The Turn of the Screw | Page 8

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