What Maisie Knew (21 page)

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'hôte
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
éclairage
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?"