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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of What Maisie Knew, by Henry James
+#46 in our series by Henry James
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+Title: What Maisie Knew
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+Release Date: December, 2004 [EBook #7118]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on March 12, 2003]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHAT MAISIE KNEW ***
+
+
+
+
+Etext created by Eve Sobol, South Bend, Indiana, USA
+
+
+
+
+WHAT MAISIE KNEW
+
+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--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 bun--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 her."
+
+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--when 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
+Qaude 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 ex-
+claimed 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--et 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 curlpapers!"
+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"
+--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 of 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 awhile, 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 breedings 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 quil 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 of What Maisie Knew, by Henry James
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHAT MAISIE KNEW ***
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