What Maisie Knew (16 page)

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.

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.