The person it appeared least to concern proved to be,till dinner, little Miles himself.My perambulations had given me, meanwhile,no glimpse of him, but they had tended to make more public the change taking place in our relation as a consequence of his having at the piano, the day before, kept me, in Flora’s interest, so beguiled and befooled. The stamp of publicity had of course been fully given by her confinement and departure, and the change itself was now ushered in by our nonobservance of the regular custom of the schoolroom. He had already disappeared when, on my way down, I pushed open his door, and I learned below that he had breakfasted—in the presence of a couple of the maids—with Mrs. Grose and his sister. He had then gone out, as he said, for a stroll; than which nothing, I reflected, could better have expressed his frank view of the abrupt transformation of my office. What he would not permit this office to consist of was yet to be settled: there was a queer relief, at all events—I mean for myself in especial—in the renouncement of one pretension. If so much had sprung to the surface, I scarce put it too strongly in saying that what had perhaps sprung highest was the absurdity of our prolonging the fiction that I had anything more to teach him. It sufficiently stuck out that, by tacit little tricks in which even more than myself he carried out the care for my dignity, I had had to appeal to him to let me off straining to meet him on the ground of his true capacity. He had at any rate his freedom now; I was never to touch it again; as I had amply shown, moreover, when, on his joining me in the schoolroom the previous night, I had uttered, on the subject of the interval just concluded, neither challenge nor hint. I had too much, from this moment, my other ideas. Yet when he at last arrived, the difficulty of applying them, the accumulations of my problem, were brought straight home to me by the beautiful little presence on which what had occurred had as yet, for the eye, dropped neither stain nor shadow.
To mark, for the house,the high state I cultivated I decreed that my meals with the boy should be served, as we called it, downstairs; so that I had been awaiting him in the ponderous pomp of the room outside of the window of which I had had from Mrs. Grose, that first scared Sunday, my flash of something it would scarce have done to call light. Here at present I felt afresh—for I had felt it again and again—how my equilibrium depended on the success of my rigid will, the will to shut my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what I had to deal with was, revoltingly, against nature. I could only get on at all by taking “nature” into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue. No attempt, nonetheless, could well require more tact than just this attempt to supply, one’s self, _all_ the nature. How could I put even a little of that article into a suppression of reference to what had occurred?How, on the other hand,could I make reference without a new plunge into the hideous obscure?Well, a sort of answer, after a time, had come to me,and it was so far confirmed as that I was met,incontestably, by the quickened vision of what was rare in my little companion.It was indeed as if he had found even now—as he had so often found at lessons—still some other delicate way to ease me off. Wasn’t there light in the fact which, as we shared our solitude, broke out with a specious glitter it had never yet quite worn?—the fact that (opportunity aiding,precious opportunity which had now come) it would be preposterous,with a child so endowed,to forego the help one might wrest from absolute intelligence?What had his intelligence been given him for but to save him?Mightn’t one, to reach his mind,risk the stretch of an angular arm over his character?It was as if, when we were face to face in the dining room,he had literally shown me the way.The roast mutton was on the table,and I had dispensed with attendance. Miles,before he sat down,stood a moment with his hands in his pockets and looked at the joint,on which he seemed on the point of passing some humorous judgment.But what he presently produced was: “I say, my dear,is she really very awfully ill?”
“Little Flora?Not so bad but that she’ll presently be better.London will set her up.Bly had ceased to agree with her.Come here and take your mutton.”
He alertly obeyed me,carried the plate carefully to his seat, and,when he was established, went on.“Did Bly disagree with her so terribly suddenly?”
“Not so suddenly as you might think.One had seen it coming on.”
“Then why didn’t you get her off before?”
“Before what?”
“Before she became too ill to travel.”
I found myself prompt. “She’s _not_ too ill to travel:she only might have become so if she had stayed.This was just the moment to seize.The journey will dissipate the influence”—oh, I was grand!—“and carry it off.”
“I see, I see”—Miles, for that matter, was grand, too.He settled to his repast with the charming little “table manner” that,from the day of his arrival,had relieved me of all grossness of admonition.Whatever he had been driven from school for,it was not for ugly feeding. He was irreproachable,as always, today; but he was unmistakably more conscious.He was discernibly trying to take for granted more things than he found,without assistance, quite easy;and he dropped into peaceful silence while he felt his situation.Our meal was of the briefest—mine a vain pretense,and I had the things immediately removed.While this was done Miles stood again with his hands in his little pockets and his back to me—stood and looked out of the wide window through which, that other day, I had seen what pulled me up. We continued silent while the maid was with us—as silent, it whimsically occurred to me, as some young couple who, on their wedding journey, at the inn, feel shy in the presence of the waiter. He turned round only when the waiter had left us. “Well—so we’re alone!”
XXIII
“Oh, more or less.” I fancy my smile was pale.“Not absolutely. We shouldn’t like that!” I went on.
“No—I suppose we shouldn’t.Of course we have the others.”
“We have the others—we have indeed the others, ” I concurred.
“Yet even though we have them,” he returned,still with his hands in his pockets and planted there in front of me,“they don’t much count, do they?”
I made the best of it, but I felt wan.“It depends on what you call ‘much’!”