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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.
Prepared and Published by:
Ebd
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