Part 9 (1/2)

I met his kiss and I had to make, while I folded him for a minute in my arms, the most stupendous effort not to cry. He had given exactly the account of himself that permitted least of my going behind it, and it was only with the effect of confirming my acceptance of it that, as I presently glanced about the room, I could say--

”Then you didn't undress at all?”

He fairly glittered in the gloom. ”Not at all. I sat up and read.”

”And when did you go down?”

”At midnight. When I'm bad I AM bad!”

”I see, I see--it's charming. But how could you be sure I would know it?”

”Oh, I arranged that with Flora.” His answers rang out with a readiness!

”She was to get up and look out.”

”Which is what she did do.” It was I who fell into the trap!

”So she disturbed you, and, to see what she was looking at, you also looked--you saw.”

”While you,” I concurred, ”caught your death in the night air!”

He literally bloomed so from this exploit that he could afford radiantly to a.s.sent. ”How otherwise should I have been bad enough?” he asked.

Then, after another embrace, the incident and our interview closed on my recognition of all the reserves of goodness that, for his joke, he had been able to draw upon.

XII

The particular impression I had received proved in the morning light, I repeat, not quite successfully presentable to Mrs. Grose, though I reinforced it with the mention of still another remark that he had made before we separated. ”It all lies in half a dozen words,” I said to her, ”words that really settle the matter. 'Think, you know, what I MIGHT do!' He threw that off to show me how good he is. He knows down to the ground what he 'might' do. That's what he gave them a taste of at school.”

”Lord, you do change!” cried my friend.

”I don't change--I simply make it out. The four, depend upon it, perpetually meet. If on either of these last nights you had been with either child, you would clearly have understood. The more I've watched and waited the more I've felt that if there were nothing else to make it sure it would be made so by the systematic silence of each. NEVER, by a slip of the tongue, have they so much as alluded to either of their old friends, any more than Miles has alluded to his expulsion. Oh, yes, we may sit here and look at them, and they may show off to us there to their fill; but even while they pretend to be lost in their fairytale they're steeped in their vision of the dead restored. He's not reading to her,” I declared; ”they're talking of THEM--they're talking horrors!

I go on, I know, as if I were crazy; and it's a wonder I'm not. What I've seen would have made YOU so; but it has only made me more lucid, made me get hold of still other things.”

My lucidity must have seemed awful, but the charming creatures who were victims of it, pa.s.sing and repa.s.sing in their interlocked sweetness, gave my colleague something to hold on by; and I felt how tight she held as, without stirring in the breath of my pa.s.sion, she covered them still with her eyes. ”Of what other things have you got hold?”

”Why, of the very things that have delighted, fascinated, and yet, at bottom, as I now so strangely see, mystified and troubled me. Their more than earthly beauty, their absolutely unnatural goodness. It's a game,”

I went on; ”it's a policy and a fraud!”

”On the part of little darlings--?”

”As yet mere lovely babies? Yes, mad as that seems!” The very act of bringing it out really helped me to trace it--follow it all up and piece it all together. ”They haven't been good--they've only been absent. It has been easy to live with them, because they're simply leading a life of their own. They're not mine--they're not ours. They're his and they're hers!”

”Quint's and that woman's?”

”Quint's and that woman's. They want to get to them.”