inquiry I said, "Of course
if she can rummage about that way she can perfectly have burnt them."

"You must wait--you must wait," Miss Tita moralized mournfully; and her
tone ministered little to my patience, for it seemed after all to accept
that wretched possibility. I would teach myself to wait, I declared
nevertheless; because in the first place I could not do otherwise and in
the second I had her promise, given me the other night, that she would
help me.

"Of course if the papers are gone that's no use," she said; not as if
she wished to recede, but only to be conscientious.

"Naturally. But if you could only find out!" I groaned, quivering again.

"I thought you said you would wait."

"Oh, you mean wait even for that?"

"For what then?"

"Oh, nothing," I replied, rather foolishly, being ashamed to tell her
what had been implied in my submission to delay--the idea that she would
do more than merely find out. I know not whether she guessed this; at
all events she appeared to become aware of the necessity for being a
little more rigid.

"I didn't promise to deceive, did I? I don't think I did."

"It doesn't much matter whether you did or not, for you couldn't!"

I don't think Miss Tita would have contested this event had she not been
diverted by our seeing the doctor's gondola shoot into the little canal
and approach the house. I noted that he came as fast as if he believed
that Miss Bordereau was still in danger. We looked down at him while he
disembarked and then went back into the sala to meet him. When he came
up however I naturally left Miss Tita to go off with him alone, only
asking her leave to come back later for news.

I went out of the house and took a long walk, as far as the Piazza,
where my restlessness declined to quit me. I was unable to sit down (it
was very late now but there were people still at the little tables in
front of the cafes); I could only walk round and round, and I did
so half a dozen times. I was uncomfortable, but it gave me a certain
pleasure to have told Miss Tita who I really was. At last I took my way
home again, slowly getting all but inextricably lost, as I did whenever
I went out in Venice: so that it was considerably past midnight when I
reached my door. The sala, upstairs, was as dark as usual and my lamp as
I crossed it found nothing satisfactory to show me. I was disappointed,
for I had notified Miss Tita that I would come back for a report, and
I thought she might have left a light there as a sign. The door of
the ladies' apartment was closed; which seemed an intimation that my
faltering friend had gone to bed, tired of waiting for me. I stood
in the middle of the place, considering, hoping she would hear me and
perhaps peep out, saying to myself too that she would never go to bed
with her aunt in a state so critical; she would sit up and watch--she
would be in a chair, in her dressing gown. I went nearer the door; I
stopped there and listened. I heard nothing at all and at last I tapped
gently. No answer came and after another minute I turned the handle.
There was no light in the room; this ought to have prevented me from
going in, but it had no such effect. If I have candidly narrated the
importunities, the indelicacies, of which my desire to possess myself of
Jeffrey Aspern's papers had rendered me capable I need not shrink from
confessing this last indiscretion. I think it was the worst thing I did;
yet there were extenuating circumstances. I was deeply though doubtless
not disinterestedly anxious for more news of the old lady, and Miss Tita
had accepted from me, as it were, a rendezvous which it might have been
a point of honor with me to keep. It may be said that her leaving the
place dark was a positive sign that she released me, and to this I can
only reply that I desired not to be released.

The door of Miss Bordereau's room was open and I could see beyond it the
faintness of a taper. There was no sound--my footstep caused no one to
stir. I came further into the room; I lingered there with my lamp in my
hand. I wanted to give Miss Tita a chance to come to me if she were with
her aunt, as she must be. I made no noise to call her; I only waited to
see if she would not notice my light. She did not, and I explained this
(I found afterward I was right) by the idea that she had fallen
asleep. If she had fallen asleep her aunt was not on her mind, and my
explanation ought to have led me to go out as I had come. I must repeat
again that it did not, for I found myself at the same moment thinking of
something else. I had no definite purpose, no bad intention, but I
felt myself held to the spot by an acute, though absurd, sense of
opportunity. For what I could not have said, inasmuch as it was not
in my mind that I might commit a theft. Even if it had been I was
confronted with the evident fact that Miss Bordereau did not leave her
secretary, her cupboard, and the drawers of her tables gaping. I had no
keys, no tools, and no ambition to smash her furniture. Nonetheless it
came to me that I was now, perhaps alone, unmolested, at the hour of
temptation and secrecy, nearer to the tormenting treasure than I had
ever been. I held up my lamp, let the light play on the different
objects as if it could tell me something. Still there came no movement
from the other room. If Miss Tita was sleeping she was sleeping sound.
Was she doing so--generous creature--on purpose to leave me the field?
Did she know I was there and was she just keeping quiet to see what I
would do--what I COULD do? But what could I do, when it came to that?
She herself knew even better than I how little.

I stopped in front of the secretary, looking at it very idiotically; for
what had it to say to me after all? In the first place it was locked,
and in the second it almost surely contained nothing in which I was
interested. Ten to one the papers had been destroyed; and even if they
had not been destroyed the old woman would not have put them in such a
place as that after removing them from the green trunk--would not have
transferred them, if she had the idea of their safety on her brain,
from the better hiding place to the worse. The secretary was more
conspicuous, more accessible in a room in which she could no longer
mount guard. It opened with a key, but there was a little brass handle,
like a button, as well; I saw this as I played my lamp over it. I did
something more than this at that moment: I caught a glimpse of the
possibility that Miss Tita wished me really to understand. If she did
not wish me to understand, if she wished me to keep away, why had she
not locked the door of communication between the sitting room and the
sala? That would have been a definite sign that I was to leave them
alone. If I did not leave them alone she meant me to come for a
purpose--a purpose now indicated by the quick, fantastic idea that to
oblige me she had unlocked the secretary. She had not left the key,
but the lid would probably move if I touched the button. This theory
fascinated me, and I bent over very close to judge. I did not propose
to do anything, not even--not in the least--to let down the lid; I only
wanted to test my theory, to see if the cover WOULD move. I touched the
button with my hand--a mere touch would tell me; and as I did so (it is
embarrassing for me to relate it), I looked over my shoulder. It was
a chance, an instinct, for I had not heard anything. I almost let my
luminary drop and certainly I stepped back, straightening myself up at
what I saw. Miss Bordereau stood there in her nightdress, in the doorway
of her room, watching me; her hands were raised, she had lifted the
everlasting curtain that covered half her face, and for the first, the
last, the only time I beheld her extraordinary eyes. They glared at me,
they made me horribly ashamed. I never shall forget her strange little
bent white tottering figure, with its lifted head, her attitude, her
expression; neither shall I forget the tone in which as I turned,
looking at her, she hissed out passionately, furiously:

"Ah, you publishing scoundrel!"

I know not what I stammered, to excuse myself, to explain; but I went
toward her, to tell her I meant no harm. She waved me off with her old
hands, retreating before me in horror; and the next thing I knew she had
fallen back with a quick spasm, as if death had descended on her, into
Miss Tita's arms.




IX


I left Venice the next morning, as soon as I learned that the old lady
had not succumbed, as I feared at the moment, to the shock I had given
her--the shock I may also say she had given me. How in the world could I
have supposed her capable of getting out of bed by herself? I failed to
see Miss Tita before going; I only saw the donna, whom I entrusted with
a note for her younger mistress. In this note I mentioned that I
should be absent but for a few days. I went to Treviso, to Bassano, to
Castelfranco; I took walks and drives and looked at musty old churches
with ill-lighted pictures and spent hours seated smoking at the doors of
cafes, where there were flies and yellow curtains, on the shady side of
sleepy little squares. In spite of these pastimes, which were mechanical
and perfunctory, I scantily enjoyed my journey: there was too strong a
taste of the disagreeable in my life. I had been devilish awkward, as
the young men say, to be found by Miss Bordereau in the dead of night
examining the attachment of her bureau; and it had not been less so
to have to believe for a good many hours afterward that it was highly
probable I had killed her. In writing to Miss Tita I attempted to
minimize these irregularities; but as she gave me no word of answer I
could not know what impression I made upon her. It rankled in my mind
that I had been called a publishing scoundrel, for certainly I did
publish and certainly I had not been very delicate. There was a moment
when I stood convinced that the only way to make up for this latter
fault was to take myself away altogether on the instant; to sacrifice
my hopes and relieve the two poor women forever of the oppression of
my intercourse. Then I reflected that I had better try a short absence
first, for I must already have had a sense (unexpressed and dim) that
in disappearing completely it would not be merely my own hopes that I
should condemn to extinction. It would perhaps be sufficient if I stayed
away long enough to give the elder lady time to think she was rid of me.
That she would wish to be rid of me after this (if I was not rid of her)
was now not to be doubted: that nocturnal scene would have cured her of
the disposition to put up with my company for the sake of my dollars.
I said to myself that after all I could not abandon Miss Tita, and I
continued to say this even while I observed that she quite failed to
comply with my earnest request (I had given her two or three addresses,
at little towns, post restante) that she would let me know how she was
getting on. I would have made my servant write to me but that he was
unable to manage a pen. It struck me there was a kind of scorn in Miss
Tita's silence (little disdainful as she had ever been), so that I was
uncomfortable and sore. I had scruples about going back and yet I
had others about not doing so, for I wanted to put myself on a better
footing. The end of it was that I did return to Venice on the twelfth
day; and as my gondola gently bumped against Miss Bordereau's steps
a certain palpitation of suspense told me that I had done myself a
violence in holding off so long.

I had faced about so abruptly that I had not telegraphed to my servant.
He was therefore not at the station to meet me, but he poked out his
head from an upper window when I reached the house. "They have put her
into the earth, la vecchia," he said to me in the lower hall, while he
shouldered my valise; and he grinned and almost winked, as if he knew I
should be pleased at the news.

"She's dead!" I exclaimed, giving him a very different look.

"So it appears, since they have buried her."

"It's all over? When was the funeral?"

"The other yesterday. But a funeral you could scarcely call it, signore;
it was a dull little passeggio of two gondolas. Poveretta!" the man
continued, referring apparently to Miss Tita. His conception of funerals
was apparently that they were mainly to amuse the living.

I wanted to know about Miss Tita--how she was and where she was--but I
asked him no more questions till we had got upstairs. Now that the fact
had met me I took a bad view of it, especially of the idea that poor
Miss Tita had had to manage by herself after the end. What did she know
about arrangements, about the steps to take in such a case? Poveretta
indeed! I could only hope that the doctor had given her assistance and
that she had not been neglected by the old friends of whom she had told
me, the little band of the faithful whose fidelity consisted in coming
to the house once a year. I elicited from my servant that two old
ladies and an old gentleman had in fact rallied round Miss Tita and had
supported her (they had come for her in a gondola of their own) during
the journey to the cemetery, the little red-walled island of tombs which
lies to the north of the town, on the way to Murano. It appeared
from these circumstances that the Misses Bordereau were Catholics, a
discovery I had never made, as the old woman could not go to church and
her niece, so far as I perceived, either did not or went only to early
mass in the parish, before I was stirring. Certainly even the priests
respected their seclusion; I had never caught the whisk of the curato's
skirt. That evening, an hour later, I sent my servant down with five
words written on a card, to ask Miss Tita if she would see me for a few
moments. She was not in the house, where he had sought her, he told me
when he came back, but in the garden walking about to refresh herself
and gathering flowers. He had found her there and she would be very
happy to see me.

I went down and passed half an hour with poor Miss Tita. She had always
had a look of musty mourning (as if she were wearing out old robes of
sorrow that would not come to an end), and in this respect there was no
appreciable change in her appearance. But she evidently had been crying,
crying a great deal--simply, satisfyingly, refreshingly, with a sort of
primitive, retarded sense of loneliness and violence. But she had none
of the formalism or the self-consciousness of grief, and I was almost
surprised to see her standing there in the first dusk with her hands
full of flowers, smiling at me with her reddened eyes. Her white face,
in the frame of her mantilla, looked longer, leaner than usual. I had
had an idea that she would be a good deal disgusted with me--would
consider that I ought to have been on the spot to advise her, to help
her; and, though I was sure there was no rancor in her composition and
no great conviction of the importance of her affairs, I had prepared
myself for a difference in her manner, for some little injured look,
half-familiar, half-estranged, which should say to my conscience, "Well,
you are a nice person to have professed things!" But historic truth
compels me to declare that Tita Bordereau's countenance expressed
unqualified pleasure in seeing her late aunt's lodger. That touched him
extremely, and he thought it simplified his situation until he found it
did not. I was as kind to her that evening as I knew how to be, and
I walked about the garden with her for half an hour. There was no
explanation of any sort between us; I did not ask her why she had not
answered my letter. Still less did I repeat what I had said to her
in that communication; if she chose to let me suppose that she had
forgotten the position in which Miss Bordereau surprised me that night
and the effect of the discovery on the old woman I was quite willing to
take it that way: I was grateful to her for not treating me as if I had
killed her aunt.

We strolled and strolled and really not much passed between us save the
recognition of her bereavement, conveyed in my manner and in a visible
air that she had of depending on me now, since I let her see that I took
an interest in her. Miss Tita had none of the pride that makes a person
wish to preserve the look of independence; she did not in the least
pretend that she knew at present what would become of her. I forebore to
touch particularly on that, however, for I certainly was not prepared
to say that I would take charge of her. I was cautious; not ignobly, I
think, for I felt that her knowledge of life was so small that in her
unsophisticated vision there would be no reason why--since I seemed
to pity her--I should not look after her. She told me how her aunt had
died, very peacefully at the last, and how everything had been done
afterward by the care of her good friends (fortunately, thanks to me,
she said, smiling, there was money in the house; and she repeated that
when once the Italians like you they are your friends for life); and
when we had gone into this she asked me about my giro, my impressions,
the places I had seen. I told her what I could, making it up partly, I
am afraid, as in my depression I had not seen much; and after she had
heard me she exclaimed, quite as if she had forgotten her aunt and her
sorrow, "Dear, dear, how much I should like to do such things--to take a
little journey!" It came over me for the moment that I ought to propose
some tour, say I would take her anywhere she liked; and I remarked at
any rate that some excursion--to give her a change--might be managed:
we would think of it, talk it over. I said never a word to her about the
Aspern documents; asked no questions as to what she had ascertained or
what had otherwise happened with regard to them before Miss Bordereau's
death. It was not that I was not on pins and needles to know, but that
I thought it more decent not to betray my anxiety so soon after the
catastrophe. I hoped she herself would say something, but she never
glanced that way, and I thought this natural at the time. Later however,
that night, it occurred to me that her silence was somewhat strange;
for if she had talked of my movements, of anything so detached as the
Giorgione at Castelfranco, she might have alluded to what she could
easily remember was in my mind. It was not to be supposed that the
emotion produced by her aunt's death had blotted out the recollection
that I was interested in that lady's relics, and I fidgeted afterward
as it came to me that her reticence might very possibly mean simply that
nothing had been found. We separated in the garden (it was she who
said she must go in); now that she was alone in the rooms I felt that
(judged, at any rate, by Venetian ideas) I was on rather a different
footing in regard to visiting her there. As I shook hands with her for
goodnight I asked her if she had any general plan--had thought over what
she had better do. "Oh, yes, oh, yes, but I haven't settled anything
yet," she replied quite cheerfully. Was her cheerfulness explained by
the impression that I would settle for her?

I was glad the next morning that we had neglected practical questions,
for this gave me a pretext for seeing her again immediately. There was a
very practical question to be touched upon. I owed it to her to let her
know formally that of course I did not expect her to keep me on as a
lodger, and also to show some interest in her own tenure, what she might
have on her hands in the way of a lease. But I was not destined, as it
happened, to converse with her for more than an instant on either of
these points. I sent her no message; I simply went down to the sala and
walked to and fro there. I knew she would come out; she would very soon
discover I was there. Somehow I preferred not to be shut up with her;
gardens and big halls seemed better places to talk. It was a splendid
morning, with something in the air that told of the waning of the long
Venetian summer; a freshness from the sea which stirred the flowers in
the garden and made a pleasant draught in the house, less shuttered and
darkened now than when the old woman was alive. It was the beginning of
autumn, of the end of the golden months. With this it was the end of
my experiment--or would be in the course of half an hour, when I should
really have learned that the papers had been reduced to ashes. After
that there would be nothing left for me but to go to the station; for
seriously (and as it struck me in the morning light) I could not linger
there to act as guardian to a piece of middle-aged female helplessness.
If she had not saved the papers wherein should I be indebted to her?
I think I winced a little as I asked myself how much, if she HAD saved
them, I should have to recognize and, as it were, to reward such
a courtesy. Might not that circumstance after all saddle me with a
guardianship? If this idea did not make me more uncomfortable as I
walked up and down it was because I was convinced I had nothing to look
to. If the old woman had not destroyed everything before she pounced
upon me in the parlor she had done so afterward.

It took Miss Tita rather longer than I had expected to guess that I was
there; but when at last she came out she looked at me without surprise.
I said to her that I had been waiting for her, and she asked why I had
not let her know. I was glad the next day that I had checked myself
before remarking that I had wished to see if a friendly intuition would
not tell her: it became a satisfaction to me that I had not indulged in
that rather tender joke. What I did say was virtually the truth--that I
was too nervous, since I expected her now to settle my fate.

"Your fate?" said Miss Tita, giving me a queer look; and as she spoke I
noticed a rare change in her. She was different from what she had been
the evening before--less natural, less quiet. She had been crying the
day before and she was not crying now, and yet she struck me as less
confident. It was as if something had happened to her during the
night, or at least as if she had thought of something that troubled
her--something in particular that affected her relations with me, made
them more embarrassing and complicated. Had she simply perceived that
her aunt's not being there now altered my position?

"I mean about our papers. ARE there any? You must know now."

"Yes, there are a great many; more than I supposed." I was struck with
the way her voice trembled as she told me this.

"Do you mean that you have got them in there--and that I may see them?"

"I don't think you can see them," said Miss Tita with an extraordinary
expression of entreaty in her eyes, as if the dearest hope she had in
the world now was that I would not take them from her. But how could
she expect me to make such a sacrifice as that after all that had passed
between us? What had I come back to Venice for but to see them, to take
them? My delight in learning they were still in existence was such that
if the poor woman had gone down on her knees to beseech me never to
mention them again I would have treated the proceeding as a bad joke. "I
have got them but I can't show them," she added.

"Not even to me? Ah, Miss Tita!" I groaned, with a voice of infinite
remonstrance and reproach.

She colored, and the tears came back to her eyes; I saw that it cost her
a kind of anguish to take such a stand but that a dreadful sense of duty
had descended upon her. It made me quite sick to find myself confronted
with that particular obstacle; all the more that it appeared to me I
had been extremely encouraged to leave it out of account. I almost
considered that Miss Tita had assured me that if she had no greater
hindrance than that--! "You don't mean to say you made her a deathbed
promise? It was precisely against your doing anything of that sort
that I thought I was safe. Oh, I would rather she had burned the papers
outright than that!"

"No, it isn't a promise," said Miss Tita.

"Pray what is it then?"

She hesitated and then she said, "She tried to burn them, but I
prevented it. She had hid them in her bed."

"In her bed?"

"Between the mattresses. That's where she put them when she took them
out of the trunk. I can't understand how she did it, because Olimpia
didn't help her. She tells me so, and I believe her. My aunt only told
her afterward, so that she shouldn't touch the bed--anything but the
sheets. So it was badly made," added Miss Tita simply.

"I should think so! And how did she try to burn them?"

"She didn't try much; she was too weak, those last days. But she told
me--she charged me. Oh, it was terrible! She couldn't speak after that
night; she could only make signs."

"And what did you do?"

"I took them away. I locked them up."

"In the secretary?"

"Yes, in the secretary," said Miss Tita, reddening again.

"Did you tell her you would burn them?"

"No, I didn't--on purpose."

"On purpose to gratify me?"

"Yes, only for that."

"And what good will you have done me if after all you won't show them?"

"Oh, none; I know that--I know that."

"And did she believe you had destroyed them?"

"I don't know what she believed at the last. I couldn't tell--she was
too far gone."

"Then if there was no promise and no assurance I can't see what ties
you."

"Oh, she hated it so--she hated it so! She was so jealous. But here's
the portrait--you may have that," Miss Tita announced, taking the little
picture, wrapped up in the same manner in which her aunt had wrapped it,
out of her pocket.

"I may have it--do you mean you give it to me?" I questioned, staring,
as it passed into my hand.

"Oh, yes."

"But it's worth money--a large sum."

"Well!" said Miss Tita, still with her strange look.

I did not know what to make of it, for it could scarcely mean that she
wanted to bargain like her aunt. She spoke as if she wished to make me a
present. "I can't take it from you as a gift," I said, "and yet I can't
afford to pay you for it according to the ideas Miss Bordereau had of
its value. She rated it at a thousand pounds."

"Couldn't we sell it?" asked Miss Tita.

"God forbid! I prefer the picture to the money."

"Well then keep it."

"You are very generous."

"So are you."

"I don't know why you should think so," I replied; and this was a
truthful speech, for the singular creature appeared to have some very
fine reference in her mind, which I did not in the least seize.

"Well, you have made a great difference for me," said Miss Tita.

I looked at Jeffrey Aspern's face in the little picture, partly in order
not to look at that of my interlocutress, which had begun to trouble me,
even to frighten me a little--it was so self-conscious, so unnatural.
I made no answer to this last declaration; I only privately consulted
Jeffrey Aspern's delightful eyes with my own (they were so young and
brilliant, and yet so wise, so full of vision); I asked him what on
earth was the matter with Miss Tita. He seemed to smile at me with
friendly mockery, as if he were amused at my case. I had got into a
pickle for him--as if he needed it! He was unsatisfactory, for the only
moment since I had known him. Nevertheless, now that I held the little
picture in my hand I felt that it would be a precious possession. "Is
this a bribe to make me give up the papers?" I demanded in a moment,
perversely. "Much as I value it, if I were to be obliged to choose, the
papers are what I should prefer. Ah, but ever so much!"

"How can you choose--how can you choose?" Miss Tita asked, slowly,
lamentably.

"I see! Of course there is nothing to be said, if you regard the
interdiction that rests upon you as quite insurmountable. In this case
it must seem to you that to part with them would be an impiety of the
worst kind, a simple sacrilege!"

Miss Tita shook her head, full of her dolefulness. "You would understand
if you had known her. I'm afraid," she quavered suddenly--"I'm afraid!
She was terrible when she was angry."

"Yes, I saw something of that, that night. She was terrible. Then I saw
her eyes. Lord, they were fine!"

"I see them--they stare at me in the dark!" said Miss Tita.

"You are nervous, with all you have been through."

"Oh, yes, very--very!"

"You mustn't mind; that will pass away," I said, kindly. Then I added,
resignedly, for it really seemed to me that I must accept the situation,
"Well, so it is, and it can't be helped. I must renounce." Miss Tita, at
this, looking at me, gave a low, soft moan, and I went on: "I only wish
to heaven she had destroyed them; then there would be nothing more to
say. And I can't understand why, with her ideas, she didn't."

"Oh, she lived on them!" said Miss Tita.

"You can imagine whether that makes me want less to see them," I
answered, smiling. "But don't let me stand here as if I had it in my
soul to tempt you to do anything base. Naturally you will understand if
I give up my rooms. I leave Venice immediately." And I took up my hat,
which I had placed on a chair. We were still there rather awkwardly,
on our feet, in the middle of the sala. She had left the door of the
apartments open behind her but she had not led me that way.

A kind of spasm came into her face as she saw me take my hat.
"Immediately--do you mean today?" The tone of the words was
tragical--they were a cry of desolation.

"Oh, no; not so long as I can be of the least service to you."

"Well, just a day or two more--just two or three days," she panted. Then
controlling herself, she added in another manner, "She wanted to say
something to me--the last day--something very particular, but she
couldn't."

"Something very particular?"

"Something more about the papers."

"And did you guess--have you any idea?"

"No, I have thought--but I don't know. I have thought all kinds of
things."

"And for instance?"

"Well, that if you were a relation it would be different."

"If I were a relation?"

"If you were not a stranger. Then it would be the same for you as for
me. Anything that is mine--would be yours, and you could do what you
like. I couldn't prevent you--and you would have no responsibility."

She brought out this droll explanation with a little nervous rush, as if
she were speaking words she had got by heart. They gave me an impression
of subtlety and at first I failed to follow. But after a moment her face
helped me to see further, and then a light came into my mind. It was
embarrassing, and I bent my head over Jeffrey Aspern's portrait. What
an odd expression was in his face! "Get out of it as you can, my dear
fellow!" I put the picture into the pocket of my coat and said to Miss
Tita, "Yes, I'll sell it for you. I shan't get a thousand pounds by any
means, but I shall get something good."

She looked at me with tears in her eyes, but she seemed to try to smile
as she remarked, "We can divide the money."

"No, no, it shall be all yours." Then I went on, "I think I know what
your poor aunt wanted to say. She wanted to give directions that her
papers should be buried with her."

Miss Tita appeared to consider this suggestion for a moment; after which
she declared, with striking decision, "Oh no, she wouldn't have thought
that safe!"

"It seems to me nothing could be safer."

"She had an idea that when people want to publish they are capable--"
And she paused, blushing.

"Of violating a tomb? Mercy on us, what must she have thought of me!"

"She was not just, she was not generous!" Miss Tita cried with sudden
passion.

The light that had come into my mind a moment before increased. "Ah,
don't say that, for we ARE a dreadful race." Then I pursued, "If she
left a will, that may give you some idea."

"I have found nothing of the sort--she destroyed it. She was very fond
of me," Miss Tita added incongruously. "She wanted me to be happy. And
if any person should be kind to me--she wanted to speak of that."

I was almost awestricken at the astuteness with which the good lady
found herself inspired, transparent astuteness as it was and sewn, as
the phrase is, with white thread. "Depend upon it she didn't want to
make any provision that would be agreeable to me."

"No, not to you but to me. She knew I should like it if you could carry
out your idea. Not because she cared for you but because she did think
of me," Miss Tita went on with her unexpected, persuasive volubility.
"You could see them--you could use them." She stopped, seeing that I
perceived the sense of that conditional--stopped long enough for me
to give some sign which I did not give. She must have been conscious,
however, that though my face showed the greatest embarrassment that was
ever painted on a human countenance it was not set as a stone, it was
also full of compassion. It was a comfort to me a long time afterward
to consider that she could not have seen in me the smallest symptom
of disrespect. "I don't know what to do; I'm too tormented, I'm too
ashamed!" she continued with vehemence. Then turning away from me and
burying her face in her hands she burst into a flood of tears. If she
did not know what to do it may be imagined whether I did any better.
I stood there dumb, watching her while her sobs resounded in the great
empty hall. In a moment she was facing me again, with her streaming
eyes. "I would give you everything--and she would understand, where she
is--she would forgive me!"

"Ah, Miss Tita--ah, Miss Tita," I stammered, for all reply. I did
not know what to do, as I say, but at a venture I made a wild, vague
movement in consequence of which I found myself at the door. I remember
standing there and saying, "It wouldn't do--it wouldn't do!" pensively,
awkwardly, grotesquely, while I looked away to the opposite end of the
sala as if there were a beautiful view there. The next thing I remember
is that I was downstairs and out of the house. My gondola was there and
my gondolier, reclining on the cushions, sprang up as soon as he saw me.
I jumped in and to his usual "Dove commanda?" I replied, in a tone that
made him stare, "Anywhere, anywhere; out into the lagoon!"

He rowed me away and I sat there prostrate, groaning softly to myself,
with my hat pulled over my face. What in the name of the preposterous
did she mean if she did not mean to offer me her hand? That was the
price--that was the price! And did she think I wanted it, poor deluded,
infatuated, extravagant lady? My gondolier, behind me, must have seen my
ears red as I wondered, sitting there under the fluttering tenda, with
my hidden face, noticing nothing as we passed--wondered whether her
delusion, her infatuation had been my own reckless work. Did she think
I had made love to her, even to get the papers? I had not, I had not;
I repeated that over to myself for an hour, for two hours, till I was
wearied if not convinced. I don't know where my gondolier took me; we
floated aimlessly about in the lagoon, with slow, rare strokes. At last
I became conscious that we were near the Lido, far up, on the right
hand, as you turn your back to Venice, and I made him put me ashore. I
wanted to walk, to move, to shed some of my bewilderment. I crossed the
narrow strip and got to the sea beach--I took my way toward Malamocco.
But presently I flung myself down again on the warm sand, in the breeze,
on the coarse dry grass. It took it out of me to think I had been
so much at fault, that I had unwittingly but nonetheless deplorably
trifled. But I had not given her cause--distinctly I had not. I had
said to Mrs. Prest that I would make love to her; but it had been a joke
without consequences and I had never said it to Tita Bordereau. I had
been as kind as possible, because I really liked her; but since when had
that become a crime where a woman of such an age and such an appearance
was concerned? I am far from remembering clearly the succession of
events and feelings during this long day of confusion, which I spent
entirely in wandering about, without going home, until late at night;
it only comes back to me that there were moments when I pacified my
conscience and others when I lashed it into pain. I did not laugh all
day--that I do recollect; the case, however it might have struck others,
seemed to me so little amusing. It would have been better perhaps for me
to feel the comic side of it. At any rate, whether I had given cause or
not it went without saying that I could not pay the price. I could
not accept. I could not, for a bundle of tattered papers, marry a
ridiculous, pathetic, provincial old woman. It was a proof that she did
not think the idea would come to me, her having determined to suggest
it herself in that practical, argumentative, heroic way, in which the
timidity however had been so much more striking than the boldness that
her reasons appeared to come first and her feelings afterward.

As the day went on I grew to wish that I had never heard of Aspern's
relics, and I cursed the extravagant curiosity that had put John Cumnor
on the scent of them. We had more than enough material without them,
and my predicament was the just punishment of that most fatal of human
follies, our not having known when to stop. It was very well to say
it was no predicament, that the way out was simple, that I had only to
leave Venice by the first train in the morning, after writing a note to
Miss Tita, to be placed in her hand as soon as I got clear of the house;
for it was a strong sign that I was embarrassed that when I tried to
make up the note in my mind in advance (I would put it on paper as soon
as I got home, before going to bed), I could not think of anything but
"How can I thank you for the rare confidence you have placed in me?"
That would never do; it sounded exactly as if an acceptance were to
follow. Of course I might go away without writing a word, but that
would be brutal and my idea was still to exclude brutal solutions. As my
confusion cooled I was lost in wonder at the importance I had attached
to Miss Bordereau's crumpled scraps; the thought of them became odious
to me, and I was as vexed with the old witch for the superstition that
had prevented her from destroying them as I was with myself for having
already spent more money than I could afford in attempting to control
their fate. I forget what I did, where I went after leaving the Lido and
at what hour or with what recovery of composure I made my way back to my
boat. I only know that in the afternoon, when the air was aglow with
the sunset, I was standing before the church of Saints John and Paul and
looking up at the small square-jawed face of Bartolommeo Colleoni, the
terrible condottiere who sits so sturdily astride of his huge bronze
horse, on the high pedestal on which Venetian gratitude maintains him.
The statue is incomparable, the finest of all mounted figures, unless
that of Marcus Aurelius, who rides benignant before the Roman Capitol,
be finer: but I was not thinking of that; I only found myself staring at
the triumphant captain as if he had an oracle on his lips. The western
light shines into all his grimness at that hour and makes it wonderfully
personal. But he continued to look far over my head, at the red
immersion of another day--he had seen so many go down into the lagoon
through the centuries--and if he were thinking of battles and stratagems
they were of a different quality from any I had to tell him of. He could
not direct me what to do, gaze up at him as I might. Was it before this
or after that I wandered about for an hour in the small canals, to
the continued stupefaction of my gondolier, who had never seen me so
restless and yet so void of a purpose and could extract from me no order
but "Go anywhere--everywhere--all over the place"? He reminded me that
I had not lunched and expressed therefore respectfully the hope that I
would dine earlier. He had had long periods of leisure during the day,
when I had left the boat and rambled, so that I was not obliged to
consider him, and I told him that that day, for a change, I would touch
no meat. It was an effect of poor Miss Tita's proposal, not altogether
auspicious, that I had quite lost my appetite. I don't know why it
happened that on this occasion I was more than ever struck with that
queer air of sociability, of cousinship and family life, which makes up
half the expression of Venice. Without streets and vehicles, the uproar
of wheels, the brutality of horses, and with its little winding ways
where people crowd together, where voices sound as in the corridors of
a house, where the human step circulates as if it skirted the angles of
furniture and shoes never wear out, the place has the character of an
immense collective apartment, in which Piazza San Marco is the most
ornamented corner and palaces and churches, for the rest, play the
part of great divans of repose, tables of entertainment, expanses
of decoration. And somehow the splendid common domicile, familiar,
domestic, and resonant, also resembles a theater, with actors clicking
over bridges and, in straggling processions, tripping along fondamentas.
As you sit in your gondola the footways that in certain parts edge the
canals assume to the eye the importance of a stage, meeting it at the
same angle, and the Venetian figures, moving to and fro against the
battered scenery of their little houses of comedy, strike you as members
of an endless dramatic troupe.

I went to bed that night very tired, without being able to compose a
letter to Miss Tita. Was this failure the reason why I became conscious
the next morning as soon as I awoke of a determination to see the poor
lady again the first moment she would receive me? That had something to
do with it, but what had still more was the fact that during my sleep a
very odd revulsion had taken place in my spirit. I found myself aware of
this almost as soon as I opened my eyes; it made me jump out of my bed
with the movement of a man who remembers that he has left the house door
ajar or a candle burning under a shelf. Was I still in time to save my
goods? That question was in my heart; for what had now come to pass
was that in the unconscious cerebration of sleep I had swung back to a
passionate appreciation of Miss Bordereau's papers. They were now more
precious than ever, and a kind of ferocity had come into my desire to
possess them. The condition Miss Tita had attached to the possession of
them no longer appeared an obstacle worth thinking of, and for an hour,
that morning, my repentant imagination brushed it aside. It was absurd
that I should be able to invent nothing; absurd to renounce so easily
and turn away helpless from the idea that the only way to get hold of
the papers was to unite myself to her for life. I would not unite myself
and yet I would have them. I must add that by the time I sent down to
ask if she would see me I had invented no alternative, though to do so I
had had all the time that I was dressing. This failure was humiliating,
yet what could the alternative be? Miss Tita sent back word that I
might come; and as I descended the stairs and crossed the sala to her
door--this time she received me in her aunt's forlorn parlor--I hoped
she would not think my errand was to tell her I accepted her hand. She
certainly would have made the day before the reflection that I declined
it.

As soon as I came into the room I saw that she had drawn this inference,
but I also saw something which had not been in my forecast. Poor Miss
Tita's sense of her failure had produced an extraordinary alteration in
her, but I had been too full of my literary concupiscence to think of
that. Now I perceived it; I can scarcely tell how it startled me. She
stood in the middle of the room with a face of mildness bent upon
me, and her look of forgiveness, of absolution, made her angelic. It
beautified her; she was younger; she was not a ridiculous old woman.
This optical trick gave her a sort of phantasmagoric brightness, and
while I was still the victim of it I heard a whisper somewhere in the
depths of my conscience: "Why not, after all--why not?" It seemed to
me I was ready to pay the price. Still more distinctly however than
the whisper I heard Miss Tita's own voice. I was so struck with the
different effect she made upon me that at first I was not clearly aware
of what she was saying; then I perceived she had bade me goodbye--she
said something about hoping I should be very happy.

"Goodbye--goodbye?" I repeated with an inflection interrogative and
probably foolish.

I saw she did not feel the interrogation, she only heard the words; she
had strung herself up to accepting our separation and they fell upon
her ear as a proof. "Are you going today?" she asked. "But it doesn't
matter, for whenever you go I shall not see you again. I don't want to."
And she smiled strangely, with an infinite gentleness. She had never
doubted that I had left her the day before in horror. How could she,
since I had not come back before night to contradict, even as a simple
form, such an idea? And now she had the force of soul--Miss Tita with
force of soul was a new conception--to smile at me in her humiliation.

"What shall you do--where shall you go?" I asked.

"Oh, I don't know. I have done the great thing. I have destroyed the
papers."

"Destroyed them?" I faltered.

"Yes; what was I to keep them for? I burned them last night, one by one,
in the kitchen."

"One by one?" I repeated, mechanically.

"It took a long time--there were so many." The room seemed to go round
me as she said this, and a real darkness for a moment descended upon my
eyes. When it passed Miss Tita was there still, but the transfiguration
was over and she had changed back to a plain, dingy, elderly person.
It was in this character she spoke as she said, "I can't stay with you
longer, I can't;" and it was in this character that she turned her back
upon me, as I had turned mine upon her twenty-four hours before, and
moved to the door of her room. Here she did what I had not done when I
quitted her--she paused long enough to give me one look. I have never
forgotten it and I sometimes still suffer from it, though it was not
resentful. No, there was no resentment, nothing hard or vindictive in
poor Miss Tita; for when, later, I sent her in exchange for the portrait
of Jeffrey Aspern a larger sum of money than I had hoped to be able to
gather for her, writing to her that I had sold the picture, she kept it
with thanks; she never sent it back. I wrote to her that I had sold the
picture, but I admitted to Mrs. Prest, at the time (I met her in London,
in the autumn), that it hangs above my writing table. When I look at it
my chagrin at the loss of the letters becomes almost intolerable.









DAISY MILLER: A STUDY

IN TWO PARTS

The text is that of the first American appearance in book form, 1879.





PART I


At the little town of Vevey, in Switzerland, there is a particularly
comfortable hotel. There are, indeed, many hotels, for the entertainment
of tourists is the business of the place, which, as many travelers will
remember, is seated upon the edge of a remarkably blue lake--a lake that
it behooves every tourist to visit. The shore of the lake presents an
unbroken array of establishments of this order, of every category, from
the "grand hotel" of the newest fashion, with a chalk-white front, a
hundred balconies, and a dozen flags flying from its roof, to the little
Swiss pension of an elder day, with its name inscribed in German-looking
lettering upon a pink or yellow wall and an awkward summerhouse in the
angle of the garden. One of the hotels at Vevey, however, is famous,
even classical, being distinguished from many of its upstart neighbors
by an air both of luxury and of maturity. In this region, in the month
of June, American travelers are extremely numerous; it may be said,
indeed, that Vevey assumes at this period some of the characteristics
of an American watering place. There are sights and sounds which evoke a
vision, an echo, of Newport and Saratoga. There is a flitting hither
and thither of "stylish" young girls, a rustling of muslin flounces,
a rattle of dance music in the morning hours, a sound of high-pitched
voices at all times. You receive an impression of these things at the
excellent inn of the "Trois Couronnes" and are transported in fancy to
the Ocean House or to Congress Hall. But at the "Trois Couronnes," it
must be added, there are other features that are much at variance with
these suggestions: neat German waiters, who look like secretaries of
legation; Russian princesses sitting in the garden; little Polish boys
walking about held by the hand, with their governors; a view of the
sunny crest of the Dent du Midi and the picturesque towers of the Castle
of Chillon.

I hardly know whether it was the analogies or the differences that were
uppermost in the mind of a young American, who, two or three years ago,
sat in the garden of the "Trois Couronnes," looking about him, rather
idly, at some of the graceful objects I have mentioned. It was a
beautiful summer morning, and in whatever fashion the young American
looked at things, they must have seemed to him charming. He had come
from Geneva the day before by the little steamer, to see his aunt, who
was staying at the hotel--Geneva having been for a long time his place
of residence. But his aunt had a headache--his aunt had almost always a
headache--and now she was shut up in her room, smelling camphor, so that
he was at liberty to wander about. He was some seven-and-twenty years
of age; when his friends spoke of him, they usually said that he was at
Geneva "studying." When his enemies spoke of him, they said--but,
after all, he had no enemies; he was an extremely amiable fellow, and
universally liked. What I should say is, simply, that when certain
persons spoke of him they affirmed that the reason of his spending so
much time at Geneva was that he was extremely devoted to a lady who
lived there--a foreign lady--a person older than himself. Very few
Americans--indeed, I think none--had ever seen this lady, about whom
there were some singular stories. But Winterbourne had an old attachment
for the little metropolis of Calvinism; he had been put to school there
as a boy, and he had afterward gone to college there--circumstances
which had led to his forming a great many youthful friendships. Many of
these he had kept, and they were a source of great satisfaction to him.

After knocking at his aunt's door and learning that she was indisposed,
he had taken a walk about the town, and then he had come in to his
breakfast. He had now finished his breakfast; but he was drinking a
small cup of coffee, which had been served to him on a little table in
the garden by one of the waiters who looked like an attache. At last
he finished his coffee and lit a cigarette. Presently a small boy came
walking along the path--an urchin of nine or ten. The child, who was
diminutive for his years, had an aged expression of countenance, a pale
complexion, and sharp little features. He was dressed in knickerbockers,
with red stockings, which displayed his poor little spindle-shanks;
he also wore a brilliant red cravat. He carried in his hand a long
alpenstock, the sharp point of which he thrust into everything that
he approached--the flowerbeds, the garden benches, the trains of the
ladies' dresses. In front of Winterbourne he paused, looking at him with
a pair of bright, penetrating little eyes.

"Will you give me a lump of sugar?" he asked in a sharp, hard little
voice--a voice immature and yet, somehow, not young.

Winterbourne glanced at the small table near him, on which his coffee
service rested, and saw that several morsels of sugar remained. "Yes,
you may take one," he answered; "but I don't think sugar is good for
little boys."

This little boy stepped forward and carefully selected three of
the coveted fragments, two of which he buried in the pocket of his
knickerbockers, depositing the other as promptly in another place. He
poked his alpenstock, lance-fashion, into Winterbourne's bench and tried
to crack the lump of sugar with his teeth.

"Oh, blazes; it's har-r-d!" he exclaimed, pronouncing the adjective in a
peculiar manner.

Winterbourne had immediately perceived that he might have the honor
of claiming him as a fellow countryman. "Take care you don't hurt your
teeth," he said, paternally.

"I haven't got any teeth to hurt. They have all come out. I have only
got seven teeth. My mother counted them last night, and one came out
right afterward. She said she'd slap me if any more came out. I can't
help it. It's this old Europe. It's the climate that makes them come
out. In America they didn't come out. It's these hotels."

Winterbourne was much amused. "If you eat three lumps of sugar, your
mother will certainly slap you," he said.

"She's got to give me some candy, then," rejoined his young
interlocutor. "I can't get any candy here--any American candy. American
candy's the best candy."

"And are American little boys the best little boys?" asked Winterbourne.

"I don't know. I'm an American boy," said the child.

"I see you are one of the best!" laughed Winterbourne.

"Are you an American man?" pursued this vivacious infant. And then,
on Winterbourne's affirmative reply--"American men are the best," he
declared.

His companion thanked him for the compliment, and the child, who had
now got astride of his alpenstock, stood looking about him, while he
attacked a second lump of sugar. Winterbourne wondered if he himself
had been like this in his infancy, for he had been brought to Europe at
about this age.

"Here comes my sister!" cried the child in a moment. "She's an American
girl."

Winterbourne looked along the path and saw a beautiful young lady
advancing. "American girls are the best girls," he said cheerfully to
his young companion.

"My sister ain't the best!" the child declared. "She's always blowing at
me."

"I imagine that is your fault, not hers," said Winterbourne. The young
lady meanwhile had drawn near. She was dressed in white muslin, with a
hundred frills and flounces, and knots of pale-colored ribbon. She was
bareheaded, but she balanced in her hand a large parasol, with a deep
border of embroidery; and she was strikingly, admirably pretty. "How
pretty they are!" thought Winterbourne, straightening himself in his
seat, as if he were prepared to rise.

The young lady paused in front of his bench, near the parapet of the
garden, which overlooked the lake. The little boy had now converted his
alpenstock into a vaulting pole, by the aid of which he was springing
about in the gravel and kicking it up not a little.

"Randolph," said the young lady, "what ARE you doing?"

"I'm going up the Alps," replied Randolph. "This is the way!" And he
gave another little jump, scattering the pebbles about Winterbourne's
ears.

"That's the way they come down," said Winterbourne.

"He's an American man!" cried Randolph, in his little hard voice.

The young lady gave no heed to this announcement, but looked straight
at her brother. "Well, I guess you had better be quiet," she simply
observed.

It seemed to Winterbourne that he had been in a manner presented. He
got up and stepped slowly toward the young girl, throwing away his
cigarette. "This little boy and I have made acquaintance," he said, with
great civility. In Geneva, as he had been perfectly aware, a young
man was not at liberty to speak to a young unmarried lady except under
certain rarely occurring conditions; but here at Vevey, what conditions
could be better than these?--a pretty American girl coming and standing
in front of you in a garden. This pretty American girl, however, on
hearing Winterbourne's observation, simply glanced at him; she then
turned her head and looked over the parapet, at the lake and the
opposite mountains. He wondered whether he had gone too far, but he
decided that he must advance farther, rather than retreat. While he was
thinking of something else to say, the young lady turned to the little
boy again.

"I should like to know where you got that pole," she said.

"I bought it," responded Randolph.

"You don't mean to say you're going to take it to Italy?"

"Yes, I am going to take it to Italy," the child declared.

The young girl glanced over the front of her dress and smoothed out a
knot or two of ribbon. Then she rested her eyes upon the prospect again.
"Well, I guess you had better leave it somewhere," she said after a
moment.

"Are you going to Italy?" Winterbourne inquired in a tone of great
respect.

The young lady glanced at him again. "Yes, sir," she replied. And she
said nothing more.

"Are you--a--going over the Simplon?" Winterbourne pursued, a little
embarrassed.

"I don't know," she said. "I suppose it's some mountain. Randolph, what
mountain are we going over?"

"Going where?" the child demanded.

"To Italy," Winterbourne explained.

"I don't know," said Randolph. "I don't want to go to Italy. I want to
go to America."

"Oh, Italy is a beautiful place!" rejoined the young man.

"Can you get candy there?" Randolph loudly inquired.

"I hope not," said his sister. "I guess you have had enough candy, and
mother thinks so too."

"I haven't had any for ever so long--for a hundred weeks!" cried the
boy, still jumping about.

The young lady inspected her flounces and smoothed her ribbons again;
and Winterbourne presently risked an observation upon the beauty of the
view. He was ceasing to be embarrassed, for he had begun to perceive
that she was not in the least embarrassed herself. There had not been
the slightest alteration in her charming complexion; she was evidently
neither offended nor flattered. If she looked another way when he spoke
to her, and seemed not particularly to hear him, this was simply her
habit, her manner. Yet, as he talked a little more and pointed out some
of the objects of interest in the view, with which she appeared quite
unacquainted, she gradually gave him more of the benefit of her glance;
and then he saw that this glance was perfectly direct and unshrinking.
It was not, however, what would have been called an immodest glance,
for the young girl's eyes were singularly honest and fresh. They were
wonderfully pretty eyes; and, indeed, Winterbourne had not seen for
a long time anything prettier than his fair countrywoman's various
features--her complexion, her nose, her ears, her teeth. He had a great
relish for feminine beauty; he was addicted to observing and analyzing
it; and as regards this young lady's face he made several observations.
It was not at all insipid, but it was not exactly expressive; and
though it was eminently delicate, Winterbourne mentally accused it--very
forgivingly--of a want of finish. He thought it very possible that
Master Randolph's sister was a coquette; he was sure she had a spirit of
her own; but in her bright, sweet, superficial little visage there was
no mockery, no irony. Before long it became obvious that she was much
disposed toward conversation. She told him that they were going to Rome
for the winter--she and her mother and Randolph. She asked him if he was
a "real American"; she shouldn't have taken him for one; he seemed more
like a German--this was said after a little hesitation--especially when
he spoke. Winterbourne, laughing, answered that he had met Germans who
spoke like Americans, but that he had not, so far as he remembered, met
an American who spoke like a German. Then he asked her if she should not
be more comfortable in sitting upon the bench which he had just quitted.
She answered that she liked standing up and walking about; but she
presently sat down. She told him she was from New York State--"if you
know where that is." Winterbourne learned more about her by catching
hold of her small, slippery brother and making him stand a few minutes
by his side.

"Tell me your name, my boy," he said.

"Randolph C. Miller," said the boy sharply. "And I'll tell you her
name;" and he leveled his alpenstock at his sister.

"You had better wait till you are asked!" said this young lady calmly.

"I should like very much to know your name," said Winterbourne.

"Her name is Daisy Miller!" cried the child. "But that isn't her real
name; that isn't her name on her cards."

"It's a pity you haven't got one of my cards!" said Miss Miller.

"Her real name is Annie P. Miller," the boy went on.

"Ask him HIS name," said his sister, indicating Winterbourne.

But on this point Randolph seemed perfectly indifferent; he continued to
supply information with regard to his own family. "My father's name is
Ezra B. Miller," he announced. "My father ain't in Europe; my father's
in a better place than Europe."

Winterbourne imagined for a moment that this was the manner in which the
child had been taught to intimate that Mr. Miller had been removed to
the sphere of celestial reward. But Randolph immediately added, "My
father's in Schenectady. He's got a big business. My father's rich, you
bet!"

"Well!" ejaculated Miss Miller, lowering her parasol and looking at
the embroidered border. Winterbourne presently released the child,
who departed, dragging his alpenstock along the path. "He doesn't like
Europe," said the young girl. "He wants to go back."

"To Schenectady, you mean?"

"Yes; he wants to go right home. He hasn't got any boys here. There is
one boy here, but he always goes round with a teacher; they won't let
him play."

"And your brother hasn't any teacher?" Winterbourne inquired.

"Mother thought of getting him one, to travel round with us. There was a
lady told her of a very good teacher; an American lady--perhaps you know
her--Mrs. Sanders. I think she came from Boston. She told her of this
teacher, and we thought of getting him to travel round with us. But
Randolph said he didn't want a teacher traveling round with us. He said
he wouldn't have lessons when he was in the cars. And we ARE in the cars
about half the time. There was an English lady we met in the cars--I
think her name was Miss Featherstone; perhaps you know her. She wanted
to know why I didn't give Randolph lessons--give him 'instruction,' she
called it. I guess he could give me more instruction than I could give
him. He's very smart."

"Yes," said Winterbourne; "he seems very smart."

"Mother's going to get a teacher for him as soon as we get to Italy. Can
you get good teachers in Italy?"

"Very good, I should think," said Winterbourne.

"Or else she's going to find some school. He ought to learn some more.
He's only nine. He's going to college." And in this way Miss Miller
continued to converse upon the affairs of her family and upon other
topics. She sat there with her extremely pretty hands, ornamented with
very brilliant rings, folded in her lap, and with her pretty eyes now
resting upon those of Winterbourne, now wandering over the garden, the
people who passed by, and the beautiful view. She talked to Winterbourne
as if she had known him a long time. He found it very pleasant. It was
many years since he had heard a young girl talk so much. It might have
been said of this unknown young lady, who had come and sat down beside
him upon a bench, that she chattered. She was very quiet; she sat in a
charming, tranquil attitude; but her lips and her eyes were constantly
moving. She had a soft, slender, agreeable voice, and her tone was
decidedly sociable. She gave Winterbourne a history of her movements
and intentions and those of her mother and brother, in Europe, and
enumerated, in particular, the various hotels at which they had stopped.
"That English lady in the cars," she said--"Miss Featherstone--asked me
if we didn't all live in hotels in America. I told her I had never been
in so many hotels in my life as since I came to Europe. I have never
seen so many--it's nothing but hotels." But Miss Miller did not make
this remark with a querulous accent; she appeared to be in the best
humor with everything. She declared that the hotels were very good, when
once you got used to their ways, and that Europe was perfectly sweet.
She was not disappointed--not a bit. Perhaps it was because she had
heard so much about it before. She had ever so many intimate friends
that had been there ever so many times. And then she had had ever so
many dresses and things from Paris. Whenever she put on a Paris dress
she felt as if she were in Europe.

"It was a kind of a wishing cap," said Winterbourne.

"Yes," said Miss Miller without examining this analogy; "it always made
me wish I was here. But I needn't have done that for dresses. I am sure
they send all the pretty ones to America; you see the most frightful
things here. The only thing I don't like," she proceeded, "is the
society. There isn't any society; or, if there is, I don't know where it
keeps itself. Do you? I suppose there is some society somewhere, but I
haven't seen anything of it. I'm very fond of society, and I have always
had a great deal of it. I don't mean only in Schenectady, but in New
York. I used to go to New York every winter. In New York I had lots of
society. Last winter I had seventeen dinners given me; and three of them
were by gentlemen," added Daisy Miller. "I have more friends in New York
than in Schenectady--more gentleman friends; and more young lady friends
too," she resumed in a moment. She paused again for an instant; she was
looking at Winterbourne with all her prettiness in her lively eyes and
in her light, slightly monotonous smile. "I have always had," she said,
"a great deal of gentlemen's society."

Poor Winterbourne was amused, perplexed, and decidedly charmed. He
had never yet heard a young girl express herself in just this fashion;
never, at least, save in cases where to say such things seemed a kind of
demonstrative evidence of a certain laxity of deportment. And yet was he
to accuse Miss Daisy Miller of actual or potential inconduite, as they
said at Geneva? He felt that he had lived at Geneva so long that he
had lost a good deal; he had become dishabituated to the American tone.
Never, indeed, since he had grown old enough to appreciate things, had
he encountered a young American girl of so pronounced a type as this.
Certainly she was very charming, but how deucedly sociable! Was she
simply a pretty girl from New York State? Were they all like that, the
pretty girls who had a good deal of gentlemen's society? Or was she also
a designing, an audacious, an unscrupulous young person? Winterbourne
had lost his instinct in this matter, and his reason could not help him.
Miss Daisy Miller looked extremely innocent. Some people had told him
that, after all, American girls were exceedingly innocent; and others
had told him that, after all, they were not. He was inclined to think
Miss Daisy Miller was a flirt--a pretty American flirt. He had never, as
yet, had any relations with young ladies of this category. He had
known, here in Europe, two or three women--persons older than Miss Daisy
Miller, and provided, for respectability's sake, with husbands--who were
great coquettes--dangerous, terrible women, with whom one's relations
were liable to take a serious turn. But this young girl was not a
coquette in that sense; she was very unsophisticated; she was only a
pretty American flirt. Winterbourne was almost grateful for having found
the formula that applied to Miss Daisy Miller. He leaned back in his
seat; he remarked to himself that she had the most charming nose he had
ever seen; he wondered what were the regular conditions and limitations
of one's intercourse with a pretty American flirt. It presently became
apparent that he was on the way to learn.

"Have you been to that old castle?" asked the young girl, pointing with
her parasol to the far-gleaming walls of the Chateau de Chillon.

"Yes, formerly, more than once," said Winterbourne. "You too, I suppose,
have seen it?"

"No; we haven't been there. I want to go there dreadfully. Of course I
mean to go there. I wouldn't go away from here without having seen that
old castle."

"It's a very pretty excursion," said Winterbourne, "and very easy to
make. You can drive, you know, or you can go by the little steamer."

"You can go in the cars," said Miss Miller.

"Yes; you can go in the cars," Winterbourne assented.

"Our courier says they take you right up to the castle," the young girl
continued. "We were going last week, but my mother gave out. She suffers
dreadfully from dyspepsia. She said she couldn't go. Randolph wouldn't
go either; he says he doesn't think much of old castles. But I guess
we'll go this week, if we can get Randolph."

"Your brother is not interested in ancient monuments?" Winterbourne
inquired, smiling.

"He says he don't care much about old castles. He's only nine. He
wants to stay at the hotel. Mother's afraid to leave him alone, and the
courier won't stay with him; so we haven't been to many places. But it
will be too bad if we don't go up there." And Miss Miller pointed again
at the Chateau de Chillon.

"I should think it might be arranged," said Winterbourne. "Couldn't you
get some one to stay for the afternoon with Randolph?"

Miss Miller looked at him a moment, and then, very placidly, "I wish YOU
would stay with him!" she said.

Winterbourne hesitated a moment. "I should much rather go to Chillon
with you."

"With me?" asked the young girl with the same placidity.

She didn't rise, blushing, as a young girl at Geneva would have done;
and yet Winterbourne, conscious that he had been very bold, thought
it possible she was offended. "With your mother," he answered very
respectfully.

But it seemed that both his audacity and his respect were lost upon Miss
Daisy Miller. "I guess my mother won't go, after all," she said. "She
don't like to ride round in the afternoon. But did you really mean what
you said just now--that you would like to go up there?"

"Most earnestly," Winterbourne declared.

"Then we may arrange it. If mother will stay with Randolph, I guess
Eugenio will."

"Eugenio?" the young man inquired.

"Eugenio's our courier. He doesn't like to stay with Randolph; he's the
most fastidious man I ever saw. But he's a splendid courier. I guess
he'll stay at home with Randolph if mother does, and then we can go to
the castle."

Winterbourne reflected for an instant as lucidly as possible--"we" could
only mean Miss Daisy Miller and himself. This program seemed almost too
agreeable for credence; he felt as if he ought to kiss the young lady's
hand. Possibly he would have done so and quite spoiled the project, but
at this moment another person, presumably Eugenio, appeared. A tall,
handsome man, with superb whiskers, wearing a velvet morning coat and
a brilliant watch chain, approached Miss Miller, looking sharply at her
companion. "Oh, Eugenio!" said Miss Miller with the friendliest accent.

Eugenio had looked at Winterbourne from head to foot; he now bowed
gravely to the young lady. "I have the honor to inform mademoiselle that
luncheon is upon the table."

Miss Miller slowly rose. "See here, Eugenio!" she said; "I'm going to
that old castle, anyway."

"To the Chateau de Chillon, mademoiselle?" the courier inquired.
"Mademoiselle has made arrangements?" he added in a tone which struck
Winterbourne as very impertinent.

Eugenio's tone apparently threw, even to Miss Miller's own apprehension,
a slightly ironical light upon the young girl's situation. She turned
to Winterbourne, blushing a little--a very little. "You won't back out?"
she said.

"I shall not be happy till we go!" he protested.

"And you are staying in this hotel?" she went on. "And you are really an
American?"

The courier stood looking at Winterbourne offensively. The young man,
at least, thought his manner of looking an offense to Miss Miller; it
conveyed an imputation that she "picked up" acquaintances. "I shall have
the honor of presenting to you a person who will tell you all about me,"
he said, smiling and referring to his aunt.

"Oh, well, we'll go some day," said Miss Miller. And she gave him a
smile and turned away. She put up her parasol and walked back to the inn
beside Eugenio. Winterbourne stood looking after her; and as she moved
away, drawing her muslin furbelows over the gravel, said to himself that
she had the tournure of a princess.

He had, however, engaged to do more than proved feasible, in promising
to present his aunt, Mrs. Costello, to Miss Daisy Miller. As soon as the
former lady had got better of her headache, he waited upon her in her
apartment; and, after the proper inquiries in regard to her health, he
asked her if she had observed in the hotel an American family--a mamma,
a daughter, and a little boy.

"And a courier?" said Mrs. Costello. "Oh yes, I have observed them. Seen
them--heard them--and kept out of their way." Mrs. Costello was a widow
with a fortune; a person of much distinction, who frequently intimated
that, if she were not so dreadfully liable to sick headaches, she would
probably have left a deeper impress upon her time. She had a long, pale
face, a high nose, and a great deal of very striking white hair, which
she wore in large puffs and rouleaux over the top of her head. She had
two sons married in New York and another who was now in Europe. This
young man was amusing himself at Hamburg, and, though he was on his
travels, was rarely perceived to visit any particular city at the moment
selected by his mother for her own appearance there. Her nephew, who had
come up to Vevey expressly to see her, was therefore more attentive than
those who, as she said, were nearer to her. He had imbibed at Geneva the
idea that one must always be attentive to one's aunt. Mrs. Costello
had not seen him for many years, and she was greatly pleased with him,
manifesting her approbation by initiating him into many of the secrets
of that social sway which, as she gave him to understand, she exerted in
the American capital. She admitted that she was very exclusive; but, if
he were acquainted with New York, he would see that one had to be. And
her picture of the minutely hierarchical constitution of the society of
that city, which she presented to him in many different lights, was, to
Winterbourne's imagination, almost oppressively striking.

He immediately perceived, from her tone, that Miss Daisy Miller's place
in the social scale was low. "I am afraid you don't approve of them," he
said.

"They are very common," Mrs. Costello declared. "They are the sort of
Americans that one does one's duty by not--not accepting."

"Ah, you don't accept them?" said the young man.

"I can't, my dear Frederick. I would if I could, but I can't."

"The young girl is very pretty," said Winterbourne in a moment.

"Of course she's pretty. But she is very common."

"I see what you mean, of course," said Winterbourne after another pause.

"She has that charming look that they all have," his aunt resumed. "I
can't think where they pick it up; and she dresses in perfection--no,
you don't know how well she dresses. I can't think where they get their
taste."

"But, my dear aunt, she is not, after all, a Comanche savage."

"She is a young lady," said Mrs. Costello, "who has an intimacy with her
mamma's courier."

"An intimacy with the courier?" the young man demanded.

"Oh, the mother is just as bad! They treat the courier like a familiar
friend--like a gentleman. I shouldn't wonder if he dines with them.
Very likely they have never seen a man with such good manners, such
fine clothes, so like a gentleman. He probably corresponds to the young
lady's idea of a count. He sits with them in the garden in the evening.
I think he smokes."

Winterbourne listened with interest to these disclosures; they helped
him to make up his mind about Miss Daisy. Evidently she was rather wild.
"Well," he said, "I am not a courier, and yet she was very charming to
me."

"You had better have said at first," said Mrs. Costello with dignity,
"that you had made her acquaintance."

"We simply met in the garden, and we talked a bit."

"Tout bonnement! And pray what did you say?"

"I said I should take the liberty of introducing her to my admirable
aunt."

"I am much obliged to you."

"It was to guarantee my respectability," said Winterbourne.

"And pray who is to guarantee hers?"

"Ah, you are cruel!" said the young man. "She's a very nice young girl."

"You don't say that as if you believed it," Mrs. Costello observed.

"She is completely uncultivated," Winterbourne went on. "But she is
wonderfully pretty, and, in short, she is very nice. To prove that I
believe it, I am going to take her to the Chateau de Chillon."

"You two are going off there together? I should say it proved just the
contrary. How long had you known her, may I ask, when this interesting
project was formed? You haven't been twenty-four hours in the house."

"I have known her half an hour!" said Winterbourne, smiling.

"Dear me!" cried Mrs. Costello. "What a dreadful girl!"

Her nephew was silent for some moments. "You really think, then," he
began earnestly, and with a desire for trustworthy information--"you
really think that--" But he paused again.

"Think what, sir?" said his aunt.

"That she is the sort of young lady who expects a man, sooner or later,
to carry her off?"

"I haven't the least idea what such young ladies expect a man to do. But
I really think that you had better not meddle with little American girls
that are uncultivated, as you call them. You have lived too long out of
the country. You will be sure to make some great mistake. You are too
innocent."

"My dear aunt, I am not so innocent," said Winterbourne, smiling and
curling his mustache.

"You are guilty too, then!"

Winterbourne continued to curl his mustache meditatively. "You won't let
the poor girl know you then?" he asked at last.

"Is it literally true that she is going to the Chateau de Chillon with
you?"

"I think that she fully intends it."

"Then, my dear Frederick," said Mrs. Costello, "I must decline the honor
of her acquaintance. I am an old woman, but I am not too old, thank
Heaven, to be shocked!"

"But don't they all do these things--the young girls in America?"
Winterbourne inquired.

Mrs. Costello stared a moment. "I should like to see my granddaughters
do them!" she declared grimly.

This seemed to throw some light upon the matter, for Winterbourne
remembered to have heard that his pretty cousins in New York were
"tremendous flirts." If, therefore, Miss Daisy Miller exceeded the
liberal margin allowed to these young ladies, it was probable that
anything might be expected of her. Winterbourne was impatient to see her
again, and he was vexed with himself that, by instinct, he should not
appreciate her justly.

Though he was impatient to see her, he hardly knew what he should say
to her about his aunt's refusal to become acquainted with her; but he
discovered, promptly enough, that with Miss Daisy Miller there was
no great need of walking on tiptoe. He found her that evening in the
garden, wandering about in the warm starlight like an indolent sylph,
and swinging to and fro the largest fan he had ever beheld. It was ten
o'clock. He had dined with his aunt, had been sitting with her since
dinner, and had just taken leave of her till the morrow. Miss Daisy
Miller seemed very glad to see him; she declared it was the longest
evening she had ever passed.

"Have you been all alone?" he asked.

"I have been walking round with mother. But mother gets tired walking
round," she answered.

"Has she gone to bed?"

"No; she doesn't like to go to bed," said the young girl. "She doesn't
sleep--not three hours. She says she doesn't know how she lives. She's
dreadfully nervous. I guess she sleeps more than she thinks. She's gone
somewhere after Randolph; she wants to try to get him to go to bed. He
doesn't like to go to bed."

"Let us hope she will persuade him," observed Winterbourne.

"She will talk to him all she can; but he doesn't like her to talk
to him," said Miss Daisy, opening her fan. "She's going to try to get
Eugenio to talk to him. But he isn't afraid of Eugenio. Eugenio's a
splendid courier, but he can't make much impression on Randolph! I don't
believe he'll go to bed before eleven." It appeared that Randolph's
vigil was in fact triumphantly prolonged, for Winterbourne strolled
about with the young girl for some time without meeting her mother. "I
have been looking round for that lady you want to introduce me to," his
companion resumed. "She's your aunt." Then, on Winterbourne's admitting
the fact and expressing some curiosity as to how she had learned it, she
said she had heard all about Mrs. Costello from the chambermaid. She was
very quiet and very comme il faut; she wore white puffs; she spoke to no
one, and she never dined at the table d'hote. Every two days she had a
headache. "I think that's a lovely description, headache and all!" said
Miss Daisy, chattering along in her thin, gay voice. "I want to know her
ever so much. I know just what YOUR aunt would be; I know I should like
her. She would be very exclusive. I like a lady to be exclusive; I'm
dying to be exclusive myself. Well, we ARE exclusive, mother and I. We
don't speak to everyone--or they don't speak to us. I suppose it's about
the same thing. Anyway, I shall be ever so glad to know your aunt."

Winterbourne was embarrassed. "She would be most happy," he said; "but I
am afraid those headaches will interfere."

The young girl looked at him through the dusk. "But I suppose she
doesn't have a headache every day," she said sympathetically.

Winterbourne was silent a moment. "She tells me she does," he answered
at last, not knowing what to say.

Miss Daisy Miller stopped and stood looking at him. Her prettiness was
still visible in the darkness; she was opening and closing her enormous
fan. "She doesn't want to know me!" she said suddenly. "Why don't you
say so? You needn't be afraid. I'm not afraid!" And she gave a little
laugh.

Winterbourne fancied there was a tremor in her voice; he was touched,
shocked, mortified by it. "My dear young lady," he protested, "she knows
no one. It's her wretched health."

The young girl walked on a few steps, laughing still. "You needn't be
afraid," she repeated. "Why should she want to know me?" Then she paused
again; she was close to the parapet of the garden, and in front of her
was the starlit lake. There was a vague sheen upon its surface, and in
the distance were dimly seen mountain forms. Daisy Miller looked out
upon the mysterious prospect and then she gave another little laugh.
"Gracious! she IS exclusive!" she said. Winterbourne wondered whether
she was seriously wounded, and for a moment almost wished that her sense
of injury might be such as to make it becoming in him to attempt to
reassure and comfort her. He had a pleasant sense that she would be very
approachable for consolatory purposes. He felt then, for the instant,
quite ready to sacrifice his aunt, conversationally; to admit that she
was a proud, rude woman, and to declare that they needn't mind her.
But before he had time to commit himself to this perilous mixture
of gallantry and impiety, the young lady, resuming her walk, gave an
exclamation in quite another tone. "Well, here's Mother! I guess she
hasn't got Randolph to go to bed." The figure of a lady appeared at a
distance, very indistinct in the darkness, and advancing with a slow and
wavering movement. Suddenly it seemed to pause.

"Are you sure it is your mother? Can you distinguish her in this thick
dusk?" Winterbourne asked.

"Well!" cried Miss Daisy Miller with a laugh; "I guess I know my own
mother. And when she has got on my shawl, too! She is always wearing my
things."

The lady in question, ceasing to advance, hovered vaguely about the spot
at which she had checked her steps.

"I am afraid your mother doesn't see you," said Winterbourne.
"Or perhaps," he added, thinking, with Miss Miller, the joke
permissible--"perhaps she feels guilty about your shawl."

"Oh, it's a fearful old thing!" the young girl replied serenely. "I told
her she could wear it. She won't come here because she sees you."

"Ah, then," said Winterbourne, "I had better leave you."

"Oh, no; come on!" urged Miss Daisy Miller.

"I'm afraid your mother doesn't approve of my walking with you."

Miss Miller gave him a serious glance. "It isn't for me; it's for
you--that is, it's for HER. Well, I don't know who it's for! But mother
doesn't like any of my gentlemen friends. She's right down timid. She
always makes a fuss if I introduce a gentleman. But I DO introduce
them--almost always. If I didn't introduce my gentlemen friends to
Mother," the young girl added in her little soft, flat monotone, "I
shouldn't think I was natural."

"To introduce me," said Winterbourne, "you must know my name." And he
proceeded to pronounce it.

"Oh, dear, I can't say all that!" said his companion with a laugh. But
by this time they had come up to Mrs. Miller, who, as they drew near,
walked to the parapet of the garden and leaned upon it, looking intently
at the lake and turning her back to them. "Mother!" said the young
girl in a tone of decision. Upon this the elder lady turned round. "Mr.
Winterbourne," said Miss Daisy Miller, introducing the young man very
frankly and prettily. "Common," she was, as Mrs. Costello had pronounced
her; yet it was a wonder to Winterbourne that, with her commonness, she
had a singularly delicate grace.

Her mother was a small, spare, light person, with a wandering eye,
a very exiguous nose, and a large forehead, decorated with a certain
amount of thin, much frizzled hair. Like her daughter, Mrs. Miller was
dressed with extreme elegance; she had enormous diamonds in her ears.
So far as Winterbourne could observe, she gave him no greeting--she
certainly was not looking at him. Daisy was near her, pulling her shawl
straight. "What are you doing, poking round here?" this young lady
inquired, but by no means with that harshness of accent which her choice
of words may imply.

"I don't know," said her mother, turning toward the lake again.

"I shouldn't think you'd want that shawl!" Daisy exclaimed.

"Well I do!" her mother answered with a little laugh.

"Did you get Randolph to go to bed?" asked the young girl.

"No; I couldn't induce him," said Mrs. Miller very gently. "He wants to
talk to the waiter. He likes to talk to that waiter."

"I was telling Mr. Winterbourne," the young girl went on; and to the
young man's ear her tone might have indicated that she had been uttering
his name all her life.

"Oh, yes!" said Winterbourne; "I have the pleasure of knowing your son."

Randolph's mamma was silent; she turned her attention to the lake. But
at last she spoke. "Well, I don't see how he lives!"

"Anyhow, it isn't so bad as it was at Dover," said Daisy Miller.

"And what occurred at Dover?" Winterbourne asked.

"He wouldn't go to bed at all. I guess he sat up all night in the public
parlor. He wasn't in bed at twelve o'clock: I know that."

"It was half-past twelve," declared Mrs. Miller with mild emphasis.

"Does he sleep much during the day?" Winterbourne demanded.

"I guess he doesn't sleep much," Daisy rejoined.

"I wish he would!" said her mother. "It seems as if he couldn't."

"I think he's real tiresome," Daisy pursued.

Then, for some moments, there was silence. "Well, Daisy Miller," said
the elder lady, presently, "I shouldn't think you'd want to talk against
your own brother!"

"Well, he IS tiresome, Mother," said Daisy, quite without the asperity
of a retort.

"He's only nine," urged Mrs. Miller.

"Well, he wouldn't go to that castle," said the young girl. "I'm going
there with Mr. Winterbourne."

To this announcement, very placidly made, Daisy's mamma offered no
response. Winterbourne took for granted that she deeply disapproved of
the projected excursion; but he said to himself that she was a simple,
easily managed person, and that a few deferential protestations would
take the edge from her displeasure. "Yes," he began; "your daughter has
kindly allowed me the honor of being her guide."

Mrs. Miller's wandering eyes attached themselves, with a sort of
appealing air, to Daisy, who, however, strolled a few steps farther,
gently humming to herself. "I presume you will go in the cars," said her
mother.

"Yes, or in the boat," said Winterbourne.

"Well, of course, I don't know," Mrs. Miller rejoined. "I have never
been to that castle."

"It is a pity you shouldn't go," said Winterbourne, beginning to feel
reassured as to her opposition. And yet he was quite prepared to find
that, as a matter of course, she meant to accompany her daughter.

"We've been thinking ever so much about going," she pursued; "but it
seems as if we couldn't. Of course Daisy--she wants to go round. But
there's a lady here--I don't know her name--she says she shouldn't think
we'd want to go to see castles HERE; she should think we'd want to wait
till we got to Italy. It seems as if there would be so many there,"
continued Mrs. Miller with an air of increasing confidence. "Of course
we only want to see the principal ones. We visited several in England,"
she presently added.

"Ah yes! in England there are beautiful castles," said Winterbourne.
"But Chillon here, is very well worth seeing."

"Well, if Daisy feels up to it--" said Mrs. Miller, in a tone
impregnated with a sense of the magnitude of the enterprise. "It seems
as if there was nothing she wouldn't undertake."

"Oh, I think she'll enjoy it!" Winterbourne declared. And he desired
more and more to make it a certainty that he was to have the privilege
of a tete-a-tete with the young lady, who was still strolling along
in front of them, softly vocalizing. "You are not disposed, madam," he
inquired, "to undertake it yourself?"

Daisy's mother looked at him an instant askance, and then walked forward
in silence. Then--"I guess she had better go alone," she said simply.
Winterbourne observed to himself that this was a very different type of
maternity from that of the vigilant matrons who massed themselves in the
forefront of social intercourse in the dark old city at the other end of
the lake. But his meditations were interrupted by hearing his name very
distinctly pronounced by Mrs. Miller's unprotected daughter.

"Mr. Winterbourne!" murmured Daisy.

"Mademoiselle!" said the young man.

"Don't you want to take me out in a boat?"

"At present?" he asked.

"Of course!" said Daisy.

"Well, Annie Miller!" exclaimed her mother.

"I beg you, madam, to let her go," said Winterbourne ardently; for
he had never yet enjoyed the sensation of guiding through the summer
starlight a skiff freighted with a fresh and beautiful young girl.

"I shouldn't think she'd want to," said her mother. "I should think
she'd rather go indoors."

"I'm sure Mr. Winterbourne wants to take me," Daisy declared. "He's so
awfully devoted!"

"I will row you over to Chillon in the starlight."

"I don't believe it!" said Daisy.

"Well!" ejaculated the elder lady again.

"You haven't spoken to me for half an hour," her daughter went on.

"I have been having some very pleasant conversation with your mother,"
said Winterbourne.

"Well, I want you to take me out in a boat!" Daisy repeated. They had
all stopped, and she had turned round and was looking at Winterbourne.
Her face wore a charming smile, her pretty eyes were gleaming, she was
swinging her great fan about. No; it's impossible to be prettier than
that, thought Winterbourne.

"There are half a dozen boats moored at that landing place," he said,
pointing to certain steps which descended from the garden to the lake.
"If you will do me the honor to accept my arm, we will go and select one
of them."

Daisy stood there smiling; she threw back her head and gave a little,
light laugh. "I like a gentleman to be formal!" she declared.

"I assure you it's a formal offer."

"I was bound I would make you say something," Daisy went on.

"You see, it's not very difficult," said Winterbourne. "But I am afraid
you are chaffing me."

"I think not, sir," remarked Mrs. Miller very gently.

"Do, then, let me give you a row," he said to the young girl.

"It's quite lovely, the way you say that!" cried Daisy.

"It will be still more lovely to do it."

"Yes, it would be lovely!" said Daisy. But she made no movement to
accompany him; she only stood there laughing.

"I should think you had better find out what time it is," interposed her
mother.

"It is eleven o'clock, madam," said a voice, with a foreign accent, out
of the neighboring darkness; and Winterbourne, turning, perceived the
florid personage who was in attendance upon the two ladies. He had
apparently just approached.

"Oh, Eugenio," said Daisy, "I am going out in a boat!"

Eugenio bowed. "At eleven o'clock, mademoiselle?"

"I am going with Mr. Winterbourne--this very minute."

"Do tell her she can't," said Mrs. Miller to the courier.

"I think you had better not go out in a boat, mademoiselle," Eugenio
declared.

Winterbourne wished to Heaven this pretty girl were not so familiar with
her courier; but he said nothing.

"I suppose you don't think it's proper!" Daisy exclaimed. "Eugenio
doesn't think anything's proper."

"I am at your service," said Winterbourne.

"Does mademoiselle propose to go alone?" asked Eugenio of Mrs. Miller.

"Oh, no; with this gentleman!" answered Daisy's mamma.

The courier looked for a moment at Winterbourne--the latter thought he
was smiling--and then, solemnly, with a bow, "As mademoiselle pleases!"
he said.

"Oh, I hoped you would make a fuss!" said Daisy. "I don't care to go
now."

"I myself shall make a fuss if you don't go," said Winterbourne.

"That's all I want--a little fuss!" And the young girl began to laugh
again.

"Mr. Randolph has gone to bed!" the courier announced frigidly.

"Oh, Daisy; now we can go!" said Mrs. Miller.

Daisy turned away from Winterbourne, looking at him, smiling and fanning
herself. "Good night," she said; "I hope you are disappointed, or
disgusted, or something!"

He looked at her, taking the hand she offered him. "I am puzzled," he
answered.

"Well, I hope it won't keep you awake!" she said very smartly; and,
under the escort of the privileged Eugenio, the two ladies passed toward
the house.

Winterbourne stood looking after them; he was indeed puzzled. He
lingered beside the lake for a quarter of an hour, turning over the
mystery of the young girl's sudden familiarities and caprices. But
the only very definite conclusion he came to was that he should enjoy
deucedly "going off" with her somewhere.

Two days afterward he went off with her to the Castle of Chillon. He
waited for her in the large hall of the hotel, where the couriers, the
servants, the foreign tourists, were lounging about and staring. It was
not the place he should have chosen, but she had appointed it. She came
tripping downstairs, buttoning her long gloves, squeezing her folded
parasol against her pretty figure, dressed in the perfection of a
soberly elegant traveling costume. Winterbourne was a man of imagination
and, as our ancestors used to say, sensibility; as he looked at her
dress and, on the great staircase, her little rapid, confiding step, he
felt as if there were something romantic going forward. He could have
believed he was going to elope with her. He passed out with her among
all the idle people that were assembled there; they were all looking
at her very hard; she had begun to chatter as soon as she joined him.
Winterbourne's preference had been that they should be conveyed to
Chillon in a carriage; but she expressed a lively wish to go in the
little steamer; she declared that she had a passion for steamboats.
There was always such a lovely breeze upon the water, and you saw such
lots of people. The sail was not long, but Winterbourne's companion
found time to say a great many things. To the young man himself their
little excursion was so much of an escapade--an adventure--that, even
allowing for her habitual sense of freedom, he had some expectation of
seeing her regard it in the same way. But it must be confessed that,
in this particular, he was disappointed. Daisy Miller was extremely
animated, she was in charming spirits; but she was apparently not at all
excited; she was not fluttered; she avoided neither his eyes nor those
of anyone else; she blushed neither when she looked at him nor when she
felt that people were looking at her. People continued to look at her
a great deal, and Winterbourne took much satisfaction in his pretty
companion's distinguished air. He had been a little afraid that she
would talk loud, laugh overmuch, and even, perhaps, desire to move about
the boat a good deal. But he quite forgot his fears; he sat smiling,
with his eyes upon her face, while, without moving from her place, she
delivered herself of a great number of original reflections. It was the
most charming garrulity he had ever heard. He had assented to the idea
that she was "common"; but was she so, after all, or was he simply
getting used to her commonness? Her conversation was chiefly of what
metaphysicians term the objective cast, but every now and then it took a
subjective turn.

"What on EARTH are you so grave about?" she suddenly demanded, fixing
her agreeable eyes upon Winterbourne's.

"Am I grave?" he asked. "I had an idea I was grinning from ear to ear."

"You look as if you were taking me to a funeral. If that's a grin, your
ears are very near together."

"Should you like me to dance a hornpipe on the deck?"

"Pray do, and I'll carry round your hat. It will pay the expenses of our
journey."

"I never was better pleased in my life," murmured Winterbourne.

She looked at him a moment and then burst into a little laugh. "I like
to make you say those things! You're a queer mixture!"

In the castle, after they had landed, the subjective element decidedly
prevailed. Daisy tripped about the vaulted chambers, rustled her skirts
in the corkscrew staircases, flirted back with a pretty little cry and
a shudder from the edge of the oubliettes, and turned a singularly
well-shaped ear to everything that Winterbourne told her about the
place. But he saw that she cared very little for feudal antiquities and
that the dusky traditions of Chillon made but a slight impression upon
her. They had the good fortune to have been able to walk about without
other companionship than that of the custodian; and Winterbourne
arranged with this functionary that they should not be hurried--that
they should linger and pause wherever they chose. The custodian
interpreted the bargain generously--Winterbourne, on his side, had been
generous--and ended by leaving them quite to themselves. Miss Miller's
observations were not remarkable for logical consistency; for anything
she wanted to say she was sure to find a pretext. She found a great many
pretexts in the rugged embrasures of Chillon for asking Winterbourne
sudden questions about himself--his family, his previous history, his
tastes, his habits, his intentions--and for supplying information upon
corresponding points in her own personality. Of her own tastes, habits,
and intentions Miss Miller was prepared to give the most definite, and
indeed the most favorable account.

"Well, I hope you know enough!" she said to her companion, after he had
told her the history of the unhappy Bonivard. "I never saw a man that
knew so much!" The history of Bonivard had evidently, as they say, gone
into one ear and out of the other. But Daisy went on to say that she
wished Winterbourne would travel with them and "go round" with them;
they might know something, in that case. "Don't you want to come
and teach Randolph?" she asked. Winterbourne said that nothing
could possibly please him so much, but that he had unfortunately other
occupations. "Other occupations? I don't believe it!" said Miss Daisy.
"What do you mean? You are not in business." The young man admitted that
he was not in business; but he had engagements which, even within a day
or two, would force him to go back to Geneva. "Oh, bother!" she said; "I
don't believe it!" and she began to talk about something else. But a few
moments later, when he was pointing out to her the pretty design of an
antique fireplace, she broke out irrelevantly, "You don't mean to say
you are going back to Geneva?"

"It is a melancholy fact that I shall have to return to Geneva
tomorrow."

"Well, Mr. Winterbourne," said Daisy, "I think you're horrid!"

"Oh, don't say such dreadful things!" said Winterbourne--"just at the
last!"

"The last!" cried the young girl; "I call it the first. I have half a
mind to leave you here and go straight back to the hotel alone." And
for the next ten minutes she did nothing but call him horrid. Poor
Winterbourne was fairly bewildered; no young lady had as yet done him
the honor to be so agitated by the announcement of his movements. His
companion, after this, ceased to pay any attention to the curiosities of
Chillon or the beauties of the lake; she opened fire upon the mysterious
charmer in Geneva whom she appeared to have instantly taken it for
granted that he was hurrying back to see. How did Miss Daisy Miller
know that there was a charmer in Geneva? Winterbourne, who denied the
existence of such a person, was quite unable to discover, and he was
divided between amazement at the rapidity of her induction and amusement
at the frankness of her persiflage. She seemed to him, in all this, an
extraordinary mixture of innocence and crudity. "Does she never allow
you more than three days at a time?" asked Daisy ironically. "Doesn't
she give you a vacation in summer? There's no one so hard worked but
they can get leave to go off somewhere at this season. I suppose, if you
stay another day, she'll come after you in the boat. Do wait over
till Friday, and I will go down to the landing to see her arrive!"
Winterbourne began to think he had been wrong to feel disappointed in
the temper in which the young lady had embarked. If he had missed the
personal accent, the personal accent was now making its appearance.
It sounded very distinctly, at last, in her telling him she would stop
"teasing" him if he would promise her solemnly to come down to Rome in
the winter.

"That's not a difficult promise to make," said Winterbourne. "My aunt
has taken an apartment in Rome for the winter and has already asked me
to come and see her."

"I don't want you to come for your aunt," said Daisy; "I want you to
come for me." And this was the only allusion that the young man was ever
to hear her make to his invidious kinswoman. He declared that, at
any rate, he would certainly come. After this Daisy stopped teasing.
Winterbourne took a carriage, and they drove back to Vevey in the dusk;
the young girl was very quiet.

In the evening Winterbourne mentioned to Mrs. Costello that he had spent
the afternoon at Chillon with Miss Daisy Miller.

"The Americans--of the courier?" asked this lady.

"Ah, happily," said Winterbourne, "the courier stayed at home."

"She went with you all alone?"

"All alone."

Mrs. Costello sniffed a little at her smelling bottle. "And that," she
exclaimed, "is the young person whom you wanted me to know!"





PART II


Winterbourne, who had returned to Geneva the day after his excursion
to Chillon, went to Rome toward the end of January. His aunt had been
established there for several weeks, and he had received a couple of
letters from her. "Those people you were so devoted to last summer at
Vevey have turned up here, courier and all," she wrote. "They seem to
have made several acquaintances, but the courier continues to be the
most intime. The young lady, however, is also very intimate with some
third-rate Italians, with whom she rackets about in a way that makes
much talk. Bring me that pretty novel of Cherbuliez's--Paule Mere--and
don't come later than the 23rd."

In the natural course of events, Winterbourne, on arriving in Rome,
would presently have ascertained Mrs. Miller's address at the American
banker's and have gone to pay his compliments to Miss Daisy. "After what
happened at Vevey, I think I may certainly call upon them," he said to
Mrs. Costello.

"If, after what happens--at Vevey and everywhere--you desire to keep
up the acquaintance, you are very welcome. Of course a man may know
everyone. Men are welcome to the privilege!"

"Pray what is it that happens--here, for instance?" Winterbourne
demanded.

"The girl goes about alone with her foreigners. As to what happens
further, you must apply elsewhere for information. She has picked up
half a dozen of the regular Roman fortune hunters, and she takes them
about to people's houses. When she comes to a party she brings with her
a gentleman with a good deal of manner and a wonderful mustache."

"And where is the mother?"

"I haven't the least idea. They are very dreadful people."

Winterbourne meditated a moment. "They are very ignorant--very innocent
only. Depend upon it they are not bad."

"They are hopelessly vulgar," said Mrs. Costello. "Whether or no being
hopelessly vulgar is being 'bad' is a question for the metaphysicians.
They are bad enough to dislike, at any rate; and for this short life
that is quite enough."

The news that Daisy Miller was surrounded by half a dozen wonderful
mustaches checked Winterbourne's impulse to go straightway to see her.
He had, perhaps, not definitely flattered himself that he had made an
ineffaceable impression upon her heart, but he was annoyed at hearing
of a state of affairs so little in harmony with an image that had lately
flitted in and out of his own meditations; the image of a very pretty
girl looking out of an old Roman window and asking herself urgently
when Mr. Winterbourne would arrive. If, however, he determined to wait a
little before reminding Miss Miller of his claims to her consideration,
he went very soon to call upon two or three other friends. One of these
friends was an American lady who had spent several winters at Geneva,
where she had placed her children at school. She was a very accomplished
woman, and she lived in the Via Gregoriana. Winterbourne found her in a
little crimson drawing room on a third floor; the room was filled with
southern sunshine. He had not been there ten minutes when the servant
came in, announcing "Madame Mila!" This announcement was presently
followed by the entrance of little Randolph Miller, who stopped in the
middle of the room and stood staring at Winterbourne. An instant later
his pretty sister crossed the threshold; and then, after a considerable
interval, Mrs. Miller slowly advanced.

"I know you!" said Randolph.

"I'm sure you know a great many things," exclaimed Winterbourne, taking
him by the hand. "How is your education coming on?"

Daisy was exchanging greetings very prettily with her hostess, but when
she heard Winterbourne's voice she quickly turned her head. "Well, I
declare!" she said.

"I told you I should come, you know," Winterbourne rejoined, smiling.

"Well, I didn't believe it," said Miss Daisy.

"I am much obliged to you," laughed the young man.

"You might have come to see me!" said Daisy.

"I arrived only yesterday."

"I don't believe that!" the young girl declared.

Winterbourne turned with a protesting smile to her mother, but this lady
evaded his glance, and, seating herself, fixed her eyes upon her son.
"We've got a bigger place than this," said Randolph. "It's all gold on
the walls."

Mrs. Miller turned uneasily in her chair. "I told you if I were to bring
you, you would say something!" she murmured.

"I told YOU!" Randolph exclaimed. "I tell YOU, sir!" he added jocosely,
giving Winterbourne a thump on the knee. "It IS bigger, too!"

Daisy had entered upon a lively conversation with her hostess;
Winterbourne judged it becoming to address a few words to her mother. "I
hope you have been well since we parted at Vevey," he said.

Mrs. Miller now certainly looked at him--at his chin. "Not very well,
sir," she answered.

"She's got the dyspepsia," said Randolph. "I've got it too. Father's got
it. I've got it most!"

This announcement, instead of embarrassing Mrs. Miller, seemed to
relieve her. "I suffer from the liver," she said. "I think it's this
climate; it's less bracing than Schenectady, especially in the winter
season. I don't know whether you know we reside at Schenectady. I was
saying to Daisy that I certainly hadn't found any one like Dr. Davis,
and I didn't believe I should. Oh, at Schenectady he stands first; they
think everything of him. He has so much to do, and yet there was nothing
he wouldn't do for me. He said he never saw anything like my dyspepsia,
but he was bound to cure it. I'm sure there was nothing he wouldn't
try. He was just going to try something new when we came off. Mr. Miller
wanted Daisy to see Europe for herself. But I wrote to Mr. Miller that
it seems as if I couldn't get on without Dr. Davis. At Schenectady he
stands at the very top; and there's a great deal of sickness there, too.
It affects my sleep."

Winterbourne had a good deal of pathological gossip with Dr. Davis's
patient, during which Daisy chattered unremittingly to her own
companion. The young man asked Mrs. Miller how she was pleased with
Rome. "Well, I must say I am disappointed," she answered. "We had heard
so much about it; I suppose we had heard too much. But we couldn't help
that. We had been led to expect something different."

"Ah, wait a little, and you will become very fond of it," said
Winterbourne.

"I hate it worse and worse every day!" cried Randolph.

"You are like the infant Hannibal," said Winterbourne.

"No, I ain't!" Randolph declared at a venture.

"You are not much like an infant," said his mother. "But we have seen
places," she resumed, "that I should put a long way before Rome." And in
reply to Winterbourne's interrogation, "There's Zurich," she concluded,
"I think Zurich is lovely; and we hadn't heard half so much about it."

"The best place we've seen is the City of Richmond!" said Randolph.

"He means the ship," his mother explained. "We crossed in that ship.
Randolph had a good time on the City of Richmond."

"It's the best place I've seen," the child repeated. "Only it was turned
the wrong way."

"Well, we've got to turn the right way some time," said Mrs. Miller with
a little laugh. Winterbourne expressed the hope that her daughter at
least found some gratification in Rome, and she declared that Daisy
was quite carried away. "It's on account of the society--the society's
splendid. She goes round everywhere; she has made a great number of
acquaintances. Of course she goes round more than I do. I must say they
have been very sociable; they have taken her right in. And then she
knows a great many gentlemen. Oh, she thinks there's nothing like Rome.
Of course, it's a great deal pleasanter for a young lady if she knows
plenty of gentlemen."

By this time Daisy had turned her attention again to Winterbourne. "I've
been telling Mrs. Walker how mean you were!" the young girl announced.

"And what is the evidence you have offered?" asked Winterbourne, rather
annoyed at Miss Miller's want of appreciation of the zeal of an admirer
who on his way down to Rome had stopped neither at Bologna nor at
Florence, simply because of a certain sentimental impatience. He
remembered that a cynical compatriot had once told him that American
women--the pretty ones, and this gave a largeness to the axiom--were at
once the most exacting in the world and the least endowed with a sense
of indebtedness.

"Why, you were awfully mean at Vevey," said Daisy. "You wouldn't do
anything. You wouldn't stay there when I asked you."

"My dearest young lady," cried Winterbourne, with eloquence, "have I
come all the way to Rome to encounter your reproaches?"

"Just hear him say that!" said Daisy to her hostess, giving a twist to a
bow on this lady's dress. "Did you ever hear anything so quaint?"

"So quaint, my dear?" murmured Mrs. Walker in the tone of a partisan of
Winterbourne.

"Well, I don't know," said Daisy, fingering Mrs. Walker's ribbons. "Mrs.
Walker, I want to tell you something."

"Mother-r," interposed Randolph, with his rough ends to his words, "I
tell you you've got to go. Eugenio'll raise--something!"

"I'm not afraid of Eugenio," said Daisy with a toss of her head. "Look
here, Mrs. Walker," she went on, "you know I'm coming to your party."

"I am delighted to hear it."

"I've got a lovely dress!"

"I am very sure of that."

"But I want to ask a favor--permission to bring a friend."

"I shall be happy to see any of your friends," said Mrs. Walker, turning
with a smile to Mrs. Miller.

"Oh, they are not my friends," answered Daisy's mamma, smiling shyly in
her own fashion. "I never spoke to them."

"It's an intimate friend of mine--Mr. Giovanelli," said Daisy without
a tremor in her clear little voice or a shadow on her brilliant little
face.

Mrs. Walker was silent a moment; she gave a rapid glance at
Winterbourne. "I shall be glad to see Mr. Giovanelli," she then said.

"He's an Italian," Daisy pursued with the prettiest serenity. "He's a
great friend of mine; he's the handsomest man in the world--except Mr.
Winterbourne! He knows plenty of Italians, but he wants to know some
Americans. He thinks ever so much of Americans. He's tremendously
clever. He's perfectly lovely!"

It was settled that this brilliant personage should be brought to Mrs.
Walker's party, and then Mrs. Miller prepared to take her leave. "I
guess we'll go back to the hotel," she said.

"You may go back to the hotel, Mother, but I'm going to take a walk,"
said Daisy.

"She's going to walk with Mr. Giovanelli," Randolph proclaimed.

"I am going to the Pincio," said Daisy, smiling.

"Alone, my dear--at this hour?" Mrs. Walker asked. The afternoon was
drawing to a close--it was the hour for the throng of carriages and of
contemplative pedestrians. "I don't think it's safe, my dear," said Mrs.
Walker.

"Neither do I," subjoined Mrs. Miller. "You'll get the fever, as sure as
you live. Remember what Dr. Davis told you!"

"Give her some medicine before she goes," said Randolph.

The company had risen to its feet; Daisy, still showing her pretty
teeth, bent over and kissed her hostess. "Mrs. Walker, you are too
perfect," she said. "I'm not going alone; I am going to meet a friend."

"Your friend won't keep you from getting the fever," Mrs. Miller
observed.

"Is it Mr. Giovanelli?" asked the hostess.

Winterbourne was watching the young girl; at this question his attention
quickened. She stood there, smiling and smoothing her bonnet ribbons;
she glanced at Winterbourne. Then, while she glanced and smiled, she
answered, without a shade of hesitation, "Mr. Giovanelli--the beautiful
Giovanelli."

"My dear young friend," said Mrs. Walker, taking her hand pleadingly,
"don't walk off to the Pincio at this hour to meet a beautiful Italian."

"Well, he speaks English," said Mrs. Miller.

"Gracious me!" Daisy exclaimed, "I don't to do anything improper.
There's an easy way to settle it." She continued to glance at
Winterbourne. "The Pincio is only a hundred yards distant; and if Mr.
Winterbourne were as polite as he pretends, he would offer to walk with
me!"

Winterbourne's politeness hastened to affirm itself, and the young girl
gave him gracious leave to accompany her. They passed downstairs
before her mother, and at the door Winterbourne perceived Mrs. Miller's
carriage drawn up, with the ornamental courier whose acquaintance he had
made at Vevey seated within. "Goodbye, Eugenio!" cried Daisy; "I'm going
to take a walk." The distance from the Via Gregoriana to the beautiful
garden at the other end of the Pincian Hill is, in fact, rapidly
traversed. As the day was splendid, however, and the concourse of
vehicles, walkers, and loungers numerous, the young Americans found
their progress much delayed. This fact was highly agreeable to
Winterbourne, in spite of his consciousness of his singular situation.
The slow-moving, idly gazing Roman crowd bestowed much attention upon
the extremely pretty young foreign lady who was passing through it upon
his arm; and he wondered what on earth had been in Daisy's mind when
she proposed to expose herself, unattended, to its appreciation. His own
mission, to her sense, apparently, was to consign her to the hands
of Mr. Giovanelli; but Winterbourne, at once annoyed and gratified,
resolved that he would do no such thing.

"Why haven't you been to see me?" asked Daisy. "You can't get out of
that."

"I have had the honor of telling you that I have only just stepped out
of the train."

"You must have stayed in the train a good while after it stopped!" cried
the young girl with her little laugh. "I suppose you were asleep. You
have had time to go to see Mrs. Walker."

"I knew Mrs. Walker--" Winterbourne began to explain.

"I know where you knew her. You knew her at Geneva. She told me so.
Well, you knew me at Vevey. That's just as good. So you ought to have
come." She asked him no other question than this; she began to prattle
about her own affairs. "We've got splendid rooms at the hotel; Eugenio
says they're the best rooms in Rome. We are going to stay all winter,
if we don't die of the fever; and I guess we'll stay then. It's a great
deal nicer than I thought; I thought it would be fearfully quiet; I was
sure it would be awfully poky. I was sure we should be going round
all the time with one of those dreadful old men that explain about the
pictures and things. But we only had about a week of that, and now
I'm enjoying myself. I know ever so many people, and they are all so
charming. The society's extremely select. There are all kinds--English,
and Germans, and Italians. I think I like the English best. I like their
style of conversation. But there are some lovely Americans. I never saw
anything so hospitable. There's something or other every day. There's
not much dancing; but I must say I never thought dancing was everything.
I was always fond of conversation. I guess I shall have plenty at Mrs.
Walker's, her rooms are so small." When they had passed the gate of the
Pincian Gardens, Miss Miller began to wonder where Mr. Giovanelli might
be. "We had better go straight to that place in front," she said, "where
you look at the view."

"I certainly shall not help you to find him," Winterbourne declared.

"Then I shall find him without you," cried Miss Daisy.

"You certainly won't leave me!" cried Winterbourne.

She burst into her little laugh. "Are you afraid you'll get lost--or run
over? But there's Giovanelli, leaning against that tree. He's staring at
the women in the carriages: did you ever see anything so cool?"

Winterbourne perceived at some distance a little man standing with
folded arms nursing his cane. He had a handsome face, an artfully poised
hat, a glass in one eye, and a nosegay in his buttonhole. Winterbourne
looked at him a moment and then said, "Do you mean to speak to that
man?"

"Do I mean to speak to him? Why, you don't suppose I mean to communicate
by signs?"

"Pray understand, then," said Winterbourne, "that I intend to remain
with you."

Daisy stopped and looked at him, without a sign of troubled
consciousness in her face, with nothing but the presence of her charming
eyes and her happy dimples. "Well, she's a cool one!" thought the young
man.

"I don't like the way you say that," said Daisy. "It's too imperious."

"I beg your pardon if I say it wrong. The main point is to give you an
idea of my meaning."

The young girl looked at him more gravely, but with eyes that were
prettier than ever. "I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me,
or to interfere with anything I do."

"I think you have made a mistake," said Winterbourne. "You should
sometimes listen to a gentleman--the right one."

Daisy began to laugh again. "I do nothing but listen to gentlemen!" she
exclaimed. "Tell me if Mr. Giovanelli is the right one?"

The gentleman with the nosegay in his bosom had now perceived our two
friends, and was approaching the young girl with obsequious rapidity.
He bowed to Winterbourne as well as to the latter's companion; he had
a brilliant smile, an intelligent eye; Winterbourne thought him not a
bad-looking fellow. But he nevertheless said to Daisy, "No, he's not the
right one."

Daisy evidently had a natural talent for performing introductions; she
mentioned the name of each of her companions to the other. She strolled
alone with one of them on each side of her; Mr. Giovanelli, who spoke
English very cleverly--Winterbourne afterward learned that he had
practiced the idiom upon a great many American heiresses--addressed her
a great deal of very polite nonsense; he was extremely urbane, and the
young American, who said nothing, reflected upon that profundity of
Italian cleverness which enables people to appear more gracious in
proportion as they are more acutely disappointed. Giovanelli, of course,
had counted upon something more intimate; he had not bargained for
a party of three. But he kept his temper in a manner which suggested
far-stretching intentions. Winterbourne flattered himself that he had
taken his measure. "He is not a gentleman," said the young American;
"he is only a clever imitation of one. He is a music master, or a
penny-a-liner, or a third-rate artist. D__n his good looks!" Mr.
Giovanelli had certainly a very pretty face; but Winterbourne felt a
superior indignation at his own lovely fellow countrywoman's not knowing
the difference between a spurious gentleman and a real one. Giovanelli
chattered and jested and made himself wonderfully agreeable. It was
true that, if he was an imitation, the imitation was brilliant.
"Nevertheless," Winterbourne said to himself, "a nice girl ought to
know!" And then he came back to the question whether this was, in fact,
a nice girl. Would a nice girl, even allowing for her being a little
American flirt, make a rendezvous with a presumably low-lived foreigner?
The rendezvous in this case, indeed, had been in broad daylight and in
the most crowded corner of Rome, but was it not impossible to regard the
choice of these circumstances as a proof of extreme cynicism? Singular
though it may seem, Winterbourne was vexed that the young girl, in
joining her amoroso, should not appear more impatient of his own
company, and he was vexed because of his inclination. It was impossible
to regard her as a perfectly well-conducted young lady; she was wanting
in a certain indispensable delicacy. It would therefore simplify matters
greatly to be able to treat her as the object of one of those sentiments
which are called by romancers "lawless passions." That she should seem
to wish to get rid of him would help him to think more lightly of her,
and to be able to think more lightly of her would make her much less
perplexing. But Daisy, on this occasion, continued to present herself as
an inscrutable combination of audacity and innocence.

She had been walking some quarter of an hour, attended by her two
cavaliers, and responding in a tone of very childish gaiety, as it
seemed to Winterbourne, to the pretty speeches of Mr. Giovanelli, when
a carriage that had detached itself from the revolving train drew up
beside the path. At the same moment Winterbourne perceived that his
friend Mrs. Walker--the lady whose house he had lately left--was seated
in the vehicle and was beckoning to him. Leaving Miss Miller's side,
he hastened to obey her summons. Mrs. Walker was flushed; she wore an
excited air. "It is really too dreadful," she said. "That girl must not
do this sort of thing. She must not walk here with you two men. Fifty
people have noticed her."

Winterbourne raised his eyebrows. "I think it's a pity to make too much
fuss about it."

"It's a pity to let the girl ruin herself!"

"She is very innocent," said Winterbourne.

"She's very crazy!" cried Mrs. Walker. "Did you ever see anything so
imbecile as her mother? After you had all left me just now, I could not
sit still for thinking of it. It seemed too pitiful, not even to attempt
to save her. I ordered the carriage and put on my bonnet, and came here
as quickly as possible. Thank Heaven I have found you!"

"What do you propose to do with us?" asked Winterbourne, smiling.

"To ask her to get in, to drive her about here for half an hour, so that
the world may see she is not running absolutely wild, and then to take
her safely home."

"I don't think it's a very happy thought," said Winterbourne; "but you
can try."

Mrs. Walker tried. The young man went in pursuit of Miss Miller, who
had simply nodded and smiled at his interlocutor in the carriage and
had gone her way with her companion. Daisy, on learning that Mrs. Walker
wished to speak to her, retraced her steps with a perfect good grace and
with Mr. Giovanelli at her side. She declared that she was delighted to
have a chance to present this gentleman to Mrs. Walker. She immediately
achieved the introduction, and declared that she had never in her life
seen anything so lovely as Mrs. Walker's carriage rug.

"I am glad you admire it," said this lady, smiling sweetly. "Will you
get in and let me put it over you?"

"Oh, no, thank you," said Daisy. "I shall admire it much more as I see
you driving round with it."

"Do get in and drive with me!" said Mrs. Walker.

"That would be charming, but it's so enchanting just as I am!" and Daisy
gave a brilliant glance at the gentlemen on either side of her.

"It may be enchanting, dear child, but it is not the custom here," urged
Mrs. Walker, leaning forward in her victoria, with her hands devoutly
clasped.

"Well, it ought to be, then!" said Daisy. "If I didn't walk I should
expire."

"You should walk with your mother, dear," cried the lady from Geneva,
losing patience.

"With my mother dear!" exclaimed the young girl. Winterbourne saw that
she scented interference. "My mother never walked ten steps in her life.
And then, you know," she added with a laugh, "I am more than five years
old."

"You are old enough to be more reasonable. You are old enough, dear Miss
Miller, to be talked about."

Daisy looked at Mrs. Walker, smiling intensely. "Talked about? What do
you mean?"

"Come into my carriage, and I will tell you."

Daisy turned her quickened glance again from one of the gentlemen beside
her to the other. Mr. Giovanelli was bowing to and fro, rubbing down
his gloves and laughing very agreeably; Winterbourne thought it a most
unpleasant scene. "I don't think I want to know what you mean," said
Daisy presently. "I don't think I should like it."

Winterbourne wished that Mrs. Walker would tuck in her carriage rug and
drive away, but this lady did not enjoy being defied, as she afterward
told him. "Should you prefer being thought a very reckless girl?" she
demanded.

"Gracious!" exclaimed Daisy. She looked again at Mr. Giovanelli, then
she turned to Winterbourne. There was a little pink flush in her cheek;
she was tremendously pretty. "Does Mr. Winterbourne think," she asked
slowly, smiling, throwing back her head, and glancing at him from
head to foot, "that, to save my reputation, I ought to get into the
carriage?"

Winterbourne colored; for an instant he hesitated greatly. It seemed so
strange to hear her speak that way of her "reputation." But he himself,
in fact, must speak in accordance with gallantry. The finest gallantry,
here, was simply to tell her the truth; and the truth, for Winterbourne,
as the few indications I have been able to give have made him known to
the reader, was that Daisy Miller should take Mrs. Walker's advice. He
looked at her exquisite prettiness, and then he said, very gently, "I
think you should get into the carriage."

Daisy gave a violent laugh. "I never heard anything so stiff! If this
is improper, Mrs. Walker," she pursued, "then I am all improper, and you
must give me up. Goodbye; I hope you'll have a lovely ride!" and, with
Mr. Giovanelli, who made a triumphantly obsequious salute, she turned
away.

Mrs. Walker sat looking after her, and there were tears in Mrs. Walker's
eyes. "Get in here, sir," she said to Winterbourne, indicating the place
beside her. The young man answered that he felt bound to accompany Miss
Miller, whereupon Mrs. Walker declared that if he refused her this
favor she would never speak to him again. She was evidently in earnest.
Winterbourne overtook Daisy and her companion, and, offering the young
girl his hand, told her that Mrs. Walker had made an imperious claim
upon his society. He expected that in answer she would say something
rather free, something to commit herself still further to that
"recklessness" from which Mrs. Walker had so charitably endeavored to
dissuade her. But she only shook his hand, hardly looking at him, while
Mr. Giovanelli bade him farewell with a too emphatic flourish of the
hat.

Winterbourne was not in the best possible humor as he took his seat in
Mrs. Walker's victoria. "That was not clever of you," he said candidly,
while the vehicle mingled again with the throng of carriages.

"In such a case," his companion answered, "I don't wish to be clever; I
wish to be EARNEST!"

"Well, your earnestness has only offended her and put her off."

"It has happened very well," said Mrs. Walker. "If she is so perfectly
determined to compromise herself, the sooner one knows it the better;
one can act accordingly."

"I suspect she meant no harm," Winterbourne rejoined.

"So I thought a month ago. But she has been going too far."

"What has she been doing?"

"Everything that is not done here. Flirting with any man she could pick
up; sitting in corners with mysterious Italians; dancing all the evening
with the same partners; receiving visits at eleven o'clock at night. Her
mother goes away when visitors come."

"But her brother," said Winterbourne, laughing, "sits up till midnight."

"He must be edified by what he sees. I'm told that at their hotel
everyone is talking about her, and that a smile goes round among all the
servants when a gentleman comes and asks for Miss Miller."

"The servants be hanged!" said Winterbourne angrily. "The poor girl's
only fault," he presently added, "is that she is very uncultivated."

"She is naturally indelicate," Mrs. Walker declared.

"Take that example this morning. How long had you known her at Vevey?"

"A couple of days."

"Fancy, then, her making it a personal matter that you should have left
the place!"

Winterbourne was silent for some moments; then he said, "I suspect, Mrs.
Walker, that you and I have lived too long at Geneva!" And he added a
request that she should inform him with what particular design she had
made him enter her carriage.

"I wished to beg you to cease your relations with Miss Miller--not to
flirt with her--to give her no further opportunity to expose herself--to
let her alone, in short."

"I'm afraid I can't do that," said Winterbourne. "I like her extremely."

"All the more reason that you shouldn't help her to make a scandal."

"There shall be nothing scandalous in my attentions to her."

"There certainly will be in the way she takes them. But I have said what
I had on my conscience," Mrs. Walker pursued. "If you wish to rejoin the
young lady I will put you down. Here, by the way, you have a chance."

The carriage was traversing that part of the Pincian Garden that
overhangs the wall of Rome and overlooks the beautiful Villa Borghese.
It is bordered by a large parapet, near which there are several seats.
One of the seats at a distance was occupied by a gentleman and a lady,
toward whom Mrs. Walker gave a toss of her head. At the same moment
these persons rose and walked toward the parapet. Winterbourne had asked
the coachman to stop; he now descended from the carriage. His companion
looked at him a moment in silence; then, while he raised his hat, she
drove majestically away. Winterbourne stood there; he had turned his
eyes toward Daisy and her cavalier. They evidently saw no one; they were
too deeply occupied with each other. When they reached the low garden
wall, they stood a moment looking off at the great flat-topped pine
clusters of the Villa Borghese; then Giovanelli seated himself,
familiarly, upon the broad ledge of the wall. The western sun in the
opposite sky sent out a brilliant shaft through a couple of cloud bars,
whereupon Daisy's companion took her parasol out of her hands and opened
it. She came a little nearer, and he held the parasol over her; then,
still holding it, he let it rest upon her shoulder, so that both of
their heads were hidden from Winterbourne. This young man lingered a
moment, then he began to walk. But he walked--not toward the couple with
the parasol; toward the residence of his aunt, Mrs. Costello.

He flattered himself on the following day that there was no smiling
among the servants when he, at least, asked for Mrs. Miller at her
hotel. This lady and her daughter, however, were not at home; and on
the next day after, repeating his visit, Winterbourne again had the
misfortune not to find them. Mrs. Walker's party took place on the
evening of the third day, and, in spite of the frigidity of his last
interview with the hostess, Winterbourne was among the guests. Mrs.
Walker was one of those American ladies who, while residing abroad, make
a point, in their own phrase, of studying European society, and she
had on this occasion collected several specimens of her diversely born
fellow mortals to serve, as it were, as textbooks. When Winterbourne
arrived, Daisy Miller was not there, but in a few moments he saw her
mother come in alone, very shyly and ruefully. Mrs. Miller's hair
above her exposed-looking temples was more frizzled than ever. As she
approached Mrs. Walker, Winterbourne also drew near.

"You see, I've come all alone," said poor Mrs. Miller. "I'm so
frightened; I don't know what to do. It's the first time I've ever been
to a party alone, especially in this country. I wanted to bring Randolph
or Eugenio, or someone, but Daisy just pushed me off by myself. I ain't
used to going round alone."

"And does not your daughter intend to favor us with her society?"
demanded Mrs. Walker impressively.

"Well, Daisy's all dressed," said Mrs. Miller with that accent of the
dispassionate, if not of the philosophic, historian with which she
always recorded the current incidents of her daughter's career. "She got
dressed on purpose before dinner. But she's got a friend of hers there;
that gentleman--the Italian--that she wanted to bring. They've got going
at the piano; it seems as if they couldn't leave off. Mr. Giovanelli
sings splendidly. But I guess they'll come before very long," concluded
Mrs. Miller hopefully.

"I'm sorry she should come in that way," said Mrs. Walker.

"Well, I told her that there was no use in her getting dressed before
dinner if she was going to wait three hours," responded Daisy's mamma.
"I didn't see the use of her putting on such a dress as that to sit
round with Mr. Giovanelli."

"This is most horrible!" said Mrs. Walker, turning away and addressing
herself to Winterbourne. "Elle s'affiche. It's her revenge for my having
ventured to remonstrate with her. When she comes, I shall not speak to
her."

Daisy came after eleven o'clock; but she was not, on such an occasion,
a young lady to wait to be spoken to. She rustled forward in radiant
loveliness, smiling and chattering, carrying a large bouquet, and
attended by Mr. Giovanelli. Everyone stopped talking and turned and
looked at her. She came straight to Mrs. Walker. "I'm afraid you thought
I never was coming, so I sent mother off to tell you. I wanted to make
Mr. Giovanelli practice some things before he came; you know he sings
beautifully, and I want you to ask him to sing. This is Mr. Giovanelli;
you know I introduced him to you; he's got the most lovely voice, and
he knows the most charming set of songs. I made him go over them this
evening on purpose; we had the greatest time at the hotel." Of all
this Daisy delivered herself with the sweetest, brightest audibleness,
looking now at her hostess and now round the room, while she gave a
series of little pats, round her shoulders, to the edges of her dress.
"Is there anyone I know?" she asked.

"I think every one knows you!" said Mrs. Walker pregnantly, and she gave
a very cursory greeting to Mr. Giovanelli. This gentleman bore himself
gallantly. He smiled and bowed and showed his white teeth; he curled his
mustaches and rolled his eyes and performed all the proper functions
of a handsome Italian at an evening party. He sang very prettily half
a dozen songs, though Mrs. Walker afterward declared that she had been
quite unable to find out who asked him. It was apparently not Daisy who
had given him his orders. Daisy sat at a distance from the piano, and
though she had publicly, as it were, professed a high admiration for his
singing, talked, not inaudibly, while it was going on.

"It's a pity these rooms are so small; we can't dance," she said to
Winterbourne, as if she had seen him five minutes before.

"I am not sorry we can't dance," Winterbourne answered; "I don't dance."

"Of course you don't dance; you're too stiff," said Miss Daisy. "I hope
you enjoyed your drive with Mrs. Walker!"

"No. I didn't enjoy it; I preferred walking with you."

"We paired off: that was much better," said Daisy. "But did you ever
hear anything so cool as Mrs. Walker's wanting me to get into her
carriage and drop poor Mr. Giovanelli, and under the pretext that it was
proper? People have different ideas! It would have been most unkind; he
had been talking about that walk for ten days."

"He should not have talked about it at all," said Winterbourne; "he
would never have proposed to a young lady of this country to walk about
the streets with him."

"About the streets?" cried Daisy with her pretty stare. "Where, then,
would he have proposed to her to walk? The Pincio is not the streets,
either; and I, thank goodness, am not a young lady of this country. The
young ladies of this country have a dreadfully poky time of it, so far
as I can learn; I don't see why I should change my habits for THEM."

"I am afraid your habits are those of a flirt," said Winterbourne
gravely.

"Of course they are," she cried, giving him her little smiling stare
again. "I'm a fearful, frightful flirt! Did you ever hear of a nice girl
that was not? But I suppose you will tell me now that I am not a nice
girl."

"You're a very nice girl; but I wish you would flirt with me, and me
only," said Winterbourne.

"Ah! thank you--thank you very much; you are the last man I should think
of flirting with. As I have had the pleasure of informing you, you are
too stiff."

"You say that too often," said Winterbourne.

Daisy gave a delighted laugh. "If I could have the sweet hope of making
you angry, I should say it again."

"Don't do that; when I am angry I'm stiffer than ever. But if you won't
flirt with me, do cease, at least, to flirt with your friend at the
piano; they don't understand that sort of thing here."

"I thought they understood nothing else!" exclaimed Daisy.

"Not in young unmarried women."

"It seems to me much more proper in young unmarried women than in old
married ones," Daisy declared.

"Well," said Winterbourne, "when you deal with natives you must go
by the custom of the place. Flirting is a purely American custom;
it doesn't exist here. So when you show yourself in public with Mr.
Giovanelli, and without your mother--"

"Gracious! poor Mother!" interposed Daisy.

"Though you may be flirting, Mr. Giovanelli is not; he means something
else."

"He isn't preaching, at any rate," said Daisy with vivacity. "And if you
want very much to know, we are neither of us flirting; we are too good
friends for that: we are very intimate friends."

"Ah!" rejoined Winterbourne, "if you are in love with each other, it is
another affair."

She had allowed him up to this point to talk so frankly that he had no
expectation of shocking her by this ejaculation; but she immediately got
up, blushing visibly, and leaving him to exclaim mentally that
little American flirts were the queerest creatures in the world. "Mr.
Giovanelli, at least," she said, giving her interlocutor a single
glance, "never says such very disagreeable things to me."

Winterbourne was bewildered; he stood, staring. Mr. Giovanelli had
finished singing. He left the piano and came over to Daisy. "Won't you
come into the other room and have some tea?" he asked, bending before
her with his ornamental smile.

Daisy turned to Winterbourne, beginning to smile again. He was still
more perplexed, for this inconsequent smile made nothing clear, though
it seemed to prove, indeed, that she had a sweetness and softness that
reverted instinctively to the pardon of offenses. "It has never occurred
to Mr. Winterbourne to offer me any tea," she said with her little
tormenting manner.

"I have offered you advice," Winterbourne rejoined.

"I prefer weak tea!" cried Daisy, and she went off with the brilliant
Giovanelli. She sat with him in the adjoining room, in the embrasure
of the window, for the rest of the evening. There was an interesting
performance at the piano, but neither of these young people gave heed
to it. When Daisy came to take leave of Mrs. Walker, this lady
conscientiously repaired the weakness of which she had been guilty at
the moment of the young girl's arrival. She turned her back straight
upon Miss Miller and left her to depart with what grace she might.
Winterbourne was standing near the door; he saw it all. Daisy turned
very pale and looked at her mother, but Mrs. Miller was humbly
unconscious of any violation of the usual social forms. She appeared,
indeed, to have felt an incongruous impulse to draw attention to her own
striking observance of them. "Good night, Mrs. Walker," she said; "we've
had a beautiful evening. You see, if I let Daisy come to parties without
me, I don't want her to go away without me." Daisy turned away, looking
with a pale, grave face at the circle near the door; Winterbourne saw
that, for the first moment, she was too much shocked and puzzled even
for indignation. He on his side was greatly touched.

"That was very cruel," he said to Mrs. Walker.

"She never enters my drawing room again!" replied his hostess.

Since Winterbourne was not to meet her in Mrs. Walker's drawing room, he
went as often as possible to Mrs. Miller's hotel. The ladies were rarely
at home, but when he found them, the devoted Giovanelli was always
present. Very often the brilliant little Roman was in the drawing room
with Daisy alone, Mrs. Miller being apparently constantly of the opinion
that discretion is the better part of surveillance. Winterbourne
noted, at first with surprise, that Daisy on these occasions was never
embarrassed or annoyed by his own entrance; but he very presently began
to feel that she had no more surprises for him; the unexpected in her
behavior was the only thing to expect. She showed no displeasure at
her tete-a-tete with Giovanelli being interrupted; she could chatter as
freshly and freely with two gentlemen as with one; there was always,
in her conversation, the same odd mixture of audacity and puerility.
Winterbourne remarked to himself that if she was seriously interested in
Giovanelli, it was very singular that she should not take more trouble
to preserve the sanctity of their interviews; and he liked her the more
for her innocent-looking indifference and her apparently inexhaustible
good humor. He could hardly have said why, but she seemed to him a girl
who would never be jealous. At the risk of exciting a somewhat derisive
smile on the reader's part, I may affirm that with regard to the women
who had hitherto interested him, it very often seemed to Winterbourne
among the possibilities that, given certain contingencies, he should be
afraid--literally afraid--of these ladies; he had a pleasant sense that
he should never be afraid of Daisy Miller. It must be added that this
sentiment was not altogether flattering to Daisy; it was part of his
conviction, or rather of his apprehension, that she would prove a very
light young person.

But she was evidently very much interested in Giovanelli. She looked at
him whenever he spoke; she was perpetually telling him to do this and
to do that; she was constantly "chaffing" and abusing him. She appeared
completely to have forgotten that Winterbourne had said anything to
displease her at Mrs. Walker's little party. One Sunday afternoon,
having gone to St. Peter's with his aunt, Winterbourne perceived
Daisy strolling about the great church in company with the inevitable
Giovanelli. Presently he pointed out the young girl and her cavalier to
Mrs. Costello. This lady looked at them a moment through her eyeglass,
and then she said:

"That's what makes you so pensive in these days, eh?"

"I had not the least idea I was pensive," said the young man.

"You are very much preoccupied; you are thinking of something."

"And what is it," he asked, "that you accuse me of thinking of?"

"Of that young lady's--Miss Baker's, Miss Chandler's--what's her
name?--Miss Miller's intrigue with that little barber's block."

"Do you call it an intrigue," Winterbourne asked--"an affair that goes
on with such peculiar publicity?"

"That's their folly," said Mrs. Costello; "it's not their merit."

"No," rejoined Winterbourne, with something of that pensiveness to which
his aunt had alluded. "I don't believe that there is anything to be
called an intrigue."

"I have heard a dozen people speak of it; they say she is quite carried
away by him."

"They are certainly very intimate," said Winterbourne.

Mrs. Costello inspected the young couple again with her optical
instrument. "He is very handsome. One easily sees how it is. She thinks
him the most elegant man in the world, the finest gentleman. She has
never seen anything like him; he is better, even, than the courier.
It was the courier probably who introduced him; and if he succeeds in
marrying the young lady, the courier will come in for a magnificent
commission."

"I don't believe she thinks of marrying him," said Winterbourne, "and I
don't believe he hopes to marry her."

"You may be very sure she thinks of nothing. She goes on from day to
day, from hour to hour, as they did in the Golden Age. I can imagine
nothing more vulgar. And at the same time," added Mrs. Costello, "depend
upon it that she may tell you any moment that she is 'engaged.'"

"I think that is more than Giovanelli expects," said Winterbourne.

"Who is Giovanelli?"

"The little Italian. I have asked questions about him and learned
something. He is apparently a perfectly respectable little man. I
believe he is, in a small way, a cavaliere avvocato. But he doesn't
move in what are called the first circles. I think it is really not
absolutely impossible that the courier introduced him. He is evidently
immensely charmed with Miss Miller. If she thinks him the finest
gentleman in the world, he, on his side, has never found himself in
personal contact with such splendor, such opulence, such expensiveness
as this young lady's. And then she must seem to him wonderfully pretty
and interesting. I rather doubt that he dreams of marrying her. That
must appear to him too impossible a piece of luck. He has nothing but
his handsome face to offer, and there is a substantial Mr. Miller in
that mysterious land of dollars. Giovanelli knows that he hasn't a title
to offer. If he were only a count or a marchese! He must wonder at his
luck, at the way they have taken him up."

"He accounts for it by his handsome face and thinks Miss Miller a young
lady qui se passe ses fantaisies!" said Mrs. Costello.

"It is very true," Winterbourne pursued, "that Daisy and her mamma have
not yet risen to that stage of--what shall I call it?--of culture at
which the idea of catching a count or a marchese begins. I believe that
they are intellectually incapable of that conception."

"Ah! but the avvocato can't believe it," said Mrs. Costello.

Of the observation excited by Daisy's "intrigue," Winterbourne gathered
that day at St. Peter's sufficient evidence. A dozen of the American
colonists in Rome came to talk with Mrs. Costello, who sat on a little
portable stool at the base of one of the great pilasters. The vesper
service was going forward in splendid chants and organ tones in the
adjacent choir, and meanwhile, between Mrs. Costello and her friends,
there was a great deal said about poor little Miss Miller's going really
"too far." Winterbourne was not pleased with what he heard, but when,
coming out upon the great steps of the church, he saw Daisy, who had
emerged before him, get into an open cab with her accomplice and roll
away through the cynical streets of Rome, he could not deny to himself
that she was going very far indeed. He felt very sorry for her--not
exactly that he believed that she had completely lost her head, but
because it was painful to hear so much that was pretty, and undefended,
and natural assigned to a vulgar place among the categories of disorder.
He made an attempt after this to give a hint to Mrs. Miller. He met one
day in the Corso a friend, a tourist like himself, who had just come
out of the Doria Palace, where he had been walking through the beautiful
gallery. His friend talked for a moment about the superb portrait
of Innocent X by Velasquez which hangs in one of the cabinets of the
palace, and then said, "And in the same cabinet, by the way, I had the
pleasure of contemplating a picture of a different kind--that pretty
American girl whom you pointed out to me last week." In answer to
Winterbourne's inquiries, his friend narrated that the pretty American
girl--prettier than ever--was seated with a companion in the secluded
nook in which the great papal portrait was enshrined.

"Who was her companion?" asked Winterbourne.

"A little Italian with a bouquet in his buttonhole. The girl is
delightfully pretty, but I thought I understood from you the other day
that she was a young lady du meilleur monde."

"So she is!" answered Winterbourne; and having assured himself that his
informant had seen Daisy and her companion but five minutes before, he
jumped into a cab and went to call on Mrs. Miller. She was at home; but
she apologized to him for receiving him in Daisy's absence.

"She's gone out somewhere with Mr. Giovanelli," said Mrs. Miller. "She's
always going round with Mr. Giovanelli."

"I have noticed that they are very intimate," Winterbourne observed.

"Oh, it seems as if they couldn't live without each other!" said Mrs.
Miller. "Well, he's a real gentleman, anyhow. I keep telling Daisy she's
engaged!"

"And what does Daisy say?"

"Oh, she says she isn't engaged. But she might as well be!" this
impartial parent resumed; "she goes on as if she was. But I've made Mr.
Giovanelli promise to tell me, if SHE doesn't. I should want to write to
Mr. Miller about it--shouldn't you?"

Winterbourne replied that he certainly should; and the state of mind of
Daisy's mamma struck him as so unprecedented in the annals of parental
vigilance that he gave up as utterly irrelevant the attempt to place her
upon her guard.

After this Daisy was never at home, and Winterbourne ceased to meet her
at the houses of their common acquaintances, because, as he perceived,
these shrewd people had quite made up their minds that she was going too
far. They ceased to invite her; and they intimated that they desired to
express to observant Europeans the great truth that, though Miss
Daisy Miller was a young American lady, her behavior was not
representative--was regarded by her compatriots as abnormal.
Winterbourne wondered how she felt about all the cold shoulders that
were turned toward her, and sometimes it annoyed him to suspect that
she did not feel at all. He said to himself that she was too light and
childish, too uncultivated and unreasoning, too provincial, to have
reflected upon her ostracism, or even to have perceived it. Then at
other moments he believed that she carried about in her elegant and
irresponsible little organism a defiant, passionate, perfectly observant
consciousness of the impression she produced. He asked himself whether
Daisy's defiance came from the consciousness of innocence, or from her
being, essentially, a young person of the reckless class. It must be
admitted that holding one's self to a belief in Daisy's "innocence" came
to seem to Winterbourne more and more a matter of fine-spun gallantry.
As I have already had occasion to relate, he was angry at finding
himself reduced to chopping logic about this young lady; he was vexed at
his want of instinctive certitude as to how far her eccentricities were
generic, national, and how far they were personal. From either view
of them he had somehow missed her, and now it was too late. She was
"carried away" by Mr. Giovanelli.

A few days after his brief interview with her mother, he encountered her
in that beautiful abode of flowering desolation known as the Palace of
the Caesars. The early Roman spring had filled the air with bloom and
perfume, and the rugged surface of the Palatine was muffled with tender
verdure. Daisy was strolling along the top of one of those great mounds
of ruin that are embanked with mossy marble and paved with monumental
inscriptions. It seemed to him that Rome had never been so lovely as
just then. He stood, looking off at the enchanting harmony of line and
color that remotely encircles the city, inhaling the softly humid odors,
and feeling the freshness of the year and the antiquity of the place
reaffirm themselves in mysterious interfusion. It seemed to him also
that Daisy had never looked so pretty, but this had been an observation
of his whenever he met her. Giovanelli was at her side, and Giovanelli,
too, wore an aspect of even unwonted brilliancy.

"Well," said Daisy, "I should think you would be lonesome!"

"Lonesome?" asked Winterbourne.

"You are always going round by yourself. Can't you get anyone to walk
with you?"

"I am not so fortunate," said Winterbourne, "as your companion."

Giovanelli, from the first, had treated Winterbourne with distinguished
politeness. He listened with a deferential air to his remarks; he
laughed punctiliously at his pleasantries; he seemed disposed to testify
to his belief that Winterbourne was a superior young man. He carried
himself in no degree like a jealous wooer; he had obviously a great deal
of tact; he had no objection to your expecting a little humility of him.
It even seemed to Winterbourne at times that Giovanelli would find a
certain mental relief in being able to have a private understanding with
him--to say to him, as an intelligent man, that, bless you, HE knew
how extraordinary was this young lady, and didn't flatter himself with
delusive--or at least TOO delusive--hopes of matrimony and dollars. On
this occasion he strolled away from his companion to pluck a sprig of
almond blossom, which he carefully arranged in his buttonhole.

"I know why you say that," said Daisy, watching Giovanelli. "Because you
think I go round too much with HIM." And she nodded at her attendant.

"Every one thinks so--if you care to know," said Winterbourne.

"Of course I care to know!" Daisy exclaimed seriously. "But I don't
believe it. They are only pretending to be shocked. They don't really
care a straw what I do. Besides, I don't go round so much."

"I think you will find they do care. They will show it disagreeably."

Daisy looked at him a moment. "How disagreeably?"

"Haven't you noticed anything?" Winterbourne asked.

"I have noticed you. But I noticed you were as stiff as an umbrella the
first time I saw you."

"You will find I am not so stiff as several others," said Winterbourne,
smiling.

"How shall I find it?"

"By going to see the others."

"What will they do to me?"

"They will give you the cold shoulder. Do you know what that means?"

Daisy was looking at him intently; she began to color. "Do you mean as
Mrs. Walker did the other night?"

"Exactly!" said Winterbourne.

She looked away at Giovanelli, who was decorating himself with his
almond blossom. Then looking back at Winterbourne, "I shouldn't think
you would let people be so unkind!" she said.

"How can I help it?" he asked.

"I should think you would say something."

"I do say something;" and he paused a moment. "I say that your mother
tells me that she believes you are engaged."

"Well, she does," said Daisy very simply.

Winterbourne began to laugh. "And does Randolph believe it?" he asked.

"I guess Randolph doesn't believe anything," said Daisy. Randolph's
skepticism excited Winterbourne to further hilarity, and he observed
that Giovanelli was coming back to them. Daisy, observing it too,
addressed herself again to her countryman. "Since you have mentioned
it," she said, "I AM engaged." * * * Winterbourne looked at her; he had
stopped laughing. "You don't believe!" she added.

He was silent a moment; and then, "Yes, I believe it," he said.

"Oh, no, you don't!" she answered. "Well, then--I am not!"

The young girl and her cicerone were on their way to the gate of the
enclosure, so that Winterbourne, who had but lately entered, presently
took leave of them. A week afterward he went to dine at a beautiful
villa on the Caelian Hill, and, on arriving, dismissed his hired
vehicle. The evening was charming, and he promised himself the
satisfaction of walking home beneath the Arch of Constantine and past
the vaguely lighted monuments of the Forum. There was a waning moon in
the sky, and her radiance was not brilliant, but she was veiled in a
thin cloud curtain which seemed to diffuse and equalize it. When, on his
return from the villa (it was eleven o'clock), Winterbourne approached
the dusky circle of the Colosseum, it recurred to him, as a lover of
the picturesque, that the interior, in the pale moonshine, would be well
worth a glance. He turned aside and walked to one of the empty arches,
near which, as he observed, an open carriage--one of the little Roman
streetcabs--was stationed. Then he passed in, among the cavernous
shadows of the great structure, and emerged upon the clear and silent
arena. The place had never seemed to him more impressive. One-half of
the gigantic circus was in deep shade, the other was sleeping in the
luminous dusk. As he stood there he began to murmur Byron's famous
lines, out of "Manfred," but before he had finished his quotation
he remembered that if nocturnal meditations in the Colosseum are
recommended by the poets, they are deprecated by the doctors. The
historic atmosphere was there, certainly; but the historic atmosphere,
scientifically considered, was no better than a villainous miasma.
Winterbourne walked to the middle of the arena, to take a more general
glance, intending thereafter to make a hasty retreat. The great cross in
the center was covered with shadow; it was only as he drew near it that
he made it out distinctly. Then he saw that two persons were stationed
upon the low steps which formed its base. One of these was a woman,
seated; her companion was standing in front of her.

Presently the sound of the woman's voice came to him distinctly in the
warm night air. "Well, he looks at us as one of the old lions or tigers
may have looked at the Christian martyrs!" These were the words he
heard, in the familiar accent of Miss Daisy Miller.

"Let us hope he is not very hungry," responded the ingenious Giovanelli.
"He will have to take me first; you will serve for dessert!"

Winterbourne stopped, with a sort of horror, and, it must be added, with
a sort of relief. It was as if a sudden illumination had been flashed
upon the ambiguity of Daisy's behavior, and the riddle had become easy
to read. She was a young lady whom a gentleman need no longer be
at pains to respect. He stood there, looking at her--looking at her
companion and not reflecting that though he saw them vaguely, he himself
must have been more brightly visible. He felt angry with himself that he
had bothered so much about the right way of regarding Miss Daisy Miller.
Then, as he was going to advance again, he checked himself, not from the
fear that he was doing her injustice, but from a sense of the danger
of appearing unbecomingly exhilarated by this sudden revulsion from
cautious criticism. He turned away toward the entrance of the place,
but, as he did so, he heard Daisy speak again.

"Why, it was Mr. Winterbourne! He saw me, and he cuts me!"

What a clever little reprobate she was, and how smartly she played at
injured innocence! But he wouldn't cut her. Winterbourne came forward
again and went toward the great cross. Daisy had got up; Giovanelli
lifted his hat. Winterbourne had now begun to think simply of the
craziness, from a sanitary point of view, of a delicate young girl
lounging away the evening in this nest of malaria. What if she WERE
a clever little reprobate? that was no reason for her dying of the
perniciosa. "How long have you been here?" he asked almost brutally.

Daisy, lovely in the flattering moonlight, looked at him a moment.
Then--"All the evening," she answered, gently. * * * "I never saw
anything so pretty."

"I am afraid," said Winterbourne, "that you will not think Roman fever
very pretty. This is the way people catch it. I wonder," he added,
turning to Giovanelli, "that you, a native Roman, should countenance
such a terrible indiscretion."

"Ah," said the handsome native, "for myself I am not afraid."

"Neither am I--for you! I am speaking for this young lady."

Giovanelli lifted his well-shaped eyebrows and showed his brilliant
teeth. But he took Winterbourne's rebuke with docility. "I told the
signorina it was a grave indiscretion, but when was the signorina ever
prudent?"

"I never was sick, and I don't mean to be!" the signorina declared. "I
don't look like much, but I'm healthy! I was bound to see the Colosseum
by moonlight; I shouldn't have wanted to go home without that; and we
have had the most beautiful time, haven't we, Mr. Giovanelli? If there
has been any danger, Eugenio can give me some pills. He has got some
splendid pills."

"I should advise you," said Winterbourne, "to drive home as fast as
possible and take one!"

"What you say is very wise," Giovanelli rejoined. "I will go and make
sure the carriage is at hand." And he went forward rapidly.

Daisy followed with Winterbourne. He kept looking at her; she seemed
not in the least embarrassed. Winterbourne said nothing; Daisy chattered
about the beauty of the place. "Well, I HAVE seen the Colosseum by
moonlight!" she exclaimed. "That's one good thing." Then, noticing
Winterbourne's silence, she asked him why he didn't speak. He made
no answer; he only began to laugh. They passed under one of the dark
archways; Giovanelli was in front with the carriage. Here Daisy stopped
a moment, looking at the young American. "DID you believe I was engaged,
the other day?" she asked.

"It doesn't matter what I believed the other day," said Winterbourne,
still laughing.

"Well, what do you believe now?"

"I believe that it makes very little difference whether you are engaged
or not!"

He felt the young girl's pretty eyes fixed upon him through the thick
gloom of the archway; she was apparently going to answer. But Giovanelli
hurried her forward. "Quick! quick!" he said; "if we get in by midnight
we are quite safe."

Daisy took her seat in the carriage, and the fortunate Italian placed
himself beside her. "Don't forget Eugenio's pills!" said Winterbourne as
he lifted his hat.

"I don't care," said Daisy in a little strange tone, "whether I have
Roman fever or not!" Upon this the cab driver cracked his whip, and they
rolled away over the desultory patches of the antique pavement.

Winterbourne, to do him justice, as it were, mentioned to no one that
he had encountered Miss Miller, at midnight, in the Colosseum with a
gentleman; but nevertheless, a couple of days later, the fact of her
having been there under these circumstances was known to every member
of the little American circle, and commented accordingly. Winterbourne
reflected that they had of course known it at the hotel, and that, after
Daisy's return, there had been an exchange of remarks between the porter
and the cab driver. But the young man was conscious, at the same moment,
that it had ceased to be a matter of serious regret to him that the
little American flirt should be "talked about" by low-minded menials.
These people, a day or two later, had serious information to give: the
little American flirt was alarmingly ill. Winterbourne, when the rumor
came to him, immediately went to the hotel for more news. He found that
two or three charitable friends had preceded him, and that they were
being entertained in Mrs. Miller's salon by Randolph.

"It's going round at night," said Randolph--"that's what made her sick.
She's always going round at night. I shouldn't think she'd want to,
it's so plaguy dark. You can't see anything here at night, except when
there's a moon. In America there's always a moon!" Mrs. Miller was
invisible; she was now, at least, giving her daughter the advantage of
her society. It was evident that Daisy was dangerously ill.

Winterbourne went often to ask for news of her, and once he saw Mrs.
Miller, who, though deeply alarmed, was, rather to his surprise,
perfectly composed, and, as it appeared, a most efficient and judicious
nurse. She talked a good deal about Dr. Davis, but Winterbourne paid her
the compliment of saying to himself that she was not, after all, such
a monstrous goose. "Daisy spoke of you the other day," she said to him.
"Half the time she doesn't know what she's saying, but that time I think
she did. She gave me a message she told me to tell you. She told me to
tell you that she never was engaged to that handsome Italian. I am sure
I am very glad; Mr. Giovanelli hasn't been near us since she was taken
ill. I thought he was so much of a gentleman; but I don't call that
very polite! A lady told me that he was afraid I was angry with him for
taking Daisy round at night. Well, so I am, but I suppose he knows I'm a
lady. I would scorn to scold him. Anyway, she says she's not engaged. I
don't know why she wanted you to know, but she said to me three times,
'Mind you tell Mr. Winterbourne.' And then she told me to ask if you
remembered the time you went to that castle in Switzerland. But I said
I wouldn't give any such messages as that. Only, if she is not engaged,
I'm sure I'm glad to know it."

But, as Winterbourne had said, it mattered very little. A week after
this, the poor girl died; it had been a terrible case of the fever.
Daisy's grave was in the little Protestant cemetery, in an angle of
the wall of imperial Rome, beneath the cypresses and the thick spring
flowers. Winterbourne stood there beside it, with a number of other
mourners, a number larger than the scandal excited by the young lady's
career would have led you to expect. Near him stood Giovanelli, who came
nearer still before Winterbourne turned away. Giovanelli was very pale:
on this occasion he had no flower in his buttonhole; he seemed to wish
to say something. At last he said, "She was the most beautiful young
lady I ever saw, and the most amiable;" and then he added in a moment,
"and she was the most innocent."

Winterbourne looked at him and presently repeated his words, "And the
most innocent?"

"The most innocent!"

Winterbourne felt sore and angry. "Why the devil," he asked, "did you
take her to that fatal place?"

Mr. Giovanelli's urbanity was apparently imperturbable. He looked on the
ground a moment, and then he said, "For myself I had no fear; and she
wanted to go."

"That was no reason!" Winterbourne declared.

The subtle Roman again dropped his eyes. "If she had lived, I should
have got nothing. She would never have married me, I am sure."

"She would never have married you?"

"For a moment I hoped so. But no. I am sure."

Winterbourne listened to him: he stood staring at the raw protuberance
among the April daisies. When he turned away again, Mr. Giovanelli, with
his light, slow step, had retired.

Winterbourne almost immediately left Rome; but the following summer he
again met his aunt, Mrs. Costello at Vevey. Mrs. Costello was fond of
Vevey. In the interval Winterbourne had often thought of Daisy Miller
and her mystifying manners. One day he spoke of her to his aunt--said it
was on his conscience that he had done her injustice.

"I am sure I don't know," said Mrs. Costello. "How did your injustice
affect her?"

"She sent me a message before her death which I didn't understand at the
time; but I have understood it since. She would have appreciated one's
esteem."

"Is that a modest way," asked Mrs. Costello, "of saying that she would
have reciprocated one's affection?"

Winterbourne offered no answer to this question; but he presently said,
"You were right in that remark that you made last summer. I was booked
to make a mistake. I have lived too long in foreign parts."

Nevertheless, he went back to live at Geneva, whence there continue to
come the most contradictory accounts of his motives of sojourn: a report
that he is "studying" hard--an intimation that he is much interested in
a very clever foreign lady.









AN INTERNATIONAL EPISODE

By Henry James





PART I


Four years ago--in 1874--two young Englishmen had occasion to go to the
United States. They crossed the ocean at midsummer, and, arriving in
New York on the first day of August, were much struck with the fervid
temperature of that city. Disembarking upon the wharf, they climbed
into one of those huge high-hung coaches which convey passengers to the
hotels, and with a great deal of bouncing and bumping, took their course
through Broadway. The midsummer aspect of New York is not, perhaps, the
most favorable one; still, it is not without its picturesque and even
brilliant side. Nothing could well resemble less a typical English
street than the interminable avenue, rich in incongruities, through
which our two travelers advanced--looking out on each side of them
at the comfortable animation of the sidewalks, the high-colored,
heterogeneous architecture, the huge white marble facades glittering
in the strong, crude light, and bedizened with gilded lettering, the
multifarious awnings, banners, and streamers, the extraordinary number
of omnibuses, horsecars, and other democratic vehicles, the vendors of
cooling fluids, the white trousers and big straw hats of the policemen,
the tripping gait of the modish young persons on the pavement, the
general brightness, newness, juvenility, both of people and things. The
young men had exchanged few observations; but in crossing Union Square,
in front of the monument to Washington--in the very shadow, indeed,
projected by the image of the PATER PATRIAE--one of them remarked to
the other, "It seems a rum-looking place."

"Ah, very odd, very odd," said the other, who was the clever man of the
two.

"Pity it's so beastly hot," resumed the first speaker after a pause.

"You know we are in a low latitude," said his friend.

"I daresay," remarked the other.

"I wonder," said the second speaker presently, "if they can give one a
bath?"

"I daresay not," rejoined the other.

"Oh, I say!" cried his comrade.

This animated discussion was checked by their arrival at the hotel,
which had been recommended to them by an American gentleman whose
acquaintance they made--with whom, indeed, they became very intimate--on
the steamer, and who had proposed to accompany them to the inn and
introduce them, in a friendly way, to the proprietor. This plan,
however, had been defeated by their friend's finding that his "partner"
was awaiting him on the wharf and that his commercial associate desired
him instantly to come and give his attention to certain telegrams
received from St. Louis. But the two Englishmen, with nothing but their
national prestige and personal graces to recommend them, were very well
received at the hotel, which had an air of capacious hospitality. They
found that a bath was not unattainable, and were indeed struck with
the facilities for prolonged and reiterated immersion with which their
apartment was supplied. After bathing a good deal--more, indeed, than
they had ever done before on a single occasion--they made their way into
the dining room of the hotel, which was a spacious restaurant, with a
fountain in the middle, a great many tall plants in ornamental tubs,
and an array of French waiters. The first dinner on land, after a sea
voyage, is, under any circumstances, a delightful occasion, and there
was something particularly agreeable in the circumstances in which our
young Englishmen found themselves. They were extremely good natured
young men; they were more observant than they appeared; in a sort of
inarticulate, accidentally dissimulative fashion, they were highly
appreciative. This was, perhaps, especially the case with the elder, who
was also, as I have said, the man of talent. They sat down at a little
table, which was a very different affair from the great clattering
seesaw in the saloon of the steamer. The wide doors and windows of the
restaurant stood open, beneath large awnings, to a wide pavement, where
there were other plants in tubs, and rows of spreading trees, and beyond
which there was a large shady square, without any palings, and with
marble-paved walks. And above the vivid verdure rose other facades of
white marble and of pale chocolate-colored stone, squaring themselves
against the deep blue sky. Here, outside, in the light and the shade
and the heat, there was a great tinkling of the bells of innumerable
streetcars, and a constant strolling and shuffling and rustling of
many pedestrians, a large proportion of whom were young women in
Pompadour-looking dresses. Within, the place was cool and vaguely
lighted, with the plash of water, the odor of flowers, and the flitting
of French waiters, as I have said, upon soundless carpets.

"It's rather like Paris, you know," said the younger of our two
travelers.

"It's like Paris--only more so," his companion rejoined.

"I suppose it's the French waiters," said the first speaker. "Why don't
they have French waiters in London?"

"Fancy a French waiter at a club," said his friend.

The young Englishman started a little, as if he could not fancy it. "In
Paris I'm very apt to dine at a place where there's an English waiter.
Don't you know what's-his-name's, close to the thingumbob? They always
set an English waiter at me. I suppose they think I can't speak French."

"Well, you can't." And the elder of the young Englishmen unfolded his
napkin.

His companion took no notice whatever of this declaration. "I say,"
he resumed in a moment, "I suppose we must learn to speak American. I
suppose we must take lessons."

"I can't understand them," said the clever man.

"What the deuce is HE saying?" asked his comrade, appealing from the
French waiter.

"He is recommending some soft-shell crabs," said the clever man.

And so, in desultory observation of the idiosyncrasies of the new
society in which they found themselves, the young Englishmen proceeded
to dine--going in largely, as the phrase is, for cooling draughts and
dishes, of which their attendant offered them a very long list. After
dinner they went out and slowly walked about the neighboring streets.
The early dusk of waning summer was coming on, but the heat was still
very great. The pavements were hot even to the stout boot soles of the
British travelers, and the trees along the curbstone emitted strange
exotic odors. The young men wandered through the adjoining square--that
queer place without palings, and with marble walks arranged in black
and white lozenges. There were a great many benches, crowded with
shabby-looking people, and the travelers remarked, very justly, that it
was not much like Belgrave Square. On one side was an enormous hotel,
lifting up into the hot darkness an immense array of open, brightly
lighted windows. At the base of this populous structure was an eternal
jangle of horsecars, and all round it, in the upper dusk, was a sinister
hum of mosquitoes. The ground floor of the hotel seemed to be a huge
transparent cage, flinging a wide glare of gaslight into the street,
of which it formed a sort of public adjunct, absorbing and emitting
the passersby promiscuously. The young Englishmen went in with everyone
else, from curiosity, and saw a couple of hundred men sitting on divans
along a great marble-paved corridor, with their legs stretched out,
together with several dozen more standing in a queue, as at the ticket
office of a railway station, before a brilliantly illuminated counter
of vast extent. These latter persons, who carried portmanteaus in their
hands, had a dejected, exhausted look; their garments were not very
fresh, and they seemed to be rendering some mysterious tribute to a
magnificent young man with a waxed mustache, and a shirtfront adorned
with diamond buttons, who every now and then dropped an absent glance
over their multitudinous patience. They were American citizens doing
homage to a hotel clerk.

"I'm glad he didn't tell us to go there," said one of our Englishmen,
alluding to their friend on the steamer, who had told them so many
things. They walked up the Fifth Avenue, where, for instance, he had
told them that all the first families lived. But the first families were
out of town, and our young travelers had only the satisfaction of seeing
some of the second--or perhaps even the third--taking the evening air
upon balconies and high flights of doorsteps, in the streets which
radiate from the more ornamental thoroughfare. They went a little way
down one of these side streets, and they saw young ladies in white
dresses--charming-looking persons--seated in graceful attitudes on the
chocolate-colored steps. In one or two places these young ladies were
conversing across the street with other young ladies seated in similar
postures and costumes in front of the opposite houses, and in the warm
night air their colloquial tones sounded strange in the ears of
the young Englishmen. One of our friends, nevertheless--the younger
one--intimated that he felt a disposition to interrupt a few of these
soft familiarities; but his companion observed, pertinently enough, that
he had better be careful. "We must not begin with making mistakes," said
his companion.

"But he told us, you know--he told us," urged the young man, alluding
again to the friend on the steamer.

"Never mind what he told us!" answered his comrade, who, if he had
greater talents, was also apparently more of a moralist.

By bedtime--in their impatience to taste of a terrestrial couch again
our seafarers went to bed early--it was still insufferably hot, and
the buzz of the mosquitoes at the open windows might have passed for an
audible crepitation of the temperature. "We can't stand this, you know,"
the young Englishmen said to each other; and they tossed about all night
more boisterously than they had tossed upon the Atlantic billows. On the
morrow, their first thought was that they would re-embark that day for
England; and then it occured to them that they might find an asylum
nearer at hand. The cave of Aeolus became their ideal of comfort, and
they wondered where the Americans went when they wished to cool
off. They had not the least idea, and they determined to apply for
information to Mr. J. L. Westgate. This was the name inscribed in a bold
hand on the back of a letter carefully preserved in the pocketbook of
our junior traveler. Beneath the address, in the left-hand corner of the
envelope, were the words, "Introducing Lord Lambeth and Percy Beaumont,
Esq." The letter had been given to the two Englishmen by a good friend
of theirs in London, who had been in America two years previously, and
had singled out Mr. J. L. Westgate from the many friends he had left
there as the consignee, as it were, of his compatriots. "He is a capital
fellow," the Englishman in London had said, "and he has got an awfully
pretty wife. He's tremendously hospitable--he will do everything in the
world for you; and as he knows everyone over there, it is quite needless
I should give you any other introduction. He will make you see everyone;
trust to him for putting you into circulation. He has got a tremendously
pretty wife." It was natural that in the hour of tribulation Lord
Lambeth and Mr. Percy Beaumont should have bethought themselves of a
gentleman whose attractions had been thus vividly depicted; all the more
so that he lived in the Fifth Avenue, and that the Fifth Avenue, as they
had ascertained the night before, was contiguous to their hotel. "Ten
to one he'll be out of town," said Percy Beaumont; "but we can at least
find out where he has gone, and we can immediately start in pursuit. He
can't possibly have gone to a hotter place, you know."

"Oh, there's only one hotter place," said Lord Lambeth, "and I hope he
hasn't gone there."

They strolled along the shady side of the street to the number
indicated upon the precious letter. The house presented an imposing
chocolate-colored expanse, relieved by facings and window cornices of
florid sculpture, and by a couple of dusty rose trees which clambered
over the balconies and the portico. This last-mentioned feature was
approached by a monumental flight of steps.

"Rather better than a London house," said Lord Lambeth, looking down
from this altitude, after they had rung the bell.

"It depends upon what London house you mean," replied his companion.
"You have a tremendous chance to get wet between the house door and your
carriage."

"Well," said Lord Lambeth, glancing at the burning heavens, "I 'guess'
it doesn't rain so much here!"

The door was opened by a long Negro in a white jacket, who grinned
familiarly when Lord Lambeth asked for Mr. Westgate.

"He ain't at home, sah; he's downtown at his o'fice."

"Oh, at his office?" said the visitors. "And when will he be at home?"

"Well, sah, when he goes out dis way in de mo'ning, he ain't liable to
come home all day."

This was discouraging; but the address of Mr. Westgate's office was
freely imparted by the intelligent black and was taken down by Percy
Beaumont in his pocketbook. The two gentlemen then returned, languidly,
to their hotel, and sent for a hackney coach, and in this commodious
vehicle they rolled comfortably downtown. They measured the whole length
of Broadway again and found it a path of fire; and then, deflecting to
the left, they were deposited by their conductor before a fresh,
light, ornamental structure, ten stories high, in a street crowded with
keen-faced, light-limbed young men, who were running about very quickly
and stopping each other eagerly at corners and in doorways. Passing into
this brilliant building, they were introduced by one of the keen-faced
young men--he was a charming fellow, in wonderful cream-colored garments
and a hat with a blue ribbon, who had evidently perceived them to be
aliens and helpless--to a very snug hydraulic elevator, in which they
took their place with many other persons, and which, shooting upward
in its vertical socket, presently projected them into the seventh
horizontal compartment of the edifice. Here, after brief delay, they
found themselves face to face with the friend of their friend in London.
His office was composed of several different rooms, and they waited very
silently in one of them after they had sent in their letter and their
cards. The letter was not one which it would take Mr. Westgate very long
to read, but he came out to speak to them more instantly than they could
have expected; he had evidently jumped up from his work. He was a tall,
lean personage and was dressed all in fresh white linen; he had a thin,
sharp, familiar face, with an expression that was at one and the same
time sociable and businesslike, a quick, intelligent eye, and a large
brown mustache, which concealed his mouth and made his chin, beneath it,
look small. Lord Lambeth thought he looked tremendously clever.

"How do you do, Lord Lambeth--how do you do, sir?" he said, holding the
open letter in his hand. "I'm very glad to see you; I hope you're very
well. You had better come in here; I think it's cooler," and he led
the way into another room, where there were law books and papers, and
windows wide open beneath striped awning. Just opposite one of the
windows, on a line with his eyes, Lord Lambeth observed the weathervane
of a church steeple. The uproar of the street sounded infinitely far
below, and Lord Lambeth felt very high in the air. "I say it's cooler,"
pursued their host, "but everything is relative. How do you stand the
heat?"

"I can't say we like it," said Lord Lambeth; "but Beaumont likes it
better than I."

"Well, it won't last," Mr. Westgate very cheerfully declared; "nothing
unpleasant lasts over here. It was very hot when Captain Littledale was
here; he did nothing but drink sherry cobblers. He expressed some doubt
in his letter whether I will remember him--as if I didn't remember
making six sherry cobblers for him one day in about twenty minutes. I
hope you left him well, two years having elapsed since then."

"Oh, yes, he's all right," said Lord Lambeth.

"I am always very glad to see your countrymen," Mr. Westgate pursued. "I
thought it would be time some of you should be coming along. A friend
of mine was saying to me only a day or two ago, 'It's time for the
watermelons and the Englishmen."

"The Englishmen and the watermelons just now are about the same thing,"
Percy Beaumont observed, wiping his dripping forehead.

"Ah, well, we'll put you on ice, as we do the melons. You must go down
to Newport."

"We'll go anywhere," said Lord Lambeth.

"Yes, you want to go to Newport; that's what you want to do," Mr.
Westgate affirmed. "But let's see--when did you get here?"

"Only yesterday," said Percy Beaumont.

"Ah, yes, by the Russia. Where are you staying?"

"At the Hanover, I think they call it."

"Pretty comfortable?" inquired Mr. Westgate.

"It seems a capital place, but I can't say we like the gnats," said Lord
Lambeth.

Mr. Westgate stared and laughed. "Oh, no, of course you don't like the
gnats. We shall expect you to like a good many things over here, but we
shan't insist upon your liking the gnats; though certainly you'll admit
that, as gnats, they are fine, eh? But you oughtn't to remain in the
city."

"So we think," said Lord Lambeth. "If you would kindly suggest
something--"

"Suggest something, my dear sir?" and Mr. Westgate looked at him,
narrowing his eyelids. "Open your mouth and shut your eyes! Leave it to
me, and I'll put you through. It's a matter of national pride with
me that all Englishmen should have a good time; and as I have had
considerable practice, I have learned to minister to their wants. I
find they generally want the right thing. So just please to consider
yourselves my property; and if anyone should try to appropriate you,
please to say, 'Hands off; too late for the market.' But let's see,"
continued the American, in his slow, humorous voice, with a distinctness
of utterance which appeared to his visitors to be part of a humorous
intention--a strangely leisurely, speculative voice for a man evidently
so busy and, as they felt, so professional--"let's see; are you going to
make something of a stay, Lord Lambeth?"

"Oh, dear, no," said the young Englishman; "my cousin was coming over
on some business, so I just came across, at an hour's notice, for the
lark."

"Is it your first visit to the United States?"

"Oh, dear, yes."

"I was obliged to come on some business," said Percy Beaumont, "and I
brought Lambeth along."

"And YOU have been here before, sir?"

"Never--never."

"I thought, from your referring to business--" said Mr. Westgate.

"Oh, you see I'm by way of being a barrister," Percy Beaumont answered.
"I know some people that think of bringing a suit against one of your
railways, and they asked me to come over and take measures accordingly."

"What's your railroad?" he asked.

"The Tennessee Central."

The American tilted back his chair a little and poised it an instant.
"Well, I'm sorry you want to attack one of our institutions," he said,
smiling. "But I guess you had better enjoy yourself FIRST!"

"I'm certainly rather afraid I can't work in this weather," the young
barrister confessed.

"Leave that to the natives," said Mr. Westgate. "Leave the Tennessee
Central to me, Mr. Beaumont. Some day we'll talk it over, and I guess I
can make it square. But I didn't know you Englishmen ever did any work,
in the upper classes."

"Oh, we do a lot of work; don't we, Lambeth?" asked Percy Beaumont.

"I must certainly be at home by the 19th of September," said the younger
Englishman, irrelevantly but gently.

"For the shooting, eh? or is it the hunting, or the fishing?" inquired
his entertainer.

"Oh, I must be in Scotland," said Lord Lambeth, blushing a little.

"Well, then," rejoined Mr. Westgate, "you had better amuse yourself
first, also. You must go down and see Mrs. Westgate."

"We should be so happy, if you would kindly tell us the train," said
Percy Beaumont.

"It isn't a train--it's a boat."

"Oh, I see. And what is the name of--a--the--a--town?"

"It isn't a town," said Mr. Westgate, laughing. "It's a--well, what
shall I call it? It's a watering place. In short, it's Newport. You'll
see what it is. It's cool; that's the principal thing. You will greatly
oblige me by going down there and putting yourself into the hands of
Mrs. Westgate. It isn't perhaps for me to say it, but you couldn't be in
better hands. Also in those of her sister, who is staying with her. She
is very fond of Englishmen. She thinks there is nothing like them."

"Mrs. Westgate or--a--her sister?" asked Percy Beaumont modestly, yet in
the tone of an inquiring traveler.

"Oh, I mean my wife," said Mr. Westgate. "I don't suppose my
sister-in-law knows much about them. She has always led a very quiet
life; she has lived in Boston."

Percy Beaumont listened with interest. "That, I believe," he said, "is
the most--a--intellectual town?"

"I believe it is very intellectual. I don't go there much," responded
his host.

"I say, we ought to go there," said Lord Lambeth to his companion.

"Oh, Lord Lambeth, wait till the great heat is over," Mr. Westgate
interposed. "Boston in this weather would be very trying; it's not the
temperature for intellectual exertion. At Boston, you know, you have to
pass an examination at the city limits; and when you come away they give
you a kind of degree."

Lord Lambeth stared, blushing a little; and Percy Beaumont stared a
little also--but only with his fine natural complexion--glancing aside
after a moment to see that his companion was not looking too credulous,
for he had heard a great deal of American humor. "I daresay it is very
jolly," said the younger gentleman.

"I daresay it is," said Mr. Westgate. "Only I must impress upon you that
at present--tomorrow morning, at an early hour--you will be expected at
Newport. We have a house there; half the people in New York go there for
the summer. I am not sure that at this very moment my wife can take you
in; she has got a lot of people staying with her; I don't know who they
all are; only she may have no room. But you can begin with the hotel,
and meanwhile you can live at my house. In that way--simply sleeping
at the hotel--you will find it tolerable. For the rest, you must make
yourself at home at my place. You mustn't be shy, you know; if you are
only here for a month that will be a great waste of time. Mrs. Westgate
won't neglect you, and you had better not try to resist her. I know
something about that. I expect you'll find some pretty girls on the
premises. I shall write to my wife by this afternoon's mail, and
tomorrow morning she and Miss Alden will look out for you. Just walk
right in and make yourself comfortable. Your steamer leaves from this
part of the city, and I will immediately send out and get you a cabin.
Then, at half past four o'clock, just call for me here, and I will go
with you and put you on board. It's a big boat; you might get lost. A
few days hence, at the end of the week, I will come down to Newport and
see how you are getting on."

The two young Englishmen inaugurated the policy of not resisting Mrs.
Westgate by submitting, with great docility and thankfulness, to her
husband. He was evidently a very good fellow, and he made an impression
upon his visitors; his hospitality seemed to recommend itself
consciously--with a friendly wink, as it were--as if it hinted,
judicially, that you could not possibly make a better bargain. Lord
Lambeth and his cousin left their entertainer to his labors and returned
to their hotel, where they spent three or four hours in their respective
shower baths. Percy Beaumont had suggested that they ought to see
something of the town; but "Oh, damn the town!" his noble kinsman had
rejoined. They returned to Mr. Westgate's office in a carriage, with
their luggage, very punctually; but it must be reluctantly recorded
that, this time, he kept them waiting so long that they felt themselves
missing the steamer, and were deterred only by an amiable modesty from
dispensing with his attendance and starting on a hasty scramble to the
wharf. But when at last he appeared, and the carriage plunged into the
purlieus of Broadway, they jolted and jostled to such good purpose that
they reached the huge white vessel while the bell for departure was
still ringing and the absorption of passengers still active. It was
indeed, as Mr. Westgate had said, a big boat, and his leadership in the
innumerable and interminable corridors and cabins, with which he seemed
perfectly acquainted, and of which anyone and everyone appeared to have
the entree, was very grateful to the slightly bewildered voyagers. He
showed them their stateroom--a spacious apartment, embellished with gas
lamps, mirrors en pied, and sculptured furniture--and then, long after
they had been intimately convinced that the steamer was in motion and
launched upon the unknown stream that they were about to navigate, he
bade them a sociable farewell.

"Well, goodbye, Lord Lambeth," he said; "goodbye, Mr. Percy Beaumont. I
hope you'll have a good time. Just let them do what they want with you.
I'll come down by-and-by and look after you."

The young Englishmen emerged from their cabin and amused themselves with
wandering about the immense labyrinthine steamer, which struck them as
an extraordinary mixture of a ship and a hotel. It was densely crowded
with passengers, the larger number of whom appeared to be ladies and
very young children; and in the big saloons, ornamented in white and
gold, which followed each other in surprising succession, beneath the
swinging gaslight, and among the small side passages where the Negro
domestics of both sexes assembled with an air of philosophic leisure,
everyone was moving to and fro and exchanging loud and familiar
observations. Eventually, at the instance of a discriminating black, our
young men went and had some "supper" in a wonderful place arranged like
a theater, where, in a gilded gallery, upon which little boxes appeared
to open, a large orchestra was playing operatic selections, and, below,
people were handing about bills of fare, as if they had been programs.
All this was sufficiently curious; but the agreeable thing, later, was
to sit out on one of the great white decks of the steamer, in the warm
breezy darkness, and, in the vague starlight, to make out the line of
low, mysterious coast. The young Englishmen tried American cigars--those
of Mr. Westgate--and talked together as they usually talked, with many
odd silences, lapses of logic, and incongruities of transition; like
people who have grown old together and learned to supply each other's
missing phrases; or, more especially, like people thoroughly conscious
of a common point of view, so that a style of conversation superficially
lacking in finish might suffice for reference to a fund of associations
in the light of which everything was all right.

"We really seem to be going out to sea," Percy Beaumont observed. "Upon
my word, we are going back to England. He has shipped us off again. I
call that 'real mean.'"

"I suppose it's all right," said Lord Lambeth. "I want to see those
pretty girls at Newport. You know, he told us the place was an island;
and aren't all islands in the sea?"

"Well," resumed the elder traveler after a while, "if his house is as
good as his cigars, we shall do very well."

"He seems a very good fellow," said Lord Lambeth, as if this idea had
just occurred to him.

"I say, we had better remain at the inn," rejoined his companion
presently. "I don't think I like the way he spoke of his house. I don't
like stopping in the house with such a tremendous lot of women."

"Oh, I don't mind," said Lord Lambeth. And then they smoked a while in
silence. "Fancy his thinking we do no work in England!" the young man
resumed.

"I daresay he didn't really think so," said Percy Beaumont.

"Well, I guess they don't know much about England over here!" declared
Lord Lambeth humorously. And then there was another long pause. "He was
devilish civil," observed the young nobleman.

"Nothing, certainly, could have been more civil," rejoined his
companion.

"Littledale said his wife was great fun," said Lord Lambeth.

"Whose wife--Littledale's?"

"This American's--Mrs. Westgate. What's his name? J.L."

Beaumont was silent a moment. "What was fun to Littledale," he said at
last, rather sententiously, "may be death to us."

"What do you mean by that?" asked his kinsman. "I am as good a man as
Littledale."

"My dear boy, I hope you won't begin to flirt," said Percy Beaumont.

"I don't care. I daresay I shan't begin."

"With a married woman, if she's bent upon it, it's all very well,"
Beaumont expounded. "But our friend mentioned a young lady--a sister, a
sister-in-law. For God's sake, don't get entangled with her!"

"How do you mean entangled?"

"Depend upon it she will try to hook you."

"Oh, bother!" said Lord Lambeth.

"American girls are very clever," urged his companion.

"So much the better," the young man declared.

"I fancy they are always up to some game of that sort," Beaumont
continued.

"They can't be worse than they are in England," said Lord Lambeth
judicially.

"Ah, but in England," replied Beaumont, "you have got your natural
protectors. You have got your mother and sisters."

"My mother and sisters--" began the young nobleman with a certain
energy. But he stopped in time, puffing at his cigar.

"Your mother spoke to me about it, with tears in her eyes," said Percy
Beaumont. "She said she felt very nervous. I promised to keep you out of
mischief."

"You had better take care of yourself," said the object of maternal and
ducal solicitude.

"Ah," rejoined the young barrister, "I haven't the expectation of a
hundred thousand a year, not to mention other attractions."

"Well," said Lord Lambeth, "don't cry out before you're hurt!"

It was certainly very much cooler at Newport, where our travelers found
themselves assigned to a couple of diminutive bedrooms in a faraway
angle of an immense hotel. They had gone ashore in the early summer
twilight and had very promptly put themselves to bed; thanks to which
circumstance and to their having, during the previous hours, in their
commodious cabin, slept the sleep of youth and health, they began to
feel, toward eleven o'clock, very alert and inquisitive. They looked out
of their windows across a row of small green fields, bordered with
low stone walls of rude construction, and saw a deep blue ocean lying
beneath a deep blue sky, and flecked now and then with scintillating
patches of foam. A strong, fresh breeze came in through the curtainless
casements and prompted our young men to observe, generally, that it
didn't seem half a bad climate. They made other observations after they
had emerged from their rooms in pursuit of breakfast--a meal of which
they partook in a huge bare hall, where a hundred Negroes, in white
jackets, were shuffling about upon an uncarpeted floor; where the
flies were superabundant, and the tables and dishes covered over with a
strange, voluminous integument of coarse blue gauze; and where several
little boys and girls, who had risen late, were seated in fastidious
solitude at the morning repast. These young persons had not the morning
paper before them, but they were engaged in languid perusal of the bill
of fare.

This latter document was a great puzzle to our friends, who, on
reflecting that its bewildering categories had relation to breakfast
alone, had an uneasy prevision of an encyclopedic dinner list. They
found a great deal of entertainment at the hotel, an enormous wooden
structure, for the erection of which it seemed to them that the
virgin forests of the West must have been terribly deflowered. It was
perforated from end to end with immense bare corridors, through which a
strong draught was blowing--bearing along wonderful figures of ladies
in white morning dresses and clouds of Valenciennes lace, who seemed
to float down the long vistas with expanded furbelows, like angels
spreading their wings. In front was a gigantic veranda, upon which an
army might have encamped--a vast wooden terrace, with a roof as lofty
as the nave of a cathedral. Here our young Englishmen enjoyed, as they
supposed, a glimpse of American society, which was distributed over the
measureless expanse in a variety of sedentary attitudes, and appeared
to consist largely of pretty young girls, dressed as if for a fete
champetre, swaying to and fro in rocking chairs, fanning themselves with
large straw fans, and enjoying an enviable exemption from social cares.
Lord Lambeth had a theory, which it might be interesting to trace to
its origin, that it would be not only agreeable, but easily possible, to
enter into relations with one of these young ladies; and his companion
(as he had done a couple of days before) found occasion to check the
young nobleman's colloquial impulses.

"You had better take care," said Percy Beaumont, "or you will have an
offended father or brother pulling out a bowie knife."

"I assure you it is all right," Lord Lambeth replied. "You know the
Americans come to these big hotels to make acquaintances."

"I know nothing about it, and neither do you," said his kinsman,
who, like a clever man, had begun to perceive that the observation of
American society demanded a readjustment of one's standard.

"Hang it, then let's find out!" cried Lord Lambeth with some impatience.
"You know I don't want to miss anything."

"We will find out," said Percy Beaumont very reasonably. "We will go and
see Mrs. Westgate and make all proper inquiries."

And so the two inquiring Englishmen, who had this lady's address
inscribed in her husband's hand upon a card, descended from the veranda
of the big hotel and took their way, according to direction, along a
large straight road, past a series of fresh-looking villas embosomed
in shrubs and flowers and enclosed in an ingenious variety of wooden
palings. The morning was brilliant and cool, the villas were smart
and snug, and the walk of the young travelers was very entertaining.
Everything looked as if it had received a coat of fresh paint the day
before--the red roofs, the green shutters, the clean, bright browns and
buffs of the housefronts. The flower beds on the little lawns seemed to
sparkle in the radiant air, and the gravel in the short carriage sweeps
to flash and twinkle. Along the road came a hundred little
basket phaetons, in which, almost always, a couple of ladies were
sitting--ladies in white dresses and long white gloves, holding the
reins and looking at the two Englishmen, whose nationality was not
elusive, through thick blue veils tied tightly about their faces as if
to guard their complexions. At last the young men came within sight of
the sea again, and then, having interrogated a gardener over the paling
of a villa, they turned into an open gate. Here they found themselves
face to face with the ocean and with a very picturesque structure,
resembling a magnified chalet, which was perched upon a green embankment
just above it. The house had a veranda of extraordinary width all around
it and a great many doors and windows standing open to the veranda.
These various apertures had, in common, such an accessible, hospitable
air, such a breezy flutter within of light curtains, such expansive
thresholds and reassuring interiors, that our friends hardly knew which
was the regular entrance, and, after hesitating a moment, presented
themselves at one of the windows. The room within was dark, but in
a moment a graceful figure vaguely shaped itself in the rich-looking
gloom, and a lady came to meet them. Then they saw that she had been
seated at a table writing, and that she had heard them and had got up.
She stepped out into the light; she wore a frank, charming smile, with
which she held out her hand to Percy Beaumont.

"Oh, you must be Lord Lambeth and Mr. Beaumont," she said. "I have heard
from my husband that you would come. I am extremely glad to see you."
And she shook hands with each of her visitors. Her visitors were a
little shy, but they had very good manners; they responded with smiles
and exclamations, and they apologized for not knowing the front door.
The lady rejoined, with vivacity, that when she wanted to see people
very much she did not insist upon those distinctions, and that Mr.
Westgate had written to her of his English friends in terms that made
her really anxious. "He said you were so terribly prostrated," said Mrs.
Westgate.

"Oh, you mean by the heat?" replied Percy Beaumont. "We were
rather knocked up, but we feel wonderfully better. We had such a
jolly--a--voyage down here. It's so very good of you to mind."

"Yes, it's so very kind of you," murmured Lord Lambeth.

Mrs. Westgate stood smiling; she was extremely pretty. "Well, I did
mind," she said; "and I thought of sending for you this morning to the
Ocean House. I am very glad you are better, and I am charmed you have
arrived. You must come round to the other side of the piazza." And she
led the way, with a light, smooth step, looking back at the young men
and smiling.

The other side of the piazza was, as Lord Lambeth presently remarked, a
very jolly place. It was of the most liberal proportions, and with its
awnings, its fanciful chairs, its cushions and rugs, its view of the
ocean, close at hand, tumbling along the base of the low cliffs whose
level tops intervened in lawnlike smoothness, it formed a charming
complement to the drawing room. As such it was in course of use at the
present moment; it was occupied by a social circle. There were several
ladies and two or three gentlemen, to whom Mrs. Westgate proceeded to
introduce the distinguished strangers. She mentioned a great many names
very freely and distinctly; the young Englishmen, shuffling about and
bowing, were rather bewildered. But at last they were provided
with chairs--low, wicker chairs, gilded, and tied with a great many
ribbons--and one of the ladies (a very young person, with a little snub
nose and several dimples) offered Percy Beaumont a fan. The fan was also
adorned with pink love knots; but Percy Beaumont declined it, although
he was very hot. Presently, however, it became cooler; the breeze from
the sea was delicious, the view was charming, and the people sitting
there looked exceedingly fresh and comfortable. Several of the ladies
seemed to be young girls, and the gentlemen were slim, fair youths,
such as our friends had seen the day before in New York. The ladies were
working upon bands of tapestry, and one of the young men had an open
book in his lap. Beaumont afterward learned from one of the ladies that
this young man had been reading aloud, that he was from Boston and was
very fond of reading aloud. Beaumont said it was a great pity that they
had interrupted him; he should like so much (from all he had heard) to
hear a Bostonian read. Couldn't the young man be induced to go on?

"Oh no," said his informant very freely; "he wouldn't be able to get the
young ladies to attend to him now."

There was something very friendly, Beaumont perceived, in the attitude
of the company; they looked at the young Englishmen with an air of
animated sympathy and interest; they smiled, brightly and unanimously,
at everything either of the visitors said. Lord Lambeth and his
companion felt that they were being made very welcome. Mrs. Westgate
seated herself between them, and, talking a great deal to each, they had
occasion to observe that she was as pretty as their friend Littledale
had promised. She was thirty years old, with the eyes and the smile of
a girl of seventeen, and she was extremely light and graceful, elegant,
exquisite. Mrs. Westgate was extremely spontaneous. She was very
frank and demonstrative and appeared always--while she looked at
you delightedly with her beautiful young eyes--to be making sudden
confessions and concessions, after momentary hesitations.

"We shall expect to see a great deal of you," she said to Lord Lambeth
with a kind of joyous earnestness. "We are very fond of Englishmen here;
that is, there are a great many we have been fond of. After a day or
two you must come and stay with us; we hope you will stay a long time.
Newport's a very nice place when you come really to know it, when you
know plenty of people. Of course you and Mr. Beaumont will have no
difficulty about that. Englishmen are very well received here; there are
almost always two or three of them about. I think they always like it,
and I must say I should think they would. They receive ever so much
attention. I must say I think they sometimes get spoiled; but I am sure
you and Mr. Beaumont are proof against that. My husband tells me you
are a friend of Captain Littledale; he was such a charming man. He made
himself most agreeable here, and I am sure I wonder he didn't stay.
It couldn't have been pleasanter for him in his own country, though,
I suppose, it is very pleasant in England, for English people. I don't
know myself; I have been there very little. I have been a great deal
abroad, but I am always on the Continent. I must say I'm extremely fond
of Paris; you know we Americans always are; we go there when we die. Did
you ever hear that before? That was said by a great wit, I mean the good
Americans; but we are all good; you'll see that for yourself. All I know
of England is London, and all I know of London is that place on that
little corner, you know, where you buy jackets--jackets with that coarse
braid and those big buttons. They make very good jackets in London, I
will do you the justice to say that. And some people like the hats; but
about the hats I was always a heretic; I always got my hats in Paris.
You can't wear an English hat--at least I never could--unless you dress
your hair a l'Anglaise; and I must say that is a talent I have never
possessed. In Paris they will make things to suit your peculiarities;
but in England I think you like much more to have--how shall I say
it?--one thing for everybody. I mean as regards dress. I don't know
about other things; but I have always supposed that in other things
everything was different. I mean according to the people--according to
the classes, and all that. I am afraid you will think that I don't take
a very favorable view; but you know you can't take a very favorable view
in Dover Street in the month of November. That has always been my fate.
Do you know Jones's Hotel in Dover Street? That's all I know of England.
Of course everyone admits that the English hotels are your weak point.
There was always the most frightful fog; I couldn't see to try my things
on. When I got over to America--into the light--I usually found they
were twice too big. The next time I mean to go in the season; I think
I shall go next year. I want very much to take my sister; she has never
been to England. I don't know whether you know what I mean by saying
that the Englishmen who come here sometimes get spoiled. I mean that
they take things as a matter of course--things that are done for them.
Now, naturally, they are only a matter of course when the Englishmen are
very nice. But, of course, they are almost always very nice. Of course
this isn't nearly such an interesting country as England; there are not
nearly so many things to see, and we haven't your country life. I have
never seen anything of your country life; when I am in Europe I am
always on the Continent. But I have heard a great deal about it; I know
that when you are among yourselves in the country you have the most
beautiful time. Of course we have nothing of that sort, we have nothing
on that scale. I don't apologize, Lord Lambeth; some Americans are
always apologizing; you must have noticed that. We have the reputation
of always boasting and bragging and waving the American flag; but I must
say that what strikes me is that we are perpetually making excuses and
trying to smooth things over. The American flag has quite gone out of
fashion; it's very carefully folded up, like an old tablecloth. Why
should we apologize? The English never apologize--do they? No; I
must say I never apologize. You must take us as we come--with all our
imperfections on our heads. Of course we haven't your country life, and
your old ruins, and your great estates, and your leisure class, and all
that. But if we haven't, I should think you might find it a pleasant
change--I think any country is pleasant where they have pleasant
manners. Captain Littledale told me he had never seen such pleasant
manners as at Newport, and he had been a great deal in European society.
Hadn't he been in the diplomatic service? He told me the dream of his
life was to get appointed to a diplomatic post in Washington. But he
doesn't seem to have succeeded. I suppose that in England promotion--and
all that sort of thing--is fearfully slow. With us, you know, it's a
great deal too fast. You see, I admit our drawbacks. But I must confess
I think Newport is an ideal place. I don't know anything like it
anywhere. Captain Littledale told me he didn't know anything like it
anywhere. It's entirely different from most watering places; it's a
most charming life. I must say I think that when one goes to a foreign
country one ought to enjoy the differences. Of course there are
differences, otherwise what did one come abroad for? Look for your
pleasure in the differences, Lord Lambeth; that's the way to do it;
and then I am sure you will find American society--at least Newport
society--most charming and most interesting. I wish very much my husband
were here; but he's dreadfully confined to New York. I suppose you
think that is very strange--for a gentleman. But you see we haven't any
leisure class."

Mrs. Westgate's discourse, delivered in a soft, sweet voice, flowed
on like a miniature torrent, and was interrupted by a hundred
little smiles, glances, and gestures, which might have figured the
irregularities and obstructions of such a stream. Lord Lambeth listened
to her with, it must be confessed, a rather ineffectual attention,
although he indulged in a good many little murmurs and ejaculations
of assent and deprecation. He had no great faculty for apprehending
generalizations. There were some three or four indeed which, in the
play of his own intelligence, he had originated, and which had seemed
convenient at the moment; but at the present time he could hardly have
been said to follow Mrs. Westgate as she darted gracefully about in the
sea of speculation. Fortunately she asked for no especial rejoinder, for
she looked about at the rest of the company as well, and smiled at Percy
Beaumont, on the other side of her, as if he too much understand her and
agree with her. He was rather more successful than his companion; for
besides being, as we know, cleverer, his attention was not vaguely
distracted by close vicinity to a remarkably interesting young girl,
with dark hair and blue eyes. This was the case with Lord Lambeth, to
whom it occurred after a while that the young girl with blue eyes and
dark hair was the pretty sister of whom Mrs. Westgate had spoken. She
presently turned to him with a remark which established her identity.

"It's a great pity you couldn't have brought my brother-in-law with you.
It's a great shame he should be in New York in these days."

"Oh, yes; it's so very hot," said Lord Lambeth.

"It must be dreadful," said the young girl.

"I daresay he is very busy," Lord Lambeth observed.

"The gentlemen in America work too much," the young girl went on.

"Oh, do they? I daresay they like it," said her interlocutor.

"I don't like it. One never sees them."

"Don't you, really?" asked Lord Lambeth. "I shouldn't have fancied
that."

"Have you come to study American manners?" asked the young girl.

"Oh, I don't know. I just came over for a lark. I haven't got long."
Here there was a pause, and Lord Lambeth began again. "But Mr. Westgate
will come down here, will not he?"

"I certainly hope he will. He must help to entertain you and Mr.
Beaumont."

Lord Lambeth looked at her a little with his handsome brown eyes. "Do
you suppose he would have come down with us if we had urged him?"

Mr. Westgate's sister-in-law was silent a moment, and then, "I daresay
he would," she answered.

"Really!" said the young Englishman. "He was immensely civil to Beaumont
and me," he added.

"He is a dear good fellow," the young lady rejoined, "and he is a
perfect husband. But all Americans are that," she continued, smiling.

"Really!" Lord Lambeth exclaimed again and wondered whether all American
ladies had such a passion for generalizing as these two.

He sat there a good while: there was a great deal of talk; it was all
very friendly and lively and jolly. Everyone present, sooner or
later, said something to him, and seemed to make a particular point of
addressing him by name. Two or three other persons came in, and there
was a shifting of seats and changing of places; the gentlemen all
entered into intimate conversation with the two Englishmen, made them
urgent offers of hospitality, and hoped they might frequently be of
service to them. They were afraid Lord Lambeth and Mr. Beaumont were not
very comfortable at their hotel; that it was not, as one of them said,
"so private as those dear little English inns of yours." This last
gentleman went on to say that unfortunately, as yet, perhaps, privacy
was not quite so easily obtained in America as might be desired; still,
he continued, you could generally get it by paying for it; in fact, you
could get everything in America nowadays by paying for it. American life
was certainly growing a great deal more private; it was growing very
much like England. Everything at Newport, for instance, was thoroughly
private; Lord Lambeth would probably be struck with that. It was also
represented to the strangers that it mattered very little whether their
hotel was agreeable, as everyone would want them to make visits; they
would stay with other people, and, in any case, they would be a great
deal at Mrs. Westgate's. They would find that very charming; it was
the pleasantest house in Newport. It was a pity Mr. Westgate was always
away; he was a man of the highest ability--very acute, very acute. He
worked like a horse, and he left his wife--well, to do about as she
liked. He liked her to enjoy herself, and she seemed to know how. She
was extremely brilliant and a splendid talker. Some people preferred her
sister; but Miss Alden was very different; she was in a different style
altogether. Some people even thought her prettier, and, certainly, she
was not so sharp. She was more in the Boston style; she had lived a
great deal in Boston, and she was very highly educated. Boston girls, it
was propounded, were more like English young ladies.

Lord Lambeth had presently a chance to test the truth of this
proposition, for on the company rising in compliance with a suggestion
from their hostess that they should walk down to the rocks and look
at the sea, the young Englishman again found himself, as they strolled
across the grass, in proximity to Mrs. Westgate's sister. Though she was
but a girl of twenty, she appeared to feel the obligation to exert an
active hospitality; and this was, perhaps, the more to be noticed as she
seemed by nature a reserved and retiring person, and had little of her
sister's fraternizing quality. She was perhaps rather too thin, and she
was a little pale; but as she moved slowly over the grass, with her arms
hanging at her sides, looking gravely for a moment at the sea and then
brightly, for all her gravity, at him, Lord Lambeth thought her at least
as pretty as Mrs. Westgate, and reflected that if this was the Boston
style the Boston style was very charming. He thought she looked very
clever; he could imagine that she was highly educated; but at the same
time she seemed gentle and graceful. For all her cleverness, however,
he felt that she had to think a little what to say; she didn't say the
first thing that came into her head; he had come from a different part
of the world and from a different society, and she was trying to adapt
her conversation. The others were scattering themselves near the rocks;
Mrs. Westgate had charge of Percy Beaumont.

"Very jolly place, isn't it?" said Lord Lambeth. "It's a very jolly
place to sit."

"Very charming," said the young girl. "I often sit here; there are all
kinds of cozy corners--as if they had been made on purpose."

"Ah! I suppose you have had some of them made," said the young man.

Miss Alden looked at him a moment. "Oh no, we have had nothing made.
It's pure nature."

"I should think you would have a few little benches--rustic seats and
that sort of thing. It might be so jolly to sit here, you know," Lord
Lambeth went on.

"I am afraid we haven't so many of those things as you," said the young
girl thoughtfully.

"I daresay you go in for pure nature, as you were saying. Nature over
here must be so grand, you know." And Lord Lambeth looked about him.

The little coast line hereabouts was very pretty, but it was not at all
grand, and Miss Alden appeared to rise to a perception of this fact.
"I am afraid it seems to you very rough," she said. "It's not like the
coast scenery in Kingsley's novels."

"Ah, the novels always overdo it, you know," Lord Lambeth rejoined. "You
must not go by the novels."

They were wandering about a little on the rocks, and they stopped and
looked down into a narrow chasm where the rising tide made a curious
bellowing sound. It was loud enough to prevent their hearing each other,
and they stood there for some moments in silence. The young girl looked
at her companion, observing him attentively, but covertly, as women,
even when very young, know how to do. Lord Lambeth repaid observation;
tall, straight, and strong, he was handsome as certain young Englishmen,
and certain young Englishmen almost alone, are handsome; with a perfect
finish of feature and a look of intellectual repose and gentle good
temper which seemed somehow to be consequent upon his well-cut nose and
chin. And to speak of Lord Lambeth's expression of intellectual repose
is not simply a civil way of saying that he looked stupid. He was
evidently not a young man of an irritable imagination; he was not, as
he would himself have said, tremendously clever; but though there was a
kind of appealing dullness in his eye, he looked thoroughly reasonable
and competent, and his appearance proclaimed that to be a nobleman,
an athlete, and an excellent fellow was a sufficiently brilliant
combination of qualities. The young girl beside him, it may be attested
without further delay, thought him the handsomest young man she had ever
seen; and Bessie Alden's imagination, unlike that of her companion,
was irritable. He, however, was also making up his mind that she was
uncommonly pretty.

"I daresay it's very gay here, that you have lots of balls and parties,"
he said; for, if he was not tremendously clever, he rather prided
himself on having, with women, a sufficiency of conversation.

"Oh, yes, there is a great deal going on," Bessie Alden replied. "There
are not so many balls, but there are a good many other things. You will
see for yourself; we live rather in the midst of it."

"It's very kind of you to say that. But I thought you Americans were
always dancing."

"I suppose we dance a good deal; but I have never seen much of it. We
don't do it much, at any rate, in summer. And I am sure," said Bessie
Alden, "that we don't have so many balls as you have in England."

"Really!" exclaimed Lord Lambeth. "Ah, in England it all depends, you
know."

"You will not think much of our gaieties," said the young girl, looking
at him with a little mixture of interrogation and decision which was
peculiar to her. The interrogation seemed earnest and the decision
seemed arch; but the mixture, at any rate, was charming. "Those things,
with us, are much less splendid than in England."

"I fancy you don't mean that," said Lord Lambeth, laughing.

"I assure you I mean everything I say," the young girl declared.
"Certainly, from what I have read about English society, it is very
different."

"Ah well, you know," said her companion, "those things are often
described by fellows who know nothing about them. You mustn't mind what
you read."

"Oh, I SHALL mind what I read!" Bessie Alden rejoined. "When I read
Thackeray and George Eliot, how can I help minding them?"

"Ah well, Thackeray, and George Eliot," said the young nobleman; "I
haven't read much of them."

"Don't you suppose they know about society?" asked Bessie Alden.

"Oh, I daresay they know; they were so very clever. But these
fashionable novels," said Lord Lambeth, "they are awful rot, you know."

His companion looked at him a moment with her dark blue eyes, and then
she looked down in the chasm where the water was tumbling about. "Do you
mean Mrs. Gore, for instance?" she said presently, raising her eyes.

"I am afraid I haven't read that, either," was the young man's
rejoinder, laughing a little and blushing. "I am afraid you'll think I
am not very intellectual."

"Reading Mrs. Gore is no proof of intellect. But I like reading
everything about English life--even poor books. I am so curious about
it."

"Aren't ladies always curious?" asked the young man jestingly.

But Bessie Alden appeared to desire to answer his question seriously. "I
don't think so--I don't think we are enough so--that we care about many
things. So it's all the more of a compliment," she added, "that I should
want to know so much about England."

The logic here seemed a little close; but Lord Lambeth, made conscious
of a compliment, found his natural modesty just at hand. "I am sure you
know a great deal more than I do."

"I really think I know a great deal--for a person who has never been
there."

"Have you really never been there?" cried Lord Lambeth. "Fancy!"

"Never--except in imagination," said the young girl.

"Fancy!" repeated her companion. "But I daresay you'll go soon, won't
you?"

"It's the dream of my life!" declared Bessie Alden, smiling.

"But your sister seems to know a tremendous lot about London," Lord
Lambeth went on.

The young girl was silent a moment. "My sister and I are two very
different persons," she presently said. "She has been a great deal in
Europe. She has been in England several times. She has known a great
many English people."

"But you must have known some, too," said Lord Lambeth.

"I don't think that I have ever spoken to one before. You are the first
Englishman that--to my knowledge--I have ever talked with."

Bessie Alden made this statement with a certain gravity--almost, as it
seemed to Lord Lambeth, an impressiveness. Attempts at impressiveness
always made him feel awkward, and he now began to laugh and swing his
stick. "Ah, you would have been sure to know!" he said. And then he
added, after an instant, "I'm sorry I am not a better specimen."

The young girl looked away; but she smiled, laying aside her
impressiveness. "You must remember that you are only a beginning," she
said. Then she retraced her steps, leading the way back to the lawn,
where they saw Mrs. Westgate come toward them with Percy Beaumont still
at her side. "Perhaps I shall go to England next year," Miss Alden
continued; "I want to, immensely. My sister is going to Europe, and she
has asked me to go with her. If we go, I shall make her stay as long as
possible in London."

"Ah, you must come in July," said Lord Lambeth. "That's the time when
there is most going on."

"I don't think I can wait till July," the young girl rejoined. "By the
first of May I shall be very impatient." They had gone further, and Mrs.
Westgate and her companion were near them. "Kitty," said Miss Alden,
"I have given out that we are going to London next May. So please to
conduct yourself accordingly."

Percy Beaumont wore a somewhat animated--even a slightly irritated--air.
He was by no means so handsome a man as his cousin, although in his
cousin's absence he might have passed for a striking specimen of the
tall, muscular, fair-bearded, clear-eyed Englishman. Just now Beaumont's
clear eyes, which were small and of a pale gray color, had a rather
troubled light, and, after glancing at Bessie Alden while she spoke,
he rested them upon his kinsman. Mrs. Westgate meanwhile, with her
superfluously pretty gaze, looked at everyone alike.

"You had better wait till the time comes," she said to her sister.
"Perhaps next May you won't care so much about London. Mr. Beaumont
and I," she went on, smiling at her companion, "have had a tremendous
discussion. We don't agree about anything. It's perfectly delightful."

"Oh, I say, Percy!" exclaimed Lord Lambeth.

"I disagree," said Beaumont, stroking down his back hair, "even to the
point of not thinking it delightful."

"Oh, I say!" cried Lord Lambeth again.

"I don't see anything delightful in my disagreeing with Mrs. Westgate,"
said Percy Beaumont.

"Well, I do!" Mrs. Westgate declared; and she turned to her sister. "You
know you have to go to town. The phaeton is there. You had better take
Lord Lambeth."

At this point Percy Beaumont certainly looked straight at his kinsman;
he tried to catch his eye. But Lord Lambeth would not look at him; his
own eyes were better occupied. "I shall be very happy," cried Bessie
Alden. "I am only going to some shops. But I will drive you about and
show you the place."

"An American woman who respects herself," said Mrs. Westgate, turning to
Beaumont with her bright expository air, "must buy something every day
of her life. If she can not do it herself, she must send out some
member of her family for the purpose. So Bessie goes forth to fulfill my
mission."

The young girl had walked away, with Lord Lambeth by her side, to whom
she was talking still; and Percy Beaumont watched them as they passed
toward the house. "She fulfills her own mission," he presently said;
"that of being a very attractive young lady."

"I don't know that I should say very attractive," Mrs. Westgate
rejoined. "She is not so much that as she is charming when you really
know her. She is very shy."

"Oh, indeed!" said Percy Beaumont.

"Extremely shy," Mrs. Westgate repeated. "But she is a dear good girl;
she is a charming species of girl. She is not in the least a flirt; that
isn't at all her line; she doesn't know the alphabet of that sort of
thing. She is very simple, very serious. She has lived a great deal in
Boston, with another sister of mine--the eldest of us--who married a
Bostonian. She is very cultivated, not at all like me; I am not in the
least cultivated. She has studied immensely and read everything; she is
what they call in Boston 'thoughtful.'"

"A rum sort of girl for Lambeth to get hold of!" his lordship's kinsman
privately reflected.

"I really believe," Mrs. Westgate continued, "that the most charming
girl in the world is a Boston superstructure upon a New York fonds; or
perhaps a New York superstructure upon a Boston fonds. At any rate, it's
the mixture," said Mrs. Westgate, who continued to give Percy Beaumont a
great deal of information.

Lord Lambeth got into a little basket phaeton with Bessie Alden, and she
drove him down the long avenue, whose extent he had measured on foot a
couple of hours before, into the ancient town, as it was called in that
part of the world, of Newport. The ancient town was a curious affair--a
collection of fresh-looking little wooden houses, painted white,
scattered over a hillside and clustered about a long straight street
paved with enormous cobblestones. There were plenty of shops--a large
proportion of which appeared to be those of fruit vendors, with piles
of huge watermelons and pumpkins stacked in front of them; and, drawn up
before the shops, or bumping about on the cobblestones, were innumerable
other basket phaetons freighted with ladies of high fashion, who greeted
each other from vehicle to vehicle and conversed on the edge of the
pavement in a manner that struck Lord Lambeth as demonstrative, with a
great many "Oh, my dears," and little quick exclamations and caresses.
His companion went into seventeen shops--he amused himself with counting
them--and accumulated at the bottom of the phaeton a pile of bundles
that hardly left the young Englishman a place for his feet. As she had
no groom nor footman, he sat in the phaeton to hold the ponies, where,
although he was not a particularly acute observer, he saw much to
entertain him--especially the ladies just mentioned, who wandered up
and down with the appearance of a kind of aimless intentness, as if they
were looking for something to buy, and who, tripping in and out of
their vehicles, displayed remarkably pretty feet. It all seemed to Lord
Lambeth very odd, and bright, and gay. Of course, before they got back
to the villa, he had had a great deal of desultory conversation with
Bessie Alden.

The young Englishmen spent the whole of that day and the whole of
many successive days in what the French call the intimite of their new
friends. They agreed that it was extremely jolly, that they had never
known anything more agreeable. It is not proposed to narrate minutely
the incidents of their sojourn on this charming shore; though if it
were convenient I might present a record of impressions nonetheless
delectable that they were not exhaustively analyzed. Many of them still
linger in the minds of our travelers, attended by a train of harmonious
images--images of brilliant mornings on lawns and piazzas that
overlooked the sea; of innumerable pretty girls; of infinite lounging
and talking and laughing and flirting and lunching and dining; of
universal friendliness and frankness; of occasions on which they knew
everyone and everything and had an extraordinary sense of ease; of
drives and rides in the late afternoon over gleaming beaches, on long
sea roads, beneath a sky lighted up by marvelous sunsets; of suppers, on
the return, informal, irregular, agreeable; of evenings at open windows
or on the perpetual verandas, in the summer starlight, above the warm
Atlantic. The young Englishmen were introduced to everybody, entertained
by everybody, intimate with everybody. At the end of three days they
had removed their luggage from the hotel and had gone to stay with
Mrs. Westgate--a step to which Percy Beaumont at first offered some
conscientious opposition. I call his opposition conscientious, because
it was founded upon some talk that he had had, on the second day, with
Bessie Alden. He had indeed had a good deal of talk with her, for she
was not literally always in conversation with Lord Lambeth. He had
meditated upon Mrs. Westgate's account of her sister, and he discovered
for himself that the young lady was clever, and appeared to have read a
great deal. She seemed very nice, though he could not make out, as Mrs.
Westgate had said, she was shy. If she was shy, she carried it off very
well.

"Mr. Beaumont," she had said, "please tell me something about Lord
Lambeth's family. How would you say it in England--his position?"

"His position?" Percy Beaumont repeated.

"His rank, or whatever you call it. Unfortunately we haven't got a
PEERAGE, like the people in Thackeray."

"That's a great pity," said Beaumont. "You would find it all set forth
there so much better than I can do it."

"He is a peer, then?"

"Oh, yes, he is a peer."

"And has he any other title than Lord Lambeth?"

"His title is the Marquis of Lambeth," said Beaumont; and then he was
silent. Bessie Alden appeared to be looking at him with interest. "He is
the son of the Duke of Bayswater," he added presently.

"The eldest son?"

"The only son."

"And are his parents living?"

"Oh yes; if his father were not living he would be a duke."

"So that when his father dies," pursued Bessie Alden with more
simplicity than might have been expected in a clever girl, "he will
become Duke of Bayswater?"

"Of course," said Percy Beaumont. "But his father is in excellent
health."

"And his mother?"

Beaumont smiled a little. "The duchess is uncommonly robust."

"And has he any sisters?"

"Yes, there are two."

"And what are they called?"

"One of them is married. She is the Countess of Pimlico."

"And the other?"

"The other is unmarried; she is plain Lady Julia."

Bessie Alden looked at him a moment. "Is she very plain?"

Beaumont began to laugh again. "You would not find her so handsome
as her brother," he said; and it was after this that he attempted
to dissuade the heir of the Duke of Bayswater from accepting Mrs.
Westgate's invitation. "Depend upon it," he said, "that girl means to
try for you."

"It seems to me you are doing your best to make a fool of me," the
modest young nobleman answered.

"She has been asking me," said Beaumont, "all about your people and your
possessions."

"I am sure it is very good of her!" Lord Lambeth rejoined.

"Well, then," observed his companion, "if you go, you go with your eyes
open."

"Damn my eyes!" exclaimed Lord Lambeth. "If one is to be a dozen times
a day at the house, it is a great deal more convenient to sleep there. I
am sick of traveling up and down this beastly avenue."

Since he had determined to go, Percy Beaumont would, of course, have
been very sorry to allow him to go alone; he was a man of conscience,
and he remembered his promise to the duchess. It was obviously the
memory of this promise that made him say to his companion a couple of
days later that he rather wondered he should be so fond of that girl.

"In the first place, how do you know how fond I am of her?" asked Lord
Lambeth. "And, in the second place, why shouldn't I be fond of her?"

"I shouldn't think she would be in your line."

"What do you call my 'line'? You don't set her down as 'fast'?"

"Exactly so. Mrs. Westgate tells me that there is no such thing as the
'fast girl' in America; that it's an English invention, and that the
term has no meaning here."

"All the better. It's an animal I detest."

"You prefer a bluestocking."

"Is that what you call Miss Alden?"

"Her sister tells me," said Percy Beaumont, "that she is tremendously
literary."

"I don't know anything about that. She is certainly very clever."

"Well," said Beaumont, "I should have supposed you would have found that
sort of thing awfully slow."

"In point of fact," Lord Lambeth rejoined, "I find it uncommonly
lively."

After this, Percy Beaumont held his tongue; but on the 10th of August
he wrote to the Duchess of Bayswater. He was, as I have said, a man of
conscience, and he had a strong, incorruptible sense of the proprieties
of life. His kinsman, meanwhile, was having a great deal of talk with
Bessie Alden--on the red sea rocks beyond the lawn; in the course of
long island rides, with a slow return in the glowing twilight; on the
deep veranda late in the evening. Lord Lambeth, who had stayed at many
houses, had never stayed at a house in which it was possible for a young
man to converse so frequently with a young lady. This young lady
no longer applied to Percy Beaumont for information concerning his
lordship. She addressed herself directly to the young nobleman. She
asked him a great many questions, some of which bored him a little; for
he took no pleasure in talking about himself.

"Lord Lambeth," said Bessie Alden, "are you a hereditary legislator?"

"Oh, I say!" cried Lord Lambeth, "don't make me call myself such names
as that."

"But you are a member of Parliament," said the young girl.

"I don't like the sound of that, either."

"Don't you sit in the House of Lords?" Bessie Alden went on.

"Very seldom," said Lord Lambeth.

"Is it an important position?" she asked.

"Oh, dear, no," said Lord Lambeth.

"I should think it would be very grand," said Bessie Alden, "to possess,
simply by an accident of birth, the right to make laws for a great
nation."

"Ah, but one doesn't make laws. It's a great humbug."

"I don't believe that," the young girl declared. "It must be a great
privilege, and I should think that if one thought of it in the right
way--from a high point of view--it would be very inspiring."

"The less one thinks of it, the better," Lord Lambeth affirmed.

"I think it's tremendous," said Bessie Alden; and on another occasion
she asked him if he had any tenantry. Hereupon it was that, as I have
said, he was a little bored.

"Do you want to buy up their leases?" he asked.

"Well, have you got any livings?" she demanded.

"Oh, I say!" he cried. "Have you got a clergyman that is looking out?"
But she made him tell her that he had a castle; he confessed to but one.
It was the place in which he had been born and brought up, and, as he
had an old-time liking for it, he was beguiled into describing it a
little and saying it was really very jolly. Bessie Alden listened with
great interest and declared that she would give the world to see such
a place. Whereupon--"It would be awfully kind of you to come and
stay there," said Lord Lambeth. He took a vague satisfaction in the
circumstance that Percy Beaumont had not heard him make the remark I
have just recorded.

Mr. Westgate all this time had not, as they said at Newport, "come on."
His wife more than once announced that she expected him on the morrow;
but on the morrow she wandered about a little, with a telegram in
her jeweled fingers, declaring it was very tiresome that his business
detained him in New York; that he could only hope the Englishmen were
having a good time. "I must say," said Mrs. Westgate, "that it is
no thanks to him if you are." And she went on to explain, while she
continued that slow-paced promenade which enabled her well-adjusted
skirts to display themselves so advantageously, that unfortunately in
America there was no leisure class. It was Lord Lambeth's theory, freely
propounded when the young men were together, that Percy Beaumont was
having a very good time with Mrs. Westgate, and that, under the pretext
of meeting for the purpose of animated discussion, they were indulging
in practices that imparted a shade of hypocrisy to the lady's regret for
her husband's absence.

"I assure you we are always discussing and differing," said Percy
Beaumont. "She is awfully argumentative. American ladies certainly don't
mind contradicting you. Upon my word I don't think I was ever treated so
by a woman before. She's so devilish positive."

Mrs. Westgate's positive quality, however, evidently had its
attractions, for Beaumont was constantly at his hostess's side. He
detached himself one day to the extent of going to New York to talk
over the Tennessee Central with Mr. Westgate; but he was absent only
forty-eight hours, during which, with Mr. Westgate's assistance, he
completely settled this piece of business. "They certainly do things
quickly in New York," he observed to his cousin; and he added that
Mr. Westgate had seemed very uneasy lest his wife should miss her
visitor--he had been in such an awful hurry to send him back to her.
"I'm afraid you'll never come up to an American husband, if that's what
the wives expect," he said to Lord Lambeth.

Mrs. Westgate, however, was not to enjoy much longer the entertainment
with which an indulgent husband had desired to keep her provided. On
the 21st of August Lord Lambeth received a telegram from his mother,
requesting him to return immediately to England; his father had been
taken ill, and it was his filial duty to come to him.

The young Englishman was visibly annoyed. "What the deuce does it mean?"
he asked of his kinsman. "What am I to do?"

Percy Beaumont was annoyed as well; he had deemed it his duty, as I have
narrated, to write to the duchess, but he had not expected that this
distinguished woman would act so promptly upon his hint. "It means,"
he said, "that your father is laid up. I don't suppose it's anything
serious; but you have no option. Take the first steamer; but don't be
alarmed."

Lord Lambeth made his farewells; but the few last words that he
exchanged with Bessie Alden are the only ones that have a place in our
record. "Of course I needn't assure you," he said, "that if you should
come to England next year, I expect to be the first person that you
inform of it."

Bessie Alden looked at him a little, and she smiled. "Oh, if we come to
London," she answered, "I should think you would hear of it."

Percy Beaumont returned with his cousin, and his sense of duty compelled
him, one windless afternoon, in mid-Atlantic, to say to Lord Lambeth
that he suspected that the duchess's telegram was in part the result
of something he himself had written to her. "I wrote to her--as I
explicitly notified you I had promised to do--that you were extremely
interested in a little American girl."

Lord Lambeth was extremely angry, and he indulged for some moments
in the simple language of indignation. But I have said that he was a
reasonable young man, and I can give no better proof of it than the fact
that he remarked to his companion at the end of half an hour, "You were
quite right, after all. I am very much interested in her. Only, to
be fair," he added, "you should have told my mother also that she is
not--seriously--interested in me."

Percy Beaumont gave a little laugh. "There is nothing so charming as
modesty in a young man in your position. That speech is a capital proof
that you are sweet on her."

"She is not interested--she is not!" Lord Lambeth repeated.

"My dear fellow," said his companion, "you are very far gone."





PART II


In point of fact, as Percy Beaumont would have said, Mrs. Westgate
disembarked on the 18th of May on the British coast. She was accompanied
by her sister, but she was not attended by any other member of her
family. To the deprivation of her husband's society Mrs. Westgate
was, however, habituated; she had made half a dozen journeys to Europe
without him, and she now accounted for his absence, to interrogative
friends on this side of the Atlantic, by allusion to the regrettable
but conspicuous fact that in America there was no leisure class. The
two ladies came up to London and alighted at Jones's Hotel, where Mrs.
Westgate, who had made on former occasions the most agreeable impression
at this establishment, received an obsequious greeting. Bessie Alden
had felt much excited about coming to England; she had expected the
"associations" would be very charming, that it would be an infinite
pleasure to rest her eyes upon the things she had read about in the
poets and historians. She was very fond of the poets and historians,
of the picturesque, of the past, of retrospect, of mementos and
reverberations of greatness; so that on coming into the English world,
where strangeness and familiarity would go hand in hand, she
was prepared for a multitude of fresh emotions. They began very
promptly--these tender, fluttering sensations; they began with the sight
of the beautiful English landscape, whose dark richness was quickened
and brightened by the season; with the carpeted fields and flowering
hedgerows, as she looked at them from the window of the train; with the
spires of the rural churches peeping above the rook-haunted treetops;
with the oak-studded parks, the ancient homes, the cloudy light,
the speech, the manners, the thousand differences. Mrs. Westgate's
impressions had, of course, much less novelty and keenness, and she gave
but a wandering attention to her sister's ejaculations and rhapsodies.

"You know my enjoyment of England is not so intellectual as Bessie's,"
she said to several of her friends in the course of her visit to this
country. "And yet if it is not intellectual, I can't say it is physical.
I don't think I can quite say what it is, my enjoyment of England." When
once it was settled that the two ladies should come abroad and should
spend a few weeks in England on their way to the Continent, they of
course exchanged a good many allusions to their London acquaintance.

"It will certainly be much nicer having friends there," Bessie Alden had
said one day as she sat on the sunny deck of the steamer at her sister's
feet on a large blue rug.

"Whom do you mean by friends?" Mrs. Westgate asked.

"All those English gentlemen whom you have known and entertained.
Captain Littledale, for instance. And Lord Lambeth and Mr. Beaumont,"
added Bessie Alden.

"Do you expect them to give us a very grand reception?"

Bessie reflected a moment; she was addicted, as we know, to reflection.
"Well, yes."

"My poor, sweet child," murmured her sister.

"What have I said that is so silly?" asked Bessie.

"You are a little too simple; just a little. It is very becoming, but it
pleases people at your expense."

"I am certainly too simple to understand you," said Bessie.

"Shall I tell you a story?" asked her sister.

"If you would be so good. That is what they do to amuse simple people."

Mrs. Westgate consulted her memory, while her companion sat gazing at
the shining sea. "Did you ever hear of the Duke of Green-Erin?"

"I think not," said Bessie.

"Well, it's no matter," her sister went on.

"It's a proof of my simplicity."

"My story is meant to illustrate that of some other people," said Mrs.
Westgate. "The Duke of Green-Erin is what they call in England a great
swell, and some five years ago he came to America. He spent most of his
time in New York, and in New York he spent his days and his nights at
the Butterworths'. You have heard, at least, of the Butterworths. BIEN.
They did everything in the world for him--they turned themselves inside
out. They gave him a dozen dinner parties and balls and were the means
of his being invited to fifty more. At first he used to come into Mrs.
Butterworth's box at the opera in a tweed traveling suit; but someone
stopped that. At any rate, he had a beautiful time, and they parted the
best friends in the world. Two years elapse, and the Butterworths come
abroad and go to London. The first thing they see in all the papers--in
England those things are in the most prominent place--is that the Duke
of Green-Erin has arrived in town for the Season. They wait a little,
and then Mr. Butterworth--as polite as ever--goes and leaves a card.
They wait a little more; the visit is not returned; they wait three
weeks--silence de mort--the Duke gives no sign. The Butterworths see
a lot of other people, put down the Duke of Green-Erin as a rude,
ungrateful man, and forget all about him. One fine day they go to Ascot
Races, and there they meet him face to face. He stares a moment and
then comes up to Mr. Butterworth, taking something from his
pocketbook--something which proves to be a banknote. 'I'm glad to see
you, Mr. Butterworth,' he says, 'so that I can pay you that ten pounds
I lost to you in New York. I saw the other day you remembered our bet;
here are the ten pounds, Mr. Butterworth. Goodbye, Mr. Butterworth.' And
off he goes, and that's the last they see of the Duke of Green-Erin."

"Is that your story?" asked Bessie Alden.

"Don't you think it's interesting?" her sister replied.

"I don't believe it," said the young girl.

"Ah," cried Mrs. Westgate, "you are not so simple after all! Believe it
or not, as you please; there is no smoke without fire."

"Is that the way," asked Bessie after a moment, "that you expect your
friends to treat you?"

"I defy them to treat me very ill, because I shall not give them the
opportunity. With the best will in the world, in that case they can't be
very offensive."

Bessie Alden was silent a moment. "I don't see what makes you talk that
way," she said. "The English are a great people."

"Exactly; and that is just the way they have grown great--by dropping
you when you have ceased to be useful. People say they are not clever;
but I think they are very clever."

"You know you have liked them--all the Englishmen you have seen," said
Bessie.

"They have liked me," her sister rejoined; "it would be more correct to
say that. And, of course, one likes that."

Bessie Alden resumed for some moments her studies in sea green. "Well,"
she said, "whether they like me or not, I mean to like them. And
happily," she added, "Lord Lambeth does not owe me ten pounds."

During the first few days after their arrival at Jones's Hotel our
charming Americans were much occupied with what they would have called
looking about them. They found occasion to make a large number of
purchases, and their opportunities for conversation were such only as
were offered by the deferential London shopmen. Bessie Alden, even
in driving from the station, took an immense fancy to the British
metropolis, and at the risk of exhibiting her as a young woman of vulgar
tastes it must be recorded that for a considerable period she desired no
higher pleasure than to drive about the crowded streets in a hansom cab.
To her attentive eyes they were full of a strange picturesque life, and
it is at least beneath the dignity of our historic muse to enumerate the
trivial objects and incidents which this simple young lady from Boston
found so entertaining. It may be freely mentioned, however, that
whenever, after a round of visits in Bond Street and Regent Street,
she was about to return with her sister to Jones's Hotel, she made an
earnest request that they should be driven home by way of Westminster
Abbey. She had begun by asking whether it would not be possible to take
the Tower on the way to their lodgings; but it happened that at a more
primitive stage of her culture Mrs. Westgate had paid a visit to this
venerable monument, which she spoke of ever afterward vaguely as a
dreadful disappointment; so that she expressed the liveliest disapproval
of any attempt to combine historical researches with the purchase of
hairbrushes and notepaper. The most she would consent to do in this line
was to spend half an hour at Madame Tussaud's, where she saw several
dusty wax effigies of members of the royal family. She told Bessie that
if she wished to go to the Tower she must get someone else to take her.
Bessie expressed hereupon an earnest disposition to go alone; but upon
this proposal as well Mrs. Westgate sprinkled cold water.

"Remember," she said, "that you are not in your innocent little Boston.
It is not a question of walking up and down Beacon Street." Then she
went on to explain that there were two classes of American girls in
Europe--those that walked about alone and those that did not. "You
happen to belong, my dear," she said to her sister, "to the class that
does not."

"It is only," answered Bessie, laughing, "because you happen to prevent
me." And she devoted much private meditation to this question of
effecting a visit to the Tower of London.

Suddenly it seemed as if the problem might be solved; the two ladies at
Jones's Hotel received a visit from Willie Woodley. Such was the social
appellation of a young American who had sailed from New York a few days
after their own departure, and who, having the privilege of intimacy
with them in that city, had lost no time, on his arrival in London,
in coming to pay them his respects. He had, in fact, gone to see them
directly after going to see his tailor, than which there can be no
greater exhibition of promptitude on the part of a young American who
has just alighted at the Charing Cross Hotel. He was a slim, pale youth,
of the most amiable disposition, famous for the skill with which he led
the "German" in New York. Indeed, by the young ladies who habitually
figured in this Terpsichorean revel he was believed to be "the best
dancer in the world"; it was in these terms that he was always spoken
of, and that his identity was indicated. He was the gentlest, softest
young man it was possible to meet; he was beautifully dressed--"in the
English style"--and he knew an immense deal about London. He had been
at Newport during the previous summer, at the time of our young
Englishmen's visit, and he took extreme pleasure in the society of
Bessie Alden, whom he always addressed as "Miss Bessie." She immediately
arranged with him, in the presence of her sister, that he should conduct
her to the scene of Anne Boleyn's execution.

"You may do as you please," said Mrs. Westgate. "Only--if you desire the
information--it is not the custom here for young ladies to knock about
London with young men."

"Miss Bessie has waltzed with me so often," observed Willie Woodley;
"she can surely go out with me in a hansom."

"I consider waltzing," said Mrs. Westgate, "the most innocent pleasure
of our time."

"It's a compliment to our time!" exclaimed the young man with a little
laugh, in spite of himself.

"I don't see why I should regard what is done here," said Bessie Alden.
"Why should I suffer the restrictions of a society of which I enjoy none
of the privileges?"

"That's very good--very good," murmured Willie Woodley.

"Oh, go to the Tower, and feel the ax, if you like," said Mrs. Westgate.
"I consent to your going with Mr. Woodley; but I should not let you go
with an Englishman."

"Miss Bessie wouldn't care to go with an Englishman!" Mr. Woodley
declared with a faint asperity that was, perhaps, not unnatural in a
young man, who, dressing in the manner that I have indicated and knowing
a great deal, as I have said, about London, saw no reason for drawing
these sharp distinctions. He agreed upon a day with Miss Bessie--a day
of that same week.

An ingenious mind might, perhaps, trace a connection between the young
girl's allusion to her destitution of social privileges and a question
she asked on the morrow as she sat with her sister at lunch.

"Don't you mean to write to--to anyone?" said Bessie.

"I wrote this morning to Captain Littledale," Mrs. Westgate replied.

"But Mr. Woodley said that Captain Littledale had gone to India."

"He said he thought he had heard so; he knew nothing about it."

For a moment Bessie Alden said nothing more; then, at last, "And don't
you intend to write to--to Mr. Beaumont?" she inquired.

"You mean to Lord Lambeth," said her sister.

"I said Mr. Beaumont because he was so good a friend of yours."

Mrs. Westgate looked at the young girl with sisterly candor. "I don't
care two straws for Mr. Beaumont."

"You were certainly very nice to him."

"I am nice to everyone," said Mrs. Westgate simply.

"To everyone but me," rejoined Bessie, smiling.

Her sister continued to look at her; then, at last, "Are you in love
with Lord Lambeth?" she asked.

The young girl stared a moment, and the question was apparently too
humorous even to make her blush. "Not that I know of," she answered.

"Because if you are," Mrs. Westgate went on, "I shall certainly not send
for him."

"That proves what I said," declared Bessie, smiling--"that you are not
nice to me."

"It would be a poor service, my dear child," said her sister.

"In what sense? There is nothing against Lord Lambeth that I know of."

Mrs. Westgate was silent a moment. "You ARE in love with him then?"

Bessie stared again; but this time she blushed a little. "Ah! if you
won't be serious," she answered, "we will not mention him again."

For some moments Lord Lambeth was not mentioned again, and it was Mrs.
Westgate who, at the end of this period, reverted to him. "Of course I
will let him know we are here, because I think he would be hurt--justly
enough--if we should go away without seeing him. It is fair to give
him a chance to come and thank me for the kindness we showed him. But I
don't want to seem eager."

"Neither do I," said Bessie with a little laugh.

"Though I confess," added her sister, "that I am curious to see how he
will behave."

"He behaved very well at Newport."

"Newport is not London. At Newport he could do as he liked; but here it
is another affair. He has to have an eye to consequences."

"If he had more freedom, then, at Newport," argued Bessie, "it is the
more to his credit that he behaved well; and if he has to be so careful
here, it is possible he will behave even better."

"Better--better," repeated her sister. "My dear child, what is your
point of view?"

"How do you mean--my point of view?"

"Don't you care for Lord Lambeth--a little?"

This time Bessie Alden was displeased; she slowly got up from the
table, turning her face away from her sister. "You will oblige me by not
talking so," she said.

Mrs. Westgate sat watching her for some moments as she moved slowly
about the room and went and stood at the window. "I will write to him
this afternoon," she said at last.

"Do as you please!" Bessie answered; and presently she turned round. "I
am not afraid to say that I like Lord Lambeth. I like him very much."

"He is not clever," Mrs. Westgate declared.

"Well, there have been clever people whom I have disliked," said Bessie
Alden; "so that I suppose I may like a stupid one. Besides, Lord Lambeth
is not stupid."

"Not so stupid as he looks!" exclaimed her sister, smiling.

"If I were in love with Lord Lambeth, as you said just now, it would be
bad policy on your part to abuse him."

"My dear child, don't give me lessons in policy!" cried Mrs. Westgate.
"The policy I mean to follow is very deep."

The young girl began to walk about the room again; then she stopped
before her sister. "I have never heard in the course of five minutes,"
she said, "so many hints and innuendoes. I wish you would tell me in
plain English what you mean."

"I mean that you may be much annoyed."

"That is still only a hint," said Bessie.

Her sister looked at her, hesitating an instant. "It will be said of you
that you have come after Lord Lambeth--that you followed him."

Bessie Alden threw back her pretty head like a startled hind, and a look
flashed into her face that made Mrs. Westgate rise from her chair. "Who
says such things as that?" she demanded.

"People here."

"I don't believe it," said Bessie.

"You have a very convenient faculty of doubt. But my policy will be, as
I say, very deep. I shall leave you to find out this kind of thing for
yourself."

Bessie fixed her eyes upon her sister, and Mrs. Westgate thought for
a moment there were tears in them. "Do they talk that way here?" she
asked.

"You will see. I shall leave you alone."

"Don't leave me alone," said Bessie Alden. "Take me away."

"No; I want to see what you make of it," her sister continued.

"I don't understand."

"You will understand after Lord Lambeth has come," said Mrs. Westgate
with a little laugh.

The two ladies had arranged that on this afternoon Willie Woodley should
go with them to Hyde Park, where Bessie Alden expected to derive much
entertainment from sitting on a little green chair, under the great
trees, beside Rotten Row. The want of a suitable escort had hitherto
rendered this pleasure inaccessible; but no escort now, for such an
expedition, could have been more suitable than their devoted young
countryman, whose mission in life, it might almost be said, was to find
chairs for ladies, and who appeared on the stroke of half-past five with
a white camellia in his buttonhole.

"I have written to Lord Lambeth, my dear," said Mrs. Westgate to her
sister, on coming into the room where Bessie Alden, drawing on her long
gray gloves, was entertaining their visitor.

Bessie said nothing, but Willie Woodley exclaimed that his lordship was
in town; he had seen his name in the Morning Post.

"Do you read the Morning Post?" asked Mrs. Westgate.

"Oh, yes; it's great fun," Willie Woodley affirmed.

"I want so to see it," said Bessie; "there is so much about it in
Thackeray."

"I will send it to you every morning," said Willie Woodley.

He found them what Bessie Alden thought excellent places, under the
great trees, beside the famous avenue whose humors had been made
familiar to the young girl's childhood by the pictures in Punch. The
day was bright and warm, and the crowd of riders and spectators, and the
great procession of carriages, were proportionately dense and brilliant.
The scene bore the stamp of the London Season at its height, and Bessie
Alden found more entertainment in it than she was able to express to
her companions. She sat silent, under her parasol, and her imagination,
according to its wont, let itself loose into the great changing
assemblage of striking and suggestive figures. They stirred up a host
of old impressions and preconceptions, and she found herself fitting a
history to this person and a theory to that, and making a place for them
all in her little private museum of types. But if she said little, her
sister on one side and Willie Woodley on the other expressed themselves
in lively alternation.

"Look at that green dress with blue flounces," said Mrs. Westgate.
"Quelle toilette!"

"That's the Marquis of Blackborough," said the young man--"the one in
the white coat. I heard him speak the other night in the House of Lords;
it was something about ramrods; he called them 'wamwods.' He's an awful
swell."

"Did you ever see anything like the way they are pinned back?" Mrs.
Westgate resumed. "They never know where to stop."

"They do nothing but stop," said Willie Woodley. "It prevents them from
walking. Here comes a great celebrity--Lady Beatrice Bellevue. She's
awfully fast; see what little steps she takes."

"Well, my dear," Mrs. Westgate pursued, "I hope you are getting some
ideas for your couturiere?"

"I am getting plenty of ideas," said Bessie, "but I don't know that my
couturiere would appreciate them."

Willie Woodley presently perceived a friend on horseback, who drove up
beside the barrier of the Row and beckoned to him. He went forward, and
the crowd of pedestrians closed about him, so that for some ten minutes
he was hidden from sight. At last he reappeared, bringing a gentleman
with him--a gentleman whom Bessie at first supposed to be his friend
dismounted. But at a second glance she found herself looking at Lord
Lambeth, who was shaking hands with her sister.

"I found him over there," said Willie Woodley, "and I told him you were
here."

And then Lord Lambeth, touching his hat a little, shook hands with
Bessie. "Fancy your being here!" he said. He was blushing and smiling;
he looked very handsome, and he had a kind of splendor that he had not
had in America. Bessie Alden's imagination, as we know, was just then in
exercise; so that the tall young Englishman, as he stood there looking
down at her, had the benefit of it. "He is handsomer and more splendid
than anything I have ever seen," she said to herself. And then she
remembered that he was a marquis, and she thought he looked like a
marquis.

"I say, you know," he cried, "you ought to have let a man know you were
here!"

"I wrote to you an hour ago," said Mrs. Westgate.

"Doesn't all the world know it?" asked Bessie, smiling.

"I assure you I didn't know it!" cried Lord Lambeth. "Upon my honor I
hadn't heard of it. Ask Woodley now; had I, Woodley?"

"Well, I think you are rather a humbug," said Willie Woodley.

"You don't believe that--do you, Miss Alden?" asked his lordship. "You
don't believe I'm a humbug, eh?"

"No," said Bessie, "I don't."

"You are too tall to stand up, Lord Lambeth," Mrs. Westgate observed.
"You are only tolerable when you sit down. Be so good as to get a
chair."

He found a chair and placed it sidewise, close to the two ladies. "If I
hadn't met Woodley I should never have found you," he went on. "Should
I, Woodley?"

"Well, I guess not," said the young American.

"Not even with my letter?" asked Mrs. Westgate.

"Ah, well, I haven't got your letter yet; I suppose I shall get it this
evening. It was awfully kind of you to write."

"So I said to Bessie," observed Mrs. Westgate.

"Did she say so, Miss Alden?" Lord Lambeth inquired. "I daresay you have
been here a month."

"We have been here three," said Mrs. Westgate.

"Have you been here three months?" the young man asked again of Bessie.

"It seems a long time," Bessie answered.

"I say, after that you had better not call me a humbug!" cried Lord
Lambeth. "I have only been in town three weeks; but you must have been
hiding away; I haven't seen you anywhere."

"Where should you have seen us--where should we have gone?" asked Mrs.
Westgate.

"You should have gone to Hurlingham," said Willie Woodley.

"No; let Lord Lambeth tell us," Mrs. Westgate insisted.

"There are plenty of places to go to," said Lord Lambeth; "each one
stupider than the other. I mean people's houses; they send you cards."

"No one has sent us cards," said Bessie.

"We are very quiet," her sister declared. "We are here as travelers."

"We have been to Madame Tussaud's," Bessie pursued.

"Oh, I say!" cried Lord Lambeth.

"We thought we should find your image there," said Mrs. Westgate--"yours
and Mr. Beaumont's."

"In the Chamber of Horrors?" laughed the young man.

"It did duty very well for a party," said Mrs. Westgate. "All the women
were decolletes, and many of the figures looked as if they could speak
if they tried."

"Upon my word," Lord Lambeth rejoined, "you see people at London parties
that look as if they couldn't speak if they tried."

"Do you think Mr. Woodley could find us Mr. Beaumont?" asked Mrs.
Westgate.

Lord Lambeth stared and looked round him. "I daresay he could. Beaumont
often comes here. Don't you think you could find him, Woodley? Make a
dive into the crowd."

"Thank you; I have had enough diving," said Willie Woodley. "I will wait
till Mr. Beaumont comes to the surface."

"I will bring him to see you," said Lord Lambeth; "where are you
staying?"

"You will find the address in my letter--Jones's Hotel."

"Oh, one of those places just out of Piccadilly? Beastly hole, isn't
it?" Lord Lambeth inquired.

"I believe it's the best hotel in London," said Mrs. Westgate.

"But they give you awful rubbish to eat, don't they?" his lordship went
on.

"Yes," said Mrs. Westgate.

"I always feel so sorry for the people that come up to town and go to
live in those places," continued the young man. "They eat nothing but
filth."

"Oh, I say!" cried Willie Woodley.

"Well, how do you like London, Miss Alden?" Lord Lambeth asked,
unperturbed by this ejaculation.

"I think it's grand," said Bessie Alden.

"My sister likes it, in spite of the 'filth'!" Mrs. Westgate exclaimed.

"I hope you are going to stay a long time."

"As long as I can," said Bessie.

"And where is Mr. Westgate?" asked Lord Lambeth of this gentleman's
wife.

"He's where he always is--in that tiresome New York."

"He must be tremendously clever," said the young man.

"I suppose he is," said Mrs. Westgate.

Lord Lambeth sat for nearly an hour with his American friends; but it
is not our purpose to relate their conversation in full. He addressed
a great many remarks to Bessie Alden, and finally turned toward her
altogether, while Willie Woodley entertained Mrs. Westgate. Bessie
herself said very little; she was on her guard, thinking of what
her sister had said to her at lunch. Little by little, however, she
interested herself in Lord Lambeth again, as she had done at Newport;
only it seemed to her that here he might become more interesting. He
would be an unconscious part of the antiquity, the impressiveness, the
picturesqueness, of England; and poor Bessie Alden, like many a Yankee
maiden, was terribly at the mercy of picturesqueness.

"I have often wished I were at Newport again," said the young man.
"Those days I spent at your sister's were awfully jolly."

"We enjoyed them very much; I hope your father is better."

"Oh, dear, yes. When I got to England, he was out grouse shooting.
It was what you call in America a gigantic fraud. My mother had got
nervous. My three weeks at Newport seemed like a happy dream."

"America certainly is very different from England," said Bessie.

"I hope you like England better, eh?" Lord Lambeth rejoined almost
persuasively.

"No Englishman can ask that seriously of a person of another country."

Her companion looked at her for a moment. "You mean it's a matter of
course?"

"If I were English," said Bessie, "it would certainly seem to me a
matter of course that everyone should be a good patriot."

"Oh, dear, yes, patriotism is everything," said Lord Lambeth, not quite
following, but very contented. "Now, what are you going to do here?"

"On Thursday I am going to the Tower."

"The Tower?"

"The Tower of London. Did you never hear of it?"

"Oh, yes, I have been there," said Lord Lambeth. "I was taken there
by my governess when I was six years old. It's a rum idea, your going
there."

"Do give me a few more rum ideas," said Bessie. "I want to see
everything of that sort. I am going to Hampton Court, and to Windsor,
and to the Dulwich Gallery."

Lord Lambeth seemed greatly amused. "I wonder you don't go to the
Rosherville Gardens."

"Are they interesting?" asked Bessie.

"Oh, wonderful."

"Are they very old? That's all I care for," said Bessie.

"They are tremendously old; they are all falling to ruins."

"I think there is nothing so charming as an old ruinous garden," said
the young girl. "We must certainly go there."

Lord Lambeth broke out into merriment. "I say, Woodley," he cried,
"here's Miss Alden wants to go to the Rosherville Gardens!"

Willie Woodley looked a little blank; he was caught in the fact of
ignorance of an apparently conspicuous feature of London life. But in
a moment he turned it off. "Very well," he said, "I'll write for a
permit."

Lord Lambeth's exhilaration increased. "Gad, I believe you Americans
would go anywhere!" he cried.

"We wish to go to Parliament," said Bessie. "That's one of the first
things."

"Oh, it would bore you to death!" cried the young man.

"We wish to hear you speak."

"I never speak--except to young ladies," said Lord Lambeth, smiling.

Bessie Alden looked at him a while, smiling, too, in the shadow of her
parasol. "You are very strange," she murmured. "I don't think I approve
of you."

"Ah, now, don't be severe, Miss Alden," said Lord Lambeth, smiling still
more. "Please don't be severe. I want you to like me--awfully."

"To like you awfully? You must not laugh at me, then, when I make
mistakes. I consider it my right--as a freeborn American--to make as
many mistakes as I choose."

"Upon my word, I didn't laugh at you," said Lord Lambeth.

"And not only that," Bessie went on; "but I hold that all my mistakes
shall be set down to my credit. You must think the better of me for
them."

"I can't think better of you than I do," the young man declared.

Bessie Alden looked at him a moment again. "You certainly speak very
well to young ladies. But why don't you address the House?--isn't that
what they call it?"

"Because I have nothing to say," said Lord Lambeth.

"Haven't you a great position?" asked Bessie Alden.

He looked a moment at the back of his glove. "I'll set that down," he
said, "as one of your mistakes--to your credit." And as if he disliked
talking about his position, he changed the subject. "I wish you would
let me go with you to the Tower, and to Hampton Court, and to all those
other places."

"We shall be most happy," said Bessie.

"And of course I shall be delighted to show you the House of Lords--some
day that suits you. There are a lot of things I want to do for you.
I want to make you have a good time. And I should like very much to
present some of my friends to you, if it wouldn't bore you. Then it
would be awfully kind of you to come down to Branches."

"We are much obliged to you, Lord Lambeth," said Bessie. "What is
Branches?"

"It's a house in the country. I think you might like it."

Willie Woodley and Mrs. Westgate at this moment were sitting in silence,
and the young man's ear caught these last words of Lord Lambeth's.
"He's inviting Miss Bessie to one of his castles," he murmured to his
companion.

Mrs. Westgate, foreseeing what she mentally called "complications,"
immediately got up; and the two ladies, taking leave of Lord Lambeth,
returned, under Mr. Woodley's conduct, to Jones's Hotel.

Lord Lambeth came to see them on the morrow, bringing Percy Beaumont
with him--the latter having instantly declared his intention of
neglecting none of the usual offices of civility. This declaration,
however, when his kinsman informed him of the advent of their American
friends, had been preceded by another remark.

"Here they are, then, and you are in for it."

"What am I in for?" demanded Lord Lambeth.

"I will let your mother give it a name. With all respect to whom," added
Percy Beaumont, "I must decline on this occasion to do any more police
duty. Her Grace must look after you herself."

"I will give her a chance," said her Grace's son, a trifle grimly. "I
shall make her go and see them."

"She won't do it, my boy."

"We'll see if she doesn't," said Lord Lambeth.

But if Percy Beaumont took a somber view of the arrival of the two
ladies at Jones's Hotel, he was sufficiently a man of the world to
offer them a smiling countenance. He fell into animated
conversation--conversation, at least, that was animated on her
side--with Mrs. Westgate, while his companion made himself agreeable
to the younger lady. Mrs. Westgate began confessing and protesting,
declaring and expounding.

"I must say London is a great deal brighter and prettier just now
than it was when I was here last--in the month of November. There
is evidently a great deal going on, and you seem to have a good many
flowers. I have no doubt it is very charming for all you people, and
that you amuse yourselves immensely. It is very good of you to let
Bessie and me come and sit and look at you. I suppose you will think I
am very satirical, but I must confess that that's the feeling I have in
London."

"I am afraid I don't quite understand to what feeling you allude," said
Percy Beaumont.

"The feeling that it's all very well for you English people. Everything
is beautifully arranged for you."

"It seems to me it is very well for some Americans, sometimes," rejoined
Beaumont.

"For some of them, yes--if they like to be patronized. But I must say I
don't like to be patronized. I may be very eccentric, and undisciplined,
and outrageous, but I confess I never was fond of patronage. I like
to associate with people on the same terms as I do in my own country;
that's a peculiar taste that I have. But here people seem to expect
something else--Heaven knows what! I am afraid you will think I am very
ungrateful, for I certainly have received a great deal of attention. The
last time I was here, a lady sent me a message that I was at liberty to
come and see her."

"Dear me! I hope you didn't go," observed Percy Beaumont.

"You are deliciously naive, I must say that for you!" Mrs. Westgate
exclaimed. "It must be a great advantage to you here in London. I
suppose that if I myself had a little more naivete, I should enjoy it
more. I should be content to sit on a chair in the park, and see the
people pass, and be told that this is the Duchess of Suffolk, and that
is the Lord Chamberlain, and that I must be thankful for the privilege
of beholding them. I daresay it is very wicked and critical of me to ask
for anything else. But I was always critical, and I freely confess to
the sin of being fastidious. I am told there is some remarkably superior
second-rate society provided here for strangers. MERCI! I don't want
any superior second-rate society. I want the society that I have been
accustomed to."

"I hope you don't call Lambeth and me second rate," Beaumont interposed.

"Oh, I am accustomed to you," said Mrs. Westgate. "Do you know that you
English sometimes make the most wonderful speeches? The first time I
came to London I went out to dine--as I told you, I have received a
great deal of attention. After dinner, in the drawing room, I had some
conversation with an old lady; I assure you I had. I forget what we
talked about, but she presently said, in allusion to something we were
discussing, 'Oh, you know, the aristocracy do so-and-so; but in one's
own class of life it is very different.' In one's own class of life!
What is a poor unprotected American woman to do in a country where she
is liable to have that sort of thing said to her?"

"You seem to get hold of some very queer old ladies; I compliment you
on your acquaintance!" Percy Beaumont exclaimed. "If you are trying to
bring me to admit that London is an odious place, you'll not succeed.
I'm extremely fond of it, and I think it the jolliest place in the
world."

"POUR VOUS AUTRES. I never said the contrary," Mrs. Westgate retorted.
I make use of this expression, because both interlocutors had begun to
raise their voices. Percy Beaumont naturally did not like to hear his
country abused, and Mrs. Westgate, no less naturally, did not like a
stubborn debater.

"Hallo!" said Lord Lambeth; "what are they up to now?" And he came away
from the window, where he had been standing with Bessie Alden.

"I quite agree with a very clever countrywoman of mine," Mrs. Westgate
continued with charming ardor, though with imperfect relevancy. She
smiled at the two gentlemen for a moment with terrible brightness, as
if to toss at their feet--upon their native heath--the gauntlet of
defiance. "For me, there are only two social positions worth speaking
of--that of an American lady and that of the Emperor of Russia."

"And what do you do with the American gentlemen?" asked Lord Lambeth.

"She leaves them in America!" said Percy Beaumont.

On the departure of their visitors, Bessie Alden told her sister that
Lord Lambeth would come the next day, to go with them to the Tower, and
that he had kindly offered to bring his "trap" and drive them thither.
Mrs. Westgate listened in silence to this communication, and for some
time afterward she said nothing. But at last, "If you had not requested
me the other day not to mention it," she began, "there is something I
should venture to ask you." Bessie frowned a little; her dark blue eyes
were more dark than blue. But her sister went on. "As it is, I will
take the risk. You are not in love with Lord Lambeth: I believe it,
perfectly. Very good. But is there, by chance, any danger of your
becoming so? It's a very simple question; don't take offense. I have a
particular reason," said Mrs. Westgate, "for wanting to know."

Bessie Alden for some moments said nothing; she only looked displeased.
"No; there is no danger," she answered at last, curtly.

"Then I should like to frighten them," declared Mrs. Westgate, clasping
her jeweled hands.

"To frighten whom?"

"All these people; Lord Lambeth's family and friends."

"How should you frighten them?" asked the young girl.

"It wouldn't be I--it would be you. It would frighten them to think that
you should absorb his lordship's young affections."

Bessie Alden, with her clear eyes still overshadowed by her dark brows,
continued to interrogate. "Why should that frighten them?"

Mrs. Westgate poised her answer with a smile before delivering it.
"Because they think you are not good enough. You are a charming girl,
beautiful and amiable, intelligent and clever, and as bien-elevee as it
is possible to be; but you are not a fit match for Lord Lambeth."

Bessie Alden was decidedly disgusted. "Where do you get such
extraordinary ideas?" she asked. "You have said some such strange things
lately. My dear Kitty, where do you collect them?"

Kitty was evidently enamored of her idea. "Yes, it would put them on
pins and needles, and it wouldn't hurt you. Mr. Beaumont is already most
uneasy; I could soon see that."

The young girl meditated a moment. "Do you mean that they spy upon
him--that they interfere with him?"

"I don't know what power they have to interfere, but I know that a
British mama may worry her son's life out."

It has been intimated that, as regards certain disagreeable things,
Bessie Alden had a fund of skepticism. She abstained on the present
occasion from expressing disbelief, for she wished not to irritate her
sister. But she said to herself that Kitty had been misinformed--that
this was a traveler's tale. Though she was a girl of a lively
imagination, there could in the nature of things be, to her sense, no
reality in the idea of her belonging to a vulgar category. What she
said aloud was, "I must say that in that case I am very sorry for Lord
Lambeth."

Mrs. Westgate, more and more exhilarated by her scheme, was smiling at
her again. "If I could only believe it was safe!" she exclaimed. "When
you begin to pity him, I, on my side, am afraid."

"Afraid of what?"

"Of your pitying him too much."

Bessie Alden turned away impatiently; but at the end of a minute she
turned back. "What if I should pity him too much?" she asked.

Mrs. Westgate hereupon turned away, but after a moment's reflection
she also faced her sister again. "It would come, after all, to the same
thing," she said.

Lord Lambeth came the next day with his trap, and the two ladies,
attended by Willie Woodley, placed themselves under his guidance, and
were conveyed eastward, through some of the duskier portions of the
metropolis, to the great turreted donjon which overlooks the London
shipping. They all descended from their vehicle and entered the famous
inclosure; and they secured the services of a venerable beefeater, who,
though there were many other claimants for legendary information, made
a fine exclusive party of them and marched them through courts and
corridors, through armories and prisons. He delivered his usual
peripatetic discourse, and they stopped and stared, and peeped and
stooped, according to the official admonitions. Bessie Alden asked the
old man in the crimson doublet a great many questions; she thought it
a most fascinating place. Lord Lambeth was in high good humor; he was
constantly laughing; he enjoyed what he would have called the lark.
Willie Woodley kept looking at the ceilings and tapping the walls with
the knuckle of a pearl-gray glove; and Mrs. Westgate, asking at frequent
intervals to be allowed to sit down and wait till they came back, was as
frequently informed that they would never come back. To a great many of
Bessie's questions--chiefly on collateral points of English history--the
ancient warder was naturally unable to reply; whereupon she always
appealed to Lord Lambeth. But his lordship was very ignorant. He
declared that he knew nothing about that sort of thing, and he seemed
greatly diverted at being treated as an authority.

"You can't expect everyone to know as much as you," he said.

"I should expect you to know a great deal more," declared Bessie Alden.

"Women always know more than men about names and dates and that sort of
thing," Lord Lambeth rejoined. "There was Lady Jane Grey we have just
been hearing about, who went in for Latin and Greek and all the learning
of her age."

"YOU have no right to be ignorant, at all events," said Bessie.

"Why haven't I as good a right as anyone else?"

"Because you have lived in the midst of all these things."

"What things do you mean? Axes, and blocks, and thumbscrews?"

"All these historical things. You belong to a historical family."

"Bessie is really too historical," said Mrs. Westgate, catching a word
of this dialogue.

"Yes, you are too historical," said Lord Lambeth, laughing, but thankful
for a formula. "Upon my honor, you are too historical!"

He went with the ladies a couple of days later to Hampton Court, Willie
Woodley being also of the party. The afternoon was charming, the famous
horse chestnuts were in blossom, and Lord Lambeth, who quite entered
into the spirit of the cockney excursionist, declared that it was a
jolly old place. Bessie Alden was in ecstasies; she went about murmuring
and exclaiming.

"It's too lovely," said the young girl; "it's too enchanting; it's too
exactly what it ought to be!"

At Hampton Court the little flocks of visitors are not provided with an
official bellwether, but are left to browse at discretion upon the local
antiquities. It happened in this manner that, in default of another
informant, Bessie Alden, who on doubtful questions was able to suggest
a great many alternatives, found herself again applying for intellectual
assistance to Lord Lambeth. But he again assured her that he was utterly
helpless in such matters--that his education had been sadly neglected.

"And I am sorry it makes you unhappy," he added in a moment.

"You are very disappointing, Lord Lambeth," she said.

"Ah, now don't say that," he cried. "That's the worst thing you could
possibly say."

"No," she rejoined, "it is not so bad as to say that I had expected
nothing of you."

"I don't know. Give me a notion of the sort of thing you expected."

"Well," said Bessie Alden, "that you would be more what I should like to
be--what I should try to be--in your place."

"Ah, my place!" exclaimed Lord Lambeth. "You are always talking about my
place!"

The young girl looked at him; he thought she colored a little; and for a
moment she made no rejoinder.

"Does it strike you that I am always talking about your place?" she
asked.

"I am sure you do it a great honor," he said, fearing he had been
uncivil.

"I have often thought about it," she went on after a moment. "I have
often thought about your being a hereditary legislator. A hereditary
legislator ought to know a great many things."

"Not if he doesn't legislate."

"But you do legislate; it's absurd your saying you don't. You are very
much looked up to here--I am assured of that."

"I don't know that I ever noticed it."

"It is because you are used to it, then. You ought to fill the place."

"How do you mean to fill it?" asked Lord Lambeth.

"You ought to be very clever and brilliant, and to know almost
everything."

Lord Lambeth looked at her a moment. "Shall I tell you something?" he
asked. "A young man in my position, as you call it--"

"I didn't invent the term," interposed Bessie Alden. "I have seen it in
a great many books."

"Hang it! you are always at your books. A fellow in my position, then,
does very well whatever he does. That's about what I mean to say."

"Well, if your own people are content with you," said Bessie Alden,
laughing, "it is not for me to complain. But I shall always think that,
properly, you should have been a great mind--a great character."

"Ah, that's very theoretic," Lord Lambeth declared. "Depend upon it,
that's a Yankee prejudice."

"Happy the country," said Bessie Alden, "where even people's prejudices
are so elevated!"

"Well, after all," observed Lord Lambeth, "I don't know that I am such a
fool as you are trying to make me out."

"I said nothing so rude as that; but I must repeat that you are
disappointing."

"My dear Miss Alden," exclaimed the young man, "I am the best fellow in
the world!"

"Ah, if it were not for that!" said Bessie Alden with a smile.

Mrs. Westgate had a good many more friends in London than she pretended,
and before long she had renewed acquaintance with most of them. Their
hospitality was extreme, so that, one thing leading to another, she
began, as the phrase is, to go out. Bessie Alden, in this way, saw
something of what she found it a great satisfaction to call to herself
English society. She went to balls and danced, she went to dinners and
talked, she went to concerts and listened (at concerts Bessie always
listened), she went to exhibitions and wondered. Her enjoyment was
keen and her curiosity insatiable, and, grateful in general for all her
opportunities, she especially prized the privilege of meeting certain
celebrated persons--authors and artists, philosophers and statesmen--of
whose renown she had been a humble and distant beholder, and who now, as
a part of the habitual furniture of London drawing rooms, struck her
as stars fallen from the firmament and become palpable--revealing also
sometimes, on contact, qualities not to have been predicted of sidereal
bodies. Bessie, who knew so many of her contemporaries by reputation,
had a good many personal disappointments; but, on the other hand, she
had innumerable satisfactions and enthusiasms, and she communicated the
emotions of either class to a dear friend, of her own sex, in Boston,
with whom she was in voluminous correspondence. Some of her reflections,
indeed, she attempted to impart to Lord Lambeth, who came almost every
day to Jones's Hotel, and whom Mrs. Westgate admitted to be really
devoted. Captain Littledale, it appeared, had gone to India; and of
several others of Mrs. Westgate's ex-pensioners--gentlemen who, as she
said, had made, in New York, a clubhouse of her drawing room--no tidings
were to be obtained; but Lord Lambeth was certainly attentive enough to
make up for the accidental absences, the short memories, all the other
irregularities of everyone else. He drove them in the park, he took them
to visit private collections of pictures, and, having a house of his
own, invited them to dinner. Mrs. Westgate, following the fashion of
many of her compatriots, caused herself and her sister to be presented
at the English court by her diplomatic representative--for it was
in this manner that she alluded to the American minister to England,
inquiring what on earth he was put there for, if not to make the proper
arrangements for one's going to a Drawing Room.

Lord Lambeth declared that he hated Drawing Rooms, but he participated
in the ceremony on the day on which the two ladies at Jones's Hotel
repaired to Buckingham Palace in a remarkable coach which his lordship
had sent to fetch them. He had on a gorgeous uniform, and Bessie Alden
was particularly struck with his appearance--especially when on her
asking him, rather foolishly as she felt, if he were a loyal subject,
he replied that he was a loyal subject to HER. This declaration was
emphasized by his dancing with her at a royal ball to which the two
ladies afterward went, and was not impaired by the fact that she
thought he danced very ill. He seemed to her wonderfully kind; she asked
herself, with growing vivacity, why he should be so kind. It was his
disposition--that seemed the natural answer. She had told her sister
that she liked him very much, and now that she liked him more she
wondered why. She liked him for his disposition; to this question as
well that seemed the natural answer. When once the impressions of London
life began to crowd thickly upon her, she completely forgot her sister's
warning about the cynicism of public opinion. It had given her great
pain at the moment, but there was no particular reason why she should
remember it; it corresponded too little with any sensible reality; and
it was disagreeable to Bessie to remember disagreeable things. So she
was not haunted with the sense of a vulgar imputation. She was not in
love with Lord Lambeth--she assured herself of that. It will immediately
be observed that when such assurances become necessary the state of a
young lady's affections is already ambiguous; and, indeed, Bessie
Alden made no attempt to dissimulate--to herself, of course--a certain
tenderness that she felt for the young nobleman. She said to herself
that she liked the type to which he belonged--the simple, candid, manly,
healthy English temperament. She spoke to herself of him as women speak
of young men they like--alluded to his bravery (which she had never in
the least seen tested), to his honesty and gentlemanliness, and was not
silent upon the subject of his good looks. She was perfectly conscious,
moreover, that she liked to think of his more adventitious merits; that
her imagination was excited and gratified by the sight of a handsome
young man endowed with such large opportunities--opportunities she
hardly knew for what, but, as she supposed, for doing great things--for
setting an example, for exerting an influence, for conferring happiness,
for encouraging the arts. She had a kind of ideal of conduct for a young
man who should find himself in this magnificent position, and she tried
to adapt it to Lord Lambeth's deportment as you might attempt to fit a
silhouette in cut paper upon a shadow projected upon a wall. But Bessie
Alden's silhouette refused to coincide with his lordship's image,
and this want of harmony sometimes vexed her more than she thought
reasonable. When he was absent it was, of course, less striking; then
he seemed to her a sufficiently graceful combination of high
responsibilities and amiable qualities. But when he sat there
within sight, laughing and talking with his customary good humor and
simplicity, she measured it more accurately, and she felt acutely that
if Lord Lambeth's position was heroic, there was but little of the
hero in the young man himself. Then her imagination wandered away
from him--very far away; for it was an incontestable fact that at such
moments he seemed distinctly dull. I am afraid that while Bessie's
imagination was thus invidiously roaming, she cannot have been herself
a very lively companion; but it may well have been that these occasional
fits of indifference seemed to Lord Lambeth a part of the young girl's
personal charm. It had been a part of this charm from the first that
he felt that she judged him and measured him more freely and
irresponsibly--more at her ease and her leisure, as it were--than
several young ladies with whom he had been on the whole about as
intimate. To feel this, and yet to feel that she also liked him,
was very agreeable to Lord Lambeth. He fancied he had compassed that
gratification so desirable to young men of title and fortune--being
liked for himself. It is true that a cynical counselor might have
whispered to him, "Liked for yourself? Yes; but not so very much!" He
had, at any rate, the constant hope of being liked more.

It may seem, perhaps, a trifle singular--but it is nevertheless
true--that Bessie Alden, when he struck her as dull, devoted some time,
on grounds of conscience, to trying to like him more. I say on grounds
of conscience because she felt that he had been extremely "nice" to her
sister, and because she reflected that it was no more than fair that
she should think as well of him as he thought of her. This effort was
possibly sometimes not so successful as it might have been, for the
result of it was occasionally a vague irritation, which expressed itself
in hostile criticism of several British institutions. Bessie Alden went
to some entertainments at which she met Lord Lambeth; but she went
to others at which his lordship was neither actually nor potentially
present; and it was chiefly on these latter occasions that she
encountered those literary and artistic celebrities of whom mention has
been made. After a while she reduced the matter to a principle. If Lord
Lambeth should appear anywhere, it was a symbol that there would be no
poets and philosophers; and in consequence--for it was almost a strict
consequence--she used to enumerate to the young man these objects of her
admiration.

"You seem to be awfully fond of those sort of people," said Lord Lambeth
one day, as if the idea had just occurred to him.

"They are the people in England I am most curious to see," Bessie Alden
replied.

"I suppose that's because you have read so much," said Lord Lambeth
gallantly.

"I have not read so much. It is because we think so much of them at
home."

"Oh, I see," observed the young nobleman. "In Boston."

"Not only in Boston; everywhere," said Bessie. "We hold them in great
honor; they go to the best dinner parties."

"I daresay you are right. I can't say I know many of them."

"It's a pity you don't," Bessie Alden declared. "It would do you good."

"I daresay it would," said Lord Lambeth very humbly. "But I must say I
don't like the looks of some of them."

"Neither do I--of some of them. But there are all kinds, and many of
them are charming."

"I have talked with two or three of them," the young man went on, "and I
thought they had a kind of fawning manner."

"Why should they fawn?" Bessie Alden demanded.

"I'm sure I don't know. Why, indeed?"

"Perhaps you only thought so," said Bessie.

"Well, of course," rejoined her companion, "that's a kind of thing that
can't be proved."

"In America they don't fawn," said Bessie.

"Ah, well, then, they must be better company."

Bessie was silent a moment. "That is one of the things I don't like
about England," she said; "your keeping the distinguished people apart."

"How do you mean apart?"

"Why, letting them come only to certain places. You never see them."

Lord Lambeth looked at her a moment. "What people do you mean?"

"The eminent people--the authors and artists--the clever people."

"Oh, there are other eminent people besides those," said Lord Lambeth.

"Well, you certainly keep them apart," repeated the young girl.

"And there are other clever people," added Lord Lambeth simply.

Bessie Alden looked at him, and she gave a light laugh. "Not many," she
said.

On another occasion--just after a dinner party--she told him that there
was something else in England she did not like.

"Oh, I say!" he cried, "haven't you abused us enough?"

"I have never abused you at all," said Bessie; "but I don't like your
PRECEDENCE."

"It isn't my precedence!" Lord Lambeth declared, laughing.

"Yes, it is yours--just exactly yours; and I think it's odious," said
Bessie.

"I never saw such a young lady for discussing things! Has someone had
the impudence to go before you?" asked his lordship.

"It is not the going before me that I object to," said Bessie; "it
is their thinking that they have a right to do it--A RIGHT THAT I
RECOGNIZE."

"I never saw such a young lady as you are for not 'recognizing.' I have
no doubt the thing is BEASTLY, but it saves a lot of trouble."

"It makes a lot of trouble. It's horrid," said Bessie.

"But how would you have the first people go?" asked Lord Lambeth. "They
can't go last."

"Whom do you mean by the first people?"

"Ah, if you mean to question first principles!" said Lord Lambeth.

"If those are your first principles, no wonder some of your arrangements
are horrid," observed Bessie Alden with a very pretty ferocity. "I am a
young girl, so of course I go last; but imagine what Kitty must feel on
being informed that she is not at liberty to budge until certain other
ladies have passed out."

"Oh, I say, she is not 'informed!'" cried Lord Lambeth. "No one would do
such a thing as that."

"She is made to feel it," the young girl insisted--"as if they were
afraid she would make a rush for the door. No; you have a lovely
country," said Bessie Alden, "but your precedence is horrid."

"I certainly shouldn't think your sister would like it," rejoined Lord
Lambeth with even exaggerated gravity. But Bessie Alden could induce
him to enter no formal protest against this repulsive custom, which he
seemed to think an extreme convenience.

Percy Beaumont all this time had been a very much less frequent visitor
at Jones's Hotel than his noble kinsman; he had, in fact, called but
twice upon the two American ladies. Lord Lambeth, who often saw him,
reproached him with his neglect and declared that, although Mrs.
Westgate had said nothing about it, he was sure that she was secretly
wounded by it. "She suffers too much to speak," said Lord Lambeth.

"That's all gammon," said Percy Beaumont; "there's a limit to what
people can suffer!" And, though sending no apologies to Jones's Hotel,
he undertook in a manner to explain his absence. "You are always there,"
he said, "and that's reason enough for my not going."

"I don't see why. There is enough for both of us."

"I don't care to be a witness of your--your reckless passion," said
Percy Beaumont.

Lord Lambeth looked at him with a cold eye and for a moment said
nothing. "It's not so obvious as you might suppose," he rejoined dryly,
"considering what a demonstrative beggar I am."

"I don't want to know anything about it--nothing whatever," said
Beaumont. "Your mother asks me everytime she sees me whether I believe
you are really lost--and Lady Pimlico does the same. I prefer to be able
to answer that I know nothing about it--that I never go there. I stay
away for consistency's sake. As I said the other day, they must look
after you themselves."

"You are devilish considerate," said Lord Lambeth. "They never question
me."

"They are afraid of you. They are afraid of irritating you and making
you worse. So they go to work very cautiously, and, somewhere or other,
they get their information. They know a great deal about you. They
know that you have been with those ladies to the dome of St. Paul's
and--where was the other place?--to the Thames Tunnel."

"If all their knowledge is as accurate as that, it must be very
valuable," said Lord Lambeth.

"Well, at any rate, they know that you have been visiting the 'sights
of the metropolis.' They think--very naturally, as it seems to me--that
when you take to visiting the sights of the metropolis with a little
American girl, there is serious cause for alarm." Lord Lambeth responded
to this intimation by scornful laughter, and his companion continued,
after a pause: "I said just now I didn't want to know anything about
the affair; but I will confess that I am curious to learn whether you
propose to marry Miss Bessie Alden."

On this point Lord Lambeth gave his interlocutor no immediate
satisfaction; he was musing, with a frown. "By Jove," he said, "they go
rather too far. They SHALL find me dangerous--I promise them."

Percy Beaumont began to laugh. "You don't redeem your promises. You said
the other day you would make your mother call."

Lord Lambeth continued to meditate. "I asked her to call," he said
simply.

"And she declined?"

"Yes; but she shall do it yet."

"Upon my word," said Percy Beaumont, "if she gets much more frightened I
believe she will." Lord Lambeth looked at him, and he went on. "She will
go to the girl herself."

"How do you mean she will go to her?"

"She will beg her off, or she will bribe her. She will take strong
measures."

Lord Lambeth turned away in silence, and his companion watched him take
twenty steps and then slowly return. "I have invited Mrs. Westgate and
Miss Alden to Branches," he said, "and this evening I shall name a day."

"And shall you invite your mother and your sisters to meet them?"

"Explicitly!"

"That will set the duchess off," said Percy Beaumont. "I suspect she
will come."

"She may do as she pleases."

Beaumont looked at Lord Lambeth. "You do really propose to marry the
little sister, then?"

"I like the way you talk about it!" cried the young man. "She won't
gobble me down; don't be afraid."

"She won't leave you on your knees," said Percy Beaumont. "What IS the
inducement?"

"You talk about proposing: wait till I HAVE proposed," Lord Lambeth went
on.

"That's right, my dear fellow; think about it," said Percy Beaumont.

"She's a charming girl," pursued his lordship.

"Of course she's a charming girl. I don't know a girl more charming,
intrinsically. But there are other charming girls nearer home."

"I like her spirit," observed Lord Lambeth, almost as if he were trying
to torment his cousin.

"What's the peculiarity of her spirit?"

"She's not afraid, and she says things out, and she thinks herself as
good as anyone. She is the only girl I have ever seen that was not dying
to marry me."

"How do you know that, if you haven't asked her?"

"I don't know how; but I know it."

"I am sure she asked me questions enough about your property and your
titles," said Beaumont.

"She has asked me questions, too; no end of them," Lord Lambeth
admitted. "But she asked for information, don't you know."

"Information? Aye, I'll warrant she wanted it. Depend upon it that she
is dying to marry you just as much and just as little as all the rest of
them."

"I shouldn't like her to refuse me--I shouldn't like that."

"If the thing would be so disagreeable, then, both to you and to her, in
Heaven's name leave it alone," said Percy Beaumont.

Mrs. Westgate, on her side, had plenty to say to her sister about the
rarity of Mr. Beaumont's visits and the nonappearance of the Duchess of
Bayswater. She professed, however, to derive more satisfaction from
this latter circumstance than she could have done from the most lavish
attentions on the part of this great lady. "It is most marked," she
said--"most marked. It is a delicious proof that we have made them
miserable. The day we dined with Lord Lambeth I was really sorry for the
poor fellow." It will have been gathered that the entertainment offered
by Lord Lambeth to his American friends had not been graced by the
presence of his anxious mother. He had invited several choice spirits
to meet them; but the ladies of his immediate family were to Mrs.
Westgate's sense--a sense possibly morbidly acute--conspicuous by their
absence.

"I don't want to express myself in a manner that you dislike," said
Bessie Alden; "but I don't know why you should have so many theories
about Lord Lambeth's poor mother. You know a great many young men in New
York without knowing their mothers."

Mrs. Westgate looked at her sister and then turned away. "My dear
Bessie, you are superb!" she said.

"One thing is certain," the young girl continued. "If I believed I were
a cause of annoyance--however unwitting--to Lord Lambeth's family, I
should insist--"

"Insist upon my leaving England," said Mrs. Westgate.

"No, not that. I want to go to the National Gallery again; I want to see
Stratford-on-Avon and Canterbury Cathedral. But I should insist upon his
coming to see us no more."

"That would be very modest and very pretty of you; but you wouldn't do
it now."

"Why do you say 'now'?" asked Bessie Alden. "Have I ceased to be
modest?"

"You care for him too much. A month ago, when you said you didn't, I
believe it was quite true. But at present, my dear child," said Mrs.
Westgate, "you wouldn't find it quite so simple a matter never to see
Lord Lambeth again. I have seen it coming on."

"You are mistaken," said Bessie. "You don't understand."

"My dear child, don't be perverse," rejoined her sister.

"I know him better, certainly, if you mean that," said Bessie. "And I
like him very much. But I don't like him enough to make trouble for him
with his family. However, I don't believe in that."

"I like the way you say 'however,'" Mrs. Westgate exclaimed. "Come; you
would not marry him?"

"Oh, no," said the young girl.

Mrs. Westgate for a moment seemed vexed. "Why not, pray?" she demanded.

"Because I don't care to," said Bessie Alden.

The morning after Lord Lambeth had had, with Percy Beaumont, that
exchange of ideas which has just been narrated, the ladies at Jones's
Hotel received from his lordship a written invitation to pay their
projected visit to Branches Castle on the following Tuesday. "I think I
have made up a very pleasant party," the young nobleman said. "Several
people whom you know, and my mother and sisters, who have so long been
regrettably prevented from making your acquaintance." Bessie Alden lost
no time in calling her sister's attention to the injustice she had done
the Duchess of Bayswater, whose hostility was now proved to be a vain
illusion.

"Wait till you see if she comes," said Mrs. Westgate. "And if she is to
meet us at her son's house the obligation was all the greater for her to
call upon us."

Bessie had not to wait long, and it appeared that Lord Lambeth's mother
now accepted Mrs. Westgate's view of her duties. On the morrow, early in
the afternoon, two cards were brought to the apartment of the American
ladies--one of them bearing the name of the Duchess of Bayswater and
the other that of the Countess of Pimlico. Mrs. Westgate glanced at the
clock. "It is not yet four," she said; "they have come early; they wish
to see us. We will receive them." And she gave orders that her visitors
should be admitted. A few moments later they were introduced, and there
was a solemn exchange of amenities. The duchess was a large lady, with a
fine fresh color; the Countess of Pimlico was very pretty and elegant.

The duchess looked about her as she sat down--looked not especially at
Mrs. Westgate. "I daresay my son has told you that I have been wanting
to come and see you," she observed.

"You are very kind," said Mrs. Westgate, vaguely--her conscience not
allowing her to assent to this proposition--and, indeed, not permitting
her to enunciate her own with any appreciable emphasis.

"He says you were so kind to him in America," said the duchess.

"We are very glad," Mrs. Westgate replied, "to have been able to make
him a little more--a little less--a little more comfortable."

"I think he stayed at your house," remarked the Duchess of Bayswater,
looking at Bessie Alden.

"A very short time," said Mrs. Westgate.

"Oh!" said the duchess; and she continued to look at Bessie, who was
engaged in conversation with her daughter.

"Do you like London?" Lady Pimlico had asked of Bessie, after looking at
her a good deal--at her face and her hands, her dress and her hair.

"Very much indeed," said Bessie.

"Do you like this hotel?"

"It is very comfortable," said Bessie.

"Do you like stopping at hotels?" inquired Lady Pimlico after a pause.

"I am very fond of traveling," Bessie answered, "and I suppose hotels
are a necessary part of it. But they are not the part I am fondest of."

"Oh, I hate traveling," said the Countess of Pimlico and transferred her
attention to Mrs. Westgate.

"My son tells me you are going to Branches," the duchess presently
resumed.

"Lord Lambeth has been so good as to ask us," said Mrs. Westgate, who
perceived that her visitor had now begun to look at her, and who had her
customary happy consciousness of a distinguished appearance. The only
mitigation of her felicity on this point was that, having inspected her
visitor's own costume, she said to herself, "She won't know how well I
am dressed!"

"He has asked me to go, but I am not sure I shall be able," murmured the
duchess.

"He had offered us the p--prospect of meeting you," said Mrs. Westgate.

"I hate the country at this season," responded the duchess.

Mrs. Westgate gave a little shrug. "I think it is pleasanter than
London."

But the duchess's eyes were absent again; she was looking very fixedly
at Bessie. In a moment she slowly rose, walked to a chair that stood
empty at the young girl's right hand, and silently seated herself.
As she was a majestic, voluminous woman, this little transaction had,
inevitably, an air of somewhat impressive intention. It diffused a
certain awkwardness, which Lady Pimlico, as a sympathetic daughter,
perhaps desired to rectify in turning to Mrs. Westgate.

"I daresay you go out a great deal," she observed.

"No, very little. We are strangers, and we didn't come here for
society."

"I see," said Lady Pimlico. "It's rather nice in town just now."

"It's charming," said Mrs. Westgate. "But we only go to see a few
people--whom we like."

"Of course one can't like everyone," said Lady Pimlico.

"It depends upon one's society," Mrs. Westgate rejoined.

The Duchess meanwhile had addressed herself to Bessie. "My son tells me
the young ladies in America are so clever."

"I am glad they made so good an impression on him," said Bessie,
smiling.

The Duchess was not smiling; her large fresh face was very tranquil.
"He is very susceptible," she said. "He thinks everyone clever, and
sometimes they are."

"Sometimes," Bessie assented, smiling still.

The duchess looked at her a little and then went on; "Lambeth is very
susceptible, but he is very volatile, too."

"Volatile?" asked Bessie.

"He is very inconstant. It won't do to depend on him."

"Ah," said Bessie, "I don't recognize that description. We have depended
on him greatly--my sister and I--and he has never disappointed us."

"He will disappoint you yet," said the duchess.

Bessie gave a little laugh, as if she were amused at the duchess's
persistency. "I suppose it will depend on what we expect of him."

"The less you expect, the better," Lord Lambeth's mother declared.

"Well," said Bessie, "we expect nothing unreasonable."

The duchess for a moment was silent, though she appeared to have more to
say. "Lambeth says he has seen so much of you," she presently began.

"He has been to see us very often; he has been very kind," said Bessie
Alden.

"I daresay you are used to that. I am told there is a great deal of that
in America."

"A great deal of kindness?" the young girl inquired, smiling.

"Is that what you call it? I know you have different expressions."

"We certainly don't always understand each other," said Mrs. Westgate,
the termination of whose interview with Lady Pimlico allowed her to give
her attention to their elder visitor.

"I am speaking of the young men calling so much upon the young ladies,"
the duchess explained.

"But surely in England," said Mrs. Westgate, "the young ladies don't
call upon the young men?"

"Some of them do--almost!" Lady Pimlico declared. "When the young men
are a great PARTI."

"Bessie, you must make a note of that," said Mrs. Westgate. "My sister,"
she added, "is a model traveler. She writes down all the curious facts
she hears in a little book she keeps for the purpose."

The duchess was a little flushed; she looked all about the room, while
her daughter turned to Bessie. "My brother told us you were wonderfully
clever," said Lady Pimlico.

"He should have said my sister," Bessie answered--"when she says such
things as that."

"Shall you be long at Branches?" the duchess asked, abruptly, of the
young girl.

"Lord Lambeth has asked us for three days," said Bessie.

"I shall go," the duchess declared, "and my daughter, too."

"That will be charming!" Bessie rejoined.

"Delightful!" murmured Mrs. Westgate.

"I shall expect to see a great deal of you," the duchess continued.
"When I go to Branches I monopolize my son's guests."

"They must be most happy," said Mrs. Westgate very graciously.

"I want immensely to see it--to see the castle," said Bessie to the
duchess. "I have never seen one--in England, at least; and you know we
have none in America."

"Ah, you are fond of castles?" inquired her Grace.

"Immensely!" replied the young girl. "It has been the dream of my life
to live in one."

The duchess looked at her a moment, as if she hardly knew how to take
this assurance, which, from her Grace's point of view, was either very
artless or very audacious. "Well," she said, rising, "I will show
you Branches myself." And upon this the two great ladies took their
departure.

"What did they mean by it?" asked Mrs. Westgate, when they were gone.

"They meant to be polite," said Bessie, "because we are going to meet
them."

"It is too late to be polite," Mrs. Westgate replied almost grimly.
"They meant to overawe us by their fine manners and their grandeur, and
to make you LACHER PRISE."

"LACHER PRISE? What strange things you say!" murmured Bessie Alden.

"They meant to snub us, so that we shouldn't dare to go to Branches,"
Mrs. Westgate continued.

"On the contrary," said Bessie, "the duchess offered to show me the
place herself."

"Yes, you may depend upon it she won't let you out of her sight. She
will show you the place from morning till night."

"You have a theory for everything," said Bessie.

"And you apparently have none for anything."

"I saw no attempt to 'overawe' us," said the young girl. "Their manners
were not fine."

"They were not even good!" Mrs. Westgate declared.

Bessie was silent a while, but in a few moments she observed that she
had a very good theory. "They came to look at me," she said, as if this
had been a very ingenious hypothesis. Mrs. Westgate did it justice;
she greeted it with a smile and pronounced it most brilliant, while, in
reality, she felt that the young girl's skepticism, or her charity, or,
as she had sometimes called it appropriately, her idealism, was proof
against irony. Bessie, however, remained meditative all the rest of that
day and well on into the morrow.

On the morrow, before lunch, Mrs. Westgate had occasion to go out for an
hour, and left her sister writing a letter. When she came back she
met Lord Lambeth at the door of the hotel, coming away. She thought he
looked slightly embarrassed; he was certainly very grave. "I am sorry to
have missed you. Won't you come back?" she asked.

"No," said the young man, "I can't. I have seen your sister. I can never
come back." Then he looked at her a moment and took her hand. "Goodbye,
Mrs. Westgate," he said. "You have been very kind to me." And with what
she thought a strange, sad look in his handsome young face, he turned
away.

She went in, and she found Bessie still writing her letter; that is,
Mrs. Westgate perceived she was sitting at the table with the pen in her
hand and not writing. "Lord Lambeth has been here," said the elder lady
at last.

Then Bessie got up and showed her a pale, serious face. She bent this
face upon her sister for some time, confessing silently and a little
pleading. "I told him," she said at last, "that we could not go to
Branches."

Mrs. Westgate displayed just a spark of irritation. "He might have
waited," she said with a smile, "till one had seen the castle." Later,
an hour afterward, she said, "Dear Bessie, I wish you might have
accepted him."

"I couldn't," said Bessie gently.

"He is an excellent fellow," said Mrs. Westgate.

"I couldn't," Bessie repeated.

"If it is only," her sister added, "because those women will think that
they succeeded--that they paralyzed us!"

Bessie Alden turned away; but presently she added, "They were
interesting; I should have liked to see them again."

"So should I!" cried Mrs. Westgate significantly.

"And I should have liked to see the castle," said Bessie. "But now we
must leave England," she added.

Her sister looked at her. "You will not wait to go to the National
Gallery?"

"Not now."

"Nor to Canterbury Cathedral?"

Bessie reflected a moment. "We can stop there on our way to Paris," she
said.

Lord Lambeth did not tell Percy Beaumont that the contingency he was
not prepared at all to like had occurred; but Percy Beaumont, on hearing
that the two ladies had left London, wondered with some intensity what
had happened; wondered, that is, until the Duchess of Bayswater came
a little to his assistance. The two ladies went to Paris, and Mrs.
Westgate beguiled the journey to that city by repeating several
times--"That's what I regret; they will think they petrified us." But
Bessie Alden seemed to regret nothing.