What Maisie Knew (18 page)

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.

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.