What Maisie Knew (20 page)

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 Sèvres 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.

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.