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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]

Edition: 10

Language: English

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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.





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