There was, alas, a difficulty about that: I would have thanked
him with all my soul had I not had in a proportionate measure this
conviction of the secret of my pupils.
How can I retrace today the strange steps of my obsession?
There were times of our being together when I would have been ready
to swear that, literally, in my presence, but with my direct sense
of it closed, they had visitors who were known and were welcome.
Then it was that, had I not been deterred by the very chance that
such an injury might prove greater than the injury to be averted,
my exultation would have broken out. "They're here, they're here,
you little wretches," I would have cried, "and you can't deny it now!"
The little wretches denied it with all the added volume of their
sociability and their tenderness, in just the crystal depths of which--
like the flash of a fish in a stream--the mockery of their advantage
peeped up. The shock, in truth, had sunk into me still deeper
than I knew on the night when, looking out to see either Quint
or Miss Jessel under the stars, I had beheld the boy over whose
rest I watched and who had immediately brought in with him--
had straightway, there, turned it on me--the lovely upward look with which,
from the battlements above me, the hideous apparition of Quint had played.
If it was a question of a scare, my discovery on this occasion
had scared me more than any other, and it was in the condition
of nerves produced by it that I made my actual inductions.
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