第24章 X(2)

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.