"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.
It was Susan Ash who came to her with the news: "He's downstairs, miss,
and he do look beautiful."
In the schoolroom at her father's, which had pretty blue curtains, she
had been making out at the piano a lovely little thing, as Mrs. Beale
called it, a "Moonlight Berceuse" sent her through the post by Sir
Claude, who considered that her musical education had been deplorably
neglected and who, the last months at her mother's, had been on the
point of making arrangements for regular lessons. She knew from him
familiarly that the real thing, as he said, was shockingly dear and that
anything else was a waste of money, and she therefore rejoiced the more
at the sacrifice represented by this composition, of which the price,
five shillings, was marked on the cover and which was evidently the real
thing. She was already on her feet. "Mrs. Beale has sent up for me?"
"Oh no—it's not that," said Susan Ash. "Mrs. Beale has been out this
hour."
"Then papa!"
"Dear no—not papa. You'll do, miss, all but them wandering 'airs,"
Susan went on. "Your papa never came 'ome at all," she added.
"Home from where?" Maisie responded a little absently and very
excitedly. She gave a wild manual brush to her locks.
"Oh that, miss, I should be very sorry to tell you! I'd rather tuck away
that white thing behind—though I'm blest if it's my work."
"Do then, please. I know where papa was," Maisie impatiently continued.
"Well, in your place I wouldn't tell."
"He was at the club—the Chrysanthemum. So!"
"All night long? Why the flowers shut up at night, you know!" cried
Susan Ash.
"Well, I don't care"—he child was at the door. "Sir Claude asked for me
ALONE?"
"The same as if you was a duchess."
Maisie was aware on her way downstairs that she was now quite as happy
as one, and also, a moment later, as she hung round his neck, that
even such a personage would scarce commit herself more grandly. There
was moreover a hint of the duchess in the infinite point with which,
as she felt, she exclaimed: "And this is what you call coming OFTEN?"
Sir Claude met her delightfully and in the same fine spirit. "My dear
old man, don't make me a scene—I assure you it's what every woman I
look at does. Let us have some fun—it's a lovely day: clap on something
smart and come out with me; then we'll talk it over quietly."
They were on their way five minutes later to Hyde Park, and nothing that
even in the good days at her mother's they had ever talked over had more
of the sweetness of tranquillity than his present prompt explanations.
He was at his best in such an office and with the exception of Mrs. Wix
the only person she had met in her life who ever explained. With him,
however, the act had an authority transcending the wisdom of woman. It
all came back—the plans that always failed, all the rewards and bribes
that she was perpetually paying for in advance and perpetually out of
pocket by afterwards—the whole great stress to be dealt with introduced
her on each occasion afresh to the question of money. Even she herself
almost knew how it would have expressed the strength of his empire to
say that to shuffle away her sense of being duped he had only, from
under his lovely moustache, to breathe upon it. It was somehow in the
nature of plans to be expensive and in the nature of the expensive to be
impossible. To be "involved" was of the essence of everybody's affairs,
and also at every particular moment to be more involved than usual.
This had been the case with Sir Claude's, with papa's, with mamma's,
with Mrs. Beale's and with Maisie's own at the particular moment, a
moment of several weeks, that had elapsed since our young lady had been
re-established at her father's. There wasn't "two-and-tuppence" for
anything or for any one, and that was why there had been no sequel to
the classes in French literature with all the smart little girls. It
was devilish awkward, didn't she see? to try, without even the limited
capital mentioned, to mix her up with a remote array that glittered
before her after this as the children of the rich. She was to feel
henceforth as if she were flattening her nose upon the hard window-pane
of the sweet-shop of knowledge. If the classes, however, that were
select, and accordingly the only ones, were impossibly dear, the
lectures at the institutions—at least at some of them—were directly
addressed to the intelligent poor, and it therefore had to be easier
still to produce on the spot the reason why she had been taken to none.
This reason, Sir Claude said, was that she happened to be just going to
be, though they had nothing to do with that in now directing their steps
to the banks of the Serpentine. Maisie's own park, in the north, had
been nearer at hand, but they rolled westward in a hansom because at the
end of the sweet June days this was the direction taken by every one
that any one looked at. They cultivated for an hour, on the Row and
by the Drive, this opportunity for each observer to amuse and for one
of them indeed, not a little hilariously, to mystify the other, and
before the hour was over Maisie had elicited, in reply to her sharpest
challenge, a further account of her friend's long absence.
"Why I've broken my word to you so dreadfully—promising so solemnly and
then never coming? Well, my dear, that's a question that, not seeing me
day after day, you must very often have put to Mrs. Beale."
"Oh yes," the child replied; "again and again."
"And what has she told you?"
"That you're as bad as you're beautiful."
"Is that what she says?"
"Those very words."
"Ah the dear old soul!" Sir Claude was much diverted, and his loud,
clear laugh was all his explanation. Those were just the words Maisie
had last heard him use about Mrs. Wix. She clung to his hand, which was
encased in a pearl-grey glove ornamented with the thick black lines
that, at her mother's, always used to strike her as connected with the
way the bestitched fists of the long ladies carried, with the elbows
well out, their umbrellas upside down. The mere sense of his grasp in
her own covered the ground of loss just as much as the ground of gain.
His presence was like an object brought so close to her face that she
couldn't see round its edges. He himself, however, remained showman of
the spectacle even after they had passed out of the Park and begun,
under the charm of the spot and the season, to stroll in Kensington
Gardens. What they had left behind them was, as he said, only a pretty
bad circus, and, through prepossessing gates and over a bridge, they
had come in a quarter of an hour, as he also remarked, a hundred miles
from London. A great green glade was before them, and high old trees,
and under the shade of these, in the fresh turf, the crooked course
of a rural footpath. "It's the Forest of Arden," Sir Claude had just
delightfully observed, "and I'm the banished duke, and you're—what was
the young woman called?—the artless country wench. And there," he went
on, "is the other girl—what's her name, Rosalind?—and (don't you
know?) the fellow who was making up to her. Upon my word he IS making
up to her!"
His allusion was to a couple who, side by side, at the end of the glade,
were moving in the same direction as themselves. These distant figures,
in their slow stroll (which kept them so close together that their
heads, drooping a little forward, almost touched), presented the back of
a lady who looked tall, who was evidently a very fine woman, and that
of a gentleman whose left hand appeared to be passed well into her arm
while his right, behind him, made jerky motions with the stick that it
grasped. Maisie's fancy responded for an instant to her friend's idea
that the sight was idyllic; then, stopping short, she brought out with
all her clearness: "Why mercy—if it isn't mamma!"
Sir Claude paused with a stare. "Mamma? But mamma's at Brussels."
Maisie, with her eyes on the lady, wondered. "At Brussels?"
"She's gone to play a match."
"At billiards? You didn't tell me."
"Of course I didn't!" Sir Claude ejaculated. "There's plenty I don't
tell you. She went on Wednesday."
The couple had added to their distance, but Maisie's eyes more than kept
pace with them. "Then she has come back."
Sir Claude watched the lady. "It's much more likely she never went!"
"It's mamma!" the child said with decision.
They had stood still, but Sir Claude had made the most of his
opportunity, and it happened that just at this moment, at the end of the
vista, the others halted and, still showing only their backs, seemed to
stay talking. "Right you are, my duck!" he exclaimed at last. "It's my
own sweet wife!"
He had spoken with a laugh, but he had changed colour, and Maisie
quickly looked away from him. "Then who is it with her?"
"Blest if I know!" said Sir Claude.
"Is it Mr. Perriam?"
"Oh dear no—Perriam's smashed."
"Smashed?"
"Exposed—in the City. But there are quantities of others!" Sir Claude
smiled.
Maisie appeared to count them; she studied the gentleman's back. "Then
is this Lord Eric?"
For a moment her companion made no answer, and when she turned her eyes
again to him he was looking at her, she thought, rather queerly. "What
do you know about Lord Eric?"
She tried innocently to be odd in return. "Oh I know more than you
think! Is it Lord Eric?" she repeated.
"It maybe. Blest if I care!"
Their friends had slightly separated and now, as Sir Claude spoke,
suddenly faced round, showing all the splendour of her ladyship and all
the mystery of her comrade. Maisie held her breath. "They're coming!"
"Let them come." And Sir Claude, pulling out his cigarettes, began to
strike a light.
"We shall meet them!"
"No. They'll meet US."
Maisie stood her ground. "They see us. Just look."
Sir Claude threw away his match. "Come straight on." The others, in the
return, evidently startled, had half-paused again, keeping well apart.
"She's horribly surprised and wants to slope," he continued. "But it's
too late."
Maisie advanced beside him, making out even across the interval that her
ladyship was ill at ease. "Then what will she do?"
Sir Claude puffed his cigarette. "She's quickly thinking." He appeared
to enjoy it.
Ida had wavered but an instant; her companion clearly gave her moral
support. Maisie thought he somehow looked brave, and he had no likeness
whatever to Mr. Perriam. His face, thin and rather sharp, was smooth,
and it was not till they came nearer that she saw he had a remarkably
fair little moustache. She could already see that his eyes were of the
lightest blue. He was far nicer than Mr. Perriam. Mamma looked terrible
from afar, but even under her guns the child's curiosity flickered and
she appealed again to Sir Claude. "Is it—IS it Lord Eric?"