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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, What Maisie Knew, by Henry James
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: What Maisie Knew
+
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+
+
+Release Date: March 12, 2003  [eBook #7118]
+[Most recently updated: November 9, 2005]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHAT MAISIE KNEW***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Eve Sobol, South Bend, Indiana, USA
+and revised by Joseph E. Loewenstein, M.D.
+
+
+
+WHAT MAISIE KNEW
+
+by
+
+HENRY JAMES
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The litigation seemed interminable and had in fact been complicated; but
+by the decision on the appeal the judgement of the divorce-court was
+confirmed as to the assignment of the child. The father, who, though
+bespattered from head to foot, had made good his case, was, in pursuance
+of this triumph, appointed to keep her: it was not so much that the
+mother's character had been more absolutely damaged as that the
+brilliancy of a lady's complexion (and this lady's, in court, was
+immensely remarked) might be more regarded as showing the spots.
+Attached, however, to the second pronouncement was a condition that
+detracted, for Beale Farange, from its sweetness--an order that he
+should refund to his late wife the twenty-six hundred pounds put down
+by her, as it was called, some three years before, in the interest of
+the child's maintenance and precisely on a proved understanding that he
+would take no proceedings: a sum of which he had had the administration
+and of which he could render not the least account. The obligation thus
+attributed to her adversary was no small balm to Ida's resentment; it
+drew a part of the sting from her defeat and compelled Mr. Farange
+perceptibly to lower his crest. He was unable to produce the money or to
+raise it in any way; so that after a squabble scarcely less public and
+scarcely more decent than the original shock of battle his only issue
+from his predicament was a compromise proposed by his legal advisers and
+finally accepted by hers.
+
+His debt was by this arrangement remitted to him and the little girl
+disposed of in a manner worthy of the judgement-seat of Solomon. She was
+divided in two and the portions tossed impartially to the disputants.
+They would take her, in rotation, for six months at a time; she would
+spend half the year with each. This was odd justice in the eyes of those
+who still blinked in the fierce light projected from the tribunal--a
+light in which neither parent figured in the least as a happy example to
+youth and innocence. What was to have been expected on the evidence was
+the nomination, _in loco parentis_, of some proper third person, some
+respectable or at least some presentable friend. Apparently, however,
+the circle of the Faranges had been scanned in vain for any such
+ornament; so that the only solution finally meeting all the difficulties
+was, save that of sending Maisie to a Home, the partition of the
+tutelary office in the manner I have mentioned. There were more reasons
+for her parents to agree to it than there had ever been for them to
+agree to anything; and they now prepared with her help to enjoy the
+distinction that waits upon vulgarity sufficiently attested. Their
+rupture had resounded, and after being perfectly insignificant
+together they would be decidedly striking apart. Had they not produced
+an impression that warranted people in looking for appeals in the
+newspapers for the rescue of the little one--reverberation, amid a
+vociferous public, of the idea that some movement should be started or
+some benevolent person should come forward? A good lady came indeed a
+step or two: she was distantly related to Mrs. Farange, to whom she
+proposed that, having children and nurseries wound up and going, she
+should be allowed to take home the bone of contention and, by working it
+into her system, relieve at least one of the parents. This would make
+every time, for Maisie, after her inevitable six months with Beale, much
+more of a change.
+
+"More of a change?" Ida cried. "Won't it be enough of a change for her
+to come from that low brute to the person in the world who detests him
+most?"
+
+"No, because you detest him so much that you'll always talk to her about
+him. You'll keep him before her by perpetually abusing him."
+
+Mrs. Farange stared. "Pray, then, am I to do nothing to counteract his
+villainous abuse of ME?"
+
+The good lady, for a moment, made no reply: her silence was a grim
+judgement of the whole point of view. "Poor little monkey!" she at
+last exclaimed; and the words were an epitaph for the tomb of Maisie's
+childhood. She was abandoned to her fate. What was clear to any
+spectator was that the only link binding her to either parent was this
+lamentable fact of her being a ready vessel for bitterness, a deep
+little porcelain cup in which biting acids could be mixed. They had
+wanted her not for any good they could do her, but for the harm they
+could, with her unconscious aid, do each other. She should serve
+their anger and seal their revenge, for husband and wife had been
+alike crippled by the heavy hand of justice, which in the last resort
+met on neither side their indignant claim to get, as they called it,
+everything. If each was only to get half this seemed to concede that
+neither was so base as the other pretended, or, to put it differently,
+offered them both as bad indeed, since they were only as good as each
+other. The mother had wished to prevent the father from, as she said,
+"so much as looking" at the child; the father's plea was that the
+mother's lightest touch was "simply contamination." These were the
+opposed principles in which Maisie was to be educated--she was to fit
+them together as she might. Nothing could have been more touching at
+first than her failure to suspect the ordeal that awaited her little
+unspotted soul. There were persons horrified to think what those in
+charge of it would combine to try to make of it: no one could conceive
+in advance that they would be able to make nothing ill.
+
+This was a society in which for the most part people were occupied
+only with chatter, but the disunited couple had at last grounds for
+expecting a time of high activity. They girded their loins, they felt
+as if the quarrel had only begun. They felt indeed more married than
+ever, inasmuch as what marriage had mainly suggested to them was the
+unbroken opportunity to quarrel. There had been "sides" before, and
+there were sides as much as ever; for the sider too the prospect
+opened out, taking the pleasant form of a superabundance of matter for
+desultory conversation. The many friends of the Faranges drew together
+to differ about them; contradiction grew young again over teacups
+and cigars. Everybody was always assuring everybody of something
+very shocking, and nobody would have been jolly if nobody had been
+outrageous. The pair appeared to have a social attraction which failed
+merely as regards each other: it was indeed a great deal to be able
+to say for Ida that no one but Beale desired her blood, and for Beale
+that if he should ever have his eyes scratched out it would be only by
+his wife. It was generally felt, to begin with, that they were awfully
+good-looking--they had really not been analysed to a deeper residuum.
+They made up together for instance some twelve feet three of stature,
+and nothing was more discussed than the apportionment of this
+quantity. The sole flaw in Ida's beauty was a length and reach of
+arm conducive perhaps to her having so often beaten her ex-husband
+at billiards, a game in which she showed a superiority largely
+accountable, as she maintained, for the resentment finding expression
+in his physical violence. Billiards was her great accomplishment
+and the distinction her name always first produced the mention of.
+Notwithstanding some very long lines everything about her that might
+have been large and that in many women profited by the licence was,
+with a single exception, admired and cited for its smallness. The
+exception was her eyes, which might have been of mere regulation size,
+but which overstepped the modesty of nature; her mouth, on the other
+hand, was barely perceptible, and odds were freely taken as to the
+measurement of her waist. She was a person who, when she was out--and
+she was always out--produced everywhere a sense of having been seen
+often, the sense indeed of a kind of abuse of visibility, so that it
+would have been, in the usual places rather vulgar to wonder at her.
+Strangers only did that; but they, to the amusement of the familiar,
+did it very much: it was an inevitable way of betraying an alien
+habit. Like her husband she carried clothes, carried them as a train
+carries passengers: people had been known to compare their taste and
+dispute about the accommodation they gave these articles, though
+inclining on the whole to the commendation of Ida as less overcrowded,
+especially with jewellery and flowers. Beale Farange had natural
+decorations, a kind of costume in his vast fair beard, burnished like
+a gold breastplate, and in the eternal glitter of the teeth that his
+long moustache had been trained not to hide and that gave him, in
+every possible situation, the look of the joy of life. He had been
+destined in his youth for diplomacy and momentarily attached, without
+a salary, to a legation which enabled him often to say "In MY time in
+the East": but contemporary history had somehow had no use for him,
+had hurried past him and left him in perpetual Piccadilly. Every one
+knew what he had--only twenty-five hundred. Poor Ida, who had run
+through everything, had now nothing but her carriage and her paralysed
+uncle. This old brute, as he was called, was supposed to have a lot
+put away. The child was provided for, thanks to a crafty godmother, a
+defunct aunt of Beale's, who had left her something in such a manner
+that the parents could appropriate only the income.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+The child was provided for, but the new arrangement was inevitably
+confounding to a young intelligence intensely aware that something had
+happened which must matter a good deal and looking anxiously out for
+the effects of so great a cause. It was to be the fate of this patient
+little girl to see much more than she at first understood, but also even
+at first to understand much more than any little girl, however patient,
+had perhaps ever understood before. Only a drummer-boy in a ballad or
+a story could have been so in the thick of the fight. She was taken
+into the confidence of passions on which she fixed just the stare she
+might have had for images bounding across the wall in the slide of a
+magic-lantern. Her little world was phantasmagoric--strange shadows
+dancing on a sheet. It was as if the whole performance had been given
+for her--a mite of a half-scared infant in a great dim theatre. She was
+in short introduced to life with a liberality in which the selfishness
+of others found its account, and there was nothing to avert the
+sacrifice but the modesty of her youth.
+
+Her first term was with her father, who spared her only in not letting
+her have the wild letters addressed to her by her mother: he confined
+himself to holding them up at her and shaking them, while he showed his
+teeth, and then amusing her by the way he chucked them, across the room,
+bang into the fire. Even at that moment, however, she had a scared
+anticipation of fatigue, a guilty sense of not rising to the occasion,
+feeling the charm of the violence with which the stiff unopened
+envelopes, whose big monograms--Ida bristled with monograms--she would
+have liked to see, were made to whizz, like dangerous missiles, through
+the air. The greatest effect of the great cause was her own greater
+importance, chiefly revealed to her in the larger freedom with which
+she was handled, pulled hither and thither and kissed, and the
+proportionately greater niceness she was obliged to show. Her features
+had somehow become prominent; they were so perpetually nipped by the
+gentlemen who came to see her father and the smoke of whose cigarettes
+went into her face. Some of these gentlemen made her strike matches and
+light their cigarettes; others, holding her on knees violently jolted,
+pinched the calves of her legs till she shrieked--her shriek was much
+admired--and reproached them with being toothpicks. The word stuck in
+her mind and contributed to her feeling from this time that she was
+deficient in something that would meet the general desire. She found
+out what it was: it was a congenital tendency to the production of a
+substance to which Moddle, her nurse, gave a short ugly name, a name
+painfully associated at dinner with the part of the joint that she
+didn't like. She had left behind her the time when she had no desires
+to meet, none at least save Moddle's, who, in Kensington Gardens, was
+always on the bench when she came back to see if she had been playing
+too far. Moddle's desire was merely that she shouldn't do that, and she
+met it so easily that the only spots in that long brightness were the
+moments of her wondering what would become of her if, on her rushing
+back, there should be no Moddle on the bench. They still went to the
+Gardens, but there was a difference even there; she was impelled
+perpetually to look at the legs of other children and ask her nurse if
+THEY were toothpicks. Moddle was terribly truthful; she always said: "Oh
+my dear, you'll not find such another pair as your own." It seemed to
+have to do with something else that Moddle often said: "You feel the
+strain--that's where it is; and you'll feel it still worse, you know."
+
+Thus from the first Maisie not only felt it, but knew she felt it. A
+part of it was the consequence of her father's telling her he felt it
+too, and telling Moddle, in her presence, that she must make a point of
+driving that home. She was familiar, at the age of six, with the fact
+that everything had been changed on her account, everything ordered to
+enable him to give himself up to her. She was to remember always the
+words in which Moddle impressed upon her that he did so give himself:
+"Your papa wishes you never to forget, you know, that he has been
+dreadfully put about." If the skin on Moddle's face had to Maisie the
+air of being unduly, almost painfully, stretched, it never presented
+that appearance so much as when she uttered, as she often had occasion
+to utter, such words. The child wondered if they didn't make it hurt
+more than usual; but it was only after some time that she was able to
+attach to the picture of her father's sufferings, and more particularly
+to her nurse's manner about them, the meaning for which these things
+had waited. By the time she had grown sharper, as the gentlemen who had
+criticised her calves used to say, she found in her mind a collection of
+images and echoes to which meanings were attachable--images and echoes
+kept for her in the childish dusk, the dim closet, the high drawers,
+like games she wasn't yet big enough to play. The great strain meanwhile
+was that of carrying by the right end the things her father said about
+her mother--things mostly indeed that Moddle, on a glimpse of them, as
+if they had been complicated toys or difficult books, took out of her
+hands and put away in the closet. A wonderful assortment of objects of
+this kind she was to discover there later, all tumbled up too with the
+things, shuffled into the same receptacle, that her mother had said
+about her father.
+
+She had the knowledge that on a certain occasion which every day brought
+nearer her mother would be at the door to take her away, and this would
+have darkened all the days if the ingenious Moddle hadn't written on a
+paper in very big easy words ever so many pleasures that she would enjoy
+at the other house. These promises ranged from "a mother's fond love"
+to "a nice poached egg to your tea," and took by the way the prospect
+of sitting up ever so late to see the lady in question dressed, in
+silks and velvets and diamonds and pearls, to go out: so that it was a
+real support to Maisie, at the supreme hour, to feel how, by Moddle's
+direction, the paper was thrust away in her pocket and there clenched in
+her fist. The supreme hour was to furnish her with a vivid reminiscence,
+that of a strange outbreak in the drawing-room on the part of Moddle,
+who, in reply to something her father had just said, cried aloud: "You
+ought to be perfectly ashamed of yourself--you ought to blush, sir, for
+the way you go on!" The carriage, with her mother in it, was at the
+door; a gentleman who was there, who was always there, laughed out very
+loud; her father, who had her in his arms, said to Moddle: "My dear
+woman, I'll settle you presently!"--after which he repeated, showing
+his teeth more than ever at Maisie while he hugged her, the words for
+which her nurse had taken him up. Maisie was not at the moment so fully
+conscious of them as of the wonder of Moddle's sudden disrespect and
+crimson face; but she was able to produce them in the course of five
+minutes when, in the carriage, her mother, all kisses, ribbons, eyes,
+arms, strange sounds and sweet smells, said to her: "And did your
+beastly papa, my precious angel, send any message to your own loving
+mamma?" Then it was that she found the words spoken by her beastly papa
+to be, after all, in her little bewildered ears, from which, at her
+mother's appeal, they passed, in her clear shrill voice, straight to
+her little innocent lips. "He said I was to tell you, from him," she
+faithfully reported, "that you're a nasty horrid pig!"
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+In that lively sense of the immediate which is the very air of a child's
+mind the past, on each occasion, became for her as indistinct as
+the future: she surrendered herself to the actual with a good faith
+that might have been touching to either parent. Crudely as they had
+calculated they were at first justified by the event: she was the little
+feathered shuttlecock they could fiercely keep flying between them. The
+evil they had the gift of thinking or pretending to think of each other
+they poured into her little gravely-gazing soul as into a boundless
+receptacle, and each of them had doubtless the best conscience in the
+world as to the duty of teaching her the stern truth that should be her
+safeguard against the other. She was at the age for which all stories
+are true and all conceptions are stories. The actual was the absolute,
+the present alone was vivid. The objurgation for instance launched
+in the carriage by her mother after she had at her father's bidding
+punctually performed was a missive that dropped into her memory with the
+dry rattle of a letter falling into a pillar-box. Like the letter it
+was, as part of the contents of a well-stuffed post-bag, delivered in
+due course at the right address. In the presence of these overflowings,
+after they had continued for a couple of years, the associates of either
+party sometimes felt that something should be done for what they called
+"the real good, don't you know?" of the child. The only thing done,
+however, in general, took place when it was sighingly remarked that she
+fortunately wasn't all the year round where she happened to be at the
+awkward moment, and that, furthermore, either from extreme cunning or
+from extreme stupidity, she appeared not to take things in.
+
+The theory of her stupidity, eventually embraced by her parents,
+corresponded with a great date in her small still life: the complete
+vision, private but final, of the strange office she filled. It was
+literally a moral revolution and accomplished in the depths of her
+nature. The stiff dolls on the dusky shelves began to move their arms
+and legs; old forms and phrases began to have a sense that frightened
+her. She had a new feeling, the feeling of danger; on which a new remedy
+rose to meet it, the idea of an inner self or, in other words, of
+concealment. She puzzled out with imperfect signs, but with a prodigious
+spirit, that she had been a centre of hatred and a messenger of insult,
+and that everything was bad because she had been employed to make it so.
+Her parted lips locked themselves with the determination to be employed
+no longer. She would forget everything, she would repeat nothing, and
+when, as a tribute to the successful application of her system, she
+began to be called a little idiot, she tasted a pleasure new and keen.
+When therefore, as she grew older, her parents in turn announced before
+her that she had grown shockingly dull, it was not from any real
+contraction of her little stream of life. She spoiled their fun, but she
+practically added to her own. She saw more and more; she saw too much.
+It was Miss Overmore, her first governess, who on a momentous occasion
+had sown the seeds of secrecy; sown them not by anything she said, but
+by a mere roll of those fine eyes which Maisie already admired. Moddle
+had become at this time, after alternations of residence of which the
+child had no clear record, an image faintly embalmed in the remembrance
+of hungry disappearances from the nursery and distressful lapses in the
+alphabet, sad embarrassments, in particular, when invited to recognise
+something her nurse described as "the important letter haitch." Miss
+Overmore, however hungry, never disappeared: this marked her somehow as
+of higher rank, and the character was confirmed by a prettiness that
+Maisie supposed to be extraordinary. Mrs. Farange had described her as
+almost too pretty, and some one had asked what that mattered so long as
+Beale wasn't there. "Beale or no Beale," Maisie had heard her mother
+reply, "I take her because she's a lady and yet awfully poor. Rather
+nice people, but there are seven sisters at home. What do people mean?"
+
+Maisie didn't know what people meant, but she knew very soon all the
+names of all the sisters; she could say them off better than she could
+say the multiplication-table. She privately wondered moreover, though
+she never asked, about the awful poverty, of which her companion also
+never spoke. Food at any rate came up by mysterious laws; Miss Overmore
+never, like Moddle, had on an apron, and when she ate she held her fork
+with her little finger curled out. The child, who watched her at many
+moments, watched her particularly at that one. "I think you're lovely,"
+she often said to her; even mamma, who was lovely too, had not such a
+pretty way with the fork. Maisie associated this showier presence with
+her now being "big," knowing of course that nursery-governesses were
+only for little girls who were not, as she said, "really" little. She
+vaguely knew, further, somehow, that the future was still bigger than
+she, and that a part of what made it so was the number of governesses
+lurking in it and ready to dart out. Everything that had happened
+when she was really little was dormant, everything but the positive
+certitude, bequeathed from afar by Moddle, that the natural way for a
+child to have her parents was separate and successive, like her mutton
+and her pudding or her bath and her nap.
+
+"DOES he know he lies?"--that was what she had vivaciously asked Miss
+Overmore on the occasion which was so suddenly to lead to a change in
+her life.
+
+"Does he know--" Miss Overmore stared; she had a stocking pulled over
+her hand and was pricking at it with a needle which she poised in the
+act. Her task was homely, but her movement, like all her movements,
+graceful.
+
+"Why papa."
+
+"That he 'lies'?"
+
+"That's what mamma says I'm to tell him--'that he lies and he knows he
+lies.'" Miss Overmore turned very red, though she laughed out till her
+head fell back; then she pricked again at her muffled hand so hard
+that Maisie wondered how she could bear it. "AM I to tell him?" the
+child went on. It was then that her companion addressed her in the
+unmistakeable language of a pair of eyes of deep dark grey. "I can't say
+No," they replied as distinctly as possible; "I can't say No, because
+I'm afraid of your mamma, don't you see? Yet how can I say Yes after
+your papa has been so kind to me, talking to me so long the other day,
+smiling and flashing his beautiful teeth at me the time we met him in
+the Park, the time when, rejoicing at the sight of us, he left the
+gentlemen he was with and turned and walked with us, stayed with us for
+half an hour?" Somehow in the light of Miss Overmore's lovely eyes that
+incident came back to Maisie with a charm it hadn't had at the time, and
+this in spite of the fact that after it was over her governess had never
+but once alluded to it. On their way home, when papa had quitted them,
+she had expressed the hope that the child wouldn't mention it to mamma.
+Maisie liked her so, and had so the charmed sense of being liked by her,
+that she accepted this remark as settling the matter and wonderingly
+conformed to it. The wonder now lived again, lived in the recollection
+of what papa had said to Miss Overmore: "I've only to look at you to see
+you're a person I can appeal to for help to save my daughter." Maisie's
+ignorance of what she was to be saved from didn't diminish the pleasure
+of the thought that Miss Overmore was saving her. It seemed to make them
+cling together as in some wild game of "going round."
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+She was therefore all the more startled when her mother said to her in
+connexion with something to be done before her next migration: "You
+understand of course that she's not going with you."
+
+Maisie turned quite faint. "Oh I thought she was."
+
+"It doesn't in the least matter, you know, what you think," Mrs. Farange
+loudly replied; "and you had better indeed for the future, miss, learn
+to keep your thoughts to yourself." This was exactly what Maisie had
+already learned, and the accomplishment was just the source of her
+mother's irritation. It was of a horrid little critical system, a
+tendency, in her silence, to judge her elders, that this lady suspected
+her, liking as she did, for her own part, a child to be simple and
+confiding. She liked also to hear the report of the whacks she
+administered to Mr. Farange's character, to his pretensions to peace
+of mind: the satisfaction of dealing them diminished when nothing came
+back. The day was at hand, and she saw it, when she should feel more
+delight in hurling Maisie at him than in snatching her away; so much so
+that her conscience winced under the acuteness of a candid friend who
+had remarked that the real end of all their tugging would be that each
+parent would try to make the little girl a burden to the other--a sort
+of game in which a fond mother clearly wouldn't show to advantage. The
+prospect of not showing to advantage, a distinction in which she held
+she had never failed, begot in Ida Farange an ill humour of which
+several persons felt the effect. She determined that Beale at any rate
+should feel it; she reflected afresh that in the study of how to be
+odious to him she must never give way. Nothing could incommode him more
+than not to get the good, for the child, of a nice female appendage who
+had clearly taken a fancy to her. One of the things Ida said to the
+appendage was that Beale's was a house in which no decent woman could
+consent to be seen. It was Miss Overmore herself who explained to
+Maisie that she had had a hope of being allowed to accompany her to her
+father's, and that this hope had been dashed by the way her mother took
+it. "She says that if I ever do such a thing as enter his service I must
+never expect to show my face in this house again. So I've promised not
+to attempt to go with you. If I wait patiently till you come back here
+we shall certainly be together once more."
+
+Waiting patiently, and above all waiting till she should come back
+there, seemed to Maisie a long way round--it reminded her of all the
+things she had been told, first and last, that she should have if she'd
+be good and that in spite of her goodness she had never had at all.
+"Then who'll take care of me at papa's?"
+
+"Heaven only knows, my own precious!" Miss Overmore replied, tenderly
+embracing her. There was indeed no doubt that she was dear to this
+beautiful friend. What could have proved it better than the fact that
+before a week was out, in spite of their distressing separation and her
+mother's prohibition and Miss Overmore's scruples and Miss Overmore's
+promise, the beautiful friend had turned up at her father's? The little
+lady already engaged there to come by the hour, a fat dark little lady
+with a foreign name and dirty fingers, who wore, throughout, a bonnet
+that had at first given her a deceptive air, too soon dispelled, of
+not staying long, besides asking her pupil questions that had nothing
+to do with lessons, questions that Beale Farange himself, when two or
+three were repeated to him, admitted to be awfully low--this strange
+apparition faded before the bright creature who had braved everything
+for Maisie's sake. The bright creature told her little charge frankly
+what had happened--that she had really been unable to hold out. She had
+broken her vow to Mrs. Farange; she had struggled for three days and
+then had come straight to Maisie's papa and told him the simple truth.
+She adored his daughter; she couldn't give her up; she'd make for her
+any sacrifice. On this basis it had been arranged that she should stay;
+her courage had been rewarded; she left Maisie in no doubt as to the
+amount of courage she had required. Some of the things she said made
+a particular impression on the child--her declaration for instance
+that when her pupil should get older she'd understand better just how
+"dreadfully bold" a young lady, to do exactly what she had done, had
+to be.
+
+"Fortunately your papa appreciates it; he appreciates it IMMENSELY"--
+that was one of the things Miss Overmore also said, with a striking
+insistence on the adverb. Maisie herself was no less impressed with
+what this martyr had gone through, especially after hearing of the
+terrible letter that had come from Mrs. Farange. Mamma had been so
+angry that, in Miss Overmore's own words, she had loaded her with
+insult--proof enough indeed that they must never look forward to being
+together again under mamma's roof. Mamma's roof, however, had its turn,
+this time, for the child, of appearing but remotely contingent, so that,
+to reassure her, there was scarce a need of her companion's secret,
+solemnly confided--the probability there would be no going back to mamma
+at all. It was Miss Overmore's private conviction, and a part of the
+same communication, that if Mr. Farange's daughter would only show a
+really marked preference she would be backed up by "public opinion" in
+holding on to him. Poor Maisie could scarcely grasp that incentive, but
+she could surrender herself to the day. She had conceived her first
+passion, and the object of it was her governess. It hadn't been put to
+her, and she couldn't, or at any rate she didn't, put it to herself,
+that she liked Miss Overmore better than she liked papa; but it would
+have sustained her under such an imputation to feel herself able
+to reply that papa too liked Miss Overmore exactly as much. He had
+particularly told her so. Besides she could easily see it.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+All this led her on, but it brought on her fate as well, the day when
+her mother would be at the door in the carriage in which Maisie now rode
+on no occasions but these. There was no question at present of Miss
+Overmore's going back with her: it was universally recognised that her
+quarrel with Mrs. Farange was much too acute. The child felt it from
+the first; there was no hugging nor exclaiming as that lady drove her
+away--there was only a frightening silence, unenlivened even by the
+invidious enquiries of former years, which culminated, according to its
+stern nature, in a still more frightening old woman, a figure awaiting
+her on the very doorstep. "You're to be under this lady's care," said
+her mother. "Take her, Mrs. Wix," she added, addressing the figure
+impatiently and giving the child a push from which Maisie gathered that
+she wished to set Mrs. Wix an example of energy. Mrs. Wix took her and,
+Maisie felt the next day, would never let her go. She had struck her at
+first, just after Miss Overmore, as terrible; but something in her voice
+at the end of an hour touched the little girl in a spot that had never
+even yet been reached. Maisie knew later what it was, though doubtless
+she couldn't have made a statement of it: these were things that a few
+days' talk with Mrs. Wix quite lighted up. The principal one was a
+matter Mrs. Wix herself always immediately mentioned: she had had a
+little girl quite of her own, and the little girl had been killed on
+the spot. She had had absolutely nothing else in all the world, and her
+affliction had broken her heart. It was comfortably established between
+them that Mrs. Wix's heart was broken. What Maisie felt was that she had
+been, with passion and anguish, a mother, and that this was something
+Miss Overmore was not, something (strangely, confusingly) that mamma was
+even less.
+
+So it was that in the course of an extraordinarily short time she
+found herself as deeply absorbed in the image of the little dead
+Clara Matilda, who, on a crossing in the Harrow Road, had been knocked
+down and crushed by the cruellest of hansoms, as she had ever found
+herself in the family group made vivid by one of seven. "She's your
+little dead sister," Mrs. Wix ended by saying, and Maisie, all in
+a tremor of curiosity and compassion, addressed from that moment a
+particular piety to the small accepted acquisition. Somehow she wasn't
+a real sister, but that only made her the more romantic. It contributed
+to this view of her that she was never to be spoken of in that character
+to any one else--least of all to Mrs. Farange, who wouldn't care for
+her nor recognise the relationship: it was to be just an unutterable and
+inexhaustible little secret with Mrs. Wix. Maisie knew everything about
+her that could be known, everything she had said or done in her little
+mutilated life, exactly how lovely she was, exactly how her hair was
+curled and her frocks were trimmed. Her hair came down far below her
+waist--it was of the most wonderful golden brightness, just as Mrs.
+Wix's own had been a long time before. Mrs. Wix's own was indeed very
+remarkable still, and Maisie had felt at first that she should never get
+on with it. It played a large part in the sad and strange appearance,
+the appearance as of a kind of greasy greyness, which Mrs. Wix had
+presented on the child's arrival. It had originally been yellow, but
+time had turned that elegance to ashes, to a turbid sallow unvenerable
+white. Still excessively abundant, it was dressed in a manner of which
+the poor lady appeared not yet to have recognised the supersession, with
+a glossy braid, like a large diadem, on the top of the head, and behind,
+at the nape of the neck, a dingy rosette like a large button. She wore
+glasses which, in humble reference to a divergent obliquity of vision,
+she called her straighteners, and a little ugly snuff-coloured dress
+trimmed with satin bands in the form of scallops and glazed with
+antiquity. The straighteners, she explained to Maisie, were put on for
+the sake of others, whom, as she believed, they helped to recognise the
+bearing, otherwise doubtful, of her regard; the rest of the melancholy
+garb could only have been put on for herself. With the added suggestion
+of her goggles it reminded her pupil of the polished shell or corslet
+of a horrid beetle. At first she had looked cross and almost cruel; but
+this impression passed away with the child's increased perception of
+her being in the eyes of the world a figure mainly to laugh at. She
+was as droll as a charade or an animal toward the end of the "natural
+history"--a person whom people, to make talk lively, described to each
+other and imitated. Every one knew the straighteners; every one knew the
+diadem and the button, the scallops and satin bands; every one, though
+Maisie had never betrayed her, knew even Clara Matilda.
+
+It was on account of these things that mamma got her for such low pay,
+really for nothing: so much, one day when Mrs. Wix had accompanied her
+into the drawing-room and left her, the child heard one of the ladies
+she found there--a lady with eyebrows arched like skipping-ropes and
+thick black stitching, like ruled lines for musical notes on beautiful
+white gloves--announce to another. She knew governesses were poor; Miss
+Overmore was unmentionably and Mrs. Wix ever so publicly so. Neither
+this, however, nor the old brown frock nor the diadem nor the button,
+made a difference for Maisie in the charm put forth through everything,
+the charm of Mrs. Wix's conveying that somehow, in her ugliness and her
+poverty, she was peculiarly and soothingly safe; safer than any one
+in the world, than papa, than mamma, than the lady with the arched
+eyebrows; safer even, though so much less beautiful, than Miss Overmore,
+on whose loveliness, as she supposed it, the little girl was faintly
+conscious that one couldn't rest with quite the same tucked-in and
+kissed-for-good-night feeling. Mrs. Wix was as safe as Clara Matilda,
+who was in heaven and yet, embarrassingly, also in Kensal Green, where
+they had been together to see her little huddled grave. It was from
+something in Mrs. Wix's tone, which in spite of caricature remained
+indescribable and inimitable, that Maisie, before her term with her
+mother was over, drew this sense of a support, like a breast-high
+banister in a place of "drops," that would never give way. If she knew
+her instructress was poor and queer she also knew she was not nearly so
+"qualified" as Miss Overmore, who could say lots of dates straight off
+(letting you hold the book yourself), state the position of Malabar, play
+six pieces without notes and, in a sketch, put in beautifully the trees
+and houses and difficult parts. Maisie herself could play more pieces
+than Mrs. Wix, who was moreover visibly ashamed of her houses and trees
+and could only, with the help of a smutty forefinger, of doubtful
+legitimacy in the field of art, do the smoke coming out of the chimneys.
+They dealt, the governess and her pupil, in "subjects," but there were
+many the governess put off from week to week and that they never got to
+at all: she only used to say "We'll take that in its proper order." Her
+order was a circle as vast as the untravelled globe. She had not the
+spirit of adventure--the child could perfectly see how many subjects she
+was afraid of. She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through
+which indeed there curled the blue river of truth. She knew swarms of
+stories, mostly those of the novels she had read; relating them with
+a memory that never faltered and a wealth of detail that was Maisie's
+delight. They were all about love and beauty and countesses and
+wickedness. Her conversation was practically an endless narrative,
+a great garden of romance, with sudden vistas into her own life and
+gushing fountains of homeliness. These were the parts where they most
+lingered; she made the child take with her again every step of her long,
+lame course and think it beyond magic or monsters. Her pupil acquired a
+vivid vision of every one who had ever, in her phrase, knocked against
+her--some of them oh so hard!--every one literally but Mr. Wix, her
+husband, as to whom nothing was mentioned save that he had been dead for
+ages. He had been rather remarkably absent from his wife's career, and
+Maisie was never taken to see his grave.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+The second parting from Miss Overmore had been bad enough, but this
+first parting from Mrs. Wix was much worse. The child had lately been to
+the dentist's and had a term of comparison for the screwed-up intensity
+of the scene. It was dreadfully silent, as it had been when her tooth
+was taken out; Mrs. Wix had on that occasion grabbed her hand and they
+had clung to each other with the frenzy of their determination not to
+scream. Maisie, at the dentist's, had been heroically still, but just
+when she felt most anguish had become aware of an audible shriek on the
+part of her companion, a spasm of stifled sympathy. This was reproduced
+by the only sound that broke their supreme embrace when, a month later,
+the "arrangement," as her periodical uprootings were called, played the
+part of the horrible forceps. Embedded in Mrs. Wix's nature as her tooth
+had been socketed in her gum, the operation of extracting her would
+really have been a case for chloroform. It was a hug that fortunately
+left nothing to say, for the poor woman's want of words at such an
+hour seemed to fall in with her want of everything. Maisie's alternate
+parent, in the outermost vestibule--he liked the impertinence of
+crossing as much as that of his late wife's threshold--stood over them
+with his open watch and his still more open grin, while from the only
+corner of an eye on which something of Mrs. Wix's didn't impinge the
+child saw at the door a brougham in which Miss Overmore also waited.
+She remembered the difference when, six months before, she had been
+torn from the breast of that more spirited protectress. Miss Overmore,
+then also in the vestibule, but of course in the other one, had been
+thoroughly audible and voluble; her protest had rung out bravely and she
+had declared that something--her pupil didn't know exactly what--was
+a regular wicked shame. That had at the time dimly recalled to Maisie
+the far-away moment of Moddle's great outbreak: there seemed always to
+be "shames" connected in one way or another with her migrations. At
+present, while Mrs. Wix's arms tightened and the smell of her hair was
+strong, she further remembered how, in pacifying Miss Overmore, papa had
+made use of the words "you dear old duck!"--an expression which, by its
+oddity, had stuck fast in her young mind, having moreover a place well
+prepared for it there by what she knew of the governess whom she now
+always mentally characterised as the pretty one. She wondered whether
+this affection would be as great as before: that would at all events be
+the case with the prettiness Maisie could see in the face which showed
+brightly at the window of the brougham.
+
+The brougham was a token of harmony, of the fine conditions papa would
+this time offer: he had usually come for her in a hansom, with a
+four-wheeler behind for the boxes. The four-wheeler with the boxes on it
+was actually there, but mamma was the only lady with whom she had ever
+been in a conveyance of the kind always of old spoken of by Moddle as a
+private carriage. Papa's carriage was, now that he had one, still more
+private, somehow, than mamma's; and when at last she found herself quite
+on top, as she felt, of its inmates and gloriously rolling away, she
+put to Miss Overmore, after another immense and talkative squeeze, a
+question of which the motive was a desire for information as to the
+continuity of a certain sentiment. "Did papa like you just the same
+while I was gone?" she enquired--full of the sense of how markedly his
+favour had been established in her presence. She had bethought herself
+that this favour might, like her presence and as if depending on it, be
+only intermittent and for the season. Papa, on whose knee she sat, burst
+into one of those loud laughs of his that, however prepared she was,
+seemed always, like some trick in a frightening game, to leap forth and
+make her jump. Before Miss Overmore could speak he replied: "Why, you
+little donkey, when you're away what have I left to do but just to love
+her?" Miss Overmore hereupon immediately took her from him, and they had
+a merry little scrimmage over her of which Maisie caught the surprised
+perception in the white stare of an old lady who passed in a victoria.
+Then her beautiful friend remarked to her very gravely: "I shall make
+him understand that if he ever again says anything as horrid as that
+to you I shall carry you straight off and we'll go and live somewhere
+together and be good quiet little girls." The child couldn't quite make
+out why her father's speech had been horrid, since it only expressed
+that appreciation which their companion herself had of old described as
+"immense." To enter more into the truth of the matter she appealed to
+him again directly, asked if in all those months Miss Overmore hadn't
+been with him just as she had been before and just as she would be now.
+"Of course she has, old girl--where else could the poor dear be?" cried
+Beale Farange, to the still greater scandal of their companion, who
+protested that unless he straightway "took back" his nasty wicked fib
+it would be, this time, not only him she would leave, but his child too
+and his house and his tiresome trouble--all the impossible things he
+had succeeded in putting on her. Beale, under this frolic menace, took
+nothing back at all; he was indeed apparently on the point of repeating
+his extravagance, but Miss Overmore instructed her little charge that
+she was not to listen to his bad jokes: she was to understand that a
+lady couldn't stay with a gentleman that way without some awfully proper
+reason.
+
+Maisie looked from one of her companions to the other; this was the
+freshest gayest start she had yet enjoyed, but she had a shy fear of not
+exactly believing them. "Well, what reason IS proper?" she thoughtfully
+demanded.
+
+"Oh a long-legged stick of a tomboy: there's none so good as that." Her
+father enjoyed both her drollery and his own and tried again to get
+possession of her--an effort deprecated by their comrade and leading
+again to something of a public scuffle. Miss Overmore declared to the
+child that she had been all the while with good friends; on which Beale
+Farange went on: "She means good friends of mine, you know--tremendous
+friends of mine. There has been no end of THEM about--that I WILL say
+for her!" Maisie felt bewildered and was afterwards for some time
+conscious of a vagueness, just slightly embarrassing, as to the subject
+of so much amusement and as to where her governess had really been.
+She didn't feel at all as if she had been seriously told, and no such
+feeling was supplied by anything that occurred later. Her embarrassment,
+of a precocious instinctive order, attached itself to the idea that
+this was another of the matters it was not for her, as her mother used
+to say, to go into. Therefore, under her father's roof during the time
+that followed, she made no attempt to clear up her ambiguity by an
+ingratiating way with housemaids; and it was an odd truth that the
+ambiguity itself took nothing from the fresh pleasure promised her by
+renewed contact with Miss Overmore. The confidence looked for by that
+young lady was of the fine sort that explanation can't improve, and she
+herself at any rate was a person superior to any confusion. For Maisie
+moreover concealment had never necessarily seemed deception; she had
+grown up among things as to which her foremost knowledge was that
+she was never to ask about them. It was far from new to her that the
+questions of the small are the peculiar diversion of the great: except
+the affairs of her doll Lisette there had scarcely ever been anything at
+her mother's that was explicable with a grave face. Nothing was so easy
+to her as to send the ladies who gathered there off into shrieks, and
+she might have practised upon them largely if she had been of a more
+calculating turn. Everything had something behind it: life was like a
+long, long corridor with rows of closed doors. She had learned that at
+these doors it was wise not to knock--this seemed to produce from within
+such sounds of derision. Little by little, however, she understood more,
+for it befell that she was enlightened by Lisette's questions, which
+reproduced the effect of her own upon those for whom she sat in the very
+darkness of Lisette. Was she not herself convulsed by such innocence? In
+the presence of it she often imitated the shrieking ladies. There were
+at any rate things she really couldn't tell even a French doll. She
+could only pass on her lessons and study to produce on Lisette the
+impression of having mysteries in her life, wondering the while whether
+she succeeded in the air of shading off, like her mother, into the
+unknowable. When the reign of Miss Overmore followed that of Mrs. Wix
+she took a fresh cue, emulating her governess and bridging over the
+interval with the simple expectation of trust. Yes, there were matters
+one couldn't "go into" with a pupil. There were for instance days when,
+after prolonged absence, Lisette, watching her take off her things,
+tried hard to discover where she had been. Well, she discovered a
+little, but never discovered all. There was an occasion when, on her
+being particularly indiscreet, Maisie replied to her--and precisely
+about the motive of a disappearance--as she, Maisie, had once been
+replied to by Mrs. Farange: "Find out for yourself!" She mimicked her
+mother's sharpness, but she was rather ashamed afterwards, though as
+to whether of the sharpness or of the mimicry was not quite clear.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+She became aware in time that this phase wouldn't have shone by
+lessons, the care of her education being now only one of the many
+duties devolving on Miss Overmore; a devolution as to which she was
+present at various passages between that lady and her father--passages
+significant, on either side, of dissent and even of displeasure. It was
+gathered by the child on these occasions that there was something in the
+situation for which her mother might "come down" on them all, though
+indeed the remark, always dropped by her father, was greeted on his
+companion's part with direct contradiction. Such scenes were usually
+brought to a climax by Miss Overmore's demanding, with more asperity
+than she applied to any other subject, in what position under the sun
+such a person as Mrs. Farange would find herself for coming down. As the
+months went on the little girl's interpretations thickened, and the more
+effectually that this stretch was the longest she had known without a
+break. She got used to the idea that her mother, for some reason, was
+in no hurry to reinstate her: that idea was forcibly expressed by her
+father whenever Miss Overmore, differing and decided, took him up on the
+question, which he was always putting forward, of the urgency of sending
+her to school. For a governess Miss Overmore differed surprisingly; far
+more for instance than would have entered into the bowed head of Mrs.
+Wix. She observed to Maisie many times that she was quite conscious of
+not doing her justice, and that Mr. Farange equally measured and equally
+lamented this deficiency. The reason of it was that she had mysterious
+responsibilities that interfered--responsibilities, Miss Overmore
+intimated, to Mr. Farange himself and to the friendly noisy little house
+and those who came there. Mr. Farange's remedy for every inconvenience
+was that the child should be put at school--there were such lots of
+splendid schools, as everybody knew, at Brighton and all over the place.
+That, however, Maisie learned, was just what would bring her mother
+down: from the moment he should delegate to others the housing of his
+little charge he hadn't a leg to stand on before the law. Didn't he keep
+her away from her mother precisely because Mrs. Farange was one of these
+others?
+
+There was also the solution of a second governess, a young person to
+come in by the day and really do the work; but to this Miss Overmore
+wouldn't for a moment listen, arguing against it with great public
+relish and wanting to know from all comers--she put it even to Maisie
+herself--they didn't see how frightfully it would give her away. "What
+am I supposed to be at all, don't you see, if I'm not here to look
+after her?" She was in a false position and so freely and loudly called
+attention to it that it seemed to become almost a source of glory. The
+way out of it of course was just to do her plain duty; but that was
+unfortunately what, with his excessive, his exorbitant demands on her,
+which every one indeed appeared quite to understand, he practically, he
+selfishly prevented. Beale Farange, for Miss Overmore, was now never
+anything but "he," and the house was as full as ever of lively gentlemen
+with whom, under that designation, she chaffingly talked about him.
+Maisie meanwhile, as a subject of familiar gossip on what was to be done
+with her, was left so much to herself that she had hours of wistful
+thought of the large loose discipline of Mrs. Wix; yet she none the less
+held it under her father's roof a point of superiority that none of his
+visitors were ladies. It added to this odd security that she had once
+heard a gentleman say to him as if it were a great joke and in obvious
+reference to Miss Overmore: "Hanged if she'll let another woman come
+near you--hanged if she ever will. She'd let fly a stick at her as they
+do at a strange cat!" Maisie greatly preferred gentlemen as inmates
+in spite of their also having their way--louder but sooner over--of
+laughing out at her. They pulled and pinched, they teased and tickled
+her; some of them even, as they termed it, shied things at her, and all
+of them thought it funny to call her by names having no resemblance to
+her own. The ladies on the other hand addressed her as "You poor pet"
+and scarcely touched her even to kiss her. But it was of the ladies she
+was most afraid.
+
+She was now old enough to understand how disproportionate a stay she had
+already made with her father; and also old enough to enter a little into
+the ambiguity attending this excess, which oppressed her particularly
+whenever the question had been touched upon in talk with her governess.
+"Oh you needn't worry: she doesn't care!" Miss Overmore had often
+said to her in reference to any fear that her mother might resent her
+prolonged detention. "She has other people than poor little YOU to
+think about, and has gone abroad with them; so you needn't be in the
+least afraid she'll stickle this time for her rights." Maisie knew Mrs.
+Farange had gone abroad, for she had had weeks and weeks before a letter
+from her beginning "My precious pet" and taking leave of her for an
+indeterminate time; but she had not seen in it a renunciation of hatred
+or of the writer's policy of asserting herself, for the sharpest of all
+her impressions had been that there was nothing her mother would ever
+care so much about as to torment Mr. Farange. What at last, however, was
+in this connexion bewildering and a little frightening was the dawn of a
+suspicion that a better way had been found to torment Mr. Farange than
+to deprive him of his periodical burden. This was the question that
+worried our young lady and that Miss Overmore's confidences and the
+frequent observations of her employer only rendered more mystifying. It
+was a contradiction that if Ida had now a fancy for waiving the rights
+she had originally been so hot about her late husband shouldn't jump at
+the monopoly for which he had also in the first instance so fiercely
+fought; but when Maisie, with a subtlety beyond her years, sounded this
+new ground her main success was in hearing her mother more freshly
+abused. Miss Overmore had up to now rarely deviated from a decent
+reserve, but the day came when she expressed herself with a vividness
+not inferior to Beale's own on the subject of the lady who had fled to
+the Continent to wriggle out of her job. It would serve this lady right,
+Maisie gathered, if that contract, in the shape of an overgrown and
+underdressed daughter, should be shipped straight out to her and landed
+at her feet in the midst of scandalous excesses.
+
+The picture of these pursuits was what Miss Overmore took refuge in when
+the child tried timidly to ascertain if her father were disposed to feel
+he had too much of her. She evaded the point and only kicked up all
+round it the dust of Ida's heartlessness and folly, of which the supreme
+proof, it appeared, was the fact that she was accompanied on her journey
+by a gentleman whom, to be painfully plain on it, she had--well, "picked
+up." The terms on which, unless they were married, ladies and gentlemen
+might, as Miss Overmore expressed it, knock about together, were the
+terms on which she and Mr. Farange had exposed themselves to possible
+misconception. She had indeed, as has been noted, often explained this
+before, often said to Maisie: "I don't know what in the world, darling,
+your father and I should do without you, for you just make the
+difference, as I've told you, of keeping us perfectly proper." The child
+took in the office it was so endearingly presented to her that she
+performed a comfort that helped her to a sense of security even in the
+event of her mother's giving her up. Familiar as she had grown with the
+fact of the great alternative to the proper, she felt in her governess
+and her father a strong reason for not emulating that detachment. At the
+same time she had heard somehow of little girls--of exalted rank, it was
+true--whose education was carried on by instructors of the other sex,
+and she knew that if she were at school at Brighton it would be thought
+an advantage to her to be more or less in the hands of masters. She
+turned these things over and remarked to Miss Overmore that if she
+should go to her mother perhaps the gentleman might become her tutor.
+
+"The gentleman?" The proposition was complicated enough to make Miss
+Overmore stare.
+
+"The one who's with mamma. Mightn't that make it right--as right as your
+being my governess makes it for you to be with papa?"
+
+Miss Overmore considered; she coloured a little; then she embraced her
+ingenious friend. "You're too sweet! I'm a REAL governess."
+
+"And couldn't he be a real tutor?"
+
+"Of course not. He's ignorant and bad."
+
+"Bad--?" Maisie echoed with wonder.
+
+Her companion gave a queer little laugh at her tone. "He's ever so much
+younger--" But that was all.
+
+"Younger than you?"
+
+Miss Overmore laughed again; it was the first time Maisie had seen her
+approach so nearly to a giggle.
+
+"Younger than--no matter whom. I don't know anything about him and don't
+want to," she rather inconsequently added. "He's not my sort, and I'm
+sure, my own darling, he's not yours." And she repeated the free caress
+into which her colloquies with Maisie almost always broke and which made
+the child feel that HER affection at least was a gage of safety. Parents
+had come to seem vague, but governesses were evidently to be trusted.
+Maisie's faith in Mrs. Wix for instance had suffered no lapse from the
+fact that all communication with her had temporarily dropped. During the
+first weeks of their separation Clara Matilda's mamma had repeatedly and
+dolefully written to her, and Maisie had answered with an enthusiasm
+controlled only by orthographical doubts; but the correspondence had
+been duly submitted to Miss Overmore, with the final effect of its not
+suiting her. It was this lady's view that Mr. Farange wouldn't care for
+it at all, and she ended by confessing--since her pupil pushed her--that
+she didn't care for it herself. She was furiously jealous, she said; and
+that weakness was but a new proof of her disinterested affection. She
+pronounced Mrs. Wix's effusions moreover illiterate and unprofitable;
+she made no scruple of declaring it monstrous that a woman in her
+senses should have placed the formation of her daughter's mind in such
+ridiculous hands. Maisie was well aware that the proprietress of the old
+brown dress and the old odd headgear was lower in the scale of "form"
+than Miss Overmore; but it was now brought home to her with pain that
+she was educationally quite out of the question. She was buried for the
+time beneath a conclusive remark of her critic's: "She's really beyond a
+joke!" This remark was made as that charming woman held in her hand the
+last letter that Maisie was to receive from Mrs. Wix; it was fortified
+by a decree proscribing the preposterous tie. "Must I then write and
+tell her?" the child bewilderedly asked: she grew pale at the dreadful
+things it appeared involved for her to say. "Don't dream of it, my
+dear--I'll write: you may trust me!" cried Miss Overmore; who indeed
+wrote to such purpose that a hush in which you could have heard a pin
+drop descended upon poor Mrs. Wix. She gave for weeks and weeks no sign
+whatever of life: it was as if she had been as effectually disposed of
+by Miss Overmore's communication as her little girl, in the Harrow Road,
+had been disposed of by the terrible hansom. Her very silence became
+after this one of the largest elements of Maisie's consciousness; it
+proved a warm and habitable air, into which the child penetrated further
+than she dared ever to mention to her companions. Somewhere in the
+depths of it the dim straighteners were fixed upon her; somewhere out of
+the troubled little current Mrs. Wix intensely waited.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+It quite fell in with this intensity that one day, on returning from
+a walk with the housemaid, Maisie should have found her in the hall,
+seated on the stool usually occupied by the telegraph-boys who haunted
+Beale Farange's door and kicked their heels while, in his room, answers
+to their missives took form with the aid of smoke-puffs and growls. It
+had seemed to her on their parting that Mrs. Wix had reached the last
+limits of the squeeze, but she now felt those limits to be transcended
+and that the duration of her visitor's hug was a direct reply to Miss
+Overmore's veto. She understood in a flash how the visit had come to be
+possible--that Mrs. Wix, watching her chance, must have slipped in under
+protection of the fact that papa, always tormented in spite of arguments
+with the idea of a school, had, for a three days' excursion to Brighton,
+absolutely insisted on the attendance of her adversary. It was true that
+when Maisie explained their absence and their important motive Mrs. Wix
+wore an expression so peculiar that it could only have had its origin in
+surprise. This contradiction indeed peeped out only to vanish, for at
+the very moment that, in the spirit of it, she threw herself afresh upon
+her young friend a hansom crested with neat luggage rattled up to the
+door and Miss Overmore bounded out. The shock of her encounter with Mrs.
+Wix was less violent than Maisie had feared on seeing her and didn't
+at all interfere with the sociable tone in which, under her rival's
+eyes, she explained to her little charge that she had returned, for a
+particular reason, a day sooner than she first intended. She had left
+papa--in such nice lodgings--at Brighton; but he would come back to
+his dear little home on the morrow. As for Mrs. Wix, papa's companion
+supplied Maisie in later converse with the right word for the attitude
+of this personage: Mrs. Wix "stood up" to her in a manner that the child
+herself felt at the time to be astonishing. This occurred indeed after
+Miss Overmore had so far raised her interdict as to make a move to the
+dining-room, where, in the absence of any suggestion of sitting down,
+it was scarcely more than natural that even poor Mrs. Wix should stand
+up. Maisie at once enquired if at Brighton, this time, anything had
+come of the possibility of a school; to which, much to her surprise,
+Miss Overmore, who had always grandly repudiated it, replied after an
+instant, but quite as if Mrs. Wix were not there:
+
+"It may be, darling, that something WILL come. The objection, I must
+tell you, has been quite removed."
+
+At this it was still more startling to hear Mrs. Wix speak out with
+great firmness. "I don't think, if you'll allow me to say so, that
+there's any arrangement by which the objection CAN be 'removed.' What
+has brought me here to-day is that I've a message for Maisie from dear
+Mrs. Farange."
+
+The child's heart gave a great thump. "Oh mamma's come back?"
+
+"Not yet, sweet love, but she's coming," said Mrs. Wix, "and she
+has--most thoughtfully, you know--sent me on to prepare you."
+
+"To prepare her for what, pray?" asked Miss Overmore, whose first
+smoothness began, with this news, to be ruffled.
+
+Mrs. Wix quietly applied her straighteners to Miss Overmore's flushed
+beauty. "Well, miss, for a very important communication."
+
+"Can't dear Mrs. Farange, as you so oddly call her, make her
+communications directly? Can't she take the trouble to write to her only
+daughter?" the younger lady demanded. "Maisie herself will tell you that
+it's months and months since she has had so much as a word from her."
+
+"Oh but I've written to mamma!" cried the child as if this would do
+quite as well.
+
+"That makes her treatment of you all the greater scandal," the governess
+in possession promptly declared.
+
+"Mrs. Farange is too well aware," said Mrs. Wix with sustained spirit,
+"of what becomes of her letters in this house."
+
+Maisie's sense of fairness hereupon interposed for her visitor. "You
+know, Miss Overmore, that papa doesn't like everything of mamma's."
+
+"No one likes, my dear, to be made the subject of such language as your
+mother's letters contain. They were not fit for the innocent child to
+see," Miss Overmore observed to Mrs. Wix.
+
+"Then I don't know what you complain of, and she's better without them.
+It serves every purpose that I'm in Mrs. Farange's confidence."
+
+Miss Overmore gave a scornful laugh. "Then you must be mixed up with
+some extraordinary proceedings!"
+
+"None so extraordinary," cried Mrs. Wix, turning very pale, "as to say
+horrible things about the mother to the face of the helpless daughter!"
+
+"Things not a bit more horrible, I think," Miss Overmore returned, "than
+those you, madam, appear to have come here to say about the father!"
+
+Mrs. Wix looked for a moment hard at Maisie, and then, turning again to
+this witness, spoke with a trembling voice. "I came to say nothing about
+him, and you must excuse Mrs. Farange and me if we're not so above all
+reproach as the companion of his travels."
+
+The young woman thus described stared at the apparent breadth of the
+description--she needed a moment to take it in. Maisie, however, gazing
+solemnly from one of the disputants to the other, noted that her answer,
+when it came, perched upon smiling lips. "It will do quite as well,
+no doubt, if you come up to the requirements of the companion of Mrs.
+Farange's!"
+
+Mrs. Wix broke into a queer laugh; it sounded to Maisie an unsuccessful
+imitation of a neigh. "That's just what I'm here to make known--how
+perfectly the poor lady comes up to them herself." She held up her head
+at the child. "You must take your mamma's message, Maisie, and you must
+feel that her wishing me to come to you with it this way is a great
+proof of interest and affection. She sends you her particular love and
+announces to you that she's engaged to be married to Sir Claude."
+
+"Sir Claude?" Maisie wonderingly echoed. But while Mrs. Wix explained
+that this gentleman was a dear friend of Mrs. Farange's, who had been
+of great assistance to her in getting to Florence and in making herself
+comfortable there for the winter, she was not too violently shaken to
+perceive her old friend's enjoyment of the effect of this news on Miss
+Overmore. That young lady opened her eyes very wide; she immediately
+remarked that Mrs. Farange's marriage would of course put an end to any
+further pretension to take her daughter back. Mrs. Wix enquired with
+astonishment why it should do anything of the sort, and Miss Overmore
+gave as an instant reason that it was clearly but another dodge in a
+system of dodges. She wanted to get out of the bargain: why else had she
+now left Maisie on her father's hands weeks and weeks beyond the time
+about which she had originally made such a fuss? It was vain for Mrs.
+Wix to represent--as she speciously proceeded to do--that all this time
+would be made up as soon as Mrs. Farange returned: she, Miss Overmore,
+knew nothing, thank heaven, about her confederate, but was very sure
+any person capable of forming that sort of relation with the lady in
+Florence would easily agree to object to the presence in his house
+of the fruit of a union that his dignity must ignore. It was a game
+like another, and Mrs. Wix's visit was clearly the first move in it.
+Maisie found in this exchange of asperities a fresh incitement to the
+unformulated fatalism in which her sense of her own career had long
+since taken refuge; and it was the beginning for her of a deeper
+prevision that, in spite of Miss Overmore's brilliancy and Mrs. Wix's
+passion, she should live to see a change in the nature of the struggle
+she appeared to have come into the world to produce. It would still be
+essentially a struggle, but its object would now be NOT to receive her.
+
+Mrs. Wix, after Miss Overmore's last demonstration, addressed herself
+wholly to the little girl, and, drawing from the pocket of her dingy old
+pelisse a small flat parcel, removed its envelope and wished to know
+if THAT looked like a gentleman who wouldn't be nice to everybody--let
+alone to a person he would be so sure to find so nice. Mrs. Farange, in
+the candour of new-found happiness, had enclosed a "cabinet" photograph
+of Sir Claude, and Maisie lost herself in admiration of the fair smooth
+face, the regular features, the kind eyes, the amiable air, the general
+glossiness and smartness of her prospective stepfather--only vaguely
+puzzled to suppose herself now with two fathers at once. Her researches
+had hitherto indicated that to incur a second parent of the same sex you
+had usually to lose the first. "ISN'T he sympathetic?" asked Mrs. Wix,
+who had clearly, on the strength of his charming portrait, made up her
+mind that Sir Claude promised her a future. "You can see, I hope," she
+added with much expression, "that HE'S a perfect gentleman!" Maisie had
+never before heard the word "sympathetic" applied to anybody's face; she
+heard it with pleasure and from that moment it agreeably remained with
+her. She testified moreover to the force of her own perception in a
+small soft sigh of response to the pleasant eyes that seemed to seek
+her acquaintance, to speak to her directly. "He's quite lovely!" she
+declared to Mrs. Wix. Then eagerly, irrepressibly, as she still held the
+photograph and Sir Claude continued to fraternise, "Oh can't I keep it?"
+she broke out. No sooner had she done so than she looked up from it at
+Miss Overmore: this was with the sudden instinct of appealing to the
+authority that had long ago impressed on her that she mustn't ask for
+things. Miss Overmore, to her surprise, looked distant and rather odd,
+hesitating and giving her time to turn again to Mrs. Wix. Then Maisie
+saw that lady's long face lengthen; it was stricken and almost scared,
+as if her young friend really expected more of her than she had to give.
+The photograph was a possession that, direly denuded, she clung to,
+and there was a momentary struggle between her fond clutch of it and
+her capability of every sacrifice for her precarious pupil. With the
+acuteness of her years, however, Maisie saw that her own avidity would
+triumph, and she held out the picture to Miss Overmore as if she were
+quite proud of her mother. "Isn't he just lovely?" she demanded while
+poor Mrs. Wix hungrily wavered, her straighteners largely covering it
+and her pelisse gathered about her with an intensity that strained its
+ancient seams.
+
+"It was to ME, darling," the visitor said, "that your mamma so
+generously sent it; but of course if it would give you particular
+pleasure--" she faltered, only gasping her surrender.
+
+Miss Overmore continued extremely remote. "If the photograph's your
+property, my dear, I shall be happy to oblige you by looking at it on
+some future occasion. But you must excuse me if I decline to touch an
+object belonging to Mrs. Wix."
+
+That lady had by this time grown very red. "You might as well see him
+this way, miss," she retorted, "as you certainly never will, I believe,
+in any other! Keep the pretty picture, by all means, my precious," she
+went on: "Sir Claude will be happy himself, I dare say, to give me one
+with a kind inscription." The pathetic quaver of this brave boast was
+not lost on Maisie, who threw herself so gratefully on the speaker's
+neck that, when they had concluded their embrace, the public tenderness
+of which, she felt, made up for the sacrifice she imposed, their
+companion had had time to lay a quick hand on Sir Claude and, with a
+glance at him or not, whisk him effectually out of sight. Released from
+the child's arms Mrs. Wix looked about for the picture; then she fixed
+Miss Overmore with a hard dumb stare; and finally, with her eyes on
+the little girl again, achieved the grimmest of smiles. "Well, nothing
+matters, Maisie, because there's another thing your mamma wrote about.
+She has made sure of me." Even after her loyal hug Maisie felt a bit of
+a sneak as she glanced at Miss Overmore for permission to understand
+this. But Mrs. Wix left them in no doubt of what it meant. "She has
+definitely engaged me--for her return and for yours. Then you'll see
+for yourself." Maisie, on the spot, quite believed she should; but
+the prospect was suddenly thrown into confusion by an extraordinary
+demonstration from Miss Overmore.
+
+"Mrs. Wix," said that young lady, "has some undiscoverable reason for
+regarding your mother's hold on you as strengthened by the fact that
+she's about to marry. I wonder then--on that system--what our visitor
+will say to your father's."
+
+Miss Overmore's words were directed to her pupil, but her face, lighted
+with an irony that made it prettier even than ever before, was presented
+to the dingy figure that had stiffened itself for departure. The
+child's discipline had been bewildering--had ranged freely between the
+prescription that she was to answer when spoken to and the experience of
+lively penalties on obeying that prescription. This time, nevertheless,
+she felt emboldened for risks; above all as something portentous seemed
+to have leaped into her sense of the relations of things. She looked at
+Miss Overmore much as she had a way of looking at persons who treated
+her to "grown up" jokes. "Do you mean papa's hold on me--do you mean
+HE'S about to marry?"
+
+"Papa's not about to marry--papa IS married, my dear. Papa was married
+the day before yesterday at Brighton." Miss Overmore glittered more
+gaily; meanwhile it came over Maisie, and quite dazzlingly, that her
+"smart" governess was a bride. "He's my husband, if you please, and I'm
+his little wife. So NOW we'll see who's your little mother!" She caught
+her pupil to her bosom in a manner that was not to be outdone by the
+emissary of her predecessor, and a few moments later, when things had
+lurched back into their places, that poor lady, quite defeated of the
+last word, had soundlessly taken flight.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+After Mrs. Wix's retreat Miss Overmore appeared to recognise that she
+was not exactly in a position to denounce Ida Farange's second union;
+but she drew from a table-drawer the photograph of Sir Claude and,
+standing there before Maisie, studied it at some length.
+
+"Isn't he beautiful?" the child ingenuously asked.
+
+Her companion hesitated. "No--he's horrid," she, to Maisie's surprise,
+sharply returned. But she debated another minute, after which she handed
+back the picture. It appeared to Maisie herself to exhibit a fresh
+attraction, and she was troubled, having never before had occasion to
+differ from her lovely friend. So she only could ask what, such being
+the case, she should do with it: should she put it quite away--where
+it wouldn't be there to offend? On this Miss Overmore again cast
+about; after which she said unexpectedly: "Put it on the schoolroom
+mantelpiece."
+
+Maisie felt a fear. "Won't papa dislike to see it there?"
+
+"Very much indeed; but that won't matter NOW." Miss Overmore spoke with
+peculiar significance and to her pupil's mystification.
+
+"On account of the marriage?" Maisie risked.
+
+Miss Overmore laughed, and Maisie could see that in spite of the
+irritation produced by Mrs. Wix she was in high spirits. "Which marriage
+do you mean?"
+
+With the question put to her it suddenly struck the child she didn't
+know, so that she felt she looked foolish. So she took refuge in saying:
+"Shall YOU be different--" This was a full implication that the bride of
+Sir Claude would be.
+
+"As your father's wedded wife? Utterly!" Miss Overmore replied. And the
+difference began of course in her being addressed, even by Maisie, from
+that day and by her particular request, as Mrs. Beale. It was there
+indeed principally that it ended, for except that the child could
+reflect that she should presently have four parents in all, and also
+that at the end of three months the staircase, for a little girl hanging
+over banisters, sent up the deepening rustle of more elaborate advances,
+everything made the same impression as before. Mrs. Beale had very
+pretty frocks, but Miss Overmore's had been quite as good, and if papa
+was much fonder of his second wife than he had been of his first Maisie
+had foreseen that fondness, had followed its development almost as
+closely as the person more directly involved. There was little indeed in
+the commerce of her companions that her precocious experience couldn't
+explain, for if they struck her as after all rather deficient in that
+air of the honeymoon of which she had so often heard--in much detail,
+for instance, from Mrs. Wix--it was natural to judge the circumstance
+in the light of papa's proved disposition to contest the empire of the
+matrimonial tie. His honeymoon, when he came back from Brighton--not
+on the morrow of Mrs. Wix's visit, and not, oddly, till several days
+later--his honeymoon was perhaps perceptibly tinged with the dawn of a
+later stage of wedlock. There were things dislike of which, as the child
+knew it, wouldn't matter to Mrs. Beale now, and their number increased
+so that such a trifle as his hostility to the photograph of Sir Claude
+quite dropped out of view. This pleasing object found a conspicuous
+place in the schoolroom, which in truth Mr. Farange seldom entered and
+in which silent admiration formed, during the time I speak of, almost
+the sole scholastic exercise of Mrs. Beale's pupil.
+
+Maisie was not long in seeing just what her stepmother had meant by the
+difference she should show in her new character. If she was her father's
+wife she was not her own governess, and if her presence had had formerly
+to be made regular by the theory of a humble function she was now on a
+footing that dispensed with all theories and was inconsistent with all
+servitude. That was what she had meant by the drop of the objection to
+a school; her small companion was no longer required at home as--it was
+Mrs. Beale's own amusing word--a little duenna. The argument against
+a successor to Miss Overmore remained: it was composed frankly of the
+fact, of which Mrs. Beale granted the full absurdity, that she was too
+awfully fond of her stepdaughter to bring herself to see her in vulgar
+and mercenary hands. The note of this particular danger emboldened
+Maisie to put in a word for Mrs. Wix, the modest measure of whose
+avidity she had taken from the first; but Mrs. Beale disposed afresh and
+effectually of a candidate who would be sure to act in some horrible
+and insidious way for Ida's interest and who moreover was personally
+loathsome and as ignorant as a fish. She made also no more of a secret
+of the awkward fact that a good school would be hideously expensive, and
+of the further circumstance, which seemed to put an end to everything,
+that when it came to the point papa, in spite of his previous clamour,
+was really most nasty about paying. "Would you believe," Mrs. Beale
+confidentially asked of her little charge, "that he says I'm a worse
+expense than ever, and that a daughter and a wife together are really
+more than he can afford?" It was thus that the splendid school at
+Brighton lost itself in the haze of larger questions, though the fear
+that it would provoke Ida to leap into the breach subsided with her
+prolonged, her quite shameless non-appearance. Her daughter and her
+successor were therefore left to gaze in united but helpless blankness
+at all Maisie was not learning.
+
+This quantity was so great as to fill the child's days with a sense of
+intermission to which even French Lisette gave no accent--with finished
+games and unanswered questions and dreaded tests; with the habit, above
+all, in her watch for a change, of hanging over banisters when the
+door-bell sounded. This was the great refuge of her impatience, but
+what she heard at such times was a clatter of gaiety downstairs; the
+impression of which, from her earliest childhood, had built up in her
+the belief that the grown-up time was the time of real amusement and
+above all of real intimacy. Even Lisette, even Mrs. Wix had never, she
+felt, in spite of hugs and tears, been so intimate with her as so many
+persons at present were with Mrs. Beale and as so many others of old had
+been with Mrs. Farange. The note of hilarity brought people together
+still more than the note of melancholy, which was the one exclusively
+sounded, for instance, by poor Mrs. Wix. Maisie in these days preferred
+none the less that domestic revels should be wafted to her from a
+distance: she felt sadly unsupported for facing the inquisition of the
+drawing-room. That was a reason the more for making the most of Susan
+Ash, who in her quality of under-housemaid moved at a very different
+level and who, none the less, was much depended upon out of doors. She
+was a guide to peregrinations that had little in common with those
+intensely definite airings that had left with the child a vivid memory
+of the regulated mind of Moddle. There had been under Moddle's system
+no dawdles at shop-windows and no nudges, in Oxford Street, of "I SAY,
+look at 'ER!" There had been an inexorable treatment of crossings and a
+serene exemption from the fear that--especially at corners, of which she
+was yet weakly fond--haunted the housemaid, the fear of being, as she
+ominously said, "spoken to." The dangers of the town equally with its
+diversions added to Maisie's sense of being untutored and unclaimed.
+
+The situation however, had taken a twist when, on another of her
+returns, at Susan's side, extremely tired, from the pursuit of exercise
+qualified by much hovering, she encountered another emotion. She on this
+occasion learnt at the door that her instant attendance was requested
+in the drawing-room. Crossing the threshold in a cloud of shame she
+discerned through the blur Mrs. Beale seated there with a gentleman who
+immediately drew the pain from her predicament by rising before her as
+the original of the photograph of Sir Claude. She felt the moment she
+looked at him that he was by far the most shining presence that had ever
+made her gape, and her pleasure in seeing him, in knowing that he took
+hold of her and kissed her, as quickly throbbed into a strange shy pride
+in him, a perception of his making up for her fallen state, for Susan's
+public nudges, which quite bruised her, and for all the lessons that, in
+the dead schoolroom, where at times she was almost afraid to stay alone,
+she was bored with not having. It was as if he had told her on the spot
+that he belonged to her, so that she could already show him off and see
+the effect he produced. No, nothing else that was most beautiful ever
+belonging to her could kindle that particular joy--not Mrs. Beale at
+that very moment, not papa when he was gay, nor mamma when she was
+dressed, nor Lisette when she was new. The joy almost overflowed
+in tears when he laid his hand on her and drew her to him, telling
+her, with a smile of which the promise was as bright as that of a
+Christmas-tree, that he knew her ever so well by her mother, but had
+come to see her now so that he might know her for himself. She could
+see that his view of this kind of knowledge was to make her come away
+with him, and, further, that it was just what he was there for and had
+already been some time: arranging it with Mrs. Beale and getting on with
+that lady in a manner evidently not at all affected by her having on the
+arrival of his portrait thought of him so ill. They had grown almost
+intimate--or had the air of it--over their discussion; and it was still
+further conveyed to Maisie that Mrs. Beale had made no secret, and would
+make yet less of one, of all that it cost to let her go. "You seem so
+tremendously eager," she said to the child, "that I hope you're at least
+clear about Sir Claude's relation to you. It doesn't appear to occur to
+him to give you the necessary reassurance."
+
+Maisie, a trifle mystified, turned quickly to her new friend. "Why it's
+of course that you're MARRIED to her, isn't it?"
+
+Her anxious emphasis started them off, as she had learned to call it;
+this was the echo she infallibly and now quite resignedly produced;
+moreover Sir Claude's laughter was an indistinguishable part of the
+sweetness of his being there. "We've been married, my dear child, three
+months, and my interest in you is a consequence, don't you know? of my
+great affection for your mother. In coming here it's of course for your
+mother I'm acting."
+
+"Oh I know," Maisie said with all the candour of her competence. "She
+can't come herself--except just to the door." Then as she thought
+afresh: "Can't she come even to the door now?"
+
+"There you are!" Mrs. Beale exclaimed to Sir Claude. She spoke as if his
+dilemma were ludicrous.
+
+His kind face, in a hesitation, seemed to recognise it; but he answered
+the child with a frank smile. "No--not very well."
+
+"Because she has married you?"
+
+He promptly accepted this reason. "Well, that has a good deal to do with
+it."
+
+He was so delightful to talk to that Maisie pursued the subject. "But
+papa--HE has married Miss Overmore."
+
+"Ah you'll see that he won't come for you at your mother's," that lady
+interposed.
+
+"Yes, but that won't be for a long time," Maisie hastened to respond.
+
+"We won't talk about it now--you've months and months to put in first."
+And Sir Claude drew her closer.
+
+"Oh that's what makes it so hard to give her up!" Mrs. Beale made this
+point with her arms out to her stepdaughter. Maisie, quitting Sir
+Claude, went over to them and, clasped in a still tenderer embrace, felt
+entrancingly the extension of the field of happiness. "I'LL come for
+you," said her stepmother, "if Sir Claude keeps you too long: we must
+make him quite understand that! Don't talk to me about her ladyship!"
+she went on to their visitor so familiarly that it was almost as if they
+must have met before. "I know her ladyship as if I had made her. They're
+a pretty pair of parents!" cried Mrs. Beale.
+
+Maisie had so often heard them called so that the remark diverted her
+but an instant from the agreeable wonder of this grand new form of
+allusion to her mother; and that, in its turn, presently left her free
+to catch at the pleasant possibility, in connexion with herself, of
+a relation much happier as between Mrs. Beale and Sir Claude than as
+between mamma and papa. Still the next thing that happened was that her
+interest in such a relation brought to her lips a fresh question.
+
+"Have you seen papa?" she asked of Sir Claude.
+
+It was the signal for their going off again, as her small stoicism had
+perfectly taken for granted that it would be. All that Mrs. Beale had
+nevertheless to add was the vague apparent sarcasm: "Oh papa!"
+
+"I'm assured he's not at home," Sir Claude replied to the child; "but if
+he had been I should have hoped for the pleasure of seeing him."
+
+"Won't he mind your coming?" Maisie asked as with need of the knowledge.
+
+"Oh you bad little girl!" Mrs. Beale humorously protested.
+
+The child could see that at this Sir Claude, though still moved to
+mirth, coloured a little; but he spoke to her very kindly. "That's just
+what I came to see, you know--whether your father WOULD mind. But Mrs.
+Beale appears strongly of the opinion that he won't."
+
+This lady promptly justified that view to her stepdaughter. "It will be
+very interesting, my dear, you know, to find out what it is to-day that
+your father does mind. I'm sure _I_ don't know!"--and she seemed to
+repeat, though with perceptible resignation, her plaint of a moment
+before. "Your father, darling, is a very odd person indeed." She turned
+with this, smiling, to Sir Claude. "But perhaps it's hardly civil for me
+to say that of his not objecting to have YOU in the house. If you knew
+some of the people he does have!"
+
+Maisie knew them all, and none indeed were to be compared to Sir Claude.
+He laughed back at Mrs. Beale; he looked at such moments quite as Mrs.
+Wix, in the long stories she told her pupil, always described the lovers
+of her distressed beauties--"the perfect gentleman and strikingly
+handsome." He got up, to the child's regret, as if he were going. "Oh I
+dare say we should be all right!"
+
+Mrs. Beale once more gathered in her little charge, holding her close
+and looking thoughtfully over her head at their visitor. "It's so
+charming--for a man of your type--to have wanted her so much!"
+
+"What do you know about my type?" Sir Claude laughed. "Whatever it may
+be I dare say it deceives you. The truth about me is simply that I'm the
+most unappreciated of--what do you call the fellows?--'family-men.' Yes,
+I'm a family-man; upon my honour I am!"
+
+"Then why on earth," cried Mrs. Beale, "didn't you marry a
+family-woman?"
+
+Sir Claude looked at her hard. "YOU know who one marries, I think.
+Besides, there ARE no family-women--hanged if there are! None of them
+want any children--hanged if they do!"
+
+His account of the matter was most interesting, and Maisie, as if it
+were of bad omen for her, stared at the picture in some dismay. At the
+same time she felt, through encircling arms, her protectress hesitate.
+"You do come out with things! But you mean her ladyship doesn't want
+any--really?"
+
+"Won't hear of them--simply. But she can't help the one she HAS got."
+And with this Sir Claude's eyes rested on the little girl in a way that
+seemed to her to mask her mother's attitude with the consciousness of
+his own. "She must make the best of her, don't you see? If only for the
+look of the thing, don't you know? one wants one's wife to take the
+proper line about her child."
+
+"Oh I know what one wants!" Mrs. Beale cried with a competence that
+evidently impressed her interlocutor.
+
+"Well, if you keep HIM up--and I dare say you've had worry enough--why
+shouldn't I keep Ida? What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the
+gander--or the other way round, don't you know? I mean to see the thing
+through."
+
+Mrs. Beale, for a minute, still with her eyes on him as he leaned upon
+the chimneypiece, appeared to turn this over. "You're just a wonder of
+kindness--that's what you are!" she said at last. "A lady's expected
+to have natural feelings. But YOUR horrible sex--! Isn't it a horrible
+sex, little love?" she demanded with her cheek upon her stepdaughter's.
+
+"Oh I like gentlemen best," Maisie lucidly replied.
+
+The words were taken up merrily. "That's a good one for YOU!" Sir Claude
+exclaimed to Mrs. Beale.
+
+"No," said that lady: "I've only to remember the women she sees at her
+mother's."
+
+"Ah they're very nice now," Sir Claude returned.
+
+"What do you call 'nice'?"
+
+"Well, they're all right."
+
+"That doesn't answer me," said Mrs. Beale; "but I dare say you do take
+care of them. That makes you more of an angel to want this job too." And
+she playfully whacked her smaller companion.
+
+"I'm not an angel--I'm an old grandmother," Sir Claude declared. "I like
+babies--I always did. If we go to smash I shall look for a place as
+responsible nurse."
+
+Maisie, in her charmed mood, drank in an imputation on her years which
+at another moment might have been bitter; but the charm was sensibly
+interrupted by Mrs. Beale's screwing her round and gazing fondly into
+her eyes, "You're willing to leave me, you wretch?"
+
+The little girl deliberated; even this consecrated tie had become as a
+cord she must suddenly snap. But she snapped it very gently. "Isn't it
+my turn for mamma?"
+
+"You're a horrible little hypocrite! The less, I think, now said about
+'turns' the better," Mrs. Beale made answer. "_I_ know whose turn it is.
+You've not such a passion for your mother!"
+
+"I say, I say: DO look out!" Sir Claude quite amiably protested.
+
+"There's nothing she hasn't heard. But it doesn't matter--it hasn't
+spoiled her. If you knew what it costs me to part with you!" she pursued
+to Maisie.
+
+Sir Claude watched her as she charmingly clung to the child. "I'm so
+glad you really care for her. That's so much to the good."
+
+Mrs. Beale slowly got up, still with her hands on Maisie, but emitting a
+soft exhalation. "Well, if you're glad, that may help us; for I assure
+you that I shall never give up any rights in her that I may consider
+I've acquired by my own sacrifices. I shall hold very fast to my
+interest in her. What seems to have happened is that she has brought you
+and me together."
+
+"She has brought you and me together," said Sir Claude.
+
+His cheerful echo prolonged the happy truth, and Maisie broke out almost
+with enthusiasm: "I've brought you and her together!"
+
+Her companions of course laughed anew and Mrs. Beale gave her an
+affectionate shake. "You little monster--take care what you do! But
+that's what she does do," she continued to Sir Claude. "She did it to me
+and Beale."
+
+"Well then," he said to Maisie, "you must try the trick at OUR place."
+He held out his hand to her again. "Will you come now?"
+
+"Now--just as I am?" She turned with an immense appeal to her
+stepmother, taking a leap over the mountain of "mending," the abyss of
+packing that had loomed and yawned before her. "Oh MAY I?"
+
+Mrs. Beale addressed her assent to Sir Claude. "As well so as any other
+way. I'll send on her things to-morrow." Then she gave a tug to the
+child's coat, glancing at her up and down with some ruefulness.
+
+"She's not turned out as I should like--her mother will pull her to
+pieces. But what's one to do--with nothing to do it on? And she's better
+than when she came--you can tell her mother that. I'm sorry to have to
+say it to you--but the poor child was a sight."
+
+"Oh I'll turn her out myself!" the visitor cordially said.
+
+"I shall like to see how!"--Mrs. Beale appeared much amused. "You must
+bring her to show me--we can manage that. Good-bye, little fright!" And
+her last word to Sir Claude was that she would keep him up to the mark.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+The idea of what she was to make up and the prodigious total it came
+to were kept well before Maisie at her mother's. These things were the
+constant occupation of Mrs. Wix, who arrived there by the back stairs,
+but in tears of joy, the day after her own arrival. The process of
+making up, as to which the good lady had an immense deal to say, took,
+through its successive phases, so long that it heralded a term at least
+equal to the child's last stretch with her father. This, however, was
+a fuller and richer time: it bounded along to the tune of Mrs. Wix's
+constant insistence on the energy they must both put forth. There was
+a fine intensity in the way the child agreed with her that under Mrs.
+Beale and Susan Ash she had learned nothing whatever; the wildness of
+the rescued castaway was one of the forces that would henceforth make
+for a career of conquest. The year therefore rounded itself as a
+receptacle of retarded knowledge--a cup brimming over with the sense
+that now at least she was learning. Mrs. Wix fed this sense from the
+stores of her conversation and with the immense bustle of her reminder
+that they must cull the fleeting hour. They were surrounded with
+subjects they must take at a rush and perpetually getting into the
+attitude of triumphant attack. They had certainly no idle hours, and the
+child went to bed each night as tired as from a long day's play. This
+had begun from the moment of their reunion, begun with all Mrs. Wix had
+to tell her young friend of the reasons of her ladyship's extraordinary
+behaviour at the very first.
+
+It took the form of her ladyship's refusal for three days to see her
+little girl--three days during which Sir Claude made hasty merry dashes
+into the schoolroom to smooth down the odd situation, to say "She'll
+come round, you know; I assure you she'll come round," and a little
+even to compensate Maisie for the indignity he had caused her to suffer.
+There had never in the child's life been, in all ways, such a delightful
+amount of reparation. It came out by his sociable admission that her
+ladyship had not known of his visit to her late husband's house and
+of his having made that person's daughter a pretext for striking up
+an acquaintance with the dreadful creature installed there. Heaven
+knew she wanted her child back and had made every plan of her own for
+removing her; what she couldn't for the present at least forgive any
+one concerned was such an officious underhand way of bringing about the
+transfer. Maisie carried more of the weight of this resentment than even
+Mrs. Wix's confidential ingenuity could lighten for her, especially as
+Sir Claude himself was not at all ingenious, though indeed on the other
+hand he was not at all crushed. He was amused and intermittent and at
+moments most startling; he impressed on his young companion, with a
+frankness that agitated her much more than he seemed to guess, that he
+depended on her not letting her mother, when she should see her, get
+anything out of her about anything Mrs. Beale might have said to him. He
+came in and out; he professed, in joke, to take tremendous precautions;
+he showed a positive disposition to romp. He chaffed Mrs. Wix till she
+was purple with the pleasure of it, and reminded Maisie of the reticence
+he expected of her till she set her teeth like an Indian captive. Her
+lessons these first days and indeed for long after seemed to be all
+about Sir Claude, and yet she never really mentioned to Mrs. Wix that
+she was prepared, under his inspiring injunction, to be vainly tortured.
+This lady, however, had formulated the position of things with an
+acuteness that showed how little she needed to be coached. Her
+explanation of everything that seemed not quite pleasant--and if her own
+footing was perilous it met that danger as well--that her ladyship was
+passionately in love. Maisie accepted this hint with infinite awe and
+pressed upon it much when she was at last summoned into the presence of
+her mother.
+
+There she encountered matters amid which it seemed really to help to
+give her a clue--an almost terrifying strangeness, full, none the less,
+after a little, of reverberations of Ida's old fierce and demonstrative
+recoveries of possession. They had been some time in the house together,
+and this demonstration came late. Preoccupied, however, as Maisie was
+with the idea of the sentiment Sir Claude had inspired, and familiar,
+in addition, by Mrs. Wix's anecdotes, with the ravages that in general
+such a sentiment could produce, she was able to make allowances for her
+ladyship's remarkable appearance, her violent splendour, the wonderful
+colour of her lips and even the hard stare, the stare of some gorgeous
+idol described in a story-book, that had come into her eyes in
+consequence of a curious thickening of their already rich circumference.
+Her professions and explanations were mixed with eager challenges and
+sudden drops, in the midst of which Maisie recognised as a memory
+of other years the rattle of her trinkets and the scratch of her
+endearments, the odour of her clothes and the jumps of her conversation.
+She had all her old clever way--Mrs. Wix said it was "aristocratic"--of
+changing the subject as she might have slammed the door in your face.
+The principal thing that was different was the tint of her golden hair,
+which had changed to a coppery red and, with the head it profusely
+covered, struck the child as now lifted still further aloft. This
+picturesque parent showed literally a grander stature and a nobler
+presence, things which, with some others that might have been
+bewildering, were handsomely accounted for by the romantic state of her
+affections. It was her affections, Maisie could easily see, that led Ida
+to break out into questions as to what had passed at the other house
+between that horrible woman and Sir Claude; but it was also just here
+that the little girl was able to recall the effect with which in earlier
+days she had practised the pacific art of stupidity. This art again came
+to her aid: her mother, in getting rid of her after an interview in
+which she had achieved a hollowness beyond her years, allowed her fully
+to understand she had not grown a bit more amusing.
+
+She could bear that; she could bear anything that helped her to feel she
+had done something for Sir Claude. If she hadn't told Mrs. Wix how Mrs.
+Beale seemed to like him she certainly couldn't tell her ladyship. In
+the way the past revived for her there was a queer confusion. It was
+because mamma hated papa that she used to want to know bad things of
+him; but if at present she wanted to know the same of Sir Claude it was
+quite from the opposite motive. She was awestruck at the manner in which
+a lady might be affected through the passion mentioned by Mrs. Wix; she
+held her breath with the sense of picking her steps among the tremendous
+things of life. What she did, however, now, after the interview with
+her mother, impart to Mrs. Wix was that, in spite of her having had her
+"good" effect, as she called it--the effect she studied, the effect of
+harmless vacancy--her ladyship's last words had been that her ladyship's
+duty by her would be thoroughly done. Over this announcement governess
+and pupil looked at each other in silent profundity; but as the weeks
+went by it had no consequences that interfered gravely with the breezy
+gallop of making up. Her ladyship's duty took at times the form of not
+seeing her child for days together, and Maisie led her life in great
+prosperity between Mrs. Wix and kind Sir Claude. Mrs. Wix had a new
+dress and, as she was the first to proclaim, a better position; so it
+all struck Maisie as a crowded brilliant life, with, for the time, Mrs.
+Beale and Susan Ash simply "left out" like children not invited to a
+Christmas party. Mrs. Wix had a secret terror which, like most of her
+secret feelings, she discussed with her little companion, in great
+solemnity, by the hour: the possibility of her ladyship's coming down
+on them, in her sudden highbred way, with a school. But she had also
+a balm to this fear in a conviction of the strength of Sir Claude's
+grasp of the situation. He was too pleased--didn't he constantly say
+as much?--with the good impression made, in a wide circle, by Ida's
+sacrifices; and he came into the schoolroom repeatedly to let them know
+how beautifully he felt everything had gone off and everything would go
+on.
+
+He disappeared at times for days, when his patient friends understood
+that her ladyship would naturally absorb him; but he always came back
+with the drollest stories of where he had been, a wonderful picture of
+society, and even with pretty presents that showed how in absence he
+thought of his home. Besides giving Mrs. Wix by his conversation a sense
+that they almost themselves "went out," he gave her a five-pound note
+and the history of France and an umbrella with a malachite knob, and to
+Maisie both chocolate-creams and story-books, besides a lovely greatcoat
+(which he took her out all alone to buy) and ever so many games
+in boxes, with printed directions, and a bright red frame for the
+protection of his famous photograph. The games were, as he said, to
+while away the evening hour; and the evening hour indeed often passed
+in futile attempts on Mrs. Wix's part to master what "it said" on the
+papers. When he asked the pair how they liked the games they always
+replied "Oh immensely!" but they had earnest discussions as to whether
+they hadn't better appeal to him frankly for aid to understand them.
+This was a course their delicacy shrank from; they couldn't have told
+exactly why, but it was a part of their tenderness for him not to let
+him think they had trouble. What dazzled most was his kindness to Mrs.
+Wix, not only the five-pound note and the "not forgetting" her, but
+the perfect consideration, as she called it with an air to which her
+sounding of the words gave the only grandeur Maisie was to have seen her
+wear save on a certain occasion hereafter to be described, an occasion
+when the poor lady was grander than all of them put together. He shook
+hands with her, he recognised her, as she said, and above all, more than
+once, he took her, with his stepdaughter, to the pantomime and, in the
+crowd, coming out, publicly gave her his arm. When he met them in sunny
+Piccadilly he made merry and turned and walked with them, heroically
+suppressing his consciousness of the stamp of his company, a heroism
+that--needless for Mrs. Wix to sound THOSE words--her ladyship, though
+a blood-relation, was little enough the woman to be capable of. Even to
+the hard heart of childhood there was something tragic in such elation
+at such humanities: it brought home to Maisie the way her humble
+companion had sidled and ducked through life. But it settled the
+question of the degree to which Sir Claude was a gentleman: he was
+more of one than anybody else in the world--"I don't care," Mrs. Wix
+repeatedly remarked, "whom you may meet in grand society, nor even to
+whom you may be contracted in marriage." There were questions that
+Maisie never asked; so her governess was spared the embarrassment of
+telling her if he were more of a gentleman than papa. This was not
+moreover from the want of opportunity, for there were no moments between
+them at which the topic could be irrelevant, no subject they were going
+into, not even the principal dates or the auxiliary verbs, in which it
+was further off than the turn of the page. The answer on the winter
+nights to the puzzle of cards and counters and little bewildering
+pamphlets was just to draw up to the fire and talk about him; and if the
+truth must be told this edifying interchange constituted for the time
+the little girl's chief education.
+
+It must also be admitted that he took them far, further perhaps than
+was always warranted by the old-fashioned conscience, the dingy
+decencies, of Maisie's simple instructress. There were hours when Mrs.
+Wix sighingly testified to the scruples she surmounted, seemed to ask
+what other line one COULD take with a young person whose experience
+had been, as it were, so peculiar. "It isn't as if you didn't already
+know everything, is it, love?" and "I can't make you any worse than
+you ARE, can I, darling?"--these were the terms in which the good lady
+justified to herself and her pupil her pleasant conversational ease.
+What the pupil already knew was indeed rather taken for granted than
+expressed, but it performed the useful function of transcending all
+textbooks and supplanting all studies. If the child couldn't be worse
+it was a comfort even to herself that she was bad--a comfort offering
+a broad firm support to the fundamental fact of the present crisis:
+the fact that mamma was fearfully jealous. This was another side
+of the circumstance of mamma's passion, and the deep couple in the
+schoolroom were not long in working round to it. It brought them face
+to face with the idea of the inconvenience suffered by any lady who
+marries a gentleman producing on other ladies the charming effect of
+Sir Claude. That such ladies wouldn't be able to help falling in love
+with him was a reflexion naturally irritating to his wife. One day
+when some accident, some crash of a banged door or some scurry of
+a scared maid, had rendered this truth particularly vivid, Maisie,
+receptive and profound, suddenly said to her companion: "And you, my
+dear, are you in love with him too?" Even her profundity had left
+a margin for a laugh; so she was a trifle startled by the solemn
+promptitude with which Mrs. Wix plumped out: "Over head and ears.
+I've NEVER since you ask me, been so far gone."
+
+This boldness had none the less no effect of deterrence for her when, a
+few days later--it was because several had elapsed without a visit from
+Sir Claude--her governess turned the tables. "May I ask you, miss, if
+YOU are?" Mrs. Wix brought it out, she could see, with hesitation, but
+clearly intending a joke. "Why RATHER!" the child made answer, as if in
+surprise at not having long ago seemed sufficiently to commit herself;
+on which her friend gave a sigh of apparent satisfaction. It might in
+fact have expressed positive relief. Everything was as it should be.
+
+Yet it was not with them, they were very sure, that her ladyship was
+furious, nor because she had forbidden it that there befell at last a
+period--six months brought it round--when for days together he scarcely
+came near them. He was "off," and Ida was "off," and they were sometimes
+off together and sometimes apart; there were seasons when the simple
+students had the house to themselves, when the very servants seemed
+also to be "off" and dinner became a reckless forage in pantries and
+sideboards. Mrs. Wix reminded her disciple on such occasions--hungry
+moments often, when all the support of the reminder was required--that
+the "real life" of their companions, the brilliant society in which it
+was inevitable they should move and the complicated pleasures in which
+it was almost presumptuous of the mind to follow them, must offer
+features literally not to be imagined without being seen. At one
+of these times Maisie found her opening it out that, though the
+difficulties were many, it was Mrs. Beale who had now become the chief.
+Then somehow it was brought fully to the child's knowledge that her
+stepmother had been making attempts to see her, that her mother had
+deeply resented it, that her stepfather had backed her stepmother up,
+that the latter had pretended to be acting as the representative of her
+father, and that her mother took the whole thing, in plain terms, very
+hard. The situation was, as Mrs. Wix declared, an extraordinary muddle
+to be sure. Her account of it brought back to Maisie the happy vision of
+the way Sir Claude and Mrs. Beale had made acquaintance--an incident to
+which, with her stepfather, though she had had little to say about it
+to Mrs. Wix, she had during the first weeks of her stay at her mother's
+found more than one opportunity to revert. As to what had taken place
+the day Sir Claude came for her, she had been vaguely grateful to Mrs.
+Wix for not attempting, as her mother had attempted, to put her through.
+That was what Sir Claude had called the process when he warned her of
+it, and again afterwards when he told her she was an awfully good "chap"
+for having foiled it. Then it was that, well aware Mrs. Beale hadn't
+in the least really given her up, she had asked him if he remained
+in communication with her and if for the time everything must really
+be held to be at an end between her stepmother and herself. This
+conversation had occurred in consequence of his one day popping into the
+schoolroom and finding Maisie alone.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+He was smoking a cigarette and he stood before the fire and looked
+at the meagre appointments of the room in a way that made her rather
+ashamed of them. Then before (on the subject of Mrs. Beale) he let her
+"draw" him--that was another of his words; it was astonishing how many
+she gathered in--he remarked that really mamma kept them rather low on
+the question of decorations. Mrs. Wix had put up a Japanese fan and two
+rather grim texts; she had wished they were gayer, but they were all she
+happened to have. Without Sir Claude's photograph, however, the place
+would have been, as he said, as dull as a cold dinner. He had said
+as well that there were all sorts of things they ought to have; yet
+governess and pupil, it had to be admitted, were still divided between
+discussing the places where any sort of thing would look best if any
+sort of thing should ever come and acknowledging that mutability in the
+child's career which was naturally unfavourable to accumulation. She
+stayed long enough only to miss things, not half long enough to deserve
+them. The way Sir Claude looked about the schoolroom had made her feel
+with humility as if it were not very different from the shabby attic in
+which she had visited Susan Ash. Then he had said in abrupt reference to
+Mrs. Beale: "Do you think she really cares for you?"
+
+"Oh awfully!" Maisie had replied.
+
+"But, I mean, does she love you for yourself, as they call it, don't you
+know? Is she as fond of you, now, as Mrs. Wix?"
+
+The child turned it over. "Oh I'm not every bit Mrs. Beale has!"
+
+Sir Claude seemed much amused at this. "No; you're not every bit she
+has!"
+
+He laughed for some moments, but that was an old story to Maisie, who
+was not too much disconcerted to go on: "But she'll never give me up."
+
+"Well, I won't either, old boy: so that's not so wonderful, and she's
+not the only one. But if she's so fond of you, why doesn't she write to
+you?"
+
+"Oh on account of mamma." This was rudimentary, and she was almost
+surprised at the simplicity of Sir Claude's question.
+
+"I see--that's quite right," he answered. "She might get at you--there
+are all sorts of ways. But of course there's Mrs. Wix."
+
+"There's Mrs. Wix," Maisie lucidly concurred. "Mrs. Wix can't abide
+her."
+
+Sir Claude seemed interested. "Oh she can't abide her? Then what does
+she say about her?"
+
+"Nothing at all--because she knows I shouldn't like it. Isn't it sweet
+of her?" the child asked.
+
+"Certainly; rather nice. Mrs. Beale wouldn't hold her tongue for any
+such thing as that, would she?"
+
+Maisie remembered how little she had done so; but she desired to protect
+Mrs. Beale too. The only protection she could think of, however, was the
+plea: "Oh at papa's, you know, they don't mind!"
+
+At this Sir Claude only smiled. "No, I dare say not. But here we mind,
+don't we?--we take care what we say. I don't suppose it's a matter on
+which I ought to prejudice you," he went on; "but I think we must on the
+whole be rather nicer here than at your father's. However, I don't press
+that; for it's the sort of question on which it's awfully awkward for
+you to speak. Don't worry, at any rate: I assure you I'll back you up."
+Then after a moment and while he smoked he reverted to Mrs. Beale and
+the child's first enquiry. "I'm afraid we can't do much for her just
+now. I haven't seen her since that day--upon my word I haven't seen
+her." The next instant, with a laugh the least bit foolish, the young
+man slightly coloured: he must have felt this profession of innocence to
+be excessive as addressed to Maisie. It was inevitable to say to her,
+however, that of course her mother loathed the lady of the other house.
+He couldn't go there again with his wife's consent, and he wasn't the
+man--he begged her to believe, falling once more, in spite of himself,
+into the scruple of showing the child he didn't trip--to go there
+without it. He was liable in talking with her to take the tone of her
+being also a man of the world. He had gone to Mrs. Beale's to fetch
+away Maisie, but that was altogether different. Now that she was in
+her mother's house what pretext had he to give her mother for paying
+calls on her father's wife? And of course Mrs. Beale couldn't come to
+Ida's--Ida would tear her limb from limb. Maisie, with this talk of
+pretexts, remembered how much Mrs. Beale had made of her being a good
+one, and how, for such a function, it was her fate to be either much
+depended on or much missed. Sir Claude moreover recognised on this
+occasion that perhaps things would take a turn later on; and he wound
+up by saying: "I'm sure she does sincerely care for you--how can she
+possibly help it? She's very young and very pretty and very clever: I
+think she's charming. But we must walk very straight. If you'll help me,
+you know, I'll help YOU," he concluded in the pleasant fraternising,
+equalising, not a bit patronising way which made the child ready to go
+through anything for him and the beauty of which, as she dimly felt, was
+that it was so much less a deceitful descent to her years than a real
+indifference to them.
+
+It gave her moments of secret rapture--moments of believing she might
+help him indeed. The only mystification in this was the imposing time of
+life that her elders spoke of as youth. For Sir Claude then Mrs. Beale
+was "young," just as for Mrs. Wix Sir Claude was: that was one of the
+merits for which Mrs. Wix most commended him. What therefore was Maisie
+herself, and, in another relation to the matter, what therefore was
+mamma? It took her some time to puzzle out with the aid of an experiment
+or two that it wouldn't do to talk about mamma's youth. She even went
+so far one day, in the presence of that lady's thick colour and marked
+lines, as to wonder if it would occur to any one but herself to do so.
+Yet if she wasn't young then she was old; and this threw an odd light on
+her having a husband of a different generation. Mr. Farange was still
+older--that Maisie perfectly knew; and it brought her in due course
+to the perception of how much more, since Mrs. Beale was younger than
+Sir Claude, papa must be older than Mrs. Beale. Such discoveries were
+disconcerting and even a trifle confounding: these persons, it appeared,
+were not of the age they ought to be. This was somehow particularly
+the case with mamma, and the fact made her reflect with some relief on
+her not having gone with Mrs. Wix into the question of Sir Claude's
+attachment to his wife. She was conscious that in confining their
+attention to the state of her ladyship's own affections they had been
+controlled--Mrs. Wix perhaps in especial--by delicacy and even by
+embarrassment. The end of her colloquy with her stepfather in the
+schoolroom was her saying: "Then if we're not to see Mrs. Beale at all
+it isn't what she seemed to think when you came for me."
+
+He looked rather blank. "What did she seem to think?"
+
+"Why that I've brought you together."
+
+"She thought that?" Sir Claude asked.
+
+Maisie was surprised at his already forgetting it. "Just as I had
+brought papa and her. Don't you remember she said so?"
+
+It came back to Sir Claude in a peal of laughter. "Oh yes--she said so!"
+
+"And YOU said so," Maisie lucidly pursued.
+
+He recovered, with increasing mirth, the whole occasion. "And YOU said
+so!" he retorted as if they were playing a game.
+
+"Then were we all mistaken?"
+
+He considered a little. "No, on the whole not. I dare say it's just what
+you HAVE done. We ARE together--it's really most odd. She's thinking of
+us--of you and me--though we don't meet. And I've no doubt you'll find
+it will be all right when you go back to her."
+
+"Am I going back to her?" Maisie brought out with a little gasp which
+was like a sudden clutch of the happy present.
+
+It appeared to make Sir Claude grave a moment; it might have made him
+feel the weight of the pledge his action had given. "Oh some day, I
+suppose! We've plenty of time."
+
+"I've such a tremendous lot to make up," Maisie said with a sense of
+great boldness.
+
+"Certainly, and you must make up every hour of it. Oh I'll SEE that you
+do!"
+
+This was encouraging; and to show cheerfully that she was reassured she
+replied: "That's what Mrs. Wix sees too."
+
+"Oh yes," said Sir Claude; "Mrs. Wix and I are shoulder to shoulder."
+
+Maisie took in a little this strong image; after which she exclaimed:
+"Then I've done it also to you and her--I've brought YOU together!"
+
+"Blest if you haven't!" Sir Claude laughed. "And more, upon my word,
+than any of the lot. Oh you've done for US! Now if you could--as I
+suggested, you know, that day--only manage me and your mother!"
+
+The child wondered. "Bring you and HER together?"
+
+"You see we're not together--not a bit. But I oughtn't to tell you such
+things; all the more that you won't really do it--not you. No, old
+chap," the young man continued; "there you'll break down. But it won't
+matter--we'll rub along. The great thing is that you and I are all
+right."
+
+"WE'RE all right!" Maisie echoed devoutly. But the next moment, in the
+light of what he had just said, she asked: "How shall I ever leave you?"
+It was as if she must somehow take care of him.
+
+His smile did justice to her anxiety. "Oh well, you needn't! It won't
+come to that."
+
+"Do you mean that when I do go you'll go with me?"
+
+Sir Claude cast about. "Not exactly 'with' you perhaps; but I shall
+never be far off."
+
+"But how do you know where mamma may take you?"
+
+He laughed again. "I don't, I confess!" Then he had an idea, though
+something too jocose. "That will be for you to see--that she shan't take
+me too far."
+
+"How can I help it?" Maisie enquired in surprise. "Mamma doesn't care
+for me," she said very simply. "Not really." Child as she was, her
+little long history was in the words; and it was as impossible to
+contradict her as if she had been venerable.
+
+Sir Claude's silence was an admission of this, and still more the tone
+in which he presently replied: "That won't prevent her from--some time
+or other--leaving me with you."
+
+"Then we'll live together?" she eagerly demanded.
+
+"I'm afraid," said Sir Claude, smiling, "that that will be Mrs. Beale's
+real chance."
+
+Her eagerness just slightly dropped at this; she remembered Mrs. Wix's
+pronouncement that it was all an extraordinary muddle. "To take me
+again? Well, can't you come to see me there?"
+
+"Oh I dare say!"
+
+Though there were parts of childhood Maisie had lost she had all
+childhood's preference for the particular promise. "Then you WILL
+come--you'll come often, won't you?" she insisted; while at the moment
+she spoke the door opened for the return of Mrs. Wix. Sir Claude
+hereupon, instead of replying, gave her a look which left her silent
+and embarrassed.
+
+When he again found privacy convenient, however--which happened to be
+long in coming--he took up their conversation very much where it had
+dropped. "You see, my dear, if I shall be able to go to you at your
+father's it yet isn't at all the same thing for Mrs. Beale to come to
+you here." Maisie gave a thoughtful assent to this proposition, though
+conscious she could scarcely herself say just where the difference would
+lie. She felt how much her stepfather saved her, as he said with his
+habitual amusement, the trouble of that. "I shall probably be able to go
+to Mrs. Beale's without your mother's knowing it."
+
+Maisie stared with a certain thrill at the dramatic element in this.
+"And she couldn't come here without mamma's--" She was unable to
+articulate the word for what mamma would do.
+
+"My dear child, Mrs. Wix would tell of it."
+
+"But I thought," Maisie objected, "that Mrs. Wix and you--"
+
+"Are such brothers-in-arms?"--Sir Claude caught her up. "Oh yes, about
+everything but Mrs. Beale. And if you should suggest," he went on, "that
+we might somehow or other hide her peeping in from Mrs. Wix--"
+
+"Oh, I don't suggest THAT!" Maisie in turn cut him short.
+
+Sir Claude looked as if he could indeed quite see why. "No; it would
+really be impossible." There came to her from this glance at what they
+might hide the first small glimpse of something in him that she wouldn't
+have expected. There had been times when she had had to make the best
+of the impression that she was herself deceitful; yet she had never
+concealed anything bigger than a thought. Of course she now concealed
+this thought of how strange it would be to see HIM hide; and while she
+was so actively engaged he continued: "Besides, you know, I'm not afraid
+of your father."
+
+"And you are of my mother?"
+
+"Rather, old man!" Sir Claude returned.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+It must not be supposed that her ladyship's intermissions were not
+qualified by demonstrations of another order--triumphal entries and
+breathless pauses during which she seemed to take of everything in the
+room, from the state of the ceiling to that of her daughter's boot-toes,
+a survey that was rich in intentions. Sometimes she sat down and
+sometimes she surged about, but her attitude wore equally in either
+case the grand air of the practical. She found so much to deplore that
+she left a great deal to expect, and bristled so with calculation that
+she seemed to scatter remedies and pledges. Her visits were as good as
+an outfit; her manner, as Mrs. Wix once said, as good as a pair of
+curtains; but she was a person addicted to extremes--sometimes barely
+speaking to her child and sometimes pressing this tender shoot to a
+bosom cut, as Mrs. Wix had also observed, remarkably low. She was always
+in a fearful hurry, and the lower the bosom was cut the more it was to
+be gathered she was wanted elsewhere. She usually broke in alone, but
+sometimes Sir Claude was with her, and during all the earlier period
+there was nothing on which these appearances had had so delightful a
+bearing as on the way her ladyship was, as Mrs. Wix expressed it, under
+the spell. "But ISN'T she under it!" Maisie used in thoughtful but
+familiar reference to exclaim after Sir Claude had swept mamma away in
+peals of natural laughter. Not even in the old days of the convulsed
+ladies had she heard mamma laugh so freely as in these moments of
+conjugal surrender, to the gaiety of which even a little girl could see
+she had at last a right--a little girl whose thoughtfulness was now all
+happy selfish meditation on good omens and future fun.
+
+Unaccompanied, in subsequent hours, and with an effect of changing
+to meet a change, Ida took a tone superficially disconcerting and
+abrupt--the tone of having, at an immense cost, made over everything to
+Sir Claude and wishing others to know that if everything wasn't right it
+was because Sir Claude was so dreadfully vague. "He has made from the
+first such a row about you," she said on one occasion to Maisie, "that
+I've told him to do for you himself and try how he likes it--see?
+I've washed my hands of you; I've made you over to him; and if you're
+discontented it's on him, please, you'll come down. So don't haul poor
+ME up--I assure you I've worries enough." One of these, visibly, was
+that the spell rejoiced in by the schoolroom fire was already in danger
+of breaking; another was that she was finally forced to make no secret
+of her husband's unfitness for real responsibilities. The day came
+indeed when her breathless auditors learnt from her in bewilderment that
+what ailed him was that he was, alas, simply not serious. Maisie wept
+on Mrs. Wix's bosom after hearing that Sir Claude was a butterfly;
+considering moreover that her governess but half-patched it up in coming
+out at various moments the next few days with the opinion that it was
+proper to his "station" to be careless and free. That had been proper to
+every one's station that she had yet encountered save poor Mrs. Wix's
+own, and the particular merit of Sir Claude had seemed precisely that he
+was different from every one. She talked with him, however, as time went
+on, very freely about her mother; being with him, in this relation,
+wholly without the fear that had kept her silent before her father--the
+fear of bearing tales and making bad things worse. He appeared to accept
+the idea that he had taken her over and made her, as he said, his
+particular lark; he quite agreed also that he was an awful fraud and an
+idle beast and a sorry dunce. And he never said a word to her against
+her mother--he only remained dumb and discouraged in the face of her
+ladyship's own overtopping earnestness. There were occasions when he
+even spoke as if he had wrenched his little charge from the arms of a
+parent who had fought for her tooth and nail.
+
+This was the very moral of a scene that flashed into vividness one day
+when the four happened to meet without company in the drawing-room and
+Maisie found herself clutched to her mother's breast and passionately
+sobbed and shrieked over, made the subject of a demonstration evidently
+sequent to some sharp passage just enacted. The connexion required that
+while she almost cradled the child in her arms Ida should speak of her
+as hideously, as fatally estranged, and should rail at Sir Claude as the
+cruel author of the outrage. "He has taken you FROM me," she cried; "he
+has set you AGAINST me, and you've been won away and your horrid little
+mind has been poisoned! You've gone over to him, you've given yourself
+up to side against me and hate me. You never open your mouth to me--you
+know you don't; and you chatter to him like a dozen magpies. Don't lie
+about it--I hear you all over the place. You hang about him in a way
+that's barely decent--he can do what he likes with you. Well then, let
+him, to his heart's content: he has been in such a hurry to take you
+that we'll see if it suits him to keep you. I'm very good to break my
+heart about it when you've no more feeling for me than a clammy little
+fish!" She suddenly thrust the child away and, as a disgusted admission
+of failure, sent her flying across the room into the arms of Mrs. Wix,
+whom at this moment and even in the whirl of her transit Maisie saw,
+very red, exchange a quick queer look with Sir Claude.
+
+The impression of the look remained with her, confronting her with such
+a critical little view of her mother's explosion that she felt the less
+ashamed of herself for incurring the reproach with which she had been
+cast off. Her father had once called her a heartless little beast,
+and now, though decidedly scared, she was as stiff and cold as if the
+description had been just. She was not even frightened enough to cry,
+which would have been a tribute to her mother's wrongs: she was only,
+more than anything else, curious about the opinion mutely expressed by
+their companions. Taking the earliest opportunity to question Mrs. Wix
+on this subject she elicited the remarkable reply: "Well, my dear, it's
+her ladyship's game, and we must just hold on like grim death."
+
+Maisie could interpret at her leisure these ominous words. Her
+reflexions indeed at this moment thickened apace, and one of them made
+her sure that her governess had conversations, private, earnest and not
+infrequent, with her denounced stepfather. She perceived in the light
+of a second episode that something beyond her knowledge had taken place
+in the house. The things beyond her knowledge--numerous enough in
+truth--had not hitherto, she believed, been the things that had been
+nearest to her: she had even had in the past a small smug conviction
+that in the domestic labyrinth she always kept the clue. This time too,
+however, she at last found out--with the discreet aid, it had to be
+confessed, of Mrs. Wix. Sir Claude's own assistance was abruptly taken
+from her, for his comment on her ladyship's game was to start on the
+spot, quite alone, for Paris, evidently because he wished to show
+a spirit when accused of bad behaviour. He might be fond of his
+stepdaughter, Maisie felt, without wishing her to be after all thrust on
+him in such a way; his absence therefore, it was clear, was a protest
+against the thrusting. It was while this absence lasted that our young
+lady finally discovered what had happened in the house to be that her
+mother was no longer in love.
+
+The limit of a passion for Sir Claude had certainly been reached, she
+judged, some time before the day on which her ladyship burst suddenly
+into the schoolroom to introduce Mr. Perriam, who, as she announced
+from the doorway to Maisie, wouldn't believe his ears that one had a
+great hoyden of a daughter. Mr. Perriam was short and massive--Mrs.
+Wix remarked afterwards that he was "too fat for the pace"; and it
+would have been difficult to say of him whether his head were more
+bald or his black moustache more bushy. He seemed also to have
+moustaches over his eyes, which, however, by no means prevented these
+polished little globes from rolling round the room as if they had been
+billiard-balls impelled by Ida's celebrated stroke. Mr. Perriam wore
+on the hand that pulled his moustache a diamond of dazzling lustre, in
+consequence of which and of his general weight and mystery our young
+lady observed on his departure that if he had only had a turban he
+would have been quite her idea of a heathen Turk.
+
+"He's quite my idea," Mrs. Wix replied, "of a heathen Jew."
+
+"Well, I mean," said Maisie, "of a person who comes from the East."
+
+"That's where he MUST come from," her governess opined--"he comes from
+the City." In a moment she added as if she knew all about him. "He's one
+of those people who have lately broken out. He'll be immensely rich."
+
+"On the death of his papa?" the child interestedly enquired.
+
+"Dear no--nothing hereditary. I mean he has made a mass of money."
+
+"How much, do you think?" Maisie demanded.
+
+Mrs. Wix reflected and sketched it. "Oh many millions."
+
+"A hundred?"
+
+Mrs. Wix was not sure of the number, but there were enough of them to
+have seemed to warm up for the time the penury of the schoolroom--to
+linger there as an afterglow of the hot heavy light Mr. Perriam sensibly
+shed. This was also, no doubt, on his part, an effect of that enjoyment
+of life with which, among her elders, Maisie had been in contact from
+her earliest years--the sign of happy maturity, the old familiar note of
+overflowing cheer. "How d'ye do, ma'am? How d'ye do, little miss?"--he
+laughed and nodded at the gaping figures. "She has brought me up for a
+peep--it's true I wouldn't take you on trust. She's always talking about
+you, but she'd never produce you; so to-day I challenged her on the
+spot. Well, you ain't a myth, my dear--I back down on that," the visitor
+went on to Maisie; "nor you either, miss, though you might be, to be
+sure!"
+
+"I bored him with you, darling--I bore every one," Ida said, "and to
+prove that you ARE a sweet thing, as well as a fearfully old one, I told
+him he could judge for himself. So now he sees that you're a dreadful
+bouncing business and that your poor old Mummy's at least sixty!"--and
+her ladyship smiled at Mr. Perriam with the charm that her daughter had
+heard imputed to her at papa's by the merry gentlemen who had so often
+wished to get from him what they called a "rise." Her manner at that
+instant gave the child a glimpse more vivid than any yet enjoyed of the
+attraction that papa, in remarkable language, always denied she could
+put forth.
+
+Mr. Perriam, however, clearly recognised it in the humour with which he
+met her. "I never said you ain't wonderful--did I ever say it, hey?" and
+he appealed with pleasant confidence to the testimony of the schoolroom,
+about which itself also he evidently felt something might be expected of
+him. "So this is their little place, hey? Charming, charming, charming!"
+he repeated as he vaguely looked round. The interrupted students clung
+together as if they had been personally exposed; but Ida relieved their
+embarrassment by a hunch of her high shoulders. This time the smile she
+addressed to Mr. Perriam had a beauty of sudden sadness. "What on earth
+is a poor woman to do?"
+
+The visitor's grimace grew more marked as he continued to look, and
+the conscious little schoolroom felt still more like a cage at a
+menagerie. "Charming, charming, charming!" Mr. Perriam insisted; but
+the parenthesis closed with a prompt click. "There you are!" said her
+ladyship. "By-bye!" she sharply added. The next minute they were on the
+stairs, and Mrs. Wix and her companion, at the open door and looking
+mutely at each other, were reached by the sound of the large social
+current that carried them back to their life.
+
+It was singular perhaps after this that Maisie never put a question
+about Mr. Perriam, and it was still more singular that by the end of a
+week she knew all she didn't ask. What she most particularly knew--and
+the information came to her, unsought, straight from Mrs. Wix--was that
+Sir Claude wouldn't at all care for the visits of a millionaire who was
+in and out of the upper rooms. How little he would care was proved by
+the fact that under the sense of them Mrs. Wix's discretion broke down
+altogether; she was capable of a transfer of allegiance, capable, at the
+altar of propriety, of a desperate sacrifice of her ladyship. As against
+Mrs. Beale, she more than once intimated, she had been willing to do
+the best for her, but as against Sir Claude she could do nothing for
+her at all. It was extraordinary the number of things that, still
+without a question, Maisie knew by the time her stepfather came back
+from Paris--came bringing her a splendid apparatus for painting in
+water-colours and bringing Mrs. Wix, by a lapse of memory that would
+have been droll if it had not been a trifle disconcerting, a second and
+even a more elegant umbrella. He had forgotten all about the first,
+with which, buried in as many wrappers as a mummy of the Pharaohs, she
+wouldn't for the world have done anything so profane as use it. Maisie
+knew above all that though she was now, by what she called an informal
+understanding, on Sir Claude's "side," she had yet not uttered a word
+to him about Mr. Perriam. That gentleman became therefore a kind of
+flourishing public secret, out of the depths of which governess and
+pupil looked at each other portentously from the time their friend was
+restored to them. He was restored in great abundance, and it was marked
+that, though he appeared to have felt the need to take a stand against
+the risk of being too roughly saddled with the offspring of others, he
+at this period exposed himself more than ever before to the presumption
+of having created expectations.
+
+If it had become now, for that matter, a question of sides, there was at
+least a certain amount of evidence as to where they all were. Maisie of
+course, in such a delicate position, was on nobody's; but Sir Claude had
+all the air of being on hers. If therefore Mrs. Wix was on Sir Claude's,
+her ladyship on Mr. Perriam's and Mr. Perriam presumably on her
+ladyship's, this left only Mrs. Beale and Mr. Farange to account for.
+Mrs. Beale clearly was, like Sir Claude, on Maisie's, and papa, it was
+to be supposed, on Mrs. Beale's. Here indeed was a slight ambiguity,
+as papa's being on Mrs. Beale's didn't somehow seem to place him quite
+on his daughter's. It sounded, as this young lady thought it over,
+very much like puss-in-the-corner, and she could only wonder if the
+distribution of parties would lead to a rushing to and fro and a
+changing of places. She was in the presence, she felt, of restless
+change: wasn't it restless enough that her mother and her stepfather
+should already be on different sides? That was the great thing that had
+domestically happened. Mrs. Wix, besides, had turned another face: she
+had never been exactly gay, but her gravity was now an attitude as
+public as a posted placard. She seemed to sit in her new dress and brood
+over her lost delicacy, which had become almost as doleful a memory as
+that of poor Clara Matilda. "It IS hard for him," she often said to her
+companion; and it was surprising how competent on this point Maisie
+was conscious of being to agree with her. Hard as it was, however, Sir
+Claude had never shown to greater advantage than in the gallant generous
+sociable way he carried it off: a way that drew from Mrs. Wix a hundred
+expressions of relief at his not having suffered it to embitter him.
+It threw him more and more at last into the schoolroom, where he
+had plainly begun to recognise that if he was to have the credit of
+perverting the innocent child he might also at least have the amusement.
+He never came into the place without telling its occupants that they
+were the nicest people in the house--a remark which always led them to
+say to each other "Mr. Perriam!" as loud as ever compressed lips and
+enlarged eyes could make them articulate. He caused Maisie to remember
+what she had said to Mrs. Beale about his having the nature of a good
+nurse, and, rather more than she intended before Mrs. Wix, to bring the
+whole thing out by once remarking to him that none of her good nurses
+had smoked quite so much in the nursery. This had no more effect than
+it was meant to on his cigarettes: he was always smoking, but always
+declaring that it was death to him not to lead a domestic life.
+
+He led one after all in the schoolroom, and there were hours of late
+evening, when she had gone to bed, that Maisie knew he sat there talking
+with Mrs. Wix of how to meet his difficulties. His consideration for
+this unfortunate woman even in the midst of them continued to show him
+as the perfect gentleman and lifted the subject of his courtesy into an
+upper air of beatitude in which her very pride had the hush of anxiety.
+"He leans on me--he leans on me!" she only announced from time to time;
+and she was more surprised than amused when, later on, she accidentally
+found she had given her pupil the impression of a support literally
+supplied by her person. This glimpse of a misconception led her to be
+explicit--to put before the child, with an air of mourning indeed for
+such a stoop to the common, that what they talked about in the small
+hours, as they said, was the question of his taking right hold of life.
+The life she wanted him to take right hold of was the public: "she"
+being, I hasten to add, in this connexion, not the mistress of his fate,
+but only Mrs. Wix herself. She had phrases about him that were full of
+easy understanding, yet full of morality. "He's a wonderful nature, but
+he can't live like the lilies. He's all right, you know, but he must
+have a high interest." She had more than once remarked that his affairs
+were sadly involved, but that they must get him--Maisie and she
+together apparently--into Parliament. The child took it from her with a
+flutter of importance that Parliament was his natural sphere, and she
+was the less prepared to recognise a hindrance as she had never heard
+of any affairs whatever that were not involved. She had in the old
+days once been told by Mrs. Beale that her very own were, and with the
+refreshment of knowing that she HAD affairs the information hadn't in
+the least overwhelmed her. It was true and perhaps a little alarming
+that she had never heard of any such matters since then. Full of
+charm at any rate was the prospect of some day getting Sir Claude in;
+especially after Mrs. Wix, as the fruit of more midnight colloquies,
+once went so far as to observe that she really believed it was all
+that was wanted to save him. This critic, with these words, struck her
+disciple as cropping up, after the manner of mamma when mamma talked,
+quite in a new place. The child stared as at the jump of a kangaroo.
+"Save him from what?"
+
+Mrs. Wix debated, then covered a still greater distance. "Why just from
+awful misery."
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+She had not at the moment explained her ominous speech, but the light of
+remarkable events soon enabled her companion to read it. It may indeed
+be said that these days brought on a high quickening of Maisie's direct
+perceptions, of her sense of freedom to make out things for herself.
+This was helped by an emotion intrinsically far from sweet--the increase
+of the alarm that had most haunted her meditations. She had no need to
+be told, as on the morrow of the revelation of Sir Claude's danger she
+was told by Mrs. Wix, that her mother wanted more and more to know why
+the devil her father didn't send for her: she had too long expected
+mamma's curiosity on this point to express itself sharply. Maisie could
+meet such pressure so far as meeting it was to be in a position to
+reply, in words directly inspired, that papa would be hanged before he'd
+again be saddled with her. She therefore recognised the hour that in
+troubled glimpses she had long foreseen, the hour when--the phrase for
+it came back to her from Mrs. Beale--with two fathers, two mothers and
+two homes, six protections in all, she shouldn't know "wherever" to
+go. Such apprehension as she felt on this score was not diminished
+by the fact that Mrs. Wix herself was suddenly white with terror: a
+circumstance leading Maisie to the further knowledge that this lady
+was still more scared on her own behalf than on that of her pupil. A
+governess who had only one frock was not likely to have either two
+fathers or two mothers: accordingly if even with these resources Maisie
+was to be in the streets, where in the name of all that was dreadful
+was poor Mrs. Wix to be? She had had, it appeared, a tremendous brush
+with Ida, which had begun and ended with the request that she would be
+pleased on the spot to "bundle." It had come suddenly but completely,
+this signal of which she had gone in fear. The companions confessed to
+each other the dread each had hidden the worst of, but Mrs. Wix was
+better off than Maisie in having a plan of defence. She declined indeed
+to communicate it till it was quite mature; but meanwhile, she hastened
+to declare, her feet were firm in the schoolroom. They could only be
+loosened by force: she would "leave" for the police perhaps, but she
+wouldn't leave for mere outrage. That would be to play her ladyship's
+game, and it would take another turn of the screw to make her desert her
+darling. Her ladyship had come down with extraordinary violence: it had
+been one of many symptoms of a situation strained--"between them all,"
+as Mrs. Wix said, "but especially between the two"--to the point of God
+only knew what.
+
+Her description of the crisis made the child blanch. "Between which
+two?--papa and mamma?"
+
+"Dear no. I mean between your mother and HIM."
+
+Maisie, in this, recognised an opportunity to be really deep.
+"'Him'?--Mr. Perriam?"
+
+She fairly brought a blush to the scared face. "Well, my dear, I must
+say what you DON'T know ain't worth mentioning. That it won't go on for
+ever with Mr. Perriam--since I MUST meet you--you can suppose? But I
+meant dear Sir Claude."
+
+Maisie stood corrected rather than abashed. "I see. But it's about Mr.
+Perriam he's angry?"
+
+Mrs. Wix waited. "He says he's not."
+
+"Not angry? He has told you so?"
+
+Mrs. Wix looked at her hard. "Not about HIM!"
+
+"Then about some one else?"
+
+Mrs. Wix looked at her harder. "About some one else."
+
+"Lord Eric?" the child promptly brought forth.
+
+At this, of a sudden, her governess was more agitated. "Oh why, little
+unfortunate, should we discuss their dreadful names?"--and she threw
+herself for the millionth time on Maisie's neck. It took her pupil but
+a moment to feel that she quivered with insecurity, and, the contact
+of her terror aiding, the pair in another instant were sobbing in each
+other's arms. Then it was that, completely relaxed, demoralised as she
+had never been, Mrs. Wix suffered her wound to bleed and her resentment
+to gush. Her great bitterness was that Ida had called her false,
+denounced her hypocrisy and duplicity, reviled her spying and tattling,
+her lying and grovelling to Sir Claude. "Me, ME!" the poor woman wailed,
+"who've seen what I've seen and gone through everything only to cover
+her up and ease her off and smooth her down? If I've been an 'ipocrite
+it's the other way round: I've pretended, to him and to her, to myself
+and to you and to every one, NOT to see! It serves me right to have held
+my tongue before such horrors!"
+
+What horrors they were her companion forbore too closely to enquire,
+showing even signs not a few of an ability to take them for granted.
+That put the couple more than ever, in this troubled sea, in the same
+boat, so that with the consciousness of ideas on the part of her fellow
+mariner Maisie could sit close and wait. Sir Claude on the morrow came
+in to tea, and then the ideas were produced. It was extraordinary how
+the child's presence drew out their full strength. The principal one was
+startling, but Maisie appreciated the courage with which her governess
+handled it. It simply consisted of the proposal that whenever and
+wherever they should seek refuge Sir Claude should consent to share
+their asylum. On his protesting with all the warmth in nature against
+this note of secession she asked what else in the world was left to them
+if her ladyship should stop supplies.
+
+"Supplies be hanged, my dear woman!" said their delightful friend.
+"Leave supplies to me--I'll take care of supplies."
+
+Mrs. Wix rose to it. "Well, it's exactly because I knew you'd be so glad
+to do so that I put the question before you. There's a way to look after
+us better than any other. The way's just to come along with us."
+
+It hung before Maisie, Mrs. Wix's way, like a glittering picture, and
+she clasped her hands in ecstasy. "Come along, come along, come along!"
+
+Sir Claude looked from his stepdaughter back to her governess. "Do you
+mean leave this house and take up my abode with you?"
+
+"It will be the right thing--if you feel as you've told me you feel."
+Mrs. Wix, sustained and uplifted, was now as clear as a bell.
+
+Sir Claude had the air of trying to recall what he had told her; then
+the light broke that was always breaking to make his face more pleasant.
+"It's your happy thought that I shall take a house for you?"
+
+"For the wretched homeless child. Any roof--over OUR heads--will do for
+us; but of course for you it will have to be something really nice."
+
+Sir Claude's eyes reverted to Maisie, rather hard, as she thought; and
+there was a shade in his very smile that seemed to show her--though she
+also felt it didn't show Mrs. Wix--that the accommodation prescribed
+must loom to him pretty large. The next moment, however, he laughed
+gaily enough. "My dear lady, you exaggerate tremendously MY poor little
+needs." Mrs. Wix had once mentioned to her young friend that when Sir
+Claude called her his dear lady he could do anything with her; and
+Maisie felt a certain anxiety to see what he would do now. Well, he only
+addressed her a remark of which the child herself was aware of feeling
+the force. "Your plan appeals to me immensely; but of course--don't you
+see--I shall have to consider the position I put myself in by leaving my
+wife."
+
+"You'll also have to remember," Mrs. Wix replied, "that if you don't
+look out your wife won't give you time to consider. Her ladyship will
+leave YOU."
+
+"Ah my good friend, I do look out!" the young man returned while Maisie
+helped herself afresh to bread and butter. "Of course if that happens I
+shall have somehow to turn round; but I hope with all my heart it won't.
+I beg your pardon," he continued to his stepdaughter, "for appearing to
+discuss that sort of possibility under your sharp little nose. But the
+fact is I FORGET half the time that Ida's your sainted mother."
+
+"So do I!" said Maisie, her mouth full of bread and butter and to put
+him the more in the right.
+
+Her protectress, at this, was upon her again. "The little desolate
+precious pet!" For the rest of the conversation she was enclosed in Mrs.
+Wix's arms, and as they sat there interlocked Sir Claude, before them
+with his tea-cup, looked down at them in deepening thought. Shrink
+together as they might they couldn't help, Maisie felt, being a very
+large lumpish image of what Mrs. Wix required of his slim fineness.
+She knew moreover that this lady didn't make it better by adding in a
+moment: "Of course we shouldn't dream of a whole house. Any sort of
+little lodging, however humble, would be only too blest."
+
+"But it would have to be something that would hold us all," said Sir
+Claude.
+
+"Oh yes," Mrs. Wix concurred; "the whole point's our being together.
+While you're waiting, before you act, for her ladyship to take some
+step, our position here will come to an impossible pass. You don't
+know what I went through with her for you yesterday--and for our poor
+darling; but it's not a thing I can promise you often to face again. She
+cast me out in horrible language--she has instructed the servants not to
+wait on me."
+
+"Oh the poor servants are all right!" Sir Claude eagerly cried.
+
+"They're certainly better than their mistress. It's too dreadful that I
+should sit here and say of your wife, Sir Claude, and of Maisie's own
+mother, that she's lower than a domestic; but my being betrayed into
+such remarks is just a reason the more for our getting away. I shall
+stay till I'm taken by the shoulders, but that may happen any day. What
+also may perfectly happen, you must permit me to repeat, is that she'll
+go off to get rid of us."
+
+"Oh if she'll only do that!" Sir Claude laughed. "That would be the very
+making of us!"
+
+"Don't say it--don't say it!" Mrs. Wix pleaded. "Don't speak of anything
+so fatal. You know what I mean. We must all cling to the right. You
+mustn't be bad."
+
+Sir Claude set down his tea-cup; he had become more grave and he
+pensively wiped his moustache. "Won't all the world say I'm awful if I
+leave the house before--before she has bolted? They'll say it was my
+doing so that made her bolt."
+
+Maisie could grasp the force of this reasoning, but it offered no check
+to Mrs. Wix. "Why need you mind that--if you've done it for so high a
+motive? Think of the beauty of it," the good lady pressed.
+
+"Of bolting with YOU?" Sir Claude ejaculated.
+
+She faintly smiled--she even faintly coloured. "So far from doing you
+harm it will do you the highest good. Sir Claude, if you'll listen to
+me, it will save you."
+
+"Save me from what?"
+
+Maisie, at this question, waited with renewed suspense for an answer
+that would bring the thing to some finer point than their companion
+had brought it to before. But there was on the contrary only more
+mystification in Mrs. Wix's reply. "Ah from you know what!"
+
+"Do you mean from some other woman!"
+
+"Yes--from a real bad one."
+
+Sir Claude at least, the child could see, was not mystified; so little
+indeed that a smile of intelligence broke afresh in his eyes. He turned
+them in vague discomfort to Maisie, and then something in the way she
+met them caused him to chuck her playfully under the chin. It was not
+till after this that he good-naturedly met Mrs. Wix. "You think me much
+worse than I am."
+
+"If that were true," she returned, "I wouldn't appeal to you. I do, Sir
+Claude, in the name of all that's good in you--and oh so earnestly! We
+can help each other. What you'll do for our young friend here I needn't
+say. That isn't even what I want to speak of now. What I want to speak
+of is what you'll GET--don't you see?--from such an opportunity to take
+hold. Take hold of US--take hold of HER. Make her your duty--make her
+your life: she'll repay you a thousand-fold!"
+
+It was to Mrs. Wix, during this appeal, that Maisie's contemplation
+transferred itself: partly because, though her heart was in her throat
+for trepidation, her delicacy deterred her from appearing herself to
+press the question; partly from the coercion of seeing Mrs. Wix come out
+as Mrs. Wix had never come before--not even on the day of her call at
+Mrs. Beale's with the news of mamma's marriage. On that day Mrs. Beale
+had surpassed her in dignity, but nobody could have surpassed her now.
+There was in fact at this moment a fascination for her pupil in the hint
+she seemed to give that she had still more of that surprise behind. So
+the sharpened sense of spectatorship was the child's main support, the
+long habit, from the first, of seeing herself in discussion and finding
+in the fury of it--she had had a glimpse of the game of football--a sort
+of compensation for the doom of a peculiar passivity. It gave her often
+an odd air of being present at her history in as separate a manner as if
+she could only get at experience by flattening her nose against a pane
+of glass. Such she felt to be the application of her nose while she
+waited for the effect of Mrs. Wix's eloquence. Sir Claude, however,
+didn't keep her long in a position so ungraceful: he sat down and opened
+his arms to her as he had done the day he came for her at her father's,
+and while he held her there, looking at her kindly, but as if their
+companion had brought the blood a good deal to his face, he said:
+
+"Dear Mrs. Wix is magnificent, but she's rather too grand about it.
+I mean the situation isn't after all quite so desperate or quite so
+simple. But I give you my word before her, and I give it to her before
+you, that I'll never, never, forsake you. Do you hear that, old fellow,
+and do you take it in? I'll stick to you through everything."
+
+Maisie did take it in--took it with a long tremor of all her little
+being; and then as, to emphasise it, he drew her closer she buried her
+head on his shoulder and cried without sound and without pain. While she
+was so engaged she became aware that his own breast was agitated, and
+gathered from it with rapture that his tears were as silently flowing.
+Presently she heard a loud sob from Mrs. Wix--Mrs. Wix was the only one
+who made a noise.
+
+She was to have made, for some time, none other but this, though
+within a few days, in conversation with her pupil, she described her
+intercourse with Ida as little better than the state of being battered.
+There was as yet nevertheless no attempt to eject her by force, and she
+recognised that Sir Claude, taking such a stand as never before, had
+intervened with passion and with success. As Maisie remembered--and
+remembered wholly without disdain--that he had told her he was afraid of
+her ladyship, the little girl took this act of resolution as a proof of
+what, in the spirit of the engagement sealed by all their tears, he was
+really prepared to do. Mrs. Wix spoke to her of the pecuniary sacrifice
+by which she herself purchased the scant security she enjoyed and which,
+if it was a defence against the hand of violence, yet left her exposed
+to incredible rudeness. Didn't her ladyship find every hour of the
+day some artful means to humiliate and trample upon her? There was a
+quarter's salary owing her--a great name, even Maisie could suspect,
+for a small matter; she should never see it as long as she lived, but
+keeping quiet about it put her ladyship, thank heaven, a little in one's
+power. Now that he was doing so much else she could never have the
+grossness to apply for it to Sir Claude. He had sent home for schoolroom
+consumption a huge frosted cake, a wonderful delectable mountain with
+geological strata of jam, which might, with economy, see them through
+many days of their siege; but it was none the less known to Mrs. Wix
+that his affairs were more and more involved, and her fellow partaker
+looked back tenderly, in the light of these involutions, at the
+expression of face with which he had greeted the proposal that he should
+set up another establishment. Maisie felt that if their maintenance
+should hang by a thread they must still demean themselves with the
+highest delicacy. What he was doing was simply acting without delay, so
+far as his embarrassments permitted, on the inspiration of his elder
+friend. There was at this season a wonderful month of May--as soft as a
+drop of the wind in a gale that had kept one awake--when he took out his
+stepdaughter with a fresh alacrity and they rambled the great town in
+search, as Mrs. Wix called it, of combined amusement and instruction.
+
+They rode on the top of 'buses; they visited outlying parks; they went
+to cricket-matches where Maisie fell asleep; they tried a hundred places
+for the best one to have tea. This was his direct way of rising to Mrs.
+Wix's grand lesson--of making his little accepted charge his duty and
+his life. They dropped, under incontrollable impulses, into shops that
+they agreed were too big, to look at things that they agreed were too
+small, and it was during these hours that Mrs. Wix, alone at home, but
+a subject of regretful reference as they pulled off their gloves for
+refreshment, subsequently described herself as least sheltered from the
+blows her ladyship had achieved such ingenuity in dealing. She again
+and again repeated that she wouldn't so much have minded having her
+"attainments" held up to scorn and her knowledge of every subject
+denied, hadn't she been branded as "low" in character and tone. There
+was by this time no pretence on the part of any one of denying it to be
+fortunate that her ladyship habitually left London every Saturday and
+was more and more disposed to a return late in the week. It was almost
+equally public that she regarded as a preposterous "pose," and indeed as
+a direct insult to herself, her husband's attitude of staying behind to
+look after a child for whom the most elaborate provision had been made.
+If there was a type Ida despised, Sir Claude communicated to Maisie, it
+was the man who pottered about town of a Sunday; and he also mentioned
+how often she had declared to him that if he had a grain of spirit
+he would be ashamed to accept a menial position about Mr. Farange's
+daughter. It was her ladyship's contention that he was in craven fear
+of his predecessor--otherwise he would recognise it as an obligation of
+plain decency to protect his wife against the outrage of that person's
+barefaced attempt to swindle her. The swindle was that Mr. Farange
+put upon her the whole intolerable burden; "and even when I pay for
+you myself," Sir Claude averred to his young friend, "she accuses me
+the more of truckling and grovelling." It was Mrs. Wix's conviction,
+they both knew, arrived at on independent grounds, that Ida's weekly
+excursions were feelers for a more considerable absence. If she came
+back later each week the week would be sure to arrive when she wouldn't
+come back at all. This appearance had of course much to do with Mrs.
+Wix's actual valour. Could they but hold out long enough the snug little
+home with Sir Claude would find itself informally established.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+This might moreover have been taken to be the sense of a remark made by
+her stepfather as--one rainy day when the streets were all splash and
+two umbrellas unsociable and the wanderers had sought shelter in the
+National Gallery--Maisie sat beside him staring rather sightlessly at a
+roomful of pictures which he had mystified her much by speaking of with
+a bored sigh as a "silly superstition." They represented, with patches
+of gold and cataracts of purple, with stiff saints and angular angels,
+with ugly Madonnas and uglier babies, strange prayers and prostrations;
+so that she at first took his words for a protest against devotional
+idolatry--all the more that he had of late often come with her and
+with Mrs. Wix to morning church, a place of worship of Mrs. Wix's own
+choosing, where there was nothing of that sort; no haloes on heads,
+but only, during long sermons, beguiling backs of bonnets, and where,
+as her governess always afterwards observed, he gave the most earnest
+attention. It presently appeared, however, that his reference was merely
+to the affectation of admiring such ridiculous works--an admonition that
+she received from him as submissively as she received everything. What
+turn it gave to their talk needn't here be recorded: the transition to
+the colourless schoolroom and lonely Mrs. Wix was doubtless an effect of
+relaxed interest in what was before them. Maisie expressed in her own
+way the truth that she never went home nowadays without expecting to
+find the temple of her studies empty and the poor priestess cast out.
+This conveyed a full appreciation of her peril, and it was in rejoinder
+that Sir Claude uttered, acknowledging the source of that peril, the
+reassurance at which I have glanced. "Don't be afraid, my dear: I've
+squared her." It required indeed a supplement when he saw that it left
+the child momentarily blank. "I mean that your mother lets me do what I
+want so long as I let her do what SHE wants."
+
+"So you ARE doing what you want?" Maisie asked.
+
+"Rather, Miss Farange!"
+
+Miss Farange turned it over. "And she's doing the same?"
+
+"Up to the hilt!"
+
+Again she considered. "Then, please, what may it be?"
+
+"I wouldn't tell you for the whole world."
+
+She gazed at a gaunt Madonna; after which she broke into a slow smile.
+"Well, I don't care, so long as you do let her."
+
+"Oh you monster!"--and Sir Claude's gay vehemence brought him to his
+feet.
+
+Another day, in another place--a place in Baker Street where at a hungry
+hour she had sat down with him to tea and buns--he brought out a question
+disconnected from previous talk. "I say, you know, what do you suppose
+your father WOULD do?"
+
+Maisie hadn't long to cast about or to question his pleasant eyes. "If
+you were really to go with us? He'd make a great complaint."
+
+He seemed amused at the term she employed. "Oh I shouldn't mind a
+'complaint'!"
+
+"He'd talk to every one about it," said Maisie.
+
+"Well, I shouldn't mind that either."
+
+"Of course not," the child hastened to respond. "You've told me you're
+not afraid of him."
+
+"The question is are you?" said Sir Claude.
+
+Maisie candidly considered; then she spoke resolutely. "No, not of
+papa."
+
+"But of somebody else?"
+
+"Certainly, of lots of people."
+
+"Of your mother first and foremost of course."
+
+"Dear, yes; more of mamma than of--than of--"
+
+"Than of what?" Sir Claude asked as she hesitated for a comparison.
+
+She thought over all objects of dread. "Than of a wild elephant!" she at
+last declared. "And you are too," she reminded him as he laughed.
+
+"Oh yes, I am too."
+
+Again she meditated. "Why then did you marry her?"
+
+"Just because I WAS afraid."
+
+"Even when she loved you?"
+
+"That made her the more alarming."
+
+For Maisie herself, though her companion seemed to find it droll, this
+opened up depths of gravity. "More alarming than she is now?"
+
+"Well, in a different way. Fear, unfortunately, is a very big thing, and
+there's a great variety of kinds."
+
+She took this in with complete intelligence. "Then I think I've got them
+all."
+
+"You?" her friend cried. "Nonsense! You're thoroughly 'game.'"
+
+"I'm awfully afraid of Mrs. Beale," Maisie objected.
+
+He raised his smooth brows. "That charming woman?"
+
+"Well," she answered, "you can't understand it because you're not in the
+same state."
+
+She had been going on with a luminous "But" when, across the table, he
+laid his hand on her arm. "I CAN understand it," he confessed. "I AM in
+the same state."
+
+"Oh but she likes you so!" Maisie promptly pleaded.
+
+Sir Claude literally coloured. "That has something to do with it."
+
+Maisie wondered again. "Being liked with being afraid?"
+
+"Yes, when it amounts to adoration."
+
+"Then why aren't you afraid of ME?"
+
+"Because with you it amounts to that?" He had kept his hand on her arm.
+"Well, what prevents is simply that you're the gentlest spirit on earth.
+Besides--" he pursued; but he came to a pause.
+
+"Besides--?"
+
+"I SHOULD be in fear if you were older--there! See--you already make me
+talk nonsense," the young man added. "The question's about your father.
+Is he likewise afraid of Mrs. Beale?"
+
+"I think not. And yet he loves her," Maisie mused.
+
+"Oh no--he doesn't; not a bit!" After which, as his companion stared,
+Sir Claude apparently felt that he must make this oddity fit with her
+recollections. "There's nothing of that sort NOW."
+
+But Maisie only stared the more. "They've changed?"
+
+"Like your mother and me."
+
+She wondered how he knew. "Then you've seen Mrs. Beale again?"
+
+He demurred. "Oh no. She has written to me," he presently subjoined.
+"SHE'S not afraid of your father either. No one at all is--really."
+Then he went on while Maisie's little mind, with its filial spring
+too relaxed from of old for a pang at this want of parental majesty,
+speculated on the vague relation between Mrs. Beale's courage and the
+question, for Mrs. Wix and herself, of a neat lodging with their friend.
+"She wouldn't care a bit if Mr. Farange should make a row."
+
+"Do you mean about you and me and Mrs. Wix? Why should she care? It
+wouldn't hurt HER."
+
+Sir Claude, with his legs out and his hand diving into his
+trousers-pocket, threw back his head with a laugh just perceptibly
+tempered, as she thought, by a sigh. "My dear stepchild, you're
+delightful! Look here, we must pay. You've had five buns?"
+
+"How CAN you?" Maisie demanded, crimson under the eye of the young woman
+who had stepped to their board. "I've had three."
+
+Shortly after this Mrs. Wix looked so ill that it was to be feared her
+ladyship had treated her to some unexampled passage. Maisie asked if
+anything worse than usual had occurred; whereupon the poor woman brought
+out with infinite gloom: "He has been seeing Mrs. Beale."
+
+"Sir Claude?" The child remembered what he had said. "Oh no--not SEEING
+her!"
+
+"I beg your pardon. I absolutely know it." Mrs. Wix was as positive as
+she was dismal.
+
+Maisie nevertheless ventured to challenge her. "And how, please, do you
+know it?"
+
+She faltered a moment. "From herself. I've been to see her."
+
+Then on Maisie's visible surprise: "I went yesterday while you were out
+with him. He has seen her repeatedly."
+
+It was not wholly clear to Maisie why Mrs. Wix should be prostrate at
+this discovery; but her general consciousness of the way things could be
+both perpetrated and resented always eased off for her the strain of the
+particular mystery. "There may be some mistake. He says he hasn't."
+
+Mrs. Wix turned paler, as if this were a still deeper ground for alarm.
+"He says so?--he denies that he has seen her?"
+
+"He told me so three days ago. Perhaps she's mistaken," Maisie
+suggested.
+
+"Do you mean perhaps she lies? She lies whenever it suits her, I'm very
+sure. But I know when people lie--and that's what I've loved in you,
+that YOU never do. Mrs. Beale didn't yesterday at any rate. He HAS seen
+her."
+
+Maisie was silent a little. "He says not," she then repeated.
+"Perhaps--perhaps--" Once more she paused.
+
+"Do you mean perhaps HE lies?"
+
+"Gracious goodness, no!" Maisie shouted.
+
+Mrs. Wix's bitterness, however, again overflowed. "He does, he does,"
+she cried, "and it's that that's just the worst of it! They'll take
+you, they'll take you, and what in the world will then become of me?"
+She threw herself afresh upon her pupil and wept over her with the
+inevitable effect of causing the child's own tears to flow. But Maisie
+couldn't have told you if she had been crying at the image of their
+separation or at that of Sir Claude's untruth. As regards this deviation
+it was agreed between them that they were not in a position to bring it
+home to him. Mrs. Wix was in dread of doing anything to make him, as
+she said, "worse"; and Maisie was sufficiently initiated to be able to
+reflect that in speaking to her as he had done he had only wished to be
+tender of Mrs. Beale. It fell in with all her inclinations to think of
+him as tender, and she forbore to let him know that the two ladies had,
+as SHE would never do, betrayed him.
+
+She had not long to keep her secret, for the next day, when she went
+out with him, he suddenly said in reference to some errand he had first
+proposed: "No, we won't do that--we'll do something else." On this, a
+few steps from the door, he stopped a hansom and helped her in; then
+following her he gave the driver over the top an address that she lost.
+When he was seated beside her she asked him where they were going; to
+which he replied "My dear child, you'll see." She saw while she watched
+and wondered that they took the direction of the Regent's Park; but
+she didn't know why he should make a mystery of that, and it was not
+till they passed under a pretty arch and drew up at a white house
+in a terrace from which the view, she thought, must be lovely that,
+mystified, she clutched him and broke out: "I shall see papa?"
+
+He looked down at her with a kind smile. "No, probably not. I haven't
+brought you for that."
+
+"Then whose house is it?"
+
+"It's your father's. They've moved here."
+
+She looked about: she had known Mr. Farange in four or five houses, and
+there was nothing astonishing in this except that it was the nicest
+place yet. "But I shall see Mrs. Beale?"
+
+"It's to see her that I brought you."
+
+She stared, very white, and, with her hand on his arm, though they had
+stopped, kept him sitting in the cab. "To leave me, do you mean?"
+
+He could scarce bring it out. "It's not for me to say if you CAN stay.
+We must look into it."
+
+"But if I do I shall see papa?"
+
+"Oh some time or other, no doubt." Then Sir Claude went on: "Have you
+really so very great a dread of that?"
+
+Maisie glanced away over the apron of the cab--gazed a minute at the
+green expanse of the Regent's Park and, at this moment colouring to the
+roots of her hair, felt the full, hot rush of an emotion more mature
+than any she had yet known. It consisted of an odd unexpected shame at
+placing in an inferior light, to so perfect a gentleman and so charming
+a person as Sir Claude, so very near a relative as Mr. Farange. She
+remembered, however, her friend's telling her that no one was seriously
+afraid of her father, and she turned round with a small toss of her
+head. "Oh I dare say I can manage him!"
+
+Sir Claude smiled, but she noted that the violence with which she had
+just changed colour had brought into his own face a slight compunctious
+and embarrassed flush. It was as if he had caught his first glimpse of
+her sense of responsibility. Neither of them made a movement to get out,
+and after an instant he said to her: "Look here, if you say so we won't
+after all go in."
+
+"Ah but I want to see Mrs. Beale!" the child gently wailed.
+
+"But what if she does decide to take you? Then, you know, you'll have to
+remain."
+
+Maisie turned it over. "Straight on--and give you up?"
+
+"Well--I don't quite know about giving me up."
+
+"I mean as I gave up Mrs. Beale when I last went to mamma's. I couldn't
+do without you here for anything like so long a time as that." It struck
+her as a hundred years since she had seen Mrs. Beale, who was on the
+other side of the door they were so near and whom she yet had not taken
+the jump to clasp in her arms.
+
+"Oh I dare say you'll see more of me than you've seen of Mrs. Beale.
+It isn't in ME to be so beautifully discreet," Sir Claude said. "But
+all the same," he continued, "I leave the thing, now that we're here,
+absolutely WITH you. You must settle it. We'll only go in if you say so.
+If you don't say so we'll turn right round and drive away."
+
+"So in that case Mrs. Beale won't take me?"
+
+"Well--not by any act of ours."
+
+"And I shall be able to go on with mamma?" Maisie asked.
+
+"Oh I don't say that!"
+
+She considered. "But I thought you said you had squared her?"
+
+Sir Claude poked his stick at the splashboard of the cab. "Not, my dear
+child, to the point she now requires."
+
+"Then if she turns me out and I don't come here--"
+
+Sir Claude promptly took her up. "What do I offer you, you naturally
+enquire? My poor chick, that's just what I ask myself. I don't see it,
+I confess, quite as straight as Mrs. Wix."
+
+His companion gazed a moment at what Mrs. Wix saw. "You mean WE can't
+make a little family?"
+
+"It's very base of me, no doubt, but I can't wholly chuck your mother."
+
+Maisie, at this, emitted a low but lengthened sigh, a slight sound of
+reluctant assent which would certainly have been amusing to an auditor.
+"Then there isn't anything else?"
+
+"I vow I don't quite see what there is."
+
+Maisie waited; her silence seemed to signify that she too had no
+alternative to suggest. But she made another appeal. "If I come here
+you'll come to see me?"
+
+"I won't lose sight of you."
+
+"But how often will you come?" As he hung fire she pressed him. "Often
+and often?"
+
+Still he faltered. "My dear old woman--" he began. Then he paused again,
+going on the next moment with a change of tone. "You're too funny! Yes
+then," he said; "often and often."
+
+"All right!" Maisie jumped out. Mrs. Beale was at home, but not in the
+drawing-room, and when the butler had gone for her the child suddenly
+broke out: "But when I'm here what will Mrs. Wix do?"
+
+"Ah you should have thought of that sooner!" said her companion with the
+first faint note of asperity she had ever heard him sound.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+Mrs Beale fairly swooped upon her and the effect of the whole hour was
+to show the child how much, how quite formidably indeed, after all, she
+was loved. This was the more the case as her stepmother, so changed--in
+the very manner of her mother--that she really struck her as a new
+acquaintance, somehow recalled more familiarity than Maisie could feel.
+A rich strong expressive affection in short pounced upon her in the
+shape of a handsomer, ampler, older Mrs. Beale. It was like making a
+fine friend, and they hadn't been a minute together before she felt
+elated at the way she had met the choice imposed on her in the cab.
+There was a whole future in the combination of Mrs. Beale's beauty and
+Mrs. Beale's hug. She seemed to Maisie charming to behold, and also to
+have no connexion at all with anybody who had once mended underclothing
+and had meals in the nursery. The child knew one of her father's wives
+was a woman of fashion, but she had always dimly made a distinction, not
+applying that epithet without reserve to the other. Mrs. Beale had since
+their separation acquired a conspicuous right to it, and Maisie's first
+flush of response to her present delight coloured all her splendour with
+meanings that this time were sweet. She had told Sir Claude she was
+afraid of the lady in the Regent's Park; but she had confidence enough
+to break on the spot, into the frankest appreciation. "Why, aren't you
+beautiful? Isn't she beautiful, Sir Claude, ISN'T she?"
+
+"The handsomest woman in London, simply," Sir Claude gallantly replied.
+"Just as sure as you're the best little girl!"
+
+Well, the handsomest woman in London gave herself up, with tender
+lustrous looks and every demonstration of fondness, to a happiness at
+last clutched again. There was almost as vivid a bloom in her maturity
+as in mamma's, and it took her but a short time to give her little
+friend an impression of positive power--an impression that seemed to
+begin like a long bright day. This was a perception on Maisie's part
+that neither mamma, nor Sir Claude, nor Mrs. Wix, with their immense and
+so varied respective attractions, had exactly kindled, and that made an
+immediate difference when the talk, as it promptly did, began to turn to
+her father. Oh yes, Mr. Farange was a complication, but she saw now that
+he wouldn't be one for his daughter. For Mrs. Beale certainly he was an
+immense one--she speedily made known as much; but Mrs. Beale from this
+moment presented herself to Maisie as a person to whom a great gift had
+come. The great gift was just for handling complications. Maisie felt
+how little she made of them when, after she had dropped to Sir Claude
+some recall of a previous meeting, he made answer, with a sound of
+consternation and yet an air of relief, that he had denied to their
+companion their having, since the day he came for her, seen each other
+till that moment.
+
+Mrs. Beale could but vaguely pity it. "Why did you do anything so
+silly?"
+
+"To protect your reputation."
+
+"From Maisie?" Mrs. Beale was much amused. "My reputation with Maisie is
+too good to suffer."
+
+"But you believed me, you rascal, didn't you?" Sir Claude asked of the
+child.
+
+She looked at him; she smiled. "Her reputation did suffer. I discovered
+you had been here."
+
+He was not too chagrined to laugh. "The way, my dear, you talk of that
+sort of thing!"
+
+"How should she talk," Mrs. Beale wanted to know, "after all this
+wretched time with her mother?"
+
+"It was not mamma who told me," Maisie explained. "It was only Mrs.
+Wix." She was hesitating whether to bring out before Sir Claude the
+source of Mrs. Wix's information; but Mrs. Beale, addressing the young
+man, showed the vanity of scruples.
+
+"Do you know that preposterous person came to see me a day or two
+ago?--when I told her I had seen you repeatedly."
+
+Sir Claude, for once in a way, was disconcerted. "The old cat! She never
+told me. Then you thought I had lied?" he demanded of Maisie.
+
+She was flurried by the term with which he had qualified her gentle
+friend, but she took the occasion for one to which she must in every
+manner lend herself. "Oh I didn't mind! But Mrs. Wix did," she added
+with an intention benevolent to her governess.
+
+Her intention was not very effective as regards Mrs. Beale. "Mrs. Wix is
+too idiotic!" that lady declared.
+
+"But to you, of all people," Sir Claude asked, "what had she to say?"
+
+"Why that, like Mrs. Micawber--whom she must, I think, rather
+resemble--she will never, never, never desert Miss Farange."
+
+"Oh I'll make that all right!" Sir Claude cheerfully returned.
+
+"I'm sure I hope so, my dear man," said Mrs. Beale, while Maisie
+wondered just how he would proceed. Before she had time to ask Mrs.
+Beale continued: "That's not all she came to do, if you please. But
+you'll never guess the rest."
+
+"Shall _I_ guess it?" Maisie quavered.
+
+Mrs. Beale was again amused. "Why you're just the person! It must be
+quite the sort of thing you've heard at your awful mother's. Have you
+never seen women there crying to her to 'spare' the men they love?"
+
+Maisie, wondering, tried to remember; but Sir Claude was freshly
+diverted. "Oh they don't trouble about Ida! Mrs. Wix cried to you to
+spare ME?"
+
+"She regularly went down on her knees to me."
+
+"The darling old dear!" the young man exclaimed.
+
+These words were a joy to Maisie--they made up for his previous
+description of Mrs. Wix. "And WILL you spare him?" she asked of Mrs.
+Beale.
+
+Her stepmother, seizing her and kissing her again, seemed charmed with
+the tone of her question. "Not an inch of him! I'll pick him to the
+bone!"
+
+"You mean that he'll really come often?" Maisie pressed.
+
+Mrs. Beale turned lovely eyes to Sir Claude. "That's not for me to
+say--its for him."
+
+He said nothing at once, however; with his hands in his pockets
+and vaguely humming a tune--even Maisie could see he was a little
+nervous--he only walked to the window and looked out at the Regent's
+Park. "Well, he has promised," Maisie said. "But how will papa like it?"
+
+"His being in and out? Ah that's a question that, to be frank with you,
+my dear, hardly matters. In point of fact, however, Beale greatly enjoys
+the idea that Sir Claude too, poor man, has been forced to quarrel with
+your mother."
+
+Sir Claude turned round and spoke gravely and kindly. "Don't be afraid,
+Maisie; you won't lose sight of me."
+
+"Thank you so much!" Maisie was radiant. "But what I meant--don't you
+know?--was what papa would say to ME."
+
+"Oh I've been having that out with him," said Mrs. Beale. "He'll behave
+well enough. You see the great difficulty is that, though he changes
+every three days about everything else in the world, he has never
+changed about your mother. It's a caution, the way he hates her."
+
+Sir Claude gave a short laugh. "It certainly can't beat the way she
+still hates HIM!"
+
+"Well," Mrs. Beale went on obligingly, "nothing can take the place of
+that feeling with either of them, and the best way they can think of to
+show it is for each to leave you as long as possible on the hands of the
+other. There's nothing, as you've seen for yourself, that makes either
+so furious. It isn't, asking so little as you do, that you're much of
+an expense or a trouble; it's only that you make each feel so well how
+nasty the other wants to be. Therefore Beale goes on loathing your
+mother too much to have any great fury left for any one else. Besides,
+you know, I've squared him."
+
+"Oh Lord!" Sir Claude cried with a louder laugh and turning again to the
+window.
+
+"_I_ know how!" Maisie was prompt to proclaim. "By letting him do what
+he wants on condition that he lets you also do it."
+
+"You're too delicious, my own pet!"--she was involved in another hug.
+"How in the world have I got on so long without you? I've not been
+happy, love," said Mrs. Beale with her cheek to the child's.
+
+"Be happy now!"--she throbbed with shy tenderness.
+
+"I think I shall be. You'll save me."
+
+"As I'm saving Sir Claude?" the little girl asked eagerly.
+
+Mrs. Beale, a trifle at a loss, appealed to her visitor, "Is she
+really?"
+
+He showed high amusement at Maisie's question. "It's dear Mrs. Wix's
+idea. There may be something in it."
+
+"He makes me his duty--he makes me his life," Maisie set forth to her
+stepmother.
+
+"Why that's what _I_ want to do!"--Mrs. Beale, so anticipated, turned
+pink with astonishment.
+
+"Well, you can do it together. Then he'll HAVE to come!"
+
+Mrs. Beale by this time had her young friend fairly in her lap and she
+smiled up at Sir Claude. "Shall we do it together?"
+
+His laughter had dropped, and for a moment he turned his handsome
+serious face not to his hostess, but to his stepdaughter. "Well, it's
+rather more decent than some things. Upon my soul, the way things are
+going, it seems to me the only decency!" He had the air of arguing it
+out to Maisie, of presenting it, through an impulse of conscience, as a
+connexion in which they could honourably see her participate; though his
+plea of mere "decency" might well have appeared to fall below her rosy
+little vision. "If we're not good for YOU" he exclaimed, "I'll be hanged
+if I know who we shall be good for!"
+
+Mrs. Beale showed the child an intenser light. "I dare say you WILL save
+us--from one thing and another."
+
+"Oh I know what she'll save ME from!" Sir Claude roundly asserted.
+"There'll be rows of course," he went on.
+
+Mrs. Beale quickly took him up. "Yes, but they'll be nothing--for you
+at least--to the rows your wife makes as it is. I can bear what _I_
+suffer--I can't bear what you go through."
+
+"We're doing a good deal for you, you know, young woman," Sir Claude
+went on to Maisie with the same gravity.
+
+She coloured with a sense of obligation and the eagerness of her desire
+it should be remarked how little was lost on her. "Oh I know!"
+
+"Then you must keep us all right!" This time he laughed.
+
+"How you talk to her!" cried Mrs. Beale.
+
+"No worse than you!" he gaily answered.
+
+"Handsome is that handsome does!" she returned in the same spirit. "You
+can take off your things," she went on, releasing Maisie.
+
+The child, on her feet, was all emotion. "Then I'm just to stop--this
+way?"
+
+"It will do as well as any other. Sir Claude, to-morrow, will have your
+things brought."
+
+"I'll bring them myself. Upon my word I'll see them packed!" Sir Claude
+promised. "Come here and unbutton."
+
+He had beckoned his young companion to where he sat, and he helped
+to disengage her from her coverings while Mrs. Beale, from a little
+distance, smiled at the hand he displayed. "There's a stepfather for
+you! I'm bound to say, you know, that he makes up for the want of other
+people."
+
+"He makes up for the want of a nurse!" Sir Claude laughed. "Don't you
+remember I told you so the very first time?"
+
+"Remember? It was exactly what made me think so well of you!"
+
+"Nothing would induce me," the young man said to Maisie, "to tell you
+what made me think so well of HER." Having divested the child he kissed
+her gently and gave her a little pat to make her stand off. The pat was
+accompanied with a vague sigh in which his gravity of a moment before
+came back. "All the same, if you hadn't had the fatal gift of beauty--"
+
+"Well, what?" Maisie asked, wondering why he paused. It was the first
+time she had heard of her beauty.
+
+"Why, we shouldn't all be thinking so well of each other!"
+
+"He isn't speaking of personal loveliness--you've not THAT vulgar
+beauty, my dear, at all," Mrs. Beale explained. "He's just talking of
+plain dull charm of character."
+
+"Her character's the most extraordinary thing in all the world," Sir
+Claude stated to Mrs. Beale.
+
+"Oh I know all about that sort of thing!"--she fairly bridled with the
+knowledge.
+
+It gave Maisie somehow a sudden sense of responsibility from which she
+sought refuge. "Well, you've got it too, 'that sort of thing'--you've
+got the fatal gift: you both really have!" she broke out.
+
+"Beauty of character? My dear boy, we haven't a pennyworth!" Sir Claude
+protested.
+
+"Speak for yourself, sir!" she leaped lightly from Mrs. Beale. "I'm good
+and I'm clever. What more do you want? For you, I'll spare your blushes
+and not be personal--I'll simply say that you're as handsome as you can
+stick together."
+
+"You're both very lovely; you can't get out of it!"--Maisie felt the
+need of carrying her point. "And it's beautiful to see you side by
+side."
+
+Sir Claude had taken his hat and stick; he stood looking at her a
+moment. "You're a comfort in trouble! But I must go home and pack you."
+
+"And when will you come back?--to-morrow, to-morrow?"
+
+"You see what we're in for!" he said to Mrs. Beale.
+
+"Well, I can bear it if you can."
+
+Their companion gazed from one of them to the other, thinking that
+though she had been happy indeed between Sir Claude and Mrs. Wix she
+should evidently be happier still between Sir Claude and Mrs. Beale. But
+it was like being perched on a prancing horse, and she made a movement
+to hold on to something. "Then, you know, shan't I bid goodbye to Mrs.
+Wix?"
+
+"Oh I'll make it all right with her," said Sir Claude.
+
+Maisie considered. "And with mamma?"
+
+"Ah mamma!" he sadly laughed.
+
+Even for the child this was scarcely ambiguous; but Mrs. Beale
+endeavoured to contribute to its clearness. "Your mother will crow,
+she'll crow--"
+
+"Like the early bird!" said Sir Claude as she looked about for a
+comparison.
+
+"She'll need no consolation," Mrs. Beale went on, "for having made your
+father grandly blaspheme."
+
+Maisie stared. "Will he grandly blaspheme?" It was impressive, it might
+have been out of the Bible, and her question produced a fresh play of
+caresses, in which Sir Claude also engaged. She wondered meanwhile who,
+if Mrs. Wix was disposed of, would represent in her life the element of
+geography and anecdote; and she presently surmounted the delicacy she
+felt about asking. "Won't there be any one to give me lessons?"
+
+Mrs. Beale was prepared with a reply that struck her as absolutely
+magnificent. "You shall have such lessons as you've never had in all
+your life. You shall go to courses."
+
+"Courses?" Maisie had never heard of such things.
+
+"At institutions--on subjects."
+
+Maisie continued to stare. "Subjects?"
+
+Mrs. Beale was really splendid. "All the most important ones. French
+literature--and sacred history. You'll take part in classes--with
+awfully smart children."
+
+"I'm going to look thoroughly into the whole thing, you know." And Sir
+Claude, with characteristic kindness, gave her a nod of assurance
+accompanied by a friendly wink.
+
+But Mrs. Beale went much further. "My dear child, you shall attend
+lectures."
+
+The horizon was suddenly vast and Maisie felt herself the smaller for
+it. "All alone?"
+
+"Oh no; I'll attend them with you," said Sir Claude. "They'll teach me
+a lot I don't know."
+
+"So they will me," Mrs. Beale gravely admitted. "We'll go with her
+together--it will be charming. It's ages," she confessed to Maisie,
+"since I've had any time for study. That's another sweet way in which
+you'll be a motive to us. Oh won't the good she'll do us be immense?"
+she broke out uncontrollably to Sir Claude.
+
+He weighed it; then he replied: "That's certainly our idea."
+
+Of this idea Maisie naturally had less of a grasp, but it inspired her
+with almost equal enthusiasm. If in so bright a prospect there would be
+nothing to long for it followed that she wouldn't long for Mrs. Wix;
+but her consciousness of her assent to the absence of that fond figure
+caused a pair of words that had often sounded in her ears to ring in
+them again. It showed her in short what her father had always meant by
+calling her mother a "low sneak" and her mother by calling her father
+one. She wondered if she herself shouldn't be a low sneak in learning to
+be so happy without Mrs. Wix. What would Mrs. Wix do?--where would Mrs.
+Wix go? Before Maisie knew it, and at the door, as Sir Claude was off,
+these anxieties, on her lips, grew articulate and her stepfather had
+stopped long enough to answer them. "Oh I'll square her!" he cried; and
+with this he departed.
+
+Face to face with Mrs. Beale, Maisie, giving a sigh of relief, looked
+round at what seemed to her the dawn of a higher order. "Then EVERY
+ONE will be squared!" she peacefully said. On which her stepmother
+affectionately bent over her again.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+It was Susan Ash who came to her with the news: "He's downstairs, miss,
+and he do look beautiful."
+
+In the schoolroom at her father's, which had pretty blue curtains, she
+had been making out at the piano a lovely little thing, as Mrs. Beale
+called it, a "Moonlight Berceuse" sent her through the post by Sir
+Claude, who considered that her musical education had been deplorably
+neglected and who, the last months at her mother's, had been on the
+point of making arrangements for regular lessons. She knew from him
+familiarly that the real thing, as he said, was shockingly dear and that
+anything else was a waste of money, and she therefore rejoiced the more
+at the sacrifice represented by this composition, of which the price,
+five shillings, was marked on the cover and which was evidently the real
+thing. She was already on her feet. "Mrs. Beale has sent up for me?"
+
+"Oh no--it's not that," said Susan Ash. "Mrs. Beale has been out this
+hour."
+
+"Then papa!"
+
+"Dear no--not papa. You'll do, miss, all but them wandering 'airs,"
+Susan went on. "Your papa never came 'ome at all," she added.
+
+"Home from where?" Maisie responded a little absently and very
+excitedly. She gave a wild manual brush to her locks.
+
+"Oh that, miss, I should be very sorry to tell you! I'd rather tuck away
+that white thing behind--though I'm blest if it's my work."
+
+"Do then, please. I know where papa was," Maisie impatiently continued.
+
+"Well, in your place I wouldn't tell."
+
+"He was at the club--the Chrysanthemum. So!"
+
+"All night long? Why the flowers shut up at night, you know!" cried
+Susan Ash.
+
+"Well, I don't care"--he child was at the door. "Sir Claude asked for me
+ALONE?"
+
+"The same as if you was a duchess."
+
+Maisie was aware on her way downstairs that she was now quite as happy
+as one, and also, a moment later, as she hung round his neck, that
+even such a personage would scarce commit herself more grandly. There
+was moreover a hint of the duchess in the infinite point with which,
+as she felt, she exclaimed: "And this is what you call coming OFTEN?"
+
+Sir Claude met her delightfully and in the same fine spirit. "My dear
+old man, don't make me a scene--I assure you it's what every woman I
+look at does. Let us have some fun--it's a lovely day: clap on something
+smart and come out with me; then we'll talk it over quietly."
+
+They were on their way five minutes later to Hyde Park, and nothing that
+even in the good days at her mother's they had ever talked over had more
+of the sweetness of tranquillity than his present prompt explanations.
+He was at his best in such an office and with the exception of Mrs. Wix
+the only person she had met in her life who ever explained. With him,
+however, the act had an authority transcending the wisdom of woman. It
+all came back--the plans that always failed, all the rewards and bribes
+that she was perpetually paying for in advance and perpetually out of
+pocket by afterwards--the whole great stress to be dealt with introduced
+her on each occasion afresh to the question of money. Even she herself
+almost knew how it would have expressed the strength of his empire to
+say that to shuffle away her sense of being duped he had only, from
+under his lovely moustache, to breathe upon it. It was somehow in the
+nature of plans to be expensive and in the nature of the expensive to be
+impossible. To be "involved" was of the essence of everybody's affairs,
+and also at every particular moment to be more involved than usual.
+This had been the case with Sir Claude's, with papa's, with mamma's,
+with Mrs. Beale's and with Maisie's own at the particular moment, a
+moment of several weeks, that had elapsed since our young lady had been
+re-established at her father's. There wasn't "two-and-tuppence" for
+anything or for any one, and that was why there had been no sequel to
+the classes in French literature with all the smart little girls. It
+was devilish awkward, didn't she see? to try, without even the limited
+capital mentioned, to mix her up with a remote array that glittered
+before her after this as the children of the rich. She was to feel
+henceforth as if she were flattening her nose upon the hard window-pane
+of the sweet-shop of knowledge. If the classes, however, that were
+select, and accordingly the only ones, were impossibly dear, the
+lectures at the institutions--at least at some of them--were directly
+addressed to the intelligent poor, and it therefore had to be easier
+still to produce on the spot the reason why she had been taken to none.
+This reason, Sir Claude said, was that she happened to be just going to
+be, though they had nothing to do with that in now directing their steps
+to the banks of the Serpentine. Maisie's own park, in the north, had
+been nearer at hand, but they rolled westward in a hansom because at the
+end of the sweet June days this was the direction taken by every one
+that any one looked at. They cultivated for an hour, on the Row and
+by the Drive, this opportunity for each observer to amuse and for one
+of them indeed, not a little hilariously, to mystify the other, and
+before the hour was over Maisie had elicited, in reply to her sharpest
+challenge, a further account of her friend's long absence.
+
+"Why I've broken my word to you so dreadfully--promising so solemnly and
+then never coming? Well, my dear, that's a question that, not seeing me
+day after day, you must very often have put to Mrs. Beale."
+
+"Oh yes," the child replied; "again and again."
+
+"And what has she told you?"
+
+"That you're as bad as you're beautiful."
+
+"Is that what she says?"
+
+"Those very words."
+
+"Ah the dear old soul!" Sir Claude was much diverted, and his loud,
+clear laugh was all his explanation. Those were just the words Maisie
+had last heard him use about Mrs. Wix. She clung to his hand, which was
+encased in a pearl-grey glove ornamented with the thick black lines
+that, at her mother's, always used to strike her as connected with the
+way the bestitched fists of the long ladies carried, with the elbows
+well out, their umbrellas upside down. The mere sense of his grasp in
+her own covered the ground of loss just as much as the ground of gain.
+His presence was like an object brought so close to her face that she
+couldn't see round its edges. He himself, however, remained showman of
+the spectacle even after they had passed out of the Park and begun,
+under the charm of the spot and the season, to stroll in Kensington
+Gardens. What they had left behind them was, as he said, only a pretty
+bad circus, and, through prepossessing gates and over a bridge, they
+had come in a quarter of an hour, as he also remarked, a hundred miles
+from London. A great green glade was before them, and high old trees,
+and under the shade of these, in the fresh turf, the crooked course
+of a rural footpath. "It's the Forest of Arden," Sir Claude had just
+delightfully observed, "and I'm the banished duke, and you're--what was
+the young woman called?--the artless country wench. And there," he went
+on, "is the other girl--what's her name, Rosalind?--and (don't you
+know?) the fellow who was making up to her. Upon my word he IS making
+up to her!"
+
+His allusion was to a couple who, side by side, at the end of the glade,
+were moving in the same direction as themselves. These distant figures,
+in their slow stroll (which kept them so close together that their
+heads, drooping a little forward, almost touched), presented the back of
+a lady who looked tall, who was evidently a very fine woman, and that
+of a gentleman whose left hand appeared to be passed well into her arm
+while his right, behind him, made jerky motions with the stick that it
+grasped. Maisie's fancy responded for an instant to her friend's idea
+that the sight was idyllic; then, stopping short, she brought out with
+all her clearness: "Why mercy--if it isn't mamma!"
+
+Sir Claude paused with a stare. "Mamma? But mamma's at Brussels."
+
+Maisie, with her eyes on the lady, wondered. "At Brussels?"
+
+"She's gone to play a match."
+
+"At billiards? You didn't tell me."
+
+"Of course I didn't!" Sir Claude ejaculated. "There's plenty I don't
+tell you. She went on Wednesday."
+
+The couple had added to their distance, but Maisie's eyes more than kept
+pace with them. "Then she has come back."
+
+Sir Claude watched the lady. "It's much more likely she never went!"
+
+"It's mamma!" the child said with decision.
+
+They had stood still, but Sir Claude had made the most of his
+opportunity, and it happened that just at this moment, at the end of the
+vista, the others halted and, still showing only their backs, seemed to
+stay talking. "Right you are, my duck!" he exclaimed at last. "It's my
+own sweet wife!"
+
+He had spoken with a laugh, but he had changed colour, and Maisie
+quickly looked away from him. "Then who is it with her?"
+
+"Blest if I know!" said Sir Claude.
+
+"Is it Mr. Perriam?"
+
+"Oh dear no--Perriam's smashed."
+
+"Smashed?"
+
+"Exposed--in the City. But there are quantities of others!" Sir Claude
+smiled.
+
+Maisie appeared to count them; she studied the gentleman's back. "Then
+is this Lord Eric?"
+
+For a moment her companion made no answer, and when she turned her eyes
+again to him he was looking at her, she thought, rather queerly. "What
+do you know about Lord Eric?"
+
+She tried innocently to be odd in return. "Oh I know more than you
+think! Is it Lord Eric?" she repeated.
+
+"It maybe. Blest if I care!"
+
+Their friends had slightly separated and now, as Sir Claude spoke,
+suddenly faced round, showing all the splendour of her ladyship and all
+the mystery of her comrade. Maisie held her breath. "They're coming!"
+
+"Let them come." And Sir Claude, pulling out his cigarettes, began to
+strike a light.
+
+"We shall meet them!"
+
+"No. They'll meet US."
+
+Maisie stood her ground. "They see us. Just look."
+
+Sir Claude threw away his match. "Come straight on." The others, in the
+return, evidently startled, had half-paused again, keeping well apart.
+"She's horribly surprised and wants to slope," he continued. "But it's
+too late."
+
+Maisie advanced beside him, making out even across the interval that her
+ladyship was ill at ease. "Then what will she do?"
+
+Sir Claude puffed his cigarette. "She's quickly thinking." He appeared
+to enjoy it.
+
+Ida had wavered but an instant; her companion clearly gave her moral
+support. Maisie thought he somehow looked brave, and he had no likeness
+whatever to Mr. Perriam. His face, thin and rather sharp, was smooth,
+and it was not till they came nearer that she saw he had a remarkably
+fair little moustache. She could already see that his eyes were of the
+lightest blue. He was far nicer than Mr. Perriam. Mamma looked terrible
+from afar, but even under her guns the child's curiosity flickered and
+she appealed again to Sir Claude. "Is it--IS it Lord Eric?"
+
+Sir Claude smoked composedly enough. "I think it's the Count."
+
+This was a happy solution--it fitted her idea of a count. But what idea,
+as she now came grandly on, did mamma fit?--unless that of an actress,
+in some tremendous situation, sweeping down to the footlights as if she
+would jump them. Maisie felt really so frightened that before she knew
+it she had passed her hand into Sir Claude's arm. Her pressure caused
+him to stop, and at the sight of this the other couple came equally to
+a stand and, beyond the diminished space, remained a moment more in
+talk. This, however, was the matter of an instant; leaving the Count
+apparently to come round more circuitously--an outflanking movement, if
+Maisie had but known--her ladyship resumed the onset. "What WILL she do
+now?" her daughter asked.
+
+Sir Claude was at present in a position to say: "Try to pretend it's
+me."
+
+"You?"
+
+"Why that I'm up to something."
+
+In another minute poor Ida had justified this prediction, erect there
+before them like a figure of justice in full dress. There were parts of
+her face that grew whiter while Maisie looked, and other parts in which
+this change seemed to make other colours reign with more intensity.
+"What are you doing with my daughter?" she demanded of her husband; in
+spite of the indignant tone of which Maisie had a greater sense than
+ever in her life before of not being personally noticed. It seemed to
+her Sir Claude also grew pale as an effect of the loud defiance with
+which Ida twice repeated this question. He put her, instead of answering
+it, an enquiry of his own: "Who the devil have you got hold of NOW?"
+and at this her ladyship turned tremendously to the child, glaring at
+her as at an equal plotter of sin. Maisie received in petrifaction the
+full force of her mother's huge painted eyes--they were like Japanese
+lanterns swung under festal arches. But life came back to her from a
+tone suddenly and strangely softened. "Go straight to that gentleman, my
+dear; I've asked him to take you a few minutes. He's charming--go. I've
+something to say to THIS creature."
+
+Maisie felt Sir Claude immediately clutch her. "No, no--thank you: that
+won't do. She's mine."
+
+"Yours?" It was confounding to Maisie to hear her speak quite as if she
+had never heard of Sir Claude before.
+
+"Mine. You've given her up. You've not another word to say about her. I
+have her from her father," said Sir Claude--a statement that startled
+his companion, who could also measure its lively action on her mother.
+
+There was visibly, however, an influence that made Ida consider; she
+glanced at the gentleman she had left, who, having strolled with his
+hands in his pockets to some distance, stood there with unembarrassed
+vagueness. She directed to him the face that was like an illuminated
+garden, turnstile and all, for the frequentation of which he had his
+season-ticket; then she looked again at Sir Claude. "I've given her
+up to her father to KEEP--not to get rid of by sending about the town
+either with you or with any one else. If she's not to mind me let HIM
+come and tell me so. I decline to take it from another person, and I
+like your pretending that with your humbug of 'interest' you've a leg to
+stand on. I know your game and have something now to say to you about
+it."
+
+Sir Claude gave a squeeze of the child's arm. "Didn't I tell you she'd
+have, Miss Farange?"
+
+"You're uncommonly afraid to hear it," Ida went on; "but if you think
+she'll protect you from it you're mightily mistaken." She gave him a
+moment. "I'll give her the benefit as soon as look at you. Should you
+like her to know, my dear?" Maisie had a sense of her launching the
+question with effect; yet our young lady was also conscious of hoping
+that Sir Claude would declare that preference. We have already learned
+that she had come to like people's liking her to "know." Before he
+could reply at all, none the less, her mother opened a pair of arms of
+extraordinary elegance, and then she felt the loosening of his grasp.
+"My own child," Ida murmured in a voice--a voice of sudden confused
+tenderness--that it seemed to her she heard for the first time. She
+wavered but an instant, thrilled with the first direct appeal, as
+distinguished from the mere maternal pull, she had ever had from lips
+that, even in the old vociferous years, had always been sharp. The next
+moment she was on her mother's breast, where, amid a wilderness of
+trinkets, she felt as if she had suddenly been thrust, with a smash of
+glass, into a jeweller's shop-front, but only to be as suddenly ejected
+with a push and the brisk injunction: "Now go to the Captain!"
+
+Maisie glanced at the gentleman submissively, but felt the want of more
+introduction. "The Captain?"
+
+Sir Claude broke into a laugh. "I told her it was the Count."
+
+Ida stared; she rose so superior that she was colossal. "You're too
+utterly loathsome," she then declared. "Be off!" she repeated to her
+daughter.
+
+Maisie started, moved backward and, looking at Sir Claude, "Only for a
+moment," she signed to him in her bewilderment. But he was too angry
+to heed her--too angry with his wife; as she turned away she heard his
+anger break out. "You damned old b----"--she couldn't quite hear all.
+It was enough, it was too much: she fled before it, rushing even to a
+stranger for the shock of such a change of tone.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+As she met the Captain's light blue eyes the greatest marvel occurred;
+she felt a sudden relief at finding them reply with anxiety to the
+horror in her face. "What in the world has he done?" He put it all on
+Sir Claude.
+
+"He has called her a damned old brute." She couldn't help bringing that
+out.
+
+The Captain, at the same elevation as her ladyship, gaped wide; then of
+course, like every one else, he was convulsed. But he instantly caught
+himself up, echoing her bad words. "A damned old brute--your mother?"
+
+Maisie was already conscious of her second movement. "I think she tried
+to make him angry."
+
+The Captain's stupefaction was fine. "Angry--SHE? Why she's an angel!"
+
+On the spot, as he said this, his face won her over; it was so bright
+and kind, and his blue eyes had such a reflexion of some mysterious
+grace that, for him at least, her mother had put forth. Her fund of
+observation enabled her as she gazed up at him to place him: he was a
+candid simple soldier; very grave--she came back to that--but not at
+all terrible. At any rate he struck a note that was new to her and that
+after a moment made her say: "Do you like her very much?"
+
+He smiled down at her, hesitating, looking pleasanter and pleasanter.
+"Let me tell you about your mother."
+
+He put out a big military hand which she immediately took, and they
+turned off together to where a couple of chairs had been placed under
+one of the trees. "She told me to come to you," Maisie explained as they
+went; and presently she was close to him in a chair, with the prettiest
+of pictures--the sheen of the lake through other trees--before them, and
+the sound of birds, the plash of boats, the play of children in the air.
+The Captain, inclining his military person, sat sideways to be closer
+and kinder, and as her hand was on the arm of her seat he put his own
+down on it again to emphasise something he had to say that would be good
+for her to hear. He had already told her how her mother, from the moment
+of seeing her so unexpectedly with a person who was--well, not at all
+the right person, had promptly asked him to take charge of her while she
+herself tackled, as she said, the real culprit. He gave the child the
+sense of doing for the time what he liked with her; ten minutes before
+she had never seen him, but she could now sit there touching him,
+touched and impressed by him and thinking it nice when a gentleman
+was thin and brown--brown with a kind of clear depth that made his
+straw-coloured moustache almost white and his eyes resemble little pale
+flowers. The most extraordinary thing was the way she didn't appear just
+then to mind Sir Claude's being tackled. The Captain wasn't a bit like
+him, for it was an odd part of the pleasantness of mamma's friend that
+it resided in a manner in this friend's having a face so informally put
+together that the only kindness could be to call it funny. An odder part
+still was that it finally made our young lady, to classify him further,
+say to herself that, of all people in the world, he reminded her most
+insidiously of Mrs. Wix. He had neither straighteners nor a diadem, nor,
+at least in the same place as the other, a button; he was sun-burnt and
+deep-voiced and smelt of cigars, yet he marvellously had more in common
+with her old governess than with her young stepfather. What he had
+to say to her that was good for her to hear was that her poor mother
+(didn't she know?) was the best friend he had ever had in all his life.
+And he added: "She has told me ever so much about you. I'm awfully glad
+to know you."
+
+She had never, she thought, been so addressed as a young lady, not even
+by Sir Claude the day, so long ago, that she found him with Mrs. Beale.
+It struck her as the way that at balls, by delightful partners, young
+ladies must be spoken to in the intervals of dances; and she tried to
+think of something that would meet it at the same high point. But this
+effort flurried her, and all she could produce was: "At first, you know,
+I thought you were Lord Eric."
+
+The Captain looked vague. "Lord Eric?"
+
+"And then Sir Claude thought you were the Count."
+
+At this he laughed out. "Why he's only five foot high and as red as
+a lobster!" Maisie laughed, with a certain elegance, in return--the
+young lady at the ball certainly would--and was on the point, as
+conscientiously, of pursuing the subject with an agreeable question. But
+before she could speak her companion challenged her. "Who in the world's
+Lord Eric?"
+
+"Don't you know him?" She judged her young lady would say that with
+light surprise.
+
+"Do you mean a fat man with his mouth always open?" She had to
+confess that their acquaintance was so limited that she could only
+describe the bearer of the name as a friend of mamma's; but a light
+suddenly came to the Captain, who quickly spoke as knowing her man.
+"What-do-you-call-him's brother, the fellow that owned Bobolink?" Then,
+with all his kindness, he contradicted her flat. "Oh dear no; your
+mother never knew HIM."
+
+"But Mrs. Wix said so," the child risked.
+
+"Mrs. Wix?"
+
+"My old governess."
+
+This again seemed amusing to the Captain. "She mixed him up, your old
+governess. He's an awful beast. Your mother never looked at him."
+
+He was as positive as he was friendly, but he dropped for a minute after
+this into a silence that gave Maisie, confused but ingenious, a chance
+to redeem the mistake of pretending to know too much by the humility of
+inviting further correction. "And doesn't she know the Count?"
+
+"Oh I dare say! But he's another ass." After which abruptly, with a
+different look, he put down again on the back of her own the hand he had
+momentarily removed. Maisie even thought he coloured a little. "I want
+tremendously to speak to you. You must never believe any harm of your
+mother."
+
+"Oh I assure you I DON'T!" cried the child, blushing, herself, up to her
+eyes in a sudden surge of deprecation of such a thought.
+
+The Captain, bending his head, raised her hand to his lips with a
+benevolence that made her wish her glove had been nicer. "Of course you
+don't when you know how fond she is of YOU."
+
+"She's fond of me?" Maisie panted.
+
+"Tremendously. But she thinks you don't like her. You MUST like her. She
+has had too much to put up with."
+
+"Oh yes--I know!" She rejoiced that she had never denied it.
+
+"Of course I've no right to speak of her except as a particular friend,"
+the Captain went on. "But she's a splendid woman. She has never had any
+sort of justice."
+
+"Hasn't she?"--his companion, to hear the words, felt a thrill
+altogether new.
+
+"Perhaps I oughtn't to say it to you, but she has had everything to
+suffer."
+
+"Oh yes--you can SAY it to me!" Maisie hastened to profess.
+
+The Captain was glad. "Well, you needn't tell. It's all for YOU--do you
+see?"
+
+Serious and smiling she only wanted to take it from him. "It's between
+you and me! Oh there are lots of things I've never told!"
+
+"Well, keep this with the rest. I assure you she has had the most
+infernal time, no matter what any one says to the contrary. She's the
+cleverest woman I ever saw in all my life. She's too charming." She had
+been touched already by his tone, and now she leaned back in her chair
+and felt something tremble within her. "She's tremendous fun--she can
+do all sorts of things better than I've ever seen any one. She has the
+pluck of fifty--and I know; I assure you I do. She has the nerve for a
+tiger-shoot--by Jove I'd TAKE her! And she is awfully open and generous,
+don't you know? there are women that are such horrid sneaks. She'll
+go through anything for any one she likes." He appeared to watch for
+a moment the effect on his companion of this emphasis; then he gave a
+small sigh that mourned the limits of the speakable. But it was almost
+with the note of a fresh challenge that he wound up: "Look here, she's
+TRUE!"
+
+Maisie had so little desire to assert the contrary that she found
+herself, in the intensity of her response, throbbing with a joy still
+less utterable than the essence of the Captain's admiration. She was
+fairly hushed with the sense that he spoke of her mother as she had
+never heard any one speak. It came over her as she sat silent that,
+after all, this admiration and this respect were quite new words, which
+took a distinction from the fact that nothing in the least resembling
+them in quality had on any occasion dropped from the lips of her father,
+of Mrs. Beale, of Sir Claude or even of Mrs. Wix. What it appeared to
+her to come to was that on the subject of her ladyship it was the first
+real kindness she had heard, so that at the touch of it something
+strange and deep and pitying surged up within her--a revelation that,
+practically and so far as she knew, her mother, apart from this,
+had only been disliked. Mrs. Wix's original account of Sir Claude's
+affection seemed as empty now as the chorus in a children's game, and
+the husband and wife, but a little way off at that moment, were face to
+face in hatred and with the dreadful name he had called her still in the
+air. What was it the Captain on the other hand had called her? Maisie
+wanted to hear that again. The tears filled her eyes and rolled down
+her cheeks, which burned under them with the rush of a consciousness
+that for her too, five minutes before, the vivid towering beauty whose
+assault she awaited had been, a moment long, an object of pure dread.
+She became on the spot indifferent to her usual fear of showing what
+in children was notoriously most offensive--presented to her companion,
+soundlessly but hideously, her wet distorted face. She cried, with a
+pang, straight AT him, cried as she had never cried at any one in all
+her life. "Oh do you love her?" she brought out with a gulp that was
+the effect of her trying not to make a noise.
+
+It was doubtless another consequence of the thick mist through which she
+saw him that in reply to her question the Captain gave her such a queer
+blurred look. He stammered, yet in his voice there was also the ring of
+a great awkward insistence. "Of course I'm tremendously fond of her--I
+like her better than any woman I ever saw. I don't mind in the least
+telling you that," he went on, "and I should think myself a great beast
+if I did." Then to show that his position was superlatively clear he
+made her, with a kindness that even Sir Claude had never surpassed,
+tremble again as she had trembled at his first outbreak. He called her
+by her name, and her name drove it home. "My dear Maisie, your mother's
+an angel!"
+
+It was an almost unbelievable balm--it soothed so her impression of
+danger and pain. She sank back in her chair, she covered her face
+with her hands. "Oh mother, mother, mother!" she sobbed. She had an
+impression that the Captain, beside her, if more and more friendly, was
+by no means unembarrassed; in a minute, however, when her eyes were
+clearer, he was erect in front of her, very red and nervously looking
+about him and whacking his leg with his stick. "Say you love her, Mr.
+Captain; say it, say it!" she implored.
+
+Mr. Captain's blue eyes fixed themselves very hard. "Of course I love
+her, damn it, you know!"
+
+At this she also jumped up; she had fished out somehow her
+pocket-handkerchief. "So do I then. I do, I do, I do!" she passionately
+asseverated.
+
+"Then will you come back to her?"
+
+Maisie, staring, stopped the tight little plug of her handkerchief on
+the way to her eyes. "She won't have me."
+
+"Yes she will. She wants you."
+
+"Back at the house--with Sir Claude?"
+
+Again he hung fire. "No, not with him. In another place."
+
+They stood looking at each other with an intensity unusual as between a
+Captain and a little girl. "She won't have me in any place."
+
+"Oh yes she will if _I_ ask her!"
+
+Maisie's intensity continued. "Shall you be there?"
+
+The Captain's, on the whole, did the same. "Oh yes--some day."
+
+"Then you don't mean now?"
+
+He broke into a quick smile. "Will you come now?--go with us for an
+hour?"
+
+Maisie considered. "She wouldn't have me even now." She could see that
+he had his idea, but that her tone impressed him. That disappointed her
+a little, though in an instant he rang out again.
+
+"She will if I ask her," he repeated. "I'll ask her this minute."
+
+Maisie, turning at this, looked away to where her mother and her
+stepfather had stopped. At first, among the trees, nobody was visible;
+but the next moment she exclaimed with expression: "It's over--here he
+comes!"
+
+The Captain watched the approach of her ladyship's husband, who lounged
+composedly over the grass, making to Maisie with his closed fingers a
+little movement in the air. "I've no desire to avoid him."
+
+"Well, you mustn't see him," said Maisie.
+
+"Oh he's in no hurry himself!" Sir Claude had stopped to light another
+cigarette.
+
+She was vague as to the way it was proper he should feel; but she had a
+sense that the Captain's remark was rather a free reflexion on it. "Oh
+he doesn't care!" she replied.
+
+"Doesn't care for what?"
+
+"Doesn't care who you are. He told me so. Go and ask mamma," she added.
+
+"If you can come with us? Very good. You really want me not to wait for
+him?"
+
+"PLEASE don't." But Sir Claude was not yet near, and the Captain had
+with his left hand taken hold of her right, which he familiarly,
+sociably swung a little. "Only first," she continued, "tell me this. Are
+you going to LIVE with mamma?"
+
+The immemorial note of mirth broke out at her seriousness. "One of these
+days."
+
+She wondered, wholly unperturbed by his laughter. "Then where will Sir
+Claude be?"
+
+"He'll have left her of course."
+
+"Does he really intend to do that?"
+
+"You've every opportunity to ask him."
+
+Maisie shook her head with decision. "He won't do it. Not first."
+
+Her "first" made the Captain laugh out again. "Oh he'll be sure to be
+nasty! But I've said too much to you."
+
+"Well, you know, I'll never tell," said Maisie.
+
+"No, it's all for yourself. Good-bye."
+
+"Good-bye." Maisie kept his hand long enough to add: "I like you too."
+And then supremely: "You DO love her?"
+
+"My dear child--!" The Captain wanted words.
+
+"Then don't do it only for just a little."
+
+"A little?"
+
+"Like all the others."
+
+"All the others?"--he stood staring.
+
+She pulled away her hand. "Do it always!" She bounded to meet Sir
+Claude, and as she left the Captain she heard him ring out with apparent
+gaiety:
+
+"Oh I'm in for it!"
+
+As she joined Sir Claude she noted her mother in the distance move
+slowly off, and, glancing again at the Captain, saw him, swinging his
+stick, retreat in the same direction.
+
+She had never seen Sir Claude look as he looked just then; flushed yet
+not excited--settled rather in an immoveable disgust and at once very
+sick and very hard. His conversation with her mother had clearly drawn
+blood, and the child's old horror came back to her, begetting the
+instant moral contraction of the days when her parents had looked to
+her to feed their love of battle. Her greatest fear for the moment,
+however, was that her friend would see she had been crying. The next
+she became aware that he had glanced at her, and it presently occurred
+to her that he didn't even wish to be looked at. At this she quickly
+removed her gaze, while he said rather curtly: "Well, who in the world
+IS the fellow?"
+
+She felt herself flooded with prudence. "Oh _I_ haven't found out!" This
+sounded as if she meant he ought to have done so himself; but she could
+only face doggedly the ugliness of seeming disagreeable, as she used to
+face it in the hours when her father, for her blankness, called her a
+dirty little donkey, and her mother, for her falsity, pushed her out of
+the room.
+
+"Then what have you been doing all this time?"
+
+"Oh I don't know!" It was of the essence of her method not to be silly
+by halves.
+
+"Then didn't the beast say anything?" They had got down by the lake and
+were walking fast.
+
+"Well, not very much."
+
+"He didn't speak of your mother?"
+
+"Oh yes, a little!"
+
+"Then what I ask you, please, is HOW?" She kept silence--so long that
+he presently went on: "I say, you know--don't you hear me?" At this she
+produced: "Well, I'm afraid I didn't attend to him very much."
+
+Sir Claude, smoking rather hard, made no immediate rejoinder; but
+finally he exclaimed: "Then my dear--with such a chance--you were the
+perfection of a dunce!" He was so irritated--or she took him to be--that
+for the rest of the time they were in the Gardens he spoke no other
+word; and she meanwhile subtly abstained from any attempt to pacify him.
+That would only lead to more questions. At the gate of the Gardens he
+hailed a four-wheeled cab and, in silence, without meeting her eyes, put
+her into it, only saying "Give him THAT" as he tossed half a crown upon
+the seat. Even when from outside he had closed the door and told the man
+where to go he never took her departing look. Nothing of this kind had
+ever yet happened to them, but it had no power to make her love him
+less; so she could not only bear it, she felt as she drove away--she
+could rejoice in it. It brought again the sweet sense of success that,
+ages before, she had had at a crisis when, on the stairs, returning from
+her father's, she had met a fierce question of her mother's with an
+imbecility as deep and had in consequence been dashed by Mrs. Farange
+almost to the bottom.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+If for reasons of her own she could bear the sense of Sir Claude's
+displeasure her young endurance might have been put to a serious test.
+The days went by without his knocking at her father's door, and the
+time would have turned sadly to waste if something hadn't conspicuously
+happened to give it a new difference. What took place was a marked
+change in the attitude of Mrs. Beale--a change that somehow, even
+in his absence, seemed to bring Sir Claude again into the house. It
+began practically with a conversation that occurred between them the
+day Maisie, came home alone in the cab. Mrs. Beale had by that time
+returned, and she was more successful than their friend in extracting
+from our young lady an account of the extraordinary passage with the
+Captain. She came back to it repeatedly, and on the very next day it
+grew distinct to the child that she was already in full possession of
+what at the same moment had been enacted between her ladyship and Sir
+Claude. This was the real origin of her final perception that though he
+didn't come to the house her stepmother had some rare secret for not
+being quite without him. This led to some rare passages with Mrs. Beale,
+the promptest of which had been--not on Maisie's part--a wonderful
+outbreak of tears. Mrs. Beale was not, as she herself said, a crying
+creature: she hadn't cried, to Maisie's knowledge, since the lowly
+governess days, the grey dawn of their connexion. But she wept now with
+passion, professing loudly that it did her good and saying remarkable
+things to her charge, for whom the occasion was an equal benefit, an
+addition to all the fine precautionary wisdom stored away. It somehow
+hadn't violated that wisdom, Maisie felt, for her to have told Mrs.
+Beale what she had not told Sir Claude, inasmuch as the greatest strain,
+to her sense, was between Sir Claude and Sir Claude's wife, and his wife
+was just what Mrs. Beale was unfortunately not. He sent his stepdaughter
+three days after the incident in Kensington Gardens a message as frank
+as it was tender, and that was how Mrs. Beale had had to bring out in
+a manner that seemed half an appeal, half a defiance: "Well yes, hang
+it--I DO see him!"
+
+How and when and where, however, were just what Maisie was not to
+know--an exclusion moreover that she never questioned in the light of
+a participation large enough to make him, while she shared the ample
+void of Mrs. Beale's rather blank independence, shine in her yearning
+eye like the single, the sovereign window-square of a great dim
+disproportioned room. As far as her father was concerned such hours
+had no interruption; and then it was clear between them that each
+was thinking of the absent and thinking the other thought, so that he
+was an object of conscious reference in everything they said or did.
+The wretched truth, Mrs. Beale had to confess, was that she had hoped
+against hope and that in the Regent's Park it was impossible Sir Claude
+should really be in and out. Hadn't they at last to look the fact in the
+face?--it was too disgustingly evident that no one after all had been
+squared. Well, if no one had been squared it was because every one had
+been vile. No one and every one were of course Beale and Ida, the extent
+of whose power to be nasty was a thing that, to a little girl, Mrs.
+Beale simply couldn't give chapter and verse for. Therefore it was that
+to keep going at all, as she said, that lady had to make, as she also
+said, another arrangement--the arrangement in which Maisie was included
+only to the point of knowing it existed and wondering wistfully what it
+was. Conspicuously at any rate it had a side that was responsible for
+Mrs. Beale's sudden emotion and sudden confidence--a demonstration
+this, however, of which the tearfulness was far from deterrent to our
+heroine's thought of how happy she should be if she could only make an
+arrangement for herself. Mrs. Beale's own operated, it appeared, with
+regularity and frequency; for it was almost every day or two that she
+was able to bring Maisie a message and to take one back. It had been
+over the vision of what, as she called it, he did for her that she
+broke down; and this vision was kept in a manner before Maisie by a
+subsequent increase not only of the gaiety, but literally--it seemed not
+presumptuous to perceive--of the actual virtue of her friend. The friend
+was herself the first to proclaim it: he had pulled her up immensely--he
+had quite pulled her round. She had charming tormenting words about him:
+he was her good fairy, her hidden spring--above all he was just her
+"higher" conscience. That was what had particularly come out with her
+startling tears: he had made her, dear man, think ever so much better of
+herself. It had been thus rather surprisingly revealed that she had been
+in a way to think ill, and Maisie was glad to hear of the corrective at
+the same time that she heard of the ailment.
+
+She presently found herself supposing, and in spite of her envy even
+hoping, that whenever Mrs. Beale was out of the house Sir Claude had
+in some manner the satisfaction of it. This was now of more frequent
+occurrence than ever before--so much so that she would have thought of
+her stepmother as almost extravagantly absent had it not been that, in
+the first place, her father was a superior specimen of that habit: it
+was the frequent remark of his present wife, as it had been, before the
+tribunals of their country, a prominent plea of her predecessor, that
+he scarce came home even to sleep. In the second place Mrs. Beale, when
+she WAS on the spot, had now a beautiful air of longing to make up for
+everything. The only shadow in such bright intervals was that, as Maisie
+put it to herself, she could get nothing by questions. It was in the
+nature of things to be none of a small child's business, even when a
+small child had from the first been deluded into a fear that she might
+be only too much initiated. Things then were in Maisie's experience so
+true to their nature that questions were almost always improper; but
+she learned on the other hand soon to recognise how at last, sometimes,
+patient little silences and intelligent little looks could be rewarded
+by delightful little glimpses. There had been years at Beale Farange's
+when the monosyllable "he" meant always, meant almost violently, the
+master; but all that was changed at a period at which Sir Claude's
+merits were of themselves so much in the air that it scarce took even
+two letters to name him. "He keeps me up splendidly--he does, my own
+precious," Mrs. Beale would observe to her comrade; or else she would
+say that the situation at the other establishment had reached a point
+that could scarcely be believed--the point, monstrous as it sounded,
+of his not having laid eyes upon her for twelve days. "She" of course
+at Beale Farange's had never meant any one but Ida, and there was the
+difference in this case that it now meant Ida with renewed intensity.
+Mrs. Beale--it was striking--was in a position to animadvert more and
+more upon her dreadfulness, the moral of all which appeared to be how
+abominably yet blessedly little she had to do with her husband. This
+flow of information came home to our two friends because, truly, Mrs.
+Beale had not much more to do with her own; but that was one of the
+reflexions that Maisie could make without allowing it to break the
+spell of her present sympathy. How could such a spell be anything but
+deep when Sir Claude's influence, operating from afar, at last really
+determined the resumption of his stepdaughter's studies? Mrs. Beale
+again took fire about them and was quite vivid for Maisie as to their
+being the great matter to which the dear absent one kept her up.
+
+This was the second source--I have just alluded to the first--of the
+child's consciousness of something that, very hopefully, she described
+to herself as a new phase; and it also presented in the brightest light
+the fresh enthusiasm with which Mrs. Beale always reappeared and which
+really gave Maisie a happier sense than she had yet had of being very
+dear at least to two persons. That she had small remembrance at present
+of a third illustrates, I am afraid, a temporary oblivion of Mrs. Wix,
+an accident to be explained only by a state of unnatural excitement. For
+what was the form taken by Mrs. Beale's enthusiasm and acquiring relief
+in the domestic conditions still left to her but the delightful form of
+"reading" with her little charge on lines directly prescribed and in
+works profusely supplied by Sir Claude? He had got hold of an awfully
+good list--"mostly essays, don't you know?" Mrs. Beale had said; a word
+always august to Maisie, but henceforth to be softened by hazy, in fact
+by quite languorous edges. There was at any rate a week in which no less
+than nine volumes arrived, and the impression was to be gathered from
+Mrs. Beale that the obscure intercourse she enjoyed with Sir Claude not
+only involved an account and a criticism of studies, but was organised
+almost for the very purpose of report and consultation. It was for
+Maisie's education in short that, as she often repeated, she closed her
+door--closed it to the gentlemen who used to flock there in such numbers
+and whom her husband's practical desertion of her would have made it a
+course of the highest indelicacy to receive. Maisie was familiar from of
+old with the principle at least of the care that a woman, as Mrs. Beale
+phrased it, attractive and exposed must take of her "character," and was
+duly impressed with the rigour of her stepmother's scruples. There was
+literally no one of the other sex whom she seemed to feel at liberty to
+see at home, and when the child risked an enquiry about the ladies who,
+one by one, during her own previous period, had been made quite loudly
+welcome, Mrs. Beale hastened to inform her that, one by one, they had,
+the fiends, been found out, after all, to be awful. If she wished to
+know more about them she was recommended to approach her father.
+
+Maisie had, however, at the very moment of this injunction much livelier
+curiosities, for the dream of lectures at an institution had at last
+become a reality, thanks to Sir Claude's now unbounded energy in
+discovering what could be done. It stood out in this connexion that when
+you came to look into things in a spirit of earnestness an immense deal
+could be done for very little more than your fare in the Underground.
+The institution--there was a splendid one in a part of the town but
+little known to the child--became, in the glow of such a spirit, a
+thrilling place, and the walk to it from the station through Glower
+Street (a pronunciation for which Mrs. Beale once laughed at her little
+friend) a pathway literally strewn with "subjects." Maisie imagined
+herself to pluck them as she went, though they thickened in the great
+grey rooms where the fountain of knowledge, in the form usually of a
+high voice that she took at first to be angry, plashed in the stillness
+of rows of faces thrust out like empty jugs. "It MUST do us good--it's
+all so hideous," Mrs. Beale had immediately declared; manifesting a
+purity of resolution that made these occasions quite the most harmonious
+of all the many on which the pair had pulled together. Maisie certainly
+had never, in such an association, felt so uplifted, and never above
+all been so carried off her feet, as at the moments of Mrs. Beale's
+breathlessly re-entering the house and fairly shrieking upstairs to
+know if they should still be in time for a lecture. Her stepdaughter,
+all ready from the earliest hours, almost leaped over the banister to
+respond, and they dashed out together in quest of learning as hard as
+they often dashed back to release Mrs. Beale for other preoccupations.
+There had been in short no bustle like these particular spasms, once
+they had broken out, since that last brief flurry when Mrs. Wix, blowing
+as if she were grooming her, "made up" for everything previously lost at
+her father's.
+
+These weeks as well were too few, but they were flooded with a new
+emotion, part of which indeed came from the possibility that, through
+the long telescope of Glower Street, or perhaps between the pillars of
+the institution--which impressive objects were what Maisie thought most
+made it one--they should some day spy Sir Claude. That was what Mrs.
+Beale, under pressure, had said--doubtless a little impatiently: "Oh
+yes, oh yes, some day!" His joining them was clearly far less of a
+matter of course than was to have been gathered from his original
+profession of desire to improve in their company his own mind; and
+this sharpened our young lady's guess that since that occasion either
+something destructive had happened or something desirable hadn't. Mrs.
+Beale had thrown but a partial light in telling her how it had turned
+out that nobody had been squared. Maisie wished at any rate that
+somebody WOULD be squared. However, though in every approach to the
+temple of knowledge she watched in vain for Sir Claude, there was
+no doubt about the action of his loved image as an incentive and a
+recompense. When the institution was most on pillars--or, as Mrs. Beale
+put it, on stilts--when the subject was deepest and the lecture longest
+and the listeners ugliest, then it was they both felt their patron in
+the background would be most pleased with them. One day, abruptly, with
+a glance at this background, Mrs. Beale said to her companion: "We'll
+go to-night to the thingumbob at Earl's Court"; an announcement putting
+forth its full lustre when she had made known that she referred to
+the great Exhibition just opened in that quarter, a collection of
+extraordinary foreign things in tremendous gardens, with illuminations,
+bands, elephants, switchbacks and side-shows, as well as crowds of
+people among whom they might possibly see some one they knew. Maisie
+flew in the same bound at the neck of her friend and at the name of Sir
+Claude, on which Mrs. Beale confessed that--well, yes, there was just a
+chance that he would be able to meet them. He never of course, in his
+terrible position, knew what might happen from hour to hour; but he
+hoped to be free and he had given Mrs. Beale the tip. "Bring her there
+on the quiet and I'll try to turn up"--this was clear enough on what
+so many weeks of privation had made of his desire to see the child: it
+even appeared to represent on his part a yearning as constant as her
+own. That in turn was just puzzling enough to make Maisie express a
+bewilderment. She couldn't see, if they were so intensely of the same
+mind, why the theory on which she had come back to Mrs. Beale, the
+general reunion, the delightful trio, should have broken down so in
+fact. Mrs. Beale furthermore only gave her more to think about in saying
+that their disappointment was the result of his having got into his head
+a kind of idea.
+
+"What kind of idea?"
+
+"Oh goodness knows!" She spoke with an approach to asperity. "He's so
+awfully delicate."
+
+"Delicate?"--that was ambiguous.
+
+"About what he does, don't you know?" said Mrs. Beale. She fumbled.
+"Well, about what WE do."
+
+Maisie wondered. "You and me?"
+
+"Me and HIM, silly!" cried Mrs. Beale with, this time, a real giggle.
+
+"But you don't do any harm--YOU don't," said Maisie, wondering afresh
+and intending her emphasis as a decorous allusion to her parents.
+
+"Of course we don't, you angel--that's just the ground _I_ take!" her
+companion exultantly responded. "He says he doesn't want you mixed up."
+
+"Mixed up with what?"
+
+"That's exactly what _I_ want to know: mixed up with what, and how you
+are any more mixed--?" Mrs. Beale paused without ending her question.
+She ended after an instant in a different way. "All you can say is that
+it's his fancy."
+
+The tone of this, in spite of its expressing a resignation, the fruit of
+weariness, that dismissed the subject, conveyed so vividly how much such
+a fancy was not Mrs. Beale's own that our young lady was led by the mere
+fact of contact to arrive at a dim apprehension of the unuttered and the
+unknown. The relation between her step-parents had then a mysterious
+residuum; this was the first time she really had reflected that except
+as regards herself it was not a relationship. To each other it was only
+what they might have happened to make it, and she gathered that this,
+in the event, had been something that led Sir Claude to keep away from
+her. Didn't he fear she would be compromised? The perception of such a
+scruple endeared him the more, and it flashed over her that she might
+simplify everything by showing him how little she made of such a danger.
+Hadn't she lived with her eyes on it from her third year? It was the
+condition most frequently discussed at the Faranges', where the word was
+always in the air and where at the age of five, amid rounds of applause,
+she could gabble it off. She knew as well in short that a person could
+be compromised as that a person could be slapped with a hair-brush or
+left alone in the dark, and it was equally familiar to her that each of
+these ordeals was in general held to have too little effect. But the
+first thing was to make absolutely sure of Mrs. Beale. This was done by
+saying to her thoughtfully: "Well, if you don't mind--and you really
+don't, do you?"
+
+Mrs. Beale, with a dawn of amusement, considered. "Mixing you up? Not a
+bit. For what does it mean?"
+
+"Whatever it means I don't in the least mind BEING mixed. Therefore if
+you don't and I don't," Maisie concluded, "don't you think that when I
+see him this evening I had better just tell him we don't and ask him why
+in the world HE should?"
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+The child, however, was not destined to enjoy much of Sir Claude at the
+"thingumbob," which took for them a very different turn indeed. On the
+spot Mrs. Beale, with hilarity, had urged her to the course proposed;
+but later, at the Exhibition, she withdrew this allowance, mentioning as
+a result of second thoughts that when a man was so sensitive anything at
+all frisky usually made him worse. It would have been hard indeed for
+Sir Claude to be "worse," Maisie felt, as, in the gardens and the crowd,
+when the first dazzle had dropped, she looked for him in vain up and
+down. They had all their time, the couple, for frugal wistful wandering:
+they had partaken together at home of the light vague meal--Maisie's
+name for it was a "jam-supper"--to which they were reduced when Mr.
+Farange sought his pleasure abroad. It was abroad now entirely that Mr.
+Farange pursued this ideal, and it was the actual impression of his
+daughter, derived from his wife, that he had three days before joined a
+friend's yacht at Cowes.
+
+The place was full of side-shows, to which Mrs. Beale could introduce
+the little girl only, alas, by revealing to her so attractive, so
+enthralling a name: the side-shows, each time, were sixpence apiece,
+and the fond allegiance enjoyed by the elder of our pair had been
+established from the earliest time in spite of a paucity of sixpences.
+Small coin dropped from her as half-heartedly as answers from bad
+children to lessons that had not been looked at. Maisie passed more
+slowly the great painted posters, pressing with a linked arm closer
+to her friend's pocket, where she hoped for the audible chink of a
+shilling. But the upshot of this was but to deepen her yearning: if Sir
+Claude would only at last come the shillings would begin to ring. The
+companions paused, for want of one, before the Flowers of the Forest, a
+large presentment of bright brown ladies--they were brown all over--in
+a medium suggestive of tropical luxuriance, and there Maisie dolorously
+expressed her belief that he would never come at all. Mrs. Beale
+hereupon, though discernibly disappointed, reminded her that he had not
+been promised as a certainty--a remark that caused the child to gaze at
+the Flowers through a blur in which they became more magnificent, yet
+oddly more confused, and by which moreover confusion was imparted to the
+aspect of a gentleman who at that moment, in the company of a lady, came
+out of the brilliant booth. The lady was so brown that Maisie at first
+took her for one of the Flowers; but during the few seconds that this
+required--a few seconds in which she had also desolately given up Sir
+Claude--she heard Mrs. Beale's voice, behind her, gather both wonder and
+pain into a single sharp little cry.
+
+"Of all the wickedness--BEALE!"
+
+He had already, without distinguishing them in the mass of strollers,
+turned another way--it seemed at the brown lady's suggestion. Her course
+was marked, over heads and shoulders, by an upright scarlet plume, as to
+the ownership of which Maisie was instantly eager. "Who is she--who is
+she?"
+
+But Mrs. Beale for a moment only looked after them. "The liar--the
+liar!"
+
+Maisie considered. "Because he's not--where one thought?" That was also,
+a month ago in Kensington Gardens, where her mother had not been.
+"Perhaps he has come back," she was quick to contribute.
+
+"He never went--the hound!"
+
+That, according to Sir Claude, had been also what her mother had not
+done, and Maisie could only have a sense of something that in a maturer
+mind would be called the way history repeats itself.
+
+"Who IS she?" she asked again.
+
+Mrs. Beale, fixed to the spot, seemed lost in the vision of an
+opportunity missed. "If he had only seen me!"--it came from between her
+teeth. "She's a brand-new one. But he must have been with her since
+Tuesday."
+
+Maisie took it in. "She's almost black," she then reported.
+
+"They're always hideous," said Mrs. Beale.
+
+This was a remark on which the child had again to reflect. "Oh not his
+WIVES!" she remonstrantly exclaimed. The words at another moment would
+probably have set her friend "off," but Mrs. Beale was now, in her
+instant vigilance, too immensely "on." "Did you ever in your life see
+such a feather?" Maisie presently continued.
+
+This decoration appeared to have paused at some distance, and in spite
+of intervening groups they could both look at it. "Oh that's the way
+they dress--the vulgarest of the vulgar!"
+
+"They're coming back--they'll see us!" Maisie the next moment cried;
+and while her companion answered that this was exactly what she wanted
+and the child returned "Here they are--here they are!" the unconscious
+subjects of so much attention, with a change of mind about their
+direction, quickly retraced their steps and precipitated themselves upon
+their critics. Their unconsciousness gave Mrs. Beale time to leap, under
+her breath, to a recognition which Maisie caught.
+
+"It must be Mrs. Cuddon!"
+
+Maisie looked at Mrs. Cuddon hard--her lips even echoed the name. What
+followed was extraordinarily rapid--a minute of livelier battle than had
+ever yet, in so short a span at least, been waged round our heroine. The
+muffled shock--lest people should notice--was violent, and it was only
+for her later thought that the steps fell into their order, the steps
+through which, in a bewilderment not so much of sound as of silence, she
+had come to find herself, too soon for comprehension and too strangely
+for fear, at the door of the Exhibition with her father. He thrust her
+into a hansom and got in after her, and then it was--as she drove along
+with him--that she recovered a little what had happened. Face to face
+with them in the gardens he had seen them, and there had been a moment
+of checked concussion during which, in a glare of black eyes and a
+toss of red plumage, Mrs. Cuddon had recognised them, ejaculated and
+vanished. There had been another moment at which she became aware of Sir
+Claude, also poised there in surprise, but out of her father's view, as
+if he had been warned off at the very moment of reaching them. It fell
+into its place with all the rest that she had heard Mrs. Beale say to
+her father, but whether low or loud was now lost to her, something
+about his having this time a new one; on which he had growled something
+indistinct but apparently in the tone and of the sort that the child,
+from her earliest years, had associated with hearing somebody retort
+to somebody that somebody was "another." "Oh I stick to the old!" Mrs.
+Beale had then quite loudly pronounced; and her accent, even as the cab
+got away, was still in the air, Maisie's effective companion having
+spoken no other word from the moment of whisking her off--none at least
+save the indistinguishable address which, over the top of the hansom and
+poised on the step, he had given the driver. Reconstructing these things
+later Maisie theorised that she at this point would have put a question
+to him had not the silence into which he charmed her or scared her--she
+could scarcely tell which--come from his suddenly making her feel his
+arm about her, feel, as he drew her close, that he was agitated in a way
+he had never yet shown her. It struck her he trembled, trembled too much
+to speak, and this had the effect of making her, with an emotion which,
+though it had begun to throb in an instant, was by no means all dread,
+conform to his portentous hush. The act of possession that his pressure
+in a manner advertised came back to her after the longest of the long
+intermissions that had ever let anything come back. They drove and
+drove, and he kept her close; she stared straight before her, holding
+her breath, watching one dark street succeed another and strangely
+conscious that what it all meant was somehow that papa was less to be
+left out of everything than she had supposed. It took her but a minute
+to surrender to this discovery, which, in the form of his present
+embrace, suggested a purpose in him prodigiously reaffirmed and with
+that a confused confidence. She neither knew exactly what he had done
+nor what he was doing; she could only, altogether impressed and rather
+proud, vibrate with the sense that he had jumped up to do something and
+that she had as quickly become a part of it. It was a part of it too
+that here they were at a house that seemed not large, but in the fresh
+white front of which the street-lamp showed a smartness of flower-boxes.
+The child had been in thousands of stories--all Mrs. Wix's and her own,
+to say nothing of the richest romances of French Elise--but she had
+never been in such a story as this. By the time he had helped her out
+of the cab, which drove away, and she heard in the door of the house
+the prompt little click of his key, the Arabian Nights had quite closed
+round her.
+
+From this minute that pitch of the wondrous was in everything,
+particularly in such an instant "Open Sesame" and in the departure of
+the cab, a rattling void filled with relinquished step-parents; it was,
+with the vividness, the almost blinding whiteness of the light that
+sprang responsive to papa's quick touch of a little brass knob on the
+wall, in a place that, at the top of a short soft staircase, struck her
+as the most beautiful she had ever seen in her life. The next thing she
+perceived it to be was the drawing-room of a lady--of a lady, she could
+see in a moment, and not of a gentleman, not even of one like papa
+himself or even like Sir Claude--whose things were as much prettier than
+mamma's as it had always had to be confessed that mamma's were prettier
+than Mrs. Beale's. In the middle of the small bright room and the
+presence of more curtains and cushions, more pictures and mirrors, more
+palm-trees drooping over brocaded and gilded nooks, more little silver
+boxes scattered over little crooked tables and little oval miniatures
+hooked upon velvet screens than Mrs. Beale and her ladyship together
+could, in an unnatural alliance, have dreamed of mustering, the child
+became aware, with a sharp foretaste of compassion, of something that
+was strangely like a relegation to obscurity of each of those women of
+taste. It was a stranger operation still that her father should on the
+spot be presented to her as quite advantageously and even grandly at
+home in the dazzling scene and himself by so much the more separated
+from scenes inferior to it. She spent with him in it, while explanations
+continued to hang back, twenty minutes that, in their sudden drop of
+danger, affected her, though there were neither buns nor ginger-beer,
+like an extemporised expensive treat.
+
+"Is she very rich?" He had begun to strike her as almost embarrassed, so
+shy that he might have found himself with a young lady with whom he had
+little in common. She was literally moved by this apprehension to offer
+him some tactful relief.
+
+Beale Farange stood and smiled at his young lady, his back to
+the fanciful fireplace, his light overcoat--the very lightest in
+London--wide open, and his wonderful lustrous beard completely
+concealing the expanse of his shirt-front. It pleased her more than ever
+to think that papa was handsome and, though as high aloft as mamma and
+almost, in his specially florid evening-dress, as splendid, of a beauty
+somehow less belligerent, less terrible.
+
+"The Countess? Why do you ask me that?"
+
+Maisie's eyes opened wider. "Is she a Countess?"
+
+He seemed to treat her wonder as a positive tribute. "Oh yes, my dear,
+but it isn't an English title."
+
+Her manner appreciated this. "Is it a French one?"
+
+"No, nor French either. It's American."
+
+She conversed agreeably. "Ah then of course she must be rich." She took
+in such a combination of nationality and rank. "I never saw anything so
+lovely."
+
+"Did you have a sight of her?" Beale asked.
+
+"At the Exhibition?" Maisie smiled. "She was gone too quick."
+
+Her father laughed. "She did slope!" She had feared he would say
+something about Mrs. Beale and Sir Claude, yet the way he spared them
+made her rather uneasy too. All he risked was, the next minute, "She has
+a horror of vulgar scenes."
+
+This was something she needn't take up; she could still continue bland.
+"But where do you suppose she went?"
+
+"Oh I thought she'd have taken a cab and have been here by this time.
+But she'll turn up all right."
+
+"I'm sure I HOPE she will," Maisie said; she spoke with an earnestness
+begotten of the impression of all the beauty about them, to which, in
+person, the Countess might make further contribution. "We came awfully
+fast," she added.
+
+Her father again laughed loud. "Yes, my dear, I made you step out!" He
+waited an instant, then pursued: "I want her to see you."
+
+Maisie, at this, rejoiced in the attention that, for their evening out,
+Mrs. Beale, even to the extent of personally "doing up" her old hat, had
+given her appearance. Meanwhile her father went on: "You'll like her
+awfully."
+
+"Oh I'm sure I shall!" After which, either from the effect of having
+said so much or from that of a sudden glimpse of the impossibility of
+saying more, she felt an embarrassment and sought refuge in a minor
+branch of the subject. "I thought she was Mrs. Cuddon."
+
+Beale's gaiety rather increased than diminished. "You mean my wife
+did? My dear child, my wife's a damned fool!" He had the oddest air of
+speaking of his wife as of a person whom she might scarcely have known,
+so that the refuge of her scruple didn't prove particularly happy. Beale
+on the other hand appeared after an instant himself to feel a scruple.
+"What I mean is, to speak seriously, that she doesn't really know
+anything about anything." He paused, following the child's charmed eyes
+and tentative step or two as they brought her nearer to the pretty
+things on one of the tables. "She thinks she has good things, don't you
+know!" He quite jeered at Mrs. Beale's delusion.
+
+Maisie felt she must confess that it WAS one; everything she had missed
+at the side-shows was made up to her by the Countess's luxuries. "Yes,"
+she considered; "she does think that."
+
+There was again a dryness in the way Beale replied that it didn't matter
+what she thought; but there was an increasing sweetness for his daughter
+in being with him so long without his doing anything worse. The whole
+hour of course was to remain with her, for days and weeks, ineffaceably
+illumined and confirmed; by the end of which she was able to read
+into it a hundred things that had been at the moment mere miraculous
+pleasantness. What they at the moment came to was simply that her
+companion was still in a good deal of a flutter, yet wished not to show
+it, and that just in proportion as he succeeded in this attempt he was
+able to encourage her to regard him as kind. He moved about the room
+after a little, showed her things, spoke to her as a person of taste,
+told her the name, which she remembered, of the famous French lady
+represented in one of the miniatures, and remarked, as if he had caught
+her wistful over a trinket or a trailing stuff, that he made no doubt
+the Countess, on coming in, would give her something jolly. He spied a
+pink satin box with a looking-glass let into the cover, which he raised,
+with a quick facetious flourish, to offer her the privilege of six rows
+of chocolate bonbons, cutting out thereby Sir Claude, who had never
+gone beyond four rows. "I can do what I like with these," he said, "for
+I don't mind telling you I gave 'em to her myself." The Countess had
+evidently appreciated the gift; there were numerous gaps, a ravage now
+quite unchecked, in the array. Even while they waited together Maisie
+had her sense, which was the mark of what their separation had become,
+of her having grown for him, since the last time he had, as it were,
+noticed her, and by increase of years and of inches if by nothing else,
+much more of a little person to reckon with. Yes, this was a part of
+the positive awkwardness that he carried off by being almost foolishly
+tender. There was a passage during which, on a yellow silk sofa under
+one of the palms, he had her on his knee, stroking her hair, playfully
+holding her off while he showed his shining fangs and let her, with
+a vague affectionate helpless pointless "Dear old girl, dear little
+daughter," inhale the fragrance of his cherished beard. She must have
+been sorry for him, she afterwards knew, so well could she privately
+follow his difficulty in being specific to her about anything. She had
+such possibilities of vibration, of response, that it needed nothing
+more than this to make up to her in fact for omissions. The tears came
+into her eyes again as they had done when in the Park that day the
+Captain told her so "splendidly" that her mother was good. What was
+this but splendid too--this still directer goodness of her father and
+this unexampled shining solitude with him, out of which everything had
+dropped but that he was papa and that he was magnificent? It didn't
+spoil it that she finally felt he must have, as he became restless, some
+purpose he didn't quite see his way to bring out, for in the freshness
+of their recovered fellowship she would have lent herself gleefully to
+his suggesting, or even to his pretending, that their relations were
+easy and graceful. There was something in him that seemed, and quite
+touchingly, to ask her to help him to pretend--pretend he knew enough
+about her life and her education, her means of subsistence and her view
+of himself, to give the questions he couldn't put her a natural domestic
+tone. She would have pretended with ecstasy if he could only have given
+her the cue. She waited for it while, between his big teeth, he breathed
+the sighs she didn't know to be stupid. And as if, though he was so
+stupid all through, he had let the friendly suffusion of her eyes yet
+tell him she was ready for anything, he floundered about, wondering what
+the devil he could lay hold of.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+When he had lighted a cigarette and begun to smoke in her face it was as
+if he had struck with the match the note of some queer clumsy ferment
+of old professions, old scandals, old duties, a dim perception of what
+he possessed in her and what, if everything had only--damn it!--been
+totally different, she might still be able to give him. What she was
+able to give him, however, as his blinking eyes seemed to make out
+through the smoke, would be simply what he should be able to get from
+her. To give something, to give here on the spot, was all her own
+desire. Among the old things that came back was her little instinct of
+keeping the peace; it made her wonder more sharply what particular thing
+she could do or not do, what particular word she could speak or not
+speak, what particular line she could take or not take, that might for
+every one, even for the Countess, give a better turn to the crisis. She
+was ready, in this interest, for an immense surrender, a surrender of
+everything but Sir Claude, of everything but Mrs. Beale. The immensity
+didn't include THEM; but if he had an idea at the back of his head
+she had also one in a recess as deep, and for a time, while they sat
+together, there was an extraordinary mute passage between her vision
+of this vision of his, his vision of her vision, and her vision of his
+vision of her vision. What there was no effective record of indeed
+was the small strange pathos on the child's part of an innocence so
+saturated with knowledge and so directed to diplomacy. What, further,
+Beale finally laid hold of while he masked again with his fine presence
+half the flounces of the fireplace was: "Do you know, my dear, I shall
+soon be off to America?" It struck his daughter both as a short cut and
+as the way he wouldn't have said it to his wife. But his wife figured
+with a bright superficial assurance in her response.
+
+"Do you mean with Mrs. Beale?"
+
+Her father looked at her hard. "Don't be a little ass!"
+
+Her silence appeared to represent a concentrated effort not to be. "Then
+with the Countess?"
+
+"With her or without her, my dear; that concerns only your poor daddy.
+She has big interests over there, and she wants me to take a look at
+them."
+
+Maisie threw herself into them. "Will that take very long?"
+
+"Yes; they're in such a muddle--it may take months. Now what I want to
+hear, you know, is whether you'd like to come along?"
+
+Planted once more before him in the middle of the room she felt herself
+turning white. "I?" she gasped, yet feeling as soon as she had spoken
+that such a note of dismay was not altogether pretty. She felt it still
+more while her father replied, with a shake of his legs, a toss of his
+cigarette-ash and a fidgety look--he was for ever taking one--all the
+length of his waistcoat and trousers, that she needn't be quite so
+disgusted. It helped her in a few seconds to appear more as he would
+like her that she saw, in the lovely light of the Countess's splendour,
+exactly, however she appeared, the right answer to make. "Dear papa,
+I'll go with you anywhere."
+
+He turned his back to her and stood with his nose at the glass of the
+chimneypiece while he brushed specks of ash out of his beard. Then he
+abruptly said: "Do you know anything about your brute of a mother?"
+
+It was just of her brute of a mother that the manner of the question in
+a remarkable degree reminded her: it had the free flight of one of Ida's
+fine bridgings of space. With the sense of this was kindled for Maisie
+at the same time an inspiration. "Oh yes, I know everything!" and she
+became so radiant that her father, seeing it in the mirror, turned back
+to her and presently, on the sofa, had her at his knee again and was
+again particularly affecting. Maisie's inspiration instructed her,
+pressingly, that the more she should be able to say about mamma the
+less she would be called upon to speak of her step-parents. She kept
+hoping the Countess would come in before her power to protect them was
+exhausted; and it was now, in closer quarters with her companion, that
+the idea at the back of her head shifted its place to her lips. She told
+him she had met her mother in the Park with a gentleman who, while Sir
+Claude had strolled with her ladyship, had been kind and had sat and
+talked to her; narrating the scene with a remembrance of her pledge of
+secrecy to the Captain quite brushed away by the joy of seeing Beale
+listen without profane interruption. It was almost an amazement, but it
+was indeed all a joy, thus to be able to guess that papa was at last
+quite tired of his anger--of his anger at any rate about mamma. He was
+only bored with her now. That made it, however, the more imperative that
+his spent displeasure shouldn't be blown out again. It charmed the child
+to see how much she could interest him; and the charm remained even
+when, after asking her a dozen questions, he observed musingly and a
+little obscurely: "Yes, damned if she won't!" For in this too there was
+a detachment, a wise weariness that made her feel safe. She had had
+to mention Sir Claude, though she mentioned him as little as possible
+and Beale only appeared to look quite over his head. It pieced itself
+together for her that this was the mildness of general indifference, a
+source of profit so great for herself personally that if the Countess
+was the author of it she was prepared literally to hug the Countess. She
+betrayed that eagerness by a restless question about her, to which her
+father replied: "Oh she has a head on her shoulders. I'll back her to
+get out of anything!" He looked at Maisie quite as if he could trace the
+connexion between her enquiry and the impatience of her gratitude. "Do
+you mean to say you'd really come with me?"
+
+She felt as if he were now looking at her very hard indeed, and also as
+if she had grown ever so much older. "I'll do anything in the world you
+ask me, papa."
+
+He gave again, with a laugh and with his legs apart, his proprietary
+glance at his waistcoat and trousers. "That's a way, my dear, of saying
+'No, thank you!' You know you don't want to go the least little mite.
+You can't humbug ME!" Beale Farange laid down. "I don't want to bully
+you--I never bullied you in my life; but I make you the offer, and it's
+to take or to leave. Your mother will never again have any more to do
+with you than if you were a kitchenmaid she had turned out for going
+wrong. Therefore of course I'm your natural protector and you've a right
+to get everything out of me you can. Now's your chance, you know--you
+won't be half-clever if you don't. You can't say I don't put it before
+you--you can't say I ain't kind to you or that I don't play fair. Mind
+you never say that, you know--it WOULD bring me down on you. I know
+what's proper. I'll take you again, just as I HAVE taken you again and
+again. And I'm much obliged to you for making up such a face."
+
+She was conscious enough that her face indeed couldn't please him if it
+showed any sign--just as she hoped it didn't--of her sharp impression of
+what he now really wanted to do. Wasn't he trying to turn the tables on
+her, embarrass her somehow into admitting that what would really suit
+her little book would be, after doing so much for good manners, to leave
+her wholly at liberty to arrange for herself? She began to be nervous
+again: it rolled over her that this was their parting, their parting
+for ever, and that he had brought her there for so many caresses only
+because it was important such an occasion should look better for him
+than any other. For her to spoil it by the note of discord would
+certainly give him ground for complaint; and the child was momentarily
+bewildered between her alternatives of agreeing with him about her
+wanting to get rid of him and displeasing him by pretending to stick
+to him. So she found for the moment no solution but to murmur very
+helplessly: "Oh papa--oh papa!"
+
+"I know what you're up to--don't tell ME!" After which he came straight
+over and, in the most inconsequent way in the world, clasped her in
+his arms a moment and rubbed his beard against her cheek. Then she
+understood as well as if he had spoken it that what he wanted, hang
+it, was that she should let him off with all the honours--with all
+the appearance of virtue and sacrifice on his side. It was exactly as
+if he had broken out to her: "I say, you little booby, help me to be
+irreproachable, to be noble, and yet to have none of the beastly bore of
+it. There's only impropriety enough for one of us; so YOU must take it
+all. REPUDIATE your dear old daddy--in the face, mind you, of his tender
+supplications. He can't be rough with you--it isn't in his nature:
+therefore you'll have successfully chucked him because he was too
+generous to be as firm with you, poor man, as was, after all, his duty."
+This was what he communicated in a series of tremendous pats on the
+back; that portion of her person had never been so thumped since Moddle
+thumped her when she choked. After a moment he gave her the further
+impression of having become sure enough of her to be able very
+gracefully to say out: "You know your mother loathes you, loathes you
+simply. And I've been thinking over your precious man--the fellow you
+told me about."
+
+"Well," Maisie replied with competence, "I'm sure of HIM."
+
+Her father was vague for an instant. "Do you mean sure of his liking
+you?"
+
+"Oh no; of his liking HER!"
+
+Beale had a return of gaiety. "There's no accounting for tastes! It's
+what they all say, you know."
+
+"I don't care--I'm sure of him!" Maisie repeated.
+
+"Sure, you mean, that she'll bolt?"
+
+Maisie knew all about bolting, but, decidedly, she WAS older, and there
+was something in her that could wince at the way her father made the
+ugly word--ugly enough at best--sound flat and low. It prompted her to
+amend his allusion, which she did by saying: "I don't know what she'll
+do. But she'll be happy."
+
+"Let us hope so," said Beale--almost as for edification. "The more happy
+she is at any rate the less she'll want you about. That's why I press
+you," he agreeably pursued, "to consider this handsome offer--I mean
+seriously, you know--of your sole surviving parent." Their eyes, at
+this, met again in a long and extraordinary communion which terminated
+in his ejaculating: "Ah you little scoundrel!" She took it from him in
+the manner it seemed to her he would like best and with a success that
+encouraged him to go on: "You ARE a deep little devil!" Her silence,
+ticking like a watch, acknowledged even this, in confirmation of which
+he finally brought out: "You've settled it with the other pair!"
+
+"Well, what if I have?" She sounded to herself most bold.
+
+Her father, quite as in the old days, broke into a peal. "Why, don't you
+know they're awful?"
+
+She grew bolder still. "I don't care--not a bit!"
+
+"But they're probably the worst people in the world and the very
+greatest criminals," Beale pleasantly urged. "I'm not the man, my dear,
+not to let you know it."
+
+"Well, it doesn't prevent them from loving me. They love me
+tremendously." Maisie turned crimson to hear herself.
+
+Her companion fumbled; almost any one--let alone a daughter--would
+have seen how conscientious he wanted to be. "I dare say. But do you
+know why?" She braved his eyes and he added: "You're a jolly good
+pretext."
+
+"For what?" Maisie asked.
+
+"Why, for their game. I needn't tell you what that is."
+
+The child reflected. "Well then that's all the more reason."
+
+"Reason for what, pray?"
+
+"For their being kind to me."
+
+"And for your keeping in with them?" Beale roared again; it was as if
+his spirits rose and rose. "Do you realise, pray, that in saying that
+you're a monster?"
+
+She turned it over. "A monster?"
+
+"They've MADE one of you. Upon my honour it's quite awful. It shows
+the kind of people they are. Don't you understand," Beale pursued,
+"that when they've made you as horrid as they can--as horrid as
+themselves--they'll just simply chuck you?"
+
+She had at this a flicker of passion. "They WON'T chuck me!"
+
+"I beg your pardon," her father courteously insisted; "it's my duty to
+put it before you. I shouldn't forgive myself if I didn't point out to
+you that they'll cease to require you." He spoke as if with an appeal to
+her intelligence that she must be ashamed not adequately to meet, and
+this gave a real distinction to his superior delicacy.
+
+It cleared the case as he had wished. "Cease to require me because they
+won't care?" She paused with that sketch of her idea.
+
+"OF COURSE Sir Claude won't care if his wife bolts. That's his game. It
+will suit him down to the ground."
+
+This was a proposition Maisie could perfectly embrace, but it still left
+a loophole for triumph. She turned it well over. "You mean if mamma
+doesn't come back ever at all?" The composure with which her face was
+presented to that prospect would have shown a spectator the long road
+she had travelled. "Well, but that won't put Mrs. Beale--"
+
+"In the same comfortable position--?" Beale took her up with relish; he
+had sprung to his feet again, shaking his legs and looking at his shoes.
+"Right you are, darling! Something more will be wanted for Mrs. Beale."
+He just paused, then he added: "But she may not have long to wait for
+it."
+
+Maisie also for a minute looked at his shoes, though they were not the
+pair she most admired, the laced yellow "uppers" and patent-leather
+complement. At last, with a question, she raised her eyes. "Aren't you
+coming back?"
+
+Once more he hung fire; after which he gave a small laugh that in the
+oddest way in the world reminded her of the unique sounds she had
+heard emitted by Mrs. Wix. "It may strike you as extraordinary that I
+should make you such an admission; and in point of fact you're not to
+understand that I do. But we'll put it that way to help your decision.
+The point is that that's the way my wife will presently be sure to put
+it. You'll hear her shrieking that she's deserted, so that she may just
+pile up her wrongs. She'll be as free as she likes then--as free, you
+see, as your mother's muff of a husband. They won't have anything more
+to consider and they'll just put you into the street. Do I understand,"
+Beale enquired, "that, in the face of what I press on you, you still
+prefer to take the risk of that?" It was the most wonderful appeal any
+gentleman had ever addressed to his daughter, and it had placed Maisie
+in the middle of the room again while her father moved slowly about her
+with his hands in his pockets and something in his step that seemed,
+more than anything else he had done, to show the habit of the place.
+She turned her fevered little eyes over his friend's brightnesses, as
+if, on her own side, to press for some help in a quandary unexampled.
+As if also the pressure reached him he after an instant stopped short,
+completing the prodigy of his attitude and the pride of his loyalty by
+a supreme formulation of the general inducement. "You've an eye, love!
+Yes, there's money. No end of money."
+
+This affected her at first in the manner of some great flashing dazzle
+in one of the pantomimes to which Sir Claude had taken her: she saw
+nothing in it but what it directly conveyed. "And shall I never, never
+see you again--?"
+
+"If I do go to America?" Beale brought it out like a man. "Never, never,
+never!"
+
+Hereupon, with the utmost absurdity, she broke down; everything gave
+way, everything but the horror of hearing herself definitely utter such
+an ugliness as the acceptance of that. So she only stiffened herself and
+said: "Then I can't give you up."
+
+She held him some seconds looking at her, showing her a strained
+grimace, a perfect parade of all his teeth, in which it seemed to her
+she could read the disgust he didn't quite like to express at this
+departure from the pliability she had practically promised. But before
+she could attenuate in any way the crudity of her collapse he gave an
+impatient jerk which took him to the window. She heard a vehicle stop;
+Beale looked out; then he freshly faced her. He still said nothing, but
+she knew the Countess had come back. There was a silence again between
+them, but with a different shade of embarrassment from that of their
+united arrival; and it was still without speaking that, abruptly
+repeating one of the embraces of which he had already been so prodigal,
+he whisked her back to the lemon sofa just before the door of the room
+was thrown open. It was thus in renewed and intimate union with him that
+she was presented to a person whom she instantly recognised as the brown
+lady.
+
+The brown lady looked almost as astonished, though not quite as alarmed,
+as when, at the Exhibition, she had gasped in the face of Mrs. Beale.
+Maisie in truth almost gasped in her own; this was with the fuller
+perception that she was brown indeed. She literally struck the child
+more as an animal than as a "real" lady; she might have been a clever
+frizzled poodle in a frill or a dreadful human monkey in a spangled
+petticoat. She had a nose that was far too big and eyes that were far
+too small and a moustache that was, well, not so happy a feature as Sir
+Claude's. Beale jumped up to her; while, to the child's astonishment,
+though as if in a quick intensity of thought, the Countess advanced as
+gaily as if, for many a day, nothing awkward had happened for any one.
+Maisie, in spite of a large acquaintance with the phenomenon, had
+never seen it so promptly established that nothing awkward was to be
+mentioned. The next minute the Countess had kissed her and exclaimed to
+Beale with bright tender reproach: "Why, you never told me HALF! My dear
+child," she cried, "it was awfully nice of you to come!"
+
+"But she hasn't come--she won't come!" Beale answered. "I've put it to
+her how much you'd like it, but she declines to have anything to do with
+us."
+
+The Countess stood smiling, and after an instant that was mainly taken
+up with the shock of her weird aspect Maisie felt herself reminded
+of another smile, which was not ugly, though also interested--the
+kind light thrown, that day in the Park, from the clean fair face of
+the Captain. Papa's Captain--yes--was the Countess; but she wasn't
+nearly so nice as the other: it all came back, doubtless, to Maisie's
+minor appreciation of ladies. "Shouldn't you like me," said this one
+endearingly, "to take you to Spa?"
+
+"To Spa?" The child repeated the name to gain time, not to show how the
+Countess brought back to her a dim remembrance of a strange woman with a
+horrid face who once, years before, in an omnibus, bending to her from
+an opposite seat, had suddenly produced an orange and murmured "Little
+dearie, won't you have it?" She had felt then, for some reason, a small
+silly terror, though afterwards conscious that her interlocutress,
+unfortunately hideous, had particularly meant to be kind. This was also
+what the Countess meant; yet the few words she had uttered and the smile
+with which she had uttered them immediately cleared everything up. Oh
+no, she wanted to go nowhere with HER, for her presence had already, in
+a few seconds, dissipated the happy impression of the room and put an
+end to the pleasure briefly taken in Beale's command of such elegance.
+There was no command of elegance in his having exposed her to the
+approach of the short fat wheedling whiskered person in whom she had now
+to recognise the only figure wholly without attraction involved in any
+of the intimate connexions her immediate circle had witnessed the growth
+of. She was abashed meanwhile, however, at having appeared to weigh in
+the balance the place to which she had been invited; and she added as
+quickly as possible: "It isn't to America then?" The Countess, at this,
+looked sharply at Beale, and Beale, airily enough, asked what the deuce
+it mattered when she had already given him to understand she wanted to
+have nothing to do with them. There followed between her companions a
+passage of which the sense was drowned for her in the deepening inward
+hum of her mere desire to get off; though she was able to guess later
+on that her father must have put it to his friend that it was no use
+talking, that she was an obstinate little pig and that, besides, she
+was really old enough to choose for herself. It glimmered back to her
+indeed that she must have failed quite dreadfully to seem ideally other
+than rude, inasmuch as before she knew it she had visibly given the
+impression that if they didn't allow her to go home she should cry. Oh
+if there had ever been a thing to cry about it was being so consciously
+and gawkily below the handsomest offers any one could ever have
+received. The great pain of the thing was that she could see the
+Countess liked her enough to wish to be liked in return, and it was from
+the idea of a return she sought utterly to flee. It was the idea of a
+return that after a confusion of loud words had broken out between the
+others brought to her lips with the tremor preceding disaster: "Can't
+I, please, be sent home in a cab?" Yes, the Countess wanted her and the
+Countess was wounded and chilled, and she couldn't help it, and it was
+all the more dreadful because it only made the Countess more coaxing and
+more impossible. The only thing that sustained either of them perhaps
+till the cab came--Maisie presently saw it would come--was its being
+in the air somehow that Beale had done what he wanted. He went out to
+look for a conveyance; the servants, he said, had gone to bed, but she
+shouldn't be kept beyond her time. The Countess left the room with him,
+and, alone in the possession of it, Maisie hoped she wouldn't come
+back. It was all the effect of her face--the child simply couldn't look
+at it and meet its expression halfway. All in a moment too that queer
+expression had leaped into the lovely things--all in a moment she had
+had to accept her father as liking some one whom she was sure neither
+her mother, nor Mrs. Beale, nor Mrs. Wix, nor Sir Claude, nor the
+Captain, nor even Mr. Perriam and Lord Eric could possibly have liked.
+Three minutes later, downstairs, with the cab at the door, it was
+perhaps as a final confession of not having much to boast of that, on
+taking leave of her, he managed to press her to his bosom without her
+seeing his face. For herself she was so eager to go that their parting
+reminded her of nothing, not even of a single one of all the "nevers"
+that above, as the penalty of not cleaving to him, he had attached to
+the question of their meeting again. There was something in the Countess
+that falsified everything, even the great interests in America and yet
+more the first flush of that superiority to Mrs. Beale and to mamma
+which had been expressed in Sevres sets and silver boxes. These were
+still there, but perhaps there were no great interests in America.
+Mamma had known an American who was not a bit like this one. She was
+not, however, of noble rank; her name was only Mrs. Tucker. Maisie's
+detachment would none the less have been more complete if she had not
+suddenly had to exclaim: "Oh dear, I haven't any money!"
+
+Her father's teeth, at this, were such a picture of appetite without
+action as to be a match for any plea of poverty. "Make your stepmother
+pay."
+
+"Stepmothers DON'T pay!" cried the Countess. "No stepmother ever paid
+in her life!" The next moment they were in the street together, and the
+next the child was in the cab, with the Countess, on the pavement, but
+close to her, quickly taking money from a purse whisked out of a pocket.
+Her father had vanished and there was even yet nothing in that to
+reawaken the pang of loss. "Here's money," said the brown lady: "go!"
+The sound was commanding: the cab rattled off. Maisie sat there with her
+hand full of coin. All that for a cab? As they passed a street-lamp she
+bent to see how much. What she saw was a cluster of sovereigns. There
+MUST then have been great interests in America. It was still at any rate
+the Arabian Nights.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+The money was far too much even for a fee in a fairy-tale, and in the
+absence of Mrs. Beale, who, though the hour was now late, had not yet
+returned to the Regent's Park, Susan Ash, in the hall, as loud as Maisie
+was low and as bold as she was bland, produced, on the exhibition
+offered under the dim vigil of the lamp that made the place a
+contrast to the child's recent scene of light, the half-crown that an
+unsophisticated cabman could pronounce to be the least he would take. It
+was apparently long before Mrs. Beale would arrive, and in the interval
+Maisie had been induced by the prompt Susan not only to go to bed like
+a darling dear, but, in still richer expression of that character, to
+devote to the repayment of obligations general as well as particular
+one of the sovereigns in the ordered array that, on the dressing-table
+upstairs, was naturally not less dazzling to a lone orphan of a
+housemaid than to the subject of the manoeuvres of a quartette. This
+subject went to sleep with her property gathered into a knotted
+handkerchief, the largest that could be produced and lodged under her
+pillow; but the explanations that on the morrow were inevitably more
+complete with Mrs. Beale than they had been with her humble friend
+found their climax in a surrender also more becomingly free. There were
+explanations indeed that Mrs. Beale had to give as well as to ask, and
+the most striking of these was to the effect that it was dreadful for
+a little girl to take money from a woman who was simply the vilest of
+their sex. The sovereigns were examined with some attention, the result
+of which, however, was to make the author of that statement desire to
+know what, if one really went into the matter, they could be called
+but the wages of sin. Her companion went into it merely so far as the
+question of what then they were to do with them; on which Mrs. Beale,
+who had by this time put them into her pocket, replied with dignity
+and with her hand on the place: "We're to send them back on the spot!"
+Susan, the child soon afterwards learnt, had been invited to contribute
+to this act of restitution her one appropriated coin; but a closer
+clutch of the treasure showed in her private assurance to Maisie that
+there was a limit to the way she could be "done." Maisie had been open
+with Mrs. Beale about the whole of last night's transaction; but she
+now found herself on the part of their indignant inferior a recipient
+of remarks that were so many ringing tokens of that lady's own
+suppressions. One of these bore upon the extraordinary hour--it was
+three in the morning if she really wanted to know--at which Mrs. Beale
+had re-entered the house; another, in accents as to which Maisie's
+criticism was still intensely tacit, characterised her appeal as such
+a "gime," such a "shime," as one had never had to put up with; a
+third treated with some vigour the question of the enormous sums due
+belowstairs, in every department, for gratuitous labour and wasted zeal.
+Our young lady's consciousness was indeed mainly filled for several
+days with the apprehension created by the too slow subsidence of her
+attendant's sense of wrong. These days would become terrific like the
+Revolutions she had learnt by heart in Histories if an outbreak in the
+kitchen should crown them; and to promote that prospect she had through
+Susan's eyes more than one glimpse of the way in which Revolutions are
+prepared. To listen to Susan was to gather that the spark applied to
+the inflammables and already causing them to crackle would prove to
+have been the circumstance of one's being called a horrid low thief for
+refusing to part with one's own. The redeeming point of this tension
+was, on the fifth day, that it actually appeared to have had to do with
+a breathless perception in our heroine's breast that scarcely more as
+the centre of Sir Claude's than as that of Susan's energies she had soon
+after breakfast been conveyed from London to Folkestone and established
+at a lovely hotel. These agents, before her wondering eyes, had combined
+to carry through the adventure and to give it the air of having owed
+its success to the fact that Mrs. Beale had, as Susan said, but just
+stepped out. When Sir Claude, watch in hand, had met this fact with the
+exclamation "Then pack Miss Farange and come off with us!" there had
+ensued on the stairs a series of gymnastics of a nature to bring Miss
+Farange's heart into Miss Farange's mouth. She sat with Sir Claude in
+a four-wheeler while he still held his watch; held it longer than any
+doctor who had ever felt her pulse; long enough to give her a vision
+of something like the ecstasy of neglecting such an opportunity to
+show impatience. The ecstasy had begun in the schoolroom and over the
+Berceuse, quite in the manner of the same foretaste on the day, a little
+while back, when Susan had panted up and she herself, after the hint
+about the duchess, had sailed down; for what harm then had there been in
+drops and disappointments if she could still have, even only a moment,
+the sensation of such a name "brought up"? It had remained with her that
+her father had foretold her she would some day be in the street, but it
+clearly wouldn't be this day, and she felt justified of the preference
+betrayed to that parent as soon as her visitor had set Susan in motion
+and laid his hand, while she waited with him, kindly on her own. This
+was what the Captain, in Kensington Gardens, had done; her present
+situation reminded her a little of that one and renewed the dim wonder
+of the fashion after which, from the first, such pats and pulls had
+struck her as the steps and signs of other people's business and even a
+little as the wriggle or the overflow of their difficulties. What had
+failed her and what had frightened her on the night of the Exhibition
+lost themselves at present alike in the impression that any "surprise"
+now about to burst from Sir Claude would be too big to burst all at
+once. Any awe that might have sprung from his air of leaving out her
+stepmother was corrected by the force of a general rule, the odd truth
+that if Mrs. Beale now never came nor went without making her think of
+him, it was never, to balance that, the main mark of his own renewed
+reality to appear to be a reference to Mrs. Beale. To be with Sir Claude
+was to think of Sir Claude, and that law governed Maisie's mind until,
+through a sudden lurch of the cab, which had at last taken in Susan and
+ever so many bundles and almost reached Charing Cross, it popped again
+somehow into her dizzy head the long-lost image of Mrs. Wix.
+
+It was singular, but from this time she understood and she followed,
+followed with the sense of an ample filling-out of any void created by
+symptoms of avoidance and of flight. Her ecstasy was a thing that had
+yet more of a face than of a back to turn, a pair of eyes still directed
+to Mrs. Wix even after the slight surprise of their not finding her, as
+the journey expanded, either at the London station or at the Folkestone
+hotel. It took few hours to make the child feel that if she was in
+neither of these places she was at least everywhere else. Maisie had
+known all along a great deal, but never so much as she was to know from
+this moment on and as she learned in particular during the couple of
+days that she was to hang in the air, as it were, over the sea which
+represented in breezy blueness and with a summer charm a crossing of
+more spaces than the Channel. It was granted her at this time to arrive
+at divinations so ample that I shall have no room for the goal if I
+attempt to trace the stages; as to which therefore I must be content to
+say that the fullest expression we may give to Sir Claude's conduct is
+a poor and pale copy of the picture it presented to his young friend.
+Abruptly, that morning, he had yielded to the action of the idea pumped
+into him for weeks by Mrs. Wix on lines of approach that she had been
+capable of the extraordinary art of preserving from entanglement in
+the fine network of his relations with Mrs. Beale. The breath of her
+sincerity, blowing without a break, had puffed him up to the flight
+by which, in the degree I have indicated, Maisie too was carried off
+her feet. This consisted neither in more nor in less than the brave
+stroke of his getting off from Mrs. Beale as well as from his wife--of
+making with the child straight for some such foreign land as would
+give a support to Mrs. Wix's dream that she might still see his
+errors renounced and his delinquencies redeemed. It would all be a
+sacrifice--under eyes that would miss no faintest shade--to what even
+the strange frequenters of her ladyship's earlier period used to call
+the real good of the little unfortunate. Maisie's head held a suspicion
+of much that, during the last long interval, had confusedly, but quite
+candidly, come and gone in his own; a glimpse, almost awe-stricken in
+its gratitude, of the miracle her old governess had wrought. That
+functionary could not in this connexion have been more impressive, even
+at second-hand, if she had been a prophetess with an open scroll or some
+ardent abbess speaking with the lips of the Church. She had clung day
+by day to their plastic associate, plying him with her deep, narrow
+passion, doing her simple utmost to convert him, and so working on him
+that he had at last really embraced his fine chance. That the chance was
+not delusive was sufficiently guaranteed by the completeness with which
+he could finally figure it out that, in case of his taking action,
+neither Ida nor Beale, whose book, on each side, it would only too well
+suit, would make any sort of row.
+
+It sounds, no doubt, too penetrating, but it was not all as an effect of
+Sir Claude's betrayals that Maisie was able to piece together the beauty
+of the special influence through which, for such stretches of time,
+he had refined upon propriety by keeping, so far as possible, his
+sentimental interests distinct. She had ever of course in her mind fewer
+names than conceptions, but it was only with this drawback that she now
+made out her companion's absences to have had for their ground that he
+was the lover of her stepmother and that the lover of her stepmother
+could scarce logically pretend to a superior right to look after her.
+Maisie had by this time embraced the implication of a kind of natural
+divergence between lovers and little girls. It was just this indeed
+that could throw light on the probable contents of the pencilled note
+deposited on the hall-table in the Regent's Park and which would greet
+Mrs. Beale on her return. Maisie freely figured it as provisionally
+jocular in tone, even though to herself on this occasion Sir Claude
+turned a graver face than he had shown in any crisis but that of putting
+her into the cab when she had been horrid to him after her parting with
+the Captain. He might really be embarrassed, but he would be sure, to
+her view, to have muffled in some bravado of pleasantry the disturbance
+produced at her father's by the removal of a valued servant. Not that
+there wasn't a great deal too that wouldn't be in the note--a great deal
+for which a more comfortable place was Maisie's light little brain,
+where it hummed away hour after hour and caused the first outlook at
+Folkestone to swim in a softness of colour and sound. It became clear in
+this medium that her stepfather had really now only to take into account
+his entanglement with Mrs. Beale. Wasn't he at last disentangled from
+every one and every thing else? The obstacle to the rupture pressed upon
+him by Mrs. Wix in the interest of his virtue would be simply that he
+was in love, or rather, to put it more precisely, that Mrs. Beale had
+left him no doubt of the degree in which SHE was. She was so much so as
+to have succeeded in making him accept for a time her infatuated grasp
+of him and even to some extent the idea of what they yet might do
+together with a little diplomacy and a good deal of patience. I may not
+even answer for it that Maisie was not aware of how, in this, Mrs. Beale
+failed to share his all but insurmountable distaste for their allowing
+their little charge to breathe the air of their gross irregularity--his
+contention, in a word, that they should either cease to be irregular
+or cease to be parental. Their little charge, for herself, had long
+ago adopted the view that even Mrs. Wix had at one time not thought
+prohibitively coarse--the view that she was after all, AS a little
+charge, morally at home in atmospheres it would be appalling to analyse.
+If Mrs. Wix, however, ultimately appalled, had now set her heart on
+strong measures, Maisie, as I have intimated, could also work round both
+to the reasons for them and to the quite other reasons for that lady's
+not, as yet at least, appearing in them at first-hand.
+
+Oh decidedly I shall never get you to believe the number of things she
+saw and the number of secrets she discovered! Why in the world, for
+instance, couldn't Sir Claude have kept it from her--except on the
+hypothesis of his not caring to--that, when you came to look at it and
+so far as it was a question of vested interests, he had quite as much
+right in her as her stepmother, not to say a right that Mrs. Beale
+was in no position to dispute? He failed at all events of any such
+successful ambiguity as could keep her, when once they began to look
+across at France, from regarding even what was least explained as most
+in the spirit of their old happy times, their rambles and expeditions in
+the easier better days of their first acquaintance. Never before had she
+had so the sense of giving him a lead for the sort of treatment of what
+was between them that would best carry it off, or of his being grateful
+to her for meeting him so much in the right place. She met him literally
+at the very point where Mrs. Beale was most to be reckoned with, the
+point of the jealousy that was sharp in that lady and of the need of
+their keeping it as long as possible obscure to her that poor Mrs. Wix
+had still a hand. Yes, she met him too in the truth of the matter that,
+as her stepmother had had no one else to be jealous of, she had made
+up for so gross a privation by directing the sentiment to a moral
+influence. Sir Claude appeared absolutely to convey in a wink that
+a moral influence capable of pulling a string was after all a moral
+influence exposed to the scratching out of its eyes; and that, this
+being the case, there was somebody they couldn't afford to leave
+unprotected before they should see a little better what Mrs. Beale was
+likely to do. Maisie, true enough, had not to put it into words to
+rejoin, in the coffee-room, at luncheon: "What CAN she do but come to
+you if papa does take a step that will amount to legal desertion?"
+Neither had he then, in answer, to articulate anything but the jollity
+of their having found a table at a window from which, as they partook of
+cold beef and apollinaris--for he hinted they would have to save lots
+of money--they could let their eyes hover tenderly on the far-off white
+cliffs that so often had signalled to the embarrassed English a promise
+of safety. Maisie stared at them as if she might really make out after a
+little a queer dear figure perched on them--a figure as to which she had
+already the subtle sense that, wherever perched, it would be the very
+oddest yet seen in France. But it was at least as exciting to feel where
+Mrs. Wix wasn't as it would have been to know where she was, and if she
+wasn't yet at Boulogne this only thickened the plot.
+
+If she was not to be seen that day, however, the evening was marked by
+an apparition before which, none the less, overstrained suspense folded
+on the spot its wings. Adjusting her respirations and attaching, under
+dropped lashes, all her thoughts to a smartness of frock and frill for
+which she could reflect that she had not appealed in vain to a loyalty
+in Susan Ash triumphant over the nice things their feverish flight had
+left behind, Maisie spent on a bench in the garden of the hotel the
+half-hour before dinner, that mysterious ceremony of the _table d'hote_
+for which she had prepared with a punctuality of flutter. Sir Claude,
+beside her, was occupied with a cigarette and the afternoon papers; and
+though the hotel was full the garden shewed the particular void that
+ensues upon the sound of the dressing-bell. She had almost had time to
+weary of the human scene; her own humanity at any rate, in the shape of
+a smutch on her scanty skirt, had held her so long that as soon as she
+raised her eyes they rested on a high fair drapery by which smutches
+were put to shame and which had glided toward her over the grass without
+her noting its rustle. She followed up its stiff sheen--up and up from
+the ground, where it had stopped--till at the end of a considerable
+journey her impression felt the shock of the fixed face which,
+surmounting it, seemed to offer the climax of the dressed condition.
+"Why mamma!" she cried the next instant--cried in a tone that, as
+she sprang to her feet, brought Sir Claude to his own beside her and
+gave her ladyship, a few yards off, the advantage of their momentary
+confusion. Poor Maisie's was immense; her mother's drop had the effect
+of one of the iron shutters that, in evening walks with Susan Ash, she
+had seen suddenly, at the touch of a spring, rattle down over shining
+shop-fronts. The light of foreign travel was darkened at a stroke; she
+had a horrible sense that they were caught; and for the first time of
+her life in Ida's presence she so far translated an impulse into an
+invidious act as to clutch straight at the hand of her responsible
+confederate. It didn't help her that he appeared at first equally hushed
+with horror; a minute during which, in the empty garden, with its long
+shadows on the lawn, its blue sea over the hedge and its startled peace
+in the air, both her elders remained as stiff as tall tumblers filled to
+the brim and held straight for fear of a spill.
+
+At last, in a tone that enriched the whole surprise by its unexpected
+softness, her mother said to Sir Claude: "Do you mind at all my speaking
+to her?"
+
+"Oh no; DO you?" His reply was so long in coming that Maisie was the
+first to find the right note.
+
+He laughed as he seemed to take it from her, and she felt a sufficient
+concession in his manner of addressing their visitor. "How in the world
+did you know we were here?"
+
+His wife, at this, came the rest of the way and sat down on the bench
+with a hand laid on her daughter, whom she gracefully drew to her and in
+whom, at her touch, the fear just kindled gave a second jump, but now in
+quite another direction. Sir Claude, on the further side, resumed his
+seat and his newspapers, so that the three grouped themselves like a
+family party; his connexion, in the oddest way in the world, almost
+cynically and in a flash acknowledged, and the mother patting the child
+into conformities unspeakable. Maisie could already feel how little it
+was Sir Claude and she who were caught. She had the positive sense of
+their catching their relative, catching her in the act of getting rid of
+her burden with a finality that showed her as unprecedentedly relaxed.
+Oh yes, the fear had dropped, and she had never been so irrevocably
+parted with as in the pressure of possession now supremely exerted
+by Ida's long-gloved and much-bangled arm. "I went to the Regent's
+Park"--this was presently her ladyship's answer to Sir Claude.
+
+"Do you mean to-day?"
+
+"This morning, just after your own call there. That's how I found you
+out; that's what has brought me."
+
+Sir Claude considered and Maisie waited. "Whom then did you see?"
+
+Ida gave a sound of indulgent mockery. "I like your scare. I know your
+game. I didn't see the person I risked seeing, but I had been ready
+to take my chance of her." She addressed herself to Maisie; she had
+encircled her more closely. "I asked for YOU, my dear, but I saw no one
+but a dirty parlourmaid. She was red in the face with the great things
+that, as she told me, had just happened in the absence of her mistress;
+and she luckily had the sense to have made out the place to which Sir
+Claude had come to take you. If he hadn't given a false scent I should
+find you here: that was the supposition on which I've proceeded." Ida
+had never been so explicit about proceeding or supposing, and Maisie,
+drinking this in, noted too how Sir Claude shared her fine impression of
+it. "I wanted to see you," his wife continued, "and now you can judge of
+the trouble I've taken. I had everything to do in town to-day, but I
+managed to get off."
+
+Maisie and her companion, for a moment, did justice to this achievement;
+but Maisie was the first to express it. "I'm glad you wanted to see me,
+mamma." Then after a concentration more deep and with a plunge more
+brave: "A little more and you'd have been too late." It stuck in her
+throat, but she brought it out: "We're going to France."
+
+Ida was magnificent; Ida kissed her on the forehead. "That's just what I
+thought likely; it made me decide to run down. I fancied that in spite
+of your scramble you'd wait to cross, and it added to the reason I have
+for seeing you."
+
+Maisie wondered intensely what the reason could be, but she knew ever so
+much better than to ask. She was slightly surprised indeed to perceive
+that Sir Claude didn't, and to hear him immediately enquire: "What in
+the name of goodness can you have to say to her?"
+
+His tone was not exactly rude, but it was impatient enough to make his
+wife's response a fresh specimen of the new softness. "That, my dear
+man, is all my own business."
+
+"Do you mean," Sir Claude asked, "that you wish me to leave you with
+her?"
+
+"Yes, if you'll be so good; that's the extraordinary request I take the
+liberty of making." Her ladyship had dropped to a mildness of irony by
+which, for a moment, poor Maisie was mystified and charmed, puzzled
+with a glimpse of something that in all the years had at intervals
+peeped out. Ida smiled at Sir Claude with the strange air she had on
+such occasions of defying an interlocutor to keep it up as long; her
+huge eyes, her red lips, the intense marks in her face formed an
+_eclairage_ as distinct and public as a lamp set in a window. The
+child seemed quite to see in it the very beacon that had lighted her
+path; she suddenly found herself reflecting that it was no wonder the
+gentlemen were guided. This must have been the way mamma had first
+looked at Sir Claude; it brought back the lustre of the time they had
+outlived. It must have been the way she looked also at Mr. Perriam and
+Lord Eric; above all it contributed in Maisie's mind to a completer
+view of that satisfied state of the Captain. Our young lady grasped
+this idea with a quick lifting of the heart; there was a stillness
+during which her mother flooded her with a wealth of support to the
+Captain's striking tribute. This stillness remained long enough
+unbroken to represent that Sir Claude too might but be gasping again
+under the spell originally strong for him; so that Maisie quite hoped
+he would at least say something to show a recognition of how charming
+she could be.
+
+What he presently said was: "Are you putting up for the night?"
+
+His wife cast grandly about. "Not here--I've come from Dover."
+
+Over Maisie's head, at this, they still faced each other. "You spend the
+night there?"
+
+"Yes, I brought some things. I went to the hotel and hastily arranged;
+then I caught the train that whisked me on here. You see what a day I've
+had of it."
+
+The statement may surprise, but these were really as obliging if not as
+lucid words as, into her daughter's ears at least, Ida's lips had ever
+dropped; and there was a quick desire in the daughter that for the hour
+at any rate they should duly be welcomed as a ground of intercourse.
+Certainly mamma had a charm which, when turned on, became a large
+explanation; and the only danger now in an impulse to applaud it would
+be that of appearing to signalise its rarity. Maisie, however, risked
+the peril in the geniality of an admission that Ida had indeed had a
+rush; and she invited Sir Claude to expose himself by agreeing with her
+that the rush had been even worse than theirs. He appeared to meet this
+appeal by saying with detachment enough: "You go back there to-night?"
+
+"Oh yes--there are plenty of trains." Again Sir Claude hesitated; it
+would have been hard to say if the child, between them, more connected
+or divided them. Then he brought out quietly: "It will be late for you
+to knock about. I'll see you over."
+
+"You needn't trouble, thank you. I think you won't deny that I can help
+myself and that it isn't the first time in my dreadful life that I've
+somehow managed it." Save for this allusion to her dreadful life they
+talked there, Maisie noted, as if they were only rather superficial
+friends; a special effect that she had often wondered at before in the
+midst of what she supposed to be intimacies. This effect was augmented
+by the almost casual manner in which her ladyship went on: "I dare say
+I shall go abroad."
+
+"From Dover do you mean, straight?"
+
+"How straight I can't say. I'm excessively ill."
+
+This for a minute struck Maisie as but a part of the conversation;
+at the end of which time she became aware that it ought to strike
+her--though it apparently didn't strike Sir Claude--as a part of
+something graver. It helped her to twist nearer. "Ill, mamma--really
+ill?"
+
+She regretted her "really" as soon as she had spoken it; but there
+couldn't be a better proof of her mother's present polish than that Ida
+showed no gleam of a temper to take it up. She had taken up at other
+times much tinier things. She only pressed Maisie's head against her
+bosom and said: "Shockingly, my dear. I must go to that new place."
+
+"What new place?" Sir Claude enquired.
+
+Ida thought, but couldn't recall it. "Oh 'Chose,' don't you know?
+--where every one goes. I want some proper treatment. It's all I've ever
+asked for on earth. But that's not what I came to say."
+
+Sir Claude, in silence, folded one by one his newspapers; then he rose
+and stood whacking the palm of his hand with the bundle. "You'll stop
+and dine with us?"
+
+"Dear no--I can't dine at this sort of hour. I ordered dinner at Dover."
+
+Her ladyship's tone in this one instance showed a certain superiority to
+those conditions in which her daughter had artlessly found Folkestone a
+paradise. It was yet not so crushing as to nip in the bud the eagerness
+with which the latter broke out: "But won't you at least have a cup of
+tea?"
+
+Ida kissed her again on the brow. "Thanks, love. I had tea before
+coming." She raised her eyes to Sir Claude. "She IS sweet!" He made no
+more answer than if he didn't agree; but Maisie was at ease about that
+and was still taken up with the joy of this happier pitch of their talk,
+which put more and more of a meaning into the Captain's version of her
+ladyship and literally kindled a conjecture that such an admirer might,
+over there at the other place, be waiting for her to dine. Was the same
+conjecture in Sir Claude's mind? He partly puzzled her, if it had risen
+there, by the slight perversity with which he returned to a question
+that his wife evidently thought she had disposed of.
+
+He whacked his hand again with his paper. "I had really much better take
+you."
+
+"And leave Maisie here alone?"
+
+Mamma so clearly didn't want it that Maisie leaped at the vision of a
+Captain who had seen her on from Dover and who, while he waited to take
+her back, would be hovering just at the same distance at which, in
+Kensington Gardens, the companion of his walk had herself hovered. Of
+course, however, instead of breathing any such guess she let Sir Claude
+reply; all the more that his reply could contribute so much to her own
+present grandeur. "She won't be alone when she has a maid in
+attendance."
+
+Maisie had never before had so much of a retinue, and she waited also to
+enjoy the action of it on her ladyship. "You mean the woman you brought
+from town?" Ida considered. "The person at the house spoke of her in a
+way that scarcely made her out company for my child." Her tone was that
+her child had never wanted, in her hands, for prodigious company. But
+she as distinctly continued to decline Sir Claude's. "Don't be an old
+goose," she said charmingly. "Let us alone."
+
+In front of them on the grass he looked graver than Maisie at all now
+thought the occasion warranted. "I don't see why you can't say it before
+me."
+
+His wife smoothed one of her daughter's curls. "Say what, dear?"
+
+"Why what you came to say."
+
+At this Maisie at last interposed: she appealed to Sir Claude. "Do let
+her say it to me."
+
+He looked hard for a moment at his little friend. "How do you know what
+she may say?"
+
+"She must risk it," Ida remarked.
+
+"I only want to protect you," he continued to the child.
+
+"You want to protect yourself--that's what you mean," his wife replied.
+"Don't be afraid. I won't touch you."
+
+"She won't touch you--she WON'T!" Maisie declared. She felt by this time
+that she could really answer for it, and something of the emotion with
+which she had listened to the Captain came back to her. It made her
+so happy and so secure that she could positively patronise mamma. She
+did so in the Captain's very language. "She's good, she's good!" she
+proclaimed.
+
+"Oh Lord!"--Sir Claude, at this, let himself go. He appeared to have
+emitted some sound of derision that was smothered, to Maisie's ears, by
+her being again embraced by his wife. Ida released her and held her off
+a little, looking at her with a very queer face. Then the child became
+aware that their companion had left them and that from the face in
+question a confirmatory remark had proceeded.
+
+"I AM good, love," said her ladyship.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+A good deal of the rest of Ida's visit was devoted to explaining, as it
+were, so extraordinary a statement. This explanation was more copious
+than any she had yet indulged in, and as the summer twilight gathered
+and she kept her child in the garden she was conciliatory to a degree
+that let her need to arrange things a little perceptibly peep out. It
+was not merely that she explained; she almost conversed; all that was
+wanting was that she should have positively chattered a little less. It
+was really the occasion of Maisie's life on which her mother was to have
+most to say to her. That alone was an implication of generosity and
+virtue, and no great stretch was required to make our young lady feel
+that she should best meet her and soonest have it over by simply seeming
+struck with the propriety of her contention. They sat together while
+the parent's gloved hand sometimes rested sociably on the child's and
+sometimes gave a corrective pull to a ribbon too meagre or a tress too
+thick; and Maisie was conscious of the effort to keep out of her eyes
+the wonder with which they were occasionally moved to blink. Oh there
+would have been things to blink at if one had let one's self go; and
+it was lucky they were alone together, without Sir Claude or Mrs. Wix
+or even Mrs. Beale to catch an imprudent glance. Though profuse and
+prolonged her ladyship was not exhaustively lucid, and her account of
+her situation, so far as it could be called descriptive, was a muddle
+of inconsequent things, bruised fruit of an occasion she had rather too
+lightly affronted. None of them were really thought out and some were
+even not wholly insincere. It was as if she had asked outright what
+better proof could have been wanted of her goodness and her greatness
+than just this marvellous consent to give up what she had so cherished.
+It was as if she had said in so many words: "There have been things
+between us--between Sir Claude and me--which I needn't go into, you
+little nuisance, because you wouldn't understand them." It suited her
+to convey that Maisie had been kept, so far as SHE was concerned or
+could imagine, in a holy ignorance and that she must take for granted a
+supreme simplicity. She turned this way and that in the predicament she
+had sought and from which she could neither retreat with grace nor
+emerge with credit: she draped herself in the tatters of her impudence,
+postured to her utmost before the last little triangle of cracked glass
+to which so many fractures had reduced the polished plate of filial
+superstition. If neither Sir Claude nor Mrs. Wix was there this was
+perhaps all the more a pity: the scene had a style of its own that would
+have qualified it for presentation, especially at such a moment as that
+of her letting it betray that she quite did think her wretched offspring
+better placed with Sir Claude than in her own soiled hands. There was at
+any rate nothing scant either in her admissions or her perversions, the
+mixture of her fear of what Maisie might undiscoverably think and of the
+support she at the same time gathered from a necessity of selfishness
+and a habit of brutality. This habit flushed through the merit she now
+made, in terms explicit, of not having come to Folkestone to kick up a
+vulgar row. She had not come to box any ears or to bang any doors or
+even to use any language: she had come at the worst to lose the thread
+of her argument in an occasional dumb disgusted twitch of the toggery in
+which Mrs. Beale's low domestic had had the impudence to serve up Miss
+Farange. She checked all criticism, not committing herself even so far
+as for those missing comforts of the schoolroom on which Mrs. Wix had
+presumed.
+
+"I AM good--I'm crazily, I'm criminally good. But it won't do for YOU
+any more, and if I've ceased to contend with him, and with you too, who
+have made most of the trouble between us, it's for reasons that you'll
+understand one of these days but too well--one of these days when I
+hope you'll know what it is to have lost a mother. I'm awfully ill, but
+you mustn't ask me anything about it. If I don't get off somewhere my
+doctor won't answer for the consequences. He's stupefied at what I've
+borne--he says it has been put on me because I was formed to suffer. I'm
+thinking of South Africa, but that's none of your business. You must
+take your choice--you can't ask me questions if you're so ready to
+give me up. No, I won't tell you; you can find out for yourself. South
+Africa's wonderful, they say, and if I do go it must be to give it a
+fair trial. It must be either one thing or the other; if he takes you,
+you know, he takes you. I've struck my last blow for you; I can follow
+you no longer from pillar to post. I must live for myself at last, while
+there's still a handful left of me. I'm very, very ill; I'm very, very
+tired; I'm very, very determined. There you have it. Make the most of
+it. Your frock's too filthy; but I came to sacrifice myself." Maisie
+looked at the peccant places; there were moments when it was a relief to
+her to drop her eyes even on anything so sordid. All her interviews, all
+her ordeals with her mother had, as she had grown older, seemed to have,
+before any other, the hard quality of duration; but longer than any,
+strangely, were these minutes offered to her as so pacific and so
+agreeably winding up the connexion. It was her anxiety that made them
+long, her fear of some hitch, some check of the current, one of her
+ladyship's famous quick jumps. She held her breath; she only wanted,
+by playing into her visitor's hands, to see the thing through. But her
+impatience itself made at instants the whole situation swim; there were
+things Ida said that she perhaps didn't hear, and there were things
+she heard that Ida perhaps didn't say. "You're all I have, and yet I'm
+capable of this. Your father wishes you were dead--that, my dear, is
+what your father wishes. You'll have to get used to it as I've done--I
+mean to his wishing that I'M dead. At all events you see for yourself
+how wonderful I am to Sir Claude. He wishes me dead quite as much; and
+I'm sure that if making me scenes about YOU could have killed me--!" It
+was the mark of Ida's eloquence that she started more hares than she
+followed, and she gave but a glance in the direction of this one; going
+on to say that the very proof of her treating her husband like an angel
+was that he had just stolen off not to be fairly shamed. She spoke as
+if he had retired on tiptoe, as he might have withdrawn from a place
+of worship in which he was not fit to be present. "You'll never know
+what I've been through about you--never, never, never. I spare you
+everything, as I always have; though I dare say you know things that,
+if I did (I mean if I knew them) would make me--well, no matter! You're
+old enough at any rate to know there are a lot of things I don't say
+that I easily might; though it would do me good, I assure you, to have
+spoken my mind for once in my life. I don't speak of your father's
+infamous wife: that may give you a notion of the way I'm letting you
+off. When I say 'you' I mean your precious friends and backers. If you
+don't do justice to my forbearing, out of delicacy, to mention, just as
+a last word, about your stepfather, a little fact or two of a kind that
+really I should only HAVE to mention to shine myself in comparison, and
+after every calumny, like pure gold: if you don't do me THAT justice
+you'll never do me justice at all!"
+
+Maisie's desire to show what justice she did her had by this time become
+so intense as to have brought with it an inspiration. The great effect
+of their encounter had been to confirm her sense of being launched with
+Sir Claude, to make it rich and full beyond anything she had dreamed,
+and everything now conspired to suggest that a single soft touch of her
+small hand would complete the good work and set her ladyship so promptly
+and majestically afloat as to leave the great seaway clear for the
+morrow. This was the more the case as her hand had for some moments been
+rendered free by a marked manoeuvre of both of her mother's. One of
+these capricious members had fumbled with visible impatience in some
+backward depth of drapery and had presently reappeared with a small
+article in its grasp. The act had a significance for a little person
+trained, in that relation, from an early age, to keep an eye on manual
+motions, and its possible bearing was not darkened by the memory of the
+handful of gold that Susan Ash would never, never believe Mrs. Beale had
+sent back--"not she; she's too false and too greedy!"--to the munificent
+Countess. To have guessed, none the less, that her ladyship's purse
+might be the real figure of the object extracted from the rustling
+covert at her rear--this suspicion gave on the spot to the child's eyes
+a direction carefully distant. It added moreover to the optimism that
+for an hour could ruffle the surface of her deep diplomacy, ruffle it
+to the point of making her forget that she had never been safe unless
+she had also been stupid. She in short forgot her habitual caution in
+her impulse to adopt her ladyship's practical interests and show her
+ladyship how perfectly she understood them. She saw without looking
+that her mother pressed a little clasp; heard, without wanting to,
+the sharp click that marked the closing portemonnaie from which
+something had been taken. What this was she just didn't see; it was not
+too substantial to be locked with ease in the fold of her ladyship's
+fingers. Nothing was less new to Maisie than the art of not thinking
+singly, so that at this instant she could both bring out what was on
+her tongue's end and weigh, as to the object in her mother's palm, the
+question of its being a sovereign against the question of its being a
+shilling. No sooner had she begun to speak than she saw that within a
+few seconds this question would have been settled: she had foolishly
+checked the rising words of the little speech of presentation to which,
+under the circumstances, even such a high pride as Ida's had had to give
+some thought. She had checked it completely--that was the next thing she
+felt: the note she sounded brought into her companion's eyes a look that
+quickly enough seemed at variance with presentations.
+
+"That was what the Captain said to me that day, mamma. I think it would
+have given you pleasure to hear the way he spoke of you."
+
+The pleasure, Maisie could now in consternation reflect, would have been
+a long time coming if it had come no faster than the response evoked by
+her allusion to it. Her mother gave her one of the looks that slammed
+the door in her face; never in a career of unsuccessful experiments had
+Maisie had to take such a stare. It reminded her of the way that once,
+at one of the lectures in Glower Street, something in a big jar that,
+amid an array of strange glasses and bad smells, had been promised as a
+beautiful yellow was produced as a beautiful black. She had been sorry
+on that occasion for the lecturer, but she was at this moment sorrier
+for herself. Oh nothing had ever made for twinges like mamma's manner of
+saying: "The Captain? What Captain?"
+
+"Why when we met you in the Gardens--the one who took me to sit with
+him. That was exactly what HE said."
+
+Ida let it come on so far as to appear for an instant to pick up a lost
+thread. "What on earth did he say?"
+
+Maisie faltered supremely, but supremely she brought it out. "What you
+say, mamma--that you're so good."
+
+"What 'I' say?" Ida slowly rose, keeping her eyes on her child, and the
+hand that had busied itself in her purse conformed at her side and amid
+the folds of her dress to a certain stiffening of the arm. "I say you're
+a precious idiot, and I won't have you put words into my mouth!" This
+was much more peremptory than a mere contradiction. Maisie could only
+feel on the spot that everything had broken short off and that their
+communication had abruptly ceased. That was presently proved. "What
+business have you to speak to me of him?"
+
+Her daughter turned scarlet. "I thought you liked him."
+
+"Him!--the biggest cad in London!" Her ladyship towered again, and in
+the gathering dusk the whites of her eyes were huge.
+
+Maisie's own, however, could by this time pretty well match them; and
+she had at least now, with the first flare of anger that had ever yet
+lighted her face for a foe, the sense of looking up quite as hard as any
+one could look down. "Well, he was kind about you then; he WAS, and it
+made me like him. He said things--they were beautiful, they were, they
+were!" She was almost capable of the violence of forcing this home, for
+even in the midst of her surge of passion--of which in fact it was a
+part--there rose in her a fear, a pain, a vision ominous, precocious,
+of what it might mean for her mother's fate to have forfeited such a
+loyalty as that. There was literally an instant in which Maisie fully
+saw--saw madness and desolation, saw ruin and darkness and death. "I've
+thought of him often since, and I hoped it was with him--with him--"
+Here, in her emotion, it failed her, the breath of her filial hope.
+
+But Ida got it out of her. "You hoped, you little horror--?"
+
+"That it was he who's at Dover, that it was he who's to take you. I mean
+to South Africa," Maisie said with another drop.
+
+Ida's stupefaction, on this, kept her silent unnaturally long, so long
+that her daughter could not only wonder what was coming, but perfectly
+measure the decline of every symptom of her liberality. She loomed there
+in her grandeur, merely dark and dumb; her wrath was clearly still, as
+it had always been, a thing of resource and variety. What Maisie least
+expected of it was by this law what now occurred. It melted, in the
+summer twilight, gradually into pity, and the pity after a little found
+a cadence to which the renewed click of her purse gave an accent.
+She had put back what she had taken out. "You're a dreadful dismal
+deplorable little thing," she murmured. And with this she turned back
+and rustled away over the lawn.
+
+After she had disappeared, Maisie dropped upon the bench again and for
+some time, in the empty garden and the deeper dusk, sat and stared at
+the image her flight had still left standing. It had ceased to be her
+mother only, in the strangest way, that it might become her father, the
+father of whose wish that she were dead the announcement still lingered
+in the air. It was a presence with vague edges--it continued to front
+her, to cover her. But what reality that she need reckon with did it
+represent if Mr. Farange were, on his side, also going off--going off to
+America with the Countess, or even only to Spa? That question had, from
+the house, a sudden gay answer in the great roar of a gong, and at the
+same moment she saw Sir Claude look out for her from the wide lighted
+doorway. At this she went to him and he came forward and met her on the
+lawn. For a minute she was with him there in silence as, just before, at
+the last, she had been with her mother.
+
+"She's gone?"
+
+"She's gone."
+
+Nothing more, for the instant, passed between them but to move together
+to the house, where, in the hall, he indulged in one of those sudden
+pleasantries with which, to the delight of his stepdaughter, his native
+animation overflowed. "Will Miss Farange do me the honour to accept my
+arm?"
+
+There was nothing in all her days that Miss Farange had accepted with
+such bliss, a bright rich element that floated them together to their
+feast; before they reached which, however, she uttered, in the spirit
+of a glad young lady taken in to her first dinner, a sociable word that
+made him stop short. "She goes to South Africa."
+
+"To South Africa?" His face, for a moment, seemed to swing for a jump;
+the next it took its spring into the extreme of hilarity. "Is that what
+she said?"
+
+"Oh yes, I didn't MISTAKE!" Maisie took to herself THAT credit. "For the
+climate."
+
+Sir Claude was now looking at a young woman with black hair, a red frock
+and a tiny terrier tucked under her elbow. She swept past them on her
+way to the dining-room, leaving an impression of a strong scent which
+mingled, amid the clatter of the place, with the hot aroma of food. He
+had become a little graver; he still stopped to talk. "I see--I see."
+Other people brushed by; he was not too grave to notice them. "Did she
+say anything else?"
+
+"Oh yes, a lot more."
+
+On this he met her eyes again with some intensity, but only repeating:
+"I see--I see."
+
+Maisie had still her own vision, which she brought out. "I thought she
+was going to give me something."
+
+"What kind of a thing?"
+
+"Some money that she took out of her purse and then put back."
+
+Sir Claude's amusement reappeared. "She thought better of it. Dear
+thrifty soul! How much did she make by that manoeuvre?"
+
+Maisie considered. "I didn't see. It was very small."
+
+Sir Claude threw back his head. "Do you mean very little? Sixpence?"
+
+Maisie resented this almost as if, at dinner, she were already bandying
+jokes with an agreeable neighbour. "It may have been a sovereign."
+
+"Or even," Sir Claude suggested, "a ten-pound note." She flushed at this
+sudden picture of what she perhaps had lost, and he made it more vivid
+by adding: "Rolled up in a tight little ball, you know--her way of
+treating banknotes as if they were curl-papers!" Maisie's flush deepened
+both with the immense plausibility of this and with a fresh wave of the
+consciousness that was always there to remind her of his cleverness--the
+consciousness of how immeasurably more after all he knew about mamma
+than she. She had lived with her so many times without discovering the
+material of her curl-papers or assisting at any other of her dealings
+with banknotes. The tight little ball had at any rate rolled away from
+her for ever--quite like one of the other balls that Ida's cue used to
+send flying. Sir Claude gave her his arm again, and by the time she was
+seated at table she had perfectly made up her mind as to the amount of
+the sum she had forfeited. Everything about her, however--the crowded
+room, the bedizened banquet, the savour of dishes, the drama of
+figures--ministered to the joy of life. After dinner she smoked with her
+friend--for that was exactly what she felt she did--on a porch, a kind
+of terrace, where the red tips of cigars and the light dresses of ladies
+made, under the happy stars, a poetry that was almost intoxicating.
+They talked but little, and she was slightly surprised at his asking
+for no more news of what her mother had said; but she had no need of
+talk--there were a sense and a sound in everything to which words had
+nothing to add. They smoked and smoked, and there was a sweetness in her
+stepfather's silence. At last he said: "Let us take another turn--but
+you must go to bed soon. Oh you know, we're going to have a system!"
+Their turn was back into the garden, along the dusky paths from which
+they could see the black masts and the red lights of boats and hear the
+calls and cries that evidently had to do with happy foreign travel; and
+their system was once more to get on beautifully in this further lounge
+without a definite exchange. Yet he finally spoke--he broke out as he
+tossed away the match from which he had taken a fresh light: "I must go
+for a stroll. I'm in a fidget--I must walk it off." She fell in with
+this as she fell in with everything; on which he went on: "You go up to
+Miss Ash"--it was the name they had started; "you must see she's not in
+mischief. Can you find your way alone?"
+
+"Oh yes; I've been up and down seven times." She positively enjoyed the
+prospect of an eighth.
+
+Still they didn't separate; they stood smoking together under the stars.
+Then at last Sir Claude produced it. "I'm free--I'm free."
+
+She looked up at him; it was the very spot on which a couple of hours
+before she had looked up at her mother. "You're free--you're free."
+
+"To-morrow we go to France." He spoke as if he hadn't heard her; but it
+didn't prevent her again concurring.
+
+"To-morrow we go to France."
+
+Again he appeared not to have heard her; and after a moment--it was an
+effect evidently of the depth of his reflexions and the agitation of
+his soul--he also spoke as if he had not spoken before. "I'm free--I'm
+free!"
+
+She repeated her form of assent. "You're free--you're free."
+
+This time he did hear her; he fixed her through the darkness with a
+grave face. But he said nothing more; he simply stooped a little and
+drew her to him--simply held her a little and kissed her goodnight;
+after which, having given her a silent push upstairs to Miss Ash, he
+turned round again to the black masts and the red lights. Maisie mounted
+as if France were at the top.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+The next day it seemed to her indeed at the bottom--down too far, in
+shuddering plunges, even to leave her a sense, on the Channel boat, of
+the height at which Sir Claude remained and which had never in every way
+been so great as when, much in the wet, though in the angle of a screen
+of canvas, he sociably sat with his stepdaughter's head in his lap and
+that of Mrs. Beale's housemaid fairly pillowed on his breast. Maisie was
+surprised to learn as they drew into port that they had had a lovely
+passage; but this emotion, at Boulogne, was speedily quenched in others,
+above all in the great ecstasy of a larger impression of life. She was
+"abroad" and she gave herself up to it, responded to it, in the bright
+air, before the pink houses, among the bare-legged fishwives and the
+red-legged soldiers, with the instant certitude of a vocation. Her
+vocation was to see the world and to thrill with enjoyment of the
+picture; she had grown older in five minutes and had by the time they
+reached the hotel recognised in the institutions and manners of France a
+multitude of affinities and messages. Literally in the course of an hour
+she found her initiation; a consciousness much quickened by the superior
+part that, as soon as they had gobbled down a French breakfast--which
+was indeed a high note in the concert--she observed herself to play to
+Susan Ash. Sir Claude, who had already bumped against people he knew and
+who, as he said, had business and letters, sent them out together for a
+walk, a walk in which the child was avenged, so far as poetic justice
+required, not only for the loud giggles that in their London trudges
+used to break from her attendant, but for all the years of her tendency
+to produce socially that impression of an excess of the queer something
+which had seemed to waver so widely between innocence and guilt. On the
+spot, at Boulogne, though there might have been excess there was at
+least no wavering; she recognised, she understood, she adored and took
+possession; feeling herself attuned to everything and laying her hand,
+right and left, on what had simply been waiting for her. She explained
+to Susan, she laughed at Susan, she towered over Susan; and it was
+somehow Susan's stupidity, of which she had never yet been so sure,
+and Susan's bewilderment and ignorance and antagonism, that gave the
+liveliest rebound to her immediate perceptions and adoptions. The place
+and the people were all a picture together, a picture that, when they
+went down to the wide sands, shimmered, in a thousand tints, with the
+pretty organisation of the _plage_, with the gaiety of spectators and
+bathers, with that of the language and the weather, and above all with
+that of our young lady's unprecedented situation. For it appeared to her
+that no one since the beginning of time could have had such an adventure
+or, in an hour, so much experience; as a sequel to which she only
+needed, in order to feel with conscious wonder how the past was changed,
+to hear Susan, inscrutably aggravated, express a preference for the
+Edgware Road. The past was so changed and the circle it had formed
+already so overstepped that on that very afternoon, in the course of
+another walk, she found herself enquiring of Sir Claude--without a
+single scruple--if he were prepared as yet to name the moment at which
+they should start for Paris. His answer, it must be said, gave her the
+least little chill.
+
+"Oh Paris, my dear child--I don't quite know about Paris!"
+
+This required to be met, but it was much less to challenge him than for
+the rich joy of her first discussion of the details of a tour that,
+after looking at him a minute, she replied: "Well, isn't that the REAL
+thing, the thing that when one does come abroad--?"
+
+He had turned grave again, and she merely threw that out: it was a way
+of doing justice to the seriousness of their life. She couldn't moreover
+be so much older since yesterday without reflecting that if by this time
+she probed a little he would recognise that she had done enough for mere
+patience. There was in fact something in his eyes that suddenly, to her
+own, made her discretion shabby. Before she could remedy this he had
+answered her last question, answered it in the way that, of all ways,
+she had least expected. "The thing it doesn't do not to do? Certainly
+Paris is charming. But, my dear fellow, Paris eats your head off. I mean
+it's so beastly expensive."
+
+That note gave her a pang--it suddenly let in a harder light. Were they
+poor then, that is was HE poor, really poor beyond the pleasantry of
+apollinaris and cold beef? They had walked to the end of the long jetty
+that enclosed the harbour and were looking out at the dangers they had
+escaped, the grey horizon that was England, the tumbled surface of the
+sea and the brown smacks that bobbed upon it. Why had he chosen an
+embarrassed time to make this foreign dash? unless indeed it was just
+the dash economic, of which she had often heard and on which, after
+another look at the grey horizon and the bobbing boats, she was ready
+to turn round with elation. She replied to him quite in his own manner:
+"I see, I see." She smiled up at him. "Our affairs are involved."
+
+"That's it." He returned her smile. "Mine are not quite so bad as yours;
+for yours are really, my dear man, in a state I can't see through at
+all. But mine will do--for a mess."
+
+She thought this over. "But isn't France cheaper than England?"
+
+England, over there in the thickening gloom, looked just then remarkably
+dear. "I dare say; some parts."
+
+"Then can't we live in those parts?"
+
+There was something that for an instant, in satisfaction of this, he had
+the air of being about to say and yet not saying. What he presently said
+was: "This very place is one of them."
+
+"Then we shall live here?"
+
+He didn't treat it quite so definitely as she liked. "Since we've come
+to save money!"
+
+This made her press him more. "How long shall we stay?"
+
+"Oh three or four days."
+
+It took her breath away. "You can save money in that time?"
+
+He burst out laughing, starting to walk again and taking her under his
+arm. He confessed to her on the way that she too had put a finger on
+the weakest of all his weaknesses, the fact, of which he was perfectly
+aware, that he probably might have lived within his means if he had
+never done anything for thrift. "It's the happy thoughts that do it," he
+said; "there's nothing so ruinous as putting in a cheap week." Maisie
+heard afresh among the pleasant sounds of the closing day that steel
+click of Ida's change of mind. She thought of the ten-pound note
+it would have been delightful at this juncture to produce for her
+companion's encouragement. But the idea was dissipated by his saying
+irrelevantly, in presence of the next thing they stopped to admire: "We
+shall stay till she arrives."
+
+She turned upon him. "Mrs. Beale?"
+
+"Mrs. Wix. I've had a wire," he went on. "She has seen your mother."
+
+"Seen mamma?" Maisie stared. "Where in the world?"
+
+"Apparently in London. They've been together."
+
+For an instant this looked ominous--a fear came into her eyes. "Then
+she hasn't gone?"
+
+"Your mother?--to South Africa? I give it up, dear boy," Sir Claude
+said; and she seemed literally to see him give it up as he stood
+there and with a kind of absent gaze--absent, that is, from HER
+affairs--followed the fine stride and shining limbs of a young fishwife
+who had just waded out of the sea with her basketful of shrimps. His
+thought came back to her sooner than his eyes. "But I dare say it's all
+right. She wouldn't come if it wasn't, poor old thing: she knows rather
+well what she's about."
+
+This was so reassuring that Maisie, after turning it over, could make it
+fit into her dream. "Well, what IS she about?"
+
+He finally stopped looking at the fishwife--he met his companion's
+enquiry. "Oh you know!" There was something in the way he said it that
+made, between them, more of an equality than she had yet imagined; but
+it had also more the effect of raising her up than of letting him down,
+and what it did with her was shown by the sound of her assent.
+
+"Yes--I know!" What she knew, what she COULD know is by this time no
+secret to us: it grew and grew at any rate, the rest of that day, in the
+air of what he took for granted. It was better he should do that than
+attempt to test her knowledge; but there at the worst was the gist of
+the matter: it was open between them at last that their great change,
+as, speaking as if it had already lasted weeks, Maisie called it, was
+somehow built up round Mrs. Wix. Before she went to bed that night she
+knew further that Sir Claude, since, as HE called it, they had been on
+the rush, had received more telegrams than one. But they separated again
+without speaking of Mrs. Beale.
+
+Oh what a crossing for the straighteners and the old brown dress--which
+latter appurtenance the child saw thriftily revived for the possible
+disasters of travel! The wind got up in the night and from her little
+room at the inn Maisie could hear the noise of the sea. The next day it
+was raining and everything different: this was the case even with Susan
+Ash, who positively crowed over the bad weather, partly, it seemed, for
+relish of the time their visitor would have in the boat, and partly to
+point the moral of the folly of coming to such holes. In the wet, with
+Sir Claude, Maisie went to the Folkestone packet, on the arrival of
+which, with many signs of the fray, he made her wait under an umbrella
+by the quay; whence almost ere the vessel touched, he was to be
+descried, in quest of their friend, wriggling--that had been his
+word--through the invalids massed upon the deck. It was long till
+he reappeared--it was not indeed till every one had landed; when he
+presented the object of his benevolence in a light that Maisie scarce
+knew whether to suppose the depth of prostration or the flush of
+triumph. The lady on his arm, still bent beneath her late ordeal, was
+muffled in such draperies as had never before offered so much support
+to so much woe. At the hotel, an hour later, this ambiguity dropped:
+assisting Mrs. Wix in private to refresh and reinvest herself, Maisie
+heard from her in detail how little she could have achieved if Sir
+Claude hadn't put it in her power. It was a phrase that in her room she
+repeated in connexions indescribable: he had put it in her power to have
+"changes," as she said, of the most intimate order, adapted to climates
+and occasions so various as to foreshadow in themselves the stages of
+a vast itinerary. Cheap weeks would of course be in their place after
+so much money spent on a governess; sums not grudged, however, by this
+lady's pupil, even on her feeling her own appearance give rise, through
+the straighteners, to an attention perceptibly mystified. Sir Claude in
+truth had had less time to devote to it than to Mrs. Wix's; and moreover
+she would rather be in her own shoes than in her friend's creaking new
+ones in the event of an encounter with Mrs. Beale. Maisie was too lost
+in the idea of Mrs. Beale's judgement of so much newness to pass any
+judgement herself. Besides, after much luncheon and many endearments,
+the question took quite another turn, to say nothing of the pleasure
+of the child's quick view that there were other eyes than Susan Ash's
+to open to what she could show. She couldn't show much, alas, till it
+stopped raining, which it declined to do that day; but this had only the
+effect of leaving more time for Mrs. Wix's own demonstration. It came
+as they sat in the little white and gold salon which Maisie thought the
+loveliest place she had ever seen except perhaps the apartment of the
+Countess; it came while the hard summer storm lashed the windows and
+blew in such a chill that Sir Claude, with his hands in his pockets and
+cigarettes in his teeth, fidgeting, frowning, looking out and turning
+back, ended by causing a smoky little fire to be made in the dressy
+little chimney. It came in spite of something that could only be named
+his air of wishing to put it off; an air that had served him--oh as all
+his airs served him!--to the extent of his having for a couple of hours
+confined the conversation to gratuitous jokes and generalities, kept it
+on the level of the little empty coffee-cups and _petits verres_ (Mrs.
+Wix had two of each!) that struck Maisie, through the fumes of the
+French fire and the English tobacco, as a token more than ever that they
+were launched. She felt now, in close quarters and as clearly as if Mrs.
+Wix had told her, that what this lady had come over for was not merely
+to be chaffed and to hear her pupil chaffed; not even to hear Sir
+Claude, who knew French in perfection, imitate the strange sounds
+emitted by the English folk at the hotel. It was perhaps half an effect
+of her present renovations, as if her clothes had been somebody's else:
+she had at any rate never produced such an impression of high colour,
+of a redness associated in Maisie's mind at THAT pitch either with
+measles or with "habits." Her heart was not at all in the gossip about
+Boulogne; and if her complexion was partly the result of the dejeuner
+and the _petits verres_ it was also the brave signal of what she was
+there to say. Maisie knew when this did come how anxiously it had been
+awaited by the youngest member of the party. "Her ladyship packed me
+off--she almost put me into the cab!" That was what Mrs. Wix at last
+brought out.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+
+Sir Claude was stationed at the window; he didn't so much as turn round,
+and it was left to the youngest of the three to take up the remark. "Do
+you mean you went to see her yesterday?"
+
+"She came to see ME. She knocked at my shabby door. She mounted my
+squalid stair. She told me she had seen you at Folkestone."
+
+Maisie wondered. "She went back that evening?"
+
+"No; yesterday morning. She drove to me straight from the station. It
+was most remarkable. If I had a job to get off she did nothing to make
+it worse--she did a great deal to make it better." Mrs. Wix hung fire,
+though the flame in her face burned brighter; then she became capable
+of saying: "Her ladyship's kind! She did what I didn't expect."
+
+Maisie, on this, looked straight at her stepfather's back; it might well
+have been for her at that hour a monument of her ladyship's kindness. It
+remained, as such, monumentally still, and for a time that permitted the
+child to ask of their companion: "Did she really help you?"
+
+"Most practically." Again Mrs. Wix paused; again she quite resounded.
+"She gave me a ten-pound note."
+
+At that, still looking out, Sir Claude, at the window, laughed loud. "So
+you see, Maisie, we've not quite lost it!"
+
+"Oh no," Maisie responded. "Isn't that too charming?" She smiled at Mrs.
+Wix. "We know all about it." Then on her friend's showing such blankness
+as was compatible with such a flush she pursued: "She does want me to
+have you?"
+
+Mrs. Wix showed a final hesitation, which, however, while Sir Claude
+drummed on the window-pane, she presently surmounted. It came to Maisie
+that in spite of his drumming and of his not turning round he was really
+so much interested as to leave himself in a manner in her hands; which
+somehow suddenly seemed to her a greater proof than he could have given
+by interfering. "She wants me to have YOU!" Mrs. Wix declared.
+
+Maisie answered this bang at Sir Claude. "Then that's nice for all of
+us."
+
+Of course it was, his continued silence sufficiently admitted while
+Mrs. Wix rose from her chair and, as if to take more of a stand, placed
+herself, not without majesty, before the fire. The incongruity of her
+smartness, the circumference of her stiff frock, presented her as really
+more ready for Paris than any of them. She also gazed hard at Sir
+Claude's back. "Your wife was different from anything she had ever shown
+me. She recognises certain proprieties."
+
+"Which? Do you happen to remember?" Sir Claude asked.
+
+Mrs. Wix's reply was prompt. "The importance for Maisie of a
+gentlewoman, of some one who's not--well, so bad! She objects to a mere
+maid, and I don't in the least mind telling you what she wants me to
+do." One thing was clear--Mrs. Wix was now bold enough for anything.
+"She wants me to persuade you to get rid of the person from Mrs.
+Beale's."
+
+Maisie waited for Sir Claude to pronounce on this; then she could only
+understand that he on his side waited, and she felt particularly full of
+common sense as she met her responsibility. "Oh I don't want Susan with
+YOU!" she said to Mrs. Wix.
+
+Sir Claude, always from the window, approved. "That's quite simple. I'll
+take her back."
+
+Mrs. Wix gave a positive jump; Maisie caught her look of alarm. "'Take'
+her? You don't mean to go over on purpose?"
+
+Sir Claude said nothing for a moment; after which, "Why shouldn't I
+leave you here?" he enquired.
+
+Maisie, at this, sprang up. "Oh do, oh do, oh do!" The next moment she
+was interlaced with Mrs. Wix, and the two, on the hearth-rug, their eyes
+in each other's eyes, considered the plan with intensity. Then Maisie
+felt the difference of what they saw in it.
+
+"She can surely go back alone: why should you put yourself out?" Mrs.
+Wix demanded.
+
+"Oh she's an idiot--she's incapable. If anything should happen to her
+it would be awkward: it was I who brought her--without her asking. If I
+turn her away I ought with my own hand to place her again exactly where
+I found her."
+
+Mrs. Wix's face appealed to Maisie on such folly, and her manner,
+as directed to their companion, had, to her pupil's surprise, an
+unprecedented firmness. "Dear Sir Claude, I think you're perverse. Pay
+her fare and give her a sovereign. She has had an experience that she
+never dreamed of and that will be an advantage to her through life.
+If she goes wrong on the way it will be simply because she wants to,
+and, with her expenses and her remuneration--make it even what you
+like!--you'll have treated her as handsomely as you always treat every
+one."
+
+This was a new tone--as new as Mrs. Wix's cap; and it could strike a
+young person with a sharpened sense for latent meanings as the upshot of
+a relation that had taken on a new character. It brought out for Maisie
+how much more even than she had guessed her friends were fighting side
+by side. At the same time it needed so definite a justification that as
+Sir Claude now at last did face them she at first supposed him merely
+resentful of excessive familiarity. She was therefore yet more puzzled
+to see him show his serene beauty untroubled, as well as an equal
+interest in a matter quite distinct from any freedom but her ladyship's.
+"Did my wife come alone?" He could ask even that good-humouredly.
+
+"When she called on me?" Mrs. Wix WAS red now: his good humour wouldn't
+keep down her colour, which for a minute glowed there like her ugly
+honesty. "No--there was some one in the cab." The only attenuation she
+could think of was after a minute to add: "But they didn't come up."
+
+Sir Claude broke into a laugh--Maisie herself could guess what it was
+at: while he now walked about, still laughing, and at the fireplace
+gave a gay kick to a displaced log, she felt more vague about almost
+everything than about the drollery of such a "they." She in fact could
+scarce have told you if it was to deepen or to cover the joke that she
+bethought herself to observe: "Perhaps it was her maid."
+
+Mrs. Wix gave her a look that at any rate deprecated the wrong tone. "It
+was not her maid."
+
+"Do you mean there are this time two?" Sir Claude asked as if he hadn't
+heard.
+
+"Two maids?" Maisie went on as if she might assume he had.
+
+The reproach of the straighteners darkened; but Sir Claude cut across it
+with a sudden: "See here; what do you mean? And what do you suppose SHE
+meant?"
+
+Mrs. Wix let him for a moment, in silence, understand that the answer
+to his question, if he didn't take care, might give him more than he
+wanted. It was as if, with this scruple, she measured and adjusted all
+she gave him in at last saying: "What she meant was to make me know that
+you're definitely free. To have that straight from her was a joy I of
+course hadn't hoped for: it made the assurance, and my delight at it, a
+thing I could really proceed upon. You already know now certainly I'd
+have started even if she hadn't pressed me; you already know what, so
+long, we've been looking for and what, as soon as she told me of her
+step taken at Folkestone, I recognised with rapture that we HAVE. It's
+your freedom that makes me right"--she fairly bristled with her logic.
+"But I don't mind telling you that it's her action that makes me happy!"
+
+"Her action?" Sir Claude echoed. "Why, my dear woman, her action is just
+a hideous crime. It happens to satisfy our sympathies in a way that's
+quite delicious; but that doesn't in the least alter the fact that it's
+the most abominable thing ever done. She has chucked our friend here
+overboard not a bit less than if she had shoved her shrieking and
+pleading, out of that window and down two floors to the paving-stones."
+
+Maisie surveyed serenely the parties to the discussion. "Oh your friend
+here, dear Sir Claude, doesn't plead and shriek!"
+
+He looked at her a moment. "Never. Never. That's one, only one, but
+charming so far as it goes, of about a hundred things we love her for."
+Then he pursued to Mrs. Wix: "What I can't for the life of me make out
+is what Ida is REALLY up to, what game she was playing in turning to you
+with that cursed cheek after the beastly way she has used you. Where--to
+explain her at all--does she fancy she can presently, when we least
+expect it, take it out of us?"
+
+"She doesn't fancy anything, nor want anything out of any one. Her
+cursed cheek, as you call it, is the best thing I've ever seen in her.
+I don't care a fig for the beastly way she used me--I forgive it all a
+thousand times over!" Mrs. Wix raised her voice as she had never raised
+it; she quite triumphed in her lucidity. "I understand her, I almost
+admire her!" she quavered. She spoke as if this might practically
+suffice; yet in charity to fainter lights she threw out an explanation.
+"As I've said, she was different; upon my word I wouldn't have known
+her. She had a glimmering, she had an instinct; they brought her. It was
+a kind of happy thought, and if you couldn't have supposed she would
+ever have had such a thing, why of course I quite agree with you. But
+she did have it! There!"
+
+Maisie could feel again how a certain rude rightness in this plea might
+have been found exasperating; but as she had often watched Sir Claude in
+apprehension of displeasures that didn't come, so now, instead of saying
+"Oh hell!" as her father used, she observed him only to take refuge in a
+question that at the worst was abrupt.
+
+"Who IS it this time, do you know?"
+
+Mrs. Wix tried blind dignity. "Who is what, Sir Claude?"
+
+"The man who stands the cabs. Who was in the one that waited at your
+door?"
+
+At this challenge she faltered so long that her young friend's pitying
+conscience gave her a hand. "It wasn't the Captain."
+
+This good intention, however, only converted the excellent woman's
+scruple to a more ambiguous stare; besides of course making Sir Claude
+go off. Mrs. Wix fairly appealed to him. "Must I really tell you?"
+
+His amusement continued. "Did she make you promise not to?"
+
+Mrs. Wix looked at him still harder. "I mean before Maisie."
+
+Sir Claude laughed again. "Why SHE can't hurt him!"
+
+Maisie felt herself, as it passed, brushed by the light humour of this.
+"Yes, I can't hurt him."
+
+The straighteners again roofed her over; after which they seemed to
+crack with the explosion of their wearer's honesty. Amid the flying
+splinters Mrs. Wix produced a name. "Mr. Tischbein."
+
+There was for an instant a silence that, under Sir Claude's influence
+and while he and Maisie looked at each other, suddenly pretended to be
+that of gravity. "We don't know Mr. Tischbein, do we, dear?"
+
+Maisie gave the point all needful thought. "No, I can't place Mr.
+Tischbein."
+
+It was a passage that worked visibly on their friend. "You must pardon
+me, Sir Claude," she said with an austerity of which the note was real,
+"if I thank God to your face that he has in his mercy--I mean his mercy
+to our charge--allowed me to achieve this act." She gave out a long puff
+of pain. "It was time!" Then as if still more to point the moral: "I
+said just now I understood your wife. I said just now I admired her. I
+stand to it: I did both of those things when I saw how even SHE, poor
+thing, saw. If you want the dots on the i's you shall have them. What
+she came to me for, in spite of everything, was that I'm just"--she
+quavered it out--"well, just clean! What she saw for her daughter was
+that there must at last be a DECENT person!"
+
+Maisie was quick enough to jump a little at the sound of this
+implication that such a person was what Sir Claude was not; the
+next instant, however, she more profoundly guessed against whom the
+discrimination was made. She was therefore left the more surprised at
+the complete candour with which he embraced the worst. "If she's bent on
+decent persons why has she given her to ME? You don't call me a decent
+person, and I'll do Ida the justice that SHE never did. I think I'm as
+indecent as any one and that there's nothing in my behaviour that makes
+my wife's surrender a bit less ignoble!"
+
+"Don't speak of your behaviour!" Mrs. Wix cried. "Don't say such
+horrible things; they're false and they're wicked and I forbid you! It's
+to KEEP you decent that I'm here and that I've done everything I have
+done. It's to save you--I won't say from yourself, because in yourself
+you're beautiful and good! It's to save you from the worst person of
+all. I haven't, after all, come over to be afraid to speak of her!
+That's the person in whose place her ladyship wants such a person as
+even me; and if she thought herself, as she as good as told me, not fit
+for Maisie's company, it's not, as you may well suppose, that she may
+make room for Mrs. Beale!"
+
+Maisie watched his face as it took this outbreak, and the most she saw
+in it was that it turned a little white. That indeed made him look,
+as Susan Ash would have said, queer; and it was perhaps a part of the
+queerness that he intensely smiled. "You're too hard on Mrs. Beale. She
+has great merits of her own."
+
+Mrs. Wix, at this, instead of immediately replying, did what Sir Claude
+had been doing before: she moved across to the window and stared a while
+into the storm. There was for a minute, to Maisie's sense, a hush that
+resounded with wind and rain. Sir Claude, in spite of these things,
+glanced about for his hat; on which Maisie spied it first and, making
+a dash for it, held it out to him. He took it with a gleam of a
+"thank-you" in his face, and then something moved her still to hold the
+other side of the brim; so that, united by their grasp of this object,
+they stood some seconds looking many things at each other. By this time
+Mrs. Wix had turned round. "Do you mean to tell me," she demanded, "that
+you are going back?"
+
+"To Mrs. Beale?" Maisie surrendered his hat, and there was something
+that touched her in the embarrassed, almost humiliated way their
+companion's challenge made him turn it round and round. She had seen
+people do that who, she was sure, did nothing else that Sir Claude did.
+"I can't just say, my dear thing. We'll see about I--we'll talk of it
+to-morrow. Meantime I must get some air."
+
+Mrs. Wix, with her back to the window, threw up her head to a height
+that, still for a moment, had the effect of detaining him. "All the air
+in France, Sir Claude, won't, I think, give you the courage to deny that
+you're simply afraid of her!"
+
+Oh this time he did look queer; Maisie had no need of Susan's vocabulary
+to note it! It would have come to her of itself as, with his hand on
+the door, he turned his eyes from his stepdaughter to her governess and
+then back again. Resting on Maisie's, though for ever so short a time,
+there was something they gave up to her and tried to explain. His lips,
+however, explained nothing; they only surrendered to Mrs. Wix. "Yes. I'm
+simply afraid of her!" He opened the door and passed out. It brought
+back to Maisie his confession of fear of her mother; it made her
+stepmother then the second lady about whom he failed of the particular
+virtue that was supposed most to mark a gentleman. In fact there were
+three of them, if she counted in Mrs. Wix, before whom he had undeniably
+quailed. Well, his want of valour was but a deeper appeal to her
+tenderness. To thrill with response to it she had only to remember all
+the ladies she herself had, as they called it, funked.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+
+It continued to rain so hard that our young lady's private dream of
+explaining the Continent to their visitor had to contain a provision for
+some adequate treatment of the weather. At the _table d'hote_ that evening
+she threw out a variety of lights: this was the second ceremony of the
+sort she had sat through, and she would have neglected her privilege
+and dishonoured her vocabulary--which indeed consisted mainly of the
+names of dishes--if she had not been proportionately ready to dazzle
+with interpretations. Preoccupied and overawed, Mrs. Wix was apparently
+dim: she accepted her pupil's version of the mysteries of the menu in a
+manner that might have struck the child as the depression of a credulity
+conscious not so much of its needs as of its dimensions. Maisie was soon
+enough--though it scarce happened before bedtime--confronted again with
+the different sort of programme for which she reserved her criticism.
+They remounted together to their sitting-room while Sir Claude, who said
+he would join them later, remained below to smoke and to converse with
+the old acquaintances that he met wherever he turned. He had proposed
+his companions, for coffee, the enjoyment of the _salon de lecture_,
+but Mrs. Wix had replied promptly and with something of an air that it
+struck her their own apartments offered them every convenience. They
+offered the good lady herself, Maisie could immediately observe, not
+only that of this rather grand reference, which, already emulous, so
+far as it went, of her pupil, she made as if she had spent her life in
+salons; but that of a stiff French sofa where she could sit and stare at
+the faint French lamp, in default of the French clock that had stopped,
+as for some account of the time Sir Claude would so markedly interpose.
+Her demeanour accused him so directly of hovering beyond her reach that
+Maisie sought to divert her by a report of Susan's quaint attitude on
+the matter of their conversation after lunch. Maisie had mentioned to
+the young woman for sympathy's sake the plan for her relief, but her
+disapproval of alien ways appeared, strange to say, only to prompt her
+to hug her gloom; so that between Mrs. Wix's effect of displacing her
+and the visible stiffening of her back the child had the sense of a
+double office and enlarged play for pacific powers.
+
+These powers played to no great purpose, it was true, in keeping before
+Mrs. Wix the vision of Sir Claude's perversity, which hung there in the
+pauses of talk and which he himself, after unmistakeable delays, finally
+made quite lurid by bursting in--it was near ten o'clock--with an object
+held up in his hand. She knew before he spoke what it was; she knew at
+least from the underlying sense of all that, since the hour spent after
+the Exhibition with her father, had not sprung up to reinstate Mr.
+Farange--she knew it meant a triumph for Mrs. Beale. The mere present
+sight of Sir Claude's face caused her on the spot to drop straight
+through her last impression of Mr. Farange a plummet that reached still
+deeper down than the security of these days of flight. She had wrapped
+that impression in silence--a silence that had parted with half its veil
+to cover also, from the hour of Sir Claude's advent, the image of Mr.
+Farange's wife. But if the object in Sir Claude's hand revealed itself
+as a letter which he held up very high, so there was something in his
+mere motion that laid Mrs. Beale again bare. "Here we are!" he cried
+almost from the door, shaking his trophy at them and looking from one to
+the other. Then he came straight to Mrs. Wix; he had pulled two papers
+out of the envelope and glanced at them again to see which was which. He
+thrust one out open to Mrs. Wix. "Read that." She looked at him hard,
+as if in fear: it was impossible not to see he was excited. Then she
+took the letter, but it was not her face that Maisie watched while she
+read. Neither, for that matter, was it this countenance that Sir Claude
+scanned: he stood before the fire and, more calmly, now that he had
+acted, communed in silence with his stepdaughter.
+
+The silence was in truth quickly broken; Mrs. Wix rose to her feet with
+the violence of the sound she emitted. The letter had dropped from her
+and lay upon the floor; it had made her turn ghastly white and she was
+speechless with the effect of it. "It's too abominable--it's too
+unspeakable!" she then cried.
+
+"Isn't it a charming thing?" Sir Claude asked. "It has just arrived,
+enclosed in a word of her own. She sends it on to me with the remark
+that comment's superfluous. I really think it is. That's all you can
+say."
+
+"She oughtn't to pass such a horror about," said Mrs. Wix. "She ought
+to put it straight in the fire."
+
+"My dear woman, she's not such a fool! It's much too precious." He had
+picked the letter up and he gave it again a glance of complacency which
+produced a light in his face. "Such a document"--he considered, then
+concluded with a slight drop--"such a document is, in fine, a basis!"
+
+"A basis for what?"
+
+"Well--for proceedings."
+
+"Hers?" Mrs. Wix's voice had become outright the voice of derision. "How
+can SHE proceed?"
+
+Sir Claude turned it over. "How can she get rid of him? Well--she IS rid
+of him."
+
+"Not legally." Mrs. Wix had never looked to her pupil so much as if she
+knew what she was talking about.
+
+"I dare say," Sir Claude laughed; "but she's not a bit less deprived
+than I!"
+
+"Of the power to get a divorce? It's just your want of the power that
+makes the scandal of your connexion with her. Therefore it's just her
+want of it that makes that of hers with you. That's all I contend!" Mrs.
+Wix concluded with an unparalleled neigh of battle. Oh she did know what
+she was talking about!
+
+Maisie had meanwhile appealed mutely to Sir Claude, who judged it easier
+to meet what she didn't say than to meet what Mrs. Wix did.
+
+"It's a letter to Mrs. Beale from your father, my dear, written from
+Spa and making the rupture between them perfectly irrevocable. It lets
+her know, and not in pretty language, that, as we technically say, he
+deserts her. It puts an end for ever to their relations." He ran his
+eyes over it again, then appeared to make up his mind. "In fact it
+concerns you, Maisie, so nearly and refers to you so particularly that
+I really think you ought to see the terms in which this new situation
+is created for you." And he held out the letter.
+
+Mrs. Wix, at this, pounced upon it; she had grabbed it too soon even
+for Maisie to become aware of being rather afraid of it. Thrusting it
+instantly behind her she positively glared at Sir Claude. "See it,
+wretched man?--the innocent child SEE such a thing? I think you must be
+mad, and she shall not have a glimpse of it while I'm here to prevent!"
+
+The breadth of her action had made Sir Claude turn red--he even looked a
+little foolish. "You think it's too bad, eh? But it's precisely because
+it's bad that it seemed to me it would have a lesson and a virtue for
+her."
+
+Maisie could do a quick enough justice to his motive to be able clearly
+to interpose. She fairly smiled at him. "I assure you I can quite
+believe how bad it is!" She thought of something, kept it back a moment,
+and then spoke. "I know what's in it!"
+
+He of course burst out laughing and, while Mrs. Wix groaned an "Oh
+heavens!" replied: "You wouldn't say that, old boy, if you did! The
+point I make is," he continued to Mrs. Wix with a blandness now
+re-established--"the point I make is simply that it sets Mrs. Beale
+free."
+
+She hung fire but an instant. "Free to live with YOU?"
+
+"Free not to live, not to pretend to live, with her husband."
+
+"Ah they're mighty different things!"--a truth as to which her
+earnestness could now with a fine inconsequent look invite the
+participation of the child.
+
+Before Maisie could commit herself, however, the ground was occupied by
+Sir Claude, who, as he stood before their visitor with an expression
+half rueful, half persuasive, rubbed his hand sharply up and down the
+back of his head. "Then why the deuce do you grant so--do you, I may
+even say, rejoice so--that by the desertion of my own precious partner
+I'm free?"
+
+Mrs. Wix met this challenge first with silence, then with a
+demonstration the most extraordinary, the most unexpected. Maisie could
+scarcely believe her eyes as she saw the good lady, with whom she had
+associated no faintest shade of any art of provocation, actually, after
+an upward grimace, give Sir Claude a great giggling insinuating naughty
+slap. "You wretch--you KNOW why!" And she turned away. The face that
+with this movement she left him to present to Maisie was to abide with
+his stepdaughter as the very image of stupefaction; but the pair lacked
+time to communicate either amusement or alarm before their admonisher
+was upon them again. She had begun in fact to show infinite variety and
+she flashed about with a still quicker change of tone. "Have you brought
+me that thing as a pretext for your going over?"
+
+Sir Claude braced himself. "I can't, after such news, in common decency
+not go over. I mean, don't you know, in common courtesy and humanity.
+My dear lady, you can't chuck a woman that way, especially taking the
+moment when she has been most insulted and wronged. A fellow must behave
+like a gentleman, damn it, dear good Mrs. Wix. We didn't come away, we
+two, to hang right on, you know: it was only to try our paces and just
+put in a few days that might prove to every one concerned that we're in
+earnest. It's exactly because we're in earnest that, dash it, we needn't
+be so awfully particular. I mean, don't you know, we needn't be so
+awfully afraid." He showed a vivacity, an intensity of argument, and if
+Maisie counted his words she was all the more ready to swallow after a
+single swift gasp those that, the next thing, she became conscious he
+paused for a reply to. "We didn't come, old girl, did we," he pleaded
+straight, "to stop right away for ever and put it all in NOW?"
+
+Maisie had never doubted she could be heroic for him. "Oh no!" It was as
+if she had been shocked at the bare thought. "We're just taking it as
+we find it." She had a sudden inspiration, which she backed up with a
+smile. "We're just seeing what we can afford." She had never yet in her
+life made any claim for herself, but she hoped that this time, frankly,
+what she was doing would somehow be counted to her. Indeed she felt Sir
+Claude WAS counting it, though she was afraid to look at him--afraid she
+should show him tears. She looked at Mrs. Wix; she reached her maximum.
+"I don't think I ought to be bad to Mrs. Beale."
+
+She heard, on this, a deep sound, something inarticulate and sweet,
+from Sir Claude; but tears were what Mrs. Wix didn't scruple to show.
+"Do you think you ought to be bad to ME?" The question was the more
+disconcerting that Mrs. Wix's emotion didn't deprive her of the
+advantage of her effect. "If you see that woman again you're lost!" she
+declared to their companion.
+
+Sir Claude looked at the moony globe of the lamp; he seemed to see
+for an instant what seeing Mrs. Beale would consist of. It was also
+apparently from this vision that he drew strength to return: "Her
+situation, by what has happened, is completely changed; and it's no
+use your trying to prove to me that I needn't take any account of
+that."
+
+"If you see that woman you're lost!" Mrs. Wix with greater force
+repeated.
+
+"Do you think she'll not let me come back to you? My dear lady, I leave
+you here, you and Maisie, as a hostage to fortune, and I promise you by
+all that's sacred that I shall be with you again at the very latest on
+Saturday. I provide you with funds; I install you in these lovely rooms;
+I arrange with the people here that you be treated with every attention
+and supplied with every luxury. The weather, after this, will mend; it
+will be sure to be exquisite. You'll both be as free as air and you can
+roam all over the place and have tremendous larks. You shall have a
+carriage to drive you; the whole house shall be at your call. You'll
+have a magnificent position." He paused, he looked from one of his
+companions to the other as to see the impression he had made. Whether or
+no he judged it adequate he subjoined after a moment: "And you'll oblige
+me above all by not making a fuss."
+
+Maisie could only answer for the impression on herself, though indeed
+from the heart even of Mrs. Wix's rigour there floated to her sense a
+faint fragrance of depraved concession. Maisie had her dumb word for the
+show such a speech could make, for the irresistible charm it could take
+from his dazzling sincerity; and before she could do anything but blink
+at excess of light she heard this very word sound on Mrs. Wix's lips,
+just as if the poor lady had guessed it and wished, snatching it from
+her, to blight it like a crumpled flower. "You're dreadful, you're
+terrible, for you know but too well that it's not a small thing to me
+that you should address me in terms that are princely!" Princely was
+what he stood there and looked and sounded; that was what Maisie for the
+occasion found herself reduced to simple worship of him for being. Yet
+strange to say too, as Mrs. Wix went on, an echo rang within her that
+matched the echo she had herself just produced. "How much you must WANT
+to see her to say such things as that and to be ready to do so much for
+the poor little likes of Maisie and me! She has a hold on you, and you
+know it, and you want to feel it again and--God knows, or at least _I_
+do, what's your motive and desire--enjoy it once more and give yourself
+up to it! It doesn't matter if it's one day or three: enough is as good
+as a feast and the lovely time you'll have with her is something you're
+willing to pay for! I dare say you'd like me to believe that your pay is
+to get her to give you up; but that's a matter on which I strongly urge
+you not to put down your money in advance. Give HER up first. Then pay
+her what you please!"
+
+Sir Claude took this to the end, though there were things in it that
+made him colour, called into his face more of the apprehension than
+Maisie had ever perceived there of a particular sort of shock. She had
+an odd sense that it was the first time she had seen any one but Mrs.
+Wix really and truly scandalised, and this fed her inference, which grew
+and grew from moment to moment, that Mrs. Wix was proving more of a
+force to reckon with than either of them had allowed so much room for.
+It was true that, long before, she had obtained a "hold" of him, as
+she called it, different in kind from that obtained by Mrs. Beale and
+originally by her ladyship. But Maisie could quite feel with him now
+that he had really not expected this advantage to be driven so home. Oh
+they hadn't at all got to where Mrs. Wix would stop, for the next minute
+she was driving harder than ever. It was the result of his saying with a
+certain dryness, though so kindly that what most affected Maisie in it
+was his patience: "My dear friend, it's simply a matter in which I must
+judge for myself. You've judged FOR me, I know, a good deal, of late, in
+a way that I appreciate, I assure you, down to the ground. But you can't
+do it always; no one can do that for another, don't you see, in every
+case. There are exceptions, particular cases that turn up and that are
+awfully delicate. It would be too easy if I could shift it all off on
+you: it would be allowing you to incur an amount of responsibility that
+I should simply become quite ashamed of. You'll find, I'm sure, that
+you'll have quite as much as you'll enjoy if you'll be so good as to
+accept the situation as circumstances happen to make it for you and to
+stay here with our friend, till I rejoin you, on the footing of as much
+pleasantness and as much comfort--and I think I have a right to add, to
+both of you, of as much faith in ME--as possible."
+
+Oh he was princely indeed: that came out more and more with every word
+he said and with the particular way he said it, and Maisie could feel
+his monitress stiffen almost with anguish against the increase of his
+spell and then hurl herself as a desperate defence from it into the
+quite confessed poorness of violence, of iteration. "You're afraid
+of her--afraid, afraid, afraid! Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!" Mrs. Wix
+wailed it with a high quaver, then broke down into a long shudder of
+helplessness and woe. The next minute she had flung herself again on
+the lean sofa and had burst into a passion of tears.
+
+Sir Claude stood and looked at her a moment; he shook his head slowly,
+altogether tenderly. "I've already admitted it--I'm in mortal terror;
+so we'll let that settle the question. I think you had best go to bed,"
+he added; "you've had a tremendous day and you must both be tired to
+death. I shall not expect you to concern yourselves in the morning
+with my movements. There's an early boat on; I shall have cleared out
+before you're up; and I shall moreover have dealt directly and most
+effectively, I assure you, with the haughty but not quite hopeless Miss
+Ash." He turned to his stepdaughter as if at once to take leave of her
+and give her a sign of how, through all tension and friction, they were
+still united in such a way that she at least needn't worry. "Maisie
+boy!"--he opened his arms to her. With her culpable lightness she flew
+into them and, while he kissed her, chose the soft method of silence to
+satisfy him, the silence that after battles of talk was the best balm
+she could offer his wounds. They held each other long enough to reaffirm
+intensely their vows; after which they were almost forced apart by Mrs.
+Wix's jumping to her feet.
+
+Her jump, either with a quick return or with a final lapse of courage,
+was also to supplication almost abject. "I beseech you not to take a
+step so miserable and so fatal. I know her but too well, even if you
+jeer at me for saying it; little as I've seen her I know her, I know
+her. I know what she'll do--I see it as I stand here. Since you're
+afraid of her it's the mercy of heaven. Don't, for God's sake, be afraid
+to show it, to profit by it and to arrive at the very safety that it
+gives you. I'M not afraid of her, I assure you; you must already have
+seen for yourself that there's nothing I'm afraid of now. Let me go to
+her--I'LL settle her and I'll take that woman back without a hair of
+her touched. Let me put in the two or three days--let me wind up the
+connexion. You stay here with Maisie, with the carriage and the larks
+and the luxury; then I'll return to you and we'll go off together--we'll
+live together without a cloud. Take me, take me," she went on and
+on--the tide of her eloquence was high. "Here I am; I know what I am
+and what I ain't; but I say boldly to the face of you both that I'll do
+better for you, far, than ever she'll even try to. I say it to yours,
+Sir Claude, even though I owe you the very dress on my back and the very
+shoes on my feet. I owe you everything--that's just the reason; and to
+pay it back, in profusion, what can that be but what I want? Here I am,
+here I am!"--she spread herself into an exhibition that, combined with
+her intensity and her decorations, appeared to suggest her for strange
+offices and devotions, for ridiculous replacements and substitutions.
+She manipulated her gown as she talked, she insisted on the items of
+her debt. "I have nothing of my own, I know--no money, no clothes, no
+appearance, no anything, nothing but my hold of this little one truth,
+which is all in the world I can bribe you with: that the pair of you are
+more to me than all besides, and that if you'll let me help you and save
+you, make what you both want possible in the one way it CAN be, why,
+I'll work myself to the bone in your service!"
+
+Sir Claude wavered there without an answer to this magnificent appeal;
+he plainly cast about for one, and in no small agitation and pain. He
+addressed himself in his quest, however, only to vague quarters until he
+met again, as he so frequently and actively met it, the more than filial
+gaze of his intelligent little charge. That gave him--poor plastic and
+dependent male--his issue. If she was still a child she was yet of
+the sex that could help him out. He signified as much by a renewed
+invitation to an embrace. She freshly sprang to him and again they
+inaudibly conversed. "Be nice to her, be nice to her," he at last
+distinctly articulated; "be nice to her as you've not even been to ME!"
+On which, without another look at Mrs. Wix, he somehow got out of the
+room, leaving Maisie under the slight oppression of these words as well
+as of the idea that he had unmistakeably once more dodged.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+
+Every single thing he had prophesied came so true that it was after all
+no more than fair to expect quite as much for what he had as good as
+promised. His pledges they could verify to the letter, down to his very
+guarantee that a way would be found with Miss Ash. Roused in the summer
+dawn and vehemently squeezed by that interesting exile, Maisie fell back
+upon her couch with a renewed appreciation of his policy, a memento of
+which, when she rose later on to dress, glittered at her from the carpet
+in the shape of a sixpence that had overflowed from Susan's pride of
+possession. Sixpences really, for the forty-eight hours that followed,
+seemed to abound in her life; she fancifully computed the number of them
+represented by such a period of "larks." The number was not kept down,
+she presently noticed, by any scheme of revenge for Sir Claude's flight
+which should take on Mrs. Wix's part the form of a refusal to avail
+herself of the facilities he had so bravely ordered. It was in fact
+impossible to escape them; it was in the good lady's own phrase
+ridiculous to go on foot when you had a carriage prancing at the door.
+Everything about them pranced: the very waiters even as they presented
+the dishes to which, from a similar sense of the absurdity of
+perversity, Mrs. Wix helped herself with a freedom that spoke to Maisie
+quite as much of her depletion as of her logic. Her appetite was a sign
+to her companion of a great many things and testified no less on the
+whole to her general than to her particular condition. She had arrears
+of dinner to make up, and it was touching that in a dinnerless state
+her moral passion should have burned so clear. She partook largely as
+a refuge from depression, and yet the opportunity to partake was just
+a mark of the sinister symptoms that depressed her. The affair was
+in short a combat, in which the baser element triumphed, between her
+refusal to be bought off and her consent to be clothed and fed. It was
+not at any rate to be gainsaid that there was comfort for her in the
+developments of France; comfort so great as to leave Maisie free to take
+with her all the security for granted and brush all the danger aside.
+That was the way to carry out in detail Sir Claude's injunction to be
+"nice"; that was the way, as well, to look, with her, in a survey of the
+pleasures of life abroad, straight over the head of any doubt.
+
+They shrank at last, all doubts, as the weather cleared up: it had an
+immense effect on them and became quite as lovely as Sir Claude had
+engaged. This seemed to have put him so into the secret of things, and
+the joy of the world so waylaid the steps of his friends, that little by
+little the spirit of hope filled the air and finally took possession of
+the scene. To drive on the long cliff was splendid, but it was perhaps
+better still to creep in the shade--for the sun was strong--along the
+many-coloured and many-odoured port and through the streets in which, to
+English eyes, everything that was the same was a mystery and everything
+that was different a joke. Best of all was to continue the creep up the
+long Grand' Rue to the gate of the _haute ville_ and, passing beneath
+it, mount to the quaint and crooked rampart, with its rows of trees,
+its quiet corners and friendly benches where brown old women in such
+white-frilled caps and such long gold earrings sat and knitted or
+snoozed, its little yellow-faced houses that looked like the homes of
+misers or of priests and its dark chateau where small soldiers lounged
+on the bridge that stretched across an empty moat and military washing
+hung from the windows of towers. This was a part of the place that could
+lead Maisie to enquire if it didn't just meet one's idea of the middle
+ages; and since it was rather a satisfaction than a shock to perceive,
+and not for the first time, the limits in Mrs. Wix's mind of the
+historic imagination, that only added one more to the variety of kinds
+of insight that she felt it her own present mission to show. They sat
+together on the old grey bastion; they looked down on the little new
+town which seemed to them quite as old, and across at the great dome and
+the high gilt Virgin of the church that, as they gathered, was famous
+and that pleased them by its unlikeness to any place in which they
+had worshipped. They wandered in this temple afterwards and Mrs. Wix
+confessed that for herself she had probably made a fatal mistake early
+in life in not being a Catholic. Her confession in its turn caused
+Maisie to wonder rather interestedly what degree of lateness it was
+that shut the door against an escape from such an error. They went back
+to the rampart on the second morning--the spot on which they appeared
+to have come furthest in the journey that was to separate them from
+everything objectionable in the past: it gave them afresh the impression
+that had most to do with their having worked round to a confidence that
+on Maisie's part was determined and that she could see to be on her
+companion's desperate. She had had for many hours the sense of showing
+Mrs. Wix so much that she was comparatively slow to become conscious
+of being at the same time the subject of a like aim. The business went
+the faster, however, from the moment she got her glimpse of it; it then
+fell into its place in her general, her habitual view of the particular
+phenomenon that, had she felt the need of words for it, she might have
+called her personal relation to her knowledge. This relation had never
+been so lively as during the time she waited with her old governess for
+Sir Claude's reappearance, and what made it so was exactly that Mrs. Wix
+struck her as having a new suspicion of it. Mrs. Wix had never yet had a
+suspicion--this was certain--so calculated to throw her pupil, in spite
+of the closer union of such adventurous hours, upon the deep defensive.
+Her pupil made out indeed as many marvels as she had made out on the
+rush to Folkestone; and if in Sir Claude's company on that occasion Mrs.
+Wix was the constant implication, so in Mrs. Wix's, during these hours,
+Sir Claude was--and most of all through long pauses--the perpetual, the
+insurmountable theme. It all took them back to the first flush of his
+marriage and to the place he held in the schoolroom at that crisis of
+love and pain; only he had himself blown to a much bigger balloon the
+large consciousness he then filled out.
+
+They went through it all again, and indeed while the interval dragged
+by the very weight of its charm they went, in spite of defences and
+suspicions, through everything. Their intensified clutch of the future
+throbbed like a clock ticking seconds; but this was a timepiece that
+inevitably, as well, at the best, rang occasionally a portentous hour.
+Oh there were several of these, and two or three of the worst on the old
+city-wall where everything else so made for peace. There was nothing
+in the world Maisie more wanted than to be as nice to Mrs. Wix as Sir
+Claude had desired; but it was exactly because this fell in with her
+inveterate instinct of keeping the peace that the instinct itself
+was quickened. From the moment it was quickened, however, it found
+other work, and that was how, to begin with, she produced the very
+complication she most sought to avert. What she had essentially done,
+these days, had been to read the unspoken into the spoken; so that thus,
+with accumulations, it had become more definite to her that the unspoken
+was, unspeakably, the completeness of the sacrifice of Mrs. Beale. There
+were times when every minute that Sir Claude stayed away was like a nail
+in Mrs. Beale's coffin. That brought back to Maisie--it was a roundabout
+way--the beauty and antiquity of her connexion with the flower of the
+Overmores as well as that lady's own grace and charm, her peculiar
+prettiness and cleverness and even her peculiar tribulations. A hundred
+things hummed at the back of her head, but two of these were simple
+enough. Mrs. Beale was by the way, after all, just her stepmother
+and her relative. She was just--and partly for that very reason--Sir
+Claude's greatest intimate ("lady-intimate" was Maisie's term) so that
+what together they were on Mrs. Wix's prescription to give up and break
+short off with was for one of them his particular favourite and for the
+other her father's wife. Strangely, indescribably her perception of
+reasons kept pace with her sense of trouble; but there was something in
+her that, without a supreme effort not to be shabby, couldn't take the
+reasons for granted. What it comes to perhaps for ourselves is that,
+disinherited and denuded as we have seen her, there still lingered in
+her life an echo of parental influence--she was still reminiscent of
+one of the sacred lessons of home. It was the only one she retained,
+but luckily she retained it with force. She enjoyed in a word an
+ineffaceable view of the fact that there were things papa called mamma
+and mamma called papa a low sneak for doing or for not doing. Now this
+rich memory gave her a name that she dreaded to invite to the lips of
+Mrs. Beale: she should personally wince so just to hear it. The very
+sweetness of the foreign life she was steeped in added with each hour
+of Sir Claude's absence to the possibility of such pangs. She watched
+beside Mrs. Wix the great golden Madonna, and one of the ear-ringed old
+women who had been sitting at the end of their bench got up and pottered
+away. "Adieu mesdames!" said the old woman in a little cracked civil
+voice--a demonstration by which our friends were so affected that they
+bobbed up and almost curtseyed to her. They subsided again, and it was
+shortly after, in a summer hum of French insects and a phase of almost
+somnolent reverie, that Maisie most had the vision of what it was to
+shut out from such a perspective so appealing a participant. It had not
+yet appeared so vast as at that moment, this prospect of statues shining
+in the blue and of courtesy in romantic forms.
+
+"Why after all should we have to choose between you? Why shouldn't we
+be four?" she finally demanded.
+
+Mrs. Wix gave the jerk of a sleeper awakened or the start even of one
+who hears a bullet whiz at the flag of truce. Her stupefaction at
+such a breach of the peace delayed for a moment her answer. "Four
+improprieties, do you mean? Because two of us happen to be decent
+people! Do I gather you to wish that I should stay on with you even
+if that woman IS capable--?"
+
+Maisie took her up before she could further phrase Mrs. Beale's
+capability. "Stay on as MY companion--yes. Stay on as just what you
+were at mamma's. Mrs. Beale WOULD let you!" the child said.
+
+Mrs. Wix had by this time fairly sprung to her arms. "And who, I'd like
+to know, would let Mrs. Beale? Do you mean, little unfortunate, that YOU
+would?"
+
+"Why not, if now she's free?"
+
+"Free? Are you imitating HIM? Well, if Sir Claude's old enough to know
+better, upon my word I think it's right to treat you as if you also
+were. You'll have to, at any rate--to know better--if that's the line
+you're proposing to take." Mrs. Wix had never been so harsh; but on the
+other hand Maisie could guess that she herself had never appeared so
+wanton. What was underlying, however, rather overawed than angered her;
+she felt she could still insist--not for contradiction, but for ultimate
+calm. Her wantonness meanwhile continued to work upon her friend, who
+caught again, on the rebound, the sound of deepest provocation. "Free,
+free, free? If she's as free as YOU are, my dear, she's free enough, to
+be sure!"
+
+"As I am?"--Maisie, after reflexion and despite whatever of portentous
+this seemed to convey, risked a critical echo.
+
+"Well," said Mrs. Wix, "nobody, you know, is free to commit a crime."
+
+"A crime!" The word had come out in a way that made the child sound it
+again.
+
+"You'd commit as great a one as their own--and so should I--if we were
+to condone their immorality by our presence."
+
+Maisie waited a little; this seemed so fiercely conclusive. "Why is it
+immorality?" she nevertheless presently enquired.
+
+Her companion now turned upon her with a reproach softer because it was
+somehow deeper. "You're too unspeakable! Do you know what we're talking
+about?"
+
+In the interest of ultimate calm Maisie felt that she must be above all
+clear. "Certainly; about their taking advantage of their freedom."
+
+"Well, to do what?"
+
+"Why, to live with us."
+
+Mrs. Wix's laugh, at this, was literally wild. "'Us?' Thank you!"
+
+"Then to live with ME."
+
+The words made her friend jump. "You give me up? You break with me for
+ever? You turn me into the street?"
+
+Maisie, though gasping a little, bore up under the rain of challenges.
+"Those, it seems to me, are the things you do to ME."
+
+Mrs. Wix made little of her valour. "I can promise you that, whatever
+I do, I shall never let you out of my sight! You ask me why it's
+immorality when you've seen with your own eyes that Sir Claude has felt
+it to be so to that dire extent that, rather than make you face the
+shame of it, he has for months kept away from you altogether? Is it any
+more difficult to see that the first time he tries to do his duty he
+washes his hands of HER--takes you straight away from her?"
+
+Maisie turned this over, but more for apparent consideration than from
+any impulse to yield too easily. "Yes, I see what you mean. But at
+that time they weren't free." She felt Mrs. Wix rear up again at the
+offensive word, but she succeeded in touching her with a remonstrant
+hand. "I don't think you know how free they've become."
+
+"I know, I believe, at least as much as you do!"
+
+Maisie felt a delicacy but overcame it. "About the Countess?"
+
+"Your father's--temptress?" Mrs. Wix gave her a sidelong squint.
+"Perfectly. She pays him!"
+
+"Oh DOES she?" At this the child's countenance fell: it seemed to give a
+reason for papa's behaviour and place it in a more favourable light. She
+wished to be just. "I don't say she's not generous. She was so to me."
+
+"How, to you?"
+
+"She gave me a lot of money."
+
+Mrs. Wix stared. "And pray what did you do with a lot of money?"
+
+"I gave it to Mrs. Beale."
+
+"And what did Mrs. Beale do with it?"
+
+"She sent it back."
+
+"To the Countess? Gammon!" said Mrs. Wix. She disposed of that plea as
+effectually as Susan Ash.
+
+"Well, I don't care!" Maisie replied. "What I mean is that you don't
+know about the rest."
+
+"The rest? What rest?"
+
+Maisie wondered how she could best put it. "Papa kept me there an hour."
+
+"I do know--Sir Claude told me. Mrs. Beale had told him."
+
+Maisie looked incredulity. "How could she--when I didn't speak of it?"
+
+Mrs. Wix was mystified. "Speak of what?"
+
+"Why, of her being so frightful."
+
+"The Countess? Of course she's frightful!" Mrs. Wix returned. After a
+moment she added: "That's why she pays him."
+
+Maisie pondered. "It's the best thing about her then--if she gives him
+as much as she gave ME!"
+
+"Well, it's not the best thing about HIM! Or rather perhaps it IS too!"
+Mrs. Wix subjoined.
+
+"But she's awful--really and truly," Maisie went on.
+
+Mrs. Wix arrested her. "You needn't go into details!" It was visibly at
+variance with this injunction that she yet enquired: "How does that make
+it any better?"
+
+"Their living with me? Why for the Countess--and for her whiskers!--he
+has put me off on them. I understood him," Maisie profoundly said.
+
+"I hope then he understood you. It's more than I do!" Mrs. Wix admitted.
+
+This was a real challenge to be plainer, and our young lady immediately
+became so. "I mean it isn't a crime."
+
+"Why then did Sir Claude steal you away?"
+
+"He didn't steal--he only borrowed me. I knew it wasn't for long,"
+Maisie audaciously professed.
+
+"You must allow me to reply to that," cried Mrs. Wix, "that you knew
+nothing of the sort, and that you rather basely failed to back me up
+last night when you pretended so plump that you did! You hoped in fact,
+exactly as much as I did and as in my senseless passion I even hope now,
+that this may be the beginning of better things."
+
+Oh yes, Mrs. Wix was indeed, for the first time, sharp; so that there
+at last stirred in our heroine the sense not so much of being proved
+disingenuous as of being precisely accused of the meanness that had
+brought everything down on her through her very desire to shake herself
+clear of it. She suddenly felt herself swell with a passion of protest.
+"I never, NEVER hoped I wasn't going again to see Mrs. Beale! I didn't,
+I didn't, I didn't!" she repeated. Mrs. Wix bounced about with a force
+of rejoinder of which she also felt that she must anticipate the
+concussion and which, though the good lady was evidently charged to the
+brim, hung fire long enough to give time for an aggravation. "She's
+beautiful and I love her! I love her and she's beautiful!"
+
+"And I'm hideous and you hate ME?" Mrs. Wix fixed her a moment, then
+caught herself up. "I won't embitter you by absolutely accusing you of
+that; though, as for my being hideous, it's hardly the first time I've
+been told so! I know it so well that even if I haven't whiskers--have
+I?--I dare say there are other ways in which the Countess is a Venus to
+me! My pretensions must therefore seem to you monstrous--which comes to
+the same thing as your not liking me. But do you mean to go so far as to
+tell me that you WANT to live with them in their sin?"
+
+"You know what I want, you know what I want!"--Maisie spoke with the
+shudder of rising tears.
+
+"Yes, I do; you want me to be as bad as yourself! Well, I won't. There!
+Mrs. Beale's as bad as your father!" Mrs. Wix went on.
+
+"She's not!--she's not!" her pupil almost shrieked in retort.
+
+"You mean because Sir Claude at least has beauty and wit and grace? But
+he pays just as the Countess pays!" Mrs. Wix, who now rose as she spoke,
+fairly revealed a latent cynicism.
+
+It raised Maisie also to her feet; her companion had walked off a few
+steps and paused. The two looked at each other as they had never looked,
+and Mrs. Wix seemed to flaunt there in her finery. "Then doesn't he pay
+YOU too?" her unhappy charge demanded.
+
+At this she bounded in her place. "Oh you incredible little waif!"
+She brought it out with a wail of violence; after which, with another
+convulsion, she marched straight away.
+
+Maisie dropped back on the bench and burst into sobs.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+
+Nothing so dreadful of course could be final or even for many minutes
+prolonged: they rushed together again too soon for either to feel that
+either had kept it up, and though they went home in silence it was with
+a vivid perception for Maisie that her companion's hand had closed upon
+her. That hand had shown altogether, these twenty-four hours, a new
+capacity for closing, and one of the truths the child could least resist
+was that a certain greatness had now come to Mrs. Wix. The case was
+indeed that the quality of her motive surpassed the sharpness of her
+angles; both the combination and the singularity of which things, when
+in the afternoon they used the carriage, Maisie could borrow from the
+contemplative hush of their grandeur the freedom to feel to the utmost.
+She still bore the mark of the tone in which her friend had thrown out
+that threat of never losing sight of her. This friend had been converted
+in short from feebleness to force; and it was the light of her new
+authority that showed from how far she had come. The threat in question,
+sharply exultant, might have produced defiance; but before anything so
+ugly could happen another process had insidiously forestalled it. The
+moment at which this process had begun to mature was that of Mrs. Wix's
+breaking out with a dignity attuned to their own apartments and with an
+advantage now measurably gained. They had ordered coffee after luncheon,
+in the spirit of Sir Claude's provision, and it was served to them while
+they awaited their equipage in the white and gold saloon. It was flanked
+moreover with a couple of liqueurs, and Maisie felt that Sir Claude
+could scarce have been taken more at his word had it been followed
+by anecdotes and cigarettes. The influence of these luxuries was
+at any rate in the air. It seemed to her while she tiptoed at the
+chimney-glass, pulling on her gloves and with a motion of her head
+shaking a feather into place, to have had something to do with Mrs.
+Wix's suddenly saying: "Haven't you really and truly ANY moral sense?"
+
+Maisie was aware that her answer, though it brought her down to her
+heels, was vague even to imbecility, and that this was the first time
+she had appeared to practise with Mrs. Wix an intellectual inaptitude to
+meet her--the infirmity to which she had owed so much success with papa
+and mamma. The appearance did her injustice, for it was not less through
+her candour than through her playfellow's pressure that after this the
+idea of a moral sense mainly coloured their intercourse. She began, the
+poor child, with scarcely knowing what it was; but it proved something
+that, with scarce an outward sign save her surrender to the swing of the
+carriage, she could, before they came back from their drive, strike up a
+sort of acquaintance with. The beauty of the day only deepened, and the
+splendour of the afternoon sea, and the haze of the far headlands, and
+the taste of the sweet air. It was the coachman indeed who, smiling and
+cracking his whip, turning in his place, pointing to invisible objects
+and uttering unintelligible sounds--all, our tourists recognised, strict
+features of a social order principally devoted to language: it was this
+polite person, I say, who made their excursion fall so much short that
+their return left them still a stretch of the long daylight and an hour
+that, at his obliging suggestion, they spent on foot by the shining
+sands. Maisie had seen the _plage_ the day before with Sir Claude, but
+that was a reason the more for showing on the spot to Mrs. Wix that it
+was, as she said, another of the places on her list and of the things of
+which she knew the French name. The bathers, so late, were absent and
+the tide was low; the sea-pools twinkled in the sunset and there were
+dry places as well, where they could sit again and admire and expatiate:
+a circumstance that, while they listened to the lap of the waves, gave
+Mrs. Wix a fresh support for her challenge. "Have you absolutely none at
+all?"
+
+She had no need now, as to the question itself at least, to be specific;
+that on the other hand was the eventual result of their quiet conjoined
+apprehension of the thing that--well, yes, since they must face
+it--Maisie absolutely and appallingly had so little of. This marked more
+particularly the moment of the child's perceiving that her friend had
+risen to a level which might--till superseded at all events--pass almost
+for sublime. Nothing more remarkable had taken place in the first heat
+of her own departure, no act of perception less to be overtraced by our
+rough method, than her vision, the rest of that Boulogne day, of the
+manner in which she figured. I so despair of courting her noiseless
+mental footsteps here that I must crudely give you my word for its being
+from this time forward a picture literally present to her. Mrs. Wix
+saw her as a little person knowing so extraordinarily much that, for
+the account to be taken of it, what she still didn't know would be
+ridiculous if it hadn't been embarrassing. Mrs. Wix was in truth more
+than ever qualified to meet embarrassment; I am not sure that Maisie had
+not even a dim discernment of the queer law of her own life that made
+her educate to that sort of proficiency those elders with whom she was
+concerned. She promoted, as it were, their development; nothing could
+have been more marked for instance than her success in promoting Mrs.
+Beale's. She judged that if her whole history, for Mrs. Wix, had been
+the successive stages of her knowledge, so the very climax of the
+concatenation would, in the same view, be the stage at which the
+knowledge should overflow. As she was condemned to know more and more,
+how could it logically stop before she should know Most? It came to her
+in fact as they sat there on the sands that she was distinctly on the
+road to know Everything. She had not had governesses for nothing: what
+in the world had she ever done but learn and learn and learn? She looked
+at the pink sky with a placid foreboding that she soon should have
+learnt All. They lingered in the flushed air till at last it turned
+to grey and she seemed fairly to receive new information from every
+brush of the breeze. By the time they moved homeward it was as if this
+inevitability had become for Mrs. Wix a long, tense cord, twitched by
+a nervous hand, on which the valued pearls of intelligence were to be
+neatly strung.
+
+In the evening upstairs they had another strange sensation, as to which
+Maisie couldn't afterwards have told you whether it was bang in the
+middle or quite at the beginning that her companion sounded with fresh
+emphasis the note of the moral sense. What mattered was merely that she
+did exclaim, and again, as at first appeared, most disconnectedly: "God
+help me, it does seem to peep out!" Oh the queer confusions that had
+wooed it at last to such peeping! None so queer, however, as the words
+of woe, and it might verily be said of rage, in which the poor lady
+bewailed the tragic end of her own rich ignorance. There was a point at
+which she seized the child and hugged her as close as in the old days of
+partings and returns; at which she was visibly at a loss how to make up
+to such a victim for such contaminations: appealing, as to what she had
+done and was doing, in bewilderment, in explanation, in supplication,
+for reassurance, for pardon and even outright for pity.
+
+"I don't know what I've said to you, my own: I don't know what I'm
+saying or what the turn you've given my life has rendered me, heaven
+forgive me, capable of saying. Have I lost all delicacy, all decency,
+all measure of how far and how bad? It seems to me mostly that I have,
+though I'm the last of whom you would ever have thought it. I've just
+done it for YOU, precious--not to lose you, which would have been worst
+of all: so that I've had to pay with my own innocence, if you do laugh!
+for clinging to you and keeping you. Don't let me pay for nothing; don't
+let me have been thrust for nothing into such horrors and such shames. I
+never knew anything about them and I never wanted to know! Now I know
+too much, too much!" the poor woman lamented and groaned. "I know so
+much that with hearing such talk I ask myself where I am; and with
+uttering it too, which is worse, say to myself that I'm far, too far,
+from where I started! I ask myself what I should have thought with my
+lost one if I had heard myself cross the line. There are lines I've
+crossed with YOU where I should have fancied I had come to a pretty
+pass--" She gasped at the mere supposition. "I've gone from one thing to
+another, and all for the real love of you; and now what would any one
+say--I mean any one but THEM--if they were to hear the way I go on? I've
+had to keep up with you, haven't I?--and therefore what could I do less
+than look to you to keep up with ME? But it's not THEM that are the
+worst--by which I mean to say it's not HIM: it's your dreadfully base
+papa and the one person in the world whom he could have found, I do
+believe--and she's not the Countess, duck--wickeder than himself. While
+they were about it at any rate, since they WERE ruining you, they might
+have done it so as to spare an honest woman. Then I shouldn't have had
+to do whatever it is that's the worst: throw up at you the badness you
+haven't taken in, or find my advantage in the vileness you HAVE! What I
+did lose patience at this morning was at how it was that without your
+seeming to condemn--for you didn't, you remember!--you yet did seem to
+KNOW. Thank God, in his mercy, at last, IF you do!"
+
+The night, this time, was warm, and one of the windows stood open to the
+small balcony over the rail of which, on coming back from dinner, Maisie
+had hung a long time in the enjoyment of the chatter, the lights, the
+life of the quay made brilliant by the season and the hour. Mrs. Wix's
+requirements had drawn her in from this pasture and Mrs. Wix's embrace
+had detained her even though midway in the outpouring her confusion
+and sympathy had permitted, or rather had positively helped, her to
+disengage herself. But the casement was still wide, the spectacle, the
+pleasure were still there, and from her place in the room, which, with
+its polished floor and its panels of elegance, was lighted from without
+more than from within, the child could still take account of them. She
+appeared to watch and listen; after which she answered Mrs. Wix with a
+question. "If I do know--?"
+
+"If you do condemn." The correction was made with some austerity.
+
+It had the effect of causing Maisie to heave a vague sigh of oppression
+and then after an instant and as if under cover of this ambiguity pass
+out again upon the balcony. She hung again over the rail; she felt the
+summer night; she dropped down into the manners of France. There was
+a cafe below the hotel, before which, with little chairs and tables,
+people sat on a space enclosed by plants in tubs; and the impression was
+enriched by the flash of the white aprons of waiters and the music of a
+man and a woman who, from beyond the precinct, sent up the strum of a
+guitar and the drawl of a song about "amour." Maisie knew what "amour"
+meant too, and wondered if Mrs. Wix did: Mrs. Wix remained within, as
+still as a mouse and perhaps not reached by the performance. After
+a while, but not till the musicians had ceased and begun to circulate
+with a little plate, her pupil came back to her. "IS it a crime?" Maisie
+then asked.
+
+Mrs. Wix was as prompt as if she had been crouching in a lair. "Branded
+by the Bible."
+
+"Well, he won't commit a crime."
+
+Mrs. Wix looked at her gloomily. "He's committing one now."
+
+"Now?"
+
+"In being with her."
+
+Maisie had it on her tongue's end to return once more: "But now he's
+free." She remembered, however, in time that one of the things she had
+known for the last entire hour was that this made no difference. After
+that, and as if to turn the right way, she was on the point of a blind
+dash, a weak reversion to the reminder that it might make a difference,
+might diminish the crime for Mrs. Beale; till such a reflexion was in
+its order also quashed by the visibility in Mrs. Wix's face of the
+collapse produced by her inference from her pupil's manner that after
+all her pains her pupil didn't even yet adequately understand. Never so
+much as when confronted had Maisie wanted to understand, and all her
+thought for a minute centred in the effort to come out with something
+which should be a disproof of her simplicity. "Just TRUST me, dear;
+that's all!"--she came out finally with that; and it was perhaps a good
+sign of her action that with a long, impartial moan Mrs. Wix floated her
+to bed.
+
+There was no letter the next morning from Sir Claude--which Mrs. Wix let
+out that she deemed the worst of omens; yet it was just for the quieter
+communion they so got with him that, when after the coffee and rolls
+which made them more foreign than ever, it came to going forth for fresh
+drafts upon his credit they wandered again up the hill to the rampart
+instead of plunging into distraction with the crowd on the sands or into
+the sea with the semi-nude bathers. They gazed once more at their gilded
+Virgin; they sank once more upon their battered bench; they felt once
+more their distance from the Regent's Park. At last Mrs. Wix became
+definite about their friend's silence. "He IS afraid of her! She has
+forbidden him to write." The fact of his fear Maisie already knew; but
+her companion's mention of it had at this moment two unexpected results.
+The first was her wondering in dumb remonstrance how Mrs. Wix, with
+a devotion not after all inferior to her own, could put into such an
+allusion such a grimness of derision; the second was that she found
+herself suddenly drop into a deeper view of it. She too had been afraid,
+as we have seen, of the people of whom Sir Claude was afraid, and by
+that law she had had her due measure of latest apprehension of Mrs.
+Beale. What occurred at present, however, was that, whereas this
+sympathy appeared vain as for him, the ground of it loomed dimly as a
+reason for selfish alarm. That uneasiness had not carried her far before
+Mrs. Wix spoke again and with an abruptness so great as almost to seem
+irrelevant. "Has it never occurred to you to be jealous of her?"
+
+It never had in the least; yet the words were scarce in the air before
+Maisie had jumped at them. She held them well, she looked at them hard;
+at last she brought out with an assurance which there was no one, alas,
+but herself to admire: "Well, yes--since you ask me." She debated, then
+continued: "Lots of times!"
+
+Mrs. Wix glared askance an instant; such approval as her look expressed
+was not wholly unqualified. It expressed at any rate something that
+presumably had to do with her saying once more: "Yes. He's afraid of
+her."
+
+Maisie heard, and it had afresh its effect on her even through the
+blur of the attention now required by the possibility of that idea of
+jealousy--a possibility created only by her feeling she had thus found
+the way to show she was not simple. It struck out of Mrs. Wix that
+this lady still believed her moral sense to be interested and feigned;
+so what could be such a gage of her sincerity as a peep of the most
+restless of the passions? Such a revelation would baffle discouragement,
+and discouragement was in fact so baffled that, helped in some degree
+by the mere intensity of their need to hope, which also, according to
+its nature, sprang from the dark portent of the absent letter, the real
+pitch of their morning was reached by the note, not of mutual scrutiny,
+but of unprecedented frankness. There were broodings indeed and
+silences, and Maisie sank deeper into the vision that for her friend
+she was, at the most, superficial, and that also, positively, she was
+the more so the more she tried to appear complete. Was the sum of all
+knowledge only to know how little in this presence one would ever reach
+it? The answer to that question luckily lost itself in the brightness
+suffusing the scene as soon as Maisie had thrown out in regard to Mrs.
+Beale such a remark as she had never dreamed she should live to make.
+"If I thought she was unkind to him--I don't know WHAT I should do!"
+
+Mrs. Wix dropped one of her squints; she even confirmed it by a wild
+grunt. "I know what _I_ should!"
+
+Maisie at this felt that she lagged. "Well, I can think of ONE thing."
+
+Mrs. Wix more directly challenged her. "What is it then?"
+
+Maisie met her expression as if it were a game with forfeits for
+winking. "I'd KILL her!" That at least, she hoped as she looked away,
+would guarantee her moral sense. She looked away, but her companion said
+nothing for so long that she at last turned her head again. Then she saw
+the straighteners all blurred with tears which after a little seemed to
+have sprung from her own eyes. There were tears in fact on both sides of
+the spectacles, and they were even so thick that it was presently all
+Maisie could do to make out through them that slowly, finally Mrs. Wix
+put forth a hand. It was the material pressure that settled this and
+even at the end of some minutes more things besides. It settled in its
+own way one thing in particular, which, though often, between them,
+heaven knew, hovered round and hung over, was yet to be established
+without the shadow of an attenuating smile. Oh there was no gleam of
+levity, as little of humour as of deprecation, in the long time they now
+sat together or in the way in which at some unmeasured point of it Mrs.
+Wix became distinct enough for her own dignity and yet not loud enough
+for the snoozing old women.
+
+"I adore him. I adore him."
+
+Maisie took it well in; so well that in a moment more she would have
+answered profoundly: "So do I." But before that moment passed something
+took place that brought other words to her lips; nothing more, very
+possibly, than the closer consciousness in her hand of the significance
+of Mrs. Wix's. Their hands remained linked in unutterable sign of their
+union, and what Maisie at last said was simply and serenely: "Oh I
+know!"
+
+Their hands were so linked and their union was so confirmed that it took
+the far deep note of a bell, borne to them on the summer air, to call
+them back to a sense of hours and proprieties. They had touched bottom
+and melted together, but they gave a start at last: the bell was the
+voice of the inn and the inn was the image of luncheon. They should be
+late for it; they got up, and their quickened step on the return had
+something of the swing of confidence. When they reached the hotel the
+_table d'hote_ had begun; this was clear from the threshold, clear
+from the absence in the hall and on the stairs of the "personnel,"
+as Mrs. Wix said--she had picked THAT up--all collected in the
+dining-room. They mounted to their apartments for a brush before the
+glass, and it was Maisie who, in passing and from a vain impulse,
+threw open the white and gold door. She was thus first to utter the
+sound that brought Mrs. Wix almost on top of her, as by the other
+accident it would have brought her on top of Mrs. Wix. It had at any
+rate the effect of leaving them bunched together in a strained stare
+at their new situation. This situation had put on in a flash the
+bright form of Mrs. Beale: she stood there in her hat and her jacket,
+amid bags and shawls, smiling and holding out her arms. If she had
+just arrived it was a different figure from either of the two that for
+THEIR benefit, wan and tottering and none too soon to save life, the
+Channel had recently disgorged. She was as lovely as the day that had
+brought her over, as fresh as the luck and the health that attended
+her: it came to Maisie on the spot that she was more beautiful than
+she had ever been. All this was too quick to count, but there was
+still time in it to give the child the sense of what had kindled the
+light. That leaped out of the open arms, the open eyes, the open
+mouth; it leaped out with Mrs. Beale's loud cry at her: "I'm free,
+I'm free!"
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+
+The greatest wonder of all was the way Mrs. Beale addressed her
+announcement, so far as could be judged, equally to Mrs. Wix, who, as
+if from sudden failure of strength, sank into a chair while Maisie
+surrendered to the visitor's embrace. As soon as the child was liberated
+she met with profundity Mrs. Wix's stupefaction and actually was able to
+see that while in a manner sustaining the encounter her face yet seemed
+with intensity to say: "Now, for God's sake, don't crow 'I told you
+so!'" Maisie was somehow on the spot aware of an absence of disposition
+to crow; it had taken her but an extra minute to arrive at such a quick
+survey of the objects surrounding Mrs. Beale as showed that among them
+was no appurtenance of Sir Claude's. She knew his dressing-bag now--oh
+with the fondest knowledge!--and there was an instant during which its
+not being there was a stroke of the worst news. She was yet to learn
+what it could be to recognise in some lapse of a sequence the proof of
+an extinction, and therefore remained unaware that this momentary pang
+was a foretaste of the experience of death. It of course yielded in
+a flash to Mrs. Beale's brightness, it gasped itself away in her own
+instant appeal. "You've come alone?"
+
+"Without Sir Claude?" Strangely, Mrs. Beale looked even brighter. "Yes;
+in the eagerness to get at you. You abominable little villain!"--and her
+stepmother, laughing clear, administered to her cheek a pat that was
+partly a pinch. "What were you up to and what did you take me for? But
+I'm glad to be abroad, and after all it's you who have shown me the way.
+I mightn't, without you, have been able to come--to come, that is, so
+soon. Well, here I am at any rate and in a moment more I should have
+begun to worry about you. This will do very well"--she was good-natured
+about the place and even presently added that it was charming. Then with
+a rosier glow she made again her great point: "I'm free, I'm free!"
+Maisie made on her side her own: she carried back her gaze to Mrs. Wix,
+whom amazement continued to hold; she drew afresh her old friend's
+attention to the superior way she didn't take that up. What she did take
+up the next minute was the question of Sir Claude. "Where is he? Won't
+he come?"
+
+Mrs. Beale's consideration of this oscillated with a smile between the
+two expectancies with which she was flanked: it was conspicuous, it
+was extraordinary, her unblinking acceptance of Mrs. Wix, a miracle of
+which Maisie had even now begun to read a reflexion in that lady's long
+visage. "He'll come, but we must MAKE him!" she gaily brought forth.
+
+"Make him?" Maisie echoed.
+
+"We must give him time. We must play our cards."
+
+"But he promised us awfully," Maisie replied.
+
+"My dear child, he has promised ME awfully; I mean lots of things, and
+not in every case kept his promise to the letter." Mrs. Beale's good
+humour insisted on taking for granted Mrs. Wix's, to whom her attention
+had suddenly grown prodigious. "I dare say he has done the same with
+you, and not always come to time. But he makes it up in his own way--and
+it isn't as if we didn't know exactly what he is. There's one thing he
+is," she went on, "which makes everything else only a question, for us,
+of tact." They scarce had time to wonder what this was before, as they
+might have said, it flew straight into their face. "He's as free as I
+am!"
+
+"Yes, I know," said Maisie; as if, however, independently weighing the
+value of that. She really weighed also the oddity of her stepmother's
+treating it as news to HER, who had been the first person literally to
+whom Sir Claude had mentioned it. For a few seconds, as if with the
+sound of it in her ears, she stood with him again, in memory and in the
+twilight, in the hotel garden at Folkestone.
+
+Anything Mrs. Beale overlooked was, she indeed divined, but the effect
+of an exaltation of high spirits, a tendency to soar that showed even
+when she dropped--still quite impartially--almost to the confidential.
+"Well, then--we've only to wait. He can't do without us long. I'm sure,
+Mrs. Wix, he can't do without YOU! He's devoted to you; he has told me
+so much about you. The extent I count on you, you know, count on you to
+help me--" was an extent that even all her radiance couldn't express.
+What it couldn't express quite as much as what it could made at any rate
+every instant her presence and even her famous freedom loom larger; and
+it was this mighty mass that once more led her companions, bewildered
+and disjoined, to exchange with each other as through a thickening veil
+confused and ineffectual signs. They clung together at least on the
+common ground of unpreparedness, and Maisie watched without relief the
+havoc of wonder in Mrs. Wix. It had reduced her to perfect impotence,
+and, but that gloom was black upon her, she sat as if fascinated by Mrs.
+Beale's high style. It had plunged her into a long deep hush; for what
+had happened was the thing she had least allowed for and before which
+the particular rigour she had worked up could only grow limp and sick.
+Sir Claude was to have reappeared with his accomplice or without
+her; never, never his accomplice without HIM. Mrs. Beale had gained
+apparently by this time an advantage she could pursue: she looked at the
+droll dumb figure with jesting reproach. "You really won't shake hands
+with me? Never mind; you'll come round!" She put the matter to no test,
+going on immediately and, instead of offering her hand, raising it, with
+a pretty gesture that her bent head met, to a long black pin that played
+a part in her back hair. "Are hats worn at luncheon? If you're as hungry
+as I am we must go right down."
+
+Mrs. Wix stuck fast, but she met the question in a voice her pupil
+scarce recognised. "I wear mine."
+
+Mrs. Beale, swallowing at one glance her brand-new bravery, which she
+appeared at once to refer to its origin and to follow in its flights,
+accepted this as conclusive. "Oh but I've not such a beauty!" Then she
+turned rejoicingly to Maisie. "I've got a beauty for YOU my dear."
+
+"A beauty?"
+
+"A love of a hat--in my luggage. I remembered THAT"--she nodded at the
+object on her stepdaughter's head--"and I've brought you one with a
+peacock's breast. It's the most gorgeous blue!"
+
+It was too strange, this talking with her there already not about
+Sir Claude but about peacocks--too strange for the child to have the
+presence of mind to thank her. But the felicity in which she had arrived
+was so proof against everything that Maisie felt more and more the depth
+of the purpose that must underlie it. She had a vague sense of its being
+abysmal, the spirit with which Mrs. Beale carried off the awkwardness,
+in the white and gold salon, of such a want of breath and of welcome.
+Mrs. Wix was more breathless than ever; the embarrassment of Mrs.
+Beale's isolation was as nothing to the embarrassment of her grace. The
+perception of this dilemma was the germ on the child's part of a new
+question altogether. What if WITH this indulgence--? But the idea lost
+itself in something too frightened for hope and too conjectured for
+fear; and while everything went by leaps and bounds one of the waiters
+stood at the door to remind them that the _table d'hote_ was half over.
+
+"Had you come up to wash hands?" Mrs. Beale hereupon asked them. "Go and
+do it quickly and I'll be with you: they've put my boxes in that nice
+room--it was Sir Claude's. Trust him," she laughed, "to have a nice
+one!" The door of a neighbouring room stood open, and now from the
+threshold, addressing herself again to Mrs. Wix, she launched a note
+that gave the very key of what, as she would have said, she was up to.
+"Dear lady, please attend to my daughter."
+
+She was up to a change of deportment so complete that it represented--oh
+for offices still honourably subordinate if not too explicitly
+menial--an absolute coercion, an interested clutch of the old woman's
+respectability. There was response, to Maisie's view, I may say at once,
+in the jump of that respectability to its feet: it was itself capable of
+one of the leaps, one of the bounds just mentioned, and it carried its
+charge, with this momentum and while Mrs. Beale popped into Sir Claude's
+chamber, straight away to where, at the end of the passage, pupil and
+governess were quartered. The greatest stride of all, for that matter,
+was that within a few seconds the pupil had, in another relation, been
+converted into a daughter. Maisie's eyes were still following it when,
+after the rush, with the door almost slammed and no thought of soap and
+towels, the pair stood face to face. Mrs. Wix, in this position, was the
+first to gasp a sound. "Can it ever be that SHE has one?"
+
+Maisie felt still more bewildered. "One what?"
+
+"Why moral sense."
+
+They spoke as if you might have two, but Mrs. Wix looked as if it were
+not altogether a happy thought, and Maisie didn't see how even an
+affirmative from her own lips would clear up what had become most of a
+mystery. It was to this larger puzzle she sprang pretty straight. "IS
+she my mother now?"
+
+It was a point as to which an horrific glimpse of the responsibility of
+an opinion appeared to affect Mrs. Wix like a blow in the stomach. She
+had evidently never thought of it; but she could think and rebound. "If
+she is, he's equally your father."
+
+Maisie, however, thought further. "Then my father and my mother--!"
+
+But she had already faltered and Mrs. Wix had already glared back:
+"Ought to live together? Don't begin it AGAIN!" She turned away with
+a groan, to reach the washing-stand, and Maisie could by this time
+recognise with a certain ease that that way verily madness did lie. Mrs.
+Wix gave a great untidy splash, but the next instant had faced round.
+"She has taken a new line."
+
+"She was nice to you," Maisie concurred.
+
+"What SHE thinks so--'go and dress the young lady!' But it's something!"
+she panted. Then she thought out the rest. "If he won't have her, why
+she'll have YOU. She'll be the one."
+
+"The one to keep me abroad?"
+
+"The one to give you a home." Mrs. Wix saw further; she mastered all the
+portents. "Oh she's cruelly clever! It's not a moral sense." She reached
+her climax: "It's a game!"
+
+"A game?"
+
+"Not to lose him. She has sacrificed him--to her duty."
+
+"Then won't he come?" Maisie pleaded.
+
+Mrs. Wix made no answer; her vision absorbed her. "He has fought. But
+she has won."
+
+"Then won't he come?" the child repeated.
+
+Mrs. Wix made it out. "Yes, hang him!" She had never been so profane.
+
+For all Maisie minded! "Soon--to-morrow?"
+
+"Too soon--whenever. Indecently soon."
+
+"But then we SHALL be together!" the child went on. It made Mrs. Wix
+look at her as if in exasperation; but nothing had time to come before
+she precipitated: "Together with YOU!" The air of criticism continued,
+but took voice only in her companion's bidding her wash herself and come
+down. The silence of quick ablutions fell upon them, presently broken,
+however, by one of Maisie's sudden reversions. "Mercy, isn't she
+handsome?"
+
+Mrs. Wix had finished; she waited. "She'll attract attention." They
+were rapid, and it would have been noticed that the shock the beauty
+had given them acted, incongruously, as a positive spur to their
+preparations for rejoining her. She had none the less, when they
+returned to the sitting-room, already descended; the open door of her
+room showed it empty and the chambermaid explained. Here again they were
+delayed by another sharp thought of Mrs. Wix's. "But what will she live
+on meanwhile?"
+
+Maisie stopped short. "Till Sir Claude comes?"
+
+It was nothing to the violence with which her friend had been arrested.
+"Who'll pay the bills?"
+
+Maisie thought. "Can't SHE?"
+
+"She? She hasn't a penny."
+
+The child wondered. "But didn't papa--?"
+
+"Leave her a fortune?" Mrs. Wix would have appeared to speak of papa as
+dead had she not immediately added: "Why he lives on other women!"
+
+Oh yes, Maisie remembered. "Then can't he send--" She faltered again;
+even to herself it sounded queer.
+
+"Some of their money to his wife?" Mrs. Wix pave a laugh still stranger
+than the weird suggestion. "I dare say she'd take it!"
+
+They hurried on again; yet again, on the stairs, Maisie pulled up.
+"Well, if she had stopped in England--!" she threw out.
+
+Mrs. Wix considered. "And he had come over instead?"
+
+"Yes, as we expected." Maisie launched her speculation. "What then would
+she have lived on?"
+
+Mrs. Wix hung fire but an instant. "On other men!" And she marched
+downstairs.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+
+Mrs. Beale, at table between the pair, plainly attracted the attention
+Mrs. Wix had foretold. No other lady present was nearly so handsome,
+nor did the beauty of any other accommodate itself with such art to the
+homage it produced. She talked mainly to her other neighbour, and that
+left Maisie leisure both to note the manner in which eyes were riveted
+and nudges interchanged, and to lose herself in the meanings that, dimly
+as yet and disconnectedly, but with a vividness that fed apprehension,
+she could begin to read into her stepmother's independent move. Mrs. Wix
+had helped her by talking of a game; it was a connexion in which the
+move could put on a strategic air. Her notions of diplomacy were thin,
+but it was a kind of cold diplomatic shoulder and an elbow of more than
+usual point that, temporarily at least, were presented to her by the
+averted inclination of Mrs. Beale's head. There was a phrase familiar to
+Maisie, so often was it used by this lady to express the idea of one's
+getting what one wanted: one got it--Mrs. Beale always said SHE at all
+events always got it or proposed to get it--by "making love." She was
+at present making love, singular as it appeared, to Mrs. Wix, and her
+young friend's mind had never moved in such freedom as on thus finding
+itself face to face with the question of what she wanted to get. This
+period of the _omelette aux rognons_ and the poulet saute, while her sole
+surviving parent, her fourth, fairly chattered to her governess, left
+Maisie rather wondering if her governess would hold out. It was strange,
+but she became on the spot quite as interested in Mrs. Wix's moral
+sense as Mrs. Wix could possibly be in hers: it had risen before her so
+pressingly that this was something new for Mrs. Wix to resist. Resisting
+Mrs. Beale herself promised at such a rate to become a very different
+business from resisting Sir Claude's view of her. More might come of
+what had happened--whatever it was--than Maisie felt she could have
+expected. She put it together with a suspicion that, had she ever in
+her life had a sovereign changed, would have resembled an impression,
+baffled by the want of arithmetic, that her change was wrong: she groped
+about in it that she was perhaps playing the passive part in a case of
+violent substitution. A victim was what she should surely be if the
+issue between her step-parents had been settled by Mrs. Beale's saying:
+"Well, if she can live with but one of us alone, with which in the world
+should it be but me?" That answer was far from what, for days, she had
+nursed herself in, and the desolation of it was deepened by the absence
+of anything from Sir Claude to show he had not had to take it as
+triumphant. Had not Mrs. Beale, upstairs, as good as given out that
+she had quitted him with the snap of a tension, left him, dropped him
+in London, after some struggle as a sequel to which her own advent
+represented that she had practically sacrificed him? Maisie assisted in
+fancy at the probable episode in the Regent's Park, finding elements
+almost of terror in the suggestion that Sir Claude had not had fair
+play. They drew something, as she sat there, even from the pride of an
+association with such beauty as Mrs. Beale's; and the child quite forgot
+that, though the sacrifice of Mrs. Beale herself was a solution she had
+not invented, she would probably have seen Sir Claude embark upon it
+without a direct remonstrance.
+
+What her stepmother had clearly now promised herself to wring from Mrs.
+Wix was an assent to the great modification, the change, as smart as a
+juggler's trick, in the interest of which nothing so much mattered as
+the new convenience of Mrs. Beale. Maisie could positively seize the
+moral that her elbow seemed to point in ribs thinly defended--the moral
+of its not mattering a straw which of the step-parents was the guardian.
+The essence of the question was that a girl wasn't a boy: if Maisie had
+been a mere rough trousered thing, destined at the best probably to grow
+up a scamp, Sir Claude would have been welcome. As the case stood he had
+simply tumbled out of it, and Mrs. Wix would henceforth find herself in
+the employ of the right person. These arguments had really fallen into
+their place, for our young friend, at the very touch of that tone in
+which she had heard her new title declared. She was still, as a result
+of so many parents, a daughter to somebody even after papa and mamma
+were to all intents dead. If her father's wife and her mother's husband,
+by the operation of a natural or, for all she knew, a legal rule, were
+in the shoes of their defunct partners, then Mrs. Beale's partner was
+exactly as defunct as Sir Claude's and her shoes the very pair to which,
+in "Farange _v._ Farange and Others," the divorce court had given
+priority. The subject of that celebrated settlement saw the rest of
+her day really filled out with the pomp of all that Mrs. Beale assumed.
+The assumption rounded itself there between this lady's entertainers,
+flourished in a way that left them, in their bottomless element, scarce
+a free pair of eyes to exchange signals. It struck Maisie even a little
+that there was a rope or two Mrs. Wix might have thrown out if she
+would, a rocket or two she might have sent up. They had at any rate
+never been so long together without communion or telegraphy, and their
+companion kept them apart by simply keeping them with her. From this
+situation they saw the grandeur of their intenser relation to her pass
+and pass like an endless procession. It was a day of lively movement
+and of talk on Mrs. Beale's part so brilliant and overflowing as to
+represent music and banners. She took them out with her promptly to walk
+and to drive, and even--towards night--sketched a plan for carrying them
+to the Etablissement, where, for only a franc apiece, they should listen
+to a concert of celebrities. It reminded Maisie, the plan, of the
+side-shows at Earl's Court, and the franc sounded brighter than the
+shillings which had at that time failed; yet this too, like the other,
+was a frustrated hope: the francs failed like the shillings and the
+side-shows had set an example to the concert. The Etablissement in short
+melted away, and it was little wonder that a lady who from the moment of
+her arrival had been so gallantly in the breach should confess herself
+it last done up. Maisie could appreciate her fatigue; the day had not
+passed without such an observer's discovering that she was excited and
+even mentally comparing her state to that of the breakers after a gale.
+It had blown hard in London, and she would take time to go down. It was
+of the condition known to the child by report as that of talking against
+time that her emphasis, her spirit, her humour, which had never dropped,
+now gave the impression.
+
+She too was delighted with foreign manners; but her daughter's
+opportunities of explaining them to her were unexpectedly forestalled
+by her own tone of large acquaintance with them. One of the things that
+nipped in the bud all response to her volubility was Maisie's surprised
+retreat before the fact that Continental life was what she had been
+almost brought up on. It was Mrs. Beale, disconcertingly, who began to
+explain it to her friends; it was she who, wherever they turned, was the
+interpreter, the historian and the guide. She was full of reference to
+her early travels--at the age of eighteen: she had at that period made,
+with a distinguished Dutch family, a stay on the Lake of Geneva. Maisie
+had in the old days been regaled with anecdotes of these adventures,
+but they had with time become phantasmal, and the heroine's quite showy
+exemption from bewilderment at Boulogne, her acuteness on some of the
+very subjects on which Maisie had been acute to Mrs. Wix, were a high
+note of the majesty, of the variety of advantage, with which she had
+alighted. It was all a part of the wind in her sails and of the weight
+with which her daughter was now to feel her hand. The effect of it on
+Maisie was to add already the burden of time to her separation from Sir
+Claude. This might, to her sense, have lasted for days; it was as if,
+with their main agitation transferred thus to France and with neither
+mamma now nor Mrs. Beale nor Mrs. Wix nor herself at his side, he must
+be fearfully alone in England. Hour after hour she felt as if she were
+waiting; yet she couldn't have said exactly for what. There were moments
+when Mrs. Beale's flow of talk was a mere rattle to smother a knock.
+At no part of the crisis had the rattle so public a purpose as when,
+instead of letting Maisie go with Mrs. Wix to prepare for dinner, she
+pushed her--with a push at last incontestably maternal--straight into
+the room inherited from Sir Claude. She titivated her little charge with
+her own brisk hands; then she brought out: "I'm going to divorce your
+father."
+
+This was so different from anything Maisie had expected that it took
+some time to reach her mind. She was aware meanwhile that she probably
+looked rather wan. "To marry Sir Claude?"
+
+Mrs. Beale rewarded her with a kiss. "It's sweet to hear you put it so."
+
+This was a tribute, but it left Maisie balancing for an objection. "How
+CAN you when he's married?"
+
+"He isn't--practically. He's free, you know."
+
+"Free to marry?"
+
+"Free, first, to divorce his own fiend."
+
+The benefit that, these last days, she had felt she owed a certain
+person left Maisie a moment so ill-prepared for recognising this lurid
+label that she hesitated long enough to risk: "Mamma?"
+
+"She isn't your mamma any longer," Mrs. Beale returned. "Sir Claude has
+paid her money to cease to be." Then as if remembering how little, to
+the child, a pecuniary transaction must represent: "She lets him off
+supporting her if he'll let her off supporting you."
+
+Mrs. Beale appeared, however, to have done injustice to her daughter's
+financial grasp. "And support me himself?" Maisie asked.
+
+"Take the whole bother and burden of you and never let her hear of you
+again. It's a regular signed contract."
+
+"Why that's lovely of her!" Maisie cried.
+
+"It's not so lovely, my dear, but that he'll get his divorce."
+
+Maisie was briefly silent; after which, "No--he won't get it," she said.
+Then she added still more boldly: "And you won't get yours."
+
+Mrs. Beale, who was at the dressing-glass, turned round with amusement
+and surprise. "How do you know that?"
+
+"Oh I know!" cried Maisie.
+
+"From Mrs. Wix?"
+
+Maisie debated, then after an instant took her cue from Mrs. Beale's
+absence of anger, which struck her the more as she had felt how much of
+her courage she needed. "From Mrs. Wix," she admitted.
+
+Mrs. Beale, at the glass again, made play with a powder-puff. "My own
+sweet, she's mistaken!" was all she said.
+
+There was a certain force in the very amenity of this, but our young
+lady reflected long enough to remember that it was not the answer Sir
+Claude himself had made. The recollection nevertheless failed to prevent
+her saying: "Do you mean then that he won't come till he has got it?"
+
+Mrs. Beale gave a last touch; she was ready; she stood there in all her
+elegance. "I mean, my dear, that it's because he HASN'T got it that I
+left him."
+
+This opened a view that stretched further than Maisie could reach. She
+turned away from it, but she spoke before they went out again. "Do you
+like Mrs. Wix now?"
+
+"Why, my chick, I was just going to ask you if you think she has come at
+all to like poor bad me!"
+
+Maisie thought, at this hint; but unsuccessfully. "I haven't the least
+idea. But I'll find out."
+
+"Do!" said Mrs. Beale, rustling out with her in a scented air and as if
+it would be a very particular favour.
+
+The child tried promptly at bed-time, relieved now of the fear that
+their visitor would wish to separate her for the night from her
+attendant. "Have you held out?" she began as soon as the two doors at
+the end of the passage were again closed on them.
+
+Mrs. Wix looked hard at the flame of the candle. "Held out--?"
+
+"Why, she has been making love to you. Has she won you over?"
+
+Mrs. Wix transferred her intensity to her pupil's face. "Over to what?"
+
+"To HER keeping me instead."
+
+"Instead of Sir Claude?" Mrs. Wix was distinctly gaining time.
+
+"Yes; who else? since it's not instead of you."
+
+Mrs. Wix coloured at this lucidity. "Yes, that IS what she means."
+
+"Well, do you like it?" Maisie asked.
+
+She actually had to wait, for oh her friend was embarrassed! "My
+opposition to the connexion--theirs--would then naturally to some extent
+fall. She has treated me to-day as if I weren't after all quite such a
+worm; not that I don't know very well where she got the pattern of her
+politeness. But of course," Mrs. Wix hastened to add, "I shouldn't like
+her as THE one nearly so well as him."
+
+"'Nearly so well!'" Maisie echoed. "I should hope indeed not." She spoke
+with a firmness under which she was herself the first to quiver. "I
+thought you 'adored' him."
+
+"I do," Mrs. Wix sturdily allowed.
+
+"Then have you suddenly begun to adore her too?"
+
+Mrs. Wix, instead of directly answering, only blinked in support of her
+sturdiness. "My dear, in what a tone you ask that! You're coming out."
+
+"Why shouldn't I? YOU'VE come out. Mrs. Beale has come out. We each have
+our turn!" And Maisie threw off the most extraordinary little laugh that
+had ever passed her young lips.
+
+There passed Mrs. Wix's indeed the next moment a sound that more than
+matched it. "You're most remarkable!" she neighed.
+
+Her pupil, though wholly without aspirations to pertness, barely
+faltered. "I think you've done a great deal to make me so."
+
+"Very true, I have." She dropped to humility, as if she recalled her so
+recent self-arraignment.
+
+"Would you accept her then? That's what I ask," said Maisie.
+
+"As a substitute?" Mrs. Wix turned it over; she met again the child's
+eyes. "She has literally almost fawned upon me."
+
+"She hasn't fawned upon HIM. She hasn't even been kind to him."
+
+Mrs. Wix looked as if she had now an advantage. "Then do you propose to
+'kill' her?"
+
+"You don't answer my question," Maisie persisted. "I want to know if you
+accept her."
+
+Mrs. Wix continued to hedge. "I want to know if YOU do!"
+
+Everything in the child's person, at this, announced that it was easy to
+know. "Not for a moment."
+
+"Not the two now?" Mrs. Wix had caught on; she flushed with it. "Only
+him alone?"
+
+"Him alone or nobody."
+
+"Not even ME?" cried Mrs. Wix.
+
+Maisie looked at her a moment, then began to undress. "Oh you're
+nobody!"
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+
+Her sleep was drawn out, she instantly recognised lateness in the way
+her eyes opened to Mrs. Wix, erect, completely dressed, more dressed
+than ever, and gazing at her from the centre of the room. The next thing
+she was sitting straight up, wide awake with the fear of the hours of
+"abroad" that she might have lost. Mrs. Wix looked as if the day had
+already made itself felt, and the process of catching up with it began
+for Maisie in hearing her distinctly say: "My poor dear, he has come!"
+
+"Sir Claude?" Maisie, clearing the little bed-rug with the width of her
+spring, felt the polished floor under her bare feet.
+
+"He crossed in the night; he got in early." Mrs. Wix's head jerked
+stiffly backward. "He's there."
+
+"And you've seen him?"
+
+"No. He's there--he's there," Mrs. Wix repeated. Her voice came out with
+a queer extinction that was not a voluntary drop, and she trembled so
+that it added to their common emotion. Visibly pale, they gazed at each
+other.
+
+"Isn't it too BEAUTIFUL?" Maisie panted back at her; a challenge with an
+answer to which, however, she was not ready at once. The term Maisie had
+used was a flash of diplomacy--to prevent at any rate Mrs. Wix's using
+another. To that degree it was successful; there was only an appeal,
+strange and mute, in the white old face, which produced the effect of
+a want of decision greater than could by any stretch of optimism have
+been associated with her attitude toward what had happened. For Maisie
+herself indeed what had happened was oddly, as she could feel, less of a
+simple rapture than any arrival or return of the same supreme friend had
+ever been before. What had become overnight, what had become while she
+slept, of the comfortable faculty of gladness? She tried to wake it up a
+little wider by talking, by rejoicing, by plunging into water and into
+clothes, and she made out that it was ten o'clock, but also that Mrs.
+Wix had not yet breakfasted. The day before, at nine, they had had
+together a _cafe complet_ in their sitting-room. Mrs. Wix on her side
+had evidently also a refuge to seek. She sought it in checking the
+precipitation of some of her pupil's present steps, in recalling to her
+with an approach to sternness that of such preliminaries those embodied
+in a thorough use of soap should be the most thorough, and in throwing
+even a certain reprobation on the idea of hurrying into clothes for
+the sake of a mere stepfather. She took her in hand with a silent
+insistence; she reduced the process to sequences more definite than any
+it had known since the days of Moddle. Whatever it might be that had
+now, with a difference, begun to belong to Sir Claude's presence was
+still after all compatible, for our young lady, with the instinct of
+dressing to see him with almost untidy haste. Mrs. Wix meanwhile luckily
+was not wholly directed to repression. "He's there--he's there!" she
+had said over several times. It was her answer to every invitation
+to mention how long she had been up and her motive for respecting so
+rigidly the slumber of her companion. It formed for some minutes her
+only account of the whereabouts of the others and her reason for not
+having yet seen them, as well as of the possibility of their presently
+being found in the salon.
+
+"He's there--he's there!" she declared once more as she made, on the
+child, with an almost invidious tug, a strained undergarment "meet."
+
+"Do you mean he's in the salon?" Maisie asked again.
+
+"He's WITH her," Mrs. Wix desolately said. "He's with her," she
+reiterated.
+
+"Do you mean in her own room?" Maisie continued.
+
+She waited an instant. "God knows!"
+
+Maisie wondered a little why, or how, God should know; this, however,
+delayed but an instant her bringing out: "Well, won't she go back?"
+
+"Go back? Never!"
+
+"She'll stay all the same?"
+
+"All the more."
+
+"Then won't Sir Claude go?" Maisie asked.
+
+"Go back--if SHE doesn't?" Mrs. Wix appeared to give this question the
+benefit of a minute's thought. "Why should he have come--only to go
+back?"
+
+Maisie produced an ingenious solution. "To MAKE her go. To take her."
+
+Mrs. Wix met it without a concession. "If he can make her go so easily,
+why should he have let her come?"
+
+Maisie considered. "Oh just to see ME. She has a right."
+
+"Yes--she has a right."
+
+"She's my mother!" Maisie tentatively tittered.
+
+"Yes--she's your mother."
+
+"Besides," Maisie went on, "he didn't let her come. He doesn't like her
+coming, and if he doesn't like it--"
+
+Mrs. Wix took her up. "He must lump it--that's what he must do! Your
+mother was right about him--I mean your real one. He has no strength.
+No--none at all." She seemed more profoundly to muse. "He might have
+had some even with HER--I mean with her ladyship. He's just a poor sunk
+slave," she asserted with sudden energy.
+
+Maisie wondered again. "A slave?"
+
+"To his passions."
+
+She continued to wonder and even to be impressed; after which she went
+on: "But how do you know he'll stay?"
+
+"Because he likes us!"--and Mrs. Wix, with her emphasis of the word,
+whirled her charge round again to deal with posterior hooks. She had
+positively never shaken her so.
+
+It was as if she quite shook something out of her. "But how will that
+help him if we--in spite of his liking!--don't stay?"
+
+"Do you mean if we go off and leave him with her?--" Mrs. Wix put the
+question to the back of her pupil's head. "It WON'T help him. It will be
+his ruin. He'll have got nothing. He'll have lost everything. It will be
+his utter destruction, for he's certain after a while to loathe her."
+
+"Then when he loathes her"--it was astonishing how she caught the
+idea--"he'll just come right after us!" Maisie announced.
+
+"Never."
+
+"Never?"
+
+"She'll keep him. She'll hold him for ever."
+
+Maisie doubted. "When he 'loathes' her?"
+
+"That won't matter. She won't loathe HIM. People don't!" Mrs. Wix
+brought up.
+
+"Some do. Mamma does," Maisie contended.
+
+"Mamma does NOT!" It was startling--her friend contradicted her flat.
+"She loves him--she adores him. A woman knows." Mrs. Wix spoke not only
+as if Maisie were not a woman, but as if she would never be one. "_I_
+know!" she cried.
+
+"Then why on earth has she left him?"
+
+Mrs. Wix hesitated. "He hates HER. Don't stoop so--lift up your hair.
+You know how I'm affected toward him," she added with dignity; "but
+you must also know that I see clear."
+
+Maisie all this time was trying hard to do likewise. "Then if she has
+left him for that why shouldn't Mrs. Beale leave him?"
+
+"Because she's not such a fool!"
+
+"Not such a fool as mamma?"
+
+"Precisely--if you WILL have it. Does it look like her leaving him?"
+Mrs. Wix enquired. She brooded again; then she went on with more
+intensity: "Do you want to know really and truly why? So that she may
+be his wretchedness and his punishment."
+
+"His punishment?"--this was more than as yet Maisie could quite accept.
+"For what?"
+
+"For everything. That's what will happen: he'll be tied to her for ever.
+She won't mind in the least his hating her, and she won't hate him back.
+She'll only hate US."
+
+"Us?" the child faintly echoed.
+
+"She'll hate YOU."
+
+"Me? Why, I brought them together!" Maisie resentfully cried.
+
+"You brought them together." There was a completeness in Mrs. Wix's
+assent. "Yes; it was a pretty job. Sit down." She began to brush her
+pupil's hair and, as she took up the mass of it with some force of
+hand, went on with a sharp recall: "Your mother adored him at first--it
+might have lasted. But he began too soon with Mrs. Beale. As you say,"
+she pursued with a brisk application of the brush, "you brought them
+together."
+
+"I brought them together"--Maisie was ready to reaffirm it. She felt
+none the less for a moment at the bottom of a hole; then she seemed to
+see a way out. "But I didn't bring mamma together--" She just faltered.
+
+"With all those gentlemen?"--Mrs. Wix pulled her up. "No; it isn't quite
+so bad as that."
+
+"I only said to the Captain"--Maisie had the quick memory of it--"that
+I hoped he at least (he was awfully nice!) would love her and keep her."
+
+"And even that wasn't much harm," threw in Mrs. Wix.
+
+"It wasn't much good," Maisie was obliged to recognise. "She can't bear
+him--not even a mite. She told me at Folkestone."
+
+Mrs. Wix suppressed a gasp; then after a bridling instant during
+which she might have appeared to deflect with difficulty from her odd
+consideration of Ida's wrongs: "He was a nice sort of person for her to
+talk to you about!"
+
+"Oh I LIKE him!" Maisie promptly rejoined; and at this, with an
+inarticulate sound and an inconsequence still more marked, her companion
+bent over and dealt her on the cheek a rapid peck which had the apparent
+intention of a kiss.
+
+"Well, if her ladyship doesn't agree with you, what does it only prove?"
+Mrs. Wix demanded in conclusion. "It proves that she's fond of Sir
+Claude!"
+
+Maisie, in the light of some of the evidence, reflected on that till her
+hair was finished, but when she at last started up she gave a sign of no
+very close embrace of it. She grasped at this moment Mrs. Wix's arm. "He
+must have got his divorce!"
+
+"Since day before yesterday? Don't talk trash."
+
+This was spoken with an impatience which left the child nothing to
+reply; whereupon she sought her defence in a completely different
+relation to the fact. "Well, I knew he would come!"
+
+"So did I; but not in twenty-four hours. I gave him a few days!" Mrs.
+Wix wailed.
+
+Maisie, whom she had now released, looked at her with interest. "How
+many did SHE give him?"
+
+Mrs. Wix faced her a moment; then as if with a bewildered sniff: "You
+had better ask her!" But she had no sooner uttered the words than she
+caught herself up. "Lord o' mercy, how we talk!"
+
+Maisie felt that however they talked she must see him, but she said
+nothing more for a time, a time during which she conscientiously
+finished dressing and Mrs. Wix also kept silence. It was as if they each
+had almost too much to think of, and even as if the child had the sense
+that her friend was watching her and seeing if she herself were watched.
+At last Mrs. Wix turned to the window and stood--sightlessly, as Maisie
+could guess--looking away. Then our young lady, before the glass, gave
+the supreme shake. "Well, I'm ready. And now to SEE him!"
+
+Mrs. Wix turned round, but as if without having heard her. "It's
+tremendously grave." There were slow still tears behind the
+straighteners.
+
+"It is--it is." Maisie spoke as if she were now dressed quite up to the
+occasion; as if indeed with the last touch she had put on the
+judgement-cap. "I must see him immediately."
+
+"How can you see him if he doesn't send for you?"
+
+"Why can't I go and find him?"
+
+"Because you don't know where he is."
+
+"Can't I just look in the salon?" That still seemed simple to Maisie.
+
+Mrs. Wix, however, instantly cut it off. "I wouldn't have you look in
+the salon for all the world!" Then she explained a little: "The salon
+isn't ours now."
+
+"Ours?"
+
+"Yours and mine. It's theirs."
+
+"Theirs?" Maisie, with her stare, continued to echo. "You mean they want
+to keep us out?"
+
+Mrs. Wix faltered; she sank into a chair and, as Maisie had often enough
+seen her do before, covered her face with her hands. "They ought to, at
+least. The situation's too monstrous!"
+
+Maisie stood there a moment--she looked about the room. "I'll go to
+him--I'll find him."
+
+"_I_ won't! I won't go NEAR them!" cried Mrs. Wix.
+
+"Then I'll see him alone." The child spied what she had been looking
+for--she possessed herself of her hat. "Perhaps I'll take him out!" And
+with decision she quitted the room.
+
+When she entered the salon it was empty, but at the sound of the opened
+door some one stirred on the balcony, and Sir Claude, stepping straight
+in, stood before her. He was in light fresh clothes and wore a straw hat
+with a bright ribbon; these things, besides striking her in themselves
+as the very promise of the grandest of grand tours, gave him a certain
+radiance and, as it were, a tropical ease; but such an effect only
+marked rather more his having stopped short and, for a longer minute
+than had ever at such a juncture elapsed, not opened his arms to her.
+His pause made her pause and enabled her to reflect that he must have
+been up some time, for there were no traces of breakfast; and that
+though it was so late he had rather markedly not caused her to be called
+to him. Had Mrs. Wix been right about their forfeiture of the salon? Was
+it all his now, all his and Mrs. Beale's? Such an idea, at the rate her
+small thoughts throbbed, could only remind her of the way in which what
+had been hers hitherto was what was exactly most Mrs. Beale's and his.
+It was strange to be standing there and greeting him across a gulf,
+for he had by this time spoken, smiled and said: "My dear child, my
+dear child!" but without coming any nearer. In a flash she saw he was
+different--more so than he knew or designed. The next minute indeed it
+was as if he caught an impression from her face: this made him hold out
+his hand. Then they met, he kissed her, he laughed, she thought he even
+blushed: something of his affection rang out as usual. "Here I am, you
+see, again--as I promised you."
+
+It was not as he had promised them--he had not promised them Mrs. Beale;
+but Maisie said nothing about that. What she said was simply: "I knew
+you had come. Mrs. Wix told me."
+
+"Oh yes. And where is she?"
+
+"In her room. She got me up--she dressed me."
+
+Sir Claude looked at her up and down; a sweetness of mockery that she
+particularly loved came out in his face whenever he did that, and it
+was not wanting now. He raised his eyebrows and his arms to play at
+admiration; he was evidently after all disposed to be gay. "Got you
+up?--I should think so! She has dressed you most beautifully. Isn't she
+coming?"
+
+Maisie wondered if she had better tell. "She said not."
+
+"Doesn't she want to see a poor devil?"
+
+She looked about under the vibration of the way he described himself,
+and her eyes rested on the door of the room he had previously occupied.
+"Is Mrs. Beale in there?"
+
+Sir Claude looked blankly at the same object. "I haven't the least
+idea!"
+
+"You haven't seen her?"
+
+"Not the tip of her nose."
+
+Maisie thought: there settled on her, in the light of his beautiful
+smiling eyes, the faintest purest coldest conviction that he wasn't
+telling the truth. "She hasn't welcomed you?"
+
+"Not by a single sign."
+
+"Then where is she?"
+
+Sir Claude laughed; he seemed both amused and surprised at the point
+she made of it. "I give it up!"
+
+"Doesn't she know you've come?"
+
+He laughed again. "Perhaps she doesn't care!"
+
+Maisie, with an inspiration, pounced on his arm. "Has she GONE?"
+
+He met her eyes and then she could see that his own were really much
+graver than his manner. "Gone?" She had flown to the door, but before
+she could raise her hand to knock he was beside her and had caught it.
+"Let her be. I don't care about her. I want to see YOU."
+
+"Then she HASN'T gone?"
+
+Maisie fell back with him. He still looked as if it were a joke, but the
+more she saw of him the more she could make out that he was troubled.
+"It wouldn't be like her!"
+
+She stood wondering at him. "Did you want her to come?"
+
+"How can you suppose--?" He put it to her candidly. "We had an immense
+row over it."
+
+"Do you mean you've quarrelled?"
+
+Sir Claude was at a loss. "What has she told you?"
+
+"That I'm hers as much as yours. That she represents papa."
+
+His gaze struck away through the open window and up to the sky; she
+could hear him rattle in his trousers-pockets his money or his keys.
+"Yes--that's what she keeps saying." It gave him for a moment an air
+that was almost helpless.
+
+"You say you don't care about her," Maisie went on. "DO you mean you've
+quarrelled?"
+
+"We do nothing in life but quarrel."
+
+He rose before her, as he said this, so soft and fair, so rich, in spite
+of what might worry him, in restored familiarities, that it gave a
+bright blur to the meaning--to what would otherwise perhaps have been
+the palpable promise--of the words.
+
+"Oh YOUR quarrels!" she exclaimed with discouragement.
+
+"I assure you hers are quite fearful!"
+
+"I don't speak of hers. I speak of yours."
+
+"Ah don't do it till I've had my coffee! You're growing up clever," he
+added. Then he said: "I suppose you've breakfasted?"
+
+"Oh no--I've had nothing."
+
+"Nothing in your room?"--he was all compunction. "My dear old
+man!--we'll breakfast then together." He had one of his happy thoughts.
+"I say--we'll go out."
+
+"That was just what I hoped. I've brought my hat."
+
+"You ARE clever! We'll go to a cafe." Maisie was already at the door; he
+glanced round the room. "A moment--my stick." But there appeared to be
+no stick. "No matter; I left it--oh!" He remembered with an odd drop and
+came out.
+
+"You left it in London?" she asked as they went downstairs.
+
+"Yes--in London: fancy!"
+
+"You were in such a hurry to come," Maisie explained.
+
+He had his arm round her. "That must have been the reason."
+
+Halfway down he stopped short again, slapping his leg. "And poor Mrs.
+Wix?"
+
+Maisie's face just showed a shadow. "Do you want her to come?"
+
+"Dear no--I want to see you alone."
+
+"That's the way I want to see YOU!" she replied. "Like before."
+
+"Like before!" he gaily echoed. "But I mean has she had her coffee?"
+
+"No, nothing."
+
+"Then I'll send it up to her. Madame!" He had already, at the foot of
+the stair, called out to the stout _patronne_, a lady who turned to
+him from the bustling, breezy hall a countenance covered with fresh
+matutinal powder and a bosom as capacious as the velvet shelf of a
+chimneypiece, over which her round white face, framed in its golden
+frizzle, might have figured as a showy clock. He ordered, with
+particular recommendations, Mrs. Wix's repast, and it was a charm to
+hear his easy brilliant French: even his companion's ignorance could
+measure the perfection of it. The _patronne_, rubbing her hands and
+breaking in with high swift notes as into a florid duet, went with him
+to the street, and while they talked a moment longer Maisie remembered
+what Mrs. Wix had said about every one's liking him. It came out enough
+through the morning powder, it came out enough in the heaving bosom, how
+the landlady liked him. He had evidently ordered something lovely for
+Mrs. Wix. _"Et bien soigne, n'est-ce-pas?"_
+
+_"Soyez tranquille"_--the patronne beamed upon him. _"Et pour Madame?"_
+
+_"Madame?"_ he echoed--it just pulled him up a little.
+
+_"Rien encore?"_
+
+"_Rien encore._ Come, Maisie." She hurried along with him, but on the way
+to the cafe he said nothing.
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+
+After they were seated there it was different: the place was not below
+the hotel, but further along the quay; with wide, clear windows and a
+floor sprinkled with bran in a manner that gave it for Maisie something
+of the added charm of a circus. They had pretty much to themselves the
+painted spaces and the red plush benches; these were shared by a few
+scattered gentlemen who picked teeth, with facial contortions, behind
+little bare tables, and by an old personage in particular, a very old
+personage with a red ribbon in his buttonhole, whose manner of soaking
+buttered rolls in coffee and then disposing of them in the little that
+was left of the interval between his nose and chin might at a less
+anxious hour have cast upon Maisie an almost envious spell. They too
+had their _cafe au lait_ and their buttered rolls, determined by Sir
+Claude's asking her if she could with that light aid wait till the hour
+of dejeuner. His allusion to this meal gave her, in the shaded sprinkled
+coolness, the scene, as she vaguely felt, of a sort of ordered mirrored
+licence, the haunt of those--the irregular, like herself--who went to
+bed or who rose too late, something to think over while she watched
+the white-aproned waiter perform as nimbly with plates and saucers as
+a certain conjurer her friend had in London taken her to a music-hall
+to see. Sir Claude had presently begun to talk again, to tell her how
+London had looked and how long he had felt himself, on either side, to
+have been absent; all about Susan Ash too and the amusement as well as
+the difficulty he had had with her; then all about his return journey
+and the Channel in the night and the crowd of people coming over and
+the way there were always too many one knew. He spoke of other matters
+beside, especially of what she must tell him of the occupations, while
+he was away, of Mrs. Wix and her pupil. Hadn't they had the good time he
+had promised?--had he exaggerated a bit the arrangements made for their
+pleasure? Maisie had something--not all there was--to say of his success
+and of their gratitude: she had a complication of thought that grew
+every minute, grew with the consciousness that she had never seen him in
+this particular state in which he had been given back.
+
+Mrs. Wix had once said--it was once or fifty times; once was enough for
+Maisie, but more was not too much--that he was wonderfully various.
+Well, he was certainly so, to the child's mind, on the present occasion:
+he was much more various than he was anything else. Besides, the fact
+that they were together in a shop, at a nice little intimate table as
+they had so often been in London, only made greater the difference of
+what they were together about. This difference was in his face, in his
+voice, in every look he gave her and every movement he made. They were
+not the looks and the movements he really wanted to show, and she could
+feel as well that they were not those she herself wanted. She had
+seen him nervous, she had seen every one she had come in contact with
+nervous, but she had never seen him so nervous as this. Little by little
+it gave her a settled terror, a terror that partook of the coldness she
+had felt just before, at the hotel, to find herself, on his answer about
+Mrs. Beale, disbelieve him. She seemed to see at present, to touch
+across the table, as if by laying her hand on it, what he had meant when
+he confessed on those several occasions to fear. Why was such a man so
+often afraid? It must have begun to come to her now that there was one
+thing just such a man above all could be afraid of. He could be afraid
+of himself. His fear at all events was there; his fear was sweet to her,
+beautiful and tender to her, was having coffee and buttered rolls and
+talk and laughter that were no talk and laughter at all with her; his
+fear was in his jesting postponing perverting voice; it was just in
+this make-believe way he had brought her out to imitate the old London
+playtimes, to imitate indeed a relation that had wholly changed, a
+relation that she had with her very eyes seen in the act of change when,
+the day before in the salon, Mrs. Beale rose suddenly before her. She
+rose before her, for that matter, now, and even while their refreshment
+delayed Maisie arrived at the straight question for which, on their
+entrance, his first word had given opportunity. "Are we going to have
+dejeuner with Mrs. Beale?"
+
+His reply was anything but straight. "You and I?"
+
+Maisie sat back in her chair. "Mrs. Wix and me."
+
+Sir Claude also shifted. "That's an enquiry, my dear child, that Mrs.
+Beale herself must answer." Yes, he had shifted; but abruptly, after a
+moment during which something seemed to hang there between them and, as
+it heavily swayed, just fan them with the air of its motion, she felt
+that the whole thing was upon them. "Do you mind," he broke out, "my
+asking you what Mrs. Wix has said to you?"
+
+"Said to me?"
+
+"This day or two--while I was away."
+
+"Do you mean about you and Mrs. Beale?"
+
+Sir Claude, resting on his elbows, fixed his eyes a moment on the white
+marble beneath them. "No; I think we had a good deal of that--didn't
+we?--before I left you. It seems to me we had it pretty well all out. I
+mean about yourself, about your--don't you know?--associating with us,
+as I might say, and staying on with us. While you were alone with our
+friend what did she say?"
+
+Maisie felt the weight of the question; it kept her silent for a space
+during which she looked at Sir Claude, whose eyes remained bent.
+"Nothing," she returned at last.
+
+He showed incredulity. "Nothing?"
+
+"Nothing," Maisie repeated; on which an interruption descended in the
+form of a tray bearing the preparations for their breakfast. These
+preparations were as amusing as everything else; the waiter poured their
+coffee from a vessel like a watering-pot and then made it froth with the
+curved stream of hot milk that dropped from the height of his raised
+arm; but the two looked across at each other through the whole play of
+French pleasantness with a gravity that had now ceased to dissemble.
+Sir Claude sent the waiter off again for something and then took up her
+answer. "Hasn't she tried to affect you?"
+
+Face to face with him thus it seemed to Maisie that she had tried so
+little as to be scarce worth mentioning; again therefore an instant she
+shut herself up. Presently she found her middle course. "Mrs. Beale
+likes her now; and there's one thing I've found out--a great thing.
+Mrs. Wix enjoys her being so kind. She was tremendously kind all day
+yesterday."
+
+"I see. And what did she do?" Sir Claude asked.
+
+Maisie was now busy with her breakfast, and her companion attacked his
+own; so that it was all, in form at least, even more than their old
+sociability. "Everything she could think of. She was as nice to her as
+you are," the child said. "She talked to her all day."
+
+"And what did she say to her?"
+
+"Oh I don't know." Maisie was a little bewildered with his pressing her
+so for knowledge; it didn't fit into the degree of intimacy with Mrs.
+Beale that Mrs. Wix had so denounced and that, according to that lady,
+had now brought him back in bondage. Wasn't he more aware than his
+stepdaughter of what would be done by the person to whom he was bound?
+In a moment, however, she added: "She made love to her."
+
+Sir Claude looked at her harder, and it was clearly something in her
+tone that made him quickly say: "You don't mind my asking you, do you?"
+
+"Not at all; only I should think you'd know better than I."
+
+"What Mrs. Beale did yesterday?"
+
+She thought he coloured a trifle; but almost simultaneously with that
+impression she found herself answering: "Yes--if you have seen her."
+
+He broke into the loudest of laughs. "Why, my dear boy, I told you just
+now I've absolutely not. I say, don't you believe me?"
+
+There was something she was already so afraid of that it covered up
+other fears. "Didn't you come back to see her?" she enquired in a
+moment. "Didn't you come back because you always want to so much?"
+
+He received her enquiry as he had received her doubt--with an
+extraordinary absence of resentment. "I can imagine of course why you
+think that. But it doesn't explain my doing what I have. It was, as I
+said to you just now at the inn, really and truly you I wanted to see."
+
+She felt an instant as she used to feel when, in the back garden at her
+mother's, she took from him the highest push of a swing--high, high,
+high--that he had had put there for her pleasure and that had finally
+broken down under the weight and the extravagant patronage of the cook.
+"Well, that's beautiful. But to see me, you mean, and go away again?"
+
+"My going away again is just the point. I can't tell yet--it all
+depends."
+
+"On Mrs. Beale?" Maisie asked. "SHE won't go away." He finished emptying
+his coffee-cup and then, when he had put it down, leaned back in his
+chair, where she could see that he smiled on her. This only added to her
+idea that he was in trouble, that he was turning somehow in his pain and
+trying different things. He continued to smile and she went on: "Don't
+you know that?"
+
+"Yes, I may as well confess to you that as much as that I do know. SHE
+won't go away. She'll stay."
+
+"She'll stay. She'll stay," Maisie repeated.
+
+"Just so. Won't you have some more coffee?"
+
+"Yes, please."
+
+"And another buttered roll?"
+
+"Yes, please."
+
+He signed to the hovering waiter, who arrived with the shining spout of
+plenty in either hand and with the friendliest interest in mademoiselle.
+_"Les tartines sont la."_ Their cups were replenished and, while he
+watched almost musingly the bubbles in the fragrant mixture, "Just
+so--just so," Sir Claude said again and again. "It's awfully awkward!"
+he exclaimed when the waiter had gone.
+
+"That she won't go?"
+
+"Well--everything! Well, well, well!" But he pulled himself together;
+he began again to eat. "I came back to ask you something. That's what
+I came back for."
+
+"I know what you want to ask me," Maisie said.
+
+"Are you very sure?"
+
+"I'm ALMOST very."
+
+"Well then risk it. You mustn't make ME risk everything."
+
+She was struck with the force of this. "You want to know if I should be
+happy with THEM."
+
+"With those two ladies only? No, no, old man: _vous n'y etes pas_. So
+now--there!" Sir Claude laughed.
+
+"Well then what is it?"
+
+The next minute, instead of telling her what it was, he laid his hand
+across the table on her own and held her as if under the prompting of a
+thought. "Mrs. Wix would stay with HER?"
+
+"Without you? Oh yes--now."
+
+"On account, as you just intimated, of Mrs. Beale's changed manner?"
+
+Maisie, with her sense of responsibility, weighed both Mrs. Beale's
+changed manner and Mrs. Wix's human weakness. "I think she talked her
+round."
+
+Sir Claude thought a moment. "Ah poor dear!"
+
+"Do you mean Mrs. Beale?"
+
+"Oh no--Mrs. Wix."
+
+"She likes being talked round--treated like any one else. Oh she likes
+great politeness," Maisie expatiated. "It affects her very much."
+
+Sir Claude, to her surprise, demurred a little to this. "Very much--up
+to a certain point."
+
+"Oh up to any point!" Maisie returned with emphasis.
+
+"Well, haven't I been polite to her?"
+
+"Lovely--and she perfectly worships you."
+
+"Then, my dear child, why can't she let me alone?"--this time Sir
+Claude unmistakeably blushed. Before Maisie, however, could answer his
+question, which would indeed have taken her long, he went on in another
+tone: "Mrs. Beale thinks she has probably quite broken her down. But she
+hasn't."
+
+Though he spoke as if he were sure, Maisie was strong in the impression
+she had just uttered and that she now again produced. "She has talked
+her round."
+
+"Ah yes; round to herself, but not round to me."
+
+Oh she couldn't bear to hear him say that! "To you? Don't you really
+believe how she loves you?"
+
+Sir Claude examined his belief. "Of course I know she's wonderful."
+
+"She's just every bit as fond of you as _I_ am," said Maisie. "She told
+me so yesterday."
+
+"Ah then," he promptly exclaimed, "she HAS tried to affect you! I don't
+love HER, don't you see? I do her perfect justice," he pursued, "but I
+mean I don't love her as I do you, and I'm sure you wouldn't seriously
+expect it. She's not my daughter--come, old chap! She's not even my
+mother, though I dare say it would have been better for me if she had
+been. I'll do for her what I'd do for my mother, but I won't do more."
+His real excitement broke out in a need to explain and justify himself,
+though he kept trying to correct and conceal it with laughs and
+mouthfuls and other vain familiarities. Suddenly he broke off, wiping
+his moustache with sharp pulls and coming back to Mrs. Beale. "Did she
+try to talk YOU over?"
+
+"No--to me she said very little. Very little indeed," Maisie continued.
+
+Sir Claude seemed struck with this. "She was only sweet to Mrs. Wix?"
+
+"As sweet as sugar!" cried Maisie.
+
+He looked amused at her comparison, but he didn't contest it; he uttered
+on the contrary, in an assenting way, a little inarticulate sound. "I
+know what she CAN be. But much good may it have done her! Mrs. Wix won't
+COME 'round.' That's what makes it so fearfully awkward."
+
+Maisie knew it was fearfully awkward; she had known this now, she felt,
+for some time, and there was something else it more pressingly concerned
+her to learn. "What is it you meant you came over to ask me?"
+
+"Well," said Sir Claude, "I was just going to say. Let me tell you it
+will surprise you." She had finished breakfast now and she sat back in
+her chair again: she waited in silence to hear. He had pushed the things
+before him a little way and had his elbows on the table. This time, she
+was convinced, she knew what was coming, and once more, for the crash,
+as with Mrs. Wix lately in her room, she held her breath and drew
+together her eyelids. He was going to say she must give him up. He
+looked hard at her again; then he made his effort. "Should you see your
+way to let her go?"
+
+She was bewildered. "To let who--?"
+
+"Mrs. Wix simply. I put it at the worst. Should you see your way to
+sacrifice her? Of course I know what I'm asking."
+
+Maisie's eyes opened wide again; this was so different from what she had
+expected. "And stay with you alone?"
+
+He gave another push to his coffee-cup. "With me and Mrs. Beale. Of
+course it would be rather rum; but everything in our whole story is
+rather rum, you know. What's more unusual than for any one to be given
+up, like you, by her parents?"
+
+"Oh nothing is more unusual than THAT!" Maisie concurred, relieved at
+the contact of a proposition as to which concurrence could have
+lucidity.
+
+"Of course it would be quite unconventional," Sir Claude went on--"I
+mean the little household we three should make together; but things have
+got beyond that, don't you see? They got beyond that long ago. We shall
+stay abroad at any rate--it's ever so much easier and it's our affair
+and nobody else's: it's no one's business but ours on all the blessed
+earth. I don't say that for Mrs. Wix, poor dear--I do her absolute
+justice. I respect her; I see what she means; she has done me a lot of
+good. But there are the facts. There they are, simply. And here am I,
+and here are you. And she won't come round. She's right from her point
+of view. I'm talking to you in the most extraordinary way--I'm always
+talking to you in the most extraordinary way, ain't I? One would think
+you were about sixty and that I--I don't know what any one would think
+_I_ am. Unless a beastly cad!" he suggested. "I've been awfully worried,
+and this's what it has come to. You've done us the most tremendous good,
+and you'll do it still and always, don't you see? We can't let you
+go--you're everything. There are the facts as I say. She IS your mother
+now, Mrs. Beale, by what has happened, and I, in the same way, I'm your
+father. No one can contradict that, and we can't get out of it. My idea
+would be a nice little place--somewhere in the South--where she and you
+would be together and as good as any one else. And I should be as good
+too, don't you see? for I shouldn't live with you, but I should be close
+to you--just round the corner, and it would be just the same. My idea
+would be that it should all be perfectly open and frank. _Honi soit qui
+mal y pense_, don't you know? You're the best thing--you and what we can
+do for you--that either of us has ever known," he came back to that.
+"When I say to her 'Give her up, come,' she lets me have it bang in the
+face: 'Give her up yourself!' It's the same old vicious circle--and when
+I say vicious I don't mean a pun, a what-d'-ye-call-'em. Mrs. Wix is the
+obstacle; I mean, you know, if she has affected you. She has affected
+ME, and yet here I am. I never was in such a tight place: please believe
+it's only that that makes me put it to you as I do. My dear child, isn't
+that--to put it so--just the way out of it? That came to me yesterday,
+in London, after Mrs. Beale had gone: I had the most infernal atrocious
+day. 'Go straight over and put it to her: let her choose, freely, her
+own self.' So I do, old girl--I put it to you. CAN you choose freely?"
+
+This long address, slowly and brokenly uttered, with fidgets and
+falterings, with lapses and recoveries, with a mottled face and
+embarrassed but supplicating eyes, reached the child from a quarter
+so close that after the shock of the first sharpness she could see
+intensely its direction and follow it from point to point; all the more
+that it came back to the point at which it had started. There was a word
+that had hummed all through it. "Do you call it a 'sacrifice'?"
+
+"Of Mrs. Wix? I'll call it whatever YOU call it. I won't funk it--I
+haven't, have I? I'll face it in all its baseness. Does it strike you it
+IS base for me to get you well away from her, to smuggle you off here
+into a corner and bribe you with sophistries and buttered rolls to
+betray her?"
+
+"To betray her?"
+
+"Well--to part with her."
+
+Maisie let the question wait; the concrete image it presented was the
+most vivid side of it. "If I part with her where will she go?"
+
+"Back to London."
+
+"But I mean what will she do?"
+
+"Oh as for that I won't pretend I know. I don't. We all have our
+difficulties."
+
+That, to Maisie, was at this moment more striking than it had ever been.
+"Then who'll teach me?"
+
+Sir Claude laughed out. "What Mrs. Wix teaches?"
+
+She smiled dimly; she saw what he meant. "It isn't so very very much."
+
+"It's so very very little," he returned, "that that's a thing we've
+positively to consider. We probably shouldn't give you another
+governess. To begin with we shouldn't be able to get one--not of the
+only kind that would do. It wouldn't do--the kind that WOULD do," he
+queerly enough explained. "I mean they wouldn't stay--heigh-ho! We'd
+do you ourselves. Particularly me. You see I CAN now; I haven't got to
+mind--what I used to. I won't fight shy as I did--she can show out WITH
+me. Our relation, all round, is more regular."
+
+It seemed wonderfully regular, the way he put it; yet none the less,
+while she looked at it as judiciously as she could, the picture it made
+persisted somehow in being a combination quite distinct--an old woman
+and a little girl seated in deep silence on a battered old bench by the
+rampart of the _haute ville_. It was just at that hour yesterday; they
+were hand in hand; they had melted together. "I don't think you yet
+understand how she clings to you," Maisie said at last.
+
+"I do--I do. But for all that--" And he gave, turning in his conscious
+exposure, an oppressed impatient sigh; the sigh, even his companion
+could recognise, of the man naturally accustomed to that argument, the
+man who wanted thoroughly to be reasonable, but who, if really he had to
+mind so many things, would be always impossibly hampered. What it came
+to indeed was that he understood quite perfectly. If Mrs. Wix clung it
+was all the more reason for shaking Mrs. Wix off.
+
+This vision of what she had brought him to occupied our young lady
+while, to ask what he owed, he called the waiter and put down a gold
+piece that the man carried off for change. Sir Claude looked after him,
+then went on: "How could a woman have less to reproach a fellow with? I
+mean as regards herself."
+
+Maisie entertained the question. "Yes. How COULD she have less? So why
+are you so sure she'll go?"
+
+"Surely you heard why--you heard her come out three nights ago? How can
+she do anything but go--after what she then said? I've done what she
+warned me of--she was absolutely right. So here we are. Her liking Mrs.
+Beale, as you call it now, is a motive sufficient, with other things,
+to make her, for your sake, stay on without me; it's not a motive
+sufficient to make her, even for yours, stay on WITH me--swallow, don't
+you see? what she can't swallow. And when you say she's as fond of me as
+you are I think I can, if that's the case, challenge you a little on it.
+Would YOU, only with those two, stay on without me?"
+
+The waiter came back with the change, and that gave her, under this
+appeal, a moment's respite. But when he had retreated again with the
+"tip" gathered in with graceful thanks on a subtle hint from Sir
+Claude's forefinger, the latter, while pocketing the money, followed
+the appeal up. "Would you let her make you live with Mrs. Beale?"
+
+"Without you? Never," Maisie then answered. "Never," she said again.
+
+It made him quite triumph, and she was indeed herself shaken by the mere
+sound of it. "So you see you're not, like her," he exclaimed, "so ready
+to give me away!" Then he came back to his original question. "CAN you
+choose? I mean can you settle it by a word yourself? Will you stay on
+with us without her?" Now in truth she felt the coldness of her terror,
+and it seemed to her that suddenly she knew, as she knew it about Sir
+Claude, what she was afraid of. She was afraid of herself. She looked at
+him in such a way that it brought, she could see, wonder into his face,
+a wonder held in check, however, by his frank pretension to play fair
+with her, not to use advantages, not to hurry nor hustle her--only to
+put her chance clearly and kindly before her. "May I think?" she finally
+asked.
+
+"Certainly, certainly. But how long?"
+
+"Oh only a little while," she said meekly.
+
+He had for a moment the air of wishing to look at it as if it were the
+most cheerful prospect in the world. "But what shall we do while you're
+thinking?" He spoke as if thought were compatible with almost any
+distraction.
+
+There was but one thing Maisie wished to do, and after an instant she
+expressed it. "Have we got to go back to the hotel?"
+
+"Do you want to?"
+
+"Oh no."
+
+"There's not the least necessity for it." He bent his eyes on his watch;
+his face was now very grave. "We can do anything else in the world." He
+looked at her again almost as if he were on the point of saying that
+they might for instance start off for Paris. But even while she wondered
+if that were not coming he had a sudden drop. "We can take a walk."
+
+She was all ready, but he sat there as if he had still something more to
+say. This too, however, didn't come; so she herself spoke. "I think I
+should like to see Mrs. Wix first."
+
+"Before you decide? All right--all right." He had put on his hat, but
+he had still to light a cigarette. He smoked a minute, with his head
+thrown back, looking at the ceiling; then he said: "There's one thing
+to remember--I've a right to impress it on you: we stand absolutely in
+the place of your parents. It's their defection, their extraordinary
+baseness, that has made our responsibility. Never was a young person
+more directly committed and confided." He appeared to say this over, at
+the ceiling, through his smoke, a little for his own illumination. It
+carried him after a pause somewhat further. "Though I admit it was to
+each of us separately."
+
+He gave her so at that moment and in that attitude the sense of wanting,
+as it were, to be on her side--on the side of what would be in every way
+most right and wise and charming for her--that she felt a sudden desire
+to prove herself not less delicate and magnanimous, not less solicitous
+for his own interests. What were these but that of the "regularity"
+he had just before spoken of? "It WAS to each of you separately," she
+accordingly with much earnestness remarked. "But don't you remember? I
+brought you together."
+
+He jumped up with a delighted laugh. "Remember? Rather! You brought us
+together, you brought us together. Come!"
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+
+She remained out with him for a time of which she could take no measure
+save that it was too short for what she wished to make of it--an
+interval, a barrier indefinite, insurmountable. They walked about, they
+dawdled, they looked in shop-windows; they did all the old things
+exactly as if to try to get back all the old safety, to get something
+out of them that they had always got before. This had come before,
+whatever it was, without their trying, and nothing came now but the
+intenser consciousness of their quest and their subterfuge. The
+strangest thing of all was what had really happened to the old safety.
+What had really happened was that Sir Claude was "free" and that Mrs.
+Beale was "free," and yet that the new medium was somehow still more
+oppressive than the old. She could feel that Sir Claude concurred with
+her in the sense that the oppression would be worst at the inn, where,
+till something should be settled, they would feel the want of
+something--of what could they call it but a footing? The question of the
+settlement loomed larger to her now: it depended, she had learned, so
+completely on herself. Her choice, as her friend had called it, was
+there before her like an impossible sum on a slate, a sum that in spite
+of her plea for consideration she simply got off from doing while she
+walked about with him. She must see Mrs. Wix before she could do her
+sum; therefore the longer before she saw her the more distant would be
+the ordeal. She met at present no demand whatever of her obligation; she
+simply plunged, to avoid it, deeper into the company of Sir Claude. She
+saw nothing that she had seen hitherto--no touch in the foreign picture
+that had at first been always before her. The only touch was that of Sir
+Claude's hand, and to feel her own in it was her mute resistance to
+time. She went about as sightlessly as if he had been leading her
+blindfold. If they were afraid of themselves it was themselves they
+would find at the inn. She was certain now that what awaited them there
+would be to lunch with Mrs. Beale. All her instinct was to avoid that,
+to draw out their walk, to find pretexts, to take him down upon the
+beach, to take him to the end of the pier. He said no other word to her
+about what they had talked of at breakfast, and she had a dim vision of
+how his way of not letting her see him definitely wait for anything from
+her would make any one who should know of it, would make Mrs. Wix for
+instance, think him more than ever a gentleman. It was true that once or
+twice, on the jetty, on the sands, he looked at her for a minute with
+eyes that seemed to propose to her to come straight off with him to
+Paris. That, however, was not to give her a nudge about her
+responsibility. He evidently wanted to procrastinate quite as much as
+she did; he was not a bit more in a hurry to get back to the others.
+Maisie herself at this moment could be secretly merciless to Mrs. Wix--
+to the extent at any rate of not caring if her continued disappearance
+did make that lady begin to worry about what had become of her, even
+begin to wonder perhaps if the truants hadn't found their remedy. Her
+want of mercy to Mrs. Beale indeed was at least as great; for Mrs.
+Beale's worry and wonder would be as much greater as the object at which
+they were directed. When at last Sir Claude, at the far end of the
+_plage_, which they had already, in the many-coloured crowd, once
+traversed, suddenly, with a look at his watch, remarked that it was
+time, not to get back to the _table d'hote_, but to get over to the
+station and meet the Paris papers--when he did this she found herself
+thinking quite with intensity what Mrs. Beale and Mrs. Wix WOULD say. On
+the way over to the station she had even a mental picture of the
+stepfather and the pupil established in a little place in the South
+while the governess and the stepmother, in a little place in the North,
+remained linked by a community of blankness and by the endless series of
+remarks it would give birth to. The Paris papers had come in and her
+companion, with a strange extravagance, purchased no fewer than eleven:
+it took up time while they hovered at the bookstall on the restless
+platform, where the little volumes in a row were all yellow and pink and
+one of her favourite old women in one of her favourite old caps
+absolutely wheedled him into the purchase of three. They had thus so
+much to carry home that it would have seemed simpler, with such a
+provision for a nice straight journey through France, just to "nip," as
+she phrased it to herself, into the coupe of the train that, a little
+further along, stood waiting to start. She asked Sir Claude where it was
+going.
+
+"To Paris. Fancy!"
+
+She could fancy well enough. They stood there and smiled, he with all
+the newspapers under his arm and she with the three books, one yellow
+and two pink. He had told her the pink were for herself and the yellow
+one for Mrs. Beale, implying in an interesting way that these were the
+natural divisions in France of literature for the young and for the old.
+She knew how prepared they looked to pass into the train, and she
+presently brought out to her companion: "I wish we could go. Won't you
+take me?"
+
+He continued to smile. "Would you really come?"
+
+"Oh yes, oh yes. Try."
+
+"Do you want me to take our tickets?"
+
+"Yes, take them."
+
+"Without any luggage?"
+
+She showed their two armfuls, smiling at him as he smiled at her, but so
+conscious of being more frightened than she had ever been in her life
+that she seemed to see her whiteness as in a glass. Then she knew that
+what she saw was Sir Claude's whiteness: he was as frightened as
+herself. "Haven't we got plenty of luggage?" she asked. "Take the
+tickets--haven't you time? When does the train go?"
+
+Sir Claude turned to a porter. "When does the train go?"
+
+The man looked up at the station-clock. "In two minutes. _Monsieur est
+place?_"
+
+_"Pas encore."_
+
+_"Et vos billets?--vous n'avez que le temps."_ Then after a look at
+Maisie, _"Monsieur veut-il que je les prenne?"_ the man said.
+
+Sir Claude turned back to her. _"Veux-tu lieu qu'il en prenne?"_
+
+It was the most extraordinary thing in the world: in the intensity of
+her excitement she not only by illumination understood all their French,
+but fell into it with an active perfection. She addressed herself
+straight to the porter. _"Prenny, prenny. Oh prenny!"_
+
+_"Ah si mademoiselle le veut--!"_ He waited there for the money.
+
+But Sir Claude only stared--stared at her with his white face. "You HAVE
+chosen then? You'll let her go?"
+
+Maisie carried her eyes wistfully to the train, where, amid cries of
+_"En voiture, en voiture!"_ heads were at windows and doors banging
+loud. The porter was pressing. _"Ah vous n'avez plus le temps!"_
+
+"It's going--it's going!" cried Maisie.
+
+They watched it move, they watched it start; then the man went his way
+with a shrug. "It's gone!" Sir Claude said.
+
+Maisie crept some distance up the platform; she stood there with her
+back to her companion, following it with her eyes, keeping down tears,
+nursing her pink and yellow books. She had had a real fright but had
+fallen back to earth. The odd thing was that in her fall her fear too
+had been dashed down and broken. It was gone. She looked round at last,
+from where she had paused, at Sir Claude's, and then saw that his
+wasn't. It sat there with him on the bench to which, against the wall of
+the station, he had retreated, and where, leaning back and, as she
+thought, rather queer, he still waited. She came down to him and he
+continued to offer his ineffectual intention of pleasantry. "Yes, I've
+chosen," she said to him. "I'll let her go if you--if you--"
+
+She faltered; he quickly took her up. "If I, if I--"
+
+"If you'll give up Mrs. Beale."
+
+"Oh!" he exclaimed; on which she saw how much, how hopelessly he was
+afraid. She had supposed at the cafe that it was of his rebellion, of
+his gathering motive; but how could that be when his temptations--that
+temptation for example of the train they had just lost--were after all
+so slight? Mrs. Wix was right. He was afraid of his weakness--of his
+weakness.
+
+She couldn't have told you afterwards how they got back to the inn: she
+could only have told you that even from this point they had not gone
+straight, but once more had wandered and loitered and, in the course of
+it, had found themselves on the edge of the quay where--still apparently
+with half an hour to spare--the boat prepared for Folkestone was drawn
+up. Here they hovered as they had done at the station; here they
+exchanged silences again, but only exchanged silences. There were
+punctual people on the deck, choosing places, taking the best; some of
+them already contented, all established and shawled, facing to England
+and attended by the steward, who, confined on such a day to the lighter
+offices, tucked up the ladies' feet or opened bottles with a pop. They
+looked down at these things without a word; they even picked out a good
+place for two that was left in the lee of a lifeboat; and if they
+lingered rather stupidly, neither deciding to go aboard nor deciding to
+come away, it was Sir Claude quite as much as she who wouldn't move. It
+was Sir Claude who cultivated the supreme stillness by which she knew
+best what he meant. He simply meant that he knew all she herself meant.
+But there was no pretence of pleasantry now: their faces were grave and
+tired. When at last they lounged off it was as if his fear, his fear of
+his weakness, leaned upon her heavily as they followed the harbour. In
+the hall of the hotel as they passed in she saw a battered old box that
+she recognised, an ancient receptacle with dangling labels that she knew
+and a big painted W, lately done over and intensely personal, that
+seemed to stare at her with a recognition and even with some suspicion
+of its own. Sir Claude caught it too, and there was agitation for both
+of them in the sight of this object on the move. Was Mrs. Wix going and
+was the responsibility of giving her up lifted, at a touch, from her
+pupil? Her pupil and her pupil's companion, transfixed a moment, held,
+in the presence of the omen, communication more intense than in the
+presence either of the Paris train or of the Channel steamer; then, and
+still without a word, they went straight upstairs. There, however, on
+the landing, out of sight of the people below, they collapsed so that
+they had to sink down together for support: they simply seated
+themselves on the uppermost step while Sir Claude grasped the hand of
+his stepdaughter with a pressure that at another moment would probably
+have made her squeal. Their books and papers were all scattered. "She
+thinks you've given her up!"
+
+"Then I must see her--I must see her," Maisie said.
+
+"To bid her good-bye?"
+
+"I must see her--I must see her," the child only repeated.
+
+They sat a minute longer, Sir Claude, with his tight grip of her hand
+and looking away from her, looking straight down the staircase to where,
+round the turn, electric bells rattled and the pleasant sea-draught
+blew. At last, loosening his grasp, he slowly got up while she did the
+same. They went together along the lobby, but before they reached the
+salon he stopped again. "If I give up Mrs. Beale--?"
+
+"I'll go straight out with you again and not come back till she has
+gone."
+
+He seemed to wonder. "Till Mrs. Beale--?" He had made it sound like a
+bad joke.
+
+"I mean till Mrs. Wix leaves--in that boat."
+
+Sir Claude looked almost foolish. "Is she going in that boat?"
+
+"I suppose so. I won't even bid her good-bye," Maisie continued. "I'll
+stay out till the boat has gone. I'll go up to the old rampart."
+
+"The old rampart?"
+
+"I'll sit on that old bench where you see the gold Virgin."
+
+"The gold Virgin?" he vaguely echoed. But it brought his eyes back to
+her as if after an instant he could see the place and the thing she
+named--could see her sitting there alone. "While I break with Mrs.
+Beale?"
+
+"While you break with Mrs. Beale."
+
+He gave a long deep smothered sigh. "I must see her first."
+
+"You won't do as I do? Go out and wait?"
+
+"Wait?"--once more he appeared at a loss.
+
+"Till they both have gone," Maisie said.
+
+"Giving US up?"
+
+"Giving US up."
+
+Oh with what a face for an instant he wondered if that could be! But his
+wonder the next moment only made him go to the door and, with his hand
+on the knob, stand as if listening for voices. Maisie listened, but she
+heard none. All she heard presently was Sir Claude's saying with
+speculation quite choked off, but so as not to be heard in the salon:
+"Mrs. Beale will never go." On this he pushed open the door and she went
+in with him. The salon was empty, but as an effect of their entrance the
+lady he had just mentioned appeared at the door of the bedroom. "Is she
+going?" he then demanded.
+
+Mrs. Beale came forward, closing her door behind her. "I've had the most
+extraordinary scene with her. She told me yesterday she'd stay."
+
+"And my arrival has altered it?"
+
+"Oh we took that into account!" Mrs. Beale was flushed, which was never
+quite becoming to her, and her face visibly testified to the encounter
+to which she alluded. Evidently, however, she had not been worsted, and
+she held up her head and smiled and rubbed her hands as if in sudden
+emulation of the _patronne_. "She promised she'd stay even if you should
+come."
+
+"Then why has she changed?"
+
+"Because she's a hound. The reason she herself gives is that you've been
+out too long."
+
+Sir Claude stared. "What has that to do with it?"
+
+"You've been out an age," Mrs. Beale continued; "I myself couldn't
+imagine what had become of you. The whole morning," she exclaimed, "and
+luncheon long since over!"
+
+Sir Claude appeared indifferent to that. "Did Mrs. Wix go down with
+you?" he only asked.
+
+"Not she; she never budged!"--and Mrs. Beale's flush, to Maisie's
+vision, deepened. "She moped there--she didn't so much as come out to
+me; and when I sent to invite her she simply declined to appear. She
+said she wanted nothing, and I went down alone. But when I came up,
+fortunately a little primed"--and Mrs. Beale smiled a fine smile of
+battle--"she WAS in the field!"
+
+"And you had a big row?"
+
+"We had a big row"--she assented with a frankness as large. "And while
+you left me to that sort of thing I should like to know where you were!"
+She paused for a reply, but Sir Claude merely looked at Maisie; a
+movement that promptly quickened her challenge. "Where the mischief have
+you been?"
+
+"You seem to take it as hard as Mrs. Wix," Sir Claude returned.
+
+"I take it as I choose to take it, and you don't answer my question."
+
+He looked again at Maisie--as if for an aid to this effort; whereupon
+she smiled at her stepmother and offered: "We've been everywhere."
+
+Mrs. Beale, however, made her no response, thereby adding to a surprise
+of which our young lady had already felt the light brush. She had
+received neither a greeting nor a glance, but perhaps this was not more
+remarkable than the omission, in respect to Sir Claude, parted with in
+London two days before, of any sign of a sense of their reunion. Most
+remarkable of all was Mrs. Beale's announcement of the pledge given by
+Mrs. Wix and not hitherto revealed to her pupil. Instead of heeding this
+witness she went on with acerbity: "It might surely have occurred to you
+that something would come up."
+
+Sir Claude looked at his watch. "I had no idea it was so late, nor that
+we had been out so long. We weren't hungry. It passed like a flash. What
+HAS come up?"
+
+"Oh that she's disgusted," said Mrs. Beale.
+
+"With whom then?"
+
+"With Maisie." Even now she never looked at the child, who stood there
+equally associated and disconnected. "For having no moral sense."
+
+"How SHOULD she have?" Sir Claude tried again to shine a little at the
+companion of his walk. "How at any rate is it proved by her going out
+with me?"
+
+"Don't ask ME; ask that woman. She drivels when she doesn't rage," Mrs.
+Beale declared.
+
+"And she leaves the child?"
+
+"She leaves the child," said Mrs. Beale with great emphasis and looking
+more than ever over Maisie's head.
+
+In this position suddenly a change came into her face, caused, as the
+others could the next thing see, by the reappearance of Mrs. Wix in the
+doorway which, on coming in at Sir Claude's heels, Maisie had left
+gaping. "I DON'T leave the child--I don't, I don't!" she thundered from
+the threshold, advancing upon the opposed three but addressing herself
+directly to Maisie. She was girded--positively harnessed--for departure,
+arrayed as she had been arrayed on her advent and armed with a small fat
+rusty reticule which, almost in the manner of a battle-axe, she
+brandished in support of her words. She had clearly come straight from
+her room, where Maisie in an instant guessed she had directed the
+removal of her minor effects. "I don't leave you till I've given you
+another chance. Will you come WITH me?"
+
+Maisie turned to Sir Claude, who struck her as having been removed to a
+distance of about a mile. To Mrs. Beale she turned no more than Mrs.
+Beale had turned: she felt as if already their difference had been
+disclosed. What had come out about that in the scene between the two
+women? Enough came out now, at all events, as she put it practically to
+her stepfather. "Will YOU come? Won't you?" she enquired as if she had
+not already seen that she should have to give him up. It was the last
+flare of her dream. By this time she was afraid of nothing.
+
+"I should think you'd be too proud to ask!" Mrs. Wix interposed. Mrs.
+Wix was herself conspicuously too proud.
+
+But at the child's words Mrs. Beale had fairly bounded. "Come away from
+ME, Maisie?" It was a wail of dismay and reproach, in which her
+stepdaughter was astonished to read that she had had no hostile
+consciousness and that if she had been so actively grand it was not from
+suspicion, but from strange entanglements of modesty.
+
+Sir Claude presented to Mrs. Beale an expression positively sick. "Don't
+put it to her THAT way!" There had indeed been something in Mrs. Beale's
+tone, and for a moment our young lady was reminded of the old days in
+which so many of her friends had been "compromised."
+
+This friend blushed; she was before Mrs. Wix, and though she bridled she
+took the hint. "No--it isn't the way." Then she showed she knew the way.
+"Don't be a still bigger fool, dear, but go straight to your room and
+wait there till I can come to you."
+
+Maisie made no motion to obey, but Mrs. Wix raised a hand that
+forestalled every evasion. "Don't move till you've heard me. I'M going,
+but I must first understand. Have you lost it again?"
+
+Maisie surveyed--for the idea of a describable loss--the immensity of
+space. Then she replied lamely enough: "I feel as if I had lost
+everything."
+
+Mrs. Wix looked dark. "Do you mean to say you HAVE lost what we found
+together with so much difficulty two days ago?" As her pupil failed of
+response she continued: "Do you mean to say you've already forgotten
+what we found together?"
+
+Maisie dimly remembered. "My moral sense?"
+
+"Your moral sense. HAVEN'T I, after all, brought it out?" She spoke as
+she had never spoken even in the schoolroom and with the book in her
+hand.
+
+It brought back to the child's recollection how she sometimes couldn't
+repeat on Friday the sentence that had been glib on Wednesday, and she
+dealt all feebly and ruefully with the present tough passage. Sir Claude
+and Mrs. Beale stood there like visitors at an "exam." She had indeed an
+instant a whiff of the faint flower that Mrs. Wix pretended to have
+plucked and now with such a peremptory hand thrust at her nose. Then it
+left her, and, as if she were sinking with a slip from a foothold, her
+arms made a short jerk. What this jerk represented was the spasm within
+her of something still deeper than a moral sense. She looked at her
+examiner; she looked at the visitors; she felt the rising of the tears
+she had kept down at the station. They had nothing--no, distinctly
+nothing--to do with her moral sense. The only thing was the old flat
+shameful schoolroom plea. "I don't know--I don't know."
+
+"Then you've lost it." Mrs. Wix seemed to close the book as she fixed
+the straighteners on Sir Claude. "You've nipped it in the bud. You've
+killed it when it had begun to live."
+
+She was a newer Mrs. Wix than ever, a Mrs. Wix high and great; but Sir
+Claude was not after all to be treated as a little boy with a missed
+lesson. "I've not killed anything," he said; "on the contrary I think
+I've produced life. I don't know what to call it--I haven't even known
+how decently to deal with it, to approach it; but, whatever it is, it's
+the most beautiful thing I've ever met--it's exquisite, it's sacred." He
+had his hands in his pockets and, though a trace of the sickness he had
+just shown perhaps lingered there, his face bent itself with
+extraordinary gentleness on both the friends he was about to lose. "Do
+you know what I came back for?" he asked of the elder.
+
+"I think I do!" cried Mrs. Wix, surprisingly un-mollified and with the
+heat of her late engagement with Mrs. Beale still on her brow. That
+lady, as if a little besprinkled by such turns of the tide, uttered a
+loud inarticulate protest and, averting herself, stood a moment at the
+window.
+
+"I came back with a proposal," said Sir Claude.
+
+"To me?" Mrs. Wix asked.
+
+"To Maisie. That she should give you up."
+
+"And does she?"
+
+Sir Claude wavered. "Tell her!" he then exclaimed to the child, also
+turning away as if to give her the chance. But Mrs. Wix and her pupil
+stood confronted in silence, Maisie whiter than ever--more awkward,
+more rigid and yet more dumb. They looked at each other hard, and as
+nothing came from them Sir Claude faced about again. "You won't tell
+her?--you can't?" Still she said nothing; whereupon, addressing Mrs.
+Wix, he broke into a kind of ecstasy. "She refused--she refused!"
+
+Maisie, at this, found her voice. "I didn't refuse. I didn't," she
+repeated.
+
+It brought Mrs. Beale straight back to her. "You accepted, angel--you
+accepted!" She threw herself upon the child and, before Maisie could
+resist, had sunk with her upon the sofa, possessed of her, encircling
+her. "You've given her up already, you've given her up for ever, and
+you're ours and ours only now, and the sooner she's off the better!"
+
+Maisie had shut her eyes, but at a word of Sir Claude's they opened.
+"Let her go!" he said to Mrs. Beale.
+
+"Never, never, never!" cried Mrs. Beale. Maisie felt herself more
+compressed.
+
+"Let her go!" Sir Claude more intensely repeated. He was looking at Mrs.
+Beale and there was something in his voice. Maisie knew from a loosening
+of arms that she had become conscious of what it was; she slowly rose
+from the sofa, and the child stood there again dropped and divided.
+"You're free--you're free," Sir Claude went on; at which Maisie's back
+became aware of a push that vented resentment and that placed her again
+in the centre of the room, the cynosure of every eye and not knowing
+which way to turn.
+
+She turned with an effort to Mrs. Wix. "I didn't refuse to give you up.
+I said I would if HE'D give up--"
+
+"Give up Mrs. Beale?" burst from Mrs. Wix.
+
+"Give up Mrs. Beale. What do you call that but exquisite?" Sir Claude
+demanded of all of them, the lady mentioned included; speaking with a
+relish as intense now as if some lovely work of art or of nature had
+suddenly been set down among them. He was rapidly recovering himself on
+this basis of fine appreciation. "She made her condition--with such a
+sense of what it should be! She made the only right one."
+
+"The only right one?"--Mrs. Beale returned to the charge. She had taken
+a moment before a snub from him, but she was not to be snubbed on this.
+"How can you talk such rubbish and how can you back her up in such
+impertinence? What in the world have you done to her to make her think
+of such stuff?" She stood there in righteous wrath; she flashed her eyes
+round the circle. Maisie took them full in her own, knowing that here at
+last was the moment she had had most to reckon with. But as regards her
+stepdaughter Mrs. Beale subdued herself to a question deeply mild. "HAVE
+you made, my own love, any such condition as that?"
+
+Somehow, now that it was there, the great moment was not so bad. What
+helped the child was that she knew what she wanted. All her learning and
+learning had made her at last learn that; so that if she waited an
+instant to reply it was only from the desire to be nice. Bewilderment
+had simply gone or at any rate was going fast. Finally she answered.
+"Will you give HIM up? Will you?"
+
+"Ah leave her alone--leave her, leave her!" Sir Claude in sudden
+supplication murmured to Mrs. Beale.
+
+Mrs. Wix at the same instant found another apostrophe. "Isn't it enough
+for you, madam, to have brought her to discussing your relations?"
+
+Mrs. Beale left Sir Claude unheeded, but Mrs. Wix could make her flame.
+"My relations? What do you know, you hideous creature, about my
+relations, and what business on earth have you to speak of them? Leave
+the room this instant, you horrible old woman!"
+
+"I think you had better go--you must really catch your boat," Sir Claude
+said distressfully to Mrs. Wix. He was out of it now, or wanted to be;
+he knew the worst and had accepted it: what now concerned him was to
+prevent, to dissipate vulgarities. "Won't you go--won't you just get off
+quickly?"
+
+"With the child as quickly as you like. Not without her." Mrs. Wix was
+adamant.
+
+"Then why did you lie to me, you fiend?" Mrs. Beale almost yelled. "Why
+did you tell me an hour ago that you had given her up?"
+
+"Because I despaired of her--because I thought she had left me." Mrs.
+Wix turned to Maisie. "You were WITH them--in their connexion. But now
+your eyes are open, and I take you!"
+
+"No you don't!" and Mrs. Beale made, with a great fierce jump, a wild
+snatch at her stepdaughter. She caught her by the arm and, completing an
+instinctive movement, whirled her round in a further leap to the door,
+which had been closed by Sir Claude the instant their voices had risen.
+She fell back against it and, even while denouncing and waving off Mrs.
+Wix, kept it closed in an incoherence of passion. "You don't take her,
+but you bundle yourself: she stays with her own people and she's rid of
+you! I never heard anything so monstrous!" Sir Claude had rescued Maisie
+and kept hold of her; he held her in front of him, resting his hands
+very lightly on her shoulders and facing the loud adversaries. Mrs.
+Beale's flush had dropped; she had turned pale with a splendid wrath.
+She kept protesting and dismissing Mrs. Wix; she glued her back to the
+door to prevent Maisie's flight; she drove out Mrs. Wix by the window or
+the chimney. "You're a nice one--'discussing relations'--with your talk
+of our 'connexion' and your insults! What in the world's our connexion
+but the love of the child who's our duty and our life and who holds us
+together as closely as she originally brought us?"
+
+"I know, I know!" Maisie said with a burst of eagerness. "I did bring
+you."
+
+The strangest of laughs escaped from Sir Claude. "You did bring us--you
+did!" His hands went up and down gently on her shoulders.
+
+Mrs. Wix so dominated the situation that she had something sharp for
+every one. "There you have it, you see!" she pregnantly remarked to her
+pupil.
+
+"WILL you give him up?" Maisie persisted to Mrs. Beale.
+
+"To YOU, you abominable little horror?" that lady indignantly enquired,
+"and to this raving old demon who has filled your dreadful little mind
+with her wickedness? Have you been a hideous little hypocrite all these
+years that I've slaved to make you love me and deludedly believed you
+did?"
+
+"I love Sir Claude--I love HIM," Maisie replied with an awkward sense
+that she appeared to offer it as something that would do as well. Sir
+Claude had continued to pat her, and it was really an answer to his
+pats.
+
+"She hates you--she hates you," he observed with the oddest quietness to
+Mrs. Beale.
+
+His quietness made her blaze. "And you back her up in it and give me up
+to outrage?"
+
+"No; I only insist that she's free--she's free."
+
+Mrs. Beale stared--Mrs. Beale glared. "Free to starve with this pauper
+lunatic?"
+
+"I'll do more for her than YOU ever did!" Mrs. Wix retorted. "I'll work
+my fingers to the bone."
+
+Maisie, with Sir Claude's hands still on her shoulders, felt, just as
+she felt the fine surrender in them, that over her head he looked in a
+certain way at Mrs. Wix. "You needn't do that," she heard him say. "She
+has means."
+
+"Means?--Maisie?" Mrs. Beale shrieked. "Means that her vile father has
+stolen!"
+
+"I'll get them back--I'll get them back. I'll look into it." He smiled
+and nodded at Mrs. Wix.
+
+This had a fearful effect on his other friend. "Haven't I looked into
+it, I should like to know, and haven't I found an abyss? It's too
+inconceivable--your cruelty to me!" she wildly broke out. She had hot
+tears in her eyes.
+
+He spoke to her very kindly, almost coaxingly. "We'll look into it
+again; we'll look into it together. It IS an abyss, but he CAN be
+made--or Ida can. Think of the money they're getting now!" he laughed.
+"It's all right, it's all right," he continued. "It wouldn't do--it
+wouldn't do. We CAN'T work her in. It's perfectly true--she's unique.
+We're not good enough--oh no!" and, quite exuberantly, he laughed again.
+
+"Not good enough, and that beast IS?" Mrs. Beale shouted.
+
+At this for a moment there was a hush in the room, and in the midst of
+it Sir Claude replied to the question by moving with Maisie to Mrs. Wix.
+The next thing the child knew she was at that lady's side with an arm
+firmly grasped. Mrs. Beale still guarded the door. "Let them pass," said
+Sir Claude at last.
+
+She remained there, however; Maisie saw the pair look at each other.
+Then she saw Mrs. Beale turn to her. "I'm your mother now, Maisie. And
+he's your father."
+
+"That's just where it is!" sighed Mrs. Wix with an effect of irony
+positively detached and philosophic.
+
+Mrs. Beale continued to address her young friend, and her effort to be
+reasonable and tender was in its way remarkable. "We're representative,
+you know, of Mr. Farange and his former wife. This person represents
+mere illiterate presumption. We take our stand on the law."
+
+"Oh the law, the law!" Mrs. Wix superbly jeered. "You had better indeed
+let the law have a look at you!"
+
+"Let them pass--let them pass!" Sir Claude pressed his friend hard--he
+pleaded.
+
+But she fastened herself still to Maisie. "DO you hate me, dearest?"
+
+Maisie looked at her with new eyes, but answered as she had answered
+before. "Will you give him up?"
+
+Mrs. Beale's rejoinder hung fire, but when it came it was noble. "You
+shouldn't talk to me of such things!" She was shocked, she was
+scandalised to tears.
+
+For Mrs. Wix, however, it was her discrimination that was indelicate.
+"You ought to be ashamed of yourself!" she roundly cried.
+
+Sir Claude made a supreme appeal. "Will you be so good as to allow these
+horrors to terminate?"
+
+Mrs. Beale fixed her eyes on him, and again Maisie watched them. "You
+should do him justice," Mrs. Wix went on to Mrs. Beale. "We've always
+been devoted to him, Maisie and I--and he has shown how much he likes
+us. He would like to please her; he would like even, I think, to please
+me. But he hasn't given you up."
+
+They stood confronted, the step-parents, still under Maisie's
+observation. That observation had never sunk so deep as at this
+particular moment. "Yes, my dear, I haven't given you up," Sir Claude
+said to Mrs. Beale at last, "and if you'd like me to treat our friends
+here as solemn witnesses I don't mind giving you my word for it that I
+never never will. There!" he dauntlessly exclaimed.
+
+"He can't!" Mrs. Wix tragically commented.
+
+Mrs. Beale, erect and alive in her defeat, jerked her handsome face
+about. "He can't!" she literally mocked.
+
+"He can't, he can't, he can't!"--Sir Claude's gay emphasis wonderfully
+carried it off.
+
+Mrs. Beale took it all in, yet she held her ground; on which Maisie
+addressed Mrs. Wix. "Shan't we lose the boat?"
+
+"Yes, we shall lose the boat," Mrs. Wix remarked to Sir Claude.
+
+Mrs. Beale meanwhile faced full at Maisie. "I don't know what to make of
+you!" she launched.
+
+"Good-bye," said Maisie to Sir Claude.
+
+"Good-bye, Maisie," Sir Claude answered.
+
+Mrs. Beale came away from the door. "Goodbye!" she hurled at Maisie;
+then passed straight across the room and disappeared in the adjoining
+one.
+
+Sir Claude had reached the other door and opened it. Mrs. Wix was
+already out. On the threshold Maisie paused; she put out her hand to her
+stepfather. He took it and held it a moment, and their eyes met as the
+eyes of those who have done for each other what they can. "Good-bye," he
+repeated.
+
+"Good-bye." And Maisie followed Mrs. Wix.
+
+They caught the steamer, which was just putting off, and, hustled across
+the gulf, found themselves on the deck so breathless and so scared that
+they gave up half the voyage to letting their emotion sink. It sank
+slowly and imperfectly; but at last, in mid-channel, surrounded by the
+quiet sea, Mrs. Wix had courage to revert. "I didn't look back, did
+you?"
+
+"Yes. He wasn't there," said Maisie.
+
+"Not on the balcony?"
+
+Maisie waited a moment; then "He wasn't there" she simply said again.
+
+Mrs. Wix also was silent a while. "He went to HER," she finally
+observed.
+
+"Oh I know!" the child replied.
+
+Mrs. Wix gave a sidelong look. She still had room for wonder at what
+Maisie knew.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHAT MAISIE KNEW***
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