The Turn of the Screw | Page 4

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