"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.
Pages:
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67